The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and the System of the World (42 page)

“You could as well have asked: are
we
thinking? Or merely reflecting God’s genius?”

“Suppose I
had
asked it, Doctor—what would your answer be?”

“My answer, sir, is both.”

“Both? But that’s impossible. It has to be one or the other.”

“I do not agree with you, Mr. Waterhouse.”

“If we are mere mechanisms, obeying rules laid down by God, then all of our actions are predestined, and we are not really thinking.”

“But Mr. Waterhouse, you were raised by Puritans, who believe in predestination.”

“Raised by them, yes…” Daniel said, and let it hang in the air for a while.

“You no longer accept predestination?”

“It does not resonate sweetly with my observations of the world, as a good hypothesis
ought
to.” Daniel sighed. “Now I see why Newton has chosen the path of Alchemy.”

“When you say he
chose
that path, you imply that he must have
rejected
another. Are you saying that your friend Newton explored the idea of a mechanically determined brain, and rejected it?”

“It may be he explored it, if only in his dreams and nightmares.”

Leibniz raised his eyebrows and spent a few moments staring at the clutter of pots and cups on the table. “This is one of the two great labyrinths into which human minds are drawn: the question of free will versus predestination. You were raised to believe in the latter. You have rejected it—which must have been a great spiritual struggle—and become a thinker. You have adopted a modern, mechanical philosophy. But that very philosophy now seems to be leading you back towards predestination. It is most difficult.”

“But you claim to know of a third way, Doctor. I should like to hear of it.”

“And I should like to tell of it,” Leibniz said, “but I must part from you now, and make rendezvous with my traveling companions. May we continue on some other day?”

Aboard Minerva, Cape Cod Bay, Massachusetts

NOVEMBER 1713

HE DISSECTED MORE
than his share of dead men’s heads during those early Royal Society days, and knows that the hull of the skull is all wrapped about with squishy rigging: haul-yards of tendon and braces of ligament cleated to pinrails on the jawbone and temple,
tugging at the corners of spreading canvases of muscle that curve over the forehead and wrap the old Jolly Roger in as many overlapping layers as there are sails on a ship of the line. As Daniel trudges up out
of Minerva’s
bilge, dragging a chinking sack of ammunition behind him, he feels all that stuff tightening up, steadily and inexorably, each stairstep a click of the pawls, as if invisible sailors were turning capstans inside his skull. He’s spent the last hour below the water-line—never his favorite place on shipboard, but safe from cannonballs anyway—smashing plates with a hammer and bellowing old songs, and never been so relaxed in all his life. But now he’s climbed back up into the center of the hull, just the sort of bulky bull’s-eye pirates might aim swivel-guns at if they lacked confidence in their ability to pick off small fine targets from their wave-tossed platforms.

Minerva’s
got a spacious stairwell running all the way down through the middle of her, just ahead of the mighty creaking trunk of the mainmast, with two flights of stairs spiraling opposite directions so the men descending don’t interfere with those ascending—or so doddering Doctors with sacks of pottery-shards do not hinder boys running up from the hold with—what? The light’s dim. They appear to be canvas sacks—heavy bulging polyhedra with rusty nails protruding from the vertices. Daniel’s glad they’re going up the other stairs, because he wouldn’t want one of those things to bump into him. It’d be certain death from lockjaw.

Some important procedure’s underway on the gundeck. The gunports are all closed, except for one cracked open a hand’s breadth on the starboard side—therefore, not far from Daniel when he emerges from the staircase. Several relatively important officers have gathered in a semicircle around this port, as if for a baptism. There’s a general commotion of pinging and thudding coming from the hull-planks and the deck above. It could be gunfire. And if it could be, it probably is. Someone grabs the sack from Daniel and drags it to the center of the gundeck. Men with empty blunderbusses converge on it like jackals on a haunch.

Daniel’s elbowed hard by a man hauling on a line that enters
Minerva
through a small orifice above the gunport. This has the effect of (1) knocking Daniel down on his bony pelvis and (2) swinging said gunport all the way open, creating a sudden square of light. Framed in it is part of the rigging of a smaller ship, so close that a younger man could easily jump to it. There is a man—a pirate—on that ship pointing a musket in Daniel’s direction, but he’s struck down by a gaudy spray of outmoded china fragments, fired down from Minerva’s upperdeck. “Caltrops away!” says
someone, and boys with sacks lunge toward the open gunport and hurl out a tinkling cosmos, down to the deck of the smaller ship. Moments later the same ceremony’s repeated through a gunport on the larboard side—so there must be a pirate-vessel
there,
too. The gunports are hauled closed again, sporting new decorations: constellations of lead balls fired into ’em from below.

The screaming/bellowing ratio has climbed noticeably. Daniel (helping himself to his feet, thank you, and hobbling crabwise to a safe haven near the mainmast, to inventory his complaints) reckons that the screaming must originate from shoeless pirates with caltrop-spikes between their metatarsals—until he hears “Fire! Fire!” and notes a curl of smoke invading the gundeck through a cracked gunport, speared on a shaft of sunlight. Then some instinct makes Daniel forget his bruises and sprains—he’s up the last flight of stairs, spry as any eight-year-old powder monkey, and out in the sail-dappled sunlight, where he’ll happily risk musket-balls.

But it’s the pirate-sloop, not
Minerva,
that’s on fire. Lines are going slack all over the starboard half of the ship. Each of them happens to terminate in a rusty grappling-hook that’s lodged in a ratline or a rail. The pirates are cutting themselves free!

Now comes a general rush of men to larboard, where a whaleboat is still pestering them.
Minerva
rolls that direction on a sea. The whaleboat comes into view, no longer eclipsed by the hull’s tumblehome, and a score of muskets and blunderbusses fire down into it at once. Daniel only glimpses the result—appalling—then
Minerva
rolls starboard and hides it from view.

The men throw their weapons into lockers and ascend into the rigging, pursuant to commands from van Hoek, who’s up on the poop deck bellowing into a shiny trumpet of hammered brass. There are plenty of men belowdecks who could be making contributions here, but they don’t come up. Daniel, beginning to get the hang of pirate-fighting, understands that van Hoek wants to hide the true size of his crew from Teach.

They have been running before a north wind (though it seems to’ve shifted a few points westwards) for over an hour. The southern limb of Cape Cod is dead ahead, barring their path. But long before reaching the shore,
Minerva
would run aground in coarse brown sand. So they have to come about now and begin to work to windward, towards the open Atlantic. These simple terms—“come about,” for example—denote procedures that are as complicated and tradition-bound as the installation of a new Pope. Great big strong men are running toward the bow: the foreyard losers and furlers, and the headsail loosers and stowers. They take up positions
on the forecastledeck or shinny out onto the bowsprit, but politely step aside for the wiry foretopmen who begin their laborious ascent up the fore shrouds to work the topsails and things higher up the foremast. It is a bristling and tangled thicket of nautical detail. Like watching fifty surgeons dissect fifty different animals at once—the kind of stuff that, half a century ago, would’ve fascinated Daniel, sucked him into this sort of life, made him a sea-captain. But like a captain reefing and striking his sails before too strong a wind, lest it drive his ship onto the shallows, Daniel ignores as much of this as he can get away with, and tries to understand what is happening in its general outlines:
Minerva
is coming round toward the wind. In her wake, a mile abaft, is the sloop, her sails lying a-shiver, leaving the little ship dead in the water, drifting slowly to leeward, as pirates try to beat out flames with sopped canvas whilst not stepping on any of those caltrops. Several miles north of that, four more ships are spread out on the bay, waiting.

A panic of luffing and shivering spreads through
Minerva’s
rig as all the sails change their relationship to the wind, then everything snaps tight, just as the sailors knew it would, and she’s running as close-hauled as she can, headed northeast. In just a few minutes she’s drawn abeam of that scorched sloop, which is now steaming, rather than smoking, and attempting to make sail. It’s obvious that caltrops and flying crockery-shards have deranged the crew, in the sense that no man knows what to do when. So the sloop’s movements are inconclusive.

All the more surprising that van Hoek orders a tack, when it isn’t really necessary.
Minerva
comes about and sails directly toward the meandering sloop. Several minutes later,
Minerva
bucks once as she rams the sloop amidships, then shudders as her keel drives the wreckage under the sea. Those burly forecastle-men go out with cutlasses and hatchets to cut shreds of the sloop’s rigging away from the bowsprit, where it has become fouled. Van Hoek, strolling on the poop deck, aims a pistol over the rail and, in a sudden lily of smoke, speeds a drowning pirate to Hell.

Royal Society Meeting, Gunfleet House

1673

“I
RENEW MY OBJECTION
—” said Robert Boyle. “It does not seem
respectful
to inventory the contents of our Founder’s guts as if they were a few keepsakes left behind in a chest—”

“Overruled,” said John Comstock, still President of the Royal Society—just barely. “Though, out of respect for our
remarkably generous
host, I will defer to
him
.”

Thomas More Anglesey, Duke of Gunfleet, was seated at the head of his drawing-room, at a conspicuously new gilt-and-white-enamel table in the
barock
style. Other bigwigs, such as John Comstock, surrounded him, seated according to equally
barock
rules of protocol. Anglesey withdrew a large watch from the pocket of his Persian vest and held it up to the light streaming in through about half an acre of window-glass, exceptionally clear and colorless and bubble-free and recently installed.

“Can we get through it in
fifty seconds?
” he inquired.

Inhalations all round. In his peripheral vision, Daniel saw several old watches being stuffed into pockets—pockets that tended to be frayed, and rimmed with that nameless dark shine. But the Earl of Upnor and—of all people—Roger Comstock (who was sitting next to Daniel) reached into clean bright pockets, took out new watches, and managed to hold them up in such a way that most everyone in the room could see that each was equipped, not just with
two
but
three
hands, the third moving so quickly that you could
see
its progress round the dial—counting the
seconds!

Many hunched glances, now, toward Robert Hooke, the Hephaestus of the tiny. Hooke managed to look as if he didn’t care about how impressed everyone was—which was probably true. Daniel looked over at Leibniz, sitting there with his box on his lap, who had a soulful, distant expression.

Roger Comstock, noting the same thing: “Is that how a German looks before he bursts into tears?”

Upnor, following Roger’s gaze: “Or before he pulls out his broadsword and begins mowing down Turks.”

“He deserves our credit for showing up at all,” Daniel
murmured—hypnotized by the movement of Roger Comstock’s second-hand. “Word arrived yesterday—his patron died in Mainz.”

“Of embarrassment, most likely,” hissed the Earl of Upnor.

A chirurgeon, looking deeply nervous and out of his depth, was chivvied up to the front of the room. It was a big room, this. Its owner, the Duke of Gunfleet, perhaps too much under the spell of his architect, insisted on calling it the
Grand Salon.
This was simply French for
Big Big Room;
but it seemed a little bigger, and ever so much grander, when the French nomenclature was used.

Even under the humble appellation of Big Big Room, it was a bit too big and too grand for the chirurgeon. “Fifty seconds!—?” he said.

There was a difficult interlude, lasting much longer than fifty seconds, as a helpful Fellow tried to explain the idea of fifty seconds to the chirurgeon, who had got stuck on the misconception that they were speaking of 1/52
S
—perhaps some idiom from the gambling world?

“Think of minutes of longitude,” someone called out from the back of the Big Big Room. “One sixtieth of that sort of a minute is called what?”

“A second of longitude,” said the chirurgeon.

“By analogy, then, one sixtieth of a minute of
time
is—”

“A second…of time,” said the chirurgeon; then was suddenly mortified as he ran through some rough calculations in his head.

“One thirty-six-hundredth of an hour,” called out a bored voice with a French accent.

“Time’s up!” announced Boyle, “Let us move on—”

“The good doctor may have
another
fifty seconds,” Anglesey ruled.

“Thank you, my lord,” said the chirurgeon, and cleared his throat. “Perhaps those gentlemen who have been the
patrons
of Mr. Hooke’s horologickal researches, and are now the
beneficiaries
of his so ingenious handiwork, will be so kind as to keep me informed, during my presentation of the results of Lord Chester’s
post-mortem,
as to the passage of time—”

“I accept that charge—you have already spent twenty seconds!” said the Earl of Upnor.

“Please, Louis, let us show due respect for our Founder, and for this Doctor,” said his father.

“It seems
too late
for the former, Father, but I assent to the latter.”

“Hear, hear!” Boyle said. This made the chirurgeon falter—but John Comstock stiffened him up with a look.

“Most of Lord Chester’s organs were normal for a man of his
age,” the chirurgeon said. “In one kidney I found two small stones. In the ureter, some gravel. Thank you.”

The chirurgeon sat down very hastily, like an infantryman who has just seen puffs of smoke bloom from the powder-pans of opposing muskets. Buzzing and droning filled the room—suddenly it was like one of Wilkins’s glass apiaries, and the chirurgeon a boy who’d poked it with a stick. But the Queen Bee was dead, and there was disagreement as to who was going to be stung.

“It is what I suspected—there was no stoppage of urine,” Hooke finally announced, “only pain from small kidney-stones. Pain that induced Lord Chester to take solace in opiates.”

Which was as good as flinging a glass of water in the face of Monsieur LeFebure. The King’s Chymist stood up. “To have given comfort to the Lord Bishop of Chester in his time of need is the greatest honor of my career,” he said. “It would be an infamous shame if any of those
other
medicines he took, led to his demise.”

Now a great deal more buzzing, in a different key. Roger Comstock stood up and cut through it: “If Mr. Pepys would be so kind as to show us
his
stone…”

Pepys fairly erupted to his feet across the room and shoved a hand into a pregnant pocket.

John Comstock sent both men back down with cast-iron eyes. “It would not be a kindness, Mr., er,
Comstock,
as we’ve all
seen
it.”

Daniel’s turn. “Mr. Pepys’s stone is colossal—yet he was able to urinate a
little
. Considering the smallness of the urinary passages, is it not possible that a
small
stone might block urine as well as a
large
one—and perhaps
better?
”

No more buzzing now, but a deep general murmur—the point was awarded, by acclamation, to Daniel. He sat down. Roger Comstock ejaculated compliments all over him.

“I’ve had stones in the kidney,” Anglesey said, “and I will testify that the pain is beyond description.”

John Comstock: “Like something meted out by the
Popish Inquisition?
”

“I cannot make out what is going on,” said Daniel, quietly, to his neighbor.

“Well, you’d best make it out before you say anything else,” Roger said. “Just a suggestion.”

“First Anglesey and Comstock are united in disgracing Wilkins’s memory—then next moment, at each other’s throats over religion.”

“Where does that put you, Daniel?” Roger asked.

Anglesey, unruffled: “I’m sure I speak for the entire Royal Society in expressing unbounded gratitude to Monsieur LeFebure for easing Lord Chester’s final months.”

“The
Elixir Proprietalis LeFebure
is greatly admired at Court—even among young ladies who are
not
afflicted with exquisitely painful disorders,” said John Comstock. “Some of them like it so well that they have started a new fashion: going to sleep, and never waking up again.”

The conversation had now taken on the semblance of a lawn-tennis match played with sputtering granadoes. There was a palpable shifting of bodies and chairs as Fellows of the R.S. aligned themselves for spectation. Monsieur LeFebure caught Comstock’s lob with perfect aplomb: “It has been known since ancient times that syrup of poppies, in even small doses, cripples the judgment by
day
and induces frightful dreams by
night
—would you not agree?”

Here John Comstock, sensing a trap, said nothing. But Hooke answered, “I can attest to that.”

“Your dedication to Truth is an example to us all, Mr. Hooke. In
large
doses, of course, the medicine
kills
. The
first
symptom—destruction of judgment—can lead to the
second
—death by overdosing. That is why the
Elixir Proprietalis LeFebure
should only be administered under
my
supervision—and that is why I have personally taken pains to visit Lord Chester several times each week, during the months that his judgment was crippled by the drug.”

Comstock was annoyed by LeFebure’s resilience. But (as Daniel realized too late) Comstock had
another
goal in sight besides denting LeFebure’s reputation, and it was a goal that he shared with Thomas More Anglesey—normally his rival and enemy. A look passed between these two.

Daniel stood. Roger got a grip on his sleeve, but was not in a position to reach his tongue. “I saw Lord Chester several times in his final weeks and saw no evidence that his mental faculties were affected! To the contrary—”

“Lest someone come away with the foolish opinion that you are being
unkind,
Monsieur LeFebure,” Anglesey said—shooting a glare at Daniel—“did Lord Chester not consider this mental impairment a fair price to pay for the opportunity to spend a few last months with his family?”

“Oh, he paid that price
gladly,
” Monsieur LeFebure said.

“I collect that this is why we’ve heard so little from him in the way of Natural Philosophy of late—” Comstock said.

“Yes—and it is why we should overlook any of his more recent, er…”

“Indiscretions?”

“Enthusiasms?”

“Impulsive ventures into the
lower
realm of
politics
—”

“His mental powers dimmed—his heart was as pure as ever—and sought solace in well-meaning gestures.”

That was all the poisoned eulogies Daniel could stand to hear—then he was out in the garden of Gunfleet House watching a white marble mermaid vomit an endless stream of clear babble into a fish-pond. Roger Comstock was right behind him.

There were marble benches a-plenty, but he could not sit. Rage had taken him. Daniel was not especially susceptible to that passion. But he understood, now, why the Greeks had believed that Furies were angels of a sort, winged-swift, armed with whips and torches, rushing up out of Erebus to goad men unto madness. Roger, watching Daniel pace around the garden, might have convinced himself that his friend’s wild lunges and strides were being provoked by invisible lashes, and that his face had been scorched by torches.

“O for a sword,” Daniel said.

“Aw, you’d be dead right away if you tried that!”

“I know that, Roger. Some would say there are worse things than being dead. Thank god Jeffreys wasn’t in the room—to see me running out of it like a thief!” And here his voice choked and tears rushed to his eyes. For this was the worst part. That in the end he had done nothing—
nothing
—except run out of the
Grand Salon.

“You’re clever, but you don’t know what to do,” Roger said. “I’m the other way round. We complement each other.”

Daniel was annoyed. Then he reflected that to be the complement of a man with as many deficiencies as Roger Comstock was a high distinction. He turned and looked the other up and down, perhaps with an eye towards punching him in the nose. Roger was not so much
wearing
his wig as
embedded
in its lower reaches, and it was
perfect
—the sort of wig that had its own staff. Daniel, even if he were the punching sort, could not bring himself to ruin anything so perfect. “You are too modest, Roger—obviously you’ve gone out and done
something
clever.”

“Oh, you’ve noticed my attire! I hope you don’t think it’s foppish.”

“I think it’s
expensive.
”

“For one of the Golden Comstocks, you mean…”

Roger came closer. Daniel kept being cruel to Roger, trying to make him go away, but Roger took it as honesty, implying profound friendship.

“Well, in any case it is certainly an improvement on your appearance the last time I saw you.” Daniel was referring to the explosion in the laboratory, which was now far enough in the past that both Daniel and Roger had their eyebrows back. He had not seen Roger since that night because Isaac, upon coming back to find the lab blown up, had fired him, and sent him packing, not just out of the laboratory, but out of Cambridge. Thus had ended a scholarly career that had probably needed to be put out of its misery in any case. Daniel knew not whither their Cinderella had fled, but he appeared to have done well there.

Roger plainly had no idea what Daniel was talking about. “I don’t recall that—did you meet me in the street, before I left for Amsterdam? I probably did look wretched then.”

Daniel now tried the Leibnizian experiment of rehearsing the explosion in the laboratory from Roger’s point of view.

Roger had been working in the dark: a necessity, as any open flame might set fire to the gunpowder. And not much of an inconvenience, since what he’d been up to was dead simple: grinding the powder in a mortar and dumping it into a bag. Both the sound, and the feel of the pestle in his hand, would tell when the powder had been ground to a fine enough consistency for whatever purpose Roger had in mind. So he had worked blind. Light was the one thing he prayed he wouldn’t see, for it would mean a spark that would be certain to ignite the powder. Attent on work and worry, he had never known that Daniel had come back to the house—why should he, since he was supposed to be watching a play? And Roger had not yet heard the applause and the distant murmur of voices that would signal its end. Roger had never heard Daniel’s approach, for Daniel, who’d phant’sied he was stalking a rat, had been at pains to move as quietly as possible. The heavy fabric screen had blocked the light of Daniel’s candle to the point where it was no brighter than the ambient furnace-glow. Suddenly the candle-flame had been in Roger’s face. In other circumstances he’d’ve known it for what it was; but standing there with a sack of gunpowder in his hands, he had taken it for what he’d most dreaded: a spark. He had dropped the mortar and the bag and flung himself back as quick as he could. The explosion had followed in the next instant. He could neither have seen nor heard anything until after he’d fled the building. So there was no ground to suppose he had ever registered as much as the faintest impression of Daniel’s presence. He’d not seen Daniel since.