The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and the System of the World

by Neal Stephenson

  “Sometimes it is better to be indirect…then each and every one of those Ladies can suppose that the ship is really named after her.”

  “Not a bad idea, Enoch…but what does each of those three Ladies have in common?”

  “Wisdom. Wisdom, and a kind of strength—a willingness to put her wisdom into effect.”

  “Say no more,” Jack said, “I have seen the very Lady in plays.” Then, turning his attention back to the ship: “I christen thee Minerva.” A moment later French wine was fizzing on his sunburnt flesh, and the cannons were firing all round. Dappa was translating all to Queen Kottakkal, who looked Jack in the eye and smiled.

  Book 5

  The Juncto

  The Thames

  FEBRUARY 1696

  “A GREAT HEAP OF CORD-WOOD and kindling, saturated with oil, was found on the brink of the cliff at Dover,” asserted Roger Comstock, Marquis of Ravenscar and Chancellor of the Exchequer, “ready to speed the news of his majesty’s assassination across the Channel.” Seated in the (more desirable) forward-facing bench of the boat, he held his head high, and gazed down the Thames as if combing the skies above the Nore for encrypted smoke-signals.

  “It speaks well of the Jacobites that they have at last got their signals worked out,” was all Daniel had to say. “They have used up half of France’s wine and firewood celebrating false reports of William’s demise.”

  Roger sighed. “You are as ever a fount of treasonous raillery. It is well that we meet on a water-taxi, where the only one who can overhear us, does not speak a word of English.” This a playful dig at the Cockney manning the oar. If Daniel had made the same jest, he’d have been pitched overboard, and the waterman would have been acquitted, at the Old Bailey, on grounds of All Too Understandable Righteous Fury. Somehow Roger said it with the wink that was as good as a one-pound tip.

  “When we parley in a coffee-house,” Roger went on, “I flinch whenever you get that look on your face, and part your lips.”

  “Soon I shall follow that other Seditious Libeller, Gomer Bolstrood, across the sea, and your flinching days shall be at an end.” Daniel, seated in the backward-facing seat, gazed wistfully toward Massachusetts.

  “Yes, so you have been claiming, for the last ten years or so—”

  “Closer seven. But to play fast and loose with quantities numerical is, of course, a perquisite—some would say, a necessity—of your office.” Daniel rotated his head a few degrees to the left and nodded in the direction of Westminster Palace, still and for the next few seconds visible around the elbow of Lambeth. This was a reference to the Exchequer, an avalanche of ill-considered additions to the river-ward side of the same Palace. It was there that Daniel had gone to meet Roger, and thence that they’d departed on this boat a few minutes ago.

  Roger turned around, following Daniel’s gaze, but too late.

  “I was looking at your Place of Business,” Daniel said. “It seems to have disappeared behind all of those immense stacks of rotting timbers that have accumulated there in recent years, along the Lambeth river-bend, in consequence of that no one can buy anything because there is no money.”

  Roger blinked very slowly, once, which was a way of letting Daniel know that the jab had quite wounded him, but that the victim was in a forgiving mood.

  “I should be ever so much obliged,” Roger said, “if you would attend to the very important news I am projecting in the general direction of your bloody ears. Forty men—gentlemen and titled nobility of England, for the most part—gathered yesterday on Turn-ham Green to fall upon the King of England, on his way back from hunting, and murder him.”

  “Say, speaking of bloody ears—”

  “Yes! He was among them.”

  People hated listening to Daniel and Roger converse, for they’d known each other much longer than was decent, proper, or good for them, and so were able to communicate in a stunted zargon of private allusions. Bloody ears was here a reference to Charles White, the Jacobite Tory who had made a habit of biting Whigs’ ears off, and (or so ’twas rumored) later displaying them, in private, to like-minded friends, as trophies.

  “In Calais, in Dunkirk,” Roger continued, “you’ll see ships crammed with French troops, waiting only for that signal-fire to blaze up before they set sail.”

  “I see that you are furious. I understand why. If I am not, it is only because this is all so bloody repetitive that I can scarcely believe I am hearing it! Did we not go through this already?”

  “What an odd reaction.”

  “Is it? I could say the same about the bloody money. When are we to have money, Roger?”

  “Some, Daniel, would say that the regrettable phænomena to which you allude were consistent, or persistent, or constant menaces to our liberties as Englishmen, and thus naturally to be confronted and subdued with manly vigor. For you to roll your eyes in this way, and deride them as merely repetitious—as if you were watching a play—is very strange.”

  “That is why I am getting ready to excuse myself, and go out to the lobby for air.”

  “The lobby is some labored metaphor, here, for Massachusetts Bay Colony?”

  “Yes.”

  “What makes you suppose Massachusetts will seem any less repetitious? The news that I get from there is just one bloody Indian-raid, and Mather-tirade, after another.”

  “I shall be able to pursue work there, of an altogether novel character.”

  “Yes—so you keep telling the Fellows of the Royal Society—all two dozen of us.”

  “The correct figure is nearer eight dozen. But I take your meaning. We have dwindled. It is all because of Want of Novelty. I mean to fix that.”

  “Here is novelty for you: When you come in sight of the French naval base at Dunkirk—”

  “That is the second time you have spoken to me as if I were about to go on a voyage to France. What is troubling your mind, to inspire such phant’sies?”

  “Troubled mind or no, I am, am I not, the sole benefactor and Chairman of the Court of Directors of the Massachusetts Bay Colony Institute of Technologickal Arts?”

  “Sir, I am not aware that the said Institute has even been Instituted yet. But if it had, you’d be the Prime Suspect.”

  “Is that a yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “It follows that I am entitled to some say in how the sole employee goes about his work—do you not agree?”

  “Employees get paid. They get paid money. Of which there is none.”

  “You are really the most exasperating chap. How have you spent the past fortnight?”

  “You know perfectly well I’ve been up at Cambridge helping Isaac clean out his lodgings.”

  Roger affected astonishment. “I say, that wouldn’t by any chance be Isaac Newton the savant—?—! Why ever is he leaving Cambridge?”

  “Coming down here—finally—to run the Mint,” Daniel allowed (this had been in the works for years; the Realm’s political complications, and Isaac’s mental disorders, had made it slow).

  “They say he is the most brilliant fellow who ever lived.”

  “He would give that distinction to Solomon; but I am with you, sir.”

  “My goodness, do you suppose he’ll be up to the task of stamping out a few bits of metal?”

  “If he is not fettered by Politicks.”

  “Daniel, you offend me. What you have just said amounts to a suggestion that the Juncto is politically incompetent. May I remind you that Recoinage has been approved—by Commons as well as Lords? So we shall only have to put up with this rubbish for a little while longer.” The Chancellor of the Exchequer reached into his shoe and pulled out a wad of Bank of England paper money he’d stuffed into it to keep his feet warm, and waggled it in the chilly air for emphasis. Then—disgusted by the sight of it—he chucked it over his shoulder into the Thames. Neither he nor the waterman looked back.

  “That was a foolish and profligate waste,” Daniel said. “We could’ve burned it to keep warm.”

&n
bsp; “Tally-sticks make more heat, guv’nor,” volunteered the waterman, “and they are circulating at a discount of forty percent.”

  “Isaac will be sworn in at the Mint at the beginning of May,” said Roger. “It is now February. How shall we occupy ourselves between now and then? Your intention is to carry forward that Comenius-Wilkins–Leibniz Pansophic Arithmetickal Engine–Logick Mill–Algebra of Ratiocination–Automatic Computation–Repository of all Knowledge project, is it not?”

  “We need a better name for it,” Daniel conceded, “but you know perfectly well the answer is yes.”

  “Then you really had ought to go have a chat with Leibniz first, or do you disagree?”

  “Of course I don’t disagree,” said Daniel, “but even if money existed in this Realm, I should not possess any, and so I had not really considered it.”

  “I found some old louis d’or, pre-debasement, in a sock,” Roger confided to him, “and should be pleased to advance them to you, while we wait for Isaac to stoke up the Mint.”

  “What on earth would I do with French coins?”

  “Buy things with them,” said Roger, “in France.”

  “We are at war with France!”

  “It has been a very slow war of late—one battle of consequence in the last two years.”

  “Still—why should I go there?”

  “It happens to be on the way to Germany, which is where Leibniz was, the last time anyone bothered to check.”

  “It would be more prudent to avoid France.”

  “But ever so much more convenient to go there direct—for that is where your jacht happens to be bound.”

  “I have a jacht now, too?”

  “Behold!” proclaimed the Marquis of Ravenscar. Daniel was obliged to swivel his head around and gaze downstream. They had, by this time, drifted past the Steelyard and were converging on the Old Swan Stairs, just above London Bridge. On the yonder side of the Bridge spread the Pool, which contained above a thousand ships.

  “I haven’t the faintest idea what it is you want me to behold,” Daniel complained. “The Fishmongers?” For that was the closest thing along the azimuth that Roger was now forcibly indicating with bladelike thrusts of the hand.

  “Oh, bloody hell,” said Roger, “she is at Tower Wharf, you cannot see her from here, let us go and pay her a visit.” And he alighted from the boat and stomped away up Old Swan Stairs without giving any money to, or even glancing back at, the waterman; who, however, seemed perfectly content. Roger must have an Understanding with him, as he seemed to with all London, a few Jacobites excepted.

  FROM THE OLD SWAN, where they bated to warm themselves with pints, they could have walked half a mile along Thames Street and then applied themselves to the lengthy and complicated work of burrowing through the Tower’s gates, bastions, causeways, and the micro-neighborhoods that had grown up around, and occluded, the same, as vegetation on infected heart-valves. But Roger was of a mind to see a thing on the river side, and so they walked only far enough to get round the end of the Bridge, then descended the terraced rectilinear cove of Lion Stairs, below the barnlike mass of the Church of St. Magnus Martyr, which Wren had rebuilt, but not got round to putting a tower or a steeple on yet. Another waterman consented to take them downriver from there. Swinging wide round the riotous congestion of Billingsgate and the broad Key before the Customs House, they pounced upon Tower Wharf. For the most part this presented itself to them as a quarter-mile-long wall jumping straight out of the river. But it was adorned here and there with cranes, guns, a wee crenellated castle, and other curios. Two stairs and one arched tunnel were cut into it, and the waterman kept guessing Roger would go to one of those; but the Marquis of Ravenscar kept exhorting him on, on to the downstream end, where two brigs and a ship had been made fast to the wharf. Daniel instinctively looked at the smaller and meaner vessels, until he recollected that he was in the company of Roger; then he had eyes only for what was high and gaudy. They were looking up at the bows of the three-master. Its figurehead was extraordinary. Not only because it was covered in many square yards of gold leaf—that was common enough—but because of its sculpture. It was a face carved into the front of a bulbous golden sphere that seemed to be hurtling forth with utmost impetuosity, drawing behind it a vast swirling wake of golden, silver, and copper flames. It was, Daniel realized, an anthropomorphic phant’sy of a Comet or a great fiery—

  “Meteor!” Roger announced. “Or Météore, as her former owner, Monsieur le duc d’Arcachon, would have it.” Then, to the waterman, “Take us up and down the length of her, and then, when Dr. Waterhouse has finished his inspection, we shall board her by yonder ladder. Daniel, I do hope you are in the mood for some ladder-climbing.”

  “I’d climb a rope to see this,” Daniel returned.

  “Mmm…any sane man, given a choice between scaling a rope, and going to France on a Duke’s jacht, would choose the latter…so I shall take your remark as a commitment to be in Dunkirk in three days’ time,” said Roger.

  EARLIER IN HIS LIFE DANIEL would have counted the guns of Météore, but as it was he had eyes mostly for the woodcarving and the decoration. The shipwrights had made it appear that Météore was draped and festooned from stem to stern with garlands of golden laurel. Victory spread her wings across the breadth of the sterncastle, and drew all those wreaths and festoons together in one hand like so many reins, while brandishing a sword in the other. Above the spreading wings was a row of windows. “Your cabin,” Roger explained, “where refreshment awaits us.”

  They dined there on a roast quail prepared in Météore’s galley, “which had to be gutted and re-built,” Roger said, “to remove the taint; for the late Duke had tastes abominable even to the French.” The azure tablecloth was embroidered with gold fleurs-de-lis; Daniel suspected it might have been a flag once.

  “Is this ship yours now, then, Roger?”

  “Please do not be vulgar by speaking of ownership, Daniel; as everyone knows, she was taken as a prize from Cherbourg the last time the Frogs got ready to invade us, and became a trifle for the King to dispose of as he wished; he had thoughts of bestowing her upon his Queen, and so had her repaired—”

  “What, the Queen?”

  “The ship. But when smallpox took her from this world—the Queen, that is, not the ship—Météore became a useless bauble, scarcely worth the upkeep—”

  “You got this ship for free!?”

  “Damn all Puritans and their base obsession with how much it costs!” Roger bellowed, shaking a tiny drumstick at Daniel’s brow as if it were the club of Hercules. “What matters is that the sentimental value of Météore to the de Lavardac family is very great. And who should be in Dunkirk just now but Eliza de Lavardac.” Roger lost focus for some moments. “I hope it is not all true, what people say about her and the pox.”

  Daniel had seen the only woman he’d ever loved chewed up and vomited out by smallpox, and urgently desired a change of subject. “I begin to understand. The Whigs are seen as the party of the Bank, and of War. The Bank is said to be foundering and the War has ground to a halt.”

  “Mind you,” put in Roger with one more admonitory shake of the drumstick, “the Bank shall succeed immensely, and we shall prevail over the French, all in good time; but it would help us if we could avoid losing the next election to Harley and Bolingbroke and his lot.” Meaning the Tories.

  “And so you would make some peace-offering to the French. Eliza is seen as a sort of bridge between France and England. You would please her and her husband by returning Météore. And you would like me to go along—?”

  “Somewhat as you went to the Hague in the days before the Revolution,” said Roger, “as the least likely imaginable diplomat.”

  “The more often I am sent on such missions the more likely I must seem,” said Daniel, “but I shall go and deliver this boat to Eliza if that is what you want. From there it is on to Hanover.”

  “It is extraordinary you should mention Hanover,” s
aid Roger. “I have a message, too sensitive to commit to paper, that I should like you to deliver to our next Queen.”

  “Are you referring to Sophie of Hanover? You confuse me, for our next Queen is named Anne, and lives in England.”

  “Syphilitic like her sister and her dad,” Roger mumbled, as if Princess Anne were only the most fleeting of distractions, “unlikely to have viable children—whereas Sophie was an unstoppable baby-maker in her day. Mark my words, if we can only suffer through to the end of these poxy, Popish Stuarts, we’ll see Hanovers on the throne—and Hanovers are natural Whigs.”

  “How does that follow?”

  “Hanovers are natural Whigs,” Roger re-iterated. “Keep saying it to yourself, Daniel, an hundred times a day, until you believe it; and then say it to Sophie of Hanover as if you mean it.”

  “Well, do not look up, Roger, but I phant’sy that some natural Tories are spying on us from the Tower.” Daniel cocked his head at a side-window of the cabin, which offered a prospect over the Wharf and the fortifications above and beyond it.

  “Really!?”

  “Oh yes indeed.”

  “The curtain-wall or—”

  “Farther in, I should say. Do keep in mind that the Tower’s a bit crowded with Tories today.”

  “I suppose it would be,” said Roger. “Well done, Daniel! Perhaps you do have some future, after all, as a scheming political hack.”

  “You forget I used to make my living as one. Excuse me, Roger, but the gastro-colic reflex is having its way with me, and I must to the head.”

  “In truth or—”

  “No, for I am stopped up in the bowels these three days; it is a diversionary ruse. Is there a prospective-glass to be found in this place?”

  “Indeed, a lovely one, in that drawer—no, to the left—now down—and down again. There you have it.”

  “To perfect the illusion, I’ll need something in lieu of a turd.”

  “Spotted Dick!” said Roger instantly, eyeing a brown log on a platter.