Quicksilver

by Neal Stephenson

  When she pulled the letter open, the disc of wax sealing it shut popped off and rolled across the floor under a chair. As she was reading the letter I went over and picked it up. The coat of arms pressed into that seal was one I did not fully recognize, but certain elements were familiar to me from my time at Versailles-----I could guess that he was related to a certain noble family of Gascony, well known for its military exploits. It seemed safe to assume he was the gentleman I’d spied on the quay the night before.

  JOURNAL ENTRY 2 SEPTEMBER 1688

  CRYPTANALYST’S NOTE: In the original, the section below contains consid erable detail about the cargoes being unloaded from the chalands at St.-Dizier, and the coats of arms and insignias of persons that the Countess observed there, all of which were no doubt of greater interest to the Prince of Orange than they can be to your majesty. I have elided them.-----B.R.

  A slow three days at the convent of St.-Dizier have given me more than enough time to catch up on my embroidery! With any luck my Vagabond will come back tonight with news. If I have received no word from the Palatinate by tomorrow I shall have little choice but to strike out on my own, though I have no idea how to manage it.

  I have tried to make what use I could of this fallow time, as I did on the chaland. During the days I have tried to make conversation with Eloise, the girl who received the letter. This has been difficult because she is not very intelligent and we have few interests in common. I let it be known that I have been at Versailles and St. Cloud recently. In time, word reached her of this, and she began to sit near me at meals, and to ask if I knew this or that person there, and what had become of so-and-so. So at last I have learned who she is, and who her well-dressed cousin is: the Chevalier d’Adour, who has devoted his last several years to currying favor with Maréchal Louvois, the King’s commander-in-chief. He distinguished himself in the recent massacres of Protestants in the Piedmont and, in sum, is the sort who might be entrusted with a mission of some importance.

  In the evenings I have tried to keep an eye on the river-front. Several more chalands have been unloaded there, in the same style as the first.

  JOURNAL ENTRY 5 SEPTEMBER 1688

  Suddenly so much happened I could not tend to my embroidery for a few days. I am catching up on it now, in a carriage on a bumpy road in the Argonne. This type of writing has more advantages to a peripatetic spy than I appreciated at first. It would be impossible for me to write with pen and ink here. But needlework I can just manage.

  To say it quickly, my young Vagabond came back and earned his ten silver pieces by informing me that the heavy ox-carts carrying the cargo from the chalands were being driven east, out of France and into Lorraine, circumventing Toul and Nancy on forest tracks, and then continuing east to Alsace, which is France again [the Duchy of Lorraine being flanked by France to both east and west]. My Vagabond had been forced, for lack of time, to turn round and come back before he could follow the carts all the way to their destination, but it is obvious enough that they are bound towards the Rhine. He heard from a wanderer he met on the road that such carts were converging from more than one direction on the fortress of Haguenau, which lately had been a loud and smoky place. This man had fled the area because the troops had been press-ganging any idlers they could find, putting them to work chopping down trees-----little ones for firewood and big ones for lumber. Even the shacks of the Vagabonds were being chopped up and burnt.

  After hearing this news I did not sleep for the rest of the night. If my recollection of the maps was right, Haguenau is on a tributary of the Rhine, and is part of the barrière de fer that Vauban built to protect France from the Germans, Dutch, Spanish, and other foes. Supposing that I was right in thinking that the cargo was lead; then the meaning of what I’d just been told was that it was being melted down at Haguenau and made into musket- and cannonballs. This would explain the demand for firewood. But why did they also require lumber? I guessed it was to build barges that could carry the ammunition down to the Rhine. The current would then take them downstream into the Palatinate in a day or two.

  Certain things I had noticed at Court now became imbued with new meanings. The Chevalier de Lorraine-----lord of the lands over which the ox-carts passed en route to Haguenau-----has long been the most senior of Monsieur’s lovers, and the most cruel and implacable of Madame’s tormentors. In theory he is a vassal of the Holy Roman Emperor, of which Lorraine is still a tributary state, but in practice he has become completely surrounded by France-----one cannot enter or leave Lorraine without traveling over territory that is ruled from Versailles. This explains why he spends all his time in the French Court instead of Vienna.

  Conventional wisdom has it that the duc d’Orleans was raised to be effeminate and passive so that he would never pose a threat to his older brother’s kingship. One might suppose that the Chevalier de Lorraine, who routinely penetrates Monsieur, and who rules his affections, has thereby exploited a vulnerability in the ruling dynasty of France. That, again, is the conventional wisdom at Court. But now I was seeing it in a different light. One cannot penetrate without being encompassed, and the Chevalier de Lorraine is encompassed by Monsieur just as his territory has been encompassed by France. Louis invades and penetrates, his brother seduces and surrounds, they share a common will, they complement each other as brothers should. I see a homosexual who makes a sham marriage and spurns his wife for the love of a man. But Louis sees a brother who will fight a sham war in the Palatinate, supposedly to defend his wife’s claim on that territory, while using his lover’s fiefdom as a highway to transport matériel to the front.

  When these three-----Monsieur, Madame, and the Chevalier-----were packed off to St. Cloud on short notice a few weeks ago, I assumed it was because the King had grown sick of their squabbling. But now I perceive that the King thinks in metaphors, and that he had to put them all together, like animals in a baiting-ring, to bring their conflict to a head, before undertaking his military campaign. Just as the domestic squabbles of Jupiter and Juno were thought by the Romans to be manifested in thunderstorms, so the squalid triangle of St. Cloud will be manifested as war in the Palatinate. Louis’ empire, which now is interrupted in the Argonne, will be extended across and down the Rhine, as far as Mannheim and Heidelberg, and when domestic tranquillity is finally restored to St. Cloud, France will be two hundred miles wider, and the barrière de fer will run across burnt territory where German-speaking Protestants used to dwell.

  All of this came together in my head in an instant, but then I lay awake until dawn fretting over what I should do. Weeks before, I had made up a little metaphor of my own, concerning two dogs named Phobos and Deimos, and put it in a letter to d’Avaux in the hopes that the Prince of Orange’s spies would read it, and understand its message. At the time I’d thought myself very clever. But now my metaphor seemed childish and inane compared to that of Louis. Worse, its message was ambiguous-----for its entire point was that I could not be sure, yet, whether Louvois intended to attack northwards into the Dutch Republic, or draw back, wheel round to the east, and launch himself across the Rhine. Now I felt sure I knew the answer, and needed to get word to the Prince of Orange. But I was stuck in a convent in St.-Dizier and had nothing to base my report on, save Vagabond hearsay, as well as a conviction in my own mind that I had understood the mentality of the King. And even this might evaporate like dew in a few hours, as the fears of the night-time so often do in the morning.

  I was on the verge of becoming a Vagabond myself, and striking out on the eastern road, when a spattered and dusty carriage pulled up in front of the convent, just before morning Mass, and a gentleman knocked on the door and asked for me under the false name I’d adopted.

  That gentleman and I were on our way as soon as his team could be fed and watered. He is Dr. Ernst von Pfung, a long-suffering gentleman scholar of Heidelberg. When he was a boy, his homeland was occupied and ravaged by the Emperor’s armies; at the end of the Thirty Years’ War, when the Palatinate was hand
ed over to the Winter Queen in the peace settlement, his family helped them establish their royal household in what remained of Heidelberg Castle. So he has known Sophie and her siblings for a long time. He got all of his education, including a doctorate of jurisprudence, at Heidelberg. He served as an advisor to Charles Louis [the brother of Sophie, and father of Liselotte] when he was Elector Palatinate, and later tried to exert some sort of steadying influence on Liselotte’s elder brother Charles when he succeeded to the Electoral throne. But this Charles was daft, and only wanted to conduct mock-sieges at his Rhine castles, using rabble like Jack as his “soldiers.” At one of these, he caught a fever and died, precipitating the succession dispute on which the King of France now hopes to capitalize.

  Dr. von Pfung, whose earliest and worst memories are of Catholic armies burning, raping, and pillaging his homeland, is beside himself with worry that the same thing is about to happen all over again, this time with French instead of Imperial troops. The events of the last few days have done nothing to reassure him.

  Between Heidelberg and the Duchy of Luxembourg, the Holy Roman Empire forms a hundred-mile-wide salient that protrudes southwards into France, almost as far as the River Moselle. It is called the Saarland and Dr. von Pfung, as a petty noble of the Empire, is accustomed to being able to travel across it freely and safely. As it gets closer to Lorraine, this territory becomes fragmented into tiny principalities. By threading his way between them Dr. von Pfung had intended to make safe passage to Lorraine, which is technically part of the Empire. A brief transit across Lorraine would have brought him across the French border very close to St.-Dizier.

  Fortunately Dr. von Pfung has the wisdom and foresight one would expect in a man of his maturity and erudition. He had not simply assumed that his plan would work out, but had sent riders out a few days in advance to scout the territory. When they had not returned, he had set out anyway, hoping for the best; but very shortly he had met one of them on the road, returning with gloomy tidings. Certain obstacles had been discovered, of a complicated nature that Dr. von Pfung declined to explain. He had ordered a volte-face and ridden south down the east bank of the Rhine as far as the city of Strasbourg, where he had crossed over into Alsace, and from there he made his way as fast as he could. As a gentleman he is entitled to bear arms, and he has not been slow to take advantage of that right, for in addition to the rapier on his hip he has a pair of pistols and a musket inside the carriage. We are accompanied by two out-riders: young gentlemen similarly armed. At every inn and river-crossing they have had to force their way through by bluff and bluster, and the strain is showing on Dr. von Pfung’s face; after we left the precincts of St.-Dizier he very courteously excused himself, removed his wig to reveal a bald pate fringed with gray, leaned back next to an open window, and rested his eyes for a quarter of an hour.

  The journey has left him suspecting much but knowing nothing, which puts him in the same predicament as I. When he had revived, I put a suggestion to him: “I hope you will not think me forward, Doctor, but it seems to me that vast consequences balance on the intelligence that we collect, or fail to, in the next days. You and I have each used all the craft and wit that we could muster, and only skirted the matter. Could it be that we must now relax our grip on Subtlety, and fling our arms around Courage, and strike for the heart of this thing?”

  Contrary to what I had expected, these words eased and softened the face of Dr. von Pfung. He smiled, revealing a finely carven set of teeth, and nodded once, in a sort of bow. “I had already resolved to gamble my life on it,” he admitted. “If I have seemed nervous or distracted to you, it is because I could not see my way clear to risking yours as well. And it makes me uneasy still, for you have much more life ahead of you than I do. But-----”

  “Say no more, we must not waste our energies on this sort of idle talk,” I said. “It is decided-----we’ll roll the dice. What of your escorts?”

  “Those young men are officers of a cavalry regiment-----probably the first to be cut down when Louvois invades. They are men of honor.”

  “Your driver?”

  “He has been in the service of my family his whole life and would never permit me to journey, or to die, alone.”

  “Then I propose we strike out for the Meuse, which ought to lie two or three days’ hard riding east of here, on the far side of the forest Argonne.”

  As quickly as that, Dr. von Pfung rapped on the ceiling and instructed the driver to keep the sun on his right hand through most of the coming day. The driver naturally fell onto those eastward roads that seemed most heavily traveled, and so we ended up following the deep wheel-ruts that had been scored across the ground by the heavy ox-carts in preceding days.

  We’d not been on the road for more than a few hours before we overtook a whole train of them, laboring up a long grade between the valleys of the Marne and the Ornain. By taking advantage of occasional wide places in the road, our driver was able to pass these carts one at a time. Peering out through the carriage windows, Dr. von Pfung and I could now plainly see that the carts were laden with pigs of a gray metal that might have been iron-----but as there was not a speck of rust on any of them, they must have been lead. Reader, I hope you will not think me silly and girlish if I confess that I was pleased and excited to see my suspicions borne out and my cleverness proven at last. But a glance at the face of Dr. von Pfung crushed any such emotions, for he looked like a man who has returned home in the night-time to discover flames and smoke billowing from the windows of his own house.

  At the head of the train rode a French cavalry officer, looking as if he had just been condemned to serve a hundred-year stint in Purgatory. He made no effort to hail us and so we quickly left him and his column far to the rear. But our hopes of making up for lost time were quashed by the nature of the terrain. The Argonne is a broad ridge running from north to south, directly across our path, and in many places the ground drops away into deep river-courses. Where the terrain is level, it is densely forested. So one has no choice but to follow the roads and to make use of the fords and bridges provided, be they never so congested and tumbledown.

  But the sight of that miserable young officer had given me an idea. I asked Dr. von Pfung to close his eyes, and made him promise not to peek. This intimidated him to such a degree that he simply climbed down out of the carriage and walked alongside it for a while. I changed out of the drab habit of the nunnery and into a dress I had brought along. At Versailles this garment would scarce have been fit to mop the floor with. Here in the Argonne Forest, though, it rated as a significant Fire Hazard.

  A few hours later, as we descended into the valley of a smaller river called the Ornain, we overtook another train of lead-bearing ox-carts, which was picking its way down the grade with an infinity of cursing, collisions, and splintering wood. Just as before, there was a young officer riding at the head. He looked every bit as miserable as the first one-----until I popped out of the carriage window, and almost out of my dress. Once he got over his astonishment, he almost wept with gratitude. It made me happy to give this poor man such pleasure, and by nothing more than putting on a dress and opening a window. His mouth fell open in a way that reminded me of a fish; so I resolved to go fishing. “Excuse me, Monsieur, but can you tell me where I might find my uncle?”

  At this his mouth opened a little wider, and his face reddened. “Mademoiselle, I am ever so sorry, but I do not know him.”

  “That is impossible! Every officer knows him!” I tried.

  “Pardon me, Mademoiselle, but you have mistaken my meaning. No doubt, your uncle is a great man whose name I would recognize, and honor, if I heard it-----but I am too foolish and ignorant to know who you are, and consequently I do not know which great man has the privilege of being your uncle.”

  “I thought you would know who I was!” I pouted. The officer looked extremely dismayed. “I am-----” Then I turned around and slapped Dr. von Pfung lightly on the arm. “Stop it!” Then, to the officer: “My chape
rone is an old fart who will not allow me to introduce myself.”

  “Indeed, Mademoiselle, for a young lady to introduce herself to a young man would be unpardonable.”

  “Then we shall have to conduct our conversation incognito, and say it never happened-----as if it were a lovers’ tryst,” I said, leaning a bit farther out the window, and beckoning him to ride a little closer. I was afraid he would swoon and get himself wrapped around the axle of our carriage. He maintained his balance with some effort, though, and drew so close that I was able to reach out and steady myself by putting my hand on the pommel of his saber. In a lower voice I continued: “You have probably guessed that my uncle is a man of very high rank who has been sent out to these parts to execute the will of the King, in coming days.”

  The officer nodded.

  “I was on my way up from Oyonnax, returning to Paris, when I learned he was in these parts, and I have decided to find his camp and pay him a surprise visit, and neither you nor my chaperone nor anyone else can prevent it! I just need to know where to find his headquarters.”

  “Mademoiselle, is your uncle the Chevalier d’Adour?”

  I adopted the look of one who has been gagged with the handle of a spoon.

  “Of course not, I didn’t really think so…neither are you of the House of Lorraine, I gather, or you would not need directions…is it Étienne d’Arcachon? No, forgive me, he has no siblings and could not have a niece. But I see from the softening of your beautiful face, Mademoiselle, that I am drawing nearer the truth. The only one in these parts who is above the young Arcachon in rank is the Maréchal de Louvois himself. And I do not know whether he has yet come south from the Dutch front…but when he does, you may look for him along the banks of the Meuse. Provided, that if you ask for him there, and learn that he has already disembarked, you will have to follow his track eastwards into the Saarland.”