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Daniel estimated that two hundred and fifty gentlemen had answered the Earl’s summons, and gathered in the lee of the Tor. But in this place, that many men seemed like ten thousand. Few of them had bothered to dismount. For whatever sort of folk their forebears might have been, these truly were modern gentlemen, and they were as out of their rightful place, here, as Daniel was. The only man who seemed at home was the blacksmith, Thomas Newcomen, who looked like a chip off the old Tor as he stood to the side, broad shoulders an umbrella against the wind, scabby hands in pockets. Daniel saw him now for what he was, a Dwarf out of some Saxon ring-saga.
Between Stones and Wind this Tor ought by right to be dominated by elements of Earth and Air, if he were disposed to think like an Alchemist; but to him it seemed more a watery place. The wind sucked heat from his body as swiftly as snow-melt. The air (compared to the miasmas of cities) had a clarity and cleanliness, and the landscape a washed, lapidary quality, that made him feel as if he were standing on the bottom of a clear New England river at the moment when the ice broke up in the spring. So Water it was; but the presence of Thomas Newcomen spoke of Fire as well, for a Dwarf was never far from his Forge.
“Do not mistake me, I would fain be of service to the Proprietors of the Engine for Raising Water by Fire,” Daniel had insisted, on the twelfth day of Christmas, after Newcomen had stoked the boiler, and the Engine he had wrought, sucking and hissing like a dragon, had begun to pump water up out of Lostwithiel’s mill-pond, and into a cistern on the roof of his house. “But I do not have money.”
“Consider that stop-cock by which Mr. Newcomen brings the machine to life,” the Earl had said, pointing to a hand-forged valve-wheel mounted on a pipe. “Does that stop-cock make steam?”
“Of course not. Steam is generated in the boiler.”
“The trade of this country is a boiler that raises all the steam-which is to say, all the capital-we require. What is wanted is a valve,” the Earl had said, “a means of conducting some of that capital into an engine where it may do something useful.”
THE JUMBLE OF SHRUGGED-OFF slabs afforded natural benches, podia, lecterns, and balconies that served the tin-men as well as the same furnishings in a proper meeting-house. The Court of Sta
He had been seated on a mossy bench of stone. Now he clambered up onto it and delivered the following remarks.
“His Majesty King Edward I decreed that this Court meet in this place, and it has been phant’sied ever since that he did simply thrust the royal finger at a Map, indicating a place equidistant from the four Sta
“My grandfather was John Comstock, the Earl of Epsom, and the scion of that branch of our ancient line, known vulgarly as the Silver Comstocks. As you know he came to ruin, and my father, Charles, fared little better, and even had to leave over the Earldom and immigrate to America when James I was overthrown. I make no bones about my ancestors.
“But even those of you who suppose that we are Jacobites (which we are not) and call us inveterate Tories (which we are) and who say that Queen A
The mention of Daniel’s name caused a sparse ripple of curiosity to propagate through the company of cold, irritable Gentlemen. The mention of Isaac’s created a sensation. Daniel suspected this had less to do with Isaac’s invention of the calculus than with the fact that he was ru
“Copper,” shouted a few voices, but they were immediately drowned out by hundreds shouting, “Tin!”
“Never mind, never mind, ’tis no concern of ours, for our mines will not produce!” proclaimed the Earl. “Else, we would have never so much to talk about. To the Saracen’s Head we should adjourn, so as not to starve or freeze during our deliberations. But as all of our mines are flooded with water, the copper, or the tin, for the next English coinage shall perforce be imported from abroad. ’Twill be of no concern and no profit to us. The doings of this ancient Parliament shall remain a mere antiquarian curiosity; and so why not convene for a few ticks of the clock on a freezing moor, and have done with it?
“Unless-gentlemen-we can pump the water out of our mines. I know how you will object, saying, ‘Nay, we have tried man-engines, horse-engines, mill-wheels and windmills, none of them profit us!’ Even though I am not a miner, gentlemen, I understand these facts. One who understands them better is this fellow standing at my left hand, Mr. Thomas Newcomen, of Dartmouth, who being an humble man styles himself blacksmith and ironmonger. Those of you who have bought mining-tools from him know him thus. But I have seen him work on mechanical prodigies that are, to a mining-pick, as the Concertos of Herr Handel are to the squeaking of a rusty wheel, and I recognize him by the title of Engineer.