Quicksilver

by Neal Stephenson

  “What think you, Dappa?”

  “I think there never was a Devil so fierce as Cap’n van Hoek, when pirates are after his Lady.”

  Charing Cross

  1670

  Sir ROBERT MORAY produced a discourse concerning coffee, written by Dr. GODDARD at the King’s command; which was read, and the author desired to leave a copy of it with the society.

  Mr. BOYLE mentioned, that he had been informed, that the much drinking of coffee produced the palsy.

  The bishop of Exeter seconded him, and said, that himself had found it dispose to paralytical effects; which however he thought were caused only in hot constitutions, by binding.

  Mr. GRAUNT affirmed, that he knew two gentlemen, great drinkers of coffee, very paralytical.

  Dr. WHISTLER suggested, that it might be inquired, whether the same persons took much tobacco.

  —THE HISTORY OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF LONDON FOR IMPROVING OF NATURAL KNOWLEDGE, JAN. 18, 1664/5*

  HAVING NO DESIRE to be either palsied, or paralytical, Daniel avoided the stuff until 1670, when he got his first taste of it at Mrs. Green’s Coffee-House, cunningly sited in the place where the western end of the Strand yawned into Charing Cross. The Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields lay to the west.† To the east was the New Exchange—this was the nucleus of a whole block of shops. North was Covent Garden, and South, according to rumor and tradition, was the River Thames, a few hundred yards distant—but you couldn’t see it because noble Houses and Palaces formed a solid levee running from the King’s residence (Whitehall Palace) all the way round the river-bend to Fleet Ditch, where the wharves began.

  Daniel Waterhouse walked past Mrs. Green’s one summer morning in 1670, a minute after Isaac Newton had done so. It had a little garden in the front, with several tables. Daniel went into it and stood for a moment, checking out his lines of sight. Isaac had risen early, sneaked out of his bedchamber, and taken to the streets without eating any breakfast—not unusual for Isaac. Daniel had followed him out the front door of the (rebuilt, and dramatically enlarged) Waterhouse residence; across Lincoln’s Inn Fields, where a few fashionable early risers were walking dogs, or huddling in mysterious conferences; and (coincidentally) right past the very place at Drury Lane and Long Acre where those two Frenchmen had died of the Black Death six years earlier, inaugurating the memorable Plague Years. Thence into the dangerous chasm of flying earth and loose paving-stones that was St. Martin’s Lane—for John Comstock, Earl of Epsom, acting in his capacity as Commissioner of Sewers, had decreed that this meandering country cowpath must be paved, and made over into a city street—the axis of a whole new London.

  Daniel had been keeping his distance so that Isaac wouldn’t notice him if he turned around—though you never knew with Isaac, who had better senses than most wild animals. St. Martin’s Lane was crowded with heavy stone-carts drawn by teams of mighty horses, just barely under the control of their teamsters, and Daniel was forced to dodge wagons, and to scurry around and over piles of dirt and cobbles, in order to keep sight of Isaac.

  Once they had reached the open spaces of Charing Cross, and the adjoining Yard where Kings of Scotland had once come to humble themselves before their liege-lord in Whitehall, Daniel could afford to maintain more distance—Isaac’s silver hair was easy to pick out in a crowd. And if Isaac’s destination was one of the shops, coffee-houses, livery stables, gardens, markets, or noblemen’s houses lining the great Intersection, why, Daniel could sit down right about here and spy on him at leisure.

  Why he was doing so, Daniel had no idea. It was just that by getting up and leaving so mysteriously, Isaac begged to be followed. Not that he was doing a good job of being sneaky. Isaac was accustomed to being so much brighter than everyone else that he really had no idea of what others were or weren’t capable of. So when he got it into his head to be tricky, he came up with tricks that would not deceive a dog. It was hard not to be insulted—but being around Isaac was never for the thin-skinned.

  They continued to live together at Trinity, though now they shared a cottage without the Great Gate. They performed experiments with lenses and prisms, and Isaac went to a hall twice a week and lectured to an empty room on mathematical topics so advanced that no one else could understand them. So in that sense nothing was different. But lately Isaac had obviously lost interest in optics (probably because he knew everything about the subject now) and become mysterious. Then three days ago he had announced, with studied nonchalance, that he was going to nip down to London for a few days. When Daniel had announced that he was planning to do the same—to pay a visit to poor Oldenburg, and attend a Royal Society meeting—Isaac had done a poor job of hiding his annoyance. But he had at least tried to hide it, which was touching.

  Then, halfway to London, Daniel (as a sort of experiment) had professed to be shocked that Isaac intended to lodge in an inn. Daniel would not hear of it—not when Raleigh had put so many Waterhouse assets into constructing a large new house on Hol-born. At this point Isaac’s eyes had bulged even more than usual and he had adopted his suffering-martyr look, and relented only when Daniel mentioned that Raleigh’s house was so large, and had so many empty rooms, that Daniel wasn’t sure if they would ever see each other.

  Daniel’s hypothesis, based on these observations, was that Isaac was committing Sins Against Nature with someone, but then certain clues (such as that Isaac never received any mail) argued against this.

  As he stood there in front of the coffee-house, a gentleman* rode out of St. Martin’s Lane, reined in his horse, stood up in the stirrups, and surveyed the ongoing low-intensity riot that was Charing Cross, looking anxious until he caught sight of whatever he was looking for. Then he relaxed, sat down, and rode slowly in the general direction of—Isaac Newton. Daniel sat down in that wee garden in front of Mrs. Green’s, and ordered coffee and a newspaper.

  King Carlos II of Spain was both feeble and sick, and not expected to live out the year. Comenius was dying, too. Anne Hyde, the Duke of York’s wife, was very ill with what everyone assumed to be syphilis. John Locke was writing a constitution for Carolina, Stenka Razin’s Cossack rebellion was being crushed in the Ukraine, the Grand Turk was taking Crete away from Venice with his left hand and declaring war on Poland with his right. In London, the fall of pepper prices was sending many City merchants into bankruptcy—while a short distance across the Narrow Seas, the V.O.C.—the Dutch East India Company—was paying out a dividend of 40 percent.

  But the news was of the doings of the CABAL† and the courtiers. John Churchill was one of the few courtiers who actually did things like go to Barbary and go mano a mano with heathen corsairs, and so there was plenty concerning him. He and most of the rest of the English Navy were blockading Algiers, trying to do something, at long last, about the Barbary Pirates.

  The gentleman on horseback had a courtier look about him, though unfashionably battered and frayed. He had nearly ridden Daniel down a few minutes previously when Daniel had emerged from Raleigh’s house and foolishly planted himself in the middle of the road trying to catch sight of Isaac. He had the general look of a poor baron from some slaty place in the high latitudes who wanted to make a name for himself in London but lacked the means. He was dressed practically enough in actual boots, rather than the witty allusions to boots worn by young men about town. He wore a dark cassock—a riding garment loosely modeled after a priest’s tent-like garment—with numerous silver buttons. He had an expensive saddle on a mediocre horse. The horse thus looked something like a fishwife dressed up in a colonel’s uniform. If Isaac was looking for a mistress (or a master or whatever the sodomitical equivalent of a mistress was), he could’ve done worse and he could’ve done better.

  Daniel had brought a Valuable Object with him—not because he’d expected to use it, but out of fear that one of Raleigh’s servants would wreck or steal it. It was in a wooden case buckled shut, which he had set on the table. He undid the buckles, raised the lid, and peeled back red velvet to divulg
e a tubular device about a foot long, fat enough that you could insert a fist, closed at one end. It was mounted on a wooden sphere the size of a large apple, and the sphere was held in a sort of clamp that gave it freedom to rotate around all axes—i.e., you could set it down on a tabletop and then point the open end of the tube in any direction, which was how Daniel used it. Bored through the tube’s wall near the open end was a finger-sized hole, and mounted below this, in the center of the tube, was a small mirror, angled backwards at a concave dish of silvered glass that sealed the butt of the tube. The design was Isaac’s, certain refinements and much of the construction were Daniel’s. Putting an eye to the little hole, he saw a colored blur. Adjusting a thumbscrew at the mirror end, and thereby collapsing the tube together a bit, he resolved the blur into a chunk of ornamented window-frame with a lace curtain being sucked out of it, down at the other end of Charing Cross. Daniel was startled to realize that he was looking all the way across the Great Court that lay before Whitehall Palace, and peering in through someone’s windows—unless he was mistaken, these were the apartments of Lady Castlemaine, the King of England’s favorite mistress.

  Nudging it round to a slightly different bearing, he saw the end of the Banqueting House, where King Charles I had been beheaded, back when Daniel had been small—Divine Right of Kings demolished, the Commonwealth founded, Free Enterprise introduced, Drake happy for once, and Daniel sitting on his shoulders, watching the King’s head rock. In those days, all of Whitehall’s windows that faced the outside had been bricked up to keep musket-balls out, and many superstitious fopperies, e.g., paintings and sculptures, had been crated up and sold to Dutchmen. But now the windows were windows again, and the artworks had been bought back, and there wasn’t a decapitated King in sight.

  So it was not a good time to reminisce about Drake. Daniel swiveled the Reflecting Telescope around until the ragged plume in the horseman’s hat showed up as a bobbing white blur, like the tail of a hustling rabbit. Once he’d focused on that, a couple of tiny adjustments brought Isaac’s waterfall of argent hair into view—just in time, for he was ascending a few steps into a building across from the Haymarket, along the convergence of traffic that eventually became Pall Mall. Daniel played the telescope around the front of the building, expecting it to be a coffee-house or pub or inn where Isaac would await his gentleman friend. But he was completely wrong. To begin with, this place was apparently nothing more than a town-house. And yet well-dressed men came and went occasionally, and when they emerged, they (or their servants) were carrying packages. Daniel reckoned it must be some sort of shop too discreet to announce itself—hardly unusual in this part of London, but not Isaac’s sort of place.

  The horseman did not go inside. He rode past the shop once, twice, thrice, looking at it sidelong—just as baffled as Daniel was. Then he seemed to be talking to a pedestrian. Daniel recalled, now, that this rider had been pursued by a couple of servants on foot. One of these pages, or whatever they were, now took off at a run, and weaved between hawkers and hay-wains all the way across Charing Cross and finally vanished into the Strand.

  The horseman dismounted, handed the reins to another page, and made a vast ceremony of unbuttoning his sleeves so that the cassock devolved into a cloak. He peeled off spatterdashes to reveal breeches and stockings that were only outmoded by six months to a year, and then found a coffee-house of his own, just across Pall Mall from the mysterious shop, along (therefore) the southern limit of St. James’s Fields—one of those Fields that the Church of St. Martin had formerly been in the middle of. But now houses were being built all around it, enclosing a little rectangle of farmland rapidly being gardenized.

  Daniel could do nothing but sit. As a way of paying rent on this chair, he kept having more coffee brought out. The first sip had been tooth-looseningly unpleasant, like one of those exotic poisons that certain Royal Society members liked to brew. But he was startled to notice after a while that the cup was empty.

  This whole exercise had begun rather early in the day when no one of quality was awake, and when it was too cold and dewy to sit at the outdoor tables anyway. But as Daniel sat and pretended to read his newspaper, the sun swung up over York House and then Scotland Yard, the place became comfortable, and Personages began to occupy seats nearby, and to pretend to read their newspapers. He even sensed that in this very coffee-house were some members of the cast of characters he had heard about while listening to his siblings talk over the dinner table. Actually being here and mingling with them made him feel like a theatregoer relaxing after a performance with the actors—and in these racy times, actresses.

  Daniel spent a while trying to spy into the upper windows of the mystery-shop with his telescope, because he thought he’d glimpsed silver hair in one of them, and so for a while he was only aware of other customers’ comings and goings by their bow-waves of perfume, the rustling of ladies’ crinolines, the ominous creaking of their whalebone corset-stays, the whacking of gentlemen’s swords against table-legs as they misjudged distances between furniture, the clacking of their slap-soled booties.

  The perfumes smelled familiar, and he had heard all of the jokes before, while dining at Raleigh’s house. Raleigh, who at this point was fifty-two years old, knew a startling number of dull persons who evidently had nothing else to do but roam around to one another’s houses, like mobs of Vagabonds poaching on country estates, and share their dullness with each other. Daniel was always startled when he learned that these people were Knights or Barons or merchant-princes.

  “Why, if it isn’t Daniel Waterhouse! God save the King!”

  “God save the King!” Daniel murmured reflexively, looking up into a vast bursting confusion of clothing and bought hair, within which, after a brief search, he was able to identify the face of Sir Winston Churchill—Fellow of the Royal Society, and father of that John Churchill who was making such a name for himself in the fighting before Algiers.

  There was a moment of exquisite discomfort. Churchill had remembered, a heartbeat too late, that the aforementioned King had personally blown up Daniel’s father. Churchill himself had many anti-Royalists in his family, and so he prided himself on being a little defter than that.

  Now Drake’s pieces had never been found. Daniel’s vague recollection (vague because he’d just been shot with a blunderbuss, at the time) was that the explosion had flung him in the general direction of the Great Fire of London, so it was unlikely that anything was left of him except for a stubborn film of greasy ash deposited on the linens and windowsills of downwind neighbors. Discovery of shattered YOU AND I ARE BUT EARTH crockery in remains of burnt houses confirmed it. John Wilkins (still distraught over the burning of his Universal Character books in the Fire) had been good enough to preside over the funeral, and only a bridge-builder of his charm and ingenuity could have prevented it from becoming a brawl complete with phalanxes of enraged Phanatiques marching on Whitehall Palace to commit regicide.

  Since then—and since most of Drake’s fortune had passed to Raleigh—Daniel hadn’t seen very much of the family. He’d been working on optics with Newton and was always startled, somehow, to find that the other Waterhouses were doing things when he wasn’t watching. Praise-God, Raleigh’s eldest son, who had gone to Boston before the Plague, had finally gotten his Harvard degree and married someone, and so everyone (Waterhouses and their visitors alike) had been talking about him—but they always did so mischievously, like naughty children getting away with something, and with occasional furtive glances at Daniel. He had to conclude that he and Praise-God were now the last vestiges of Puritanism in the family and that Raleigh was discreetly admired, among the coffee-house set, for having stashed one of them away at Cambridge and the other at Harvard where they could not interfere in whatever it was that the other Waterhouses were up to.

  In this vein: he had gotten the impression, from various tremendously significant looks exchanged across tables at odd times by his half-siblings, their extended families, and their
overdressed visitors, that the Waterhouses and the Hams and perhaps a few others had joined together in some kind of vast conspiracy the exact nature of which wasn’t clear—but to them it was as huge and complicated as, say, toppling the Holy Roman Empire.

  Thomas Ham was now called Viscount Walbrook. All of his gold had melted in the Fire, but none had leaked out of his newly refurbished cellar—when they came back days later they found a slab of congealed gold weighing tons, the World’s Largest Gold Bar. None of his depositors lost a penny. Others hastened to deposit their gold with the incredibly reliable Mr. Ham. He began lending it to the King to finance the rebuilding of London. Partly in recognition of that, and partly to apologize for having blown up his father-in-law, the King had bestowed an Earldom on him.

  All of which was Context for Daniel as he sat there gazing upon the embarrassed face of Sir Winston Churchill. Now if Churchill had only asked, Daniel might have told him that blowing up Drake was probably the correct action for the King to have taken under the circumstances. But Churchill didn’t ask, he assumed. Which was why he’d never make a real Natural Philosopher. Though the Royal Society would tolerate him as long as he continued paying his dues.

  Daniel for his part was aware, now, that he was surrounded by the Quality, and that they were all peering at him. He had gotten himself into a Complicated Situation, and he did not like those. The Reflecting Telescope was resting on the table right in front of him, as obvious as a severed head. Sir Winston was too embarrassed to’ve noticed it yet, but he would, and given that he’d been a member of the Royal Society since before the Plague, he would probably be able to guess what it was—and even if Daniel lied to him about it, the lie would be discovered this very evening when Daniel presented it, on Isaac’s behalf, to the Royal Society. He felt an urge to snatch it away and hide it, but this would only make it more conspicuous.