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

by Neal Stephenson

  “Tell his majesty that if I had a shovel I’d go plant some right now,” Daniel said hopelessly.

  The King, having been made aware of this, blinked and nodded. He had got a distant look now in his eyes, which reflected the green light of the future turnip-patch. Daniel could almost see the man’s jowls fill up with saliva as he envisioned a grand turnip-feast in a year’s time.

  Ravenscar was chuckling. “How your shovel-work would discomfit those prancing, Frenchified Tory courtiers,” he remarked, “who, seeing such an excellent plot of land as that, have not the wit to imagine any use for it save to parade about on their gaudy chevals.”

  “The Marquis of Ravenscar,” von Bothmar explained, and Daniel now had to avert his gaze from the not especially appetizing spectacle of Roger planting a smooch on George’s hand.

  When Daniel felt it was safe to look back, the King seemed to have been put in mind of something. He was casting about for an eye-line to the Duke of Marlborough, and presently got one—Marlborough was one of the few actual English people suffered to stand anywhere near the King of England. Much as iron filings stand up and get organized in the presence of a magnet, certain facts and memories that had been scattered round the King’s periwig came into alignment when his visual cortex was stimulated by the face of Marlborough. He harrumphed and began to burp out some phrases having to do with a soirée and a Vulkan that were translated into prose, and into English, by Bothmar. “His majesty has heard from my lord Marlborough that the Duke very much enjoyed your recent party, at which the famous Volcano was made to erupt. His majesty would fain witness this amusement. Not now. Later. But my lord Marlborough spoke well of how the Royal Mint has been looked after, and of the quality of the coinage. His majesty will require good men to look after the Treasury. Good men—not a good man. For such is the importance of this task that he has decided to change the tradition of appointing a Lord Treasurer, and place that office in commission. His majesty is pleased to nominate my lord Ravenscar First Lord of the Treasury. And he is also pleased to nominate Daniel Waterhouse a member of that same Commission.”

  All of which came as news to Daniel—though Roger had been winking at and elbowing him even more than usual in recent days, which ought to have given him a clew.

  Rather a lot of bowing and scraping occurred round now, as tremendous gratitude had to be expressed, et cetera. Daniel happened to glance Marlborough’s way, and caught the Duke glaring at Roger. Roger, who had peripheral vision subtending a full three hundred and sixty degrees, was well aware of it; it was some sort of arranged cue. “What will be my lord’s first act as First Lord of the Treasury?” inquired Bothmar, who, too, had taken part in these silent, fevered exchanges.

  “Why, to make a clean start of his majesty’s coinage!” Roger answered. “Not that there was anything wrong with that of Queen Anne—this is well established. It is more of a procedural matter—some would call it superficial pomp, but we English have a weakness for that sort of thing—there is this special box, called the Pyx, which we keep in the Tower, all locked up, and put samples of the new coins into it as they are produced. And from time to time his majesty’s council will say, ‘Let’s have a look at the old Pyx, shall we,’ just as a routine precaution, as gunners try their powder before a battle. And so out comes the Pyx, and it is carried in a sort of solemn procession to the Star Chamber at Westminster where a furnace has been set up for the occasion, and the Pyx is unlocked in the presence of his majesty’s Lords of the Council and the coins are taken out and assayed by goldsmiths from the City and compared against a trial plate, which is, as a rule, kept locked up in a crypt below Westminster Abbey along with a lot of old saints’ bones and whatnot.” Here the new King’s attention began to drift very noticeably and Roger seemed to come aware that he might as well be a witch-doctor dancing about in a fright wig and a carven mask. “Never mind, it is quite the rite, and it gives the City men a warm feeling. And when they have such a feeling it is rather a good thing for your majesty’s commerce.”

  Bothmar had taken to raising his eyebrows at Roger so violently that it seemed they might fly off and stick to the ceiling. “Anyway,” Roger concluded, “time to clean out the Pyx! It is half full of most excellent coins bearing the stamp of the late Queen Anne, R.I.P. One Charles White has been looking after it—you may inquire among others as to the man’s character. In fact, you’ll probably meet him today!”

  “In about ten minutes,” said Bothmar, and glanced over toward the door. “That is, if you’ll finish.” Daniel couldn’t help following Bothmar’s gaze, and had his day ruined by the sight of Mr. White, just inside the threshold, staring at him interestedly.

  Roger polished it off thus: “To put to rest any possible confusion, I say, before we begin throwing new King George guineas into the Pyx, and mixing them up with Anne’s, why, let’s have a Trial of the Pyx, empty the thing out, kill the rumors, and start off your majesty’s reign with a lot of sparkling new coins.”

  “For a while the schedule is terribly busy—”

  “Not to worry,” Roger assured him, “the Mint would not go into production anyway until after the coronation, which I’m told is scheduled for the twentieth of October. Give us, then, say, a week for the festivities to subside…”

  “Sir Isaac Newton suggests Friday, the twenty-ninth.”

  “Worst possible day, I am afraid. That is a Hanging-Day at Tyburn. Impossible to move.”

  “Sir Isaac is aware of the fact,” said Bothmar, “but says it is good, because on that day the Coiner shall be executed.”

  “I see. Yes. Yes. On one day—practically at the same moment—the Pyx shall be put to the trial, Sir Isaac shall be vindicated, and the most notorious of all coiners shall be put to death before an audience of, oh, half a million. Practicalities aside, Sir Isaac’s proposal is, come to think of it, very clever.”

  “Well,” Bothmar pointed out, “he is a genius.”

  “That he is!”

  “And,” Bothmar added, “his majesty thinks highly of Sir Isaac’s philosophickal prowess.”

  “Did Sir Isaac have an opinion about the turnips?” Daniel inquired, but Roger stepped on his foot and Bothmar politely omitted to translate it.

  “So,” said Bothmar, “unless you object—”

  “Not in the least! Friday, October the twenty-ninth, it is! Get the Privy Council to wave a quill over it, and we shall make ready for a Trial of the Pyx!”

  ROGER AND DANIEL were permitted to stay and mingle. But Daniel hated mingling worse than anything. He launched a desperate escape attempt via the terrace in the back, but could not work out how to get round to the Thames side and flag down a passing Ship without making a spectacle of himself. He stared across the Lawn and pretended to philosophize about the turnip farm. When he felt this pretense might be wearing a bit thin, he stared up the hill at the Observatory and wondered if Flamsteed was awake yet, and whether he’d raise objections if Daniel went up there to tinker with the equipment. This too was wearing thin when haply he came across that old last resort of introverts at cocktail parties: a document that he could pretend to be utterly absorbed in. It was a broadside, lying face down on the stone pavement of the terrace with gentlemen’s boot-prints all over it. Daniel raked it up over his toe with the tip of his walking-stick and from there was able to coax it up into a hand, and flip it over.

  At the top of the sheet were two portraits of equal size, arrayed next to each other. One looked like an ink-blot. It was a miserable rendering of a black-haired black man in a black suit with two white eyes poking out. Beneath was a caption: Dappa as rendered in April 1714 by the renown’d portraitist, Charles White. The other was a rather good engraving of an African gentleman with silvery dreadlocks and a beard, dusky, of course, but with a range of skin tones suggested by the hatchures and other tricks of the engraver’s art. It was captioned DAPPA as rendered in September 1714 by—, and here was given the name of a highly regarded artist. Looking more closely Daniel saw, in th
e background of the picture, a barred window, through which could be espied the skyline of London rising above the Thames. It was the view from the Liberty of the Clink.

  The title was ADDITIONAL REMARKS on FAME by DAPPA. Daniel began to read it. It took the form of a sugary and, Daniel suspected, sarcastic encomium to the Duke of Marlborough.

  “That was inadvertent,” remarked a man who had been standing nearby, smoking a pipe. From the corner of his eye, Daniel had already marked this chap as a military man, for he was wearing an officer’s uniform. Reckoning him to be a fellow non-Mingler, he had had the simple decency to ignore him. Now this general or colonel or whatever he was had shown the poor form to irrupt in on Daniel while he was pretending to read something so as not to have to talk to anyone. Daniel looked up and saw, first, that the facings, piping, cuffs, &c. of the uniform were those of the King’s Own Black Torrent Guard. Second, that this was Marlborough.

  “What was inadvertent, my lord?”

  “When you came to call on me at my levée, just after I returned to this city, a month and a half ago, I had been reading some of this chap’s work,” said Marlborough. “Must have made some remark. Those other chaps must have gone forth and spread the rumor that I was a devotee of Mr. Dappa’s work. It seems he has only become more popular since. People have sent him money—he lives now in the finest apartment that the Clink has to offer, and strolls on a private balcony there, and is called on by fops and whatnot. He says in the document you are holding in your hand there, that he has all but become a white man as a result, and presents these portraits as evidence. He still wears chains; but those are less restrictive than the chains of the mind that bind some to out-moded ideas such as Slavery. So he deems himself a Gentleman now, and has begun to place donations in escrow, in the hopes that he may purchase Charles White as soon as the price drops low enough.”

  “My word! You practically have the thing memorized!” Daniel exclaimed.

  “I have had to spend many hours of late waiting for his majesty to wax talkative. Dappa writes well.”

  “You have command of your old regiment again, I gather?”

  “Yes. The details are quite unfathomable. Others are toiling away at them. Colonel Barnes has been located, and put in charge of rounding up certain elements who were scattered during the amusements of the summer. I am glad I was not here. It all would have vexed me to no end. I understand congratulations are in order for you.”

  “Thank you,” said Daniel. “I have no idea what are the duties of a member of the Treasury Commission—”

  “Keep an eye on my lord Ravenscar. See to it that the Trial of the Pyx goes rather well.”

  “That, my lord, hangs on what is in the Pyx.”

  “Yes. I was meaning to ask you. Does anyone really know what’s in the bloody thing?”

  “Perhaps he does,” said Daniel, and inclined his head toward a nearby window. A red-wigged gentleman was in there, mingling with Germans, but glancing frequently at them.

  “Charles White,” said Marlborough, “is, it’s true, still in command of the King’s Messengers, who pretend to guard the Pyx. I am pleased to let you know that they are now surrounded, and carefully observed, by the King’s Own Black Torrent Guard. So Mr. White cannot make any more mischief with the Pyx. And Colonel Barnes has related to me that White was downriver with you and Sir Isaac Newton at the moment that the Pyx was molested in April.”

  “Very well,” said Daniel, since, plainly enough, Marlborough had figured this all out on his own: “The only one who really knows what is in the Pyx is Jack Shaftoe.”

  “Hmm. If that is the case, then I am astonished that there is not a queue before Newgate Prison quite as long as that yonder.”

  “Perhaps there is,” Daniel said.

  White came out on the terrace and bowed. “My lord,” he said to Marlborough. “Doctor Waterhouse.”

  “Mr. White,” they both said. Then they all took turns saying, “God save the King.”

  “I trust you’ll be even more busy than usual,” White said to Daniel, “now that you’ve two Mints to look after.”

  “Two Mints? I do not understand, Mr. White. There is only one Mint that I know of.”

  “Oh, perhaps I was misinformed,” said White, mock-confused. “People are saying there is another.”

  “Do you mean Jack Shaftoe’s coining house in Surrey? The Tory Mint?” Daniel asked, and let the handbill snap in the breeze, hoping that White would notice it. He did.

  “You really ought to have better sources of information. Don’t read that rubbish. Listen to what Persons of Quality are saying.”

  Marlborough turned his back, which was a rude thing to do; but the way this was going, it would soon become a duelling matter unless the Duke pretended he wasn’t hearing it.

  “And what are Persons of Quality saying, Mr. White?”

  “That Ravenscar is coining, too.”

  “People are accusing the Marquis of Ravenscar of committing High Treason? Seems audacious.”

  “Everyone knows he raised a private army. ’Tis a small step from that, to a private Mint.”

  “Bored toffs in drawing-rooms may believe any phant’sies they please! Such accusations require at least some evidence.”

  “They say that evidence may be found in abundance,” said White, “at Clerkenwell Court, and at Bridewell, and in the cellars of the Bank of England. Good day.” And he left. Which was fortunate for Daniel. A few seconds ago he had been amused at the sheer idiocy of the notion that Roger had been coining. Now he had become too flustered to speak.

  “What was that about?” Marlborough very much wanted to know.

  “It is a philosophical project I have been undertaking with Leibniz,” said Daniel, “that, to make a long story—” and he gave a sketchy account of the thing to the Duke, explaining the movement of the gold from Clerkenwell to Bridewell to the Bank to Hanover. “Someone seems to have gathered rather a lot of information about it,” Daniel concluded, “and spreads now a twisted version according to which it is a coining operation.”

  “We know who is spreading it—we have just been conversing with him,” said Marlborough. “It matters not where the rumor originated.” To this Daniel said nothing, for a sickening awareness had come over him that this might all have originated with Isaac.

  “What does matter—very much—is that two members of the new Treasury Commission are mixed up in it,” said Marlborough.

  “Mixed up in what? A science experiment?”

  “In something that looks a bit dodgy.”

  “I can’t help it if it looks dodgy to an ignoramus!”

  “But you can help that you are mixed up in it.”

  “What do you mean, my lord?”

  “I mean that your experiment is at an end, sir. It must stop. And the moment it has stopped, responsible persons, trusted by the King and the City alike, must go to this Clerkenwell Court, and to Bridewell, and into the vaults of the Bank, and inspect them, and find nothing of what Mr. White has been talking of.”

  “It could be stopped at any time,” Daniel said, “but to wind it up properly and cast away the residue is impossible in a day, or a week.”

  “How long will it take then?”

  “October twenty-ninth,” said Daniel, “is the date that has just been set for the Trial of the Pyx, the execution of Jack the Coiner, and the elimination of all doubt as to the soundness of his majesty’s coinage. No later than that date, my lord, you’ll be able to visit the places mentioned with as many inspectors as you might care to bring along with you—including even Sir Isaac himself—and you shall find nothing save Templar-tombs at Clerkenwell, hemp-pounders at Bridewell, and Coin of the Realm at the Bank.”

  “Done,” said the Duke of Marlborough, and strode away, pausing to bow to a young lady crossing the terrace alone: the Princess of Wales.

  “Dr. Waterhouse,” Caroline said, “I need something from you.”

  Roger Comstock’s House

  3:3
0 A.M., FOUR DAYS LATER (22 SEPTEMBER 1714)

  DANIEL HAD BARELY GOT in the front door when the most exquisite body in Britain was pressed up against him, hard. He wondered, not for the first time, how the world might have been different had said body been united in one person with her uncle’s mind. Not much was separating him from Catherine Barton; having been rousted by a most urgent message, he’d come over in his nightshirt. She was wearing something diaphanous that he only glimpsed in the fraction of a second before she impacted on him. She smelled good: not an easy thing to accomplish in 1714. Daniel began to get his first erection since—since—well, since the last time he’d seen Catherine Barton. It was most inappropriate, as she was distraught. She was most certainly the sort of girl who would notice—but not the sort who would take it the wrong way.

  She took him by the hand and led him back through the courtyard, round the fountain, and into the Ballroom, which smelled of oil, and was eerily lit up by the white-green glow of kaltes feuer: Phosphorus. A new thing had been added to the place. Seen from the entrance it looked like the rounded prow of a ship that happened to be made of silver, wreathed and festooned with garlands smitten of gold. Some manner of bas-relief Classical frieze had been molded into it. A sort of ram projected up and out of the thing, explicitly Priapic; Daniel recoiled and edged round this, for its tip was like to have caught him in the face. Iron rings, straps, &c., dangled from it. Coming now round the side of the object he discovered that it sat between a pair of wheels, made of wood but covered in gold leaf. This solved the mystery of how so heavy an object could have been moved into the ballroom. It was nothing less than a chariot—a huge one, eight feet wide. It was, he realized, a Chariot of the Gods. Coming finally around the open back of it, which faced towards the Volcano only a few yards away, he saw that the whole floor of the vehicle was a tongue-shaped expanse of Bed: as wide as the Chariot and ten feet long, upholstered in crimson silk and bestrewn with furs, and silk- and velvet-covered pillows in diverse glandular shapes. Sprawled in the middle of it was Roger Comstock, the Marquis of Ravenscar. A laurel wreath was awry on his bald head. Mercifully, his purple toga had not been altogether torn off, but the middle of it was poked up, producing a Turkish tent effect that echoed the shape of the nearby Volcano. But the Volcano, mechanism that it was, still pumped away faithfully, its hidden Screw sending spurt after spurt of Oil of Phosphorus down its slopes. Whereas Roger was, or had been, animated by what Newton would call a Vegetative Spirit, which had quite fled his body. The toga-lifter was rigor mortis. He’d have to be buried in a special coffin.