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

by Neal Stephenson

  On the 30th, which was a Saturday, they got a late start. Daniel first had to find a hackney-carriage to take him from Oxford back out to Woodstock. There was a lot of blundering about in the woods there trying to rendezvous with Mr. Threader’s train. When he spied it, drawn up before a cottage on the edge of the wood, he saw that he was too early after all, as the horses were all in their feed-bags. He had the hackney-driver unload his trunks on the spot, so that Mr. Threader’s men could get them packed on the right cart. But Daniel himself remained in the hackney-coach, and asked the driver to continue a mile down the road and drop him off, so that he could enjoy a stroll back through the woods. If they were going to attempt to make it all the way to London today, this would be his last opportunity to stretch his legs.

  The woods were pleasant enough. Spring was trying to come early. Even though branches were bare, holly and ivy provided some greenery. But the road was a slough, with puddles that would have challenged an albatross. It seemed to be cutting round the base of a rise situate between him and the cottage, and so Daniel angled away from it first chance he got, taking what looked like a game trail up onto higher and firmer ground. Reaching the top of the rise he was faintly disappointed to discover the cottage just where he had expected to find it. Decades had passed since he had enjoyed the thrill of getting lost. So down he went, and approached the little compound from its back side, and thereby saw something through a window.

  The three wooden chests from Mr. Threader’s baggage cart had been brought in and unlocked. They contained scales—exquisite scales made out of gold, so that cycles of tarnishing and polishing would not, over the years, throw off their balance. In front of each scale sat one of Mr. Threader’s assistants, weighing golden coins, one at a time. Another assistant was counting the coins out of a chest and distributing them, as needed, to the weighers, who stacked the weighed coins one at a time on embroidered green felt cloths that they had unrolled on the tabletop. Each weigher was maintaining three stacks of coins; the stack in the middle tended to be higher than the other two. When a stack grew precarious it would be carried off, counted, and deposited in one of Mr. Threader’s strong-boxes. Or that was the general impression Daniel collected peering through bubbly ancient window-panes with sixty-seven-year-old eyes.

  Then he remembered the warning that Will had spoken to him at the Saracen’s Head. He knew instantly that, even though he had come this way with intentions wholly innocent, and stumbled upon this scene by chance, it would never be viewed that way. He began to feel actual guilt-pangs even though he was blameless. This was a miraculous prodigy of self-shaming that was taught to young Puritans by their elders, as Gypsies taught their children to swallow fire. He skulked back into the forest like a poacher who has stumbled upon the gamekeeper’s camp, and worked his way round to the road, and approached the carts from that side, just as the scales and strong-boxes were being loaded onto the carts for transport.

  They began to work their way down the gantlet of thriving river ports that crowded the brinks of the Thames. It was market-day in several of the towns they passed through, which impeded their progress, and at the end of the day they had got no farther than Windsor. This suited Mr. Threader, who perceived opportunities for conversation and profit in that district, so lousy with Viscounts, Earls, &c. Daniel was of a mind to stroll up the road to the nearby town of Slough, which was full of inns, including one or two newish-looking ones where he thought he could find decent lodgings. Mr. Threader deemed the plan insane, and watched Daniel set out on the journey with extreme trepidation, and not before Daniel had, in the presence of several witnesses, released Mr. Threader from liability. But Daniel had scarcely got himself into a good walking-rhythm before he was recognized and hailed by a local petty noble who was a Fellow of the Royal Society, and who insisted that Daniel accompany him to his house near Eton and stay the night in his guest bedchamber. Daniel accepted gladly—to the fascination of Mr. Threader, who saw it play out in the carriageway, and found it extremely singular, verging on suspicious, that a chap such as Daniel should be thus recognized and plucked out of the crowd simply because of what went on in his brain.

  The next day, Sunday, January 31st, 1714, Daniel did not get breakfast, because none was served. His host had given his kitchen staff the day off. Instead he was hustled off to a splendid church between Windsor and London. It was exactly the sort of church that Drake would have set fire to with extreme prejudice during the Civil War. As a matter of fact, the longer Daniel looked at it, the more certain he became that Drake had torched it, and that Daniel had watched. No matter; as Mr. Threader would say, that was in the past. The church was vaulted with a fair new roof now. Daniel’s bum, and the bums of the noble and gentle congregants, were kept up off the stony floor by most excellent carven pews, which were rented out to the occupants at annual rates that Daniel did not dare to even think about.

  This seemed like the sort of High-Flyer church where the minister would wear glorious raiments. And maybe it was. But not today. He trudged up the aisle in burlap, his head hung low, pallid knuckles locked together below his chin, dolorous musick wheezing out of the organ, played upon reed stops that mocked the rumblings of the parishioners’ empty stomachs.

  ’Twas a scene of pre-Norman gloom. Daniel half expected to see Vikings crash through the stained glass windows and begin raping the ladies. He was quite certain that Queen Anne must have suffered another Setback, or the French unloaded a hundred regiments of Irishmen in the Thames Estuary. But when they had got through the obligatory stuff in the beginning of the service, and the Minister finally had an opportunity to stand up and share what was on his mind, it turned out that all of this fasting, humiliation, and wearing of rough garments was to bewail an event that Daniel had personally witnessed, from a convenient perch on his father’s shoulders, sixty-five years earlier.

  “THOSE PEOPLE MIGHT AS WELL have been Hindoos to me!” he shouted as he was diving into Mr. Threader’s carriage three hours later—scant moments after the Recessional dirge had expired.

  Then he looked at Mr. Threader, expecting to see the man’s periwig turned into a nimbus of crackling flames, and his spectacle-frames dripping, molten, from his ears, for Daniel’s humours got sorely out of balance when he was not fed, and he was quite certain that fire must be vomiting from his mouth, and sparks flying from his eyes. But Mr. Threader merely blinked in wonderment. Then his white eyebrows, which were not on fire at all, went up, which was what Mr. Threader did when overtaken by the urge to smile.

  Daniel knew that Mr. Threader was feeling that urge for the following reason: that now, in the final hours of their two-week trek, starvation and a High Church sermon had succeeded where Mr. Threader had failed: the real Daniel Waterhouse had been unmasked.

  “I see no Hindoos, Dr. Waterhouse, only a flock of good English parishioners, emerging not from a heathen temple but from a church—the Established Church of this Realm, in case you were misinformed.”

  “Do you know what they were doing?”

  “That I do, sir, for I was in the church too, though I must admit, in a less expensive pew…”

  “ ‘Expiating the horrid Sin committed in the execrable Murder of the Royal Martyr! Remembrancing his rank Butchery at the Hands of the Mobb!’ ”

  “This confirms that we did attend the same service.”

  “I was there,” Daniel said—referring to the rank Butchery—“and to me it looked like a perfectly regular and well-ordered proceeding.” He had, by this time, had a few moments to compose himself, and did not feel that he was spewing flames any more. He uttered this last in a very mild conversational tone. Yet it affected Mr. Threader far more strongly than anything Daniel could have screamed or shouted at him. The conversation stopped as dramatically as it had begun. Little was said for an hour, and then another, as the carriage, and the train of wagons bringing up the rear, found its way along town streets to the Oxford Road, and turned towards the City, and made its way eastwards across a green,
pond-scattered landscape. Mr. Threader, who was facing forward, stared out a side window and looked alarmed, then pensive, then sad. Daniel recognized this train of emotions all too well; it was a treatment meted out by evangelicals to Damnable Sinners. The sadness would soon give way to determination. Then Daniel could expect a fiery last-ditch conversion attempt.

  Daniel was facing backwards, watching the road pass under the wheels of the baggage-cart. On that cart, he knew, was Mr. Threader’s strangely over-organized collection of strong-boxes. This put him in mind of a much-needed change of subject.

  “Mr. Threader. How shall I compensate you?”

  “Mm—Dr. Waterhouse? What?”

  “You have not only transported me but boarded me, entertained me, and edified me, for two weeks, and I owe you money.”

  “No. Not at all, actually. I am a very particular man, Mr. Waterhouse, in my dealings. Had I desired compensation, I’d have said as much before we set out from Tavistock, and I’d have held you to it. As I did not do so then I cannot accept a penny from you now.”

  “I had in mind more than a penny—”

  “Dr. Waterhouse, you have made a lengthy journey—an unimaginable journey, to me—and are far from home, it would be a sin to accept so much as a farthing from your purse.”

  “My purse need not enter into it, Mr. Threader. I have not undertaken this journey without backing. My banker in the City will not hesitate to advance you an equitable sum, on the credit of the Person who has underwritten my travels.”

  Now Mr. Threader was, at least, interested; he stopped looking out the window, and turned his attention to Daniel. “I’ll not take anyone’s money—yours, your banker’s, or your backer’s, sir. And I’ll not ask who your backer is, for it has gradually become obvious to me that your errand is—like a bat—dark, furtive, and delicate. But if you would be so good as to indulge my professional curiosity on one small matter, I should consider your account paid in full.”

  “Name it.”

  “Who is your banker?”

  “Living as I do in Boston, I have no need of a bank in London—but I am fortunate enough to have a family connexion in that business, whom I can call upon as the occasion demands: my nephew, Mr. William Ham.”

  “Mr. William Ham! Of Ham Brothers! The money-goldsmiths who went bankrupt!”

  “You are thinking of his father. William was only a boy then.” Daniel began to explain young William’s career at the Bank of England but he bated, seeing a glassy look on Mr. Threader’s face.

  “The money-goldsmiths!” Mr. Threader reiterated, “The money-goldsmiths.” Something in his tone put Daniel in mind of Hooke identifying a parasite under a microscope. “Well, you see then, it’s of no account anyway, Dr. Waterhouse, as I do not think that Mr. Ham’s money would have any utility for me.”

  Daniel understood now that Mr. Threader had set a trap by asking for the name of his banker. Saying to Mr. Threader, a money-scrivener, My banker is a money-goldsmith, was like mentioning to an Archbishop I attend church in a barn: proof that he belonged to the Enemy. The trap had sprung on him now; and, whether by design or no, it happened at the moment they trundled through Tyburn Cross, where limbs of freshly quartered criminals were spiked to the scaffold, festooned with unraveled bowels. Mr. Threader proclaimed, “Coiners!” with the finality of a Norn.

  “They’re drawing and quartering people for that now?”

  “Sir Isaac is determined to root them out. He has brought the judicial Powers round to his view, which is that counterfeiting is not just a petty crime—it is high treason! High treason, Dr. Waterhouse. And every coiner that Sir Isaac catches, ends up thusly, torn by flies and ravens at Tyburn Cross.”

  Then, as if it were the most natural Transition imaginable, Mr. Threader—who had leaned far forward and screwed his head around to contemplate, at greater length, the festering shreds of Sir Isaac’s latest kills—fell back into his repose with a contented sigh, and fastened the same sort of look on the tip of Daniel’s nose. “You were there when Charles the First was decapitated?”

  “That is what I told you, Mr. Threader. And I was startled, to say the least, to enter a church three score and five years later, and be confronted with evidence that these High Church folk have not yet recovered from the event. Do you have any idea, Mr. Threader, how many Englishmen perished in the Civil War? In accordance with our norms, I shall not even mention Irishmen.”

  “No, I’ve no idea…”

  “Precisely! And so to make such a bother about one chap seems as bizarre, idolatrous, fetishistic, and beside the point to me, as Hindoos venerating Cows.”

  “He lived in the neighborhood,” said Mr. Threader, meaning Windsor.

  “A local connexion that was not even mentioned in the homily—not, I say, in the first, the second, or the third hour of it. Rather, I heard much talk that sounded to me like politics.”

  “To you. Yes. But to me, Dr. Waterhouse, it sounded like church. Whereas, if we were to go there—” and Mr. Threader pointed at a barn in a field to the north side of Tyburn Road, surrounded by carriages, and emanating four-part harmony; i.e., a Meeting-House of some Gathered Church “—we would hear much that would sound like church to you, and politics to me.”

  “To me it would sound like common sense,” Daniel demurred, “and I hope that in time you would come round to the same opinion—which would be an impossibility for me, in there—” Fortuitously, they had just crossed over some important new street that had not existed, or had been just a cow-path, in Daniel’s day; but never mind, as looking north he saw Oxford Chapel just where it had always been, and so he was able to thrust his finger at an Anglican church-steeple, which was all he wanted to illustrate his point. “—in that there is no sense to it whatever, only mindless ritual!”

  “It is naturally the case that Mysteries of Faith do not lend themselves to commonsensical explanation.”

  “You, sir, might as well be a Catholic, if that is what you believe.”

  “And you, sir, might as well be an Atheist—unless, like so many of the Royal Society, you have, on your way to Atheism, chosen to pause for refreshment at the Spring of Arianism.”

  Daniel was fascinated. “Is it widely known—or supposed, I should say—that the Royal Society is a nest of Arianism?”

  “Only among those capable of recognizing the obvious, sir.”

  “Those capable of recognizing the obvious might conclude from the service you and I have just been subjected to, that this country is ruled by Jacobites—and ruled, I say, thusly from the very top.”

  “Your powers of perception put mine to shame, Dr. Waterhouse, if you know the Queen’s mind on this question. The Pretender may be a staunch Catholic, and he may be in France, but he is her brother! And at the end of a poor old lonely woman’s life, to expect that she’ll not be swayed by such considerations is inhumane.”

  “Not nearly as inhumane as the welcome her brother would receive if he came to these shores styling himself King. Consider the example just cited, so tediously, in church.”

  “Your candor is bracing. Among my circle, one does not allude so freely to Decapitation of Kings by a Mobb.”

  “I am glad that you are braced, Mr. Threader. I am merely hungry.”

  “To me you seem thirsty—”

  “For blood?”

  “For royal blood.”

  “The blood of the Pretender is not royal, for he is no King, and never will be. I saw his father’s blood, streaming out of his nostrils in a gin-house at Sheerness, and I saw his uncle’s blood being let from his jugulars at Whitehall, and his grandfather’s plashing all round the scaffold at the Banqueting House, sixty-five years ago today, and none of it looked different from the blood of convicts that we put up in jars at the Royal Society. If spilling the Pretender’s blood prevents another Civil War, why spill it.”

  “You really should moderate your language, sir. If the Pretender did come to the throne, the words you just spoke would be high treason,
and you would be dragged on a sledge to the place we have just put behind us, where you would be half-hanged, drawn, and quartered.”

  “I simply find it inconceivable that that man would ever be suffered to reign over England.”

  “We call it the United Kingdom now. If you were fresh from New England, Dr. Waterhouse, which is a hot-bed of Dissidents, or if you had been dwelling too long in London, where Whigs and Parliament lord it over ordinary sensible Englishmen, then I should understand why you feel as you do. But during our journey I have showed you England as it is, not as Whigs phant’sy it to be. How can a man of your intelligence not perceive the wealth of this country—the wealth temporal of our commerce and the wealth spiritual of our Church? For I say to you that if you did comprehend that wealth you would certainly be a Tory, possibly even a Jacobite.”

  “The spiritual side of the account is balanced, and perhaps o’er-balanced, by the congregations who gather together in Meeting-Houses, where one does not need to sign a lease, to sit on a pew. So we may leave Church-disputes out of the reckoning. Where money is concerned, I shall confess, that the prosperity of the countryside quite overtopped my expectations. But it comes to little when set against the wealth of the City.”

  Timing once again favored Daniel, for they were now on Oxford Street. To the carriage’s left side, the Green Lane stretched northwards across open country, threading its way between parks, gardens and farms, darting into little vales and bounding over rises. To the right side it was all built-up: a development that had been only a gleam in Sterling’s* eye twenty years ago: Soho Square. Gesturing first this way, then that, Daniel continued: “For the country draws its revenue from a fixed stock: sheep eating grass. Whereas, the City draws its wealth from foreign trade, which is ever-increasing and, I say, inexhaustible.”

  “Oh, Dr. Waterhouse, I am so pleased that Providence has given me the opportunity to set you right on that score, before you got to London and embarrassed yourself by holding views that stopped being true while you were gone. For look, we are come to Tottenham Court Road, the city begins in earnest.” Mr. Threader pounded on the roof and called out the window to the driver, “High Street is impassable for re-paving, jog left and take Great Russell round to High Holborn!”