Below him, a strange plucking sound, like a man endlessly tuning a lute. He went down stairs and found Hooke sitting there with a few inches of quill sticking out of his ear, plucking a string stretched over a wooden box. It was far from the strangest thing Hooke had ever done, so Daniel went to work for a time, trying to dissolve Wilkins’s bladder-gravel in various potions. Hooke continued plucking and humming. Finally Daniel went over to investigate.

A housefly was perched on the end of the quill that was stuck in Hooke’s ear. Daniel tried to shoo it away. Its wings blurred, but it didn’t move. Looking more closely Daniel saw that it had been glued down.

“Do that again, it gives me a different pitch,” Hooke demanded.

“You can hear the fly’s wings?”

“They drone at a certain fixed pitch. If I tune this string”- pluck, pluck-“to the same pitch, I know that the string, and the fly’s wings, are vibrating at the same frequency. I already know how to reckon the frequency of a string’s vibration-hence, I know how many times in a second a fly’s wings beat. Useful data if we are ever to build a flying-machine.”

Autumn rain made the field turn mucky, and ended the chariot experiments. Charles Comstock had to find other things to do. He had matriculated at Cambridge this year, but Cambridge was closed for the duration of the Plague. Daniel reckoned that as a quid pro quo for staying here at Epsom, Wilkins was obliged to tutor Charles in Natural Philosophy. But most of the tutoring was indistinguishable from drudge work on Wilkins’s diverse experiments, many of which (now that the weather had turned) were being conducted in the cottage’s cellar. Wilkins was starving a toad in a jar to see if new toads would grow out of it. There was a carp living out of water, being fed on moistened bread; Charles’s job was to wet its gills several times a day. The King’s ant question had gotten Wilkins going on an experiment he’d wanted to try for a long time: before long, down in the cellar, between the starving toad and the carp, they had a maggot the size of a man’s thigh, which had to be fed rotten meat, and weighed once a day. This began to smell and so they moved it outside, to a shack downwind, where Wilkins had also embarked on a whole range of experiments concerning the generation of flies and worms out of decomposing meat, cheese, and other substances. Everyone knew, or thought they knew, that this happened spontaneously. But Hooke with his microscope had found tiny motes on the undersides of certain leaves, which grew up into insects, and in water he had found tiny eggs that grew up into gnats, and this had given him the idea that perhaps all things that were believed to be bred from putrefaction might have like origins: that the air and the water were filled with an invisible dust of tiny eggs and seeds that, in order to germinate, need only be planted in something moist and rotten.

From time to time, a carriage or wagon from the outside world was suffered to pass into the gate of the manor and approach the big house. On the one hand, this was welcome evidence that some people were still alive out there in England. On the other-

“Who is that madman, coming and going in the midst of the Plague,” Daniel asked, “and why does John Comstock let him into his house? The poxy bastard’ll infect us all.”

“John Comstock could not exclude that fellow any more than he could ban air from his lungs,” Wilkins said. He had been tracking the carriage’s progress, at a safe distance, through a prospective glass. “That is his money-scrivener.”

Daniel had never heard the term before. “I have not yet reached that point in the Tables where ‘money-scrivener’ is defined. Does he do what a goldsmith does?”

“Smite gold? No.”

“Of course not. I was referring to this new line of work that goldsmiths have got into-handling notes that serve as money.”

“A man such as the Earl of Epsom would not suffer a money-goldsmith to draw within a mile of his house!” Wilkins said indignantly. “A money-scrivener is different altogether! And yet he does something very much the same.”

“Could you explain that, please?” Daniel said, but they were interrupted by Hooke, shouting from another room:

“Daniel! Fetch a cannon.”

In other circumstances this demand would have posed severe difficulties. However, they were living on the estate of the man who had introduced the manufacture of gunpowder to Britain, and provided King Charles II with many of his armaments. So Daniel went out and enlisted that man’s son, young Charles Comstock, who in turn drafted a corps of servants and a few horses. They procured a field-piece from John Comstock’s personal armoury and towed it out into the middle of a pasture. Meanwhile, Mr. Hooke had caused a certain servant, who had long been afflicted with deafness, to be brought out from the town. Hooke bade the servant stand in the same pasture, only a fathom away from the muzzle of the cannon (but off to one side!). Charles Comstock (who knew how to do such things) charged the cannon with some of his father’s finest powder, shoved a longish fuse down the touch-hole, lit it, and ran away. The result was a sudden immense compression of the air, which Hooke had hoped would penetrate the servant’s skull and knock away whatever hidden obstructions had caused him to become deaf. Quite a few window-panes in John Comstock’s manor house were blown out of their frames, amply demonstrating the soundness of the underlying idea. But it didn’t cure the servant’s deafness.

“As you may know, my dwelling is a-throng, just now, with persons from the city,” said John Comstock, Earl of Epsom and Lord Chancellor of England.

He had appeared, suddenly and unannounced, in the door of the cottage. Hooke and Wilkins were busy hollering at the deaf servant, trying to see if he could hear anything at all. Daniel noticed the visitor first, and joined in the shouting: “Excuse me! Gentlemen! REVEREND WILKINS!”

After several minutes’ confusion, embarrassment, and makeshift stabs at protocol, Wilkins and Comstock ended up sitting across the table from each other with glasses of claret while Hooke and Waterhouse and the deaf servant held up a nearby wall with their arses.

Comstock was pushing sixty. Here on his own country estate, he had no patience with wigs or other Court foppery, and so his silver hair was simply queued, and he was dressed in plain simple riding-and-hunting togs. “In the year of my birth, Jamestown was founded, the pilgrims scurried off to Leyden, and work commenced on the King James version of the Bible. I have lived through London’s diverse riots and panics, plagues and Gunpowder Plots. I have escaped from burning buildings. I was wounded at the Battle of Newark and made my way, in some discomfort, to safety in Paris. It was not my last battle, on land or at sea. I was there when His Majesty was crowned in exile at Scone, and I was there when he returned in triumph to London. I have killed men. You know all of these things, Dr. Wilkins, and so I mention them, not to boast, but to emphasize that if I were living a solitary life in that large House over yonder, you could set off cannonades, and larger detonations, at all hours of day and night, without warning, and for that matter you could make a pile of meat five fathoms high and let it fester away beneath my bedchamber’s window- and none of it would matter to me.But as it is, my house is crowded, just now, with Persons of Quality. Some of them are of royal degree. Many of them are female, and some are of tender years. Two of them are all three. ”

“My lord!” Wilkins exclaimed. Daniel had been carefully watching him, as who wouldn’t-the opportunity to watch a man like Wilkins being called on the carpet by a man like Comstock was far more precious than any Southwark bear-baiting. Until just now, Wilkins had pretended to be mortified-though he’d done a very good job of it. But now, suddenly, he really was.