Quicksilver

by Neal Stephenson

  But on the first day that the baby began to kick inside of me, the idea of giving him away faded to an abstraction, and shortly vanished from my mind.

  When I reached my seventh month, Eleanor sent to Eisenach for a certain Frau Heppner. Frau Heppner arrived some weeks later, claiming to be a nurse who would look after Princess Caroline and teach her the German language. And this she did; but in truth, Frau Heppner is a midwife. She delivered Eleanor, and has delivered many other noble and common babies since then. Eleanor said that she was loyal and that her discretion could be relied on.

  The Binnenhof, though far from luxurious by the standards of French palaces, contains several suites of apartments, each appointed in such a way that a royal house guest can dwell there in the company of her ladies-in-waiting, Lady of the Bedchamber, &c. As you will understand from my earlier letters, Princess Eleanor did not have enough of a household to occupy a suite fully; she had a couple of servants who had come out from Eisenach, and two Dutch girls who’d been assigned to her, by William’s household staff, as an act of charity. And now she had Frau Heppner. This still left an empty room in her suite. And so, when Frau Heppner was not giving Caroline lessons, she began organizing the bedsheets and other necessaries of the midwife’s art, making that extra room into a birthing-chamber.

  The plan was that when I went into labor I would be carried across the square into the Binnenhof in a sedan-chair, and taken direct to Eleanor’s suite. We practiced this, if you can believe such a thing: I hired a pair of brawny Dutchmen to serve as porters, and once a day, during the final weeks of my pregnancy, had them carry me from Huygens’s house to the Binnenhof, not stopping or slowing until they had set the sedan chair down inside Eleanor’s bedchamber.

  These dress rehearsals seemed a good idea at the time, because I did not know the strength of my enemy, and the number of his spies in the Binnenhof. In retrospect, I was telling him everything about my plan, and giving him all he needed to lay a perfect ambush.

  But again I get ahead of myself. The plan was that Frau Heppner would preside over the delivery. If the baby died and I lived, no word of it need ever leave that chamber. If I died and the infant lived, it would become a ward of Eleanor, and inherit my wealth. If both I and the baby survived, then I would recuperate for a few weeks and then move to London as soon as the obvious symptoms of childbirth were gone from my body. I would bring the infant along with me, and pass it off as an orphaned niece or nephew, the sole survivor of some massacre in the Palatinate. There is no shortage of massacres to choose from, and no want of Englishmen who would be eager to credit such a tale be it never so patchy—particularly if the tale came from a Duchess who had been of great service to their new King.

  Yes, it all sounds absurd. I never would have dreamed such things went on if I had not gone to Whitehall and seen (from a distance) the retinue of high and mighty persons gathered there for no reason other than to stand in the Queen’s bedchamber and stare fixedly at her vagina all day, like villagers at a magic-show, determined to catch the magician out in some sleight-of-hand.

  I supposed that my own vagina, so humble and common, would never draw such a large and distinguished audience. So by making some simple arrangements ahead of time, I should be able to adjust matters to my satisfaction after it was over.

  You may refer to the plaintext now, doctor, to become acquainted with all of the delightful sensations that preoccupied me during my first several hours of labor (I assume it was several hours; at first ’twas dark outside and then light). When my bag of waters broke, and I knew that the time had come, I sent word for the porters. Between contractions, I made my way carefully downstairs and climbed into the sedan chair, which was kept waiting in a room at the side of the house, at street-level. Once I was inside the box, I closed the door, and drew the curtains across the little windows, so that curious eyes should not look in on me as I was taken across the square. The darkness and confinement did not really trouble me, considering that the baby inside my womb had been living with far worse for many weeks, and had suffered it patiently, aside from a few kicks.

  Presently I heard the familiar voices of the porters outside, and felt the sedan being lifted into the air, and rotated around in the street for the short journey to the Binnenhof. This passed without incident. I believe that I may have dozed a little bit. Certainly I lost track of the twists and turns, after a while, as they carried me down the long galleries of the Binnehof. But soon enough I felt the sedan being set down on a stone floor, and heard the porters walking away.

  I reached up, flipped the door-latch, and pushed it open, expecting to see the faces of Frau Heppner, Eleanor, and Caroline.

  Instead I was looking at the face of Dr. Alkmaar, the court physician, a man I had seen once or twice, but never spoken to.

  I was not in Eleanor’s apartment. It was an unfamiliar bedchamber, somewhere else in the Binnenhof. A bed was ready—ready for me!—and a steaming vat of water rested on the floor, and piles of torn sheets had been put in position. There were some women in the room, whom I knew a little, and a young man I’d never seen at all.

  It was a trap; but so shocking that I did not know what to do. Would that I could tell you, Doctor, that I kept my wits about me, and perceived all that was going on, and jumped out of the sedan chair and ran down the gallery to freedom. But in truth, I was perfectly dumbfounded. And at the moment that I found myself in this unfamiliar room, I was taken by a strong contraction, which made me helpless.

  By the time that the pangs had subsided, I was lying in that bed; Dr. Alkmaar and the others had pulled me out of the sedan chair. The porters were long since gone. Whoever had arranged this ambush—and I had a good idea of who it was—had either paid them to take me to the wrong room, or somehow talked them into believing that this was what I wanted. I had no way to send out a message. I could scream for help, but women in labor always scream for help. There was plenty of help already in the room.

  Dr. Alkmaar was far from being a warm person, but he was reputed competent and (almost as important) loyal. If he spied on me (which was only to be expected) he would tell my secrets to William of Orange, who knows my secrets anyway. Dr. Alkmaar was assisted by one of his pupils (the young man) and by two girls who had no real business being in this room. When I had arrived in the Hague almost nine months before, in a canal-boat with Eleanor and Caroline, William had tried to furnish me with the rudiments of a household, befitting my exalted rank. The Prince of Orange did this not because I desired it but because it is how things are done, and it seemed absurd to have a Duchess in residence at a royal palace who was bereft of servants and staff. He sent me two young women. Both were daughters of minor nobles, serving time at Court, awaiting husbands, and wishing they were at Versailles instead. Since being spied on by members of one’s household is the staple of palace intrigue, I had been careful to have all of my conversations with Eleanor in places where neither of these two girls could possibly overhear us. Later I had moved to Huygens’s house, dismissed them from my service, and forgotten about them. But by some narrow definition of Court protocol, they were still technically members of my household, whether I wanted them or not. My fogged mind, trying to make sense of these events, cast that up as an explanation.

  Again refer to plaintext for description of various agonies and indignities. The point, for purposes of this narration, is that when the worst fits came over me, I was not really conscious. If you doubt it, Doctor, eat some bad oysters and then try doing some of your calculus at the moment your insides try to turn themselves inside out.

  At the conclusion of one of these fits I gazed down through half-closed eyes at Dr. Alkmaar, who was standing between my thighs with his sleeve rolled up and his armhairs plastered to his skin by some sort of wetness. I inferred that he had been inside me, doing a little exploration.”

  “It’s a boy,” he announced, more for the benefit of the spectators than for me—I could tell from the way they looked at me that they thought I w
as asleep or delirious.

  I opened my eyes slightly, thinking that it was all over, wanting to see the baby. But Dr. Alkmaar was empty-handed and he was not smiling.

  “How do you know?” asked Brigitte—one of those two girls who made up my household. Brigitte looked like she belonged in a Dutch farm-yard operating a butter churn. In Court dress she looked big and out of place. She was harmless.

  “He is trying to come out buttocks-first,” Dr. Alkmaar said distractedly.

  Brigitte gasped. Despite the bad news, I took comfort from this. I had found Brigitte tedious and stupid because of her sweetness. Now, she was the only person in the room feeling sympathy for me. I wanted to get out of bed and hug her, but it did not seem practical.

  Marie—the other girl—said, “That means both of them will die, correct?”

  Now, Doctor, since I am writing this letter, there is no point in my trying to keep you in suspense—obviously I did not die. I mention this as a way of conveying something about the character of this girl Marie. In contrast to Brigitte, who was always warm (if thick-seeming), Marie had an icy soul—if a mouse ran into the room, she would stomp it to death. She was the daughter of a baron, with a pedigree pieced together from the dribs, drabs, fag-ends, and candle-stubs of diverse Dutch and German principalities, and she struck me (by your leave) as one who had issued from a family where incest was practiced often and early.

  Dr. Alkmaar corrected her: “It means I must reach up and rotate the baby until it is head-down. The danger is that the umbilical cord will squirt out while I am doing this, and get throttled later. The chief difficulty is the contractions of her uterus, which bear down on the infant with more strength than my arms, or any man’s, can match. I must wait for her womb to relax and then try it.”

  So we waited. But even in the intervals between my contractions, my womb was so tense that Dr. Alkmaar could not budge the infant. “I have drugs that might help,” he mused, “or I could bleed her to make her weaker. But it would be better to wait for her to become completely exhausted. Then I might have a better chance.”

  More delay now—for them it was a matter of standing around waiting for time to pass, for me it was to be a victim of bloody murder and then to return to life again, over and over; but a lower form of life each time.

  By the time the messenger burst in, I could only lie there like a sack of potatoes and listen to what was said.

  “Doctor Alkmaar! I have just come from the bedside of the Chevalier de Montluçon!”

  “And why is the new ambassador in bed at four in the afternoon?”

  “He has suffered an attack of some sort and urgently requires your assistance to bleed him!”

  “I am occupied,” said Dr. Alkmaar, after thinking about it. But I found it disturbing that he had to mull it over in this way.

  “A midwife is on her way to take over your work here,” said the messenger.

  As if on cue, there was a knock at the door. Showing more vitality than she had all day, Marie dashed over and flung it open to reveal a certain crone of a midwife, a woman with a very mixed reputation. Peering out through a haze of eyelashes I could see Marie throwing her arms around the midwife’s neck with a little cry of simulated joy, and muttering something into her ear. The midwife listened and said something back, listened and said something back, three times before she ever turned her colorless gray eyes towards me, and when she did, I felt death reaching for me.

  “Tell me more of the symptoms,” said Dr. Alkmaar, beginning to take an interest in this new case. The way he was looking at me—staring without seeing—I sensed he was giving up.

  I mustered the strength to lever myself up on one elbow, and reached out to grab the bloody cravat around Dr. Alkmaar’s neck. “If you think I am dead, explain this!” I said, giving him a violent jerk.

  “It will be hours before you will have become exhausted enough,” he said. “I shall have time to go and bleed the Chevalier de Montluçon—”

  “Who will then suffer another attack, and then another!” I replied. “I am not a fool. I know that if I become so exhausted that you are able to turn the baby around in my womb, I shall be too weak to push her out. Tell me of the drug you mentioned before!”

  “Doctor, the French Ambassador may be dying! The rules of precedence dictate that—” began Marie, but Dr. Alkmaar held up one hand to stay her. To me, he said, “It is but a sample. It relaxes certain muscles for a time, then it wears off.”

  “Have you experimented with it yet?”

  “Yes.”

  “And?”

  “It made me unable to hold in my urine.”

  “Who gave it to you?”

  “A wandering alchemist who came to visit two weeks ago.”

  “A fraud or—”

  “He is well reputed. He remarked that, with so many pregnant women in the house, I might have need of it.”

  “’Twas the Red?”

  Dr. Alkmaar’s eyes darted from side to side before he answered with a very slight nod.

  “Give me the drug.”

  It was some sort of plant extract, very bitter, but after about a quarter of an hour it made me go all loose in the joints, and I became light-headed even though I had not lost that much blood yet. So I was not fully conscious when Dr. Alkmaar did the turning, and that suited me, as it was not anything I wanted to be conscious of. My passion for Natural Philosophy has its limits.

  I heard him saying to the midwife, “Now the baby is head down, as it should be. God be praised, the cord did not emerge. The baby is crowning now, and when the drug wears off in a few hours, the contractions will resume and, God willing, she will deliver normally. Know that she is delivering late; the baby is well-developed; as frequently occurs in such cases, it has already defecated inside the womb.”

  “I have seen it before,” said the midwife, a little bit insulted.

  Dr. Alkmaar did not care whether she was insulted or not: “The baby has got some of it into his mouth. There is danger that when he draws his first breath he shall aspirate it into his lungs. If that happens he shall not live to the end of the week. I was able to get my finger into the little one’s mouth and clear out a good deal of it, but you must remember to hold him head-down when he emerges and clear the mouth again before he inhales.”

  “I am in debt to your wisdom, Doctor,” said the midwife bitterly.

  “You felt around in his mouth? The baby’s mouth?” Marie asked him.

  “That is what I have just said,” Dr. Alkmaar replied.

  “Was it…normal?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The palate…the jaw…?”

  “Other than being full of baby shit,” said Dr. Alkmaar, picking up his bag of lancets and handing it to his assistant, “it was normal. Now I go to bleed the French Ambassador.”

  “Take a few quarts for me, Doctor,” I said. Hearing this weak jest, Marie turned and gave me an indescribably evil look as she closed the door behind the departing Doctor.

  The crone took a seat next to me, used the candle on the night-stand to light up her clay-pipe, and set to work replacing the air in the room with curls of smoke.

  The words of Marie were an encrypted message that I had understood as soon as it had reached my ears. Here is its meaning:

  Nine months ago I got into trouble on the banks of the Meuse. As a means of getting out of this predicament I slept with Étienne d’Arcachon, the scion of a very ancient family that is infamous for passing along its defects as if they were badges and devices on its coat of arms. Anyone who has been to the royal palaces in Versailles, Vienna, or Madrid has seen the cleft lips and palates, the oddly styled jaw-bones, and the gnarled skulls of these people; King Carlos II of Spain, who is a cousin to the Arcachons in three different ways, cannot even eat solid food. Whenever a new baby is born into one of these families, the first thing everyone looks at, practically before they even let it breathe, is the architecture of the mouth and jaw.

  I was pleased to
hear that my son would be free of these defects. But that Marie had asked proved that she had an opinion as to who the father was. But how could this be possible? “It is obvious,” you might say, “this Étienne d’Arcachon must have boasted, to everyone who would listen, of his conquest of the Countess de la Zeur, and nine months was more than enough time for the gossip to have reached the ears of Marie.” But you do not know Étienne. He is an odd duck, polite to a fault, and not the sort to boast. And he could not know that the baby in my womb was his. He knew only that he’d had a single opportunity to roger me (as Jack would put it). But I traveled for weeks before and weeks after in the company of other men; and certainly I had not impressed Étienne with my chastity!

  The only possible explanation was that Marie—or, much more likely, someone who was controlling her—had read a decyphered version of my personal journal, in which I stated explicitly that I had slept with Étienne and only Étienne.

  Clearly Marie and the midwife were working as cat’s-paws of some Frenchman or other of high rank. M. le comte d’Avaux had been recalled to Versailles shortly after the Revolution in England, and this Chevalier de Montluçon had been sent out to assume his role. But Montluçon was a nobody, and there was no doubt in my mind that he was a meat marionette whose strings were being pulled by d’Avaux, or some other personage of great power at Versailles.

  Suddenly I felt sympathy with James II’s queen, for here I was flat on my back in a foreign palace with a lot of strangers gazing fixedly at my vagina.

  Who had arranged this? What orders had been given to Marie?

  Marie had made it obvious that one of her tasks was to find out whether the baby was sound.

  Who would care whether Étienne’s bastard child had a well-formed skull?

  Étienne had written me a love poem, if you can call it that: