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

by Neal Stephenson

  A sense of relief now washed over him as he came to a realization: they were altogether doomed.

  He went belowdecks to inform Isaac. Daniel might have expected Isaac to be furious over having been left in the dark. But as the light of the lanthorn invaded the hold, it revealed Isaac curled up on the decking with one ear pressed against the side of the chest, like one of Queen Anne’s physicians trying to make out whether she was still alive.

  “It is a Tompion balance-spring movement,” Isaac proclaimed, “of curiously massive construction—like a watch wrought for a giant. But well-wrought. There is no grinding in the bearings, the gears mesh cleanly.”

  “Shall we try to force it open?”

  “The art of building lethal traps into lock-boxes is far more ancient than that of constructing Infernal Devices,” Isaac returned.

  “I understand,” said Daniel, “but if the alternative is to do nothing, and be blown to bits—” But he stopped there, for Isaac’s eyelids had fluttered shut, his lips had parted, and he shifted to press his skull even harder against the cold iron frame of the chest.

  “Something is happening,” he announced. “A pin was engaged. A cam revolves—” he opened his eyes and drew back as if it had only just entered his mind that he was in danger. Daniel caught one of Isaac’s hands and assisted him to his feet—then caught him in his arms as the boat was heaved beneath their feet by a swell coming in from the sea.

  “Well,” Daniel said, “are you ready to find out what comes next?”

  “As I told you, there is some mechanism—”

  “I meant, after we die,” Daniel said.

  “For that I have long been ready,” said Isaac; and Daniel was put in mind of Whitsunday 1662, when Isaac had repented of all the sins he had ever committed, and begun a ledger of sins committed since then. Did that ledger still exist somewhere? Was it still blank?

  “And you, Daniel?” Isaac inquired.

  “I made myself ready twenty-five years ago, when I was dying of the Stone,” Daniel said, “and have oft wondered when Death would bother to come for me.”

  “Then neither of us has anything to fear,” said Isaac. Which Daniel agreed with on a purely intellectual level; but still he flinched when a hefty mechanical clunk sounded from the chest, and its lid sprang open, driven by a pair of massive springs. Daniel missed what happened next because (as he was ashamed to realize) he had jumped behind Isaac. But now he stepped clear. He let the lanthorn drop to his side. It was no longer of any use. The chest was emitting its own light. Fountains of colored sparks gushed from several metal tubes that splayed from its rim, a bit like the iron pikes that adorned London Bridge’s Great Stone Gate. Their light blinded him for a few moments. But when his eyes adjusted he saw a little carved and painted figure—a poppet—jutting from the top of the box, bobbling up and down atop a coil spring that had thrust it into the air. The poppet was adorned with a motley fool’s cap with wee bells on the ends of its tentacles, and its face had been carven into a foolish grin. Illuminated from beneath by the fizzing sparklers, it wore a ghoulish and sinister aspect.

  “Jack in the Box!” Daniel exclaimed.

  Isaac approached the chest. The poppet had sprung up out of a mound of hundreds of coins. These had avalanched over the rim of the chest when the lid had sprung open, and were still tumbling to the deck in ones and twos. One of them rolled to within inches of Isaac’s toe. He stooped and picked it up. Daniel, ever the lab-assistant, held the light near to hand. Isaac stared at it for a quarter of a minute. Daniel’s lanthorn-arm began to ache, but he dared not move.

  Finally it occurrred to Isaac to resume breathing. A tiny smacking noise came from his mouth as he re-animated his parts of speech.

  “We must get back to the Tower of London straightaway.”

  “I am all for it,” Daniel said, “but I’m afraid that the currents of the Thames and the Medway disagree with us.”

  Book 7

  Currency

  There was the usual amount of corruption, intimidation, and rioting.

  —SIR CHARLES PETRIE, DESCRIBING A PARLIAMENTARY ELECTION OF THE ERA

  Hanover

  JUNE 18 (CONTINENTAL) / 7 (ENGLISH) 1714

  Do not pity me. I am at last going to satisfy my curiosity about the origin of things, which even Leibniz could never explain to me, to understand space, infinity, being and nothingness…

  —SOPHIE CHARLOTTE, QUEEN OF PRUSSIA, ON HER DEATHBED AT AGE THIRTY-SIX

  “ONCE UPON A TIME there was a penniless orphan girl named Wilhelmina Caroline, or Caroline for short. Father was a brilliant if odd man, who died young of the smallpox, leaving Mother at the mercy of his son by an earlier marriage. But this son had inherited neither his father’s wisdom nor his love for the beautiful mother of Caroline; and, conceiving of her as a wicked stepmother, and of the infant as a future rival, he cast them out. Mother took little Caroline up in her arms and fled to a house deep in the woods. The two lived almost as Vagabonds for some years, making occasional sojourns in the houses of more fortunate relations. But when the compassion of her family was spent, Mother was left with no choice but to marry the first suitor who came along: a brute who had been hit on the head when he was a child. This fellow cared little for Caroline’s mother and less for Caroline. He relegated them to a miserable life on the fringe of his household while he openly made love to his vile, ignorant, and wicked mistress.

  “In time both stepfather and mistress died of smallpox. Not long after, Caroline’s mother also perished, leaving the little girl alone, penniless, and destitute.

  “Only one heirloom passed to Caroline upon her mother’s death, for it was the only thing that could not be separated from her by pestilence or theft: the title of Princess. Without this inheritance, she would soon have ended up in a poorhouse, a nunnery, or worse; but because, like her mother before her, she was a Princess, two wise men came and bore her away in a carriage to a palace in a distant city, where a clever and beautiful young Queen named Sophie Charlotte took her under her wing, and gave her all she needed.

  “Of all that was offered to Princess Caroline in the years that followed, two mattered above all others: first Love. For Sophie Charlotte was both an elder sister and a foster mother to her. And second Knowledge. For in the palace was a great library, to which Caroline was given a key by one of the wise men: a Doctor who was the Queen’s mentor and advisor. She spent every minute that she could in that library, doing what she loved most, which was reading books.

  “Years later, after she had grown to a woman and begun to have children of her own, Caroline was to ask the Doctor how he had been so clever as to know that she would want a key to the library. The Doctor explained: ‘As a little boy, I lost my own father, who, like your royal highness’s, was a well-read man; but later I came to know him, and to feel his presence in my life, by reading the books he left behind.’ ”

  Henrietta Braithwaite trailed off hereabouts, and shaped her brow into a tasteful and courtly little frown. Her finger plowed a crooked trail back up the terrain of the last paragraph, like a pig’s snout rooting for a truffle. “Rather fine to this point, your royal highness, but the story becomes confused when this Doctor enters into it, and you begin to jump back and forth between tenses, and tell things in his voice—pray, how does a Doctor enter into a færy-tale anyhow? Up to here, it’s all palaces, stepmothers, and houses in the woods, which fit. But a Doctor—?”

  “Es ist ja ein Märchen—”

  “In English if you please, your royal highness.”

  “It is indeed a færy-tale, but it is also my story,” said Princess Wilhelmina Caroline of Brandenburg-Ansbach, “and my story has a Doctor in it.”

  She glanced out a window. Today’s English lesson was in a salon of the Leine Schloß, on the side that faced away from the river. The view was across a small paved courtyard that spilled onto a busy Hanover street. Leibniz’s house was only two or three doors down—near enough that she could shout a philosophical inqu
iry out the window and half expect to get an answer back.

  “The next chapter will treat of persons, and happenings, not found in færy-tales,” Caroline continued, after a pause to get the English words queued up in the right order. “For what I have written on the leaves you hold in your hands only goes up to when Sophie Charlotte died—or, as some say, was poisoned by the Prussian court.”

  Mrs. Braithwaite now turned in a workmanlike effort to conceal her horror and loathing of the fact that Princess Caroline had given voice to this thought. It was not that this Englishwoman had any particular love for the courtiers who infested the Charlottenburg. Mrs. Braithwaite, wife of an English Whig, would have taken Sophie Charlotte’s side in just about any imaginable debate—supposing she had the kidney to choose sides. What troubled her was Caroline’s forthrightness. But the ability to say things directly, and get away with it, was a birthright that came along with the title of Princess.

  “It has indeed been an eventful nine years since that dolorous day,” Mrs. Braithwaite allowed, “but it would still read much like a færy-tale to the common reader, if you but changed a few words. The Doctor could become a wizard, the aged Electress a wise Queen—no one in England would object to that change!”

  “Except for all those Jacobites who want Sophie dead,” Caroline returned.

  This was a bit like sticking her leg out in front of Mrs. Braithwaite when she was trying to tiptoe, skirts hiked up, down a turd-strewn alley. The Englishwoman faltered and pinkened but did not come to a full stop. As everyone in Hanover, including Caroline’s husband, had noted, she was the very soul of poise and grace. “The other characters and events of your last nine years—the handsome and brave young Prince, the long war against an evil King, a lost kingdom across the sea, rightfully yours, which sends emissaries—”

  “Emissaries,” Caroline said, “but other busy persons too, not fit for færy-tales at all.”

  Mrs. Henrietta Braithwaite, Caroline’s dame du palais and English tutor, was also the official mistress of Caroline’s husband. Caroline did not really object to her “brave young Prince” having sex all the time with the wife of an Englishman—and a rather dodgy Englishman at that. On the contrary. Sex with the Electoral Prince George Augustus had been mildly pleasant more often than it had been downright painful. But most of the time, like trimming one’s fingernails, it had been a body-chore that no longer seemed gross after it had been done a few hundred times. Four children—one Prince, three Princesses—had ensued so far, and there would probably be more, provided George Augustus did not spill all of his seed into Henrietta Braithwaite. The arrival of this Englishwoman at the Court of Hanover two years ago, and her speedy promotion to maîtresse en titre of Young Hanover Brave (as Caroline’s husband was styled by Whiggish Brits), had relieved Caroline of one of the less fascinating tasks that she had to put up with as a wife and a Princess, and given her more time to sleep at night and to read during the day. So there was not anything like rancor between her and Henrietta.

  But relations between one who was a Princess and one who was not were governed, not by what the Princess was really feeling and thinking, but rather by certain forms that were supposed to ensure the steady functioning of the Court, and, by extension, the sæcular world. By those lights, Caroline—who was married in the sight of God to George Augustus, and who had been endowed by her mother with the incredible and priceless faculty of generating new Princes and Princesses—stood in the same wise, to the likes of Henrietta Braithwaite, as Hera to some dung-flecked shepherdess who had lately been rolling in the clover with Zeus. Caroline was expected to remind Mrs. Braithwaite of her inferiority from time to time, and Mrs. Braithwaite was expected to receive it meekly and submissively. As how could she not, for the grandchildren of Caroline would reign over the British Empire while the Braithwaites would spend their lives losing at cards and killing themselves with gin in mildewy London salons.

  “It is with the greatest pleasure that I shall read the next chapter of your royal highness’s færy-tale,” Mrs. Braithwaite predicted. “In this Household it is an oft-told tale that when your royal highness was stricken with the smallpox, two years after your wedding, his royal highness George Augustus spurned the counsel of the physicians, and placed his own life at risk to sit by his young bride’s bedside and hold her hand.”

  “It is true. George did not leave my bedside until I was well.”

  “To me—as to every other woman who can never hope to be the object of such pure adoration—that is a færy-tale we would fain read over and over, until the pages crumbled,” said Mrs. Braithwaite.

  “I may write it then,” answered Princess Caroline, “or I may keep it to myself, as a thing rightfully mine, and not to be shared with any who does not merit it.”

  Some two years earlier, at a courtly soirée that had brought many noble persons together, Princess Caroline had overheard another Princess saying something rude about Sophie. The words that had passed between them were long since forgotten. What was remembered was that Caroline had thrown a punch at the other Princess. It happened to land on the jaw. The other Princess was carried out of the room, feigning unconsciousness.

  It was not really in Caroline’s nature to do some of the cruel things that a Princess was required to do. But as her færy-tale had mentioned, she well knew that being a Princess was the only thing that had kept her from ending up as a child whore in a Saxon mining-camp. So to pretend otherwise—to play with the ancient laws of Princesshood—was idle.

  Suddenly weights were falling and springs unwinding in the belfry of the big old church across the square from Leibniz’s house. A large piece of metal was mercilessly pounding on a bell, which stood still for it, quivering and moaning. Here in the Leine Schloß it was time for Caroline to leave off of the ritual drubbing of Mrs. Braithwaite, and to go out on her daily excursion to Herrenhausen. A skirmish of curtseys got the Englishwoman out of the Presence without violating any etiquette-laws.

  Minutes later—having nipped into several nurseries and schoolrooms along the way to kiss her little Prince and Princesses good-bye—Caroline was in the courtyard of the Leine Schloß telling the stable-hands that they had got it all wrong. Herr Schwartz, the retainer who was in charge of the stables, had reached an age when he phant’sied he could foretell the weather by the pains in his joints. Today, his hip and his elbow were united in prophesying rain. Accordingly, he had given orders for the coach-and-four to be made ready. But Caroline’s senses assured her that it was a perfect sunny day, and too sultry to be pent up in a wooden box. So she chided Herr Schwartz, in a playful way, and ordered that her favorite mare be saddled. The mount was led out, ready to go, before she had finished uttering the command—Herr Schwartz knew her well enough. She hitched up her skirts, ascended a little Barock stair, and perched on the saddle. A few moments later she was riding out onto the street without so much as a look back. She knew that a small escort would be not far behind; or if it weren’t, the persons responsible for deploying her escort would be sent down in disgrace and replaced with others.

  Anyway, the Leine Schloß was not the sort of thing any cultivated person would take the trouble to look back at. The hundred or so paces that separated it from Leibniz’s house vaulted an architectural chasm. Leibniz’s house was much bigger than a bachelor really needed, because he cohabited with a library. It was one of those Hapsburg wedding-cakes, thickly frosted in high-relief friezes of queer and heinous goings-on from the Bible. Next to it, the Leine Schloß need never worry about accusations of gaudiness. In a continent that was now freckled with more or less embarrassing knock-offs of Versailles, the Leine Schloß was Proud to be Dowdy. It was trapped between the sluggish Leine on one side and an ordinary Hanover street on the other, and so it would never have gardens or even a decent forecourt. To be sure, embedded in the heart of the Schloß was a single, stupefyingly gaudy room called the Rittersaal, built by Sophie’s husband thirty years ago after Leibniz had come back from Italy bearing evid
ence that he was at least as Royal as his Sophie. But no common person riding along the street or floating down the river past the Schloß would dream that anything colorful, ornate, decorative, or lively was contained in those walls. It was a mashing-together of several blocky, four-storey wings ventilated by many rectangular windows, all of a common size, and arrayed in rows and columns. The first thing Princess Caroline saw every day, when she opened her eyes, parted her bed-curtains, and glanced toward her window to check the weather, was two intersecting stone walls of window-grid, marching off in an infinite logarithmic progression.

  Merely seeing it would put Leibniz into a funk. What was only boring to Caroline was troubling to him, because he felt partly responsible. The Doctor had grown up in the aftermath of the Thirty Years’ War when many towns did not have buildings at all—only ruins and shanties! The structures that survived were round-shouldered half-timbered things, as same and yet as various as a basket of apples. But the buildings of today were informed by geometry; which meant that each one betrayed the particular Idea of geometry that its architect had drilled on in school. A hundred years ago this might have meant parabolas, ellipses, surfaces of revolution, involutes and evolutes, and parallel curves. Now it meant Cartesian rectilinear coordinates—the cruel gridiron to which all of those soaring arcs had been lashed fast by the toiling algebraists. A plaything for hares had fallen among the tortoises. The non-helpless minority of Christendom—those who could read, who could travel, who were not starving—had (Leibniz brooded) got only the most superficial notion of what had been happening in Natural Philosophy and, rather than going to the trouble of actually understanding it, had fastened on to the Cartesian grid as a relic or fetish of enlightenment. A result was grid-buildings. Leibniz could not bear to look at them because more than anyone else he was responsible for Cartesian coordinates. He who had launched his career with an epiphany in a rose-garden! So he and Caroline tended to meet, not in the waffle iron of the Leine Schloß but out beyond the ramparts along the gently curving banks of the Leine, or at Sophie’s garden.