Free The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and the System of the World by Neal Stephenson

its contents.”
    “Wilkins and I were idly trying to reproduce one of Boyle’s experiments when things got out of hand. Fortunately no serious damage was done. It wasn’t a serious fire, but it accomplished what Wilkins wanted it to: wrecked the mask of etiquette that Drake had set over me, and set my tongue a-run. I must have looked as if I’d gazed upon the face of God. Wilkins let slip that, if it was an actual education I was looking for, there was this thing down in London called Gresham’s College where he and a few of his old Oxford cronies were teaching Natural Philosophy directly, without years and years of tedious Classical nincompoopery as prerequisite.
    “Now, I was too young to even think of being devious. Even had I practiced to be clever, I’d have had second thoughts doing it in that room. So I simply told Wilkins the truth: I had no interest in religion, at least as a profession, and wanted only to be a natural philosopher like Boyle or Huygens. But of course Wilkins had already discerned this. ‘Leave it in my hands,’ he said, and winked at me.
    “Drake would not hear of sending me to Gresham’s, so two years later I enrolled at that old vicar-mill: Trinity College, Cambridge. Father believed that I did so in fulfillment of his plan for me. Wilkins meanwhile had come up with his own plan for my life. And so you see, Enoch, I am well accustomed to others devising hare-brained plans for how I am to live. That is why I have come to Massachusetts, and why I do not intend to leave it.”
    “Your intentions are your own business. I merely ask that you read the letter,” Enoch says.
    “What sudden event caused you to be sent here, Enoch? A falling-out between Sir Isaac and a young protégé?”
    “Remarkable guesswork!”
    “It’s no more a guess than when Halley predicted the return of the comet. Newton’s bound by his own laws. He’s been working on the second edition of the Principia with that young fellow, what’s-his-name…”
    “Roger Cotes.”
    “Promising, fresh-faced young lad, is he?”
    “Fresh-faced, beyond doubt,” Enoch says, “promising, until…”
    “Until he made some kind of a misstep, and Newton flew into a rage, and flung him into the Lake of Fire.”
    “Apparently. Now, all that Cotes was working on—the revised Principia Mathematica and some kind of reconciliation with Leibniz—is ruined, or at least stopped.”
    “Isaac never cast me into the Lake of Fire,” Daniel muses. “I was so young and so obviously innocent—he could never think the worst of me, as he does of everyone else.”
    “Thank you for reminding me! Please.” Enoch shoves the letter across the table.
    Daniel breaks the seal and hauls it open. He fishes spectacles from a pocket and holds them up to his face with one hand, as if actually fitting them over his ears would imply some sort of binding commitment. At first he locks his elbow to regard the whole letter as a work of calligraphic art, admiring its graceful loops and swirls. “Thank God it’s not written in those barbarous German letters,” he says. Finally the elbow bends, and he gets down to actually reading it.
    As he nears the bottom of the first page, a transformation comes over Daniel’s face.
    “As you have probably noted,” Enoch says, “the Princess, fully appreciating the hazards of a trans-Atlantic voyage, has arranged an insurance policy…”
    “A posthumous bribe!” Daniel says. “The Royal Society is infested with actuaries and statisticians nowadays—drawing up tables for those swindlers at the ‘Change. You must have ‘run the numbers’ and computed the odds of a man my age surviving a voyage across the Atlantic; months or even years in that pestilential metropolis; and a journey back to Boston.”
    “Daniel! We most certainly did not ‘run the numbers.’ It’s only reasonable for the Princess to insure you.”
    “At this amount? This is a pension—a legacy —for my wife and my son.”
    “Do you