It was two days before the sergeant came to call on Daniel. They were trying days. For just when Daniel had convinced himself that his soul was a disembodied consciousness in a stone tower, perceiving the world through narrow slits, he had been given oysters. They were of the best: Roger Comstock had sent them. They made his body happy when he ate them, and affected his soul much more than seemed proper, for a disembodied consciousness. Either his theory was wrong, or the seductions of the world were more powerful than he’d remembered. When Tess had got the smallpox she’d got it bad, and the pustules had all joined together and her whole skin had fallen off, and her guts had shot out of her anus into a bloody pile on the bed. After that she had somehow remained alive for a full ten and a half hours. Considering the carnal pleasures she had brought him during the years she’d been his mistress, Daniel had taken this the same way Drake would’ve: as a cautionary parable about fleshly delights. Better to perceive the world as Tess had during those ten and a half hours than as Daniel had while he’d been fucking her. But the oysters were extraordinarily good, their flavor intense and vaguely dangerous, their consistency clearly sexual.
Daniel shared some with the sergeant, who agreed that they were extraordinary but had little else to say-most of Daniel’s questions caused him to go shifty-eyed, and some even made him cringe. Finally he agreed to take the matter up with his sergeant, giving Daniel a nightmare vision of some endless regression of sergeants, each more senior and harder to reach than the last.
Robert Hooke showed up with a firkin of ale. Daniel assaulted it in much the same way as the murderers would him. “I was apprehensive that you would spurn my gift, and pour it into the Thames,” Hooke said irritably, “but I see that the privations of the Tower have turned you into a veritable satyr. ”
“I am developing a new theory of bodily perceptions, and their intercourse with the soul, and this is research, ” said Daniel, quaffing vigorously. He huffed ale-foam out of his whiskers (he’d not shaved in weeks) and tried to adopt a searching look. “Being condemned to die is a mighty stimulus to philosophick ratiocination, all of which is however wasted at the instant the sentence is carried out-fortunately I’ve been spared-”
“So that you may pass on your insights to me, ” Hooke finished dourly. Then, with ponderous tact: “My memory has become faulty, pray just write it all down.”
“They won’t allow me pen and paper.”
“Have you asked again recently? They would not allow me, or anyone, to visit you until today. But with the new regiment, a new regimen.”
“I’ve been scratching on yonder wall instead,” Daniel announced, waving at the beginnings of a geometric diagram.
Hooke’s gray eyes regarded it bleakly. “I spied it when I came in,” he confessed, “and supposed ’twas something very ancient and time-worn. Very recent and in progress would never have crossed my mind.”
Daniel was flummoxed for a few moments-just long enough for his pulse to rouse, his face to flush, and his vocal cords to constrict. “It is difficult not to take that as a rebuke, ” he said. “I am merely trying to see if I can reconstruct one of Newton’s proofs from memory.”
Hooke looked away. The sun had gone down a few minutes ago. A westerly embrasure reflected in his eyes as an identical pair of vertical red slits. “It is a perfectly defensible practice,” he admitted. “If I’d spent more of my youth learning geometers’ tricks and less of it looking at things, and learning how to see, perhaps I’d have written the Principia instead of him.”
This was an appalling thing to say. Envy was common as pipe-smoke at Royal Society meetings, but to voice it so baldly was rare. But then Hooke had never cared, or even noticed, what people thought of him.
It took a few moments for Daniel to collect himself, and to give Hooke’s utterance the ceremonial silence it demanded. Then he said, “Leibniz has much to say on the subject of perceptions which I have but little understood until recently. And you may love Leibniz or not. But consider: Newton has thought things that no man before has ever thought. A great accomplishment, to be sure. Perhaps the greatest achievement any human mind has ever made. Very well-what does that say of Newton, and of us? Why, that his mind is framed in such a way that it can out-think anyone else’s. So, all hail Isaac Newton! Let us give him his due, and glorify and worship whatever generative force can frame such a mind. Now, consider Hooke. Hooke has perceived things that no man before has ever perceived. What does that say of Hooke, and of us? That Hooke was framed in some special way? No, for just look at you, Robert-by your leave, you are stooped, asthmatic, fitful, beset by aches and ills, your eyes and ears are no better than those of men who’ve not perceived a thousandth part of what you have. Newton makes his discoveries in geometrickal realms where our minds cannot go, he strolls in a walled garden filled with wonders, to which he has the only key. But you, Hooke, are cheek-by-jowl with all of humanity in the streets of London. Anyone can look at the things you have looked at. But in those things you see what no one else has. You are the millionth human to look at a spark, a flea, a raindrop, the moon, and the first to see it. For anyone to say that this is less remarkable than what Newton has done, is to understand things in but a hollow and jejune way, ’Tis like going to a Shakespeare play and remembering only the sword-fights.”
Hooke was silent for a time. The room had gone darker, and he’d faded to a gray ghost, that vivid pair of red sparks still marking his eyes. After a while, he sighed, and the sparks winked out for a few moments.
“I shall have to fetch you quill and paper, if this is to be the nature of your discourse, sir,” he said finally.
“I am certain that in the fullness of time, the opinion I have just voiced will be wide spread among learned persons,” Daniel said. “This may not however elevate your stature during the years you have remaining; for fame’s a weed, but repute is a slow-growing oak, and all we can do during our lifetimes is hop around like squirrels and plant acorns. There is no reason why I should conceal my opinions. But I warn you that I may express them all I like without bringing you fame or fortune.”
“It is enough you’ve expressed them to me in the aweful privacy of this chamber, sir,” Hooke returned. “I declare that I am indebted to you, and will repay that debt one day, by giving you something of incalculable value when you least expect it. A pearl of great price.”
LOOKING AT THE MASTER SERGEANTmade Daniel feel old. From the way that lower ranks had alluded to this man, Daniel had expected some sort of graybearded multiple amputee. But under the scars and weathering was a man probably no more than thirty years of age. He entered Daniel’s chamber without knocking or introducing himself, and inspected it as if he owned the place, taking particular care to learn the field of fire commanded by each of its embrasures. Moving sideways past each of those slits, he seemed to envision a fan-shaped territory of dead enemies spread across the ground beyond.
“Are you expecting to fight a war, sergeant?” said Daniel, who’d been scratching at some paper with a quill and casting only furtive dart-like glances at the sergeant.
“Are you expecting to start one?” the sergeant answered a minute later, as if in no especial hurry to respond.
“Why do you ask me such an odd question?”
“I am trying to conjure up some understanding of how a Puritan gets himself clapped in Tower just now, at a time when the only friends the King has are Puritans.”