“You threw a bomb into someone else’s boat?”

“Aye, and then-if all went according to plan-our Filipinos-former pearl divers, excellent swimmers-climbed over the gunwales with daggers in their teeth and cut a few throats-”

“But that’s mad! This is Massachusetts!”

Dappa chuckles. “Aye. That it is.”

An hour later the sun rises gorgeously over Cape Cod Bay. Daniel is pacing around the ship, trying to find a place where he won’t have to listen to the screams of the pirates. Two open boats are now thudding against Minerva ’s hull: the ship’s own longboat, freshly caulked and painted, and the pirate whaler, which was evidently in poor condition even before this morning’s action. Splinters of fresh blond wood show where a bench was snapped by the grenade, and an inch or two of blood sloshes back and forth in the bottom as the empty boat is tossed around by a rising wind. Five pirates survived, and were towed back to Minerva by the raiding party. Now (judging from the sounds) they are all down in the bilge, where two of Minerva ’s largest sailors are holding their heads beneath the filthy water. When they are hauled out, they scream for air, and Daniel thinks about Hooke and Wilkins with their poor dogs.

He discovereth the depe amp; secret things: he knoweth what is in the darkenes, and the light dwelleth with him.

–Daniel 2:22

FROMISAAC’S INSTRUCTIONS(“Turn left at Grimethorpe Ruin”) he’d been expecting a few hovels gripping the rim of a windburned scarp, but Woolsthorpe was as pleasant a specimen of English countryside as he’d ever seen. North of Cambridge it was appallingly flat, a plain scratched with drainage ditches. But beyond Peterborough the coastal fens fell away and were replaced by pastures of radiant greenness, like stained-glass windows infested with sheep. There were a few tall pine trees that made the place seem farther north than it really was. Another day north, the country began to roll, and the earth turned brown as coffee, with cream-colored stone rising out of the soil here and there: once-irregular croppings rationalized to squared-off block-heaps by the efforts of quarrymen. Woolsthorpe gave an impression of being high up in the world, close to the sky, and the trees that lined the lane from the village all had the same telltale skewage, suggesting that the place might not be as pleasant all year round as it was on the morning Daniel arrived.

Woolsthorpe Manor was a very simple house, shaped like a fat T with its crossbar fronting on the lane, made of the soft pale stone that was used for everything around here-its roof a solid mass of lichens. It was built sideways to a long slope that rose as it went northwards, and so, on its southern end, the land fell away from it, giving it a clear sunny exposure. But this opportunity had been wasted by the builders, who had put almost no windows there-just a couple of them, scarcely larger than gun-slits, and one tiny portal up in the attic that made no sense to Daniel at first. As Daniel noted while his horse toiled up the hill through the grasping spring mud, Isaac had already taken advantage of this south-facing wall by carving diverse sundials into it. Sprawling away from there, down the hill and away from the lane, were long stables and barns that marked the place as an active farmstead, and that Daniel didn’t have to concern himself with.

He turned off the lane. The house was set back from it not more than twenty feet. Set above the door was a coat of arms carved into the stone: on a blank shield, a pair of human thigh-bones crossed. A Jolly Roger, minus skull. Daniel sat on his horse and contemplated its sheer awfulness for a while and savored the dull, throbbing embarrassment of being English. He was waiting for a servant to notice his arrival.

Isaac had mentioned in his letter that his mother was away for a few weeks, and this was perfectly acceptable to Daniel-all he knew of the mother was that she had abandoned Isaac when he’d been three years old, and gone to live with a rich new husband several miles away, leaving the toddler to be raised in this house by his grandmother. Daniel had noticed that there were some families (like the Waterhouses) skilled at presenting a handsome facade to the world, no matter what was really going on; it was all lies, of course, but at least it was a convenience to visitors. But there were other families where the emotional wounds of the participants never healed, never even closed up and scabbed over, and no one even bothered to cover them up-like certain ghastly effigies in Papist churches, with exposed bleeding hearts and gushing stigmata. Having dinner or even polite conversation with them was like sitting around the table participating in Hooke’s dog experiment-everything you did or said was another squeeze of the bellows, and you could stare right in through the vacancies in the rib cage and see the organs helplessly responding, the heart twitching with its own macabre internal power of perpetual motion. Daniel suspected that the Newtons were one of those families, and he was glad Mother was absent. Their coat of arms was a proof, of Euclidean certainty, that he was right about this.

“Is that you, Daniel?” said the voice of Isaac Newton, not very loud. A little bubble of euphoria percolated into Daniel’s bloodstream: to re-encounter anyone, after so long, during the Plague Years, and find them still alive, was a miracle. He looked uphill. The northern end of the house looked into, and was sheltered by, rising terrain. A small orchard of apple trees had been established on that side. Seated on a bench, with his back to Daniel and to the sun, was a man or woman with long colorless hair spilling down over a blanket that had been drawn round the shoulders like a shawl.

“Isaac?”

The head turned slightly. “It is I.”

Daniel rode up out of the mud and into the apple-garden, then dismounted and tethered the horse to the low branch of an apple tree-a garland of white flowers. The petals were coming down from the apple-blossoms like snow. Daniel swung round Isaac in a wide Copernican arc, peering at him through the fragrant blizzard. Isaac’s hair had always been pale, and prematurely streaked with gray, but in the year since Daniel had seen him, he’d gone almost entirely silver. The hair fell about him like a hood-as Daniel came around to the front, he was expecting to see Isaac’s protruding eyes, but instead he saw two disks of gold looking back at him, as if Isaac’s eyes had been replaced by five-guinea coins. Daniel must have shouted, because Isaac said, “Don’t be alarmed. I fashioned these spectacles myself. I’m sure you know that gold is almost infinitely malleable-but did you know that if you pound it thin enough, you can see through it? Try them.” He took the spectacles off with one hand while clamping the other over his eyes. Daniel bobbled them because they were lighter than he’d expected-they had no lenses, just membranes of gold stretched like drum-heads over wire frames. As he raised them towards his face, their color changed.

“They are blue!”

“It is another clue about the nature of light,” Isaac said. “Gold is yellow-it reflects the part of light that is yellow, that is, but allows the remnant to pass through-which being deprived of its yellow part, appears blue.”

Daniel was peering out at a dim vision of blue-blossomed apple trees before a blue stone house-a blue Isaac Newton sitting with his back to a blue sun, one blue hand covering his eyes.

“Forgive me their rude construction-I made them in the dark.”

“Is there something the matter with your eyes, Isaac?”