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

by Neal Stephenson

  William’s a banker, not a practicing Goldsmith. In the councils of that Company he is of low rank and little account. But outside their Clubb-house, in the City of London, he has earned a gravitas that makes heads turn his way when he speaks. This is why they nominated him as Fusour. Perhaps it is why the senior Goldsmith is calling the Assay into question; he’s spooked by William’s influence. Such political currents are too subtle for Daniel to follow; all he needs to know is that the Goldsmiths and the City men alike are swayed by William’s words. If they trouble to look at the senior Goldsmith at all, it is in glances over their shoulders, as if looking back curiously at one who has fallen behind.

  To his credit, the elder sees clearly enough the way it’s going. He cringes once at what he’s being forced to do, then his face slackens. “Very well,” he says, “let us give Sir Isaac his due, then. He has exasperated us more than any other Master of the Mint; but no one has ever claimed he did not know his way around a furnace.” He turns toward Marlborough, as do the other Goldsmiths, and they all bow. Marlborough notes it and nods to the chap he’s been talking to, who turns around to see it. Daniel recognizes the fellow as Isaac Newton, and feels a kind of pride that his friend is being honored in this way, and that he seems at last to have earned the trust of Marlborough. A moment passes before Daniel remembers that Isaac is dead.

  This courtly scene is disturbed by trouble in the gallery leading in from New Palace Yard: some uncivil person is trying to crash the party, and the Serjeant is dutifully trying to stop him. Their dispute and their footsteps draw nearer.

  “What business—”

  “The King’s business, sir!”

  “Whom would you—”

  “My captain, sir! The Duke of Marlborough! Perhaps you will have heard of him!” The speaker stomps right into Star Chamber, moving in an uneven gait: a uniformed Colonel with a peg-leg of carven ebony. Then he stops, realizing he’s just burst in upon a solemn moment, and doesn’t know what to say. It promptly gets worse: recent evolutions have given the Lords waiting in the side chamber the idea that they have been missing out on something. Most of them choose this moment to debouche into the Star Chamber wearing expressions that say, “Explain, or be hanged!”

  Daniel by now has recognized the peg-legged colonel: this is Barnes of the Black Torrent Guard. Barnes was already of a mind to dig his own grave and jump into it even before the King’s Remembrancer, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, First Lord of the Treasury, Lord Privy Seal, and Lord Chancellor filed into the room, followed by enough Hanoverian Dukes and Princes to conquer Saxony. Barnes is now not only peg-legged but peg-tongued and peg-brained. The only man who dares make a sound is Marlborough.

  “My lords,” he says, when the side-chamber has emptied out, “we have news from the Jurors. And unless I have mistaken the signs, we have got news from Tyburn Cross as well.”

  Daniel glances at Barnes, who is going through a chrestomathy of head-shaking, throat-slitting, eye-bulging, and hand-waving. But Marlborough is oblivious; he’s got eyes only for the Lords of the Council, and the Hanoverians. He goes on, “Would the Juries care to make a preliminary report?”

  The Pesour and the Fusour make after-you gestures at each other. Finally William Ham steps forward, and bows. “We shall of course draw up the document presently, and give it to the King’s Remembrancer,” he says, “but it is my great pleasure to inform my lords that the assay has been performed, and it has proved beyond doubt that His Majesty’s currency is sounder than it has ever been in all the history of this Realm, and that the highest accolades are owed to the Master of his majesty’s Mint, Sir Isaac Newton!”

  Isaac is diffident, but the Fusour’s announcement starts up a round of hip-hip-huzzahs that only bates when he steps forward and bows to the room. Which he does gracefully and with perfect balance; he has not looked so spry in years. Daniel searches the room for Miss Barton, and only finds her when she appears at his side, seizes him by the right arm, and plants a kiss on his cheek.

  “It is my very great honor,” says Isaac, “to do what I can for my country. Some distinguish themselves in battle” (a nod at Marlborough), “others in sage advice” (a nod—astonishingly—at Daniel), “still others in grace and beauty” (Miss Barton). “I make coins, and strive to make them sound, as a foundation on which the Commerce of this Realm may be builded by her thrifty and industrious Citizens.” A nod to the Jurors.

  “There is another thing that you do very well, besides making coins, is there not, Sir Isaac?”

  This Marlborough enunciates very clearly, for the benefit of the Hanoverians, and he waits for Johann von Hacklheber to effect a translation before he goes on: “I refer, of course, to your duty of prosecuting those who make bad coins.”

  “That, too, is the charge of the Master of the Mint,” Isaac admits.

  Barnes has gone back into frantic pantomiming, but he can’t seem to get the eye of Marlborough, who is rapt on the Germans. Marlborough goes on, “Sir Isaac’s triumph here, in the Trial of the Pyx, has, as I understand it, been matched—some would even say, surpassed—by a simultaneous triumph at Tyburn! Colonel Barnes?” And all eyes turn to Barnes. But he has dropped the gesticulations and now stands there the very picture of martial dignity.

  “Indeed, my lord,” he announces. “Jack Shaftoe, L’Emmerdeur, the King of the Vagabonds, a.k.a. Jack the Coiner, has been hanged.”

  “Hanged, drawn, and quartered, according to the sentence pronounced against him?” Marlborough says, so fiercely that it is more assertion than query.

  “Hanged, my lord,” Barnes says. It dangles there for a terrible long time, like a kicking wretch on a gallows, and he feels a need to make improvements: “Hanged by the neck until dead.”

  “Half dead, I should say, and then cut down, drawn, and quartered?”

  “Mr. Ketch was balked from carrying out the, er, supplemental eviscerations and dismemberments and whatnot, upon the hanged and dead, corpse of the late villain Shaftoe.”

  “Prevented by what, pray tell? Squeamishness? Did Mr. Ketch forget to bring his cutlery?”

  “Prevented by the Mobb. By the violence and the menace of the greatest and surliest Mobb that has ever assembled upon this Island.”

  A murky side-conversation now starts up in the Hanover contingent, as Johann von Hacklheber tries to translate “Mobb” into High German.

  “I ordered the King’s Own Black Torrent Guard to defend the gallows, precisely because I expected a larger than usual Mobb,” says Marlborough distractedly, in a sort of quiet prodrome to raging anger. Recognizing it as such, Barnes says: “And that is precisely what we accomplished, my lord, and the hangings were all carried out in good order, and Jack Ketch and the bailiffs and gaolers conveyed out of there safe and sound. The gallows will, alas, have to be rebuilt, but that’s a job for carpenters, not soldiers.”

  “I see. But you deemed it prudent to retreat before the drawing and quartering could be performed.”

  “Yes my lord, ’twas at that moment when the Mobb became most frenzickal, and rushed the Gallows to cut him down—”

  “Him, or his corpse?” Isaac Newton asks.

  “Colonel Barnes,” says Marlborough, “did they cut him down, or did they merely rush the gallows to cut him down? There is a difference, you see.”

  “If you want to know whose hand wielded the knife that severed the rope, I cannot give you his name,” Barnes says. “Just then, I was preoccupied with the larger task of leading my troops.”

  “How did you lead them? What orders did you give?”

  “To form a cordon with fixed bayonets around Jack Ketch and those other participants who were still alive.”

  “Did you give an order to fire?”

  “No,” says Barnes, “as I judged it would be suicidal; and though I am ever ready to die in the line of duty, I was of the view that for us to commit suicide would have impeded us in the conduct of our mission.”

  “I have often thought that the Vicar and t
he Warrior in you were struggling to achieve dominance, Colonel Barnes. Now I see that the Warrior has at last prevailed. For the Vicar would have opened fire and trusted to God. It is only the Warrior who would have chosen the difficult path of an orderly retreat.”

  Barnes—who has been expecting anything but praise—salutes, and goes red in the face.

  “They wish to know why the soldiers did not fire on the Mobb to restore order!” says Johann von Hacklheber, speaking on behalf of a formation of very disgruntled-looking Hanoverians.

  “Because this is England and we don’t massacre people in England!” Marlborough announces. “Or rather, we do but we are striving to turn over a new leaf. Pray translate that into more diplomatic language, Freiherr von Hacklheber, and see to it that the new King quite gets the message, so that we don’t have to send the Barkers after him.” Marlborough winks at Daniel.

  Isaac has paid little heed to these last few exchanges. “In truth it is just as well for my purposes that Jack Shaftoe’s corpse was left intact, for I have been looking forward to conducting an autopsy on the wretch at the College of Physicians, to find out what on earth made him the way he was.”

  “I know,” says Barnes. “All London knows, for Jack announced as much—somewhat more colorfully—from the gallows. It was this very thing that so infuriated the Mobb.”

  “So be it,” says Isaac, with a shrug. “Have your men take the corpse to the College of Physicians.”

  “We don’t know where it is,” says Colonel Barnes.

  “On Warwick Lane, off Newgate.”

  “No. I meant, we don’t know where the corpse is.”

  “I beg your pardon?” says Isaac, and looks to Marlborough. But the Duke is in a frank Cultural Exchange with his Hanoverian counterparts and has no time for Isaac. It has taken the Germans some time to fully comprehend the impertinence of Marlborough’s quip about the Barkers, and to believe that the Duke actually said something that rude; now they are waxing wroth, getting a bit foamy even. Johann von Hacklheber, seeing he’s caught in a perilous crossfire, is edging away, trying to make himself party to the safer and more interesting conversation re: Jack Shaftoe’s carcass.

  “After the dead body was cut down,” Barnes continues, “some of the Mobb raised it up. I sent soldiers to wrest it from them. The Mobb scampered away and gave it a right good heave.”

  “On to the ground?”

  “No, it was caught and raised up on high again by others of the Mobb; and when they spied my soldiers coming for them, they gave it another heave, so that others, farther from the gallows, took up the burthen. And from there it developed into a sort of, well, orderly procedure, and I had to climb up on to the scaffold to see where it went. He sort of glided. Like a leaf, floating on a turbulent and swirling stream, dodging and spinning in unseen Mobb-currents, but ever moving in the same general direction: away from me.”

  Isaac sighs, and begins to look his age again. “Spare me any further poetick description and just say forthrightly, please, where did you last see the body of Jack Shaftoe?”

  “Sort of dissolving into the western horizon.”

  Isaac stares at him.

  “The Mobb was of tremendous size,” Barnes explains.

  “You are quite certain he was dead at the time he was cut down?”

  “If I may, sir, that’s easily answered!” says Johann von Hacklheber. “Anyone who was at Newgate this morning can tell you he was wearing a king’s ransom in cloth-of-gold, and that his pockets bulged with coins. All of which, of course, was payment for Jack Ketch—”

  “To hang him fast—break his neck in an instant,” Isaac says. “Very well! Let the Mobb have him then. Let him end up in a potter’s field somewhere.”

  “Yes,” says Daniel Waterhouse, “it is a most fitting end for such a villainous man. And this—the new King, the strong Bank, the sound coinage, and all the works of Natural Philosophers and ingénieurs—are a fine beginning for a new System of the World.”

  At this, Johann von Hacklheber looks askance at Marlborough, who is close to getting into a sword-fight with some Duke of Germany.

  “Never you mind that,” Daniel reassures him, “for it is all part of the System.”

  Epilogs

  For Time, though in Eternitie, appli’d

  To motion, measures all things durable

  By present, past, and future

  —MILTON, Paradise Lost

  Leibniz-Haus, Hanover

  NOVEMBER 1714

  MOST MEN, standing knee-deep in gold, would talk about that. But not these two eccentric Barons.

  “Then he stepped out of his sedan chair and looked perfectly all right,” says Johann von Hacklheber.

  He sits down upon an empty barrel. Leibniz, cringing and mincing from the gout, has been seated for some while. They are beneath Leibniz’s great house, in a cellar made to store victuals. But the bottles of wine, the kegs of beer, the turnips, potatoes, and belching buckets of sauerkraut have been hauled out and given to the poor. The place has been filled up with barrels of a different sort. Leibniz, unwilling now to trust anyone in Hanover, left them sealed until Johann arrived. Johann’s been dismantling them, removing the gold plates, and placing them in orderly stacks.

  “It sounds as though he was re-animated by the Elixir Vitae,” Leibniz admits.

  “I thought you didn’t believe in such things,” says Johann, and gestures at the gold plates all around.

  “I don’t think about such matters the way he does,” says Leibniz, “but I can’t rule out the possibility that monads, ordered in the right way, might do things that would seem like miracles to us.”

  “Well, you have got all the magic gold you could ever desire, if you want to cure that gout, or—”

  “Live forever?”

  Johann looks abashed, and instead of answering, picks up his pry-bar, and goes to work on another barrel.

  “I suspect that there are some of us who have been living forever,” Leibniz says, “such as your supposed great-uncle, and my benefactor, Egon von Hacklheber. Or Enoch Root, as others know him. Let us suppose that Enoch knows how to manipulate the Subtile Spirit in such a way as to heal diseases and extend life. What of it, then? What has he accomplished? How has it changed anything?”

  “Hardly at all,” says Johann.

  “Hardly at all,” agrees Leibniz, “save that from time to time he may grant a few years’ undeserved life to someone who would otherwise have perished. Enoch must have been asking himself, these last couple of millennia, what is the point of it all. It is obvious that he took a lively interest in Natural Philosophy, and did what he could to foster it. Why?”

  “Because Alchemy was not bringing him satisfaction.”

  “Evidently not. Now, Johann, it would seem that Sir Isaac has been granted a few more years by Alchemy, and yet clearly it has not brought him any happiness or enlightenment that he did not possess before. Which gives us another hint as to why it does not satisfy Enoch. You point out that I, likewise, could use the Solomonic Gold in this cellar to extend my life. Let us suppose that it’s true. But obviously this is not the goal toward which I have been directed by Enoch, or by Solomon Kohan. On the contrary! Those two have sought to sequester the gold and keep it out of the hands of the one man who knows how to wield it: Isaac Newton. For me to take up Alchemy at my age, and melt those plates down to make an elixir—why, it’d be Doctor Faustus all over again! And with the same dismal result in the last act.”

  “I can’t bear to see Newton triumph, while you sicken and dwindle here in Hanover.”

  “I’ve got all of the Solomonic Gold. He doesn’t. That is a triumph. It does not make me glad. No, triumph will not be mine if I only ape what he did. That is surrender. If I am to outlive Newton, it will not be by extending the span of my life with unnatural coctions. We must do all in our power to see that the Logic Mill is built.”

  “In St. Petersburg?”

  “Or wherever, and whenever, some great prince sees f
it to build it.”

  “I’ll make arrangements to have some stout crates built,” says Johann, “and delivered here. I’ll take them into this cellar myself and pack the golden cards into them with my own two hands, and nail them shut so that no one will have cause to think that they contain anything more valuable than musty old letters. Once that is done, you may ship them to St. Petersburg, if that is the right place for them, with a stroke of a quill. But if what I hear from Russia has any color of truth, the Tsar is distracted, and may not see the thing through.”

  Leibniz smiles. “That’s why I was careful to say whenever some great prince sees fit to build it. If not the Tsar, then someone else who will come along after my death.”

  “Or after mine, or my son’s or my grandson’s,” Johann says. “Human nature being what it is, I fear that this will only happen when the things that the Logic Mill is good at become important to a war. And that is a difficult thing to imagine.”

  “Then pray bring up your son and your grandson, if you have any, to be imaginative. Then impress on them the importance of looking after those dusty old crates in the Leibniz-Archiv. Speaking of which—”

  “The Princess of Wales,” says Johann, holding up a hand, “has become most imperious since she got her new lands and titles, and has ordered me to find a woman I have some actual prospect of marrying. My dear mother has weighed in, too. I beg you not to start.”

  “Very well,” says Leibniz, and lets a respectful silence fall. “That must have been a difficult conversation. I am sorry.”