The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and the System of the World

by Neal Stephenson

  Getting the horses, their tack, and the carriage to pass through that archway was a bit like funneling a model ship, rigging a-luff, through the neck of a jug. At one point they drew to a full stop and Daniel, glancing out a side-window, found himself within kissing range of a pedestrian—gawky, post-smallpox, perhaps thirty years of age—whose advance down Fleet Street had been barred by all of Mr. Threader’s maneuvers. This fellow, who affected a ratty horse-hair wig, and who carried a smoky lanthorn in one hand and a staff in the other, peered in on them with frank curiosity that Mr. Threader found unseemly. “Go to, go to, sirrah, we are no concern of the Watch!”

  The carriage moved forward into the narrow cul-de-sac of Crane Court.

  “One of the Royal Society’s new neighbors?” Daniel asked.

  “That watchman? No, I should think not!”

  “Each inhabitant is supposed to take his turn on the Watch,” Daniel said pedantically, “and so I assumed…”

  “That was twenty years ago when the Act was passed,” Mr. Threader returned, sorrowful over Daniel’s naïveté. “It has become the practice for householders to pool a bit of money and pay some fellow—usually some caitiff from Southwark—to do the chore in their stead. As you encountered him this evening, so shall you every evening, unless you have the good fortune to pass by while he is in Pub.”

  Still they were making their way, tentatively, down Crane Court. Once they had squeezed through the entrance, it had broadened slightly, to the point where two oncoming carriages might scrape past each other.

  “I rather thought we should be leaving you off at the home of some distinguished Fellow,” said the bemused Mr. Threader. “I say, you’re not on the outs with them, are you?” he jested, trying to terminate their journey on a jolly note.

  I shall be soon enough. “I have several invitations in my pocket, and mean to spend them methodically—”

  “Like a miser with his coins!” said Mr. Threader, still trying to haul Daniel up to the level of joviality that he considered suitable upon parting; perhaps this meant he wanted to see Daniel again.

  “Or a soldier with his pouch of balls,” Daniel returned.

  “You may add one more!”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Invitation! You must come and lodge with me for a few days, Dr. Waterhouse; I shall take it as an affront if you do not.”

  Before Daniel could think of a polite way to beg off, the carriage came to a stop, and at the same moment the door was pulled open by a fellow Daniel assumed was a porter, albeit over-dressed for the job in his Sunday church-going togs. He was not a porter of the gorilla type, but rather tall, of reasonably normal proportions, perhaps forty-five years old, clean-shaven, almost gentlemanly.

  “It is I,” Daniel volunteered, as this man could not seem to decide which of the two passengers was the honored guest.

  “Welcome to Crane Court, Dr. Waterhouse,” said the porter, sincerely but coolly, speaking in a French accent. “I am Henry Arlanc, at your service.”

  “A Huguenot,” muttered Mr. Threader as Henry Arlanc helped Daniel down onto the pavement.

  Daniel glanced at the front of the house that formed the end of the court, but it looked just like the engravings, which was to say, very plain and simple. He turned to look back towards Fleet Street. His view was blocked by the baggage-cart, which had taken longer to negotiate the entrance, and was still fifty feet away, lumbering towards them. “Merci,” said Mr. Threader as Arlanc helped him out.

  Daniel moved over to one side so that he could peer between the baggage-cart and the line of house-fronts running down to Fleet. His night vision was not what it had once been, but he thought he could see the glimmer of the inquisitive watchman’s lanthorn limning the arch, perhaps three hundred feet away. He was bothering someone else now, someone in a sedan chair.

  The luggage wagon suddenly got much larger, as if a giant bladder had been inflated to fill the entire width of the court. Daniel had scarcely registered that impression, when it became a source of light. Then it seemed a radiant yellow fist was punching at Daniel through a curtain of iron-colored smoke. The punch was pulled long before it reached him, and collapsed and paled into an ashy cloud. But he had felt its heat on his face, and things had flown out of it and struck him. Crane Court was now enlivened by the music of færy-bells as golden coins sought out resting-places on the paving-stones, and fell in twirling parabolas onto the roof-tiles. Some of them must have been flung straight up in the air for great distances because they continued to land hard and to bounce high for several seconds after Daniel had found his own resting-place: on his arse in the street. The court had been blocked off by a wall of smoke which now advanced to surround him; he could not see his own feet. But he could smell the smoke; it was sulfurous, unmistakenly the product of the combustion of gunpowder. Mixed in with that was a sharper chymical scent that Daniel probably could have identified if he had sniffed it in a laboratory; as it was, he had distractions.

  People were calling names, including his. “I am all right,” Daniel announced, but it sounded as if his fingers were in his ears. He got to his feet, spry as a twenty-year-old, and began working his way down the court in the direction of Fleet Street. The air was clearer nearer the ground, and he ended up walking bent nearly double, tracking his progress by the passage of sprayed coins and other detritus under his feet. There was a kind of snow fluttering through the smoke as well: raccoon fur.

  “Watchman!” Daniel shouted, “can you hear me?”

  “Yes, sir! The Marching Watch has been sent for!”

  “I do not care about the Marching Watch, they are too late! I want that you should follow that sedan chair, and tell me where it goes!”

  No answer came back.

  Mr. Threader’s voice came out of the smoke, just a few yards away. “Watchman, follow that sedan chair and I shall give you a guinea!”

  “Right you are, sir!” returned the watchman.

  “…or a guinea’s equivalent value in other goods or services, at my discretion, provided that timely and useful information, which would not have been obtainable through other means, is brought to me, and me alone; and note that nothing in this offer shall be construed to create a condition of employment between you and me, particularly where assumption of liabilities, criminal or civil, is concerned. Did you hear all of that, Dr. Waterhouse?”

  “Yes, Mr. Threader.”

  “It is so witnessed this thirty-first day of January, Year of our Lord 1714.” Mr. Threader muttered very rapidly.

  In the next breath, he began finally to answer the hails of his assistants, who had come running up from Fleet Street and were now tramping blindly through the smoke all round, hardly less dangerous than the terrified horses. Having found Mr. Threader and Daniel by nearly running them down, they began asking, repeatedly and redundantly, whether they were all right; which soon became annoying to Daniel, who suspected that they were only doing it to be noticed. He told them to instead go and find the driver of the baggage-cart, who had been airborne when Daniel had lost sight of him.

  The smoke was finally beginning to clear; it seemed to be draining, rather than rising, from the court. Mr. Threader approached. “Did anything strike you, Dr. Waterhouse?”

  “Not very hard.” For the first time it occurred to him to brush himself off. Wood-shards and raccoon-tufts showered from the folds of his clothing. His finger caught the edge of a coin, which had been made rough as a saw-blade by the violence of its recent career, and this fluttered to the ground and hit with a tinny slap. Daniel bent to examine it. It was not a coin at all. It was a miniature gear. He picked it up. All round him, Mr. Threader’s assistants were in similar postures, snatching guineas off the ashlars like a crew of gleaners. The driver of the baggage-cart was face down, moaning like a drunk as he was tended to by Henry Arlanc and a woman, possibly Arlanc’s wife. Someone had had the presence of mind to draw the other baggage-cart across the entrance of Crane Court so that the Marching Watch
—when and if they arrived—would not simply march in watching for stray coins.

  “At the risk of being one of those bores who will only venture to state facts after they have become perfectly obvious to all,” said Mr. Threader, “I guess that my baggage-cart has just been Blown Up.”

  Daniel flipped the gear over in his palm several times, then put it in his pocket. “Without a doubt, your hypothesis passes the test that we call, Ockham’s Razor.”

  Mr. Threader was strangely merry. For that matter, even Daniel, who had been in a sour mood all day from fasting, was feeling a bit giddy. He saw Henry Arlanc approaching, wiping traces of blood from his hands, his face blackened. “Mr. Arlanc, if you are all right, would you be so good as to fetch a broom, and sweep my things in-doors?”

  This actually produced a guffaw from Mr. Threader. “Dr. Waterhouse! If I may speak frankly, I had been concerned that your coonskins would leave you open to ridicule from London’s à la mode. But in the end, the Garment in Question was not even suffered to pass the city gates.”

  “It must have been done by someone very young,” Daniel guessed.

  “Why do you suppose so, sir?”

  “I have never seen you happier, Mr. Threader! Only a fellow who had lived through very little would imagine that a gentleman of your age and experience would find this sort of thing impressive.”

  This hammered a bung into Mr. Threader’s barrel of chuckles, and straightened him right up for several moments. In time he worked his way back to merry, but only after perilous detours through confused, astonished, and outraged. “I was about to make a similar remark directed at you!” He was less shocked by the explosion than by Daniel’s imputation that it had anything to do with him. Another cycle of bewilderment and stifled anger swirled round his face. Daniel observed with some fascination; Mr. Threader had facial features after all, plenty of them.

  In the end, all Mr. Threader could do was laugh. “I was going to express my outrage, Dr. Waterhouse, that you imagined this had anything to do with me; but I bated. I cannot throw stones, since I have been guilty, mutatis mutandis, of the identical sin.”

  “You thought it was for me!? But no one knew I was coming,” Daniel said. But he said it weakly, for he had just remembered the pirates in Cape Cod Bay, and how Edward Teach, literally smouldering on the poop deck of Queen Anne’s Revenge, had asked for him by name.

  “No one, save the entire crew of the ship that put you ashore at Plymouth—for she must have reached London by now.”

  “But no one knew how I was coming to London.”

  “No one, save the Court of Directors, and most of the Investors, of the Proprietors of the Engine for Raising Water by Fire! Not to mention your Backer.” Mr. Threader then got a bright look on his face and said, “Perhaps they were not trying to affright you, but simply to kill you!”

  “Or you,” Daniel returned.

  “Are you a wagering man, Dr. Waterhouse?”

  “I was brought up to loathe it. But my return to London is proof that I am a fallen man.”

  “Ten guineas.”

  “On the identity of the intended victim?”

  “Just so. What say you, Dr. Waterhouse?”

  “As my life is already staked, ’twere false œconomy to quibble over ten guineas. Done.”

  Crane Court

  EARLY FEBRUARY 1714

  But what should be the reason that such a good man should be all his days so much in the dark?

  —JOHN BUNYAN, The Pilgrim’s Progress

  DANIEL’S FIRST FORTNIGHT at the Royal Society was not equal, in excitement or glamour, to that fiery Spectacle that had heralded his arrival. In the minutes after the blast, excitement born of fear had made him feel half a century younger. But the next morning, he woke in his little guest-garret to discover that the thrill had vanished as quickly as the smoke of the blast; while the fear persisted as stubbornly as the carbon-black scorches it had sprayed on the pavement. Aches and pains had appeared in every part of him, as if all the shocks and insults he had suffered since Enoch Root had walked into his Institute some four months ago, had not been registered at once by his body, but had been marked down in a credit-ledger which had now come due, all at once, and with usurous interest.

  Much more debilitating was a melancholy that settled over his spirit, and took away his desire to eat, to get out of bed, or even to read. He only stirred at odd intervals when the melancholy condensed into a raw, beastly fear that set his heart thumping and caused all the blood to drop out of his head. One morning before dawn he found himself crouching before his tiny window, twitching a linen curtain, peering out at a wagon that had trundled into Crane Court to deliver some sea-coal to a neighboring house, wondering whether the collier and his boys might be disguised murderers.

  His own clear awareness that he had gone half mad did nothing to lessen the physical power of his fear, which moved his body with irresistible power, as a sea heaves a swimmer. He got no rest during the two weeks he spent in that garret, despite staying in bed most of the while, and realized only one gain: namely, he arrived at a better understanding of the mentality of Sir Isaac Newton. But that hardly seemed like a reward. It was almost as if he had suffered a stroke, or a blow to the head, that had stolen away his faculty of thinking about the future. He was quite certain that his story had come to an end, that his sudden journey across the Atlantic was a flash in the pan, which had quite failed to ignite the powder in the barrel, and that Princess Caroline would purse her lips, shake her head, and write it all off as a failed investment and a Bad Idea. Really he was no better off during that time than he had been tied to Hooke’s chair at Bedlam being cut for the stone. The pain was not as intense, but the mental state was much the same: trapped in the here and now like a dog, and not part of any coherent Story.

  He got better on Saint Valentine’s Day. The agent that brought about this miraculous cure was as obscure as the cause of the disease itself. It certainly did not originate from the College of Physicians, for Daniel had used what energies he had to keep the doctors and their lancets at bay. It seemed to issue, rather, from a part of town that had not existed when Daniel had been a young man: a place, just up the road from Bedlam, called Grub Street.

  Daniel’s medicine, in other words, was Newspapers. Mrs. Arlanc (the wife of Henry, an English Dissenter, and the housekeeper of Crane Court) had been faithfully bringing up food, drink, and new-papers. She had told visitors that Dr. Waterhouse was deathly ill, and physicians that he was doing much better now, and thereby stopped all of them from crossing his threshold. At Daniel’s request, she refrained from bringing him his mail.

  Now, most places did not have newspapers, and so, if Mrs. Arlanc had not brought him any, he would never have known that they were wanting. But London had eighteen of them. ’Twas as if the combination in one city of too many printing presses; a bloody and perpetual atmosphere of Party Malice; and an infinite supply of coffee; had combined, in some alchemical sense, to engender a monstrous prodigy, an unstanchable wound that bled Ink and would never heal. Daniel, who had grown to maturity in a London where printing presses had to be hidden in hay-wagons to preserve them from the sledgehammers of the Censor, could not quite believe this at first; but they kept coming, every day. Mrs. Arlanc brought these to him as if it were perfectly normal for a man to read about all London’s scandals, duels, catastrophes, and outrages every morning as he spooned up his porridge.

  At first Daniel found them intolerable. It was as if the Fleet Ditch were being diverted into his lap for half an hour every day. But once he grew accustomed to them, he began to draw a kind of solace from their very vileness. How self-absorbed for him to cower in bed, for fear of mysterious enemies, here in the center of a metropolis that was to Hostility what Paris was to Taste? To be so unnerved, simply because someone had tried to blow him up in London, was like a sailor in a naval engagement pouting and sulking because one of his fellows had stepped on his toe.

  So, inasmuch as it made him
feel better, Daniel began to look forward to his daily ink-toilette. Immersion in Bile, a splash of Calumny on the face, and a dab of Slander behind each ear, and he was a new man.

  The 14th of February was a Sunday, meaning that before the sun had risen, Mr. and Mrs. Arlanc had embarked on their weekly pilgrimage to a Huguenot meeting-house that lay somewhere out beyond Ratcliff. Daniel awoke to find, next to his door, a bowl of cold porridge resting on an otherwise empty tray. No newspapers! Down he ventured into the lower storeys of the house, scavenging for old ones. Most of the rooms had no reading material whatever, except for damned Natural Philosophy books. But on the ground floor, back in Mrs. Arlanc’s kitchen, he found a sheaf of old newspapers preserved as fire-starters. He re-ascended in triumph to his garret and read a few of the more recent numbers while excavating a pit in his congealed porridge.

  Of the past week’s editions, several actually agreed on something factual. This happened about as often as a Total Eclipse of the Sun, and was just as likely to cause panic in the streets. They agreed that Queen Anne was going to open Parliament tomorrow.

  Daniel had been conceiving of this Queen as a caricature of elderliness and frailty. News that this half-embalmed figment was going to clamber out of bed and do something of consequence made Daniel feel ashamed of himself. When the Arlancs returned from church in the late afternoon, and the Mrs. trudged up to the garret to collect the tray and porridge-bowl, Daniel announced that tomorrow he would read his mail, and perhaps even put on clothes and get out of bed.

  Mrs. Arlanc, who hid competence beneath a jiggly, henlike façade, smiled at this news; though she had the good manners to keep her lips pressed together so that Daniel would not be exposed to the sight of her teeth. Like most Londoners’, these had been well blackened by sugar.