Quicksilver Read online

  Pepys, Comstock, the Bishop of Chester, and Enoch the Red climbed out. Down in the tunnel, lights were now being lit. Consequently, through an open window, Daniel could see a banquet laid: a leg of mutton, a wheel of Cheshire, a dish of larks, ale, China oranges. But this room was not a dining-hall. In its corners he could see the gleam of retorts and quicksilver-flasks and fine balances, the glow of furnaces. He had heard rumors that the King had caused an alchemical laboratory to be built in the bowels of Whitehall, but until now, they had only been rumors.

  “My coachman will take you back to Mr. Raleigh Waterhouse’s residence,” Pepys told him, pausing at the lip of the stairway. “Please make yourself comfortable below.”

  “You are very kind, sir, but I’m not far from Raleigh’s, and I could benefit from the walk.”

  “As you wish. Please give my compliments to Mr. Oldenburg when you see him.”

  “I shall be honored to do so,” Daniel answered, and just restrained himself from saying, Please give mine to the King!

  Daniel now worked up his courage and walked down into the Sermon Court and gazed up into the windows of the King’s chambers, though not for long—he was trying to look as if he came here all the time. A little side passage, under the end of the Privy Gallery, got him into the corner of the Privy Garden, which was a vast space. Another gallery ran along its edge, parallel to the river, and by going down it he could have got all the way to the royal bowling green and thence down into Westminster. But he’d had enough excitement for just now—instead he cut back across the great Garden, heading towards the Holbein Gate. Courtiers strolled and gossiped all round. Every so often he turned around and gazed back towards the river to admire the lodgings of the King and the Queen and their household rising up above the garden with the golden light of many beeswax candles shining out of them.

  If Daniel had truly been the man about town that, for a few minutes, he was pretending to be, he’d have had eyes only for the people in the windows and on the garden paths. He’d have strained to glimpse something—a new trend in the cut of Persian vests, or two important Someones exchanging whispers in a shadowed corner. But as it was, there was one spectacle, and one only, that drew his gaze, like Polaris sucking on a lodestone. He turned his back on the King’s dwellings and looked south across the garden and the bowling green towards Westminster.

  There, mounted up high on a weatherbeaten stick, was a sort of irregular knot of stuff, barely visible as a gray speck in the moonlight: the head of Oliver Cromwell. When the King had come back, ten years ago, he’d ordered the corpse to be dug up from where Drake and the others had buried it, and the head cut off and mounted on a pike and never taken down. Ever since then Cromwell had been looking down helplessly upon a scene of unbridled lewdness that was Whitehall Palace. And now Cromwell, who had once dandled Drake’s youngest son on his knee, was looking down upon him.

  Daniel tilted his head back and looked up at the stars and supposed that seen from Drake’s perspective up in Heaven it must all look like Hell—and Daniel right in the middle of it.

  BEING LOCKED UP in the Tower of London had changed Henry Oldenburg’s priorities all around. Daniel had expected that the Secretary of the Royal Society would jump headfirst into the great sack of foreign mail that Daniel had brought him, but all he cared about was the new lute-strings. He’d grown too fat to move around very effectively and so Daniel fetched necessaries from various parts of the half-moon-shaped room: Oldenburg’s lute, extra candles, a tuning-fork, some sheet-music, more wood on the fire. Oldenburg turned the lute over across his knees like a naughty boy for spanking, and tied a piece of gut or two around the instrument’s neck to serve as frets (the old ones being worn through), then replaced a couple of broken strings. Half an hour of tuning ensued (the new strings kept stretching) and then, finally, Oldenburg got what he really ached for: he and Daniel, sitting face to face in the middle of the room, sang a two-part song, the parts cleverly written so that their voices occasionally joined in chords that resonated sweetly: the curving wall of the cell acting like the mirror of Newton’s telescope to reflect the sound back to them. After a few verses, Daniel had his part memorized, and so when he sang the chorus he sat up straight and raised his chin and sang loudly at those walls, and read the graffiti cut into the stone by prisoners of centuries past. Not your vulgar Newgate Prison graffiti—most of it was in Latin, big and solemn as gravestones, and there were astrological diagrams and runic incantations graven by imprisoned sorcerers.

  Then some ale to cool the wind-pipes, and a venison pie and a keg of oysters and some oranges contributed by the R.S., and Oldenburg did a quick sort of the mail—one pile containing the latest doings of the Hotel Montmor salon in Paris, a couple of letters from Huygens, a short manuscript from Spinoza, a large pile of ravings sent in by miscellaneous cranks, and a Leibniz-mound. “This damned German will never shut up!” Oldenburg grunted—which, since Oldenburg was himself a notoriously prolix German, was actually a jest at his own expense. “Let me see…Leibniz proposes to found a Societas Eruditorum that will gather in young Vagabonds and raise them up to be an army of Natural Philosophers to overawe the Jesuits…here are his thoughts on free will versus predestination…it would be great sport to get him in an argument with Spinoza…he asks me here whether I’m aware Comenius has died…says he’s ready to pick up the faltering torch of Pan-sophism*…here’s a light, easy-to-read analysis of how the bad Latin used by Continental scholars leads to faulty thinking, and in turn to religious schism, war, bad philosophy…”

  “Sounds like Wilkins.”

  “Wilkins! Yes! I’ve considered decorating these walls with some graffiti of my own, and writing it in the Universal Character…but it’s too depressing. ‘Look, we have invented a new Philosophickal Language so that when we are imprisoned by Kings we can scratch a higher form of graffiti on our cell walls.’ ”

  “Perhaps it’ll lead us to a world where Kings can’t, or won’t, imprison us at all—”

  “Now you sound like Leibniz. Ah, here are some new mathematical proofs…nothing that hasn’t been proved already, by Englishmen…but Leibniz’s proofs are more elegant…here’s something he has modestly entitled Hypothesis Physica Nova. Good thing I’m in the Tower, or I’d never have time to read all this.”

  Daniel made coffee over the fire—they drank it and smoked Virginia tobacco in clay-pipes. Then it was time for Oldenburg’s evening constitutional. He preceded Daniel down a stack of stone pie-wedges that formed a spiral stair. “I’d hold the door and say ‘after you,’ but suppose I fell—you’d end up in the basement of Broad Arrow Tower crushed beneath me—and I’d be in the pink.”

  “Anything for the Royal Society,” Daniel jested, marveling at how Oldenburg’s bulk filled the helical tube of still air.

  “Oh, you’re more valuable to them than I am,” Oldenburg said.

  “Poh!”

  “I am near the end of my usefulness. You are just beginning. They have great plans for you—”

  “Until yesterday I wouldn’t’ve believed you—then I was allowed to hear a conversation—perfectly incomprehensible to me—but it sounded frightfully important.”

  “Tell me about this conversation.”

  They came out onto the top of the old stone curtain-wall that joined Broad Arrow Tower to Salt Tower on the south. Arm in arm, they strolled along the battlements. To the left they could look across the moat—an artificial oxbow-lake that communicated with the Thames—and a defensive glacis beyond that, then a few barracks and warehouses having to do with the Navy, and then the pasture-grounds of Wapping crooked in an elbow of the Thames, dim lights out at Ratcliff and Limehouse—then a blackness containing, among other things, Europe.

  “The Dramatis Personae: John Wilkins, Lord Bishop of Chester, and Mr. Samuel Pepys Esquire, Admiral’s Secretary, Treasurer of the Fleet, Clerk of Acts of the Navy Board, deputy Clerk of the Privy Seal, Member of the Fishery Corporation, Treasurer of the Tangier Committee, right-hand-
man of the Earl of Sandwich, courtier…am I leaving anything out?”

  “Fellow of the Royal Society.”

  “Oh, yes…thank you.”

  “What said they?”

  “First a brief speculation about who was reading your mail…”

  “I assume it’s John Comstock. He spied for the King during the Interregnum, why can’t he spy for the King now?”

  “Rings true…this led to some double entendres about tender negotiations. Mr. Pepys volunteered—speaking of the King of England, here—‘his feelings for sa soeur are most affectionate, he’s writing many letters to her.’ ”

  “Well, you know that Minette is in France—”

  “Minette?”

  “That is what King Charles calls Henrietta Anne, his sister,” Oldenburg explained. “I don’t recommend using that name in polite society—unless you want to move in with me.”

  “She’s the one who’s married to the Duc d’Orléans*—?”

  “Yes, and Mr. Pepys’s lapsing into French was of course a way of emphasizing this. Pray continue.”

  “My Lord Wilkins wondered whether she wrote back, and Pepys said Minette was spewing out letters like a diplomat.”

  Oldenburg cringed, and shook his head in dismay. “Very crude work on Mr. Pepys’s part. He was letting it be known that this exchange of letters was some sort of diplomatic negotiation. But he did not need to be so coarse with Wilkins…he must have been tired, distracted…”

  “He’d been working late—lots of gold going into the Navy Treasury under cover of darkness.”

  “I know it—behold!” Oldenburg said, and, tightening his arm, swung Daniel round so that both of them were looking west, across the Inmost Ward. They were near Salt Tower, which was the southeastern corner of the squarish Tower complex. The southern wall, therefore, stretched away from them, paralleling the river, connecting a row of squat round towers. Off to their right, planted in the center of the ward, was the ancient donjon: a freestanding building called the White Tower. A few low walls partitioned the ward into smaller quadrangles, but from this viewpoint the most conspicuous structure was the great western wall, built strong to resist attack from the always difficult City of London. On the far side of that wall, hidden from their view, a street ran up a narrow defile between it and a somewhat lower outer wall. Stout piles of smoke and steam were building from that street—which was lined with works for melting and working precious metals. It was called Mint Street. “Their infernal hammers keep me awake—the smoke of their furnaces comes in through the embrasures.” Walls hereabouts tended to have narrow cross-shaped arrow-slits called embrasures, which was one of the reasons the Tower made a good prison, especially for fat men.

  “So that’s why kings live at Whitehall nowadays—to be upwind of the Mint?” Daniel said jestingly.

  On Oldenburg’s face, perfunctory amusement stamped out by pedantic annoyance. “You don’t understand. The Mint’s operations are extremely sporadic—it has been cold and silent for months—the workers idle and drunk.”

  “And now?”

  “Now they are busy and drunk. A few days ago, as I stood in this very place, I saw a three-master, a man of war, heavily laden, drop anchor just around the river-bend, there. Small boats carrying heavy loads began to put in at the water-gate just there, in the middle of the south wall. On the same night, the Mint came suddenly to life, and has not slept since.”

  “And gold began to arrive at the Navy Treasury,” Daniel said, “making much work for Mr. Pepys.”

  “Now, let us get back to this conversation you were allowed to hear. How did the Bishop of Chester respond to Mr. Pepys’s rather ham-handed revelations?”

  “He said something like, ‘So Minette keeps his Majesty well acquainted with the doings of her beau?’”

  “Now whom do you suppose he meant by that?”

  “Her husband—? I know, I know—my naïveté is pathetic.”

  “Philippe, duc d’Orleans, owns the largest and finest collection of women’s underwear in France—his sexual adventures are strictly limited to being fucked up the ass by strapping officers.”

  “Poor Minette!”

  “She knew perfectly well when she married him,” Oldenburg said, rolling his eyes. “She spent her honeymoon in bed with her new husband’s elder brother: King Louis XIV. That is what Bishop Wilkins meant when he referred to Minette’s beau.”

  “I stand corrected.”

  “Pray go on.”

  “Pepys assured Wilkins that, considering the volume of correspondence, King Charles couldn’t help but be very close to the man in question—an analogy was made to hoops of gold…”

  “Which you took to mean, matrimonial bliss?”

  “Even I knew what Pepys meant by that,” Daniel said hotly.

  “So did Wilkins, I’m sure—how did he seem, then?”

  “Ill at ease—he wanted reassurance that ‘the two arch-Dissenters’ were handling formal contacts.”

  “It is a secret—but generally known among the sort who rattle around London in private coaches in the night-time—that a treaty with France is being negotiated by the Earl of Shaftesbury, and His Majesty’s old drinking and whoring comrade, the Duke of Buckingham. Chosen for the job not because they are skilled diplomats but because not even your late father would ever accuse them of Popish sympathies.”

  A Yeoman Warder was approaching, making his rounds. “Good evening, Mr. Oldenburg. Mr. Waterhouse.”

  “Evening, George. How’s the gout?”

  “Better today, thank you, sir—the cataplasm seemed to work—where did you get the receipt from?” George then went into a rote exchange of code-words with another Beefeater on the roof of Salt Tower, then reversed direction, bade them good evening, and strolled away.

  Daniel enjoyed the view until he was certain that the only creature that could overhear them was a spaniel-sized raven perched on a nearby battlement.

  Half a mile upstream, the river was combed, and nearly dammed up, by a line of sloppy, boat-shaped, man-made islands, supporting a series of short and none too ambitious stone arches. The arches were joined, one to the next, by a roadway, made of wood in some places and of stone in others, and the roadway was mostly covered with buildings that sprayed in every direction, cantilevered far out over the water and kept from falling into it by makeshift diagonal braces. Far upstream, and far downstream, the river was placid and sluggish, but where it was forced between those starlings (as the man-made islands were called), it was all furious. The starlings themselves, and the banks of the Thames for miles downstream, were littered with wreckage of light boats that had failed in the attempt to shoot the rapids beneath London Bridge, and (once a week or so) with the corpses and personal effects of their passengers.

  A few parts of the bridge had been kept free of buildings so that fires could not jump the river. In one of those gaps a burly woman stopped to fling a jar into the angry water below. Daniel could not see it from here, but he knew it would be painted with a childish rendering of a face: this a charm to ward off witch-spells. The water-wheels constructed in some of those arch-ways made gnashing and clanking noises that forced Waterhouse and Oldenburg, half a mile away, to raise their voices slightly, and put their heads closer together. Daniel supposed this was no accident—he suspected they were coming to a part of the conversation that Oldenburg would rather keep private from those sharp-eared Beefeaters.

  Directly behind London Bridge, but much farther away round the river-bend, were the lights of Whitehall Palace, and Daniel almost convinced himself that there was a greenish glow about the place tonight, as Enoch the Red schooled the King, and his court, and the most senior Fellows of the Royal Society, in the new Element called Phosphorus.

  “Then Pepys got too enigmatic even for Wilkins,” Daniel said. “He said, ‘I refer you to Chapter Ten of your 1641 work.’”

  “The Cryptonomicon ?”

  “So I assume. Chapter Ten is where Wilkins explains steganog-raphy,
or how to embed a subliminal message in an innocuous-seeming letter—” but here Daniel stopped because Oldenburg had adopted a patently fake look of innocent curiosity. “I think you know this well enough. Now, Wilkins apologized for being thickheaded and asked whether Pepys was speaking, now, of you.”

  “Ho, ho, ho!” Oldenburg bellowed, the laughter bouncing like cannon-fire off the hard walls of the Inmost Ward. The raven hopped closer to them and screeched, “Caa, caa, caa!” Both humans laughed, and Oldenburg fetched a bit of bread from his pocket and held it out to the bird. It hopped closer and reared back to peck it out of the fat pale hand—but Oldenburg snatched it back and said very distinctly, “Cryptonomicon.”

  The raven cocked its head, opened its beak, and made a long gagging noise. Oldenburg sighed and opened his hand. “I have been trying to teach him words,” he explained, “but that one is too much of a mouthful, for a raven.” The bird’s beak struck the bread out of Oldenburg’s hand, and it hopped back out of reach, in case Oldenburg should change his mind.

  “Wilkins’s confusion is understandable—but Pepys’s meaning is clear. There are some suspicious-minded persons upriver” (waving in the general direction of Whitehall) “who think I’m a spy, communicating with Continental powers by means of subliminal messages embedded in what purport to be philosophickal discourses—it being beyond their comprehension that anyone would care as much as I seem to about new species of eels, methods for squaring hyperbolae, et cetera. But Pepys was not referring to that—he was being ever so much more clever. He was telling Wilkins that the not-very-secret negotiations being carried on by Buckingham and Shaftesbury are like the innocuous-seeming message, being used to conceal the truly secret agreement that the two Kings are drawing up, using Minette as the conduit.”