Isaac had worked out during which hours of the night Venus would be shining her perfectly unidirectional light on Woolsthorpe Manor’s south wall, and he’d done it not only for tonight but for every night in the next several weeks. All of those hours were spoken for: he had planned out a whole program of experiments. It was clear to Daniel that Isaac had been arguing his case against a whole court full of imaginary Jesuits hurling Latin barbs at him from every quarter, objecting to his methods in ways that were often ridiculous-that Isaac fancied himself as a combination of Galileo and St. Anne, but that unlike Galileo he had no intention of knuckling under, and unlike St. Anne he would not end up riddled with his tormentors’ arrows-he was getting ready to catch the arrows, and fling them back.
It was the sort of thing that Hooke never bothered with-because for Hooke being right was enough, and he didn’t care what anyone else thought of him or his ideas.
When Isaac had got his prisms situated in the window and blown out the candle, Daniel was blind, and painfully embarrassed, for several minutes-he was anxious that, lacking Isaac’s acute senses, he would not be able to see the spectrum cast against the wall by the light shining from Venus. “Have due patience,” Isaac said with a tenderness Daniel hadn’t heard from him in years. The thought stole upon Daniel, as he sat there in the dark with Isaac, that Isaac might have more than one reason for wearing those golden spectacles all the time. They shielded his burnt eyes from the light, yes. But as well, might they hide his burnt heart from the sight of Daniel?
Then Daniel noticed a multicolored blur on the wall-a sliver, red on one end and violet on the other. He said, “I have it.”
He was startled by a heavy rustling directly above them, in the attic, a scrabbling of claws.
“What was that?”
“There is a tiny window up there-an invitation for owls to build nests in the attic,” Isaac said. “So vermin don’t eat the grain stored up there.”
Daniel laughed at it. For a moment he and Isaac were boys up past bedtime playing with their toys, the complications of their past forgotten and the perils of the future unthought of.
A deep hooing noise, like the resonant tone of an organ pipe. Then the rustle of feathers as the bird squeezed through the opening, and the rhythm of powerful wings, like the beating of a heart, receding into the sky. The spectrum of Venus flashed off, then on, as the owl momentarily eclipsed the planet. When Daniel looked, he realized that he could now see not only the spectrum from Venus, but tiny, ghostly streaks of color all over the wall: the spectra cast by the stars that surrounded Venus in the southern sky. But spectra were all he could see. The earth spun and the ribbons of color migrated across the invisible wall, an inch a minute, pouring across the rough plaster like shining puddles of quicksilver driven before a steady wind, revealing, in gorgeous colors, tiny strips of the pictures that Isaac had drawn and scratched on those walls. Each of the little rainbows showed only a fragment of a picture, and each picture in turn was only part of Isaac’s tapestry of sketchings and scratchings, but Daniel supposed that if he stood there through a sufficient number of long cold nights and concentrated very hard, he might be able to assemble, in his mind, a rough conception of the entire thing. Which was the way he had to address Isaac Newton in any case.
But I did believe, and do still, that the end of our City will be with fire and brimstone from above, and therefore I have made mine escape.
-JOHNBUNYAN,The Pilgrim’s Progress
CAMBRIDGE TRIED TO RESUMEthat spring, but Daniel and Isaac had only just settled back into their chamber when someone died of the Plague and they had to move out again-Isaac back to Woolsthorpe, Daniel back to a wandering life. He spent some weeks with Isaac working on the colors experiment, others with Wilkins (now back in London, running regular meetings of the Royal Society again) working on the Universal Character manuscript, others with Drake or with his older half-siblings, who’d returned to London at Drake’s command, to await the Apocalypse. The Year of the Beast, 1666, was halfway through, then two-thirds. Plague had gone away. War continued, and it was more than just an Anglo-Dutch war now, for the French had made a league with the Dutch against the English. But whatever plans the Duke of York had hatched with his Admirals on that chilly day at Epsom must not have been altogether worthless, because it was going well for them. Drake must be torn between patriotic ardor, and a feeling of disappointment that it showed no sign whatever of developing into an Armageddon sort of war. It was merely a string of naval engagements, and the gist of it was that the English fleet was driving the Dutch and French from the Channel. All in all, there was a failure of events to match up with the program laid out in the Books of Daniel and of Revelation, which forced Drake to re-read them almost every day, working out interpretations new and ever more strained. For Daniel’s part, he sometimes went for days without thinking about the End of the World at all.
One evening early in September he was riding back toward London from the north. He’d been up in Woolsthorpe helping Isaac run the numbers on his planetary orbit theory, but with inconclusive results, because they did not know exactly how far from the center of the Earth they were when they stood on the ground and weighed things. He had stopped in at that plague-ridden town of Cambridge to fetch a new book that claimed to specify the crucial figure: how big around was the Earth? and now he was going down to visit his father, who’d sent him an alarming letter, claiming that he had just calculated a different crucial figure: the exact date (early in September, as it happened) that the world would end.
Daniel was still twenty miles outside of the city, riding along in the late afternoon, when a messenger came galloping up the road toward him and shouted, “London has been burning for a day and is burning still!” as he hurtled past.
Daniel knew this, in a way, but he had been denying it. The air had had a burnt smell about it all day long, and a haze of smoke had clung about the trees and the sheltered hollows in the fields. The sun had been a glaring patch that seemed to fill half the southern sky. Now, as the day went on and it sank toward the horizon, it turned orange and then red, and began to limn vast billows and towers of smoke-portents and omens that seemed incomparably vaster than the (still unknown) radius of the Earth. Daniel rode into the night, but not into darkness. A vault of orange light had been thrown about a mile high up into the sky above London. Thuds propagated through the earth-at first he supposed they must be the impacts of buildings falling down, but then they began coming in slow premeditated onslaughts and he reckoned that they must be blowing up whole buildings with powder-kegs, trying to gouge fire-breaks through the city.
At first he’d thought it was impossible for any fire to reach as far as Drake’s house outside of town on Holborn, but the number of explosions, the diameter of the arch of light, told him nothing was safe. He was working upstream against a heavy traffic of soot-faced wretches now. It made for slow going, but there was nothing to do about it. The folds of his clothing, and even the porches of his ears, were collecting black grit, nodules and splinters and flakes of charcoal that rained down tickingly on everything.
“Cor, look, it’s snowing!” exclaimed a boy with his face turned upwards to catch reflected light. Daniel-not wanting to see it, really-raised his eyes slowly, and found the sky filled with some kind of loose chaff, swirling in slow vortices here and there but heading generally downwards. He grabbed a piece of it from the air: it was page 798 of a Bible, all charred round the margins. He reached again and snared a hand-written leaf from a goldsmith’s account-book, still glowing at one corner. Then a handbill-a libel attacking Free Coinage. A personal letter from one Lady to another. They accumulated on his shoulders like falling leaves and he stopped reading them after a while.