Quicksilver

by Neal Stephenson

  “It seems a farfetched way for this Mr. Vliet to raise money,” Eliza said, “when there is a large and extremely vigorous capital market right here in Amsterdam.”

  This was (as Jack figured out later, when he had much time to consider it) Eliza’s way of saying that she thought Mr. Vliet was a knave, and the voyage not fit for persons in their right minds to invest in. But having been in Amsterdam for so long, she said it in the zargon of bankers.

  “Why not just sell the jewels and give the money to your boys?” she continued.

  “Why not invest it—as they have no immediate need for money—and, in a few years, give them quadruple the amount?”

  “Quadruple?”

  “We expect no less.”

  Eliza made a face as if she were being forced to swallow a whole English walnut. “Speaking of money,” she murmured, “what of the horse, and the ostrich plumes?”

  “That noble steed is in Dunkirk, awaiting the return of John Churchill, who has voiced an intention of buying him from me. The plumes are safe in the hands of my commission-agents in Paris,” Jack said, and gripped the table-edge with both hands, expecting a thorough interrogation. But Eliza let the matter drop, as if she couldn’t stand to come any nearer to the truth. Jack realized she’d never expected to see him, or the money, again—that she’d withdrawn, long ago, from the partnership they’d formed beneath the Emperor’s palace in Vienna.

  She would not look him in the eye, nor laugh at his jokes, nor blush when he provoked her, and he thought that chill Amsterdam had frozen her soul—sucked the humour of passion from her veins. But in time he persuaded her to come outside with him. When she stood up, and the Maiden’s proprietor helped her on with a cape, she looked finer than ever. Jack was about to compliment her on her needle-work when he noticed rings of gold on her fingers, and jewels round her neck, and knew she probably had not touched needle and thread since reaching Amsterdam.

  “Windhandel, or gifts from suitors?”

  “I did not escape slavery to be a whore,” she answered. “You might wake up next to a Yevgeny and jest about it—I would be of a different mind.”

  Yevgeny, unaware that he was being abused in this way, followed them through the scrubbed streets of the town, thumping at the pavement with the butt of his harping-iron. Presently they came to a southwestern district not so well scrubbed, and began to hear a lot of French and Ladino, as Huguenots and Sephardim had come to live here—even a few Raskolniks, who stopped Yevgeny to exchange rumors and stories. The houses became cracked and uneven, settling into the muck so fast you could practically see them moving, and the canals became narrow and scummed-over, as if rarely troubled by commerce.

  They walked up such a street to a warehouse where heavy sacks were being lowered into the hold of a sloop. “There it is—our Commodity,” Jack said. “Good as—and in some parts of the world, preferable to—gold.”

  “What is it—hazelnuts?” Eliza asked. “Coffee beans?” Jack had no particular reason to keep the secret from her, but this was the first time she’d shown any interest at all in his venture, and he wanted to make it last.

  The sloop’s hold was full. So even as Jack, Eliza, and Yevgeny were approaching, the lines were cast off and sails raised, and she began to drift down the canal ahead of a faint breeze, headed for the inner harbor, a few minutes’ walk away.

  They followed on foot. “You have insurance?” she asked.

  “Funny you should ask,” Jack said, and at this Eliza rolled her eyes, and then slumped like one of those sinking houses. “Mr. Foot says that this is a great adventure, but—”

  “He means that you have made Mr. Vliet a loan à la grosse aventure, which is a typical way of financing trading-voyages,” Eliza said. “But those who make such loans always buy insurance—if they can find anyone to sell it to them. I can point you to coffee-houses that specialize in just that. But—”

  “How much does it cost?”

  “It depends on everything, Jack, there is no one fixed price. Are you trying to tell me you don’t have enough money left to buy insurance?”

  Jack said nothing.

  “If so, you should withdraw now.”

  “Too late—the victuals are paid for and stowed in the hold of God’s Wounds. But perhaps there is room for one more investor.”

  Eliza snorted. “What’s come over you? Vagabonding you do very well, and you cut a fine figure doing it. But investing—it’s not your métier.”

  “I wish you had mentioned that before,” Jack said. “From the first moment Mr. Foot mentioned it to me, I saw this trading-voyage as a way I might become worthy in your eyes.” Then Jack nearly toppled into a canal, as recklessly telling the truth had given him an attack of giddiness. Eliza, for her part, looked as if she’d been butt-stroked by Yevgeny’s harpoon—she stopped walking, planted her feet wide, and crossed her arms over her bodice as if nursing a stomach-ache; looked up the canal with watery eyes for a moment; and sniffled once or twice.

  Jack ought to’ve been delighted. But all he felt, finally, was a dull sense of doom. He hadn’t told Eliza about the rotten fish or the pink-eyed horses. He certainly had not mentioned that he could have killed, but had idiotically spared, the villain who had once made her a slave. But he knew that someday she would find out, and when that happened, he did not want to be on the European continent.

  “Let me see the ship,” she said finally.

  They came round a bend and were greeted by one of those sudden surprising Amsterdam-vistas, down the canal to the ship-carpeted Ijsselmeer. Planted on the Ij-bank was the Herring-Packers’ Tower, a roundish brick silo rising above a sloppy, fragrant quay where three vessels were tied up: a couple of hulks that were shuttling victuals out to bigger ships in the outer harbor, and God’s Wounds, which looked as if she were being disassembled. All her hatches were removed for loading, and what remained had a structurally dubious look—especially when great sweating barrels of herring, and these mysterious sacks from the warehouse, were being dropped into it.

  But before Jack could really dwell on the topic of sea-worthiness, Eliza—moving with a decisiveness he could no longer muster—had gone out onto the quay, her skirts sweeping up all manner of stuff that she would later regret having brought home. A sack had split open and spilled its contents, which snapped, crackled, and popped beneath the soles of her shoes as she drew up close. She bent over and thrust her hand into the hole, somewhat like doubting Thomas, and raised up a handful of the cargo, and let it spill in a colorful clinking shower.

  “Cowrie shells,” she said distractedly.

  Jack thought, at first, that she was dumbfounded—probably by the brilliance and magnificence of the plan—but on a closer look he saw that she was showing all the symptoms of thinking.

  “Cowrie shells to you,” Jack said. “In Africa, this is money!”

  “Not for long.”

  “What do you mean? Money’s money. Mr. Vliet has been sitting on this hoard for twenty years, waiting for prices to drop.”

  “A few weeks ago,” said Eliza, “news arrived that the Dutch had acquired certain isles, near India, called the Maldives and Laccadives, and that vast numbers of cowrie shells had been found there. Since that news arrived, these have been considered worthless.”

  It took Jack some time to recover from this.

  He had a sword, and Mr. Vliet, a pudgy flaxen-haired man, was just a stone’s throw away, going over some paperwork with a ship’s victualer, and it was natural to imagine simply running over and inserting the tip of the sword between any two of Mr. Vliet’s chins and giving it a hard shove. But this, he supposed, would simply have proved Eliza’s point (viz. that he was not cut out to be a businessman), and he did not want to give her such satisfaction. Jack wasn’t going to get the kind of satisfaction he had been craving for the last six months, and so why should she get any? As a way of keeping his body occupied while the mind worked, he helped roll some barrels over the plank to the deck of the ship.

>   “Now I understand the word Windhandel in a new way,” was all that he could come up with. “This is real,” he said, slapping a barrel-head, “and this” (stomping the deck of God’s Wounds) “is real, and these” (lofting a double handful of cowrie shells) “are real, and all of them every bit as real, now, as they were, ten minutes ago, or before this rumor arrived from the Maldives and the Laccadives…”

  “The news came over land—faster than ships normally travel, when they have to round the Cape of Good Hope. So it is possible that you will reach Africa in advance of the great cargo-ships of cowrie-shells that, one can only presume, are headed that way now from the Maldives.”

  “Just as Mr. Vliet had it planned, I’m sure.”

  “But when you get to Africa, what will you buy with your cowrie-shells, Jack?”

  “Cloth.”

  “Cloth!?”

  “Then we sail west—there is said to be a great market for African cloth in the West Indies.”

  “Africans do not export cloth, Jack. They import it.”

  “You must be mistaken—Mr. Vliet is very clear on this—we will sail to Africa and exchange our cowrie-shells for pieces of India, which as I’m sure you know means India cloth, and then carry it across the Atlantic…”

  “A piece of India is an expression meaning a male African slave between fifteen and forty years of age,” Eliza said. “India cloth—just like cowrie shells—is money in Africa, Jack, and Africans will sell other Africans for one piece of it.”

  Now a silence nearly as long as the one at the duc d’Arcachon’s party. Jack standing on the slowly moving deck of the God’s Wounds, Eliza on the quay.

  “You are going into the slave trade,” she said, in a dead voice.

  “Well…I had no idea, until now.”

  “I believe you. But now you have to get off that boat and walk away.”

  This was a superb idea, and part of Jack was thrilled by it. But the Imp of the Perverse prevailed, and Jack decided to take Eliza’s suggestion in a negative and resentful spirit.

  “And simply throw away my investment?”

  “Better than throwing away your immortal soul. You threw away the ostrich plumes and the horse, Jack, I know you did—so why not do the same now?”

  “This is more valuable by far.”

  “What about the other item you looted from the Grand Vizier’s camp, Jack?”

  “What, the sword?”

  Eliza shook her head no, looked him in the eye, and waited.

  “I remember that item,” Jack allowed.

  “Will you throw her away, too?”

  “She is far more valuable, true…”

  “And worth more money,” Eliza put in slyly.

  “You’re not proposing to sell yourself—?”

  Eliza went into a strange amalgam of laughing and crying. “I mean to say that I have already made more money than the plumes, sword, and horse were worth, and stand to make far more, soon—and so if it is money that concerns you, walk away from the God’s Wounds and stay with me, here in Amsterdam—soon you’ll forget this ship ever existed.”

  “It does not seem respectable—being supported by a woman.”

  “When in your life have you ever cared about respect?”

  “Since people began to respect me.”

  “I am offering you safety, happiness, wealth—and my respect,” Eliza said.

  “You would not respect me for long. Let me take this one voyage, and get my money back, then—”

  “One voyage for you. Eternal wretchedness for the Africans you’ll buy, and their descendants.”

  “Either way I’ve lost my Eliza,” Jack said with a shrug. “So that makes me something of an authority when it comes to eternal wretchedness.”

  “Do you want your life?”

  “This life? Not especially.”

  “Get off the boat, if you want to have a life at all.”

  Eliza had noticed what Jack hadn’t, which was that God’s Wounds had finished being loaded. The hatch-covers were back in place, the herring was paid for (in silver coins, not cowrie-shells), and the sailors were casting off lines. Only Mr. Vliet, and Yevgeny, remained on the quay—the former haggling with an apothecary over a medicine-chest, and the latter being blessed by an outlandish Raskolnik priest in a towering hat. This scene was so curious that it diverted Jack’s attention completely, until all of the sailors began to holler. Then he looked at them. But they were all looking at some apparently horrid spectacle on the quay, putting Jack suddenly in fear that ruffians, or something, were assaulting Eliza.

  Jack turned around just in time to discover that Eliza had seized the harpoon, which Yevgeny had left leaning against a stack of crates, and was just in the act of launching it toward Jack. She was not, of course, a professional harpooneer, but she had the womanly knack of aiming for the heart, and so the weapon came at him straight as Truth. Jack, recalling a dim bit of sword-fighting lore from his Regimental days, twisted sideways to present a narrower target, but lost his balance and fell toward the mainmast and threw out his left arm to break his fall. The broad flukes of the harpoon made a slashing attack across the breadth of his chest and glanced off a rib, or something, so that its point struck his forearm and passed sideways through the narrow space between the two bones and buried itself in the mast—pinning him. He felt all of this before he saw it because he was looking for Eliza. But she’d already turned her back on him and was walking away, not even caring whether she had hit him or not.

  Amsterdam

  JUNE 1685

  D’AVAUX AND A PAIR OF tall, uncommonly hard-bitten “valets” saw her to the brink of a canal, not far from the Dam, that ran westwards toward Haarlem. A vessel was tied up there, accepting passengers, and from a distance Eliza thought it a tiny one, because it had an amusing toylike look, with the stem and the stern both curved sharply upwards—giving it the profile of a fat boy doing a bold belly-flop. But as they drew closer she saw it was a large (albeit lightly built) ship, at least twenty yards long, and narrower of beam than she’d expected—a crescent moon.

  “I do not mean to belabor you with tedious details—that sort of thing is the responsibility of Jacques, here, and Jean-Baptiste…”

  “These are coming with me!?”

  “The way to Paris is not devoid of perils, mademoiselle,” d’Avaux said drily, “even for the weak and the innocent.” Then he turned his head in the direction of the still lightly smoking wrack of Mr. Sluys’s string of houses, only a musket-shot away along this very canal.

  “Evidently you think I am neither,” Eliza sniffed.

  “Your practice of harpooning sailors along the waterfront would make it difficult for even the most lubrique to harbor illusions as to your true nature—”

  “You’ve heard about that?”

  “Miracle you weren’t arrested—here, in a city where kissing someone is a misdemeanour.”

  “Have you had me followed, monsieur?” Eliza looked indignantly at Jacques and Jean-Baptiste, who pretended, for the time being, to be deaf and blind, and busied themselves with a cartload of rather good luggage. She’d never seen most of these bags before, but d’Avaux had implied, more than once, that they and their contents all belonged to her.

  “Men will ever follow you, mademoiselle, you’d best adapt. In any event—setting aside the odd harpooning—in this town are certain busybodies, scolds, and cancaniers who insist that you were involved in the financial implosion of Mr. Sluys; the invasion fleet that sailed for England, from Texel, the other day, flying the Duke of Monmouth’s colors; and the feral mob of Orangist patriots who, some say, set Mr. Sluys’s dwelling afire. I, of course, do not believe in any of these nonsenses—and yet I worry about you—”

  “Like a fretful uncle. Oh, how dear!”

  “So. This kaag will take you, and your escorts—”

  “Over the Haarlemmermeer to Leiden, and thence to Den Briel via the Hague.”

  “How did you guess?”

 
“The coat of arms of the City of Den Briel is carved on the taffrail, there, opposite that of Amsterdam,” Eliza said, pointing up at the stern. D’Avaux turned to look, and so did Jacques and Jean-Baptiste; and in the same moment Eliza heard behind her a weird sighing, whistling noise, like a bagpipe running out of wind, and was jostled by a passing boer headed for the gangplank. As this rustic clambered up onto the kaag she saw his oddly familiar humpbacked profile, and caught her breath for a moment. D’Avaux turned to peer at her. Something told Eliza that this would be an awkward time to make a fuss, and so she let her mouth run: “She carries more sail than the usual canal-barge—presumably for crossing the Haarlemmermeer. She is a slender vessel, made to pass through that narrow lock between Leiden and the Hague. And yet she’s too flimsy to traverse Zeeland’s currents and tides—she could never afford the insurance.”

  “Yes,” d’Avaux said, “at Den Briel you must transfer to a more insurable ship that will take you to Brussels.” He was looking at Eliza queerly—so suspicious! The boer, meanwhile, had disappeared into the clutter of passengers and cargo on the kaag’s deck. “From Brussels you will travel over land to Paris,” d’Avaux continued. “The inland route is less comfortable during summer—but much safer during an armed rebellion against the King of England.”

  Eliza sighed deeply, trying to hold in her mind the phant’sy of a million slaves being released from bondage. But it was a frail gauzy construction ripped apart by the strong summer-light of Amsterdam, the hard clear shapes of black buildings and white windows. “My lovely Dukie,” she said, “so impetuous.”

  “Étienne d’Arcachon—who asks about you, by the way, in every one of his letters—suffers from a similar fault. In his case it is tempered by breeding and intelligence; yet he has lost a hand to a Vagabond because of it!”