Quicksilver

by Neal Stephenson

  “God in Heaven,” Daniel said, and felt obliged to lean back against a battlement so that his spinning head wouldn’t whirl him off into the moat.

  “An agreement whose details we can only guess at—except for this: it causes gold to appear there in the middle of the night.” Oldenburg pointed to the Tower’s water-gate along the Thames. Discretion kept him from speaking its ancient name: Traitor’s Gate.

  “Pepys mentioned in passing that Thomas More Anglesey was responsible for filling the Navy’s coffers…I didn’t understand what he meant.”

  “Our Duke of Gunfleet has much warmer connections with France than anyone appreciates,” Oldenburg said—but then refused to say any more.

  And because silver and gold have their value from the matter itself; they have first this privilege, that the value of them cannot be altered by the power of one, nor of a few commonwealths; as being a common measure of the commodities of all places. But base money, may easily be enhanced, or abased.

  —HOBBES, Leviathan

  OLDENBURG GENTEELLY KICKED him out not much later, eager to get into that pile of mail. Under the politely curious gaze of the Beefeaters and their semi-tame ravens, Daniel walked down Water Lane, on the southern verge of the Tower complex. He walked past a large rectangular tower planted in the outer wall, above the river, and realized too late that if he’d only turned his head and glanced to the left at that point, he could’ve looked through the giant arch of Traitor’s Gate and out across the river. Too late now—seemed a poor idea to go back. Probably just as well he hadn’t gawked—then whoever was watching him would suspect that Oldenburg had mentioned it.

  Was he thinking like a courtier now?

  The massive octagonal pile of Bell Tower was on his right. As he got past it he dared to look up a narrow buffer between two layers of curtain-walls no more than fifty feet apart. Half of that width was filled up by the Mint’s indifferent low houses and workshops. Daniel glimpsed furnace-light radiating from windows, warming high stone walls, making silhouettes of a congestion of carts bringing coal to burn. Men with muskets gazed coolly back at him. Mint workers crossed from building to building in the shambling gait of the exhausted.

  Then he was underneath the great arch of the Byward Tower, an elevated building thrown over Water Lane to control the Tower’s land approach. A raven perched on a gargoyle and screeched “Cromwell!” at him as he passed through onto the drawbridge that ran from Byward Tower out to Middle Tower, over the moat. Middle Tower gave way to Lion Tower—but the King’s menagerie were all asleep and he did not hear the lions roar. From there he crossed over a last little backwater of the moat, over another drawbridge, and came into a little walled-in yard called the Bulwark—finally, then, through one last gate and into the world, though he had a lonely stroll over an empty moonlit glacis, past a few scavenging rats and copulating dogs, before he was among buildings and people.

  But then Daniel Waterhouse was right in the City of London—slightly confused, as some of the streets had been straightened and simplifed after the Fire. He pulled a fat gold egg from his pocket—one of Hooke’s experimental watches, a failed stab at the Longitude Problem, adequate only for landlubbers. It told him that the Phosphorus Demo’ was not quite finished at Whitehall, but that it was not too late to call on his in-laws. Daniel did not especially like to just call on people—seemed presumptuous to think they’d want to open the door and see him—but he knew that this was how men like Pepys got to become men like Pepys. So to the house of Ham.

  Lights burned expensively, and a coach and pair dawdled out front. Daniel was startled to discover his own family coat of arms (a castle bestriding a river) painted on the door of this coach. The house was smoking like a heavy forge—it was equipped with oversized chimneys, projecting tubes of orange light into their own smoke. As Daniel ascended the front steps he heard singing, which faltered but did not stop when he knocked: a very current melody making fun of the Dutch for being so bright, hard-working, and successful. Viscount Walbrook’s* butler opened the door and recognized Daniel as a social caller—not, as sometimes happened, a nocturnal customer brandishing a goldsmith’s note.

  Mayflower Ham, neé Waterhouse—tubby, fair, almost fifty, looking more like thirty—gave him a hug that pulled him up on tiptoe. Menopause had finally terminated her fantastically involved and complex relationship with her womb: a legendary saga of irregular bleeding, eleven-month pregnancies straight out of the Royal Society proceedings, terrifying primal omens, miscarriages, heartbreaking epochs of barrenness punctuated by phases of such explosive fertility that Uncle Thomas had been afraid to come near her—disturbing asymmetries, prolapses, relapses, and just plain lapses, hellish cramping fits, mysterious interactions with the Moon and other cœlestial phenomena, shocking imbalances of all four of the humours known to Medicine plus a few known only to Mayflower, seismic rumblings audible from adjoining rooms—cancers reabsorbed—(incredibly) three successful pregnancies culminating in four-day labors that snapped stout bedframes like kindling, vibrated pictures off walls, and sent queues of vicars, mid-wives, physicians, and family members down into their own beds, ruined with exhaustion. Mayflower had (fortunately for her!) been born with that ability, peculiar to certain women, of being able to talk about her womb in any company without it seeming inappropriate, and not only that but you never knew where in a conversation, or a letter, she would launch into it, plunging everyone into a clammy sweat as her descriptions and revelations forced them to consider topics so primal that they were beyond eschatology—even Drake had had to shut up about the Apocalypse when Mayflower had gotten rolling. Butlers fled and serving-maids fainted. The condition of Mayflower’s womb affected the moods of England as the Moon ruled the tides.

  “How, er…are you?” Daniel inquired, bracing himself, but she just smiled sweetly, made rote apologies about the house not being finished (but no fashionable house ever was finished), and led him to the Dining-Room, where Uncle Thomas was entertaining Sterling and Beatrice Waterhouse, and Sir Richard Apthorp and his wife. The Apthorps had a goldsmith’s shop of their own, and lived a few doors up Threadneedle. The attire was not so aggressively fine, Daniel not so monstrously out of place, as at the coffee-house. Sterling greeted him warmly, as if saying, Sorry old chap but the other day was business.

  They appeared to be celebrating something. Reference was made to all the work that lay ahead, so Daniel assumed it was some milestone in their grand shop-house-project. He wanted someone to ask him where he’d been, so that he could offhandedly let them know he’d been to the Tower waving around a warrant from the Secretary of State. But no one asked. After a while he realized that they probably would not care if they did know. The back door, fronting on Cornhill, kept creaking open, then booming shut. Finally, Daniel caught Uncle Thomas’s eye, and, with a look, inquired what on earth was happening back there. A few minutes later, Viscount Walbrook got up, as if to use the House of Office, but tapped Daniel on the shoulder on his way out of the room.

  Daniel rose and followed him down a hall—dark except for a convenient red glow at the far end. Daniel couldn’t see around the tottering Punchinello silhouette of his host, but he could hear shovels crunching into piles of something, ringing as they flung their loads—obviously coal being fed to a furnace. But sometimes there was the icy trill of a coin falling and spinning on a hard floor.

  The hall became sooty and extremely warm, and gave way to a brick-lined room where a laborer, stripped to a pair of drawers, was heaving coal into the open door of the House of Ham’s forge—which had been hugely expanded when the house was reconstructed after the Fire. Another laborer was pumping bellows with his feet, climbing an endless ladder. In the old days, this forge had been a good size for baking tarts, which made sense for the sort of goldsmith who made earrings and teaspoons. Now it looked like something that could be used to cast cannon-barrels, and half the weight of the building was concentrated in the chimney.

  Several black iron lock-boxes
were open on the floor—some full of silver coins and others empty. One of the Hams’ senior clerks sat on the floor by one of these in a pond of his own sweat, counting coins into a dish out loud: “Ninety-eight…ninety-nine…hundred!” whereupon he handed the dish up to Charles Ham (the youngest Ham brother—Thomas being the eldest), who emptied it onto the pan of a scale and weighed the coins against a brass cylinder—then raked them off into a bucket-sized crucible. This was repeated until the crucible was nearly full. Then a glowing door was opened—knives of blue flame probed out into the dark room—Charles Ham donned black gauntlets, heaved a gigantic pair of iron tongs off the floor, thrust them in, hugged, and backed away, drawing out another crucible: a cup shining daffodil-colored light. Turning around very carefully, he positioned the crucible (Daniel could’ve tracked it with his eyes closed, by feeling its warmth shine on his face) and tipped it. A stream of radiant liquid formed in its lip and arced down into a mold of clay. Other molds were scattered about the floor, wherever there was room, cooling down through shades of yellow, orange, red, and sullen brown, to black; but wherever light glanced off of them, it gleamed silver.

  When the crucible was empty, Charles Ham set it down by the scales, then picked up the crucible that was full of silver coins and put it into the fire. Through all of this, the man on the floor never paused counting coins out of the lock-box, his reedy voice making a steady incantation out of the numbers, the coins going chink, chink, chink.

  Daniel stepped forward, bent down, took a coin out of the lockbox, and angled it to shine fire-light into his eyes, like the little mirror in the center of Isaac’s telescope. He was expecting to see a worn-out shilling with a blurred portrait of Queen Elizabeth on it, or an old piece of eight or thaler that the Hams had somehow picked up in a money-changing transaction. What he saw was in fact the profile of King Charles II, very new and crisp, stamped on a limpid pool of brilliant silver—perfect. Shining that way in firelight, it brought back memories of a night in 1666. Daniel flung it back into the lock-box. Then, not believing his eyes, he thrust his hand in and pulled out a fistful. They were all the same. Their edges, fresh from Monsieur Blondeau’s ingenious machine, were so sharp they almost cut his flesh, their mass blood-warm…

  The heat was too much. He was out in the street with Uncle Thomas, bathing in cool air.

  “They are still warm!” he exclaimed.

  Uncle Thomas nodded.

  “From the Mint?”

  “Yes.”

  “You mean to tell me that the coins being stamped out at the Mint are, the very same night, melted down into bullion on Thread-needle Street?”

  Daniel was noticing, now, that the chimney of Apthorp’s shop, two doors up the street, was also smoking, and the same was true of diverse other goldsmiths up and down the length of Threadneedle.

  Uncle Thomas raised his eyebrows piously.

  “Where does it go then?” Daniel demanded.

  “Only a Royal Society man would ask,” said Sterling Water-house, who had slipped out to join them.

  “What do you mean by that, brother?” Daniel asked.

  Sterling was walking slowly towards him. Instead of stopping, he flung his arms out wide and collided with Daniel, embraced him and kissed him on the cheek. Not a trace of liquor on his breath. “No one knows where it goes—that is not the point. The point is that it goes—it moves—the movement ne’er stops—it is the blood in the veins of Commerce.”

  “But you must do something with the bullion—”

  “We tender it to gentlemen who give us something in return” said Uncle Thomas. “It’s like selling fish at Billingsgate—do the fishwives ask where the fish go?”

  “It’s generally known that silver percolates slowly eastwards, and stops in the Orient, in the vaults of the Great Mogul and the Emperor of China,” Sterling said. “Along the way it might change hands hundreds of times. Does that answer your question?”

  “I’ve already stopped believing I saw it,” Daniel said, and went back into the house, his thin shoe-leather bending over irregular paving-stones, his dull dark clothing hanging about him coarsely, the iron banister cold under his hand—he was a mote bobbing in a mud-puddle and only wanted to be back in the midst of fire and heat and colored radiance.

  He stood in the forge-room and watched the melting for a while. His favorite part was the sight of the liquid metal building behind the lip of the canted crucible, then breaking out and tracing an arc of light down through the darkness.

  “Quicksilver is the elementary form of all things fusible; for all things fusible, when melted, are changed into it, and it mingles with them because it is of the same substance with them…”

  “Who said that?” Sterling asked—keeping an eye on his little brother, who was showing signs of instability.

  “Some damned Alchemist,” Daniel answered. “I have given up hope, tonight, of ever understanding money.”

  “It’s simple, really…”

  “And yet it’s not simple at all,” Daniel said. “It follows simple rules—it obeys logic—and so Natural Philosophy should understand it, encompass it—and I, who know and understand more than almost anyone in the Royal Society, should comprehend it. But I don’t. I never will…if money is a science, then it is a dark science, darker than Alchemy. It split away from Natural Philosophy millennia ago, and has gone on developing ever since, by its own rules…”

  “Alchemists say that veins of minerals in the earth are twigs and offshoots of an immense Tree whose trunk is the center of the earth, and that metals rise like sap—” Sterling said, the firelight on his bemused face. Daniel was too tired at first to take the analogy—or perhaps he was underestimating Sterling. He assumed Sterling was prying for suggestions on where to look for gold mines. But later, as Sterling’s coach was taking him off towards Charing Cross, he understood that Sterling had been telling him that the growth of money and commerce was—as far as Natural Philosophers were concerned—like the development of that mysterious subterranean Tree: suspected, sensed, sometimes exploited for profit, but, in the end, unknowable.

  THE KING’S HEAD TAVERN was dark, but it was not closed. When Daniel entered he saw patches of glowing green light here and there—pooled on tabletops and smeared on walls—and heard Persons of Quality speaking in hushed voices punctuated by outbreaks of riotous giggling. But the glow faded, and then serving-wenches scurried out with rush-lights and re-lit all of the lamps, and finally Daniel could see Pepys and Wilkins and Comstock, and the Duke of Gunfleet, and Sir Christopher Wren, and Sir Winston Churchill, and—at the best table—the Earl of Upnor, dressed in what amounted to a three-dimensional Persian carpet, trimmed with fur and studded with globs of colored glass, or perhaps they were precious gems.

  Upnor was explaining phosphorus to three gaunt women with black patches glued all over their faces and necks: “It is known, to students of the Art, that each metal is created when rays from a particular planet strike and penetrate the Earth, videlicet, the Sun’s rays create gold; the Moon’s, silver; Mercury’s, quicksilver; Venus’s, copper; Mars’s, iron; Jupiter’s, tin; and Saturn’s lead. Mr. Root’s discovery of a new elemental substance suggests there may be another planet—presumably of a green color—beyond the orbit of Saturn.”

  Daniel edged toward a table where Churchill and Wren were talking past each other, staring ever so thoughtfully at nothing: “It faces to the east, and it’s rather far north, isn’t it? Perhaps His Majesty should name it New Edinburgh…”

  “That would only give the Presbyterians ideas!” Churchill scoffed.

  “It’s not that far north,” Pepys put in from another table. “Boston is farther north by one and a half degrees of latitude.”

  “We can’t go wrong suggesting that he name it after himself…”

  “Charlestown? That name is already in use—Boston again.”

  “His brother then? But Jamestown was used in Virginia.”

  “What are you talking about?” Daniel inquired.<
br />
  “New Amsterdam! His Majesty is acquiring it in exchange for Surinam,” Churchill said.

  “Speak up, Sir Winston, there may be some Vagabonds out in Dorset who didn’t hear you!” Pepys roared.

  “His Majesty has asked the Royal Society to suggest a new name for it,” Churchill added, sotto voce.

  “Hmmm…his brother sort of conquered the place, didn’t he?” Daniel asked. He knew the answer, but couldn’t presume to lecture men such as these.

  “Yes,” Pepys said learnedly, “ ‘twas all part of York’s Atlantic campaign—first he took several Guinea ports, rich in gold, and richer in slaves, from the Dutchmen, and then it was straight down the trade winds to his next prize—New Amsterdam.”

  Daniel made a small bow toward Pepys, then continued: “If you can’t use his Christian name of James, perhaps you can use his title…after all, York is a city up to the north on our eastern coast—and yet not too far north…”

  “We have already considered that,” Pepys said glumly. “There’s a Yorktown in Virginia.”

  “What about ‘New York’?” Daniel asked.

  “Clever…but too obviously derivative of ‘New Amsterdam,’” Churchill said.

  “If we call it ‘New York,’ we’re naming it after the city of York…the point is to name it after the Duke of York,” Pepys scoffed.

  Daniel said, “You are correct, of course—”

  “Oh, come now!” Wilkins barked, slapping a table with the flat of his hand, splashing beer and phosphorus all directions. “Don’t be pedantic, Mr. Pepys. Everyone will understand what it means.”

  “Everyone who is clever enough to matter, anyway,” Wren put in.