“O for a sword,” Daniel said.

“Aw, you’d be dead right away if you tried that!”

“I know that, Roger. Some would say there are worse things than being dead. Thank god Jeffreys wasn’t in the room-to see me running out of it like a thief!” And here his voice choked and tears rushed to his eyes. For this was the worst part. That in the end he had done nothing- nothing-except run out of the Grand Salon.

“You’re clever, but you don’t know what to do,” Roger said. “I’m the other way round. We complement each other.”

Daniel was annoyed. Then he reflected that to be the complement of a man with as many deficiencies as Roger Comstock was a high distinction. He turned and looked the other up and down, perhaps with an eye towards punching him in the nose. Roger was not so much wearing his wig as embedded in its lower reaches, and it was perfect- the sort of wig that had its own staff. Daniel, even if he were the punching sort, could not bring himself to ruin anything so perfect. “You are too modest, Roger-obviously you’ve gone out and done something clever.”

“Oh, you’ve noticed my attire! I hope you don’t think it’s foppish.”

“I think it’s expensive. ”

“For one of the Golden Comstocks, you mean…”

Roger came closer. Daniel kept being cruel to Roger, trying to make him go away, but Roger took it as honesty, implying profound friendship.

“Well, in any case it is certainly an improvement on your appearance the last time I saw you.” Daniel was referring to the explosion in the laboratory, which was now far enough in the past that both Daniel and Roger had their eyebrows back. He had not seen Roger since that night because Isaac, upon coming back to find the lab blown up, had fired him, and sent him packing, not just out of the laboratory, but out of Cambridge. Thus had ended a scholarly career that had probably needed to be put out of its misery in any case. Daniel knew not whither their Cinderella had fled, but he appeared to have done well there.

Roger plainly had no idea what Daniel was talking about. “I don’t recall that-did you meet me in the street, before I left for Amsterdam? I probably did look wretched then.”

Daniel now tried the Leibnizian experiment of rehearsing the explosion in the laboratory from Roger’s point of view.

Roger had been working in the dark: a necessity, as any open flame might set fire to the gunpowder. And not much of an inconvenience, since what he’d been up to was dead simple: grinding the powder in a mortar and dumping it into a bag. Both the sound, and the feel of the pestle in his hand, would tell when the powder had been ground to a fine enough consistency for whatever purpose Roger had in mind. So he had worked blind. Light was the one thing he prayed he wouldn’t see, for it would mean a spark that would be certain to ignite the powder. Attent on work and worry, he had never known that Daniel had come back to the house-why should he, since he was supposed to be watching a play? And Roger had not yet heard the applause and the distant murmur of voices that would signal its end. Roger had never heard Daniel’s approach, for Daniel, who’d phant’sied he was stalking a rat, had been at pains to move as quietly as possible. The heavy fabric screen had blocked the light of Daniel’s candle to the point where it was no brighter than the ambient furnace-glow. Suddenly the candle-flame had been in Roger’s face. In other circumstances he’d’ve known it for what it was; but standing there with a sack of gunpowder in his hands, he had taken it for what he’d most dreaded: a spark. He had dropped the mortar and the bag and flung himself back as quick as he could. The explosion had followed in the next instant. He could neither have seen nor heard anything until after he’d fled the building. So there was no ground to suppose he had ever registered as much as the faintest impression of Daniel’s presence. He’d not seen Daniel since.

And so Daniel was presented with a choice between telling Roger the truth, and assenting to the lie that Roger had conveniently proffered: namely, that Daniel had spied Roger in the street before Roger had departed for Amsterdam. Telling the truth held no danger, so far as he could see. The lie was attended with a small peril that Roger-who was cunning, in a way-might be dangling it before him as some sort of test.

“I thought you knew,” Daniel said, “I was in the laboratory when it happened. Had gone there to fetch Isaac’s paper on tangents. Nearly got blown to bits myself!”

Astonishment and revelation came out of Roger’s face like sudden flame. But if Daniel had owned a Hooke watch, he would have counted only a few seconds of time before the old look came back down over his face. As when a candle-snuffer pounces on a wild flame and the errant brilliance that had filled one’s vision a moment ago is in an instant vanished, the only thing left in its place a dull sight of old silver-work, frozen and familiar.

“I phant’sied I’d heard someone moving about in there!” Roger exclaimed. Which was obviously a lie; but it made the conversation move along better.

Daniel was keen to ask Roger what he’d been doing with the gunpowder. But perhaps it would be better to wait for Roger to volunteer something. “So it was to Amsterdam you went, to recuperate from the excitements of that evening,” Daniel said.

“Here first.”

“Here to London?”

“Here to the Angleseys’. Lovely family. And socializing with them has its benefits.” Roger reached up as if to stroke his wig-but dared not touch it.

“What, you’re not in their employ -?”

“No, no! It’s much better. I know things. Certain of the Golden Comstocks immigrated-all right, all right, some would say fled- to Holland in the last century. Settled in Amsterdam. I went and paid them a visit. From them, I knew that de Ruyter was taking his fleet to Guinea to seize the Duke of York’s slave-ports. So I sold my Guinea Company shares while they were still high. Then from the Angleseys I learned that King Looie was making preparations to invade the Dutch Republic-but could never stage a campaign without purchasing grain first-purchasing it you’ll never guess where. ”

“No!”

“Just so-the Dutch sold France the grain that King Looie is using to conquer them! At any rate-I took my money from the Guinea Company shares, and took a large position in Amsterdam-grain just before King Looie bid the price up! Voila! Now I’ve a Hooke-watch, a big wig, and a lot on fashionable Waterhouse Square!”

“You own-” Daniel began, and was well on his way to saying You own some of my family estate!? when they were interrupted by Leibniz, stalking through a flower-bed, hugging his brain-in-a-box.

“Dr. Leibniz-the Royal Society were quite taken with your Arithmetickal Engine,” Roger said.

“But they did not like my mathematickal proofs,” said one dejected German savant.

“On the contrary-they were acknowledged to be unusually elegant!” Daniel protested.

“But there is no honor in elegantly proving a theorem in 1672 that some Scotsman proved barbarously in 1671!”

“You could not possibly have known that,” Daniel said.

“Happens all the time,” said Roger, a-bristle with bogus authority.

“Monsieur Huygens should have known, when he assigned me those problems as exercises,” Leibniz grumbled.

“He probably did, ” Daniel said. “Oldenburg writes to him every week.”

“It is well-known that GRUBENDOL is a trafficker in foreign intelligence!” announced Robert Hooke, crashing through a laurel bush and tottering onto a marble bench as vertigo seized him. Daniel gritted his teeth, waiting for a fist-fight, or worse, to break out between Hooke and Leibniz, but Leibniz let this jab at Oldenburg pass without comment, as if Hooke had merely farted at High Table.