The Confusion: Volume Two of the Baroque Cycle

by Neal Stephenson

  “No, madame, your senses have not misled you, it is just as mean, narrow, and squalid as you feared, and no apology from me shall balance the offense I have done you, by bringing you to it; but it was a suitable place for me to wait, and behold, it is nigh to the mysteries and delights of the ’Change.”

  Eliza followed his gaze down the alley. It rambled on in the same vein for a stone’s throw and discharged into a proper street, which seemed to be crowded with an inordinate number of well-to-do-chaps who were all in a frightful hurry. She knew what it was just that quickly. If she had been wearing Versailles court-makeup, it would have cracked and fallen to the ground like ice from a warming roof. For her face had done something she never allowed it to do at Versailles, namely, opened up into a broad grin. She directed this at Ravenscar, who all but swooned. “On the contrary, my lord, in all London there’s no place I’d rather be than the ’Change, and there is no place I am so well suited for, in my present state, than a dark doorway in Nag’s Head Court—so—”

  Ravenscar was aghast, and quick-stepped to the base of the wee Barock staircase that the footmen had arranged beneath the carriage-door. This was to help her down, if she insisted; but really he was throwing his body across her path as a barrier. “I would not dream of escorting a Duchess into that place! I had hoped that the lady might suffer me to join her in the carriage while we proceeded to some destination worthy to be graced by one of her dignity.”

  “It is, after all, your carriage, monsieur—”

  “Nay, madame, yours, for as long as you choose to remain on our Isle, and I, your servant.”

  “Get in the damned carriage, then. And pray lower the shades, for I am not fit to stop light.”

  Ravenscar did as he was told. The carriage began to move. “Obviously, my driver was able to find you in Portsmouth—?”

  “We found him. The skipper of our boat would not go to Portsmouth, or any other proper port-town, but only to certain coves he knew of. Thence we hired a waggon.”

  Ravenscar was looking curiously about the interior of the carriage, as if someone were missing. “We?”

  “I was with an Englishman.”

  “A Person of Quality, or—”

  “A Person of Usefulness. But somewhat bull-headed. He had set his mind to looking up his whilom Captain. When we reached Portsmouth he began to make inquiries about the fellow—name of Churchill.”

  Ravenscar winced. “Eeeyuh, the Earl of Marlborough has been clapped in the Tower of London!”

  “So you tell me now, but, isolated as I’d been, I’d not heard that news. Otherwise I’d have warned my companion not to mention the name.”

  “They put your man in irons, did they?”

  “They did. For I gather that the charge on which Marlborough is being held is that of being a Jacobite spy—?”

  “It is so ludicrous that I am too embarrassed even to repeat it to you. But a moiety of the English race are the more inclined to credit an accusation, the more fanciful it becomes; and whoever it was that arrested your man in Portsmouth—”

  “Was of that sort, and, seeing a man just off a boat from Cherbourg, asking the whereabouts of Marlborough, assumed the worst.”

  “Have they hanged him yet?”

  “No, nor will they soon, for haply your carriage came along. I, to them, was just a wench in a wet dress; but when this fine vehicle made the scene, with your arms on the door, and your driver started in with ‘la duchesse’ this and ‘the Duchess’ that—”

  “Matters changed.”

  “Matters changed, and I was able to let those in charge know that hanging my companion would not be in their best interests. But now that I’m here, I would visit Marlborough.”

  “Many would, my lady. The queue of carriages at the Tower is long. You rank most of them, and should be able to go directly to its head. But if I might, first—?”

  “Yes?”

  They had been driving around a triangular circuit of Cornhill, Threadneedle, and Bishopsgate, enclosing some twenty acres of ground that contained more money than the rest of the British Isles. It was remarkable that they had been able to converse for even this long without the topic having arisen.

  “It is frightfully indecent of me to mention this, I know,” said Ravenscar, “but I am, at present, the owner of rather a lot of silver. Rather a lot. They tell me ’tis worth ever so much more now than ’twas three weeks ago, when I bought it; but if news were to arrive, say from Portsmouth, that the French invasion had miscarried—”

  “It would suddenly be worth ever so much less. Yes, I know. Well, the invasion has failed.”

  Ravenscar’s pelvis actually rose off the bench as if someone had shoved a dagger into his kidney. His voice vaulted to a higher register: “If we could, then, pay a brief call upon a certain gentleman, now, before you go spreading the news about—”

  “I’ve no intention of doing that, as the news shall get here soon enough on its own,” said Eliza, which little comforted Ravenscar. “But before you spread the news, by selling all of your silver, I have a small transaction that I must conduct at the House of Hacklheber—do you know it?”

  “That? It is a hole in the wall, a niche, a dovecote—if you require pocket money in London, madame, I can convey you to the banca of Sir Richard Apthorp himself, who will be pleased to extend you credit—”

  “That is most courteous of you,” said Eliza, rummaging in her pathetic bag, and drawing out a slimy bundle of skins, “but I prefer to get my pocket-money from my own banker, and that is the House of Hacklheber.”

  “Very well,” said the Marquis of Ravenscar, and boomed on the ceiling with the head of his walking-stick. “To the Golden Mercury in ’Change Alley!”

  “I CONFESS THAT I was observing through the window—and only out of a gentlemanly concern for your safety,” said the Marquis of Ravenscar, “and only after some half an hour had elapsed—for it struck me as rather a lengthy transaction.”

  Eliza had only just returned to the carriage and was still smoothing her skirts down. She’d been in there for an hour and twelve minutes. Ten minutes’ waiting would have made Ravenscar impatient; twenty, apoplectic. Seventy-two had put him through the full gamut of emotional states known to mortal man, as well as a few normally reserved for angels and devils. Now, he was spent, drained. Though perhaps just a bit apprehensive that she would want to go on some other errand next.

  “Yes, my lord?”

  “The fellow had—well, I don’t know, a bit of a startled look about him. Perhaps ’twas just my imagination.”

  “Mind your toes!” This warning came simultaneously from Eliza, and from one of Ravenscar’s footmen, who had carried a box up the wee stairs behind Eliza and thrust it inside; its weight overbore his strength, and it crashed onto the floor, making the carriage rock and bounce up and down for a while on its springs. One of the horses whinnied in protest. “Where shall I place the others, madame?” he inquired.

  “There are more!?” exclaimed Ravenscar.

  “Ten more, yes.”

  “What are we—pardon me, you—going to do with so much, er…did you say ten? Please tell me it is copper.”

  Eliza flipped the lid open with her toe to reveal more freshly minted silver pennies than the Marquis of Ravenscar had seen in one place in years. He responded in the only way fitting: with absolute silence. Meanwhile his driver answered the question for him.

  “Not load it on this coach, guv’nor, the suspension won’t hold.” The driver was struggling to settle the exhausted horses, who had sensed that the carriage was rapidly getting heavier. Another crash sounded from the shelf in the back, causing the vehicle to pitch nose up, and then another on the roof, which began to bulge downward and emit ominous ticks.

  “Summon a hackney!” commanded the Marquis, and then swiveled his eyes back to Eliza, imploring her to answer his question.

  “What am I going to do with it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sell it, I suppose, at the s
ame time as you are selling yours. It is rather more pocket-money than I shall be requiring during my stay in your city. Though I should very much like to go to the West End later, and go—what is the word they use for it now?”

  “I believe the word you are looking for is ‘shopping,’ madame.”

  “Yes, shopping. The money, of course, belongs to the King of France. But, gentleman that he is, he would never begrudge me the loan of a few pounds sterling so that I might change into a new dress.”

  “Nor would I, madame,” said Ravenscar, “if it came to that—but le Roi, it goes without saying, has precedence.” Ravenscar swallowed. “It is a remarkable coincidence.”

  “What coincidence, my lord?”

  More jingling crashes came to their ears from just behind, where a hackney had pulled up, and was being laden with more strong-boxes. The sound was enormously distracting to Ravenscar, who struggled to keep stringing words together. “Our route to the lovely shops of the West End shall take us past Apthorp’s, where—”

  “Oh, that’s right. You wish to put your silver on the market. Not yet.”

  “Not yet!?”

  “Think of a ship’s captain, sailing into battle, guns charged and ready to let go a broadside. If he loses his nerve, and fires too soon, the balls fall short of their target, and splash into the water, and he looks a fool. Worse, he is not afforded the opportunity to re-load. It is like that now.”

  Ravenscar did not seem convinced.

  “After our epistolary flirtation, which I did enjoy so much,” Eliza tried, “I should be crestfallen if I journeyed all the way to London only to find that you were a premature ejaculator.”

  “Really! Madame! I do not know how the ladies discourse in France, but here in England—”

  “Oh, stop it. ’Twas a figure of speech, nothing more.”

  “And not a very accurate one, by your leave; for more is at stake here than you seem to know!”

  “I know precisely what’s at stake, my lord.” Here Eliza was distracted by some activity without. A man had emerged from the door of the House of Hacklheber, dressed as if about to embark on a voyage, and was signalling for a hackney. There was no lack of these, as word seemed to have spread that coins were falling from the sky hereabouts. Within moments the fellow was on his way.

  “Was that one of the shouting Germans?” Ravenscar inquired.

  Eliza met his eye. “You could hear them all the way out here?” Then she tilted her head out the window to watch.

  “Madame, I could have heard them from Wales. What were they on about?”

  Eliza was crooking her finger at someone outside, then nodding as if to say, yes, I mean you, sirrah! Presently a face appeared in the window: a hackney-driver, hat in hands. “Follow yonder German until he gets on a boat. Watch the boat until you can’t see it any more. Go to—what did you call your Den of Iniquity, my lord?”

  “The Nag’s Head.”

  “Go to the Nag’s Head and leave word for the Marquis that his ship has come in. Someone there will then give you more of these.” Eliza blindly scooped some coins out of her strong-box and slapped them into the driver’s hat.

  “Right you are, milady!”

  “It shall probably be the Gravesend Ferry, but you might have to trail him all the way to Ipswich or something,” Eliza added, partly to explain the amount; for she got the idea, from the way Ravenscar had just swallowed his own tongue, that she had overpaid.

  The hackney driver was so gone, ’twas as if he’d been launched from a siege-mortar. Eliza looked back to Ravenscar. “You asked, what were the Germans shouting about?”

  “Yes. I was afraid I should have to venture within and run them through.” Ravenscar slapped the scabbard of his small-sword.

  “They were full of impertinent questions about what I meant to do with all that silver.”

  “And you told them—?”

  “I affected a noble diffidence, and pretended not to understand any language other than the high French of Versailles.”

  “Right. So they believe that the invasion has begun!”

  “I cannot read their minds, my lord; and if I could, I should not wish to.”

  “And they have in consequence despatched a runner to the Continent. You mentioned Ipswich—implying that his destination is Holland—and his mission is, what?”

  Eliza shrugged. “To fetch the rest, I’d suppose.”

  “The rest of the Germans!?”

  “No, no, the rest of the silver—the remaining four-fifths of it.”

  An observer standing without the carriage would have seen it buck and rock. Some sort of nervous catastrophe had caused all of the Marquis of Ravenscar’s muscles to contract at once. He was a few moments getting his faculties back. When he spoke again, it was from a sprawling, semi-prone position. “What the hell are you going to do with so much silver?”

  “Most likely, convert it into Bills of Exchange that can be taken back to France.”

  “Where the money came from in the first place. Why bother at all?”

  “Now it is you who asks impertinent questions,” Eliza said. “All that need concern you for now is that the Hacklhebers believe the invasion has been launched. They are probably trying to buy silver on the London market now. Which shall lead all to believe in the invasion, until positive news arrives to the contrary. Your silver has only gone up in value.”

  “In truth there is one other matter that doth concern me,” said Ravenscar, “which is that we are sitting out in the street with a king’s ransom in silver; pray, could we get it now behind walls, locks, and guns?”

  “Wherever you consider it shall be safest, monsieur.”

  “The Tower of London!” commanded Ravenscar, and the carriage moved, setting off small tinkly avalanches in all the strong-boxes.

  “Ah,” said Eliza with evident satisfaction, “no want of walls and guns there, I suppose; and I shall have an opportunity to pay a call on my lord Marlborough.”

  “I exist to please you, madame.”

  Gresham’s College

  10/20 JUNE 1692

  Even Solomon had wanted Gold to adorn the Temple, unless he had been supply’d by Miracles.

  —DANIEL DEFOE,

  A Plan of the English Commerce

  “MY DELIGHT AT seeing Monsieur Fatio again is joined by wonder at the company he keeps!” Feeble as it was, this was the best that Eliza could muster when Fatio walked into the library accompanied by a man with long silver hair—a man who could not be anyone but Isaac Newton.

  Even by the standards of savants, this had been a socially awkward morning. Eliza had been in London for a fortnight. The first few days had gone to buying clothes, finding lodgings, sleeping, and vomiting; for obviously she was pregnant. Then she had sent notes out to a few London acquaintances. Most had responded within a day. Fatio’s message had not arrived until this morning—it had been shot under her door as she knelt over a chamber-pot. Given the lengthy delay, she might have expected it to be a flawlessly composed letter, the utmost of many drafts; but it had been scratched out in haste on a page torn from a waste-book, and it had asked that Eliza come to Gresham’s right away. This Eliza had done, not without much discomfort and inconvenience; then she had waited in the library for an hour. Now Fatio was at last here, looking flushed and wild, as if he had just galloped in from some battlefield. And he had this silver-haired gentleman in tow.

  For a few moments he had stood between them, calculating the etiquette; then he remembered his manners, and bowed to Eliza, and spoke in French: “My lady. Our exploit at Scheveningen is never far from my mind. I think of it every day. Which may give some measure of my joy in seeing you again.” This had been rehearsed, and he delivered it in too much haste for it to seem perfectly sincere; but the situation was, after all, complicated. Before Eliza could respond, Fatio stepped aside and thrust a hand at his companion. “I present to you Isaac Newton,” he announced. Then, switching to English: “Isaac, it is my honor to give you El
iza de Lavardac, Duchess of Arcachon and of Qwghlm.”

  Fatio scarcely took his eyes from Eliza’s face as he spoke these words, and as Eliza and Isaac curtseyed or bowed and said polite things to each other.

  Eliza liked Fatio but remembered, now, why the man had always made her a bit uneasy. Nicolas Fatio de Duillier was forever an Actor in an Italian Opera that existed in his own mind. Today’s scene at the Library of Gresham’s was meant to be some kind of a set-piece. The Duchess, summoned in haste by a mysterious note, fumes impatiently for an hour—dramatick tension mounts—finally, just when she is about to storm out, Fatio saves the day by rushing in, aglow from superhuman efforts, and turns disaster to triumph by bringing in the Master himself. And it was dramatick, after a fashion; but whatever genuine emotions Eliza might have had she kept to herself, for no reason other than that Fatio was studying her as a starving man studies a closed oyster.

  Newton had been dragged here; this was plain enough. But once he saw Eliza in the flesh, and she became something concrete to him, his reluctance was forgotten. Then it was a simple matter of remembering why he had been brought here.

  They sat around a table, like students, all in the same sorts of chairs, with no thought given to rank. Newton fixed his gaze on a small burn-mark on the tabletop, and collected his thoughts for a minute or two. Eliza and Fatio filled the silence with chit-chat. But each kept an eye on Newton. Finally Newton’s eyes flicked up to a nearby window, and he got a look on his face as if he were ready to unburden his mind of something. Fatio broke off in mid-sentence and half turned toward him.

  “I shall speak as if everything Nicolas has said of your wit and erudition is true,” Newton began, “which means that I shall not limp along with half-truths, nor circle back to proffer tedious explanations, as I might do when speaking to certain other Duchesses.”