Between Broad Street and Bishopsgate
In
his left hand he holds a pamphlet picked up minutes before at a stall in
Threadneedle Street, a copy of one section of Hooke’s Micrographia, regarding the moon,
wherein Hooke concludes, having observed light near the Hipparchus crater, that
“the Vale may have Vegetables analogus to our Grass, Shrubs and Trees;
and most of these encompassing Hills as may be covered with a thin vegetable Coat,
such as the short Sheep pasture which covers the Hills of Salisbury
Plains.” His boots echo off the quadrangle’s brick and timber
walls. He walks a path that scores the yard from upper left to lower right.
There’s another from right to left. Where they cross, a bath welcomes
magpies and mice. The triangles formed are spread with golden sand, the yard
lined with saplings (almond) in blossom. Gresham College—once private
residence of Thomas Gresham, merchant and financial counselor to three Tudor
monarchs, now home to professors in divinity, geometry, music, astronomy, law,
and physic, who live in rooms (in scholarly celibacy), for “the education
and practical benefit of the citizens of London”—lies not too far
from St Michael’s Alley, where London’s first coffee-shop was
opened in 1652 by Mr. Edwards the Turkey merchant, who’d earlier brought
from Smyrna a youth called Pasqua Rosee to prepare the exotic brew each
morning—so the sign is Pasqua’s head. But Henry Oldenberg
doesn’t drink coffee.
Just now, Hooke spies Henry in the yard. It is the second
Wednesday in March (violets, specially the single blue, which are the earliest;
the yellow daffodil; the daisy; the almond-tree in blossom; the peach-tree in
blossom; the cornelian tree in blossom; sweet-briar) and Hooke has only
recently returned to his rooms after fleeing the city with friend and mentor
John Wilkins to avoid the worst of the plague’s most recent outbreak. The
men stayed at Durdans near Epsom in Surrey—a country house in the
possession of a Gentleman Fellow of The Royal Society (a.k.a The Invisible
College, recently renamed and chartered). They came first to a brook, then a
gate, then the house, which was nearly overrun with ivy. There, Hooke managed
to amass a great assortment of wonderful objects, such as “shining
animals whose blood, or juices, did shine more bright than the tail of a
glow-worm,” and to walk each day along the banks of the Mole River
through Banstead Downs. At night he measured the progress of a stem of ivy
grown through a crack in the wall. Each day he and Wilkins collaborated on the
design and manufacture of an experimental conveyance: a carriage in which one
man rides on a bouncing seat suspended above the horse’s back. And
Wilkins, for his part, at last completed his book on the Universal
Character—a new language to be spoken by all, representing, perhaps, his
most significant work since “Discovery of a New World in the Moon,”
published and argued three decades before. It, too, was concerned with unusual
modes of conveyance: a carriage to the moon able to “pass through the
vast spaces of air.”
Seeing Oldenberg approach, Hooke slips his newest
article—tentatively entitled “The Inflection of a Direct Motion
into a Curve by a Supervening Attractive Principle”—into a drawer
of his desk. Eleanor, the Dean’s eldest daughter, sits on his bed quickly
lacing up her stay.
