Quicksilver

by Neal Stephenson

  LYDIA: Oh, too late, father!

  VAN UND: What mean you, child?

  LYDIA: When the boatswain heard you, he lost what firmness he had, and fled in a panic.

  VAN UND: How do you know it? LYDIA: Why, he upset the hammock altogether, and tumbled me onto the deck!

  VAN UND: Lydia, Lydia, I have spent a fortune sending you to that school in Venice, where you have been studying to become a virtuous maiden—

  LYDIA: And I have studied hard, Father, but it is ever so difficult!

  VAN UND: Has all that money been wasted?

  LYDIA: Oh, no, Father, I learned some lovely songs from our dancing-master, Signore Fellatio.

  Sings.*

  VAN UND: I’ve heard enough—Boatswain!

  Enter Lady Brimstone.

  LADY BRIMSTONE: My lord, have you found who is making that dreadful noise yet?

  LORD B: M’lady, it’s that Dutchman.

  LADY B: SO much for idle investigations—what have you done about it, my lord?

  LORD B: Nothing, my lady, for they say that the only way to quiet one of these obstreperous Dutchmen is to drown him.

  LADY B: Drown—why, my lord—you’re not thinking of throwing him overboard—?

  LORD B: Every soul aboard is thinking of it, M’lady. But with a Dutchman it isn’t necessary, as they live below sea-level to begin with. ’Tis merely a question of getting the sea to go back where the Good Lord put it in the first place—

  LADY B: And how d’you propose to effect that, my lord?

  LORD B: I have been conducting experiments on a novel engine to make windmills turn backwards, and pump water down-hill—

  LADY B: Experiments! Engines! I say the way to put Dutchmen under water’s with French gunpowder and English courage!

  Whatever the actor playing Lord Brimstone said was like expectorating into the River Amazon. For the true SCENE of these events was Neville’s Court* on a spring evening, and the true Dramatis Personae a roll that would’ve consumed many yards of paper and drams of ink to set it out fully. The script was an unpublished mas-terwork of courtly and collegiate intrigue, comprising hundreds of more or less clever lines being delivered—mostly sotto voce—at the same instant, producing a contrapuntal effect quite intricate but entirely too much for young Daniel Waterhouse to grasp. He had been wondering why persons such as these bothered to go to plays at all, when every day at Whitehall provided more spectacle—now he sensed that they did so because the stories in the theatre were simple, and arrived at fixed conclusions after an hour or two.

  Heading up the cast of tonight’s performance was King Charles II of England, situated on the upper floor of Trinity’s miserable wreck of a library, where several consecutive windows had been opened up and converted into temporary opera-boxes. The Queen, one Catherine of Braganza, a Portuguese princess with a famously inoperative womb, was seated to one side of His Majesty, pretending to understand English as usual. The guest of honor, the Duke of Monmouth (King Charles’s son by his mistress Lucy Walter), was on the other side. The windows flanking the King’s contained various elements of his court: one was anchored by Louise de Kéroualle, the Duchess of Portsmouth and the King’s mistress. Another by Barbara Villiers, a.k.a. Lady Castlemaine, a.k.a. the Duchess of Cleveland, former lover of John Churchill, and the King’s mistress.

  Moving outwards from the three central windows, there was one all filled up with Angleseys: Thomas More Anglesey and his nearly indistinguishable sons, Philip, now something like twenty-seven years old, and Louis, who was twenty-four, but looking younger. For protocol dictated that, as the Earl of Upnor was visiting his alma mater, he had to wear academic robes. Though he’d mobilized a squadron of French tailors to liven them up, they were still academic robes, and the object infesting his wig was unmistakably a mortarboard.

  Balancing this Anglesey-window was a window all crowded with Comstocks, specifically the so-called Silver branch of that race: John and his sons Richard and Charles foremost, all dressed likewise in robes and mortarboards. Unlike the Earl of Upnor they seemed comfortable dressed that way. Or at least had until the play had begun, and the character of Jehoshaphat Stopcock, Lord Brimstone, had come tottering out dressed precisely as they were.

  The King’s Comedians, performing on a temporary stage that had been erected in Neville’s Court, had decided to plow onwards in spite of the fact that no one could hear a word they were saying. “Lord Brimstone” seemed to be upbraiding his wife about something—presumably, her reference to “French gunpowder,” as opposed to “English,” which, on some other planet, might have been a rhetorical figure, but here seemed very much like a stab at John Comstock. Meanwhile, most of the audience—who, if they had the good fortune to be seated, were seated on chairs and benches arranged in the corner of Neville’s Court, beneath the windows of King and Court—were trying to break out into the opening stanza of “Pikes on the Dikes,” the most widely plagiarized song in England: a rousing ditty about why it was an excellent idea to invade Holland. But the King held out one hand to silence them. Not that he was lacking in belligerence—but down on the stage, “Lydia van Underdevater” was delivering a line that looked like it was meant to be funny. And the King didn’t like it when the buzz of Intrigue drowned out his Mistress.

  All of the Comedians suddenly fell down, albeit in dramatickal and actorly ways—and that went double for Nell Gwyn, who wound up draped over a bench with one arm stretched out gracefully, displaying about a square yard of flawless pale armpits and bosoms. The audience were poleaxed. The long-called-for boatswain finally ran in and announced that the ship had run aground in sands just off Castle Suckmire. “Lord Brimstone” sent Nzinga out to fetch his trunk, which arrived with the immediacy that can only happen in stage-plays. The owner pawed through its contents, spilling out a strange mixture of drab outmoded clothing and peculiar equipment, viz. retorts, crucibles, skulls, and microscopes. Meanwhile Lydia was picking up certain of his garments, such as farmers’ breeches and cowherds’ boots, holding them at arm’s length and mugging. Finally, Lord Brimstone stood up, tucking a powder-keg under one arm, and slapping a frayed and bent mortarboard onto his head.

  LORD B: What’s wanted to move this ship is Gunpowder!

  Among the groundlings in their chairs and on the grass, much uneasy shifting and muttering, and tassels flopping this way and that, as mortarboard-wearing scholars turned to each other to enquire as to just who was being made fun of here, or shook their heads, or bowed them low to pray for the souls of the King’s Comedians, and of whomever had written this play, and of the King who’d insisted he couldn’t make it through a one-night stand at Cambridge without being entertained.

  Very different reactions, though, from the windows-cum-opera-boxes: the Duchess of Portsmouth was undone. Her bosom was heaving like a spritsail gone all a-luff, her head was thrown back to expose a whole lot of jewelled throat. These spectacles had already caused diverse groundling scholars to fall out of their chairs. She was being supported by a pair of young blades in huge curled and beribboned wigs, who were wiping tears of mirth away from their eyes with the fingertips of their kid gloves—having already donated their lace hankies to the Duchess.

  Meanwhile, mortarboard-wearing gunpowder magnate John Comstock—who’d long opposed the Duchess of Portsmouth’s efforts to introduce French fashions to the English court—was managing a thin, oddly distracted smile. The King—who, until tonight anyway, had generally sided with Comstock—was smiling, and the Angleseys were all having the times of their lives.

  An elbow to the kidney forced Daniel to stop gaping at the Duchess’s efforts to rupture her bodice, and to pay some attention to the rather homelier sight of Oldenburg, who was seated next to him. The hefty German had been released from the Tower as suddenly and as inexplicably as he’d been clapped into it. He glanced down toward the far end of Neville’s Court, then frowned at Daniel and said, “Where is he? Or at least it!” meaning Isaac Newton and his paper on tangents, respec
tively. Then Oldenburg turned the other way and peeked up round the edge of his mortarboard toward the Angleseys’ box, where Louis Anglesey, the Earl of Upnor, had somehow gotten his merriment under control and was giving Oldenburg a Significant Glare.

  Daniel was glad to have a pretext for leaving. All through the play he had been trying and trying to suspend his disbelief, but the damned thing just wouldn’t suspend. He rose to his feet, bunched his robes up, and sidestepped down a row of chairs, treading on diverse Royal Society feet. Sir Winston Churchill: Cheers on your boy’s Maestricht work, old chap. Christopher Wren: Let’s get that cathedral up, what, no dilly-dallying! Sir Robert Moray: Let’s have lunch and talk about eels. Thank God Hooke had had the temerity to not show up—too busy rebuilding London—so Daniel didn’t have to step on any of his parts. Finally, Daniel was out on open grass. This was really a job for John Wilkins—but the Bishop of Chester was lying on his bed down in London, ill of the stone.

  Working his way round back of the stage, Daniel found himself among several wagons that had been used to haul dramaturgickal mysteries up from London. Awnings had been rigged to them and tents pitched in between, so tent-ropes were stretched across the darkness, thick as ship’s rigging, and hitched round splintery wooden stakes piercing the (until the actors had shown up, anyway) flawless lawn. Various items of what he could only assume were ladies’ undergarments (they were definitely garments, but he had never seen their like—Q.E.D.) dangled from the ropes and occasionally surprised the hell out of him by pawing clammily at his face. Daniel had to plot a devious course, then pursue it slowly, to escape the tangle. So it was really—really—just an accident that he found the two actresses, doing whatever the hell it was that females do when they excuse themselves and exchange warm knowing looks and go off in pairs. He caught the very end of it: “What should I do w’th’old one?” said a young lady with a lovely voice, and an accent from some part of England with too many sheep.

  “Fling it into the crowd—start a riot,” suggested the other—an Irish girl.

  This touched off fiendish whooping. Clearly no one had taught these girls how to titter.

  “But they wouldn’t even know what it was,” said the girl with the lovely voice, “we are the first women to set foot in this place.”

  “Then neither will they know if you leave it where it lies,” the Irish girl answered.

  The other now dropped her rural accent and began talking exactly like a Cambridge scholar from a good family. “I say, what’s this in the middle of my bowling-green? It would appear to be…fox-bait!”

  More whooping—cut short by a man’s voice out of a backstage caravan: “Tess—save some of that for the King—you’re wanted on the stage.”

  The lasses picked up their skirts and exeunted. Daniel glimpsed them as they transited across a gap between tents, and recognized the one called Tess from the “Siege of Maestricht.” She was the one he had taken for a Frenchwoman, simply because he’d heard her talking that way. He now understood that she was really an Englishwoman who could talk any way she pleased. This might have been obvious, since she was a professional actress; but it was new to him, and it made her interesting.

  Daniel emerged from behind the tent where he’d been (it is fair to say) lurking, and—purely in a spirit of philosophical inquiry—approached the spot where Tess of the beautiful voice and many accents had been (fair to say) squatting.

  In a sort of hod projecting above the stage, more gunpowder was lit off in an attempt to simulate lightning, and it made a pool of yellow light in front of Daniel for just a moment. Neatly centered in a patch of grass—grass that was almost phosphorus-green, this being Spring—was a wadded-up rag, steaming from the warmth of Tess, bright with blood.

  Of sooty coal the Empiric Alchimist Can turn, or holds it possible to turn Metals of drossiest Ore to perfet Gold As from the Mine.

  —MILTON, Paradise Lost

  IT HAD BEEN A FULL DAY for the King. Or perhaps Daniel was being naïve to think so—more likely, it was a typical day for the King, and the only persons feeling exhausted were the Cantabrigians who had been trying to maintain the pretense that they could keep up with him. The entourage had appeared on the southern horizon in mid-morning, looking (Daniel supposed) quite a bit like the invasion that Louis XIV had recently flung into the Dutch Republic: meaning that it thundered and threw up dust-clouds and consumed oats and generated ramparts of manure like any Regiment, but its wagons were all gilded, its warriors were armed with jewelled Italian rapiers, its field-marshalls wore skirts and commanded men, or condemned them, with looks—this fell upon Cambridge, anyway, with more effect than King Louis had achieved, so far, in the Netherlands. The town was undone, dissolved. Bosoms everywhere, bare-assed courtiers spilling out of windows, the good Cambridge smell of fens and grass overcome by perfumes, not just of Paris but of Araby and Rajasthan. The King had abandoned his coach and marched through the streets of the town accepting the cheers of the scholars of Cambridge, who had formed up in front of their several Colleges, robed and arranged by ranks and degrees, like soldiers drawn up for review. He’d been officially greeted by the outgoing Chancellor, who had presented him with a colossal Bible—they said it was possible to see the royal nose wrinkling, and the eyes rolling, from half a mile away. Later the King (and his pack of demented spaniels) had dined at High Table in the College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity, under the big Holbein portrait of the college’s Founder, King Henry VIII. As Fellows, Daniel and Isaac were accustomed to sitting at High Table, but the town was now stuffed with persons who ranked them, and so they’d been demoted halfway across the room: Isaac in his scarlet robes talking to Boyle and Locke about something, and Daniel shoved off in a corner with several vicars who—in violation of certain Biblical guidelines—plainly did not love one another. Daniel tried to stanch their disputatious drone and to pick up a few snatches of conversation from the High Table. The King had a lot to say about Henry VIII, all of it apparently rather droll.

  At first, it was Old Hank’s approach to polygamy: so ham-handed it was funny. All of it was veiled in royal wit, of course—he didn’t come right out and say anything really, but the point seemed to be: why do people call me a libertine? At least I don’t chop their heads off. If Daniel (or any other scholar in this place) had wanted to die instantly, he could have stood up at this point and hollered, “Well, at least he eventually got round to producing a legitimate male heir!” but this did not occur.

  Several goblets later, the King moved on to some reflections on what a fine and magnificent and (not to put too fine a point on it) rich place Trinity College was, and how remarkable it was that such results could have been achieved by Henry VIII merely by defying the Pope, and sacking a few monasteries. So perhaps the coffers of Puritans, Quakers, Barkers, and Presbyterians might go, one day, towards building an even finer College! This was said as a jest, of course—he went on to say that of course he was speaking of voluntary contributions. Even so, it made the Dissenters in the room very angry—but (as Daniel later reflected) no more angry, really, than they’d been before. And it was a masterly bit of Catholic-bashing. In other words, all nicely calculated to warm the hearts and ease the fears of all the High Anglicans (such as John Comstock) in the hall. The King had to do a lot of that, because many assumed he was soft on Catholics, and some even thought he was one.

  In other words, maybe he had just seen a little slice of Court politics as usual, and nothing of consequence had happened. But since John Wilkins had lost the ability to urinate, Daniel’s job was to pay attention and report all of this to him later.

  Then it was off to the chapel where the Duke of Monmouth, now a war hero as well as a renowned scholar and bastard, was installed as Chancellor of the University. After that, finally, the Comedy in Neville’s Court.

  DANIEL PAUSED IN THE CENTER of a Gothic arch and looked out over a spread of stone steps that led down into the Great Court of Trinity College: an area about four times the size of
Neville’s Court. In a strange way it reminded him of the ’Change in London, except that where the ’Change was a daytime place, all a-sparkle with Thomas Gresham’s golden grasshoppers and vaulting Mercurys, and crowded with lusty shouting traders, this place was Gothickal in the extreme, faintly dusted with the blue light of a half-moon, sparsely populated by robed and/or big-wigged men skulking about the paths and huddling in doorways in groups of two or three. And whereas the ’Change-men made common cause to buy shares in sailing-ships or joint stock companies, and traded Jamaica sugar for Spanish silver, these men were transacting diverse small conspiracies or trading snatches of courtly data. The coming of Court to Cambridge was like Stourbridge Fair—an occasional opportunity for certain types of business, most of which was in some sense occult. He couldn’t get in any trouble simply walking direct across the Great Court to the Gate. As a Fellow, he was allowed to tread on the grass. Most of these lurkers and strollers weren’t. Not that they cared about the College’s pedantic rules, but they preferred shadowy edges, having the courtier’s natural affinity for joints and crevices. Across broad open space Daniel strode, so that no one could accuse him of eavesdropping. A line stretched from where he’d come in, to the Gate, would pass direct through a sort of gazebo in the center of the Great Court: an octagonal structure surmounting a little pile of steps, with a goblet-shaped fountain in the middle. Moonlight slanted in among the pillars and gave it a ghastly look—the stone pale as a dead man’s flesh, streaked with rivulets of blood, pulsing from arterial punctures. Daniel reckoned it had to be some sort of Papist-style Vision, and was just about to lift up his hands to inspect them for Stigmata when he caught a whiff, and recollected that the fountain had been drained of water and filled with claret wine in honor of the King and of the new Chancellor: a decision that begged to be argued with. But no accounting for taste…

  “The Africans cannot propagate,” said a familiar voice, startlingly close.