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

by Neal Stephenson

  “This cannot be a coincidence.”

  “Good morning, Grandmama.”

  Sophie was staring at the coins. At eighty-three she had no difficulty seeing them without glasses. She could even tell heads from tails, and recognize the portrait of Queen Anne stamped into the former.

  “I see that bitch going and coming,” she remarked.

  Princess Caroline said nothing.

  “It is a symbol, a sign,” the Electress of Hanover announced, “planted here by one of those horrid visiting Englishmen.”

  “What do you think it signifies?”

  “That depends on what you think of the English money,” Sophie replied. “Which is the same thing as to ask, is it worth anything?”

  This, being oddly similar to some remarks made moments ago by the horrid visiting Englishman in question, caused Caroline to look away from the coins, and gaze into Sophie’s face. In order to do this Caroline had to look slightly down, for Sophie had lost a few inches of height. She had the loose skin that one would expect in a woman of that age, but this had lent to her eyes a marvelous clarity. The walls of Herrenhausen and of the Leine Schloß were adorned with old family portraits, not only of Sophie and her sisters but of their mother. These women stared out from the canvases with arched brows, enormous eyes, and tiny mouths, seeing much and saying little. They were certainly not the first girls in a salon that an insecure young man would approach, and engage in conversation. Now Caroline knew as well as anyone that portraits of royals must be taken with a grain of salt. But the visage she was regarding now did not look all that far removed from the ones in those paintings. The eyes, the mouth were the same. More so the feeling of self-possession, of completeness, the sense that this woman was by no means standing around waiting to be joined, or wishing that someone would talk to her. The only changes were in clothing. Sophie, though never responsive to fashion, had adopted the fontange, a tall vertical screen of white lace that rose from the hairline, added some inches to her height, and kept her thinning white hair out of view, and out of the way of those wonderful eyes.

  Caroline had a funny thought then, which was that Sophie and Daniel Waterhouse might be a match for each other. For he had great staring eyes too, and a disposition to match Sophie’s. They could threaten to chop each other’s heads off well into the Eighteenth Century.

  “Have you spoken to any of the English? I mean the ones who have just arrived, not of the Braithwaite type.”

  “Briefly.”

  “Come, I wish to be away from those coins, and that woman,” Sophie said, turning her back on the pool and leaning towards Caroline, knowing that she’d find a strong arm there. The two women clasped together like halves of a locket and began to walk away from the pool’s rim. Sophie steered Caroline firmly in the direction she wanted. But she had nothing further to say for a little while.

  This half of the garden was partitioned into quadrants, each of which was laid out around a fountain much smaller than the great one in the center. Small paths radiated from each of those fountains, sectioning each quadrant into several pie-wedges. Each of those wedges—thirty-two all told—had been made into a little garden-plot, and each was a bit different: some as clean and tidy as parlours, others as dark and overgrown as the Thüringer Wald. Sophie steered Caroline to one that was screened by a high wall of trimmed trees. Passing through a gap they found themselves in a pleasant green atrium with a little pool in the center, and stone benches around it. Sophie let it be known that she wished to sit on one of these—unusual since for her, a walk in the garden was precisely that.

  “One of the English was using a funny word yester evening—‘currency.’ Do you know it?”

  “It is the quality that a current has. They speak of the currency of the River Thames, which is sluggish in most places, but violent when it passes under London Bridge. It is just the same as our word Umlauf—running around.”

  “That is what I supposed. This Englishman kept discoursing of currency in a way that was most fraught with meaning, and I thought he was speaking of some river or drainage-ditch. Finally I collected that he was using it as a synonym for money.”

  “Money?”

  “I’ve never felt so dense! Fortunately, Baron von Hacklheber is visiting from Leipzig. He was familiar with the term—or quicker to decypher it. Later I spoke with him in private and he explained all.”

  “What an odd coinage.”

  “You are too witty for your own good, girl.”

  “The Englishmen cannot get away from this topic. Their relationship to money is most peculiar.”

  “It is because they have nothing but sheep,” Sophie explained. “You must understand this if you are to be their Queen. They had to fight Spain, which has all of the gold and silver in the world. Then they had to fight France, which has every other source of material wealth that can be imagined. How does a poor country defeat rich ones?”

  “I think I am supposed to say ‘the grace of God’ or some such—”

  “If you please. But in what form is the grace of God manifested? Did piles of gold materialize on the banks of the Thames, as in a miracle?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Does Sir Isaac turn Cornish tin into gold in an alchemical laboratory in the Tower of London?”

  “Opinions differ. Leibniz thinks not.”

  “I agree with Baron von Leibniz. And yet all the gold is in England! It is dug up from Portuguese and Spanish mines, but it flows, by some occult power of attraction, to the Tower of London.”

  “Flows,” Caroline repeated, “flows like a current.”

  Sophie nodded. “And the English have grown so used to this that they use ‘currency’ as a synonym for ‘money’ as if no distinction need be observed between them.”

  Caroline said, “Is this the answer to your question—how does a poor country defeat rich ones?”

  “Indeed. The answer is, not by acquiring wealth, in the sense that France has it—”

  “Meaning vineyards, farms, peasants, cows—”

  “But rather to play a sort of trick, and redefine wealth to mean something novel.”

  “Currency!”

  “Indeed. Baron von Hacklheber says that the idea is not wholly new, having been well understood by the Genoese, the Florentines, the Augsburgers, the Lyonnaise for many generations. The Dutch built a modest empire on it. But the English—having no other choices—perfected it.”

  “You have given me new food for thought.”

  “Oh? And what think you? What think you now of our prospects, Caroline?”

  To Sophie’s generation of royals, this question was shocking, absurd. One who was heir to a throne did not have to think about his prospects. Royal succession just happened, like the tide coming in. But it was different now; and Sophie deserved credit for having adjusted to this new state of affairs, where many of her contemporaries had passed from ignorance to indignation to senility.

  Caroline answered: “I am pleased by the cleverness of this trick that the English have played, to win wars against their betters by tinkering with what wealth is. Because of it, I do not have to marry some inbred Bourbon, as poor Eliza did, and live out my days at Versailles, or in the Escorial. But I am troubled by the uncertainty that all of this brings. To paraphrase a wise man I know, it is as though a new System of the World has been drawn up. And not by us but by some strange Natural Philosophers in a smoky room in London. Now we must live by the rules of that System. But it is not perfectly understood; and I fear that where the English have played a trick with money, to gain a temporary advantage, some other trick might be played upon them to reverse the field.”

  “Just so! And now you have come round to the meaning of Anne’s letter!” Sophie proclaimed, and flogged the parchment several times with her ivory fan. At the same time, the tree-wall behind them let out a gasp as it was struck by a fist of cold air. The wind had changed from south to west; new weather was coming; Herr Schwartz’s joints had not misled him. The tree-w
all flexed toward them as if trying to spread shelter above their heads, and a dry sleet of brown leaves and twigs made the air and the ground restless with tiny itchings and fidgetings. Sophie—who of all persons was least disposed to take a fart for a thunderclap—paid this no heed whatever. Perhaps she was too absorbed in conversation to care. Or perhaps she was so comfortable in this place that she could not muster any sense of concern.

  If Sophie did not wish to speak of the weather, ’twere hopeless, as well as rude, to force the topic, and so Caroline contented herself with gestures: she arched her back against the cool breeze, clasped her hands together on her knee, and glanced skyward. Then she responded, “The Queen’s letter has to do with money?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, she doesn’t know what money is. And would never write of anything so vulgar even if she did. The letter concerns family matters. Several paragraphs are devoted to your husband.”

  “That is even more chilling to me than this recent change in the wind.”

  “She refers to him by his English titles: Duke of Cambridge, Earl of Milford Haven, Viscount Northallerton, Baron Tewkesbury,” said Sophie, reading the outlandish names from the letter with parched amusement.

  “Now you are teasing me, by not reading what the letter says.”

  “I am not teasing you but doing you a favor, dear heart.”

  “Is it that bad?”

  “It is the worst yet.”

  “Has my father-in-law seen it yet?”

  “George Louis has not read it.”

  “My husband and I would be in England now,” Caroline complained, “and he would be sitting in the House of Lords, if George Louis merely had the backbone to let us go. Another such letter from Queen Anne only cows him all the more, and delays our departure another month.”

  Sophie smiled, showing sympathy. “George Louis cannot read this letter if you and I get caught in a rain-shower, and the ink is dissolved.”

  A cold drop came through the sleeve of Caroline’s dress and sent a thrill up her arm. She laughed. Sophie did not move. A raindrop pocked into the letter. “However,” Sophie continued, “you must not deceive yourself. My son won’t let you go to England, it is true. But this is not simply because Queen Anne hates the idea. George Louis has his shortcomings. No one knows this better than his mama. But spinelessness is not among them! He keeps you and George Augustus pent up in Hanover, because he is envious of his son—his poise, his battle-glory—and distrustful of his son’s women.”

  “You mean Mrs. Braithwaite?”

  Sophie flinched. “She is a dust-mote. Everyone knows that except you. You, Eliza, the late Sophie Charlotte, and I—the women who walk in the garden—are to George Louis like some witch-coven. He is appalled that his son and heir is comfortable among us, and shares intelligence with us. For this reason he will never give George Augustus, and you, leave to move to England. He may use this as an excuse—” and she held up the letter so that many collected raindrops, black with dissolved abuse, tumbled down over the Queen of England’s signature “—but you must never be deceived.”

  A strong wind-burst came through now, and cracked a branch somewhere. All the rainwater that had gathered on the leaves above was knocked loose and rushed down around them. Sophie looked around herself for the first time, becoming aware that this might develop into something more than a June shower. Her starched fontange was beginning to wilt.

  But now it was Caroline’s turn to be oblivious to weather. “When we sat down here you said that the letter had some import, having to do with currency—?”

  “Not the substance but the tone of it,” Sophie returned, raising her voice to match the volume of the wind. “Her previous letters, you know, written after the Whigs invited your husband to England, were petulant. Bitter. But this one is—or was—written in a haughty tone. Triumphant.”

  “Something has changed in the last month or two—?”

  “That is what she believes, I fear.”

  “She phant’sies we are never coming at all. She’s going to give the throne to the Pretender.”

  Sophie said nothing.

  “But the throne is not all hers to give away. Parliament has some say in the matter. What could have occurred in the last few weeks to give the Jacobites such confidence?”

  “A blow has been struck against the currency. An interruption in the flow.”

  “That is just the sort of thing I was talking about a moment ago.”

  “Perhaps you are a witch, dear, with powers of divination.”

  “Perhaps I receive unscheduled visits from ‘horrid Englishmen.’ ”

  “Aha!” Sophie glanced in the direction of the great fountain.

  “Something must have gone awry at the English Mint.”

  “But Sir Isaac Newton has charge of the Mint! I have been studying it,” Sophie said proudly. “When I’m Queen of England we shall all go to the Tower of London and see it.” Then she slapped her knee, meaning it was time to get up. For it was absolutely raining now, and search parties had probably been sent out from the Palace. Caroline got to her feet and gave Sophie an arm, helping her up off the bench. Meanwhile Sophie went on, “Sir Isaac has reformed the English coinage, which was the world’s worst, and now it is the best.”

  “But this proves my point! All you are saying is that English coins have an excellent reputation…Let’s get out of here.” Caroline led the way this time, ushering Sophie out the nearest gate and onto one of the radiating paths. But then she pulled up short. The way back to the Palace was not obvious, even to one who knew the garden well. Sophie sensed her hesitation. “Let us wait it out in the pavilion,” she decreed, inclining her ruined fontange toward a diagonal path that would conduct them to the edge of the garden, where a stone dome overlooked the canal.

  Caroline did not favor this idea because it would take them to a distant and unfrequented corner, and the way was hemmed in by dense wooded plots that were black and opaque and loud in the rain.

  “Don’t you think we should return to the great fountain? Someone should be looking for us there.”

  “If someone finds us, we shall have to stop talking!” Sophie answered, very provoked.

  That was that. They turned their backs on the fountain and entered into a cleft between stands of trees. “It’s only water,” Caroline said philosophically. But Sophie seemed to have had quite enough of it, for she yanked on Caroline’s arm and began pulling her onwards, trying to quicken their pace. Caroline let herself be pulled.

  “I take your point,” Sophie said. “A coinage based upon silver and gold has a sort of absolute value.”

  “Like Sir Isaac’s absolute space and time,” Caroline mused. “You can assay it.”

  “But if value is based upon reputations—like stocks in Amsterdam—or upon this even more nebulous concept of flow—”

  “Like the dynamics of Leibniz in which space and time inhere in relationships among objects—”

  “Why, then, it becomes unknowable, plastic, vulnerable. For flow may have some value in a market-place—and that value might even be real—”

  “Of course it is real! People make money from it all the time!”

  “—but that sort of value cannot survive the refiner’s fire at a Trial of the Pyx.”

  “What on earth is a Pyx?” Caroline asked. But no answer was coming. Sophie pulled sharply on her arm and at the same moment fell into her. Caroline had to bend her knees and whip her free arm round Sophie’s shoulders to avoid falling down. “Grandmama? You wish to go in this way?” She glanced at the dark stand of trees to the left side of the path. “You wish to visit the Teufelsbaum?” Perhaps Sophie had changed her mind, and wished to take shelter under the trees instead of going all the way to the pavilion.

  Some sound came out of Sophie’s mouth that could not really be understood. The clatter of raindrops on leaves made it difficult to hear even well-spoken words. But this utterance of Sophie’s had not been well spoken. Caroline doubted that it was even w
ords. Relying on Caroline for support, Sophie shuffled and hopped on one leg until she had brought them face to face with an iron gate. For the plot of the Teufelsbaum, the Devil’s Tree, was surrounded by a wrought-iron fence as if it needed to be kept in a cage.

  Sophie nodded at the gate, then looked up at Caroline with a kind of lopsided sneer: half of her face pleading, the other half sagging and vacant. Caroline reached out for the handle of the gate. At the same moment that the cold wet iron touched her skin she knew that Sophie had suffered a stroke. For this was not the first half-paralyzed face Caroline had ever seen. The symptoms were more difficult to recognize in a face she knew so well and loved so much. For a moment she froze with a hand on the gate-latch, as if some spell had turned her own flesh to cold iron. She ought to go for help, to find the doctors.

  But then Sophie did something telling, which was that she looked up and down the garden path, and she did it furtively. This from someone who had never been furtive in her life.

  Sophie could not speak and could hardly stand up, but she knew what was happening. She was afraid of being seen. Afraid of being rushed to the Palace, bled by the surgeons, pitied to her face and mocked behind her back. Her instinct was to hie to the deepest and darkest part of the garden and to die there.

  Caroline shoved the gate open and they stepped into the dark.

  The Teufelsbaum was a curiosity that Sophie had brought back from the family holdings in the Harz Mountains: a worthless tree that crawled along the ground and climbed up things, with all the mass and might of a great tree, but the writhing habit of a vine, enclosing other things and growing round them. Its boughs twisted round and divided and forked and kinked bizarrely. The bends looked something like elbows and knees, and the smooth bark and sinewy shape of the wood made the whole thing look like unidentifiable limbs of strange animals, melted into one another. The woodcutters of the Harz hated it, and cut it back wherever they could, but here Sophie had given it leave to spread. Now the Teufelsbaum returned the favor by embracing Sophie and Caroline in its sinuous arms. Caroline settled Sophie down in a crook of the tree, up off the cold ground, and then sat on a flat place and cradled Sophie’s head in her lap. The rain-shower had now abated somewhat, or perhaps the leaves gentled it. Time became stretched and immeasurable as they listened to the rain, Caroline stroking Sophie’s white hair, and holding the one hand that had not lost its power to grip back. But the garden was a place of quiet and of relaxation. Presently Sophie relaxed her grip on Caroline’s hand, and on the world.