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

by Neal Stephenson

  “MR. THREADER,” the butler announced.

  Daniel looked up, and turned around.

  Mr. Threader stood in the laboratory doorway, hat in hand, decidedly cringing, looking about the room as if expecting Sir Isaac Newton to spring out from behind a glowing furnace and turn him into a newt.

  “He is not here,” Daniel said gently. “He is at his niece’s house.”

  “Recuperating—or so ’tis rumored—from an attaque of some sort—?” Mr. Threader, emboldened, stepped over the threshold. The butler closed the door behind him and walked away.

  “We shall help him recuperate, you and I. Please, please, come in!” Daniel beckoned with one, then both hands. Mr. Threader obeyed with extreme reluctance. He was not accustomed to Alchemical laboratories. The glowing furnaces, the smells, the open flames, the jars and retorts with their cryptic labels, were all vaguely threatening to him. Seeing as much, Daniel felt, for a moment, what a second-rate Alchemist must feel when a gullible person ventures into his shop: a smug self-satisfaction in the bamboozlement and bewilderment of one’s fellow-man, and a perverse urge to milk the wretch for all he is worth.

  But alas, he had other errands, and must needs put Mr. Threader at ease.

  “It must all seem quite foreign to you. I was fortunate: I was chumming with Isaac during the years that he turned our domicile into one great smoking Lab. So, all the stuff you see around you here was moved in to our house one bit at a time, and I could ask Isaac what it was, and how to use it.” Daniel laughed. “I am more at home here than I should care to admit!”

  Mr. Threader permitted himself a dry chuckle. “I must say that you look quite at home here, which is quite amusing after all of the unkind remarks you have made about Alchemy.”

  Daniel wondered what Mr. Threader would make of it if Daniel were to let him know that tomorrow he, Daniel, might be the most eminent Alchemist since King Solomon went in to the East. But he shook it off as being too uncanny to speak of just now.

  “Is Sir Isaac expected to be in any condition to attend the Trial?”

  “He would not miss it for anything.”

  “It is good to know his condition improves.”

  Daniel said nothing. Isaac’s condition was not improving; he suspected that the gaol-fever was creating a lesion on Isaac’s heart. As a boy Isaac had tried to make perpetual motion machines, seeing in them a model of the heart. But Isaac’s heart, Daniel suspected, was about to give out. Men had not been able to fashion perpetual motion machines because men were mechanics who only knew how to work with inert matter. Hearts pumped longer than any machine could, because the matter of which they were made—or so Alchemists supposed—was suffused with the vegetative spirit.

  “Let’s make some money!” Daniel said. “Did you bring the molds?”

  What Daniel had mentioned was so perilous that Mr. Threader, by way of an answer, could only flinch. “Do you have a bit of gold?” he returned.

  Daniel flourished his right hand, then pulled off the gold ring and tossed it without ceremony into a small crucible. Picking this up with a pair of tongs, he made to thrust it into a small, keening, and radiating furnace. “Is it fine gold?” Mr. Threader wanted to know.

  “It is finer than fine,” Daniel said, and maneuvered the crucible into the glowing heart of the furnace. “It is heavier than pure gold.”

  Mr. Threader blinked. “I’m afraid that is quite impossible.”

  “You may verify it in a minute or two.”

  “How can such a thing be?”

  “A divine quintessence fills its pores, which, in ordinary gold, are vacant cavities.”

  Mr. Threader stared at him, to see if Daniel was having him on; but Daniel himself was not certain. In the end Mr. Threader believed it, not because of weighing the gold or because he found Alchemy convincing, but because of the political, the human logic of the thing. “I say! I say! You want me to—to—you are up to something! Aren’t you!”

  “We are all up to something,” Daniel said, and gave Mr. Threader what was meant to be a chilly look. He was afraid that the other was about to launch into some self-righteous peroration. But Mr. Threader had the decency to stifle himself.

  “You have been chosen by the Jury of the Citizens to serve in the rôle of Pesour tomorrow, have you not?”

  “Dr. Waterhouse, you are strangely well-informed about what is supposed to have been a secret, and so I shall not make a fool of myself denying it.”

  “You are, therefore, the adversary—the challenger—of the Master of the Mint.”

  “That is how the avarice of the Mint-men has been kept in check since ancient days,” Mr. Threader said agreeably. “It is the goldsmiths’ duty and their honour.”

  “It poses a curious conflict of interests,” Daniel remarked, “when one considers that Sir Isaac had it in his power, a few weeks ago, to send you to Tyburn along with Jack Shaftoe, but elected not to.”

  Mr. Threader only made a seething noise at that, which was nearly lost in like noises emitted by the furnace. In August he had been pitiable, abject, almost a little disgusting. But now he’d got used to the whole affair’s having been swept under the rug, and considered it very bad manners indeed for Daniel to have revisited it. Daniel was distracted now, for a moment, by the curious sight of the ring beginning to melt: most of it was yet unchanged, but where it touched the walls of the crucible it was sagging and ponding.

  “The only ones who can testify against me are Jack and his boys,” Mr. Threader reminded him. “Jack has not implicated me, and will be dead in a few hours. The boys have escaped—”

  “I know,” Daniel said, “I broke them out of prison. I know where they are. Got affidavits from them, before they left the country. Witnessed and sealed affidavits stating that you took part in coining. Speaking of which, I do believe we are just about ready for that mold.”

  Mr. Threader reached into his coat-pocket. “To own this thing is a death-warrant,” he said, “but you already have mine in your hip pocket, it seems, and so this is redundant.” And he took out a cylinder of clay, a bit larger in diameter than a guinea coin, and as long as a finger. In the middle it had been broken or chopped into two halves that had been rejoined with slip and fired to make the thing whole. He lay this on its side on the workbench and then rolled it until a tapered hole, like a tiny funnel, came round to the top. Then he chocked it between a pair of fire-bricks. “Be my guest,” he offered, “but this is hardly the way to forge a proper guinea!”

  “It need not be all that convincing,” Daniel said, “as we are going to chop it up anyway.”

  Mr. Threader was startled, then baffled by this remark; then he understood, and nodded. Meanwhile Daniel had taken up the tongs again, and reached in to the furnace. The crucible came out a-glow. Daniel swung it round over the bench-top and let the tongs rest on one of the fire-bricks, to steady himself. Then he twisted his wrists. Liquid fire spilled out of the crucible. A bead or two went astray, but most of it went down the hole in the clay cylinder.

  “There,” said Mr. Threader, “we are in the same boat now—you have just committed High Treason!”

  “It is an old failing of my family,” Daniel admitted. He tapped the last drips of gold from the crucible; they beaded on the table and instantly congealed. He set the tongs and crucible aside, and closed the furnace door. With a pair of tweezers he picked up every bead of gold that had gone astray and dropped them into a little cup. Then he took up the clay mold, which was warm, and snapped it in half. A guinea fell out of it and spun on the table. As Mr. Threader had warned him, it was not a very good guinea: the gold had not evenly filled the mold, so parts of it were indistinct. The edging was no good at all, and it had a bubble trapped in it. A prong stuck out of its rim where the filling-hole had been. Daniel flicked it into a bowl of water to cool it down, then plucked it out with his bare fingers and attacked it with a pair of heavy shears. His hands almost were not equal to this task, and he thought for a moment that he might hav
e to send for Saturn. But Mr. Threader, warming to the task, wrapped his hands around Daniel’s and they squeezed together, grunting like swine, and finally there was a snap and two halves of the guinea went flying opposite directions. Daniel had so arranged things that one of these halves included the prong and most of the other gross imperfections. This he placed in the bowl with the other surplus. But the other half was more presentable. Daniel fetched this off the floor and brought it back, and they halved it again, and again—a little bit like cutting a Piece of Eight into reales, except they made the bits smaller and quite irregular—reducing the false half-guinea into a rubble of mangled shards. When Mr. Threader deemed that they had a suitable range of shapes and sizes, they raked it all into a scale-pan and weighed it—both men jotting down the number.

  And then both agreed, without having to say it, that they were finished. Daniel saw the visitor out; Mr. Threader had taken a sedan chair so that no one might see the Pesour paying a call on the Master of the Mint, something that would have seemed very fishy indeed.

  “Did you—somehow—influence the Jury to choose me?” Mr. Threader wanted to know.

  “I used what influence I could muster.”

  “Because of my guilty conscience.”

  “No, in truth, any member of the Jury probably could have been swayed, one way or another,” Daniel said. “I thought of you because of your skill at prestidigitation. And I hope you can do tricks with coin-snips as well as with whole guineas.”

  “Most of it is a matter of misdirecting the audience’s attention—less dexterity is involved than is commonly supposed. But I shall practice with these tonight.”

  “Then I shall practice making a distracting spectacle of myself,” Daniel promised him.

  “Then you shall be up all night long, for it does not come naturally to you.”

  “I’ll be up all night anyway,” Daniel said, “doing all kinds of unnatural things.”

  Friday

  29 October 1714

  Westminster Abbey

  MORNING

  HE GETS THERE much too early because he overestimated the Hanging-Traffic. So many people want to see Jack Shaftoe drawn and quartered that everyone has gone early to line the route. Daniel need only walk out of Sir Isaac Newton’s town-house, turn his back on the dim roar that resounds against the vault of heaven to the north—a sort of Aurora Borealis of Crowd-clamour—and stroll for a few minutes on quiet streets, and there he is in the Broad Sanctuary: a sweep of open ground splayed out north and west of the Abbey.

  He must be a very old and strange man indeed to be approaching a stained Pile such as this one on official business. So peculiar is his errand that he falters, knowing not which entrance to use, which presbyter to accost. But the place is all out of kilter anyway because laborers are still taking down the galleries and bleachers put up for the Coronation. Cockney and Irish demolition-men are strutting out the doors with great rough-sawn planks on their shoulders. There is nary a churchman in sight. Daniel elects to go in the west entrance, which seems a bit less congested than the north with bulky blokes and baulks of wood. Moments later he is struck to find himself walking over the stone where Tompion was planted eleven months ago. It being a great peculiarity of this æra that a horologist should be given a resting-place that one or two generations before would have been reserved for a knight or a general.

  He puts Tompion’s bones behind him, ducks beneath a moving plank, and gets out in to the cloisters. This is a square courtyard framed in a quadrilateral of roofed stone galleries, but otherwise open to the elements. Those elements today consist of raw bright autumn sun and cold turbulent air. Daniel shoves hands in pockets, hunches, and stiff-legs it to the next corner, turns right, follows the East Cloister to its end. There on the left wall is an unmarked medieval fortress-door, massive planks hinged, strapped, gridded, and pierced with black iron. Diverse ancient hand-crafted padlocks depend from its hasp-system like medals on the breast of a troll-general. Daniel has a key to only one of them, and no one else is here. He is freezing. Men half your age and double your weight have been slain on these wastes by Extremity of Cold. The cloister blocks the eastern sun but does nothing to shelter him from the breeze, which is coming out of the northwest, striking down into the Cloisters and nearly pinning him to this door. So he back-tracks a few paces and passes through a doorway that does happen to be open. This gets him into a corridor that is out of the wind, but cold and dark. Light beckons at its other end, and he can sense warmth on his face, so he goes that way for several paces, and is rewarded, and astonished, to find himself all alone in the most beautiful room in Britain.

  Any other Brit would have known in advance that this was the Chapter House. But because of his Revolutionary up-bringing, this was the least likely place on the Isle for Daniel ever to have set foot—until this day. It is a great octagon whose walls seem to consist entirely of stained glass—a structural impossibility given that the vault overhead consists of numberless tons of stone. It is all held up, he reasons, by pillars at the eight vertices, and a ninth one in the center of the room, so tall and slender it seems doomed to buckle. But it has stayed up for something like four hundred years, and only the most bitter and skeptickal Empiricist would inspect it with such a jaded eye. The place is not going to collapse on him. Those windows are harvesting the sunlight and warming the place. Daniel falls into an orbit around the central pillar. Some of his lessons are coming back to him, and he recalls that this was where the King’s Council, and later Parliament, convened until the monks got sick of their hollering and kicked them out and across the street to Westminster Palace. From the way one old man’s footfalls and breathing echo around the place, Daniel can’t imagine how raucous it must have been when it was filled with politicians.

  The brilliant windows capture his attention during the first few orbits, but later his eyes are drawn to the wooden panels below them, at head level. These are painted with scenes that Daniel recognizes, almost without even having to look at them, as the Revelation of that scary lunatick St. John the Divine. The Four Horsemen on their color-coded steeds, the Great Beast spitting terrified Saints, misguided humans queueing up to receive the Mark of the Beast. The Whore drunk on the Blood of the butchered Saints, and later being burned for it. Christ leading the armies of Heaven on a white horse. Much of this is so faded that it can only be made out by one such as Daniel who had to memorize it when he was a boy, so that, like an actor standing backstage awaiting his scene, he’d be able to follow the script, and know his cue, when it happened for real. In the more dilapidated Mobb-scenes, only the eyes stand out among the faded and peeling pigmentation: some sleepy, some upraised, some darting about for Earthly advantage, others attending to the faraway deeds of Angels, still others lost in contemplation of what it all means. He can not help seeing this all as a final message from Drake. A reminder that, in spite of all Isaac’s lucubrations, Isaac still does not know the date and time of the Last Trumpet, and that in spite of all Drake’s methodical preparations, Daniel has yet to step out of the wings and play his assigned role.

  Footsteps and jolly hallooing come his way: sounds more terrible to his ears than the hoofbeats of the Four Horsemen, for they signify that he shall have to be civil to chaps he barely knows. He turns toward the entrance. In comes the First Lord of the Treasury his Clarke, Writer of the Tallies, and Auditor of the Receipt of the King’s Exchequer (one man) in his finest clothes. On his arm is the almost-as-well

  -turned-out Chamberlain’s Deputy of the Receipt of the King’s Exchequer. These men, of course, have names and lives, but Daniel has forgot the former, and has no interest in the latter. This is one of those occasions in England when names do not matter, only titles. “Good morning, Dr. Waterhouse!” exclaims the first, “have you your Key?”

  It is an inane question, as there’d be no point in Daniel’s being here if he didn’t have the bloody key; but the man who asks it does so with a twinkle in his eye. It is nothing more than a rhetorica
l and facetious chat-starter, and perhaps a way of taking Daniel’s measure.

  “Have you yours, sir?” Daniel returns, and the oppressively cheerful Writer of the Tallies (&c.) whips it out of his pocket. Not to be outdone, the Chamberlain’s Deputy (&c.) pats his breast; a key hangs on a ribbon there.

  Daniel’s key is in his left coat-pocket and his hand is clenched around it. In the right pocket, his other hand cradles a small wooden box, like a jewelry-chest, that he nicked from a storage-closet at Isaac’s a couple of hours ago. He is struck by a little spell of dizziness for a moment, and spreads his feet wider, as a precaution against toppling and splitting his head on the old floor-tiles. The Key and the Chest, the rite of the Six Padlocks—why, it’s as if he’s been dropped in to some hidden, never-published Chapter of the Revelation—perhaps even a whole separate book, an apocryphal sequel to the Bible.

  Other voices can be heard out in the cloisters, and Daniel reckons they must be nearing a quorum. Noting Daniel’s interest, the Writer of the Tallies steps aside and settles into an after-you posture—whether because of age, rank, or general obsequiousness, Daniel can’t tell. Daniel’s here as one of the Treasury delegation. He leads the Writer of the Tallies and the Chamberlain’s Deputy back out to the gusty Cloister. Men have gathered before the door of the Pyx Chamber, some sitting on the huge mottled stone benches, others standing on stones bearing the names of middling-famous dead people. But when they spy Daniel and the others approaching, all rise and turn—as if he’s in charge! Which—given what he’s got in his pockets—he has every right to be. “Good morning, gentlemen,” he says, and waits for the answering murmur to die down. “Are we all present, then?” He sees a gaudy cleric, but not a bishop (no mitre), and pegs him as the Dean of Westminster. Two other gentlemen step up fondling great keys. Some very junior Church-men stand by with lanthorns at the ready, and there is a contingent of befuddled/suspicious Hanoverian nobles, escorted by a personable English Duke who’s been despatched to explain matters to them, and Johann von Hacklheber, serving as interpreter.