Quicksilver

by Neal Stephenson

  The Inquisitive Jesuit Riccioli had pointed out that if the heavens were sown with stars, some near and some far, and if the Earth were looping round the Sun in a vast ellipse, then the positions of those stars with respect to one another should shift during the course of the year, as trees in a forest changed their relative positions in the eyes of a traveler moving past. But no such parallax had been observed, which proved (to Riccioli, anyway) that the Earth must be fixed in the center of the Universe. To Hooke it only proved that good enough telescopes hadn’t been built, nor precise enough measurements made. To obtain the level of magnification he needed, he had to construct a telescope 32 feet long. To annull the light-bending effects of the Earth’s atmosphere (which were obvious from the fact that the Sun became an oval when it rose or set), he had to aim it straight up—hence the demand for a vertical shaft to be bored through Gresham’s College. Gresham’s antique mansion was now like an ancient plaster wall that had been mended so many times it consisted entirely of interlocked patches. It was solid scar tissue. This made the work more interesting for Daniel, and taught him more than he’d ever cared to know about how buildings were put up, and what kept them from falling down.

  The goal was to gaze straight up into Heaven, and count the miles to the nearest stars. But as Daniel did most of the work during the daytime, he spent most of his idle moments looking down into London—six years since the Fire now—but its reconstruction really just getting underway.

  Formerly Gresham’s College had huddled among buildings of about the same height, but the Fire had burnt almost to its front door, and so now it loomed like a manor house over a devastated fiefdom. If Daniel stood on the ridge of the roof, facing south toward London Bridge half a mile away, everything in his field of view bore marks of heat and smoke. Suppose the city were a giant Hooke-watch, with Gresham’s College the central axle-tree, and London Bridge marking twelve o’clock. Then Bedlam was directly behind Daniel at six o’clock. The Tower of London was at about ten o’clock. The easterly wind, and its glacis, had preserved it from the flames. The wedge from the Tower to the Bridge was a tangle of old streets with charred spikes of old church-steeples jutting up here and there, like surveyor’s stakes—literally. This to the chagrin of Hooke, who’d presented the City with a plan to rationalize the streets, only to be frustrated by a few such impediments that had survived the flames; for those who opposed his plans used the carbonized steeples as landmarks to shew where streets had once been, and ought to be remade, be they never so narrow and tortuous. The negative space between construction-sites defined new streets now, only a little wider and straighter than the old. Right in the center of this wedge was the place where the Fire had started—an empty moon-crater cordoned off so that Hooke and Wren could build a monument there.

  Directly before Daniel, in the wedge from about noon to one o’clock, was the old goldsmiths’ district of Threadneedle and Cornhill streets, which converged at the site of the Royal Exchange—all so close that Daniel could hear the eternal flame of buying and selling in the courtyard of the ‘Change, fueled by the latest data from abroad, and he could look into the windows of Thomas Ham’s house and see Mayflower (like a matron) plumping pillows and (like a schoolgirl) playing leapfrog with William Ham, her youngest child, her dear heart.

  The west-bound street formed by the confluence of Threadnee-dle and Cornhill became Cheapside, which Hooke had insisted on making much wider than it had been before—eliciting screams of agony and near-apocalyptic rantings from many—attacks that Hooke, who cared less than anyone what people thought of him, was uniquely qualified to ignore. It ran straight as Hooke could make it to the once and future St. Paul’s, now a moraine of blackened stones, congealed roofing-lead, and plague-victims’ jumbled bones. Wren was still working on plans and models for the new one. The streets limning St. Paul’s Churchyard were lined with printers’ shops, including the ones that produced most Royal Society publications, so the trip up and down Cheapside had become familiar to Daniel, as he went there to fetch copies of Hooke’s Micrographia or inspect the proofs for Wilkins’s Universal Character.

  Raising his sights a notch and gazing over the scab of St. Paul’s (which stood at about two o’clock), he could see Bridewell on the far side of it—a former Royal palace, now tumbledown, where whores, actresses, and Vagabond-wenches picked oakum, pounded hemp, and carried out diverse other character-building chores, until they had become reformed. That marked the place where the Fleet River—which was simply a ditch full of shit—intersected the Thames. Which explained why the Royals had moved out of Bridewell and ceded it to the poor. The fire had jumped the ditch easily, and kept eating through the city until a shortage of fuel, and the King’s and Lord Mayor’s heroic house-bombing campaign, had finally drawn a lasso around it. So whenever he did this Daniel inevitably had to trace the dividing-line between burnt and unburnt parts of the city from the River up across Fleet Street as far as Hol-born (three o’clock). Out back of the place where his father had been blown up six years ago, a quadrangle had been laid out, lined with houses and shops, and filled with gardens, fountains, and statues. Others just like it were going up all around, and starting to crowd in around the edges of those few great Houses along Piccadilly, such as Comstock House. But those developments, and the great successes they had brought to Sterling and Raleigh, were old news to Daniel, and didn’t command his attention as much as certain strange new undertakings around the edges of the city.

  If he turned and looked north over the bones of the old Roman wall he could look right into Bedlam less than a quarter of a mile away. It had not been burnt, but the city had hired Hooke to tear it down and rebuild it anyway, as long as they were rebuilding everything else. The joke being that London and Bedlam seemed to have exchanged places: for Bedlam had been emptied out and torn down in preparation for its reconstruction, and was a serene rock-garden now, whereas all of London (save a few special plots such as the Monument site and St. Paul’s) was in the throes of building—stones and bricks and timbers moving through the city on streets so congested that watching them fill up in the morning was like watching sausage casings being stuffed with meat. Wrecked buildings being torn down, cellars being dug, mortar being mixed, paving-stones being flung off carts, bricks and stones being chiselled to fit, iron wheel-rims grinding over cobbles—all of it made noise that merged together into a mad grind, like a Titan chewing up a butte.

  So: strange enough. But beyond Bedlam, to the north and northeast, and sweeping round beyond the Tower along the eastern skirts of the city, were several artillery-grounds and army camps. These had been busy of late, because of the Anglo-Dutch War. Not the same Anglo-Dutch war that Isaac had listened to from his orchard in Woolsthorpe six years ago, for that had concluded in 1667. This was a wholly new and different Anglo-Dutch War, the third in as many decades. This time around, though, the English had finally gotten it right: they were allied with the French. Ignoring all considerations of what was really in the best interests of England, and setting aside all questions of moral rightness (and the current King was rarely troubled and little hindered by either), this seemed like a much better plan than fighting against France. Plenty of French gold had entered the country to bring Parliament around to Louis XIV’s side, and to pay for a lot of ships to be built. France had an immense army and needed little help from England on land; what Louis had bought, and paid for several times over, was the Royal Navy, and its guns, and its gunpowder.

  It was difficult, therefore, for Daniel to make any sense of the project underway northeast of London. Over several weeks Daniel watched a flat parade-ground develop pits and wrinkles, which slowly grew to ditches and mounds, and shaped and resolved themselves (as if he were adjusting the focus of a prospective glass) into sharp neat earthworks. Daniel had never seen such things because, until now, they had not been built in England, but from books and siege-paintings he knew them as ramparts, a bastion, ravelins, and a demilune work. But if this were a preparation for Du
tch invasion, it was poorly thought out, because these works stood in isolation, protecting nothing save a pasture with a few dozen befuddled, but extremely well-defended, cows. Nevertheless, guns were mustered out from the Ordnance storehouses in the Tower, and hauled up onto the ramparts by teams of straining oxen—hernias with legs. The cracks of the teamsters’ whips and the snorts and bellows of the beasts were carried for miles on a sea breeze all the way across Houndsditch and over the Wall and up the pitched roof of Gre-sham’s College into Daniel’s ears. Daniel for his part only stared in amaze.

  Nearer the river, in the flat country beyond the Tower, Naval works took over from Military ones: shipyards messy with blond timber from Scotland or Massachusetts, splattered planks drawing themselves up into the curved hulls of ships, dead firs resurrected as masts. Colossal plumes of black smoke spreading downwind, pointing to Comstock-forges where tons of iron were being melted down and poured into subterranean cannon-molds, and windmill-blades rolling on the horizon, turning the gear-trains of mighty Comstock-machines that bored holes down the centers of those cannons.

  Which brought Daniel’s gaze back to the Tower, where he’d started: the central mystery, where treasure-ships from (as everyone in London now knew) France brought in the gold to be minted into the guineas that paid for all of those ships and cannons, and for the services of England in its new role as a sort of naval auxiliary to France.

  ONE DAY, HEARING CHURCH-BELLS RING two o’clock, Daniel descended the ladder through the telescope-shaft. Hooke had gone out to inspect some new pavement, leaving behind nothing but a faint metallic scent of vomit. Daniel walked directly across the street, dodging uncouth traffic of heavy carts. He climbed into Samuel Pepys’s carriage and made himself comfortable. Several minutes passed. Daniel looked at passers-by out the window. A hundred yards south, the streets would be a-bustle with brokers of East India stocks and goldsmiths’ notes, but this place, tucked up against London wall, was a queer eddy, or backwater, and Daniel observed a jumble of Navy men, Dissident preachers, Royal Society hangers-on, foreigners, and Vagabonds, stirring and shuffling about one another in no steady pattern. It was an inscrutable Gordian knot suddenly cleft by one Chase Scene: a scruffy barefoot boy came bolting up Broad Street, pursued by a bailiff with a cudgel. Glimpsing a side street that ran off to the left, between the Navy Treasury and the Dutch Church, the boy skidded round the corner—paused—considered matters—and freed himself of a burden by heaving a pale brick into the air. It sheared apart, the wind caught it, and it puffed into a cloud of fluttering rectangles, whirling mysteriously round their long axes. By the time Daniel or anyone else thought to look for him, the boy was gone. The bailiff shifted to a straddling gait, as if riding an invisible pony, and began trying to step on all of the libels at once, gathering them in his arms, stuffing them into his pockets. Several members of the Watch stormed up and exchanged monosyllabic gasping noises with the bailiff. They all turned and glared at the façade of the Dutch Church, then went back to rounding up handbills.

  Samuel Pepys was preceded by his cologne and his wig, and pursued by a minion embracing a sheaf of giant rolled documents. “I thought it well played, on the boy’s part,” he said, climbing into the coach and handing Daniel one of the libels.

  “An old trick of the trade,” Daniel said.

  Pepys looked delighted. “Drake put you out on the streets?”

  “Of course…‘twas the common rite of passage for all Water-house boys.”

  The handbill was a cartoon depicting King Louis XIV of France with his breeches piled up round his ankles and hairy buttocks thrust out, shitting an immense turd into the mouth of an English sailor.

  “Let’s take it to Wilkins! It’ll cheer him up enormously,” Pepys suggested, and pounded on the ceiling. The coachman drove the horses forward. Daniel made his body go limp so that he would not accrue lacerations from the continual battering onslaughts of the vehicle’s benches and bulkheads.

  “Did you bring it?”

  “I always have it with me,” Pepys said, producing an irregular nodule about the size of a tennis ball, “as you have all your parts.”

  “To remind you of your own mortality?”

  “Once a man’s been cut for the stone, ’tis hardly necessary.”

  “Why, then?”

  “It is my conversation-starter of last resort. It gets anyone talking: Germans, Puritans, Red Indians…” He handed the object to Daniel. It was heavy. Heavy as a stone.

  “I cannot believe this came out of your bladder,” Daniel said.

  “You see? Never fails!” Pepys answered.

  But Daniel got no further response from Pepys, who’d already unrolled one of the large documents, creating a screen that divided the carriage in half. Daniel had assumed that they were all diagrams of men-of-war. But when they turned west on Cheapside the sun came in the carriage window and shone through the paper, revealing a grid of numbers. Pepys muttered things to his assistant, who jotted them down. Daniel was left to rotate the bladder-stone in his hand and gaze out at London, so different when seen at street-level. Passing through St. Paul’s Churchyard, they saw the whole contents of a printer’s shop turned out into the street—several bailiffs, and one of Sir Roger L’Estrange’s lieutenants, pawing through stacks of unbound sheets, and holding wood-blocks up to mirrors.

  Within a few minutes, anyway, they were at Wilkins’s house. Pepys left his assistant and his papers below in the carriage and pounded up stairs holding the bladder-stone in his hand like a questing knight brandishing a fragment of the Cross.

  He shook it in Wilkins’s face. Wilkins only laughed. But it was good that he did, because his room was otherwise a horror—his dark breeches couldn’t conceal that he had been pissing blood, sometimes sooner than he could get to the chamber-pot. He was both wizened and bloated at the same time, if that were possible, and the smell that came out of his flesh seemed to suggest his kidneys weren’t keeping up their end of the bargain.

  While Pepys exhorted the Bishop of Chester to allow himself to be cut for the stone, Daniel looked about, and was dispirited but not surprised to see several empty bottles from the apothecary shop of Monsieur LeFebure. He gave one a sniff. It was Elixir Pro-prietalis LeFebure—the same stuff Hooke swallowed when headaches had brought him to the brink of suicide—the fruits of LeFebure’s researches into certain remarkable properties of the poppy family. It was hugely popular at Court, even among those not afflicted with headaches or the Stone. But when Daniel saw Wilkins go into a bladder spasm—reducing the Lord Bishop of Chester, and Founder of the Royal Society, to a dumb animal for several minutes, convulsing and howling—he decided perhaps Monsieur LeFebure was not such a sinister fellow after all.

  When it was over, and Wilkins was Wilkins again, Daniel showed him the handbill, and mentioned L’Estrange’s raid on the printing-shop.

  “The same men doing the same things as ten years ago,” Wilkins pronounced.

  From that—the same men—Daniel knew that the originator of the handbills, and ultimate target of L’Estrange’s raids, must be Knott Bolstrood.

  “And that is why I cannot stop what I am doing to be cut for the Stone,” Wilkins said.

  DANIEL ERECTED A BLOCK AND TACKLE above the Gresham shaft, Hooke put the rebuilding of London on hold for a day, and they put the long telescope into place, Hooke cringing and screaming every time it was bumped, as if the instrument were an extension of his own eyeball.

  Meanwhile Daniel could never keep his attention fixed on the heavens, for the warm mutterings and nudgings of London would not leave him alone—notes slipped under his door, raised eyebrows in coffee-shops, odd things witnessed in the street all captured his attention more than they should’ve. Outside the city, scaffolding rose up from the glacis of those mysterious fortifications, and long benches began to shingle it.

  Then, one afternoon, Daniel and all London’s Persons of Quality and most of her pickpockets were there, sitting on those benches or milling about i
n the fields. The Duke of Monmouth rode out, in a Cavalier outfit whose magnificence was such as to refute and demolish every sermon ever preached by a Calvinist—because if those sermons were true, Monmouth ought to be struck dead on the spot by a jealous God. John Churchill—possibly the only man in England handsomer than Monmouth—therefore wore slightly less thrilling clothes. The King of France could not attend this event, as he was so busy conquering the Dutch Republic just now, but a strapping actor pranced out in his stead, dressed in royal ermine, and took up a throne on an artificial hillock, and occupied himself with suitable bits of stage-business, viz. peering at events through a glass; pointing things out to diverse jewelled mistresses draped all about his vicinity; holding out his Sceptre to order his troops forward; descending from his throne to speak a few kind words to wounded officers who were brought up to him on litters; standing up and striking a grave defiant pose during moments of crisis, whilst holding out a steady hand to calm his jittery femmes. Likewise an actor had been hired to play the role of D’Artagnan. Since everyone knew what was about to happen to him, he got the most applause when he was introduced—to the visible chagrin of the (real) Duke of Monmouth. In any event: cannons were discharged picturesquely from the ramparts of “Maestricht,” and “Dutchmen” struck defiant poses on the battlements, creating among the spectators a frisson of righteous anger (how dare those insolent Dutchmen defend themselves!?)—rapidly transmuted into patriotic fervor as, at a signal from “Louis XIV,” Monmouth and Churchill led a charge up the slope of the demilune work. After a bit of thrilling swordplay and much spattering-about of stage-blood, they planted French and English flags side by side on the parapet, shook hands with “D’Artagnan,” and exchanged all manner of fond and respectful gestures with the “King” on his hillock.