Daniel’s gaze fell on a great leather wallet, gnawed at the corners by rodents, but still intact. He unwound the ribbon that held it closed, and spread it out on the lid of a trunk. It was a stack of foolscap sheets rising to the thickness of three fingers, creased and compressed from long immurement, but still perfectly legible. It contained notes, written in Hooke’s hand, and illustrated with more admirable diagrams, on divers subjects:

Dr. Dee’s Book of Spirits expos’d

Animadversions upon Dr. Vossius’s Hypothesis of Gravitation

Acerbity in Fruits

Plagiarism in the Parisian Academy

Cryptography of Trithemius

Sheathing ships with lead, as practic’d by the Chinese

Telescopick Sights for Instruments Vindicated

Inconceivable Distance of the Fixt Stars

Parisian philosophers evade Proof from Observations, when they are unwilling to allow Consequences

272 Vibrations of a String in a Second, make the sound of G Sol re ut

Python explain’d

Of the Rowing of Ancient Gallies

Structure of Muscles explain’d

Iron and Sp. Salis take fire with explosion

Unguent for Burns, a Receipt

Ideas are corporeal, with their Explication, and the possible number that may be formed in a Man’s Life

Monkeys wherein different from Men

How Light is produced in putrifying Bodies

Micrometer of a new contrivance

A Cause hinted of the Libration of the Moon

Flints: of their formation and former fluidity

French Academy have published some Matters first discovered here

Why freezing expands water

Effects of Earthquakes on the Constitution of Air

Hills generated by Earthquakes

Hob’s Hypothesis of Gravity defective

Flying Fish, and of Flying in general

Center of the Earth not the Center of Gravity

Decay in human bodies observed

Anthelme’s Opinion of Light refuted

The Genuine Receipt for making Orvietano

Why heat is not sensible in the Moon’s Rays

Gravity and Light the two great Laws of Nature, are but different Effects of the same Cause

Hodometrickal Method for finding the Longitude

Effects on one Experimenter of the Plant, call’d Bangue by the Portugals, amp; Gange by the Moors

Mechanical Way of drawing Conical Figures

Burning-glasses of the Ancients

Implicit was that Hooke had concealed these in the walls of Bedlam because he would not entrust the Royal Society-specifically, Newton-with his legacy. And so Daniel began to read these titles aloud as a sort of rebuke to Isaac. But having started in on such a Litany, he found it difficult to stop. This was a sort of concentrated essence of that quicksilver spirit that had animated Daniel’s, and the Royal Society’s, halcyon days. To handle these pages was to drink deep from the Fountain of Youth.

What eventually stopped him was a page written, not in English like most of the others, and not in Latin like some of them, but in a wholly different alphabet. The characters on this page bore no relationship to any from the Roman, Greek, or Hebrew script; they were not Cyrillic, not Arabic, and yet bore no connection to any of the writing-systems of Asia. It was an admirably simple, clean, and lucid way of writing-if only one could understand it. And Daniel almost could. The sight of it stopped him cold for a minute. He was just beginning to decipher the glyphs of the title when Saturn put in: “I have already come across several of those, Doc-what tongue is that?”

Isaac, gazing at the leaf in Daniel’s hand from three yards away, answered the question: “It is the Real Character,” he said, “a language invented by the late John Wilkins, on philosophical principles, in hopes that it would drive out Latin. Hooke and Wren adopted it for a time. Can you still read it, Daniel?”

“Can you, Isaac?” Daniel asked; for it might be important for him to know this.

“Not without revising Wilkins’s book.”

“It is a receipt,” Daniel said, elevating the page slightly, “for a restorative medicine, made from gold.”

“Then pray do not waste time translating it,” Isaac said, “for we all know of the late Mr. Hooke’s susceptibility to quackery.”

“This is not Hooke’s receipt,” Daniel said. “He wrote it out, but did not invent it. He gives credit to the same fellow who shewed the Royal Society how to make Phosphorus.” To Saturn and diverse other eavesdroppers this signified nothing, but to Isaac it was as good as saying Enoch the Red. As such it drew Isaac’s full and disconcertingly sharp attention. “Pray go on, Daniel.”

“It begins with a sort of narration. An account of something Hooke witnessed somewhere…” A long pause now for difficult translation, then sudden knowledge: “No, here! Just here, where we are standing. The date given is…if my arithmetick is to be credited…anno domini 1689.”

“The same year, and place, as your strangely premature going-away party,” Saturn reflected.

This tripped Daniel up for a moment, being an acute observation on Saturn’s part, and one that Daniel had entirely missed. But Isaac urged him to go on, and so he did, haltingly: “It began with a medical-no, a surgical procedure on a subject-human-male-aged two score and three.”

“Ah, a contemporary of you two gentlemen!” Saturn put in. “Perhaps you knew him.”

“He was quite ill because of a stone. A stone in his bladder. Hooke performed a lithotomy.”

“What, here!?” Saturn exclaimed, looking about.

“I have seen them done in the street,” Daniel said.

“It would not be the strangest thing Hooke did here,” Isaac assured Saturn.

“That becomes the clearer, the more we go through his leavings,” Saturn mused.

“Pray continue, Daniel!”

“The procedure went normally. However, the patient…the patient died,” Daniel translated. He had begun to feel unaccountably woozy, and took a moment now to sit down atop a dusty trunk, lest he lose consciousness and topple over the balustrade into Bedlam’s Well of Souls. “I beg your pardon…the patient died, as often happens, of shock. No pulse was evident. Whereupon the learned fellow I spoke of earlier emerged from a place of concealment, from which he had been observing the procedure.”

“How convenient!” Saturn scoffed. “What, are we to believe this Alchemist lurks in Bedlam’s shadows just waiting for someone to give up the ghost during an impromptu tabletop lithotomy?”

“The truth is not so fanciful. He had been present, earlier in the evening, for a social gathering. He overstayed to keep an eye on the procedure,” Daniel said. This much was not written down on the page-it came from Daniel’s memory.

“A social gathering-the oft-mentioned premature going-away party, perhaps!” Saturn said. He meant it as a jest. But neither Daniel nor Isaac laughed.

Daniel continued with the translation: “Hooke had in this room a Reverberatory Furnace, which was already hot for another experiment. The Alchemist went to work in some haste, using some chymicals from Hooke’s own cupboard-which I can testify was well-stocked. For example, he used something that is rendered, on this page, as a bone-cube-cup…”

“Hooke must have meant a cupel.”

“Ah, well done, Isaac. A cupel, and certain materials that he carried on his person in a small wooden chest. The receipt is not easy to translate-I too shall have to revise Wilkins.” He skipped a page, then another. “The result: a small quantity of a light-bearing compound. Placed in the mouth of the dead patient, it caused his heart to resume beating, and cured him of his shock. Several minutes after, he came awake, and professed to have no memory of what had transpired. The Alchemist had by then departed, taking all the residues of the receipt with him. Hooke set it down as best he could from his recollections.”

“This explains much,” said Sir Isaac Newton, eyeing Daniel very oddly indeed. Daniel hardly cared; he had leaned back flaccid against the wall, and was gazing mindlessly at the oculus of silver light in the cupola. He felt no more alive than stone Melancholy.