Quicksilver

by Neal Stephenson

  Of late, reductions in the cost of window-glass, and improvements in the science of architecture, had made it possible to build whole blocks of shops with large windows facing the street, so that fine goods could be set out in view of passers-by. Shrewd builders such as Sterling (the Earl of Willesden) Waterhouse and Roger (the Marquis of Ravenscar) Comstock had built neighborhoods where courtiers went to do just that. The noun “shop” had been verbed; people went “shopping” now. Daniel of course never lowered himself to this newfangled vice—except that as he crossed the river he seemed to be doing it with ships. And he was a discriminating shopper. The watermen’s boats, the smacks and barges of the estuary were beneath his notice altogether, and the coasting vessels—anything with a fore-and-aft rig—were scarcely more than impediments. He raised his eyes up out of the clutter to scan for the great ships thrusting their yards up, like High Church priests exalting the sacraments above the rabble, into the sky where the wind blew straight and brave. The sails hung from those yards like vestments. There were not many such ships in the Pool tonight, but Daniel sought them all out and appraised each one shrewdly. He was shopping for something to take him away; he wanted to voyage out of sight of land for once in his life, to die and be buried on another continent.

  One in particular caught his eye: trim, clean-lined, and sharply managed. She was taking advantage of the in-coming tide to make her way up-stream, ushered forward by a faint southerly breeze. The movement of the air was too faint for Daniel to feel it, but the crew of this ship, Hare, had seen flickers of life in the streamers dangling from her mastheads, and spread out her topsails. These stopped a bit of air. They stopped some of the fire-light from the city, too, projecting long prismatic shadows off into the void. The sails of Hare hovered above the black river, glowing like curtained windows. Mr. Bhnh tracked them for half a mile or so, taking advantage of the lead that the great ship forced among the smaller vessels. “She’s fitted out for a long voyage,” he mused, “probably sailing for America on the next tide.”

  “Would I had a grapnel,” Daniel said, “I’d climb aboard like a pirate, and stow away on her.”

  This startled Mr. Bhnh, who was not used to hearing such flights of fancy from his clientele. “Are you going to America, Mr. Waterhouse?”

  “Someday,” Daniel allowed, “there is tidying-up to do in this country yet.”

  Mr. Bhnh was loath to discharge Daniel in the fiery wilds of East London, which tonight was thronged with drunken mudlarks lighting out in torrid pursuit of real or imaginary Jesuits. Daniel gave no heed to this good man’s worries. He had made it all the way from Sheerness without any trouble. Even in the tavern there, he had been left alone. Those who took any notice of him at all, soon lost their interest, or (strange to relate) lost their nerve and looked away. For Daniel carried now the unstudied nonchalance of a man who knew he’d be dead in a year no matter what; people seemed to smell the grave about him, and were happy to leave him alone.

  On the other hand, a man with little time to live, and no heirs, need not be so miserly. “I shall give you a pound if you take me direct to the Tower,” Daniel said. Then, observing a wary look on Mr. Bhnh’s face, he teased his purse open and tossed a handful of coins beside the boat’s lantern until he found one that shone a little, and was nearly round. In the center was a battered and scratched plop of silver that with careful tilting and squinting and use of the imagination could be construed as a portrait of the first King James, who had died sixty-some odd years ago, but who was held to have managed the Mint competently. The waterman’s hand closed over this artifact and almost as quickly Daniel’s eyelids came to with an almost palpable slamming noise. He was remotely aware of massive wool blankets being thrown over his body by the solicitous Mr. Bhnh, and then he was aware of nothing.

  For the King of the North shal returne, and shal set forthe a greater multitude then afore, and shal come forthe (after certeine yeres) with a mightie armie, & great riches.

  And at the same time there shal manie stand up against the King of the South: also the rebellious children of thy people shal exalte them selves to establish the vision, but they shal fall.

  So the King of the North shal come, and cast up a mounte, & take the strong citie: and the armes of the South shal not resist, neither his chosen people, neither shal there be anie strength to withstand.

  —DANIEL 11:13–15

  HAVING GONE TO SLEEP in that boat on that night he should on no account have been surprised to wake up in the same boat on the same night; but when it happened he was perfectly amazed, and had to see and understand everything afresh. His body was hot on the top and cold on the bottom, and on the whole, not happy with its management. He tried closing and opening his eyes a few times to see if he could conjure up a warm bed, but a mightier conjuration had been wrought on him, and condemned him to this place and time. To call it nightmarish was too easy, for it had all the detail, the lively perversity that nightmares wanted. London—burning, smoking, singing—was still all around. However, he was confronted by a sheer wall of stone that rose up out of the Thames, and was thickly jacketed in all of the unspeakables that flowed in it. Atop that wall was a congeries of small buildings, hoists, large guns, a few relatively small and disciplined bonfires, armed men, but snarls of running boys, too. There was the smell of coal, iron, and sulfur, reminding Daniel of Isaac’s laboratory. And because the sense of smell is plumbed into the mind down in the cellar, where dark half-formed notions lurk and breed, Daniel entertained a momentary phant’sy that Isaac had come to London and set his mind to the acquisition of temporal power, and constructed a laboratory the size of Jerusalem.

  Then he perceived stone walls and towers rising up behind this wharf, and taller ones rising up behind them, and an even higher fort of pale stone above and behind those, and he understood that he lay before the Tower of London. The roar of the artificial cataracts between the starlings of London Bridge, off to his left, confirmed it.

  The wharf-wall was pierced by an arch whose floor was a noisome back-water of the Thames. The boat of Mr. Bhnh was more or less keeping station before that arch, though the current was flowing one way and the tide striving against it, so they were being ill-used by marauding vortices and pounced upon by rogue waves. The waterman, in other words, was using every drowning-avoidance skill he’d practised in the rocky flows off Qwghlm, and more than earning his pound. For in addition to duelling those currents he had been prosecuting a negotiation with a figure who stood on the top of the wharf, just above the arch. That man in turn was exchanging shouts through a speaking trumpet with a periwigged gentleman up on the parapet of the wall behind: a crenellated medieval sort of affair with a modern cannon poking out through each slot, and each cannon conspicuously manned.

  Some of the men on the wharf were standing near enough to bonfires that Daniel could make out the colors of their garments. These were the Black Torrent Guards.

  Daniel rose up against the gravity of many stout damp blankets, his body reminding him of every injustice he had dealt it since he had been awakened, twenty-four hours ago, with news that the King had gone on the lam. “Sergeant!” he hollered to the man on the wharf, “please inform yonder officer that the escaped prisoner has returned.”

  THE KING’S OWN BLACK TORRENT Guards had gone into the west country with King James just long enough for their commander, John Churchill, to sneak away from camp and ride to join up with William of Orange. This might have surprised some of the Guards, but it had not surprised Daniel, for almost a year ago he had personally conveyed letters from John Churchill, among others, to the Prince of Orange in the Hague; and though he hadn’t read those letters, he could guess what they had said.

  Within a few days, Churchill and his regiment had been back in London. But if they’d hoped to be stationed back at their old haunt of Whitehall, they’d been disappointed. William, still trying to sort out his newly acquired Kingdom, was posting his own Dutch Blue Guards at the royal palaces of Whitehall an
d St. James, and was happy to keep Churchill and the Black Torrent Guards at arm’s length in the Tower—which needed defending in any case, as it housed the Royal Mint, and controlled the river with its guns, and was the chief arsenal of the Realm.

  Now Daniel was known, to the men of that regiment, as a wretch who’d been imprisoned there by King James II; one cheer for Daniel! Jeffreys had sent murderers to slay him—two cheers! And he had arrived at some untalked-about agreement with Sergeant Bob: three cheers! So in the last weeks before his “escape” Daniel had become a sort of regimental mascot—as Irish regiments kept giant wolf-hounds, this one had a Puritan.

  And so the long and the short of it was that Mr. Bhnh was suffered to bring his boat through that tunnel under the wharf. After they passed under the arch, the sky appeared again briefly, but a good half of it was occulted by that out-thrust bulwark: St. Thomas’s Tower, a fortress unto itself, grafted to the outer wall of the Tower complex, straddling another stone arch-way paved with fœtid moat-water. Their progress was barred by a water-gate filling that arch. But as they approached, the gates were drawn open, each vertical bar leaving an arc of oily vortices in its wake. Mr. Bhnh hesitated, as any sane man would, and tilted his head back for a moment, in case he never got a chance to see the sky again. Then he probed for the bottom with his pole.

  “This is my family coat of arms, such as it is,” Daniel remarked, “a stone castle bestriding a river.”

  “Don’t say that!” Mr. Bhnh hissed.

  “Why ever not?”

  “We are entering into Traitor’s Gate!”

  PAST THE NARROW APERTURE OF THE Gate lay a pool vaulted over with a vast, fair stone arch. Some engineer had lately constructed a tide-driven engine there for raising water to a cistern in some higher building back in the penetralia of the citadel, and its fearsome grinding—like a troll gnashing its teeth in a cave—appalled Mr. Bhnh more than anything he’d seen all night. He took his leave gladly. Daniel had disembarked onto some ancient slime-covered stairs. He ascended, carefully, to the level of the Water Lane, which ran between the inner and outer fortifications. This had become the scene of a makeshift camp: several hundred Irish people at least were here, taking their ease on blankets or thin scatterings of straw, smoking pipes if they were lucky, playing hair-raising plaints on penny-whistles. No celebratory bonfires here: just a few brooding cook-fires setting kettle-bottoms aglow, and begrudging faint red warmth on the hands and faces of the squatters. There had to be a rational explanation for their being here, but Daniel could not conjure one up. But that was what made city life interesting.

  Bob Shaftoe approached, harried by a couple of boys who were running around barefoot even though this was December. He ordered them away gruffly, even a bit cruelly, and as they turned to run off, Daniel got a look at one of their faces. He thought he saw a familial resemblance to Bob.

  Sergeant Shaftoe was headed down the lane in the direction of the Byward Tower, which was the way out to London. Daniel fell into step beside him and in a few paces they’d left the water-engine far enough behind that they could talk without shouting.

  “I was ready to set off without you,” Bob said somewhat bitterly.

  “For where?”

  “I don’t know. Castle Upnor.”

  “He’s not there yet. I’d wager he’s still in London.”

  “Let’s to Charing Cross, then,” Bob said, “as I think he has a house near there.”

  “Can we get horses?”

  “You mean, is the Lieutenant of the Tower going to supply you, an escaped prisoner, with a free horse—?”

  “Never mind, there are other ways of getting down the Strand. Any news concerning Jeffreys?”

  “I have impressed ’pon Bob Carver the grave importance of his providing useful information to us concerning that man’s whereabouts,” Bob said. “I do not think his fear was affected; on the other hand, he has a short memory, and London contains many diversions to-night, most appealing to a man of his character.”

  Passing through the Byward Tower they came out into the open and began to traverse the causeway over the moat: first a plank bridge that could be moved out of the way, then a stone ramp onto the permanent causeway. Here they encountered John Churchill, smoking a pipe in the company of two armed gentlemen whom Daniel recognized well enough that he could have recalled their names, had it been worth the effort. Churchill broke away from them when his eyes fell on Daniel, and pursued for a few steps, glaring at Bob Shaftoe in a way that meant “keep walking.” So Daniel ended up isolated in mid-causeway, face to face with Churchill.

  “In truth I have no idea whether you’re about to embrace and thank me, or stab me and shove me into the moat,” Daniel blurted, because he was nervous, and too exhausted to govern his tongue.

  Churchill appeared to take Daniel’s words with utmost gravity—Daniel reckoned he must’ve said something terribly meaningful, out of blind luck. Daniel had encountered Churchill many times at Whitehall, where he had always been surrounded by a sort of aura or nimbus of Import, of which his wig was only the innermost core. You could feel the man coming. He had never been more important than he was tonight—yet here on this causeway all that remained of his aura was his wig, which stood sore in need of maintenance. It was easy to see him as Sir Winston’s lad, a Royal Society whelp who had gone to sojourn in the world of affairs.

  “So it’ll be for everyone, from now on,” Churchill said. “The old schemes by which we reckoned a man’s virtue have now been o’erthrown along with Absolute Monarchy. Your Revolution is pervasive. It is tricky, too. I don’t know whether you will run afoul of its tricks in the end. But if you do, it shall not be by my hand…”

  “Your face seems to say, ‘provided…’”

  “Provided you continue to be the enemy of my enemies—”

  “Alas, I’ve little choice.”

  “So you say. But when you walk through yonder gate,” Churchill said, pointing toward the Middle Tower at the end of the causeway, which was visible only as a crenellated cutout in the orange sky, “you’ll find yourself in a London you no longer know. The changes wrought by the Fire were nothing. In that London, loyalty and allegiance are subtle and fluxional. ’Tis a chessboard with not only black and white pieces, but others as well, in diverse shades. You’re a Bishop, and I’m a Knight, I can tell that much by our shapes, and the changes we have wrought on the board; but by fire-light ’tis difficult to make out your true shade.”

  “I have been awake for twenty-four hours and cannot follow your meaning when you speak in figures.”

  “It is not that you are tired, but that you are a Puritan and a Natural Philosopher; neither group is admired for its grasp of the subtle and the ambiguous.”

  “I am defenseless against your japes. But as we are not within earshot of anyone, please avail yourself of this opportunity to speak plainly.”

  “Very well. I know many things, Mr. Waterhouse, because I make it my business to converse with fellows like those—we trade news as fervidly as traders swapping stocks on the ’Change. And one thing I know is that Isaac Newton is in London to-night.”

  It struck Daniel as bizarre that John Churchill should even know who Isaac was. Until Churchill continued, “Another thing I know is that Enoch turned up in our city a few days ago.”

  “Enoch the Red?”

  “Don’t act like an imbecile. It makes me distrustful, as I know you are not one.”

  “I take such a dim view of the Art that my heart denies what my mind knows.”

  “That is just the sort of thing you would say if you were one of them, and wished to hide it.”

  “Ah. Now I perceive what you meant with your talk of chess-pieces and colors—you think I am hiding the red robes of an Alchemist beneath these weeds?! What a thought!”

  “You’d have me just know that the notion is absurd? Pray tell, sir, how should I know it? I’m not learned as you are, I’ll admit it; but no one has yet accused me of being stupid. And I
say to you that I do not know whether you are mixed up in Alchemy or no.”

  “It is vexing to you,” Daniel thought aloud, “not to follow it.”

  “More than that, it is alarming. In a given circumstance, I know what a soldier will do, what a Puritan will do, what a French cardinal or a Vagabond will do—certain ones excepted—but the motives of the esoteric brotherhood are occult to me, and I do not love that. And as I look forward to being a man of moment in the new order—”

  “Yes, I know, I know.” Daniel sighed and tried to gather himself. “Really, I think you make too much of them. For never have you seen such a gaggle of frauds, fops, ninehammers, and mountebanks.”

  “Which of these is Isaac Newton?”

  The question was like a bung hammered into Daniel’s gob.

  “What of King Charles II? Which was His Majesty, ninehammer or mountebank?”

  “I have to go and talk to them anyway,” Daniel finally said.

  “If you can penetrate that cloud, Mr. Waterhouse, I shall consider myself obliged to you.”

  “How obliged?”

  “What is on your mind?”

  “If an earl dies on a night such as this, might it be overlooked?”

  “Depends on the earl,” Churchill said evenly. “There will be someone, somewhere, who’ll not be of a mind to overlook it. You must never forget that.”

  “I entered from the river tonight,” Daniel said.

  “This is an oblique way of saying, you came in through the Traitor’s Gate—?”

  Daniel nodded.