“Except what, Mr. Root?”

“Studying the hidden laws of God’s creation. Some of them-in particular John Comstock and Thomas More Anglesey-fell in with Monsieur LeFebure, who was the apothecary to the French Court. They spent rather a lot of time on Alchemy.”

“But wasn’t it all stupid nonsense, rot, gibberish, and criminally fraudulent nincompoopery?”

“Godfrey, you are living proof that the apple does not fall far from the tree. Who am I to dispute such matters with your father? Yes. ‘Twas all rubbish.”

“Then why’d you go to Paris?”

“Partly, if truth be told, I wished to see the coronation of the French King.”

“Which one?” asks Godfrey.

“The same one as now!” says Ben, outraged that they are having to waste their time on such questions.

“The big one,” Enoch says, “ theKing. Louis the Fourteenth. His formal coronation was in 1654. They anointed him with angel-balm, a thousand years old.”

“Eeeyew, it must have stunk to high heaven!”

“Hard to say, in France.”

“Where would they’ve gotten such a thing?”

“Never mind. I am drawing closer to answering the question of when. But that was not my whole reason. Really it was that something was happening. Huygens-a brilliant youth, of a great family in the Hague-was at work on a pendulum-clock there that was astonishing. Of course, pendulums were an old idea-but he did something simple and beautiful that fixed them so that they would actually tell time! I saw a prototype, ticking away there in that magnificent house, where the afternoon light streamed in off the Plein-that’s a sort of square hard by the palace of the Dutch Court. Then down to Paris, where Comstock and Anglesey were toiling away on-you’re correct-stupid nonsense. They truly wanted to learn. But they wanted the brilliance of a Huygens, the audacity to invent a whole new discipline. Alchemy was the only way they knew of.”

“How’d you cross over to England if there was a sea-war on?”

“French salt-smugglers,” says Enoch, as if this were self-evident. “Now, many an English gentleman had made up his mind that staying in London and dabbling with Alchemy was safer than riding ’round the island making war against Cromwell and his New Model Army. So I’d no difficulty lightening my load, and stuffing my purse, in London. Then I nipped up to Oxford, meaning only to pay a call on John Wilkins and pick up some copies of Cryptonomicon. ”

“What is that?” Ben wants to know.

“A very queer old book, dreadfully thick, and full of nonsense,” says Godfrey. “Papa uses it to keep the door from blowing shut.”

“It is a compendium of secret codes and cyphers that this chap Wilkins had written some years earlier,” says Enoch. “In those days, he was Warden of Wadham College, which is part of the University of Oxford. When I arrived, he was steeling himself to make the ultimate sacrifice in the name of Natural Philosophy.”

“He was beheaded?” Ben asks

Godfrey: “Tortured?”

Ben: “Mutilated, like?”

“No: he married Cromwell’s sister.”

“But I thought you said there was no Natural Philosophy in those days,” Godfrey complains.

“There was -once a week, in John Wilkins’s chambers at Wadham College,” says Enoch. “For that is where the Experimental Philosophical Clubb met. Christopher Wren, Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, and others you ought to have heard of. By the time I got there, they’d run out of space and moved to an apothecary’s shop-a less flammable environment. It was that apothecary, come to think of it, who exhorted me to make the journey north and pay a call on Mr. Clarke in Grantham.”

“Have we settled on a year yet?”

“I’ll settle on one now, Ben. By the time I reached Oxford, that pendulum-clock I’d seen on the table of Huygens’s house in the Hague had been perfected, and set into motion. The first clock worthy of the name. Galileo had timed his experiments by counting his pulse or listening to musicians; but after Huygens we used clocks, which-according to some-told absolute time, fixed and invariant. God’s time. Huygens published a book about it later; but the clock first began to tick, and the Time of Natural Philosophy began, in the year of Our Lord-”

For between true science and erroneous doctrines, ignorance is in the middle.

-HOBBES,Leviathan

IN EVERY KINGDOM, empire, principality, archbishopric, duchy, and electorate Enoch had ever visited, the penalty for transmuting base metals into gold-or trying to-or, in some places, even thinking about it-was death. This did not worry him especially. It was only one of a thousand excuses that rulers kept handy to kill inconvenient persons, and to carry it off in a way that made them look good. For example, if you were in Frankfurt-on-Main, where the Archbishop-Elector von Schonborn and his minister and sidekick Boyneburg were both avid practitioners of the Art, you were probably safe.

Cromwell’s England was another matter. Since the Puritans had killed the king and taken the place over, Enoch didn’t go around that Commonwealth (as they styled it now) in a pointy hat with stars and moons. Not that Enoch the Red had ever been that kind of alchemist anyway. The old stars-and-moons act was a good way to farm the unduly trusting. But the need to raise money in the first place seemed to call into question one’s own ability to turn lead into gold.

Enoch had made himself something of an expert on longevity. It was only a couple of decades since a Dr. John Lambe had been killed by the mobile in the streets of London. Lambe was a self-styled sorcerer with high connections at Court. The Mobb had convinced themselves that Lambe had conjured up a recent thunderstorm and tornado that had scraped the dirt from graves of some chaps who had perished in the last round of Plague. Not wishing to end up in Lambe’s position, Enoch had tried to develop the knack of edging around people’s perceptions like one of those dreams that does not set itself firmly in memory, and is flushed into oblivion by the first thoughts and sensations of the day.

He’d stayed a week or two in Wilkins’s chambers, and attended meetings of the Experimental Philosophical Clubb. This had been a revelation to him, for during the Civil War, practically nothing had been heard out of England. The savants of Leipzig, Paris, and Amsterdam had begun to think of it as a rock in the high Atlantic, overrun by heavily armed preachers.

Gazing out Wilkins’s windows, studying the northbound traffic, Enoch had been surprised by the number of private traders: adventuresome merchants, taking advantage of the cessation of the Civil War to travel into the country and deal with farmers in the country, buying their produce for less than what it would bring in a city market. They mostly had a Puritan look about them, and Enoch did not especially want to ride in their company. So he’d waited for a full moon and a cloudless night and ridden up to Grantham in the night, arriving before daybreak.

THE FRONT OFCLARKE’S HOUSEwas tidy, which told Enoch that Mrs. Clarke was still alive. He led his horse round into the stable-yard. Scattered about were cracked mortars and crucibles, stained yellow and vermilion and silver. A columnar furnace, smoke-stained, reigned over coal-piles. It was littered with rinds of hardened dross raked off the tops of crucibles-the f?ces of certain alchemical processes, mingled on this ground with the softer excrement of horses and geese.

Clarke backed out his side-door embracing a brimming chamber-pot.

“Save it up,” Enoch said, his voice croaky from not having been used in a day or two, “you can extract much that’s interesting from urine.”

The apothecary startled, and upon recognizing Enoch he nearly dropped the pot, then caught it, then wished he had dropped it, since these evolutions had set up a complex and dangerous sloshing that must be countervailed by gliding about in a bent-knee gait, melting foot-shaped holes in the frost on the grass, and, as a last resort, tilting the pot when whitecaps were observed. The roosters of Grantham, Lincolnshire, who had slept through Enoch’s arrival, came awake and began to celebrate Clarke’s performance.