Quicksilver

by Neal Stephenson

  Someone, anyway, had decided that he was dangerous—a younger man costumed as a Captain of Horse, who now rode out in front of the Admiral and drew his sword, and waited for Jack to do something.

  “What’d you pay for that nag?” Jack snarled, and, since he didn’t have time to disassemble his crutch, raised it up like a knight’s lance, bracing the padded cross-piece against his ribs, and spurred Turk forward with his heels. The cold air felt good rushing over his bare feet. The Captain got a look of dignified befuddlement on his face that Jack would always remember, and the others, behind him, got out of the way in a sudden awkward clocking and scraping of hooves—and then at the last moment this Captain realized he was in an impossible situation, and tried to lean out of the way. The crutch-tip caught him in the upper arm and probably gave him a serious bruise. Jack rode through the middle of the Admiral’s entourage and then got Turk turned around to face them again, which took longer than he was comfortable with—but all of those Admirals and Colonels and Captains had to get turned around, too, and their horses were not as good as Jack’s.

  One in particular, a pretty black charger with a bewigged and beribboned aristocrat on top of it, was declining to follow orders, and stood broadside to Jack, a couple of lengths away. “And what do I hear for this magnificent Turkish charger?” Jack demanded, spurring Turk forward again, so that after building up some speed he T-boned the black horse just in the ribcage and actually knocked it over sideways—the horse went down in a fusillade of hooves, and the rider, who hadn’t seen it coming, flew halfway to the next arrondissement.

  “I’ll buy it right now, Jack,” said an English voice, somehow familiar, “if you stop being such a fucking tosser, that is.”

  Jack looked up into a face. His first thought was that this was the handsomest face he had ever seen; his second, that it belonged to John Churchill. Seated astride a decent enough horse of his own, right alongside of Jack.

  Someone was maneuvering towards them, shouting in French—Jack was too flabbergasted to consider why until Churchill, without taking his eyes off Jack’s, whipped out his rapier, and spun it (seemingly over his knuckles) so as to deflect a sword-thrust that had been aimed directly at Jack’s heart. Instead it penetrated several inches into Jack’s thigh. This hurt, and had the effect of waking Jack up and forcing him to understand that all of this was really happening.

  “Bob sends greetings from sunny Dunkirk,” said Churchill. “If you shut up, there is an infinitesimal chance of my being able to save you from being tortured to death before sundown.”

  Jack said nothing.

  Amsterdam

  APRIL 1685

  The Art of War is so well study’d, and so equally known in all Places, that ’tis the longest Purse that conquers now, not the longest Sword. If there is any Country whose people are less martial, less enterprising, and less able for the Field; yet if they have but more Money than their Neighbors, they shall soon be superior to them in Strength, for Money is Power…

  —DANIEL DEFOE, A Plan of the English Commerce

  “IT WAS PHANTASTICKAL in the extreme—Mademoiselle, it was beyond French—”

  Like a still pond into which a boy has flung a handful of gravel, the Duke of Monmouth’s beauty—aglow in the golden light of an Amsterdam afternoon—was now marred by a thought. The eyebrows steepled, the lips puckered, and the eyes might’ve crossed slightly—it was very difficult to tell, given his and Eliza’s current positions: straight out of a Hindoo frieze.

  “What is it?”

  “Did we actually achieve sexual, er, congress, at any point during those, er, proceedings?”

  “Poh! What’re you, then, some Papist who must draw up a schedule of his sins?”

  “You know that I am not, mademoiselle, but—”

  “You’re the sort who keeps a tally, aren’t you? Like a tavern-goer who prides himself on the Ps and Qs chalked up on the wall next his name—save in your case it’s wenches.”

  Monmouth tried to look indignant. But at the moment his body contained, of the yellow bile, less than at any time since infancy, and so even his indignation was flaccid. “I don’t think there’s anything untoward in wanting to know whom I have, and haven’t, rogered! My father—God rest his soul—rogered simply everyone. I’m merely the first and foremost of a legion of royal bastards! Wouldn’t be proper to lose track.”

  “…of your royal bastards?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then know that no royal bastards can possibly result from what we just did.”

  Monmouth got himself worked round to a less outlandish position, viz. sitting up and gazing soulfully into Eliza’s nipples. “I say, would you like to be a Duchess or something?”

  Eliza arched her back and laughed. Monmouth shifted his attention to her oscillating navel, and looked wounded.

  “What would I have to do? Marry some syphilitic Duke?”

  “Of course not. Be my mistress—when I am King of England. My father made all his mistresses into Duchesses.”

  “Why?”

  Monmouth, scandalized: “Elsewise, ’tweren’t proper!”

  “You already have a mistress.”

  “It’s common to have one…”

  “And noble to have several?”

  “What’s the point of being a king if you can’t fuck a lot of Duchesses?”

  “Just so, sir!”

  “Though I don’t know if ‘fuck’ is le mot juste for what we did.”

  “What I did. You just fidgeted and shuddered.”

  “Well it’s like some modish dance, isn’t it, where only one knows the steps. You just have to teach me the other part of it.”

  “I am honored, Your Grace—does that mean we’ll be seeing each other again?”

  Monmouth, miffed and slightly buffaloed: “I was sincere about making you a Duchess.”

  “First you have to make yourself a King.”

  The Duke of Monmouth sighed and slammed back into the mattress, driving out an evoluting cloud of dust, straw-ends, bedbugs, and mite fœces. All of it hung beautifully in the lambent air, as if daubed on canvas by one of those Brueghels.

  “I know it is ever so tiresome,” Eliza said, stroking the Duke’s hair back from his brow and tucking it neatly behind his ear. “Later you’ll be slogging round dreadful battlefields. Tonight we go to the Opera!”

  Monmouth made a vile face. “Give me a battlefield any time.”

  “William’s going to be there.”

  “Eeeyuh, he’s not going to do any tedious acting, is he?”

  “What, the Prince of Orange—?”

  “After the Peace of Breda he put on a ballet, and appeared as Mercury, bringing news of Anglo-Dutch rapprochement. Embarrassing to see a rather good warrior prancing about with a couple of bloody goose-wings lashed to his ankles.”

  “That was a long time ago—he is a grown man, and it is beneath his dignity now. He’ll just peer down from his box. Pretend to whisper bons mots to Mary, who’ll pretend to get them.”

  “If he is coming, we can go late,” Monmouth said. “They’ll have to search the place for bombs.”

  “Then we must go early,” Eliza countered, “as there’ll be that much more time for plots and intrigues.”

  LIKE ONE WHO HAS ONLY read books and heard tales of a foreign land, and finally goes there and sees the real thing—thus Eliza at the Opera. Not so much for the place (which was only a building) as for the people, and not so much for the ones with titles and formal ranks (viz. the Raadspensionary, and diverse Regents and Magistrates with their fat jewelled wives) as for the ones who had the power to move the market.

  Eliza, like most of that caterwauling, hand-slapping crowd who migrated between the Dam and the Exchange, did not have enough money to trade in actual V.O.C. shares. When she was flush, she bought and sold ducat shares, and when she wasn’t, she bought and sold options and contracts to buy or sell them. Strictly speaking, ducat shares didn’t even exist. They were splinters, fragments,
of actual V.O.C. shares. They were a fiction that had been invented so that people who weren’t enormously wealthy could participate in the market.

  Yet even above the level of those who traded full V.O.C. shares were the princes of the market, who had accumulated large numbers of those shares, and borrowed money against them, which they lent out to diverse ventures: mines, sailing-voyages, slave-forts on the Guinea coast, colonies, wars, and (if conditions were right) the occasional violent overthrow of a king. Such a man could move the market simply by showing his face at the Exchange, and trigger a crash, or a boom, simply by strolling across it with a particular expression on his face, leaving a trail of buying and selling in his wake, like a spreading cloud of smoke from a bishop’s censer.

  All of those men seemed to be here at the Opera with their wives or mistresses. The crowd was something like the innards of a harpsichord, each person tensed to thrum or keen when plucked. Mostly it was a cacophony, as if cats were lovemaking on the keyboard. But the arrival of certain Personages was a palpable striking of certain chords.

  “The French have a word for this: they name it a frisson,” muttered the Duke of Monmouth behind a kid-gloved hand as they made their way toward their box.

  “Like Orpheus, I struggle with a desire to turn around and look behind me—”

  “Stay, your turban would fall off.”

  Eliza reached up to pat the cyclone of cerulean Turkish silk. It was anchored to her hair by diverse heathen brooches, clips, and pins. “Impossible.”

  “Anyway, why would you want to look behind you?”

  “To see what has caused this frisson.”

  “It is we, you silly.” And for once, the Duke of Monmouth had said something that was demonstrably true. Countless sets of jewelled and gilded opera-glasses had been trained on them, making the owners look like so many goggle-eyed amphibians crowded together on a bank.

  “Never before has the Duke’s woman been more gloriously attired than he,” Eliza ventured.

  “And never again,” Monmouth snarled. “I only hope that your magnificence does not distract them from what we want them to see.”

  They stood at the railing of their box as they talked, presenting themselves for inspection. For the proscenium where the actors cavorted was only the most obvious of the Opera House’s stages, and the story that they acted out was only one of several dramas all going on at once. For example, the Stadholder’s box, only a few yards away, was being ransacked by Blue Guards looking for French bombs. That had grown tedious, and so now the Duke of Monmouth and his latest mistress had the attention of most everyone. The gaze of so many major V.O.C. shareholders, through so many custom-ground lenses, made Eliza feel like an insect ’neath a Natural Philosopher’s burning-glass. She was glad that this Turkish courtesan’s get-up included a veil, which hid everything but her eyes.

  Even through the veil’s narrow aperture, some of the observers might’ve detected a few moments’ panic, or at least anxiety, in Eliza’s eyes, as the frisson drew out into a general murmur of confusion: opera-goers all nudging one another down below, pointing upwards with flicks of the eyeballs or discreet waftings of gloved and ringed fingers, getting their wigs entangled as they whispered speculations to each other.

  It took a few moments for the crowd to even figure out who Eliza’s escort was. Monmouth’s attire was numblingly practical, as if he were going to jump on a war-horse immediately following the Opera and gallop through fen, forest, and brush until he encountered some foe who wanted slaying. Even his sword was a cavalry saber—not a rapier. To that point, at least, the message was clear enough. The question was, in what direction would Monmouth ride, and what sorts of heads, specifically, did he intend to be lopping off with that saber?

  “I knew it—to expose your navel was a mistake!” the Duke hissed.

  “On the contrary—’tis the keyhole through which the entire riddle will be unlocked,” Eliza returned, the t’s and k’s making her veil ripple gorgeously. But she was not as confident as she sounded, and so, at the risk of being obvious, she allowed her gaze to wander, in what she hoped would be an innocent-seeming way, around the crescent of opera-boxes until she found the one where the comte d’Avaux was seated along with (among other Amsterdammers who had recently gone on shopping sprees in Paris) Mr. Sluys the traitorous lead-hoarder.

  D’Avaux removed a pair of golden opera-glasses from his eyes and stared Eliza in the face for a ten-count.

  His eyes shifted to William’s box, where the Blue Guards were making an endless thrash.

  He looked at Eliza again. Her veil hid her smile, but the invitation in her eyes was clear enough.

  “It’s…not…working,” Monmouth grunted.

  “It is working flawlessly,” Eliza said. D’Avaux was on his feet, excusing himself from the crowd in that box: Sluys, and an Amsterdam Regent, and some sort of young French nobleman, who must have been of high rank, for d’Avaux gave him a deep bow.

  A few moments later he was giving the same sort of bow to the Duke of Monmouth, and kissing Eliza’s hand.

  “The next time you grace the Opera, mademoiselle, the Blue Guards will have to search your box, too—for you may be sure that every Lady in this building is shamed by your radiance. None of them will ever forgive you.” But as he was saying these words to Eliza, his gaze was traveling curiously up and down Monmouth, searching for clues.

  The Duke was wearing several pins and badges that had to be viewed from close range in order to be properly interpreted: one bearing the simple red cross of a Crusader, and another with the arms of the Holy League—the alliance of Poland, Austria, and Venice that was nudging the wreckage of the Turkish Army back across Hungary.

  “Your Grace,” d’Avaux said, “the way East is dangerous.”

  “The way West is barred forever, to me anyway,” Monmouth replied, “and my presence in Holland is giving rise to all manner of ugly rumors.”

  “There is always a place for you in France.”

  “The only thing I’ve ever been any good for is fighting—” Monmouth began.

  “Not the only thing…my lord,” Eliza said lasciviously. D’Avaux flinched and licked his lips. Monmouth flushed slightly and continued: “as my uncle* has brought peace to Christendom, I must seek glory in heathen lands.”

  Something was happening in the corner of Eliza’s eye: William and Mary entering their box. Everyone rose and applauded. It was dry, sparse applause, and it didn’t last. The comte d’Avaux stepped forward and kissed the Duke of Monmouth on both cheeks. Many of the opera-goers did not see the gesture, but some did. Enough, anyway, to strike a new chord in the audience: a baritone commotion that was soon covered up by the opening strains of the overture.

  The ladies and gentlemen of Amsterdam were settling into their seats, but their servants and lackeys still stood in the shadows under the boxes and loges, and some of them were now moving as their masters beckoned to them: stepping forward and cocking their heads to hear whispered confidences, or holding out their hands to accept scribbled notes.

  The market was moving. Eliza had moved it with her turban and her navel, and d’Avaux had moved it by showing slightly greater than normal affection for the Duke of Monmouth. Together, these clues could only mean that Monmouth had given up his claim to the English throne and was bound for Constantinople.

  The market was moving, and Eliza desperately wanted to be out on the Dam, moving with it—but her place was here for now. She saw d’Avaux return to his box and sit down. Actors had begun to sing down on the stage, but d’Avaux’s guests were leaning towards him to whisper and listen. The young French nobleman nodded his head, turned towards Monmouth, crossed himself, then opened his hand as if throwing a prayer to the Duke. Eliza half expected to see a dove fly out of his sleeve. Monmouth pretended to snatch it from the air, and kissed it.

  But Mr. Sluys was not in a praying mood. He was thinking. Even in semi-darkness, through a miasma of candle and tobacco smoke, Eliza could read his fac
e: Monmouth slaying Turks in Hungary means he won’t use Holland as a platform to invade England—so there won’t be a catastrophe in Anglo-Dutch relations—so the English Navy won’t be firing any broadsides at the Dutch merchant fleet—so V.O.C. stock will rise. Sluys held his right hand up slightly and caressed the air with two fingers. A servant was suddenly draped over his epaulet, memorizing something, counting on his fingers. He nodded sharply, like a pecking gull, and was gone.

  Eliza reached up behind her head, untied her veil, and let it fall down onto her bosom. Then she enjoyed the opera.

  A hundred feet away, Abraham de la Vega was hiding in the wings with a spyglass, made of lenses ground, to tolerances of a few thousandths of an inch, by his late second cousin, Baruch de Spinoza. Through those lenses, he saw the veil descend. He was nine years old. He moved through the backstage and out of the opera-house like the moon-shadow of a nightingale. Aaron de la Vega, his uncle, was waiting there astride a swift horse.

  “HAS HE OFFERED to make you a Duchess yet?” d’Avaux asked during the intermission.

  “He said that he would have—had he not renounced his claim to the throne,” Eliza said.

  D’Avaux was amused by her carefulness. “As your gallant is renewing his Platonic friendship with the Princess, may I escort you to Mr. Sluys’s box? I cannot stand to see you neglected.”

  Eliza looked at the Stadholder’s box. Mary was there but William had already sneaked out, leaving the field clear for Monmouth, whose brave resolve to go East and fight the Turk had Mary almost in tears.

  “I never even saw the Prince,” Eliza said, “just glimpsed him scurrying in at the last minute.”

  “Rest assured, mademoiselle, he is nothing to look at.” And he offered Eliza his arm. “If it’s true that your beau is leaving soon for the East, you’ll need new young men to amuse you. Frankly, you are overdue for a change. La France did her best to civilize Monmouth, but the Anglo-Saxon taint had penetrated too deeply. He never developed the innate discretion of a Frenchman.”