The man had stopped writhing and screaming now because he was dead. Daniel had taken Isaac’s arm and was rather firmly pulling him back, but Isaac continued to approach the specimen. Daniel looked round and saw that suddenly there was no one within musket range-horses and tents had been abandoned, back-loads of goods spilled on the ground by porters now halfway to Ely.

“I can see the buboes expanding even though the body is dead,” Isaac said. “The generative spirit lives on-transmuting dead flesh into something else-just as maggots are generated out of meat, and silver grows beneath mountains-why does it bring death sometimes and life others?”

That they lived was evidence that Daniel eventually pulled Isaac away and got him pointed back up the river toward Cambridge. But Isaac’s mind was still on those Satanic miracles that had appeared in the dead man’s groin. “I admire Monsieur Descartes’ analysis, but there is something missing in his supposition that the world is just bits of matter jostling one another like coins shaken in a bag. How could that account for the ability of matter to organize itself into eyes and leaves and salamanders, to transmute itself into alternate forms? And yet it’s not simply that matter comes together in good ways-not some ongoing miraculous Creation-for the same process by which our bodies turn meat and milk into flesh and blood can also cause a man’s body to convert itself into a mass of buboes in a few hours’ time. It might seem aimless, but it cannot be. That one man sickens and dies, while another flourishes, are characters in the cryptic message that philosophers seek to decode.”

“Unless the message was set down long ago and is there in the Bible for all men to read plainly,” Daniel said.

Fifty years later, he hates to remember that he ever talked this way, but he can’t stop himself.

“What do you mean by that?”

“The year 1665 is halfway over-you know what year comes next. I must to London, Isaac. Plague has come to England. What we have seen today is a harbinger of the Apocalypse.”

DANIEL IS ROUSEDby a rooster on the forecastledeck*that is growing certain it’s not just imagining that light in the eastern sky. Unfortunately, the eastern sky is off to port this morning. Yesterday it was to starboard. Minerva has been sailing up and down the New England coast for the better part of a fortnight, trying to catch a wind that will decisively take her out into the deep water, or “off soundings,” as they say. They are probably not more than fifty miles away from Boston.

He goes below to the gun deck, a dim slab of sharp-smelling air. When his eyes have adjusted he can see the cannons, all swung around on their low carriages so they are parallel to the hull planking, aimed forwards, lashed in place, and the heavy hatches closed over the gun ports. Now that he cannot see the horizon, he must use the soles of his feet to sense the ship’s rolling and pitching-if he waits for his balance-sense to tell him he’s falling, it’ll be too late. He makes his way aft in very short, carefully planned steps, trailing fingertips along the ceiling, jostling the long ramrods and brushes racked up there for tending the guns. This takes him to a door and thence into a cabin at the stern that’s as wide as the entire ship and fitted with a sweep of windows, gathering what light they can from the western sky and the setting moon.

Half a dozen men are in here working and talking, all of them relatively old and sophisticated compared to ordinary seamen-this is where great chests full of good tools are stored, and sheets of potent diagrams nested. A tiller the dimensions of a battering-ram runs straight down the middle of the ceiling and out through a hole in the stern to the rudder, which it controls; the forward end of the tiller is pulled to and fro by a couple of cables that pass up through openings in the decks to the wheel. The air smells of coffee, wood-shavings, and pipe-smoke. Grudging hellos are scattered about. Daniel goes back and sits by one of the windows-these are undershot so that he can look straight down and see Minerva ’s wake being born in a foamy collision down around the rudder. He opens a small hatch below a window and drops out a Fahrenheit thermometer on a string. It is the very latest in temperature measurement technology from Europe-Enoch presented it to him as a sort of party favor. He lets it bounce through the surf for a few minutes, then hauls it in and takes a reading.

He’s been trying to perform this ritual every four hours-the objective being to see if there’s anything to the rumor that the North Atlantic is striped with currents of warm water. He can present the data to the Royal Society if-God-willing-he-reaches-London. At first he did it from the upperdeck, but he didn’t like the way the instrument got battered against the hull, and he was wearied by the looks of incomprehension on the sailors’ faces. The old gaffers back here don’t necessarily think he’s any less crazy but they don’t think less of him for it.

So like a sojourner in a foreign city who eventually finds a coffeehouse where he feels at home, Daniel has settled on this place, and been accepted here. The regulars are mostly in their thirties and forties: a Filipino; a Lascar; a half-African, half-white from the Portuguese city of Goa; a Huguenot; a Cornish man with surprisingly poor English; an Irishman. They’re all perfectly at home here, as if Minerva were a thousand-year-old ship on which their ancestors had always lived. If she ever sinks, Daniel suspects they’ll happily go down with her, for lack of any other place to live. Joined with one another and with Minerva, they have the power to travel anywhere on earth, fighting their way past pirates if need be, eating well, sleeping in their own beds. But if Minerva were lost, it almost wouldn’t make any difference whether it spilled them into the North Atlantic in a January gale, or let them off gently into some port town-either way, it’d be a short, sad life for them after that. Daniel wishes there were a comforting analogy to the Royal Society to be made here, but as that lot are currently trying to throw one of their own number (Baron Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz) overboard, it doesn’t really work.

A brick-lined cabin is wedged between the upperdeck and the forecastledeck, always full of smoke because fires burn there-food comes out of it from time to time. A full meal is brought to Daniel once a day, and he takes it, usually by himself, sometimes with Captain van Hoek, in the common-room. He’s the only passenger. Here it’s evident that Minerva ’s an old ship, because the crockery and flatware are motley, chipped, and worn. Those parts of the ship that matter have been maintained or replaced as part of what Daniel’s increasingly certain must be a subtle, understated, but fanatical program of maintenance decreed by van Hoek and ramrodded by one of his mates. The crockery and other clues suggest that the ship’s a good three decades old, but unless you go down into the hold and view the keel and the ribs, you don’t see any pieces that are older than perhaps five years.

None of the plates match, and so it’s always a bit of a game for Daniel to eat his way down through the meal (normally something stewlike with expensive spices) until he can see the pattern on the plate. It is kind of an idiotic game for a Fellow of the Royal Society to indulge in, but he doesn’t introspect about it until one evening when he’s staring into his plate, watching the gravy slosh with the ship’s heaving (a microcosm of the Atlantic?), and all of a sudden it’s-