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

by Neal Stephenson

  “Whigs’ve been whispering in a lot of ears,” Bob continued, glancing at the place where Colonel Barnes had stood a moment earlier. “Are you with us or against us? Will you stand up and be counted? When the Hanovers reign, shall they know you as one who was loyal, who can be trusted with command?”

  “I see. Hard to resist that sort of talk.”

  “Not so hard, when there is Marlborough, just over there,” nodding at the eastern horizon, “but contrary pressure, even greater, comes now from Bolingbroke.”

  “What has my lord Bolingbroke done?”

  “He’s not come out and done anything just yet. But he is making ready to do something that will make some of us uneasy.”

  “What is he making ready to do?”

  “He’s drawing up a list of all the captains, the colonels, and the generals. And according to White—who lets things slip, for effect, when he is pretending to be drunker than he really is—Bolingbroke will soon order those officers to sell their companies and their regiments, unless they sign a pledge that they will serve their Queen unconditionally.”

  “Sell them to Jacobite captains and colonels, one presumes.”

  “One presumes,” Bob returned, a bit mockingly.

  “So that if the Queen were to decide, on her deathbed, that the crown should go to her half-brother (I’ll dispense with the pretense of calling him the Changeling), the army would stand ready to enforce that decree and welcome the Pretender to England.”

  “That is how it looks. And it puts a bloke like Colonel Barnes in a bit of a spot. The Marquis of Ravenscar’s entreaties may be shrugged off, provided it is done civilly. But Bolingbroke offers a choice, like the Buoy of the Nore—we must go one way or t’other, and there’s no going back once the decision’s made.”

  “Yes,” Daniel said. And he held back from saying what was obvious: that Barnes, with his loyalty to Marlborough, would never go Bolingbroke’s way. But as Bob had pointed out, he had to choose one path or the other. He could not say no to Bolingbroke without saying yes to Ravenscar.

  Daniel stood for a time brooding and fuming over the stupidity of Bolingbroke, who would force men like Barnes into the arms of the opposing camp. It was an act of panic. Panic was notoriously catchy; and the questions Barnes and Shaftoe had been directing his way suggested it was beginning to spread.

  Which raised the question of why on earth they would think of him. Barnes owned a regiment of dragoons, for Christ’s sake, and if a tenth of the hints dropped by him and Sergeant Bob held true, they were in communication with Marlborough.

  What was it Barnes had said just a few minutes ago? Everyone is scared to death just now. On its face this was about Isaac and his fears concerning Leibniz. But perhaps Barnes was really speaking of himself.

  Or of anyone. Obviously Bolingbroke was scared. Roger Comstock, the Marquis of Ravenscar, was too outward merry to let on that he was scared; but then he was apparently deep into mustering a Whiggish army, which was not the act of a man who had been sleeping soundly.

  Who wasn’t scared? The only person Daniel could think of who wasn’t, was Sir Christopher Wren.

  If the Duchess of Arcachon-Qwghlm was scared, she was not letting on.

  Perhaps Marlborough wasn’t scared. There was no telling as long as he remained in Antwerp.

  Those were the only ones he could think of.

  Then he had one of those moments where he suddenly stood outside of his own body and beheld himself, as from a seagull’s perspective, standing on the deck of Mr. Charles White’s sloop running down the tide in the Hope. And he came to ask, why was he, who had little time left on earth, devoting these minutes to drawing up a tedious inventory of who was, and was not, scared? Was there nothing better for a Doctor and Fellow of the Royal Society to do with his time?

  The answer was all around him, buoying him up and keeping him and the others from drowning: Hope. According to myth, the last thing to emerge from Pandora’s Box. Feeling Fear’s clammy arms reaching around him, Daniel had an almost physical longing for Hope. And perhaps Hope was no less contagious than Fear. He wanted to be infected with Hope and so he was trying to think of someone, like Wren or Marlborough, who would give it him.

  It was an hypothesis, anyway. And it described the actions of others as well as it did his own. Why had Princess Caroline summoned him from Boston? Why had Mr. Threader wanted to make a Clubb with him? Why did Roger want him to find the Longitude and Leibniz want him to make a thinking machine? Why did the likes of Saturn trail him through Hockley-in-the-Hole, asking for spiritual direction? Why did Isaac solicit his aid? Why did Mr. Baynes expect Daniel to look after his wayward daughter in Bridewell? Why were Colonel Barnes and Sergeant Shaftoe asking him these pointed questions today?

  Because they were all scared, and, just like Daniel, they longed for Hope, and sought anyone who might give it to them; and when they drew up their mental inventories of who was and wasn’t scared, why, somehow—through what was either a grotesque error or a miracle—they put Daniel in the “wasn’t scared” column.

  Daniel laughed when he understood this. Bob Shaftoe might’ve been unnerved by that. But because Bob had got in the habit of thinking Daniel wasn’t scared, he read it as further evidence of Daniel’s supreme and uncanny self-confidence.

  What to make of it? Daniel briefly considered hiring one of the printers in St. Paul’s Churchyard to make up a broadsheet in which he, Daniel Waterhouse, declared to the whole world that he was scared shitless nearly all the time. And in other times this might have been a fair course—humiliating to be sure, but honest, and a sure way to be rid of all these needy people who wanted to feed from his supposed rich store of Hope.

  But that was to take a child’s view of the Pandora’s Box story, and to conceive of Hope as an angel. Perhaps what Pandora had was really just a jack-in-the-box, and Hope had never been anything more than a clock-work clown, a deus ex machina.

  God from the machine. Daniel had spent enough time with theatrical machinery to watch its workings, and its effect upon audiences, with a cynical eye. Indeed, had passed through a long phase of despising the theatre, and the groundlings who paid money to be fooled.

  But coming back to London (which had theatres) from Boston (which didn’t), he had seen that his cynicism had been ill-founded. London was a better city, England a more advanced place, for its theatres. It was not wrong for people to be fooled by actors, or even by machinery.

  And so even if Hope was a contrived thing—a mechanism that popped up out of Pandora’s Box by dint of levers and springs—it was by no means bad. Which signified that if a crowd of people had somehow deluded themselves into phant’sying that Daniel was un-afraid, and, from that, were now generating Hope and courage of their own, why, that was an excellent practice. Daniel was obliged to remain upon the stage and to play his role, be it never so false. Because by doing so he might defeat the contagion of panic that was leading men like Bolingbroke to pursue such abysmally stupid gambits. False, machine-made Hope could make real Hope—that was the true Alchemy, the turning of lead into gold.

  “Charles White is very like my lord Jeffreys, would you not say?”

  “In many respects, yes, guv.”

  “Do you recall the night we hunted Jeffreys down like a rabid dog, and arrested him, and sent him to justice?”

  “Indeed, guv, I have dined out on the tale for a quarter-century.”

  Which explained much, for the tale had probably grown in the re-telling, and made Daniel seem more heroic than he’d been in the event.

  “When you and I were leaving the Tower that evening, we encountered John Churchill—I use his name thus since he was not yet Marlborough in those days.”

  “That I do remember. And the two of you drew aside for a private conversation, in the middle of the causeway where you’d not be overheard.”

  “Indeed. And the subject of that conversation must remain as private as ever. But do you recall how it ended?”

  “Th
e two of you shook hands, very pompously, as if closing a Transaction.”

  “You are almost too keen for your own good, Sergeant. Now, from what you know of Marlborough, and of me, do you phant’sy either of us is the sort to renege on a Transaction, solemnly entered into in such a pass: before the very gates of the Tower of London, on the eve of the Glorious Revolution, when both of our lives hung in the balance?”

  “Of course not, sir. I never—”

  “I know. Stay. Only let me say to you now, Sergeant, that our Transaction is still alive, even today; that the present voyage and mission are part of it; that all is well, and the Revolution only grows more Glorious with each passing day.”

  “That’s all I wanted to hear, guv,” said Bob with a little bow.

  Daniel resisted the urge to say I know it is.

  The Monument, London

  LATE AFTERNOON

  HALF-WAY UP THEY STOPPED to pant. The two younger pilgrims shared a stone ledge lit by a wee air-hole; some stone-masons had gone to a lot of trouble, here, to frame a toenail of gassy white sky in thunderous vault-work.

  “Pity ’tis such an indifferent day,” said one, but not until after he’d lunged at the window and worked his lungs, for a minute, like black-smith’s bellows.

  “We’ll have to gin up our own meteorology,” answered the other. He jammed a shoulder into a crevice of light that had opened up between the frame of the window and his fellow-pilgrim’s ribs, pried him out of the way, and availed himself of some air. Being London-air it could not be called fresh, but it was an improvement on the congealed miasma that filled these confines: a sort of well-shaft two hundred feet high.

  An older pilgrim, several turns of the helix below them, stumbled. He was too short of breath to curse. He had to be content with inhaling and exhaling in a very cross way. “Out…of…my…light!” he then managed, one syllable per stair-tread.

  The younger two—who were not really all that young, being in their middle thirties—moved up. Then they came aware of an impending need to make way for three young gentlemen who were descending. These had all prudently removed their small-swords from their hangers, so as not to trip on them, and were carrying the weapons before them like saints with crucifixes.

  The two ascenders by the window were garbed all in black, except for their white collars, and even had black capes reaching below their knees. They were evidently Nonconformists: Quakers, or even Barkers. The three descenders were gaudy Piccadilly boys reeking of snuff and gin.

  “Beg pardon, we have been up to view Heaven,” sang one of the latter, “and found it ever so boring, and now we are in a great hurry to reach Hell.” His companions laughed.

  The pilgrims had their backs to the light and their faces to the dark. Otherwise, un-pilgrim-like amusement might have been seen.

  “Make way for them, brother,” said the uppermost of the two young Dissidents, “Heaven can wait for us; Hell’s hungry for these.” He flattened himself against the wall, back to the chilly stone. But his brother was disfigured by an enormous hump on the back, and had to retreat to the window, and lean backwards into the cavity.

  “You’re in my fucking light!” re-iterated the old one, now barely visible as a disembodied white collar spiraling up the dusky shaft.

  “Making way for some unrepentant sinners, father,” explained the humpback. “Do thou comport thyself as a good Christian pilgrim.”

  “Why don’t you take ’em hostage!? We need hostages!”

  This extraordinary suggestion welled up out of the gloom just as the foremost of the three young fops was squeezing past the pilgrim who’d backed against the wall. They were so close that the latter could hear the former’s stomach growling, and the former smelt oysters on the latter’s breath. They shared a Moment there, each in his own mind weighing the threats. One had a sword, but his back was to a hundred-foot abyss. The other was pinned to a stone wall, but carrying a long pilgrim’s staff.

  The Heaven-bound one averted his gaze politely—not a thing to be done with ease, as he had the look of one who had never lost a staredown—and called to the one below, “O Father, I have spoke with them, and found that they are all Englishmen. Not French dragoons as we had first supposed.” He then winked at Sword Boy—who, getting it, said, “Ah,” then, “ ’tis well—no fit place for an Engagement, this!” and then went on to maneuver past the humpback. A few moments later, the three Hell-bound could be heard bidding good day to the old pilgrim with the offensive politeness reserved for the mad.

  “Time for a swop,” said the humpback. He moved up from the window, shedding some gray glare on the staggering old man, and threw off his cape to reveal a great long helmet-shaped object strapped to his back. Getting it off, and transferring it to the other, was several minutes’ feverish work. By the end of it they had made themselves near as irritable as the elder.

  He had caught up with them and leaned towards the window to catch his breath. The light shone on a face imprinted with more odd and unwholesome tales than a warehouse full of Bibles. “An indifferent day,” he repeated mockingly. “I know not what you mean. The weather does not make the day. We make the day, as suits us. This day it suits me to destroy the currency of the Realm. The weather is fine.”

  “This bloody stair has holiday-makers tramping up and down, can’t you keep a secret, Dad?” said the foremost, who was now trapped in a web of lashings that bound the helmet-shaped thing to his spine.

  “As long as that is in plain view, ’tis farcical to make a great show of discretion, Jimmy,” returned Dad.

  Taking the point, Jimmy’s brother—who now stood straight-backed, and carried the pilgrim’s staff—threw the cape over Jimmy’s shoulders, turning him into a bent hunchback. “Is there really no better way to gain entry to the Tower, Dad?”

  “What do you mean!?”

  “There’s public taverns crowded right against the foot of the wall. From there, a grapnel tossed up to the battlements—”

  “The prisoners have maid-servants who go to and from market every day. You could disguise yourself as one of them,” suggested Jimmy.

  “Or hide in one of the Mint’s hay-wains.”

  “Or in one of those great bloody wagons they use to bring in the Cornish tin…”

  “Or pretend to be the barber to some noble traitor…”

  “I myself have sneaked in with night-time burial processions, just to have a look around the place…”

  “You could bribe the Wharf-guard to overlook you when they lock the place up for the night…”

  The old man said, “Danny boy, if you hadn’t spent the last month at Shive Tor making all ready; and Jimmy, if you hadn’t been toiling over the coin-presses; you’d know that half of our number did. But for me to enter by some such subtile way would not serve the purpose now, would it? Don’t stand there a-gawping at your Dad, move along, let’s get it done before the whole venture misfires! And if you get ahead of me, and you meet with any decent London folk who’d make good witnesses, why, don’t be foolish, take ’em hostage! You know how it’s done!”

  A few minutes later they burst out into the light, and found themselves sharing a square stone platform with four Jews, two Filipinos, and a Negro.

  “ ’Tis like the set-up for one of those tedious jests that are proffered in Taverns by Imbeciles,” muttered the old pilgrim, but no one heard him.

  Jimmy and Danny were flabbergasted by the view: the new dome of St. Paul’s in one direction, about a mile away. Opposite, and only half as far, the Tower of London. Just below them, and so close that they could hear the grinding of the Dutch water-engines being impelled by the out-going tide, was London Bridge.

  “Tomba! What are these bloody Sons of Israel doing here!?” he demanded of the Negro.

  Tomba was sitting crosslegged at the southeast corner of the platform. In his lap was a pulley, or in nautical jargon a block, as big as a bull’s head. He removed a whalebone fid from his mouth and said, “They came up to look at the view,
mon. They’ve caused us no troubles.” He had a spray of dreadlocks that would fill a bushel basket.

  “Really I meant, in a larger sense, why do I encounter them everywhere I go,” said the old pilgrim—though he was now stripping off the collar and cape to reveal conventional breeches, a long-skirted coat, and a breathtaking waistcoat made of cloth of gold with silver buttons. He made sure that the Jews saw it. “Amsterdam, Algiers, Cairo, Manila—now here.”

  Tomba shrugged. “They got here first. You can’t pretend astonishment, when you see ’em.” He was working on a splice. This platform on which they all stood was impaled, as it were, on the shaft of the Monument: an immense fluted column that stood alone on Fish Street Hill. Supposedly its foundation covered the place where the Fire had started in 1666. Or so ’twas asserted by the Latin inscription on its base, which blamed the conflagration on Popish incendiaries, despatched from the Vatican. At any rate the middle of the high viewing-platform was occupied by a stone cylinder, which was the upper terminus of the stairway, as well as the support for diverse Barock decorations, knobs, lanthorns, &c. piled on top to make the Monument that much taller. Several turns of rope had been laid round this by the two Filipinos, who’d set out their street-shoes in a tidy row so that they could work barefoot, sailor-style. The same ropes passed through the eye of the huge block on Tomba’s lap. To look at it, a landlubber would phant’sy that the pulley had already been made fast to the top of the Monument; but the Filipinos were riggers, and would not let it rest until a good deal more splicing, seizing, stropping, and serving had been effected. They’d been busy enough, until now; but the arrival of the man in the golden waistcoat threw them into a lather, and even the Jews backed away from them, lest they get jabbed by a marlinspike or bludgeoned by a heaver, and find their forelocks unfathomably convolved with a turk’s-head.

  The father of Jimmy and Danny went the long way round to the east side of the platform. A spyglass emerged from his pocket and snicked out to length. He scanned some third of a mile of London, stretching from the square at the base of the Monument to the vast killing-ground of Tower Hill. Fifty years before, this had all been smoking cinders and puddles of liquefied roofing-lead. It followed that all the buildings standing there today were Stuart, and all of ’em were brick, except for a few Wren-churches, which had a lot of stone to them. Closest was St. George’s, so near by that he could jump from here and splatter on its roof. But he had no use for St. George’s today, save as a landmark to establish a heading. Raising his glass then brought him straight to a view of St. Mary-at-Hill, five hundred and some feet from the Monument’s gaudy plinth. A bloke with a spyglass was perched in its cupola; he took the instrument from his eye and waved. It seemed a cheerful gesture, not a warning, so he did not let his gaze linger there, other than to verify that there was a crossbow-man on the roof of that church, standing next to a copper tun and facing across the street (St. Mary Hill) toward a block of buildings on the eastern side. Beyond those, a few degrees to starboard, was a great hulk of a church, St.-Dunstan-in-the-East. Unauthorized personnel had likewise gained access to roof of same. It lay all of a hundred yards from St. Mary-at-Hill; and another hundred yards to the east of it was another bulky fabrique whose roof too was infested with crossbow-men and other unlikely trespassers. This would be Trinity House, the Guild or Clubb of Thames river-pilots. The lower floors would be sparsely occupied with retired tillermen drunk on sherry and wondering what all the confounded fuss was about.