Quicksilver

by Neal Stephenson

  Richard Comstock, the eldest son of John, and the model for the stalwart if dim Eugene Stopcock in Breeches, was on a ship that was part of a fleet that fell under the guns of Admiral de Ruyter at Sole Bay. Along with thousands of other Englishmen, he went to David Jones’s Locker. Many of the survivors could now be seen hobbling round London on bloody stumps, or rattling cups on street-corners. Daniel was startled to receive an invitation to the funeral. Not from John, of course, but from Charles, who had been John’s fourth son and was now the only one left (the other two had died young of smallpox). After his stint as laboratory assistant during the Plague Year at Epsom, Charles had matriculated at Cambridge, where he’d been tutored by Daniel. He had been well on his way to being a competent Natural Philosopher. But now he was the scion of a great family, and never could be aught else, unless the family ceased to be great, or he ceased being a part of it.

  John Comstock got up in front of the church and said, “The Hollander exceeds us in industry, and in all things else, but envy.”

  King Charles shut down the Exchequer one day, which is to say that he admitted that the country was out of money, and that not only could the Crown not repay its debts, but it couldn’t even pay interest on them. Within a week, Daniel’s uncle, Thomas Ham, Viscount Walbrook, was dead—of a broken heart or suicide, no one save Aunt Mayflower knew—but it scarcely made a difference. This led to the most theatrickal of all the scenes Daniel witnessed in London that year (with the possible exception of the re-enactment of the Siege of Maestricht): the opening of the Crypt.

  Thomas Ham’s reliable basement had been sealed up by court officials immediately upon the death of its proprietor, and musketeers had been posted all round to prevent Ham’s depositors (who had, in recent weeks, formed a small muttering knot that never went away, loitering outside; as others held up libels depicting the atrocities of King Looie’s army in Holland, so these held up Goldsmiths’s Notes addressed to Thomas Ham) from breaking in and claiming their various plates, candlesticks, and guineas. Legal maneuverings began, and continued round the clock, casting a queer shadow over Uncle Thomas’s funeral, and stretching beyond it to two days, then three. The cellar’s owner was already in the grave, his chief associates mysteriously unfindable, and rumored to be in Dunkirk trying to buy passage to Brazil with crumpled golden punch-bowls and gravy-boats. But those were rumors. The facts were in the famously safe and sturdy Ham Bros. Cellar on Threadneedle.

  This was finally unsealed by a squadron of Lords and Justices, escorted by musketeers, and duly witnessed by Raleigh, Sterling, and Daniel Waterhouse; Sir Richard Apthorp; and various stately and important Others. It was three days exactly since King Charles had washed his hands of the royal debts and Thomas Ham had met his personal Calvary at the hands of the Exchequer. That statistic was noted by Sterling Waterhouse—as always, noticer of details par excellence. As the crowd of Great and Good Men shuffled up the steps of Ham House, he muttered to Daniel: “I wonder if we shall roll the stone aside and find an empty tomb?”

  Daniel was appalled by this dual sacrilege—then reflected that as he was now practically living in a theatre and mooning over an actress every night, he could scarcely criticize Sterling for making a jest.

  It turned out not to be a jest. The cellar was empty.

  Well—not empty. It was full, now, of speechless men, standing flatfooted on the Roman mosaic.

  RALEIGH: “I knew it would be bad. But—my God—there’s not even a potatoe.”

  STERLING: “It is a sort of anti-miracle.”

  LORD HIGH CHANCELLOR OF THE REALM: “Go up and tell the musketeers to go and get more musketeers.”

  They all stood there for quite a while. Attempts to make conversation flared sporadically all round the cellar and fizzled like flashes in damp pans. Except—strangely—among Waterhouses. Disaster had made them convivial.

  RALEIGH: “Our newest tenant informs me you’ve decided to turn architect, Daniel.”

  STERLING: “We thought you were going to be a savant.”

  DANIEL: “All the other savants are doing it. Just the other day, Hooke figured out how arches work.”

  STERLING: “I should have thought that was known by now.”

  RALEIGH: “Do you mean to say all existing arches have been built on guesswork?”

  SIR RICHARD APTHORP: “Arches—and Financial Institutions.”

  DANIEL: “Christopher Wren is going to re-design all the arches in St. Paul’s, now that Hooke has explained them.”

  STERLING: “Good! Maybe the new one won’t become all bow-legged and down-at-heels, as the old one did.”

  RALEIGH: “I say, brother Daniel—don’t you have some drawings to show us?”

  DANIEL: “Drawings?”

  RALEIGH: “In the w’drawing room, perhaps?”

  Which was a bad pun and a cryptickal sign, from Raleigh the patriarch (fifty-five years comically aged, to Daniel’s eyes seeming like a young Raleigh dressed up in rich old man’s clothes and stage-makeup), that they were all supposed to Withdraw from the cellar. So they did, and Sir Richard Apthorp came with them. They wound up on the upper floor of Ham House, in a bedchamber—the very same one that Daniel had gazed into from his perch atop Gresham’s College. A rock had already come in through a window and was sitting anomalously in the middle of a rug, surrounded by polygons of glass. More were beginning to thud against the walls, so Daniel swung the windows open to preserve the glazing. Then they all retreated to the center of the room and perched up on the bed and watched the stones come in.

  STERLING: “Speaking of Guineas, or lack thereof—shame about the Guinea Company, what?”

  APTHORP: “Pfft! ’Twas like one of your brother’s theatrickal powder-squibs. Sold my shares of it long ago.”

  STERLING: “What of you, Raleigh?”

  RALEIGH: “They owe me money, is all.”

  APTHORP: “You’ll get eight shillings on the pound.”

  RALEIGH: “An outrage—but better than what Thomas Ham’s depositors will get.”

  DANIEL: “Poor Mayflower!”

  RALEIGH: “She and young William are moving in with me anon—and so you’ll have to seek other lodgings, Daniel.”

  STERLING: “What fool is buying the Guinea Company’s debts?”

  APTHORP: “James, Duke of York.”

  STERLING: “As I said—what dauntless hero is, et cetera…”

  DANIEL: “But that’s nonsense! They are his own debts!”

  APTHORP: “They are the Guinea Company’s debts. But he is winding up the Guinea Company and creating a new Royal Africa Company. He’s to be the governor and chief shareholder.”

  RALEIGH: “What, sinking our Navy and making us slaves to Popery is not sufficient—he’s got to enslave all the Neegers, too?”

  STERLING: “Brother, you sound more like Drake every day.”

  RALEIGH: “Being surrounded by an armed mob must be the cause of sounding that way.”

  APTHORP: “The Duke of York has resigned the Admiralty…”

  RALEIGH: “As there’s nothing left to be Admiral of…”

  APTHORP: “And is going to marry that nice Catholic girl* and compose his African affairs.”

  STERLING: “Sir Richard, this must be one of those things that you know before anyone else does, or else there would be rioters in the streets.”

  RALEIGH: “There are, you pea-wit, and unless I’m having a Drakish vision, they have set fire to this very house.”

  STERLING: “I meant they’d be rioting ’gainst the Duke, not our late bro-in-law.”

  DANIEL: “I personally witnessed a sort of riot ’gainst the Duke the other day—but it was about his religious, not his military, political, or commercial shortcomings.”

  STERLING: “You left out ‘intellectual and moral.’”

  DANIEL: “I was trying to be concise—as we are getting a bit short of that spiritous essence, found in fresh air, for which fire competes with living animals.”

  RALEIGH: “The Duke
of York! What bootlicking courtier was responsible for naming New York after him? ’Tis a perfectly acceptable city.”

  DANIEL: “If I may change the subject…the reason I led us to this room was yonder ladder, which in addition to being an excellent Play Structure for William Ham, will also convey us to the roof—where it’s neither so hot nor so smoky.”

  STERLING: “Daniel, never mind what people say about you—you always have your reasons.”

  [Now a serio-comical musical interlude: the brothers Water-house break into a shouted, hoarse (because of smoke) rendition of a Puritan hymn about climbing Jacob’s Ladder.]

  SCENE: The rooftops of Threadneedle Street. Shouts, shattering of glass, musket-shots heard from below. They gather round the mighty Ham-chimney, which is now venting smoke of burning walls and furniture below.

  SIR RICHARD APTHORP: “How inspiring, Daniel, to gaze down the widened and straightened prospect of Cheapside and know that St. Paul’s will be rebuilt there anon—’pon mathematick principles—so that it’s likely to stay up for a bit.”

  STERLING: “Sir Richard, you sound ominously like a preacher opening his sermon with a commonplace observation that is soon to become one leg of a tedious and strained analogy.”

  APTHORP: “Or, if you please, one leg of an arch—the other to be planted, oh, about here.”

  RALEIGH: “You want to build, what, some sort of triumphal arch, spanning that distance? May I remind you that first we want some sort of triumph!?”

  APTHORP: “It is only a similitude. What Christopher Wren means to do yonder in the way of a Church, I mean to do here with a Banca. And as Wren will use Hooke’s principles to build that Church soundly, I’ll use modern means to devise a Banca that—without in any way impugning your late brother-in-law’s illustrious record—will not have armed mobs in front of it burning it down.”

  RALEIGH: “Our late brother-in-law was ruined, because the King borrowed all of his deposits—presumably at gunpoint—and then declined to pay ’em back—what mathematick principle will you use to prevent that?”

  APTHORP: “Why, the same one that you and your co-religionists have used in order to maintain your faith: tell the King to leave us alone.”

  RALEIGH: “Kings do not love to be told that, or anything.”

  APTHORP: “I saw the King yesterday, and I tell you that he loves being bankrupt even less. I was born in the very year that the King seized the gold and silver that Drake and the other merchants had deposited in the Tower of London for safekeeping. Do you recall it?”

  RALEIGH: “Yes, ’twas a black year, and made rebels of many who only wanted to be merchants.”

  APTHORP: “Your brother-in-law’s business, and the practice of goldsmith’s notes, arose as a result—no one trusted the Tower any more.”

  STERLING: “And after today no one will trust goldsmiths, or their silly notes.”

  APTHORP: “Just so. And just as the Empty Tomb on Easter led, in the fullness of time, to a Resurrection…”

  DANIEL: “I am stopping up mine ears now—if the conversation turns Christian, wave your hands about.”

  THE KNOWLEDGE THAT THE DUTCH had won the war percolated through London invisibly, like Plague. Suddenly everyone had it. Daniel woke up in Bedlam one morning knowing that William of Orange had opened the sluices and put a large part of his Republic under water to save Amsterdam. But he couldn’t recall whence that knowledge had come.

  He and his brothers had worked their way up Threadneedle by assailing one rooftop after another. They’d parted company with Apthorp on the roof of his goldsmith’s shop, which was still solvent—yet there was an armed mob in front of it, too, and in front of the next goldsmith’s, and the next. Far from escaping a riot, they understood, somewhat too late, that they were working their way toward the center of a much larger one. The obvious solution was to turn round and go back the way they’d come—but now a platoon of Quakers was coming toward them over the rooftops gripping matchlocks, each Quaker trailing a long thread of smoke from the smoldering punk in his fingers. Looking north across Threadneedle they could see a roughly equivalent number of infantrymen headed over the rooftops of Broad Street, coming from the direction of Gresham’s College, and it seemed obvious enough that Quakers and Army men would soon be swapping musket-balls over the heads of the mob of Quakers, Barkers, Ranters, Diggers, Jews, Huguenots, Presbyterians, and other sects down below.

  So it was down to the street and into the stone-throwing fray. But when they got down there, Daniel saw that these were not the young shin-kickers and head-butters of Drake’s glory days. These were paunchy mercers who simply wanted to know where all of their money had got to. The answer was that it had gone to wherever it goes when markets crash. Daniel kept treading on wigs. Sometimes a hundred rioters would turn around and flee en bloc from sudden musket-fire and all of their wigs would fall off at once, as though this were a practiced military drill. Some of the wigs had dollops of brain in them, though, which ended up as pearly skeins on Daniel’s shoes.

  They pushed their way up Broad Street, away from the ’Change, which seemed to be the center of all disturbance. Those mock-Polish grenadiers were formed up in front of the building that had been the Guinea, and was soon to be the Royal Africa, Company. So the Waterhouses squirted past on the far side of the street, looking back to see whether any of those fatal spheres were trajecting after them. They tried to get in at Gresham’s College. But many offices of the City of London had been moved into it after the fire, and so it was shut up and almost as well guarded as the Royal Africa Company.

  So they had kept moving north and eventually reached Bedlam, and found an evening’s refuge there amid piles of dressed stone and splats of mortar. Sterling and Raleigh had departed the next morning, but Daniel had remained: encamped, becalmed, drained, and feeling no desire to go back into the city. From time to time he would hear a nearby church-bell tolling the years of someone who’d died in the rioting.

  Daniel’s whereabouts became known, and messengers began to arrive, several times a day, bearing invitations to more funerals. He attended several of them, and was frequently asked to stand up and say a few words—not about the deceased (he scarcely knew most of them), but about more general issues of religious tolerance. In other words, he was asked to parrot what Wilkins would’ve said, and for Daniel that was easy—much easier than making up words of his own. Out of a balanced respect for his own father, he mentioned Drake, too. This felt like a slow and indirect form of suicide, but after his conversation with John Comstock he did not feel he had much of a life to throw away. He was strangely comforted by the sight of all those pews filled with men in white and black (though sometimes Roger Comstock would show up as a gem of color, accompanied by one or two courtiers who were sympathetic, or at least curious). More mourners would be visible through open doors and windows, filling the church-yard and street.

  It reminded him of the time during his undergraduate days when the Puritan had been murdered by Upnor, and Daniel had traveled five miles outside of Cambridge to the funeral, and found his father and brothers, miraculously, there. Exasperating to his mind but comforting to his soul. His words swayed their emotions much more than he wanted, or expected—as two inert substances, mixed in an Alchemist’s mortar, can create a fulminating compound, so the invocation of Drake’s and Wilkins’s memories together.

  But this was not what he wanted and so he began to avoid the funerals after that, and stayed in the quiet stone-garden of Bedlam.

  Hooke was there, too, for Gresham’s College had become too crowded with scheming fops. Bedlam was years away from being done. The masons hadn’t even begun work on the wings. But the middle part was built, and on top of it was a round turret with windows on all sides, where Hooke liked to retreat and work, because it was lonely and the light was excellent. Daniel for his part stayed down below, and only went out into the city to meet with Leibniz.

  DOCTOR GOTTFRIED WILHELM LEIBNIZ picked up the coffee-pot and tippe
d it into his cup for the third time, and for the third time nothing came out of it. It had been empty for half an hour. He made a little sigh of regret, and then reluctantly stood up. “I beg your pardon, but I begin a long journey tomorrow. First the Channel crossing—then, between Calais and Paris, we shall have to dodge French regiments, straggling home, abject, starving, and deranged.”

  Daniel insisted on paying the bill, and then followed the Doctor out the door. They began strolling in the direction of the inn where Leibniz had been staying. They were not far from the ’Change. Paving-stones and charred firebrands still littered the unpaved streets.

  “Not much divine harmony in evidence, here in London,” Daniel said. “I can only hang my head in shame, as an Englishman.”

  “If you and France had conquered the Dutch Republic, you would have much more to be ashamed of,” Leibniz returned.

  “When, God willing, you get back to Paris, you can say that your mission was a success: there is no war.”

  “It was a failure,” Leibniz said, “we did not prevent the war.”

  “When you came to London, Doctor, you said that your philosophick endeavours were nothing more than a cover for diplomacy. But I suspect that it was the other way round.”

  “My philosophick endeavours were a failure, too,” Leibniz said.

  “You have gained one adherent…”

  “Yes. Oldenburg pesters me every day to complete the Arithmetickal Engine.”

  “Make that two adherents, then, Doctor.”

  Leibniz actually stopped in his tracks and turned to examine Daniel’s face, to see if he was jesting. “I am honored, sir,” he said, “but I would prefer to think of you not as an adherent but as a friend.”

  “Then the honor is all mine.”

  They linked arms and walked in silence for a while.