• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“There must be something,” O Be Joyful objected, but the clerk only shook his head.

“I know it’s odd, but there isn’t. We’ve a ground plan but no elevations, no models, nothing. All Wren does is provide drawings of the sections we’re working on. I suppose it’s all in his head.”

The signs in the heavens began the next spring. No one had ever seen anything like them before, and not only was their message clear; it was insistent. There were two eclipses of the moon, and of the sun first one, then another, then a third. Amidst these terrible signs, Titus Oates confirmed all O Be Joyful’s worst fears. There was a popish plot, and Sir Christopher Wren, O Be Joyful felt sure, was involved.

He would like to have denounced Wren; but if he did that, he would simply lose his job and nobody would believe him. He did join some Whig marches, but all that year and through the next, as the revelations of Titus Oates kept coming, and the popish court still held out, he could only reflect, with increasing bitterness: what would Martha have said?

O Be Joyful’s greatest confusion had been caused by Meredith. Once or twice he had reminded the clergyman about his fears over Wren’s papist cathedral, but even after Oates had revealed the conspiracy, Meredith refused to worry. Most puzzling of all, however, had been his reaction to the eclipses.

“The eclipses are welcome,” he told Carpenter. “By these events we may measure the heavenly motions precisely.”

“Are they not a sign from God?” asked O Be Joyful anxiously.

Meredith smiled. “They are a sign of how wonderfully He has made the universe.” And as best he could he explained to the craftsman how the solar system worked and how eclipses took place. “All these eclipses may be precisely predicted,” he told him. “Why, even the wandering stars, the fiery comets which used to frighten men, these too, we may suppose, travel in paths we shall be able to discover.” This at least was the idea of a fellow member of the Royal Society, Edmond Halley, who had just returned to London from a voyage to the southern hemisphere where he had been mapping the stars of the southern sky. “Eclipses, comets, all the heavenly motions, these are determined by huge physical causes, not by the puny actions of men,” he said reassuringly. But O Be Joyful was not reassured at all. The universe as Meredith described it sounded like a machine, strangely godless.

“You mean that God cannot send us a sign by an eclipse or a comet?” he demanded.

“Well, I suppose He can,” said Meredith with a laugh, “since all things are possible to God. But He doesn’t. So you needn’t worry.” But O Be Joyful worried even more. I wonder, he thought, if his science, his Royal Society and Observatory may not all be the work of the Devil too. After all, Wren was an astronomer. It pained him to think that Meredith, whom he knew to be a good man, might unwittingly be on the path to hell.

It was not until the summer of 1679 that O Be Joyful truly understood the cunning of Sir Christopher Wren. He was hard at work carving a pulpit for the old church of St Clement Danes which Wren was rebuilding, and often walked by the cathedral on his way home. He had paused to chat one evening with a mason working on the eastern end when, glancing down the length of the huge interior, he noticed that not only were the foundations arising all the way down the church, the walls were going up too. “Apart from the extreme west end, he’s building the whole cathedral up in a single piece,” the mason confirmed. “At least, that’s how it seems to us. I don’t know why.”

Suddenly O Be Joyful knew exactly why. He only wondered why he hadn’t guessed it before.

“He’s building it like that,” he said bitterly, “so that by the time people realize what he’s really doing, it’ll be too late to change anything. They’ll either have to let him finish it his way or knock it all down and start again.” He could not help admiring the architect’s cleverness, wicked though he knew it was.

“So what’s he