All of the Comedians suddenly fell down, albeit in dramatickal and actorly ways-and that went double for Nell Gwyn, who wound up draped over a bench with one arm stretched out gracefully, displaying about a square yard of flawless pale armpits and bosoms. The audience were poleaxed. The long-called-for boatswain finally ran in and announced that the ship had run aground in sands just off Castle Suckmire. “Lord Brimstone” sent Nzinga out to fetch his trunk, which arrived with the immediacy that can only happen in stage-plays. The owner pawed through its contents, spilling out a strange mixture of drab out-moded clothing and peculiar equipment, viz. retorts, crucibles, skulls, and microscopes. Meanwhile Lydia was picking up certain of his garments, such as farmers’ breeches and cowherds’ boots, holding them at arm’s length and mugging. Finally, Lord Brimstone stood up, tucking a powder-keg under one arm, and slapping a frayed and bent mortarboard onto his head.

LORDB: What’s wanted to move this ship is Gunpowder!

Among the groundlings in their chairs and on the grass, much uneasy shifting and muttering, and tassels flopping this way and that, as mortarboard-wearing scholars turned to each other to enquire as to just who was being made fun of here, or shook their heads, or bowed them low to pray for the souls of the King’s Comedians, and of whomever had written this play, and of the King who’d insisted he couldn’t make it through a one-night stand at Cambridge without being entertained.

Very different reactions, though, from the windows-cum-opera-boxes: the Duchess of Portsmouth was undone. Her bosom was heaving like a spritsail gone all a-luff, her head was thrown back to expose a whole lot of jewelled throat. These spectacles had already caused diverse groundling scholars to fall out of their chairs. She was being supported by a pair of young blades in huge curled and beribboned wigs, who were wiping tears of mirth away from their eyes with the fingertips of their kid gloves-having already donated their lace hankies to the Duchess.

Meanwhile, mortarboard-wearing gunpowder magnate John Comstock-who’d long opposed the Duchess of Portsmouth’s efforts to introduce French fashions to the English court-was managing a thin, oddly distracted smile. The King-who, until tonight anyway, had generally sided with Comstock-was smiling, and the Angleseys were all having the times of their lives.

An elbow to the kidney forced Daniel to stop gaping at the Duchess’s efforts to rupture her bodice, and to pay some attention to the rather homelier sight of Oldenburg, who was seated next to him. The hefty German had been released from the Tower as suddenly and as inexplicably as he’d been clapped into it. He glanced down toward the far end of Neville’s Court, then frowned at Daniel and said, “Where is he? Or at least it! ” meaning Isaac Newton and his paper on tangents, respectively. Then Oldenburg turned the other way and peeked up round the edge of his mortarboard toward the Angleseys’ box, where Louis Anglesey, the Earl of Upnor, had somehow gotten his merriment under control and was giving Oldenburg a Significant Glare.

Daniel was glad to have a pretext for leaving. All through the play he had been trying and trying to suspend his disbelief, but the damned thing just wouldn’t suspend. He rose to his feet, bunched his robes up, and sidestepped down a row of chairs, treading on diverse Royal Society feet. Sir Winston Churchill: Cheers on your boy’s Maestricht work, old chap. Christopher Wren: Let’s get that cathedral up, what, no dilly-dallying! Sir Robert Moray: Let’s have lunch and talk about eels. Thank God Hooke had had the temerity to not show up-too busy rebuilding London-so Daniel didn’t have to step on any of his parts. Finally, Daniel was out on open grass. This was really a job for John Wilkins-but the Bishop of Chester was lying on his bed down in London, ill of the stone.

Working his way round back of the stage, Daniel found himself among several wagons that had been used to haul dramaturgickal mysteries up from London. Awnings had been rigged to them and tents pitched in between, so tent-ropes were stretched across the darkness, thick as ship’s rigging, and hitched round splintery wooden stakes piercing the (until the actors had shown up, anyway) flawless lawn. Various items of what he could only assume were ladies’ undergarments (they were definitely garments, but he had never seen their like-Q.E.D.) dangled from the ropes and occasionally surprised the hell out of him by pawing clammily at his face. Daniel had to plot a devious course, then pursue it slowly, to escape the tangle. So it was really- really-just an accident that he found the two actresses, doing whatever the hell it was that females do when they excuse themselves and exchange warm knowing looks and go off in pairs. He caught the very end of it: “What should I do w’th’old one?” said a young lady with a lovely voice, and an accent from some part of England with too many sheep.

“Fling it into the crowd-start a riot,” suggested the other-an Irish girl.

This touched off fiendish whooping. Clearly no one had taught these girls how to titter.

“But they wouldn’t even know what it was,” said the girl with the lovely voice, “we are the first women to set foot in this place.”

“Then neither will they know if you leave it where it lies,” the Irish girl answered.

The other now dropped her rural accent and began talking exactly like a Cambridge scholar from a good family. “I say, what’s this in the middle of my bowling-green? It would appear to be… fox-bait!”

More whooping-cut short by a man’s voice out of a backstage caravan: “Tess-save some of that for the King-you’re wanted on the stage.”

The lasses picked up their skirts and exeunted. Daniel glimpsed them as they transited across a gap between tents, and recognized the one called Tess from the “Siege of Maestricht.” She was the one he had taken for a Frenchwoman, simply because he’d heard her talking that way. He now understood that she was really an Englishwoman who could talk any way she pleased. This might have been obvious, since she was a professional actress; but it was new to him, and it made her interesting.

Daniel emerged from behind the tent where he’d been (it is fair to say) lurking, and-purely in a spirit of philosophical inquiry-approached the spot where Tess of the beautiful voice and many accents had been (fair to say) squatting.

In a sort of hod projecting above the stage, more gunpowder was lit off in an attempt to simulate lightning, and it made a pool of yellow light in front of Daniel for just a moment. Neatly centered in a patch of grass-grass that was almost phosphorus-green, this being Spring-was a wadded-up rag, steaming from the warmth of Tess, bright with blood.

Of sooty coal the Empiric Alchimist

Can turn, or holds it possible to turn

Metals of drossiest Ore to perfet Gold

As from the Mine.

-MILTON,Paradise Lost

IT HAD BEEN A FULL DAYfor the King. Or perhaps Daniel was being naive to think so-more likely, it was a typical day for the King, and the only persons feeling exhausted were the Cantabrigians who had been trying to maintain the pretense that they could keep up with him. The entourage had appeared on the southern horizon in mid-morning, looking (Daniel supposed) quite a bit like the invasion that Louis XIV had recently flung into the Dutch Republic: meaning that it thundered and threw up dust-clouds and consumed oats and generated ramparts of manure like any Regiment, but its wagons were all gilded, its warriors were armed with jewelled Italian rapiers, its field-marshalls wore skirts and commanded men, or condemned them, with looks-this fell upon Cambridge, anyway, with more effect than King Louis had achieved, so far, in the Netherlands. The town was undone, dissolved. Bosoms everywhere, bare-assed courtiers spilling out of windows, the good Cambridge smell of fens and grass overcome by perfumes, not just of Paris but of Araby and Rajasthan. The King had abandoned his coach and marched through the streets of the town accepting the cheers of the scholars of Cambridge, who had formed up in front of their several Colleges, robed and arranged by ranks and degrees, like soldiers drawn up for review. He’d been officially greeted by the outgoing Chancellor, who had presented him with a colossal Bible-they said it was possible to see the royal nose wrinkling, and the eyes rolling, from half a mile away. Later the King (and his pack of demented spaniels) had dined at High Table in the College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity, under the big Holbein portrait of the college’s Founder, King Henry VIII. As Fellows, Daniel and Isaac were accustomed to sitting at High Table, but the town was now stuffed with persons who ranked them, and so they’d been demoted halfway across the room: Isaac in his scarlet robes talking to Boyle and Locke about something, and Daniel shoved off in a corner with several vicars who-in violation of certain Biblical guidelines-plainly did not love one another. Daniel tried to stanch their disputatious drone and to pick up a few snatches of conversation from the High Table. The King had a lot to say about Henry VIII, all of it apparently rather droll.