“To say nothing of Spain with the Inquisition,” said Vigani drolly. Which was a heroic and well-executed bid to change the topic to something so banal as to be a complete waste of breath-after all, the Spanish Inquisition had few defenders locally.

But Daniel had not endured years among courtiers without developing skills of his own. “I’m afraid we’ll have to wait for an English Inquisition to find out what our friend was just about to say!”

“ Thatshould be coming along any day now,” someone muttered.

They were beginning to break ranks! But Vigani had recovered: “Inquisition? Nonsense! Freedom of Conscience is the King’s byword-or so Dr. Waterhouse has been telling everyone.”

“I have been a mere conduit for what the King says.”

“But you have just come from releasing a lot of Dissenters from prison, have you not?”

“Your knowledge of my pastimes is uncanny, sir,” Daniel said. “You are correct. There are plenty of empty cells available just now.”

“Shame to waste ’em,” someone offered.

“The King will find some use for those vacancies,” predicted someone else.

“An easy prediction to make. Here’s a more difficult: what will that King’s name be?”

“England.”

“I meant his Christian name.”

“You’re assuming he’s going to be a Christian, then?”

“You’re assuming he’s one now?”

“Are we speaking of the King who lives in Whitehall, or the one who has been spotted in the Hague?”

“The one in Whitehall has been spotted ever since his years in France: spotted on his face, on his hands, on his-”

“Gentlemen, gentlemen, this room is too warm and close for your wit, I beg you,” said the most senior of the Fellows present, who looked as if he might be on the verge of having a stroke of his own. “Dr. Waterhouse was merely enquiring about his old friend, our colleague, Newton-”

“Is this the version we’re all going to relate to the English Inquisition?”

“You are merry, too merry!” protested the Senior Fellow, now red in the face, and not with embarrassment. “Dr. Newton might serve as an example to you, for he goes about his work with gravity, and it is sound work in geometry, mathematics, astronomy…”

“Eschatology, astrology, alchemy…”

“No! No! Ever since Mr. Halley came up to enquire on the subject of Comets, Newton has had many fewer visitors from outside, and Signore Vigani has had to seek companionship in the Hall.”

“I need only enter the Hall and companionship is found, ” said Vigani smoothly, “there is never seeking. ”

“Please excuse me,” Daniel said, “it sounds as if Newton might welcome a visitor.”

“He might welcome a crust of bread,” someone said, “lately he has been scratching in his garden like a peckish hen.”

I cannot choose but condemn those Persons, who suffering themselves to be too much dazzled with the Lustre of the noble Actions of the Ancients, make it their Study to Extol them to the Skies; without reflecting, that these later Ages have furnished us with others more Heroick and Wonderful.

–Gemelli Careri

PASSING THROUGHthe Great Gate, he borrowed a lantern from a porter and exited onto a walkway that led to the street, hemmed in by crenellated walls. The wall to his left had a narrow gate let into it. Using his old key, Daniel opened the lock on this gate and stepped through into a sizable garden. It was laid out as a grid of gravel walkways with squares of greenery between. Some of the squares were planted with small fruit trees, others with shrubs or grass. To his left a line of taller trees screened the windows of the row of chambers that filled the space between the Great Gate and the Chapel. The buds in their branches were just evolving to nascent leaves, and where light shone from Isaac’s windows they glowed like stopped explosions, phosphorus-green. But most of the windows were dark, and the stars above the muzzles of the chimneys were sharp and crystalline, not blurred by heat or dimmed by smoke. Isaac’s furnaces were cold, the stuff in their crucibles congealed. Their heat had all gone into his skull.

Daniel let his lantern-hand fall to his side so that the light shone across the gravel path from the altitude of his knee. This made Isaac’s chicken-scratchings stand out in high relief.

Every one had started the same way: with Isaac slashing the toe of his shoe, or the point of his stick, across the ground to make a curve. Not a specific curve-not a circle or a parabola-but a representative curve. Everything in the universe was curved, and those curves were evanescent and fluxional, but with this gesture Isaac snatched a particular curve-it didn’t matter which-down from the humming cosmos, like a frog flicking its tongue out to filch a gnat from a swarm. Once trapped in the gravel, it was frozen and helpless. Isaac could stand and look at it for as long as he wanted, like Sir Robert Moray gazing at a stuffed eel in a glass box. After a while Isaac would begin to slash straight lines into the gravel, building up a scaffold of rays, perpendiculars, tangents, chords, and normals. At first this would seem to grow in a random way, but then lines would intersect with others to form a triangle, which would miraculously turn out to be an echo of another triangle in a different place, and this fact would open up a sort of sluice-gate that would free information to flood from one part of the diagram to another, or to leap across to some other, completely different diagram-but the results never came clear to Daniel’s mind because here the diagram would be aborted and a series of footsteps-lunar craters in the gravel-would plot Isaac’s hasty return to his chambers, where it could be set down in ink.

Daniel followed these footsteps into the chambers he had once shared. The ground floor was cluttered with alchemical droppings, but not as dangerous as usual, since everything was cold. Daniel shone his lantern around one quiet room and then another. Everything that gave light back was hard mineral stuff, the inert refractory elements to which nature always returned: crusty crucibles, sooty retorts, corroded tongs, black crystals of charcoal, globs of quicksilver trapped in floor-cracks, a box of golden guineas left open next to a window as if to prove to all passers-by that the man who lived here cared nothing for gold.

On a desk he saw letters in Latin from gentlemen in Prague, Naples, St.-Germain, addressed to JEOVA SANCTUS UNUS. Through gaps between them Daniel saw parts of a large drawing that had been pinned down to the surface of the table. It looked like a floor plan of a building. Daniel moved some papers and books out of the way to expose more of it. He was wondering whether Isaac-like Wren, Hooke, and Daniel himself-had gone into Architecture.

Isaac appeared to be designing a square, walled court with a rectangular structure in the middle. Sweeping a trapezoid of lantern-light over a block of writing, Daniel read the following: The same God gave the dimensions of the Tabernacle to Moses and Temple with its Courts to David amp; Ezekiel amp; altered not the proportion of the areas but only doubled them in the Temple… So then Solomon and Ezekiel agree, and are double to Moses.

“I am only trying to recover what Solomon knew,” Isaac said.

Knowing that the lantern would blind Isaac’s burnt eyes, Daniel raised it up and blew it out before turning around. Isaac had come in silence down a stone staircase. His atelier on the first story had candles burning, and these warmed the stone behind Isaac with orange light. He was a black silhouette robed in a dressing-gown, his head cloaked with silver. He had not grown any heavier since College days, which was no surprise if the rumors about his dining habits were to be credited.

“I can’t help but wonder if you-perhaps even I- don’t know a hell of a lot more about practically every subject than Solomon ever did,” Daniel said.