Quicksilver

by Neal Stephenson

“If the stakes are that high, then I suppose the least I can do is contrive some way to get close to Liselotte.”

  “I don’t want you to get close to her, I want you to seduce her, I want you to make her your slave.”

  “I was trying to be delicate.”

  “My apologies!” William said with a courtly bow, looking her up and down. Covered in salt and sand, and wrapped up in a bloody dragoon-coat, Eliza couldn’t have looked delicate at all. William looked as if he were on the verge of saying as much. But he thought better of it, and looked away.

  “You have ennobled me, my prince. It was done some years ago. You have grown used to thinking of me as a noblewoman, even if that is only a secret between you and me. To Versailles I am still a commoner, and a foreigner to boot. As long as this remains true you may be assured that Liselotte will have nothing to do with me.”

  “In public.”

  “Even in private! Not everyone there is as much of a hypocrite as you seem to think.”

  “I did not say it would be easy. This is why I am asking you to do it.”

  “As I said, I am willing to give it a try. But if d’Avaux has seen me here today, going back to Versailles would seem unwise.”

  “D’Avaux prides himself on playing a deep and subtle game, and that is his weakness,” William announced. “Besides, he depends on your financial advice. He will not crush you immediately.”

  “Later, then?”

  “He’ll try to,” William corrected her.

  “And he will succeed.”

  “No. For by that point you will be the mistress of Madame—Liselotte—the King’s sister-in-law. Who has her rivals and her weaknesses, true—but who is of infinitely higher rank than d’Avaux.”

  Versailles

  EARLY 1688

  To Leibniz, February 3, 1688

  Doctor,

  Madame has graciously offered to send this letter to Hanover along with some others that her friend is carrying personally to Sophie, and so I’ll dispense with the cypher.

  You may wonder why Madame is offering such courtesies to me now, since in the past she has always viewed me as a mouse turd in the pepper.

  It seems that as the King of France was rising one day recently, he remarked, to the nobles who were attending his getting-out-of-bed ceremony, that he had heard that “the woman from Qwghlm” was secretly of noble blood.

  It was a secret even to me until an hour or so later, when I heard someone calling for “Mademoiselle la comtesse de la Zeur,” which (as I slowly figured out) is their way of trying to pronounce Sghr. As you may know, my island is a well-known Hazard to Navigation, recognizable, to terrified sailors, by its three towers of rock, which we denote by that name. Evidently some courtier, who had been so reckless as to sail within view of Qwghlm at some point, remembered this detail and concocted a title for me. To the Court ladies here, especially those of ancient families, it has a savage ring to it. Fortunately there are many foreign princesses here who do not have such exacting standards, and they have already sent minions around to invite me to parties.

  Of course Kings may ennoble commoners whenever they please, and so it isn’t clear to me why someone has gone to the trouble of making me out to be a hereditary noble. Here is a clue, though: Father Édouard de Gex has been asking me questions about the Qwghlmian Church, which is not technically Protestant in that it was founded before the Roman Catholic Church was established (or at least before anyone notified the Qwghlmians). The Father speaks of going to visit Qwghlm to seek out proofs that our faith is really no different from his and that the two should be merged.

  Meanwhile I keep hearing expressions of sympathy from various French nobles, who cluck their tongues over the barbaric occupation of my homeland by England. In fact, every Qwghlmian would be pleased if Englishmen did come and occupy our Island, for presumably they would bring some food and warm clothes. I suspect that Louis knows he may soon see a sworn enemy sitting on the throne of England, and is making ready to out-flank that foe by shoring up relations with places such as Ireland, Scotland, and that flyspeck of rock where I was born. It has been ages since Qwghlm had hereditary nobles (nine hundred years ago the Scots rounded them all up and sealed them into a cave with some bears), but now they have decided I am one. Mother would have been so proud!

  According to the date at the top of your last letter, you penned it while you were paying a visit to Sophie’s daughter at the Court of Brandenburg around the time of Christmas. Please tell me what Berlin is like! I know that many Huguenots have ended up there. It is strange to consider that only a few years ago Sophie and Ernst August were offering their daughter’s hand in marriage to Louis XIV. Yet now Sophie Charlotte is Electress of Brandenburg instead, and (if the rumors are to be believed) presiding over a salon of religious dissidents and free-thinkers in Berlin. If the marriage had gone the other way she would bear a measure of responsibility for putting the very same men to death or slavery. I can’t help but suppose she is happier where she is.

  They say that Sophie Charlotte participates in the discussions of those savants with ever so much poise and confidence. I can’t help but suppose that this is because she grew up around you, Doctor, and listened to the conversations you had with her mother. Now that I am reckoned a Countess, and am considered fit to exchange chit-chat with Madame, I have begged her to tell me what you and Sophie talk about at Hanover. But she only rolls her eyes and claims that erudite talk makes no sense to her. I believe that she has spent too much time around self-styled Alchemists, and suspects that all such talk is rubbish.

  The Star Chamber, Westminster Palace

  APRIL 1688

  For to accuse, requires less eloquence, such is man’s nature, than to excuse; and condemnation, than absolution more resembles justice.

  —HOBBES, Leviathan

  “HOW DOES THE SAYING GO? ‘All work and no play…a dull boy,” said a disembodied voice. It was the only perception that Daniel’s brain was receiving at the moment. Vision, taste, and the other senses were dormant, and memory did not exist. This made it possible for him to listen with more-than-normal acuteness to the voice, and to appreciate its fine qualities—of which there were many. It was a delicious voice, belonging to an upper-class man who was used to being listened to, and who liked it that way.

  “This boy’s lucubrations have made him very dull indeed, he is a very sluggard!” the voice continued.

  A few men chuckled, and shifted bodies sheathed in silk. The sounds echoed from a high and hard ceiling.

  Daniel’s mind now recollected that it was attached to a body. But like a regiment that has lost contact with its colonel, the body had not received any orders in a long time. It had gone all loose and discomposed, and had stopped sending signals back to headquarters.

  “Give him more water!” commanded the beautiful voice.

  Daniel heard boots moving on a hard floor to his left, felt blunt pressure against numbed lips, heard the rim of a bottle crack against one of his front teeth. His lungs began to fill up with some sort of beverage. He tried to move his head back but it responded sluggishly, and something cold hit him on the back of the neck hard enough to stop him. The fluid was flooding down his chin now and trickling under his clothes. His whole thorax clenched up trying to cough the fluid out of his lungs, and he tried to move his head forward—but now something cold caught him across the throat. He coughed and vomited at the same moment and sprayed hot humours all over his lap.

  “These Puritans cannot hold their drink—really one cannot take them anywhere.”

  “Save, perhaps, to Barbados, my Lord!” offered up another voice.

  Daniel’s eyes were bleary and crusted. He tried raising his hands to his face, but halfway there each one of them collided with a bar of iron that was projecting across space. Daniel groped at these, but dire things happened to his neck when he did, and so he ended up feeling around them to paw at his eyes and wipe grit and moisture away from his face. He could make out now that he was
sitting on a chair in the middle of a large room; it was night, and the place was lit up by only a modest number of candles. The light gleamed from white lace cravats round the throats of several gentlemen who were arranged round Daniel in a horseshoe.

  The light wasn’t bright enough, and his vision wasn’t clear enough, to make sense of this ironmongery that was about his neck, so he had to explore that with his hands. It seemed to be a band of iron bent into a neck-ring. From four locations equally spaced around its circumference rods of iron projected outwards like spokes from a wheel-hub, to a radius of perhaps half a yard, where each split into a pair of back-curved barbs, like the flukes of grappling-hooks.

  “While you were sleeping off the effects of M. LeFebure’s draught, I took the liberty of having you fitted out with new neckwear,” said the voice, “but as you are a Puritan, and have no use for vanity, I called upon a blacksmith instead of a tailor. You’ll find that this is all the mode in the sugar plantations of the Caribbean.”

  The barbs sticking out behind had gotten lodged in the back of the chair when Daniel had unwisely tried to sit forward. Now he gripped the ones in front and pushed himself back hard, knocking the rear ones free. Momentum carried him and the collar back; his spine slammed into the chair and the collar kept moving and tried to shear his head off. He ended up with his head tilted back, gazing almost straight up at the ceiling. His first thought was that candles had somehow been planted up there, or burning arrows shot at random into the ceiling by bored soldiery, but then his eyes focused and he saw that the vault had been decorated with painted stars that gleamed in the candle-light from beneath. Then he knew where he was.

  “The Court of Star Chamber is in session—Lord Chancellor Jeffreys presiding,” said another excellent voice, husky with some kind of precious emotion. And what sort of man got choked up over this?

  Now just as Daniel’s senses had recovered one at a time, beginning with his ears, so his mind was awakening piece-meal. The part of it that warehoused ancient facts was, at the moment, getting along much better than the part that did clever things. “Nonsense…the Court of Star Chamber was abolished by the Long Parliament in 1641…five years before I was born, or you were, Jeffreys.”

  “I do not recognize the self-serving decrees of that rebel Parliament,” Jeffreys said squeamishly. “The Court of Star Chamber was ancient—Henry VII convened it, but its procedures were rooted in Roman jurisprudence—consequently, ‘twas a model of clarity, of effiency, unlike the time-encrusted monstrosity of Common Law, that staggering, cobwebbed Beast, that senile compendium of folklore and wives’ tales, a scabrous Colander seiving all the chunky bits out of the evanescent flux of Society and compacting ‘em into legal head-cheese.”

  “Hear, hear!” said one of the other Judges, who apparently felt that Jeffreys had now encompassed everything there was to be said about English Common Law. Daniel assumed they must all be judges, at any rate, and that they’d been hand-picked by Jeffreys. Or, more like it, they’d simply gravitated to him during his career, they were the men that he always saw, whenever he troubled to glance around him.

  Another one of them said, “The late Archbishop Laud found this Chamber to be a convenient facility for the suppression of Low Church dissidents, such as your father, Drake Waterhouse.”

  “But the entire point of my father’s story is that he was not suppressed—Star Chamber cut his nose and his ears off and it only made him more formidable.”

  “Drake was a man of exceptional strength and resilience,” Jeffreys said. “Why, he haunted my very nightmares when I was a boy. My father told me tales of him as if he were a bogey-man. I know that you are no Drake. Why, you stood by and watched one of your own kind be murdered, under your window, at Trinity, by my lord Upnor, twenty-some years ago, and you did nothing—nothing! I remember it well, and I know that you do as well, Waterhouse.”

  “Does this sham have a purpose, other than to reminisce about College days?” Daniel inquired.

  “Give him a revolution,” Jeffreys said.

  The fellow who had poured water into Daniel’s mouth earlier—some sort of armed bailiff—stepped up, grabbed one of the four grappling-hooks projecting from Daniel’s collar, and gave it a wrench. The whole apparatus spun round, using Daniel’s neck as an axle, until he could get his arms up to stop it. A simpler man would have guessed—from the sheer amount of pain involved—that his head had been half sawed away. But Daniel had dissected enough necks to know where all the important bits were. He ran a few quick experiments and concluded that, as he could swallow, breathe, and wiggle his toes, none of the main cables had been severed.

  “You are charged with perverting the English language,” Jeffreys proclaimed. “To wit: that on numerous occasions during idle talk in coffee-houses, and in private correspondence, you have employed the word ‘revolution,’ heretofore a perfectly innocent and useful English word, in an altogether new sense, conceived and propagated by you, meaning radical and violent overthrow of a government.”

  “Oh, I don’t think violence need have anything to do with it.”

  “You admit you are guilty then!”

  “I know how the genuine Star Chamber worked…I don’t imagine this sham one is any different…why should I dignify it by pretending to put up a defense?”

  “The defendant is guilty as charged!” Jeffreys announced, as if, by superhuman effort, he’d just brought an exhausting trial to a close. “I shan’t pretend to be surprised by the outcome—while you were asleep, we interrogated several witnesses—all agreed you have been using ‘revolution’ in a sense that is not to be found in any treatise of Astronomy. We even asked your old chum from Trinity…”

  “Monmouth? But didn’t you chop his head off?”

  “No, no, the other one. The Natural Philosopher who has been so impertinent as to quarrel with the King in the matter of Father Francis…”

  “Newton!?”

  “Yes, that one! I asked him, ‘You have written all of these fat books on the subject of Revolutions, what does the word signify to you?’ He said it meant one body moving about another—he uttered not a word about politics.”

  “I cannot believe you have brought Newton into this matter.”

  Jeffreys abruptly stopped playing the rôle of Grand Inquisitor, and answered in the polite, distracted voice of the busy man-about-town: “Well, I had to grant him an audience anyway, on the Father Francis matter. He does not know you are here…just as you, evidently, did not know he was in London.”

  In the same sort of tone, Daniel replied, “Can’t blame you for finding it all just a bit bewildering. Of course! You’d assume that Newton, on a visit to London, would renew his acquaintance with me, and other Fellows of the Royal Society.”

  “I have it on good authority he has been spending time with that damned Swiss traitor instead.”

  “Swiss traitor?”

  “The one who warned William of Orange of the French dragoons.”

  “Fatio?”

  “Yes, Fatio de Duilliers.”

  Jeffreys was absent-mindedly patting his wig, puzzling over this fragment re Newton. The sudden change in the Lord Chancellor’s affect had engendered, in Daniel, a giddiness that was probably dangerous. He had been trying to stifle it. But now Daniel’s stomach began to shake with suppressed laughter.

  “Jeffreys! Fatio is a Swiss Protestant who warned the Dutch of a French plot, on Dutch soil…and for this you call him a traitor?”

  “He betrayed Monsieur le comte de Fenil. And now this traitor has moved to London, for he knows that his life is forfeit anywhere on the Continent…anywhere Persons of Quality observe a decent respect for justice. But here! London, England! Oh, in other times his presence would not have been tolerated. But in these parlous times, when such a man comes and takes up residence in our city, no one bats an eye…and when he is seen buying alchemical supplies, and talking in coffee-houses with our foremost Natural Philosopher, no one thinks of it as scandalous.”


  Daniel perceived that Jeffreys was beginning to work himself up into another frenzy. So before the Lord Chancellor completely lost his mind, Daniel reminded him: “The real Star Chamber was known for pronouncing stern sentences, and executing them quickly.”

  “True! And if this assembly had such powers, your nose would be lying in the gutter, and the rest of you would be on a ship to the West Indies, where you would chop sugar cane on my plantation for the rest of your life. As it stands, I cannot punish you until I’ve convicted you of something in the common-law court. Shouldn’t be all that difficult, really.”

  “How do you suppose?”

  “Tilt the defendant back!”

  The Star Chamber’s bailiffs, or executioners or whatever they were, converged on Daniel from behind, gripped the back of his chair, and yanked, raising its front legs up off the floor and leaving Daniel’s feet a-dangle. His weight shifted from his buttocks to his back, and the iron collar went into motion and tried to fall to the floor. But it was stopped by Daniel’s throat. He tried to raise his hands to take the weight of the iron off his wind-pipe, but Jeffreys’ henchmen had anticipated that: each of them had a spare hand that he used to pin one of Daniel’s hands down to the chair. Daniel could see nothing but stars now: stars painted on the ceiling when his eyes were open, and other stars that zoomed across his vision when his eyes were closed. The face of the Lord Chancellor now swam into the center of this firmament like the Man in the Moon.

  Now Jeffreys had been an astonishingly beautiful young man, even by the standards of the generation of young Cavaliers that had included such Adonises as the Duke of Monmouth and John Churchill. His eyes, in particular, had been of remarkable beauty—perhaps this accounted for his ability to seize and hold the young Daniel Waterhouse with his gaze. Unlike Churchill, he had not aged well. Years in London, serving as solicitor general to the Duke of York, then as a prosecutor of supposed conspirators, then Lord Chief Justice, and now Lord Chancellor, had put leaves of lard on him, as on a kidney in a butcher-stall. His eyebrows had grown out into great gnarled wings, or horns. The eyes were beautiful as ever, but instead of gazing out from the fair unblemished face of a youth, they peered out through a sort of embrasure, between folds of chub below and snarled brows above. It had probably been fifteen years since Jeffreys could list, from memory, all the men he had murdered through the judicial system; if he hadn’t lost count while extirpating the Popish Plot, he certainly had during the Bloody Assizes.