The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and the System of the World (198 page)

“Was that one of the shouting Germans?” Ravenscar inquired.

Eliza met his eye. “You could hear them all the way out here?” Then she tilted her head out the window to watch.

“Madame, I could have heard them from Wales. What were they on about?”

Eliza was crooking her finger at someone outside, then nodding as if to say, yes, I mean
you
, sirrah! Presently a face appeared in the window: a hackney-driver, hat in hands. “Follow yonder German until he gets on a boat. Watch the boat until you can’t see it any more. Go to—what did you call your Den of Iniquity, my lord?”

“The Nag’s Head.”

“Go to the Nag’s Head and leave word for the Marquis that his ship has come in. Someone there will then give you more of these.” Eliza blindly scooped some coins out of her strong-box and slapped them into the driver’s hat.

“Right you are, milady!”

“It shall probably be the Gravesend Ferry, but you might have to trail him all the way to Ipswich or something,” Eliza added, partly to explain the amount; for she got the idea, from the way Ravenscar had just swallowed his own tongue, that she had overpaid.

The hackney driver was
so
gone, ’twas as if he’d been launched from a siege-mortar. Eliza looked back to Ravenscar. “You asked, what were the Germans shouting about?”

“Yes. I was afraid I should have to venture within and run them through.” Ravenscar slapped the scabbard of his small-sword.

“They were full of impertinent questions about what I meant to do with all that silver.”

“And you told them—?”

“I affected a noble diffidence, and pretended not to understand any language other than the high French of Versailles.”

“Right. So
they
believe that the invasion has begun!”

“I cannot read their minds, my lord; and if I could, I should not wish to.”

“And they have in consequence despatched a runner to the Continent. You mentioned Ipswich—implying that his destination is Holland—and his mission is, what?”

Eliza shrugged. “To fetch the rest, I’d suppose.”

“The rest of
the Germans
!?”

“No, no, the rest of the
silver
—the remaining four-fifths of it.”

An observer standing without the carriage would have seen it buck and rock. Some sort of nervous catastrophe had caused all of the Marquis of Ravenscar’s muscles to contract at once. He was a few moments getting his faculties back. When he spoke again, it was from a sprawling, semi-prone position. “What the hell are you going to do with so much silver?”

“Most likely, convert it into Bills of Exchange that can be taken back to France.”

“Where the money came from in the first place. Why bother at all?”

“Now it is
you
who asks impertinent questions,” Eliza said. “All that need concern you for now is that the Hacklhebers believe the invasion has been launched. They are probably trying to buy silver on the London market
now
. Which shall lead
all
to believe in the invasion, until positive news arrives to the contrary. Your silver has only gone
up
in value.”

“In truth there is one other matter that doth concern me,” said Ravenscar, “which is that we are sitting out in the street with a king’s ransom in silver; pray, could we get it now behind walls, locks, and guns?”

“Wherever you consider it shall be safest, monsieur.”

“The Tower of London!” commanded Ravenscar, and the carriage moved, setting off small tinkly avalanches in all the strong-boxes.

“Ah,” said Eliza with evident satisfaction, “no want of walls and guns
there,
I suppose; and I shall have an opportunity to pay a call on my lord Marlborough.”

“I exist to please you, madame.”

10/20
JUNE
1692

“M
Y
DELIGHT
AT
seeing Monsieur Fatio again is joined by
wonder
at the company he keeps!” Feeble as it was, this was the best that Eliza could muster when Fatio walked into the library accompanied by a man with long silver hair—a man who could not be anyone but Isaac Newton.

Even by the standards of savants, this had been a socially awkward morning. Eliza had been in London for a fortnight. The first few days had gone to buying clothes, finding lodgings, sleeping, and vomiting; for obviously she was pregnant. Then she had sent notes out to a few London acquaintances. Most had responded within a day. Fatio’s message had not arrived until this morning—it had been shot under her door as she knelt over a chamber-pot. Given the lengthy delay, she might have expected it to be a flawlessly composed letter, the utmost of many drafts; but it had been scratched out in haste on a page torn from a waste-book, and it had asked that Eliza come to Gresham’s right away. This Eliza had done, not without much discomfort and inconvenience; then she had waited in the library for an hour. Now Fatio was at last here, looking flushed and wild, as if he had just galloped in from some battlefield. And he had this silver-haired gentleman in tow.

For a few moments he had stood between them, calculating the etiquette; then he remembered his manners, and bowed to Eliza, and spoke in French: “My lady. Our exploit at Scheveningen is never far from my mind. I think of it every day. Which may give some measure of my joy in seeing you again.” This had been rehearsed, and he delivered it in too much haste for it to seem perfectly sincere; but the situation
was, after all, complicated. Before Eliza could respond, Fatio stepped aside and thrust a hand at his companion. “I present to you Isaac Newton,” he announced. Then, switching to English: “Isaac, it is my honor to give you Eliza de Lavardac, Duchess of Arcachon and of Qwghlm.”

Fatio scarcely took his eyes from Eliza’s face as he spoke these words, and as Eliza and Isaac curtseyed or bowed and said polite things to each other.

Eliza liked Fatio but remembered, now, why the man had always made her a bit uneasy. Nicolas Fatio de Duillier was forever an Actor in an Italian Opera that existed in his own mind. Today’s scene at the Library of Gresham’s was meant to be some kind of a set-piece. The Duchess, summoned in haste by a mysterious note, fumes impatiently for an hour—dramatick tension mounts—finally, just when she is about to storm out, Fatio saves the day by rushing in, aglow from superhuman efforts, and turns disaster to triumph by bringing in the Master himself. And it
was
dramatick, after a fashion; but whatever genuine emotions Eliza might have had she kept to herself, for no reason other than that Fatio was studying her as a starving man studies a closed oyster.

Newton had been dragged here; this was plain enough. But once he saw Eliza in the flesh, and she became something concrete to him, his reluctance was forgotten. Then it was a simple matter of remembering why he had been brought here.

They sat around a table, like students, all in the same sorts of chairs, with no thought given to rank. Newton fixed his gaze on a small burn-mark on the tabletop, and collected his thoughts for a minute or two. Eliza and Fatio filled the silence with chit-chat. But each kept an eye on Newton. Finally Newton’s eyes flicked up to a nearby window, and he got a look on his face as if he were ready to unburden his mind of something. Fatio broke off in mid-sentence and half turned toward him.

“I shall speak as if everything Nicolas has said of your wit and erudition is true,” Newton began, “which means that I shall not limp along with half-truths, nor circle back to proffer tedious explanations, as I might do when speaking to certain other Duchesses.”

“Then I shall strive to be worthy of Fatio’s compliments and of your respect, sir,” Eliza answered.

Which seemed to be just the sort of thing Newton had been hoping to hear, for he gave a little nod, and almost smiled, before going on. “I would address in a straightforward way the question of Alchemy, and why I esteem it. For you will think me addled in the mind, that I devote so much time to it. You will think this because all of the Alchemists you have talked to are mountebanks or their fools.
This will have given you a low opinion of the Art and its practitioners.

“You are a friend of Daniel Waterhouse, who does not love Alchemy, and who looks on my time spent in the laboratory as time lost to Natural Philosophy. You know, he went so far as to set fire to my laboratory in 1677. I have forgiven him. He has not, however, forgiven
me
for continuing to study Alchemy. Perhaps he has, by words or gestures, communicated his views to you, my lady.

“You are also a friend of Leibniz. Now, there are those who would have me believe that Leibniz is, to me, some sort of adversary. I do not think so.” Newton’s eyes strayed towards Fatio as he said this. Fatio turned red, and would not meet his gaze. “I say that the product of mass and velocity is conserved; Leibniz says that the product of mass and
the square of
velocity is conserved; it seems that both of us are correct, and that by applying both of these principles we may build a science of Dynamics—to borrow Leibniz’s term—that is more than the sum of these two parts. So in this Leibniz has not detracted from my work, but added to it.

“Likewise, he would not detract from
Principia Mathematica
but rather add to it what is plainly wanting: namely, an account of the seats and causes of Force. In this, Leibniz and I are comrades-in-arms. I, too, would unlock the riddle of Force: Force at a distance, such as joins gravitating bodies, and Forces in and among bodies, as when they collide. Or as here.”

Newton extended one hand, palm up, and Eliza supposed for a moment that he was directing her attention to the window set into the wall above this table. But Newton waved his hand around in the air as if trying to catch a moth, and finally steadied it. His palm, which was as pale as parchment, was striped with a little rainbow, projected by some bevel or irregularity in the windowpane. Eliza turned her attention to it. The swath of colors was steady as a gyroscope on a stand, even though Newton’s hand never stopped moving. This was a
trompe l’oeil
to best anything daubed on a wall by a mischievous painter at Versailles. Eliza acted without thinking: she reached out with both hands, cupping them together beneath Newton’s, and cradled his wayward hand in hers, steadying it. “I see that you are unwell,” she said, “for this is not the tremor of a coffee-enthusiast, but the shivering of a man with a fever.” Yet Newton’s hand felt cold.

“We are all unwell, if it comes to that,” Newton returned, “for if some Plague were to take us all, why, these little spectra would still crawl about the room until the End of Days, neither knowing nor caring whether living hands were held up to catch them. Our flesh
stops the light. The flesh is weak, yes, but the spirit is strong, and by applying our minds to the contemplation of what has been interrupted by our fleshly organs of sense, we may make our minds wiser and our spirits better, even though flesh decays. Now! I do not have a fever, my lady.” He took his hand back, and gripped the arm of his chair to stop its shivering. The little rainbow now fell on Eliza’s cupped hands. “But I am mortal and would fain do all that I could, in the time allotted to me, to penetrate this mystery of Force. Now consider this light that you are catching in your hands. It has traveled a hundred million miles from the Sun without being affected in any wise by the Cœlestial Æther. In its passage through the atmosphere it has been subjected to only slight distortions. And yet in traversing a quarter of an inch of window-glass, its course is bent, and it is riven into several colors. It is such an everyday thing that we do not mark it; yet pray consider for a moment just how remarkable it is! During its hundred-million-mile passage, is it not acted upon by the gravity of the Sun, which is powerful enough to hold even mighty Jupiter in its grasp, though at a much greater remove? And is it not acted upon as well by the gravity of the Earth and Moon, and all the other planets? And yet it seems perfectly insensitive to thse mighty forces. Yet there is embedded within this shard of glass some hidden Force that bends it and splits it with no effort. It’s as if a cannonball, hurled at infinite speed from some gun of inconceivable might, and passing through ramparts and bulwarks as if they were shadows, were deflected and shivered into bits by a child holding up a feather. What could be concealed within an ordinary piece of window-glass that harbors such potency, and yet affects you and me not at all? Or consider the action of acids, which can in a few moments dissolve stones that have stood unmarked by Time and the elements since the world was formed. What has the power to annihilate a stone God made, a stone that could support a Pyramid, stop fire, or turn aside musket-balls? Some force of immense power must be latent in acids, to destroy what is so strong. And is it so inconceivable that this force might be akin to, or the same as, what bends the light as it passes through the window? Are these not perfectly suitable questions to be asked by those who style themselves Natural Philosophers?”

“If only others who study Alchemy would form their questions so well, and state them so lucidly!” Eliza said.

“The traditions of the Art are ancient and strange. Alchemists, when they say aught, say it in murky similitudes. This is not for me to remedy, save by pursuing the Work to its proper conclusion and thereby making plain what has been occulted for so many centuries.
And it is concerning that Work that I should like to say something to you concerning the gold that Jack Shaftoe stole in Bonanza.”

This was such an unexpected turn in the conversation that Eliza flopped back hard in her chair, like a doll tossed into a box. Fatio turned his face toward her and stared avidly. Newton seemed ever so drily amused by her astonishment. “I do not know the nature of your involvement with this, my lady, and it is neither my place, nor my desire, to quarry the truth out of you. It suffices that you are
believed
, by diverse members of the Esoteric Brotherhood, to know something about the matter; and as long as that is true, why, it is in your interest to know
why
Alchemists care so much about this gold.
Do
you know, my lady?”

“I know, or suspect, only what I have inferred from the words and deeds of certain men who desire it. Those men believe that this particular gold has some supernatural properties exceeding normal gold.”

“I do not know what the word
supernatural
means, really,” said Isaac, bemused. “But you are not far wrong.”

“I do not wish to be
at all
wrong. So pray correct me, sir.”

“King Solomon the Wise, builder of the Temple, was the forefather of all Alchemists,” Isaac said. “Set upon the throne, a young man, fearing himself unequal to the task, he made a thousand burnt offerings to the LORD; who then came to him in a dream and said, ‘Ask what I shall give thee.’ And Solomon asked not for wealth or power but for an understanding heart. And it pleased the LORD ‘so well that Solomon had desired this thing, that he gave him an understanding heart ‘so that there hath been none like thee before thee, neither after thee shall arise the like unto thee.’ First Kings, Chapter Three, Verse 12. Thus Solomon’s name became a byword for wisdom:
Sophia
. What is the name we give to those who love wisdom? Philosophers. I am a philosopher; and though I can never equal the wisdom of Solomon—for it says quite plainly in the chapter and verse I have quoted, that no man who came after Solomon would achieve like wisdom—I can strive to discover some of what is today hidden but was once in plain view in the Temple of Wisdom that Solomon built.

“Now it says, too, that the LORD gave Solomon riches, even though Solomon had not asked for them. Solomon had gold, and moreover he had an understanding heart, so that the secrets hidden within matter—such as I have discoursed of in window-glass and acids—could scarcely have been hidden from his gaze for long. The lucubrations of latter-day Alchemists such as I must be little more than crude mockery of the Great Work that Solomon the Wise undertook in his Temple. For thousands of years, Alchemists have
sought to re-discover what fell into obscurity when Solomon came to the end of his years in Jerusalem. Most of their efforts have been unavailing; yet a few of the great ones—Hermes Trismegistus, Sendigovius, the Black Monk, Didier, Artephius—came to similar, if not identical, conclusions as to the process that must be followed to achieve the Great Work. I am very close now—” And here Newton faltered for the first time in several minutes, and took his gaze away from Eliza, and with a little nod and the faintest trace of a smile gathered Fatio once more into the discourse. “
We
are very close now to achieving this thing. I am told, my lady, that there are those who hold my
Principia Mathematica
in some high regard; but I say to you that it shall be nothing but a preface to what I shall bring forth next, provided I can only move the Work a short step further.

“It would be of immense help to us in this if we had even a small sample of the original gold given to Solomon by the LORD.”

“Now I understand it at last,” Eliza said. “That gold that was taken by Jack Shaftoe and his pirates from Bonanza is believed, by you and other Alchemists, to have been a sample of King Solomon’s gold, somehow preserved down through the ages. It is somehow different from the gold that the slaves of the Portuguese dig from the earth in Brazil—”

“The theory of
how
it differs has been developed in more detail than you might care to listen to, particularly if you hold Alchemy to be nonsensical,” said Fatio. “It has to do with how the particles—the atoms—of gold are composed, one to the next, to form networks, and networks of networks,
et cetera, et cetera,
and what occupies, or may pass into, the holes in the said nets. Suffice it to say that the Solomonic Gold, though it looks the same, is slightly heavier than mundane gold. And so even those who know nothing of the Art may recognize a sample of this Gold as extraordinary merely by weighing it, and computing its density. A large trove of such gold was found in Mexico some years ago and brought back to Spain by the ex-Viceroy, who intended to sell it to Lothar von Hacklheber, but—”