“He will sense that, and be cheered by it,” Daniel said. “The last few years of Wilkins’s life have been sacrified entirely to politics-he has been working to dismantle the framework of theocracy, to prevent its resurgence, in the event a Papist ascends to the throne-”
“Or already has done so,” Leibniz said immediately.
The offhanded way in which Leibniz suggested that King Charles II might be a crypto-Catholic hinted to Daniel that it was common knowledge on the Continent. This made him feel hopelessly dull, naive, and provincial. He had suspected the King of many crimes and deceptions, but never of baldly lying about his religion to the entire Realm.
He had plenty of time to conceal his annoyance as they were passing through the heart of the city, which had turned into a single vast and eternal building-site even as the normal business of the ‘Change and the goldsmiths’ shops continued. Paving-stones were whizzing between Daniel and the Doctor like cannonballs, shovels slicing the air around their heads like cutlasses, barrows laden with gold and silver and bricks and mud trundling like munition-carts over temporary walk-ways of planks and stomped dirt.
Perhaps reading anxiety on Daniel’s face, Leibniz said, “Just like the Rue Vivienne in Paris,” with a casual hand-wave. “I go there frequently to read certain manuscripts in the Bibliotheque du Roi.”
“I’ve been told that a copy of every book printed in France must be sent to that place.”
“Yes.”
“But it was established in the same year that we had our Fire-so I ween that it must be very small yet, as it’s had only a few years to grow.”
“A few very good years in mathematics, sir. And it also contains certain unpublished manuscripts of Descartes and Pascal.”
“But none of the classics?”
“I had the good fortune to be raised, or to raise myself, in my father’s library, which contained all of them.”
“Your father was mathematickally inclined?”
“Difficult to say. As a traveler comprehends a city only by viewing pictures of it drawn from differing standpoints, I know my father only by having read the books that he read.”
“I understand the similitude now, Doctor. The Bibliotheque du Roi then gives you the closest thing that currently exists to God’s understanding of the world.”
“And yet with a bigger library we could come ever so much closer.”
“But with all due respect, Doctor, I do not understand how this street could be anything less like the Rue Vivienne-we have no such Bibliotheque in England.”
“The Bibliotheque du Roi is just a house, you see, a house Colbert happened to buy on the Rue Vivienne-probably as an investment, because that street is the center of goldsmiths. Every ten days, from ten in the morning until noon, all of the merchants of Paris send their money to the Rue Vivienne to be counted. I sit there in Colbert’s house trying to understand Descartes, working the mathematical proofs that Huygens, my tutor, gives me, and looking out the windows as the street fills up with porters staggering under their back-loads of gold and silver, converging on a few doorways. Are you beginning to understand my riddle now?”
“Which riddle was that?”
“This box! I said it contained something infinitely more valuable than gold, and yet it could not be stolen. Which way do we turn here?”
For they’d come out into the hurricane where Threadneedle, Cornhill, Poultry, and Lombard all collided. Message-boys were flying across that intersection like quarrels from crossbows-or (Daniel suspected) like broad Hints that he was failing to Get.
LONDON CONTAINED A HUNDRED LORDS, bishops, preachers, scholars, and gentlemen-philosophers who would gladly have provided Wilkins with a comfortable sick-bed, but he had ended up in his stepdaughter’s home in Chancery Lane, actually rather close to where the Waterhouses lived. The entrance to the place, and the street in front, were choked with sweating courtiers-not the sleek top-level ones but the dented, scarred, slightly too old and slightly too ugly ones who actually got everything done.*They were milling in the street around a black coach blazoned with the arms of Count Penistone. The house was an old one (the Fire had stopped a few yards short of it). It was one of those slump-shouldered, thatch-roofed, half-timbered Canterbury Tales productions, completely out-moded by the gleaming coach and the whip-thin rapiers.
“You see-despite the purity of your motives, you’re immersed in politics already,” Daniel said. “The lady of the house is Cromwell’s niece.”
“What!? The Cromwell?”
“The same whose skull gazes down on Westminster from the end of a stick. Now, the owner of that excellent coach is Knott Bolstrood, Count Penistone-his father founded a sect called the Barkers, normally lumped in with many others under the pejorative term of Puritans. The Barkers are gratuitously radical, however-for example, they believe that Government and Church should have naught to do with each other, and that all slaves in the world should be set free.”
“But the gentlemen in front are dressed like courtiers! Are they getting ready to siege the Puritan-house?”
“They are Bolstrood’s hangers-on. You see, Count Penistone is His Majesty’s Secretary of State.”
“I had heard that King Charles the Second made a Phanatique his Secretary of State, but could not believe it.”
“Consider it-could Barkers exist in any other country? Save Amsterdam, that is.”
“Naturally not!” Leibniz said, lightly offended by the very idea. “They would be extinguished.”
“Therefore, whether or not he feels any loyalty toward the King, Knott Bolstrood has no choice but to stand for a free and independent England-and so, when Dissenters accuse the King of being too close to France, His Majesty need only point to Bolstrood as the living credential of his independent foreign policy.”
“But it’s all a farce!” Leibniz muttered. “All Paris knows England’s in France’s pocket.”
“All London knows it, too-the difference is that we have three dozen theatres here-Paris has only one of them-”
Leibniz’s turn, finally, to be baffled. “I don’t understand.”
“All I am saying is that we happen to enjoy farces.”
“Why is Bolstrood visiting the niece of Cromwell?”
“He’s probably visiting Wilkins.”
Leibniz stopped and considered matters. “Tempting. But the protocol is impossible. I cannot enter the house!”
“Of course you can-with me,” Daniel said. “Just follow.”
“But I must go back and fetch my companions-for I do not have the standing to disturb the Secretary of State-”
“I do,” Daniel said. “One of my earliest memories is of watching him destroy a pipe organ with a sledgehammer. Seeing me will give him a warm feeling.”
Leibniz stopped and looked aghast; Daniel could almost see, reflected in his eyes, the stained-glass windows and organ-pipes of some fine Lutheran church in Leipzig. “Why would he commit such an outrage!?”
“Because it was in an Anglican cathedral. He would have been about twenty-a high-spirited age.”
“Your family were followers of Cromwell?”
“It is more correct to say that Cromwell was a follower of my father-may God rest both of their souls.” But now they were in the midst of the courtier-mob, and it was too late for Leibniz to obey his instincts, and run away.
They spent several minutes pushing among progressively higher-ranking and better-dressed men, into the house and up the stairs, and finally entered a tiny low-ceilinged bedchamber. It smelled as if Wilkins had already died, but most of him still lived-he was propped up on pillows, with a board on his lap, and a fine-looking document on the board. Knott Bolstrood-forty-two years old-knelt next to the bed. He turned round to look as Daniel entered. During the ten years Knott had survived on the Common-Side of Newgate Prison, living in a dark place among murderers and lunaticks, he had developed a strong instinct for watching his back. It was as useful for a Secretary of State as it had been for a marauding Phanatique.