VANUND: Easily remedied-what’s the name of the place?

LYDIA:That pretty boatswain said we were just off a place called Suckmire.

VANUND: Don’t pine for him, Lydia-yonder Castle’s sure to house some Persons of Quality-why, I spy some now! Halloo!

TOMRUNAGATE:You see, Miss Straddle, they’ve already marked us as Courtiers. A few stolen rags are as good as Title and Pedigree.

MISSSTRADDLE:Aye, Tom, true enough when we’re barely within bowshot-but what’s to come later?

TOM(peering through spyglass): What is to come? I have spied one candidate-

SRADDLE:That lass has breeding, my wayward Tom-she’ll scorn you as a Vagabond, when she hears your voice-

TOM:I can do a fine accent well as any Lord.

SRADDLE:-and observes your uncouth manners.

TOM:Don’t you know that bad manners are high fashion now?

SRADDLE:Stab me!

TOM:’Tis truth! These fine people insult one another all day long-’Tis called wit! Then they poke at one another with swords, and call it honor.

SRADDLE:Then ‘tween Wit and Honor, the treasure on that wrack is as good as ours.

VANUND: Halloo, there, sir! Throw us a line, we are sinking into your garden!

TOM:This one must be daft, he mistakes yonder mud-flat for a garden!

SRADDLE:Daft, or Delft.

TOM:You think he’s Dutch!? Then I might levy a rope-climbing toll…

SRADDLE:What’ll his daughter think of you then?

TOM:’Tis well considered…

Throws rope.

LORDBRIMSTONE:Who’s that Frenchman on the sea-wall? Has England been conquered? Heaven help us!

LADYB: He is no Frenchman, my lord, but a good English gentleman in modern attire-most likely it is Count Suckmire, and that lady is his latest courtesan.

LORDB: You don’t say!

To Miss Straddle.Good day, madam-I’m informed that you are a Cartesian-here stands another!

SRADDLE:What’s he on about?

TOM:Never mind-remember what I told you.

Lord B:Cogito, ergo sum!

SRADDLE:Air go some? Yes, the air goes some when you flap your jaw, sir-I thought it was a sea-breeze, until I smelled it.

To Tom.Is that the sort of thing?

TOM:Well played, my flower.

LADYB: That whore is most uncivil.

LORDB: No need to be vulgar, my dear-it means she recognizes us as her equals.

ENTER, from opposite, the Rev. Yahweh Pucker, with

BIBLE and SHOVEL.

PUCKER:Here’s proof the Lord works in mysterious ways-I came expecting to find a ship-wrack, and drownded bodies in need of burying-which service I am ever willing to perform, for a small contribution-group rates available-instead, it is a courtly scene. St. James’s Park on a sunny May morn ne’er was so.

TOM:Between the Dutch mercer, and the English lord, there must be treasure aplenty on that wrack-if you can divert them in the Castle, I’ll get word to our merry friends-they can steal the longboat these rowed in on, and go fetch the goods.

SRADDLE:Whilst you salvage the Dutch girl’s maidenhead?

TOM:Lost at sea already, I fear.

NOW THERE WAS A CHANGEof scene to the interior of Castle Suckmire. As things were being re-arranged upon the stage, Oldenburg leaned close and said, “Is that him, then?”

“Yes, that’s Isaac Newton.”

“Well done-more than one Anglesey will be pleased-how did you flush him into the open?”

“I am not entirely sure.”

“What of the tangents paper?”

“One thing at a time, please, sir…”

“I cannot understand his reticence!”

“He’s only published one thing in his life-”

“The colors paper!? That was two years ago!”

“For you, two years of interminable waiting-for Isaac, two years of siege warfare-fending off Hooke on one front, Jesuits on the other.”

“Perhaps if you would only relate to him how you have passed the last two months-”

Daniel managed not to laugh in Oldenburg’s face.

UP ON THE STAGE INNeville’s Court, the plot was thickening, or, depending on how you liked your plots, expanding into a froth. Miss Straddle, played by Tess, was flirting with Eugene Stopcock, an infantry officer, who had rushed in from London to rescue his shipwrecked parents. Tom Runagate had already been to bed at least once with Lydia van Underdevater. The courtier Francis Buggermy had showed up incognito and begun chasing the slave Nzinga around in hopes of verifying certain rumors about the size of African men.

Isaac Newton was pinching the high bridge of his nose and looking mildly nauseated. Oldenburg was glaring at Daniel, and several important personages were glaring from On High at Oldenburg.

The play was entering Act V. Soon it would come to an end, triggering a plan, laid by Oldenburg, in which Isaac was finally going to be introduced to the King, and to the Royal Society at large. If Isaac’s paper were not brought forth tonight, it never would be, and Isaac would be known only as an Alchemist who once invented a telescope. So Daniel excused himself and set out across Trinity’s courtyards one more time.

The lurkers in the Great Court had thinned out, or perhaps he simply was not paying so much attention to them-he had decided what to do, and that gave him liberty, for the first time in months, to tilt his head back and look up at the stars.

It had turned out that Hooke, with his telescope project, had had much more on his mind than countering the ravings of some pedantic Jesuit. Sitting in the dark hole of Gresham’s College, marking down the coordinates of various stars, he’d outlined the rudiments of a larger theory to Daniel: first that all c?lestial bodies attracted all others within their sphere of influence, by means of some gravitating power; second that all bodies put into motion moved forward in a straight line unless acted upon by some effectual power; third that the attractive power became more powerful as the body wrought upon came nearer to the center.

Oldenburg did not yet know the magnitude of Isaac’s powers. Not that Oldenburg was stupid-he was anything but. But Isaac, unlike, say, Leibniz the indefatigable letter-writer or Hooke the Royal Society stalwart, did not communicate his results, and did not appear to socialize with anyone save daft Alchemists. And so in Oldenburg’s mind, Newton was a clever though odd chap who’d written a paper about colors and then got into a fracas over it with Hooke. If Newton would only mingle with the Fellows a bit, Oldenburg seemed to believe, he would soon learn that Hooke had quite put colors out of his mind and moved on to matters such as Universal Gravitation, which of course would not interest young Mr. Newton in the slightest.

This entire plan was, in other words, an embryonic disaster. But it might not occur for another hundred years that most of the Royal Society, and a King with a passion for Natural Philosophy, would spend a night together in Cambridge, within shouting distance of the bed where Isaac slept and the table where he worked. Isaac had to be drawn out, and it had to happen tonight. If this would lead to open war with Hooke, so be it. Perhaps that was inevitable anyway, no matter what Daniel did in the next few minutes.

DANIEL WAS BACKin the chambers. Roger Comstock, left behind, Cinderella-like, to tidy up and tend the furnaces, had apparently gotten bored and sneaked off to an alehouse, because the candles had all been snuffed, leaving the big room lit only by the furnaces’ rosy glow. Here Daniel would’ve been at a stand, if not for the fact that he lived there, and could find his way round in the dark. He groped a candle out of a drawer and lit it from a furnace. Then he went into the room where he’d conversed with Isaac earlier. Rummaging through papers, trying to find the one about tangents-the first practical fruits of Isaac’s old work about fluxions-he was reminded that the sight of something on this table had rattled Isaac, and persuaded him to expose himself to the awful torment of watching a comedy. Daniel kept a sharp eye out, but saw nothing except for tedious alchemical notes and recipes, many signed not “Isaac Newton” but “Jeova Sanctus Unus,” which was the pseudonym Isaac used for Alchemy work.