Newton's Cannon (9 page)

“What are you saying?” Adrienne asked. “Are you saying that Orléans is planning to kill the king and the dauphin?”

Torcy now revealed one of his true smiles, a hard, cold thing totally unlike the amiable façade he had presented earlier. Adrienne found that she liked this one better; it was real.

“I would never
say
that, Mademoiselle. Nevertheless, the duke is the son of the king's late brother, and I need not tell you of the strife that existed between them. Worse yet, he is the son of that
German
woman, the Princess Palatine.”

“I know that there was never any love lost between the princess and my late mistress,” Adrienne said. “But what has all of this to do with me?”

Torcy examined her squarely. “I do not know,” he replied.
“But if
you
know, you had best tell me now. Do not let me discover through spies that you are dissembling.”

Adrienne returned his gaze frankly, though her lips trembled. “Before God, I do not know, sir,” she said, “though when you find out I would be very pleased if you told me.”

Torcy gazed out the window. After a moment of silence, he let down the glass and called for the driver to shutter the lanterns. An instant later, the coach was plunged into complete darkness. Adrienne felt the hackles on her neck rise and a sudden terror of what the marquis might do gripped her. And yet, after a few moments, as nothing happened, the darkness became less black as the natural light of the stars and half moon dusted the landscape argent. In the pearly glow, Torcy's face was as that of a marble statue. “I wonder sometimes,” he said, so softly that she almost did not hear, “if these new lights we have created do not blind us to what is real.”

Adrienne remained silent, and after a moment, Torcy chuckled.

“I will take you at your word, Mademoiselle, but I encourage you to keep your eyes and ears open. Do not doubt that some game is being played in which you are a piece. Whether you are a queen or a pawn I do not know, but either may check a king— and I will deal with either in the same way.”

“I understand,” Adrienne replied. “I have no desire to be a queen and no small disdain for pawns.”

As abruptly as he had begun, the man stopped running. He stood, holding Ben's arm, staring without apparent passion down at him as he struggled.

“Let go of me, damn you!” Ben managed to gasp. “What do you want? What have I done?” He choked down another scream, overcome by terror. The man dropped him, and Ben fell sprawling facedown on the damp, cold grass. He lay, eyes clenched, waiting for the blow, the knife—whatever was coming.

“Sit up,” Bracewell said quietly. Shaking, Ben pushed up with his palms, keeping his eyes on the ground.

“Look at me.”

Ben reluctantly turned his gaze upward.

“Now, Benjamin, I want you to listen to me,” the man said, squatting down on his haunches so that their eyes were more or less level. He reached over and mussed Ben's hair. “Listen and remember. What you did the other day, with your machine— you are
not
to do that again, is that clear?”

“Ga-w-what?” Ben gagged.

Trevor Bracewell leaned closer. “Or anything of the kind. Do you understand? Leave things be, Benjamin.”

“I don't understand.” Ben tried to sound defiant but failed. “God curse you, I don't understand.”

Behind Bracewell, Ben saw something rise. It looked like the fog but thicker, darker, a sheet of smoke with a dull ember of flame glowing inside, resembling nothing so much as an eye.

“Yes, yes,” Bracewell snapped irritably. Ben understood that his attacker was no longer talking to him. Then, the apparition vanished. But in that fleeting instant, Ben felt something thrust
into him where his dreams lurked. It was a whole vision, fully formed, an answer to a question.

“What was that?” Bracewell snapped, now speaking to Ben. “What did you just see?”

“What?” Ben gaped.

Bracewell took a deep breath, and then with an apparent effort, he smiled again. “It doesn't matter, does it?” he said, his voice calm once more. “It doesn't matter what
they
let slip because you've understood
me
, haven't you? You will build no more devices, experiment no more. Be a printer, Benjamin Franklin. Keep your mind here, on the things of this world, and you will live a long and healthy life.”

With that, the man who called himself Trevor Bracewell stood and, without a single backward glance, strode off into the lifting fog.

Back in Boston, the town clock struck the first chime of six. Before the last had sounded, Ben was already back on Common Street, running faster than he ever had. Halfway home he stopped, his belly heaving to expel a breakfast he had never eaten.

Four hours later, Ben's fingers still trembled as he set type. He kept feeling that grip on his arm, kept hearing the words.

Leave things be, Benjamin, leave them be.

What could that possibly mean? What would Trevor Bracewell do to him if he didn't ‘leave things be’?

Bracewell had lied. He
had
to be a magus, despite his claim to the contrary. Was that what this was about, some wizardly competition? Was Boston only large enough, in Bracewell's view, to support one magus—himself? Ben knew that alchemists, adepts, and magi
did
dispute with one another. Sir Isaac Newton had his share of opponents and had waged public war on some of them— notably Gottfried von Leibniz, who claimed to have invented calculus before Newton. But these had been battles fought with words, not with fists and promises of murder. What could have driven Bracewell to threaten a fourteen-year-old boy? In this age of miracles, what could so frighten or anger a man about a machine that merely created ice and steam?

That
gave Ben pause. Perhaps the man was
not
a philosopher or a sorcerer; perhaps he was one of the old-style Puritans. Perhaps the man was a witch hunter.

Perhaps he was the devil himself. Whoever Trevor Bracewell was, he was a bully, and Ben had too much experience with bullies to remain long daunted by them. James had hurt him far more than any stranger. No, it wasn't Trevor Bracewell that kept his fingers shaking or sickened him to the point of nausea.

What did
that
was the knowledge that he now
knew
how to fix the aetherschreiber. He was not at all certain what he had seen on the Common, but in the instant in which that single eye had touched him, he had asked himself,
What do I really want?
And the answer had not been, “to live,” “to escape,” or any other such sensible thought. No, it had been,
to fix the aetherschreiber.
And then he had felt an intense involuntary response— followed by equally intense self-anger—and he had known how to do it. It was as if a million pieces of something had joined together in his head.

The door banged open, and Ben jumped, upsetting the entire line of type he was working on. James was stalking toward him, fury only barely banked behind his eyes. In his hand he carried a newspaper, which he threw toward Ben.

“Look at that!” he snarled.

Ben picked up the paper dumbly.
The London Mercury
, it read, and the date was April 7, 1720.

“Yesterday,” Ben said. “We set this yesterday. But this isn't the font we set it in.”

“Yes, and what do you suppose that means?” James asked.

“It means— Oh, no, not already.”

James nodded grimly. “Yes, already. Someone must have gotten wind of our plan.”

Yes
, Ben thought,
anyone and everyone at the Green Dragon, I should think.
All the printers that Ben knew had mentioned it to
him.
“Did ours sell?”

James nodded. “Ours was on the street an hour or so before theirs, though I had to pay the Lawson boy to run it.”

“You told me to work on the aetherschreiber,” Ben began defensively.

“Yes, I know that,” James snapped. “I'm not laying blame on you. The blame goes to me for allowing you to convince me of this mad scheme.” He threw himself heavily into a chair. “Fine,” he said, finally. “So what do we have? Have you written any ballads, as we discussed?”

Ben nodded reluctantly. “I wrote one called the ‘Siege of Calais.’ It's about Marlborough.” He hesitated. “It isn't very good.”

“Is it as good as your poem about Blackbeard?”

“Probably.”

“We print it tomorrow, then. What of the aetherschreiber? Can you change it so that we can receive more sorts of news?”

Ben stared at James, and for an instant he felt a sort of panic.

“Yes,” he said quietly. “I am certain that I can.”

“Hah!” James said. “Then I
was
right.”

“Yes,” Ben acknowledged. “But I need something from you.”

“What is that?” James asked, a bit suspiciously.

“Money,” Ben told him. “I need money to pay a glassblower.”

James pursed his lips angrily. “I've already wagered a lot of money on you, Ben. How much do you need?”

“I don't know. If you give me your leave to go now, I shall find out. If the glassblower works quickly, I can have your news—something—by tonight.”

James looked skeptical, and Ben's fury suddenly lashed forth. “It was
your
idea,” he snarled.

“Don't yell at me! Don't take that tone with me!” And Ben realized, with a cold, sobering shock, that a tear was working down one of James' cheeks. Ben's hand darted to his mouth in astonishment, and he suddenly felt his own tears crowd thickly around his lids.

“Go, go,” James hissed, thus saving them both, for Ben had no more than reached the street before his tears poured forth like the hot, wet drops of a summer storm.

“Will it work?” John Collins asked, touching the odd glass surface with the tip of his index finger.

Ben shrugged. “If it doesn't, James and I are in the poor-
house. Father has no more money for either of us, and with everyone in town selling the
Mercury
, we won't feed ourselves
that
way.” He sighed in exasperation. “I thought I was so smart, John.”

“Well, you can always sell ice,” John began, trying, for once, to brighten the conversation. It didn't work; how could James know that Ben had been forbidden, essentially on pain of death, to continue his experiments?

Of course, here he was, at it again. But if Bracewell could see him here—in his own, shuttered bedroom—then what hope was there? His only hope was that his nemesis had no magical scrying device that could spy through walls.

“Well, then, try it,” John continued.

“I'm afraid,” Ben admitted. Once he began acting on it, the certainty of his vision had ebbed with dismaying swiftness. Now, looking at the thing the glassblower had made for him, he felt faintly ridiculous.

It was two nested glass cylinders. They stood upright and fit together tightly enough that the inner tube could be drawn up or lowered by gentle pressure from the finger but would remain in whatever position it was left in when one stopped pushing or pulling. In the lower tube rested a silvery fluid; a suspension of philosopher's mercury in its near cousin, ordinary mercury.

“And the chime itself—” John began.

“Yes, melted and alloyed with ordinary glass to form the tubes. I went to the mercantile office and found that they had several broken chimes on hand, and they sold me them for next to nothing, so they are included, too.”

“It seems as likely to work as anything. How will you sound the crystal?”

“That's the thing—with this arrangement I don't think I'll have to. I guess we'll see.”

Ben lifted his odd construction, fitting it into the new brace he had made. The tubes now rested where the former, flat chime had—within the translator housing. He pulled the inner tube as far out as it would come without it coming free.

“Now,” he told John, “wind the scribing arm.”

John did so. There was already a piece of paper waiting to be written on, and the lead pencil in the arm's grip was sharp.

“Start it,” John said.

“It
is
started,” Ben replied.

“Oh.”

After a moment, Ben pushed the tube a bit farther in, but there was still no result. He pushed farther, then farther still. John gave a disappointed sigh.

The arm suddenly spasmed, and John yelped. Ben froze, his heart pounding, and then slowly eased the tube back up. The arm jumped again, and then, incredibly, began writing in a thick, crabbed hand.

Ben felt like shouting in triumph.

“It works,” he muttered. “By the Lord God, it most certainly works.”

“You must have known it would,” John said suspiciously. “Did you try this one without me, too?”

“No, John,” Ben assured him, “I wanted you with me this time in case it didn't work, to save me from throwing myself from the window.”

“Move it down,” John said, his voice nearly choked on eagerness.

Another half inch down and the arm jumped again. This time it wrote in a language that neither of them understood, though the letters were Roman.

“Mark the tube,” John said suddenly, “like a gauge. So you can find them again.”

“An excellent thought,” Ben replied.

The third schreiber they found wrote in Latin, which Ben laid
aside to translate later. The fourth was English again, and the boys followed it with great interest, for it was what appeared to be news of the European war.