Quicksilver (116 page)

“D
R
. W
ATERHOUSE
.”

“Sergeant Shaftoe.”

“Your visitors have arrived—Mr. Bob Carver and Mr. Dick Gripp.”

Daniel rose from his bed; he had never come awake so fast. “Please, I beg you, Sergeant, do not—” he began, but he stopped there, for it had occurred to him that perhaps Sergeant Shaftoe’s mind was already made up, the deed was all but done, and that Daniel was merely groveling. He got to his feet and shuffled over the wooden floor towards Bob Shaftoe’s face and his candle, which hung in darkness like a poorly resolved binary star: the face a dim reddish blob, the flame a burning white point. The blood dropped from Daniel’s head and he tottered, but did not hesitate. He’d be nothing more than a bleating voice in the darkness until he entered the globe of light balanced on that flame; if Bob Shaftoe had thoughts of letting the murderers into this room, let him look full on Daniel’s face first. The brilliance of the light was governed by an inverse square law, just like gravity.

Shaftoe’s face finally came into focus. He looked a little sea-sick. “I’m not such a black-hearted bastard as’d admit a pair of hired killers to spit a helpless professor. There is only one man alive whom I hate enough to wish such an end on him.”

“Thank you,” Daniel said, drawing close enough now that he could feel the candle’s faint warmth on his face.

Shaftoe noticed something, turned sideways to Daniel, and cleared his throat. This was not your delicate pretentious upper-class ’hem but an honest and legitimate bid to dislodge an actual phlegm-ball that had sprung into his gorge.

“You’ve noticed me pissing myself, haven’t you?” Daniel said. “You imagine that it’s your fault—that you put such a terror into me, just now, that I could not hold my urine. Well, you did have me going, it is true, but that’s not why piss is running down my leg. I have the stone, Sergeant, and cannot make water at times of my own choosing, but rather I leak and seep like a keg that wants caulking.”

Bob Shaftoe nodded and looked to have been somewhat relieved of his burden of guilt. “How long d’you have then?”

He asked the question so offhandedly that Daniel did not get it for a few moments. “Oh—you mean,
to live
?” The Sergeant nodded. “Pardon me, Sergeant Shaftoe, I forget that your profession has put you on such intimate terms with death that you speak of it as sea-captains speak of wind. How long have I? Perhaps a year.”

“You could have it cut out.”

“I have seen men cut for the stone, Sergeant, and I’ll take death, thank you very much. I’ll wager it is worse than anything you may have witnessed on a battlefield. No, I shall follow the example of my mentor, John Wilkins.”

“Men have been cut for the stone, and lived, have they not?”

“Mr. Pepys was cut nigh on thirty years ago, and lives still.”

“He walks? Talks? Makes water?”

“Indeed, Sergeant Shaftoe.”

“Then, by your leave, Dr. Waterhouse, being cut for the stone is
not
worse than anything I have seen on battlefields.”

“Do you know how the operation is performed, Sergeant? The incision is made through the perineum, which is that tender place between your scrotum and your anus—”

“If it comes down to swapping blood-curdling tales, Dr. Water-house, we shall be here until this candle has burnt down, and all to no purpose; and if you really intend to die of the stone, you oughtn’t to be wasting that much time.”

“There is nothing to do, here,
but
waste time.”

“That is where you are wrong, Dr. Waterhouse, for I have a lively sort of proposition to make you. We are going to help each other, you and I.”

“You want money in exchange for keeping Jeffreys’s murderers out of my chamber?”

“That’s what I should want, were I a base, craven toad,” Bob Shaftoe said. “And if you keep mistaking me for that sort, why, perhaps I
shall
let Bob and Dick in here.”

“Please forgive me, Sergeant. You are right in being angry with me. It is only that I cannot imagine what sort of transaction you and I could…”

“Did you see that fellow being whipped, just before sundown? He would’ve been visible to you out in the dry-moat, through yonder arrow-slit.”

Daniel remembered it well enough. Three soldiers had gone out, carrying their pikes, and lashed them together close to their points, and spread their butts apart to form a tripod. A man had been led out shirtless, his hands tied together in front of him, and the rope had then been thrown over the lashing where the pikes were joined, and drawn tight so that his arms were stretched out above his head. Finally his ankles had been spread apart and lashed fast to the pikes to either side of him, rendering him perfectly immobile, and then a large man had come out with a whip, and used it. All in all it was a common rite around military camps, and went a long way towards explaining why people of means tried to live as far away from barracks as possible.

“I did not observe it closely,” Daniel said, “I am familiar with the general procedure.”

“You might’ve watched more carefully had you known that the man being whipped calls himself Mr. Dick Gripp.”

Daniel was at a loss for words.

“They came for you last night,” said Bob Shaftoe. “I had them clapped into separate cells while I decided what to do with ’em. Talked to ’em separately, and all they gave me was a deal of hot talk. Now. Some men are entitled to talk that way, they have been ennobled, in a sense, by their deeds and the things they have lived through. I did not think that Bob Carver and Dick Gripp were men of that kind. Others may be suffered to talk that way simply because they entertain the rest of us. I once had a brother who was like that. But not Bob and Dick. Unfortunately I am not a magistrate and have no power to throw men in prison, compel them to answer questions,
et cetera.
On the other hand, I am a sergeant, and have the power to recruit men into the King’s service. As Bob and Dick were clearly idle fellows, I recruited them into the King’s Own Black Torrent Guards on the spot. In the next instant, I perceived that I’d made a mistake, for these two were discipline problems, and wanted chastisement. Using the oldest trick in the book, I had Dick—who struck me as the better man—whipped directly in front of Bob Carver’s cell window. Now Dick is a strong bloke, he is unbowed, and I may keep him in the regiment. But Bob feels about
his
chastisement—which is scheduled for dawn—the same way you feel about being cut for the stone. So an hour ago he woke up his guards, and they woke me, and I went and had a chat with Mr. Carver.”

“Sergeant, you are so industrious that I almost cannot follow everything you are about.”

“He told me that Jeffreys personally ordered him and Mr. Gripp to cut your throat. That they were to do it slow-like, and that they were to explain to you, while you lay dying, that it had been done by Jeffreys.”

“It is what I expected,” Daniel said, “and yet to hear it set out in plain words leaves me dizzy.”

“Then I shall wait for you to get your wits back. More to the point, I shall wait for you to become angry. Forgive me for presuming to instruct a fellow of your erudition, but at a moment like this, you are supposed to be angry.”

“It is a very odd thing about Jeffreys that he can treat people abominably and never make them angry. He influences his victims’ minds strangely, like a glass rod bending a stream of water, so that we feel we deserve it.”

“You have known him a long time.”

“I have.”

“Let’s kill him.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Slay, murder. Let us bring about his death, so he won’t plague you any more.”

Daniel was shocked. “It is an extremely fanciful idea—”

“Not in the least. And there is something in your tone of voice that tells me you like it.”

“Why do you say ‘we’? You have no part in my problems.”

“You are high up in the Royal Society.”

“Yes.”

“You know many Alchemists.”

“I wish I could deny it.”

“You know my lord Upnor.”

“I do. I’ve known him as long as I’ve known Jeffreys.”

“Upnor owns my lady love.”

“I beg your pardon—did you say he
owns
her?”

“Yes—Jeffreys sold her to him during the Bloody Assizes.”

“Taunton—your love is one of the Taunton schoolgirls!”

“Just so.”

Daniel was fascinated. “You are proposing some sort of pact.”

“You and I’ll rid the world of Jeffreys and Upnor. I’ll have my Abigail and you’ll live your last year, or whatever time God affords you, in peace.”

“I do not mean to quail and fret, Sergeant—”

“Go ahead! My men do it all the time.”

“—but may I remind you that Jeffreys is the Lord Chancellor of the Realm?”

“Not for long,” Shaftoe answered.

“How do you know?”

“He’s as much as admitted it, by his actions! You were thrown in Tower why?”

“For acting as go-between to William of Orange.”

“Why, that is treason—you should’ve been half-hanged, drawn, and quartered for it! But you were kept alive why?”

“Because I am a witness to the birth of the Prince, and as such, may be useful in attesting to the legitimacy of the next King.”

“If Jeffreys has now decided to kill you, what does that signify then?”

“That he is giving up on the King—my God, on the entire
dynasty
—and getting ready to flee. Yes, I understand your reasoning now, thank you for being so patient with me.”

“Mind you, I’m not asking you to take up arms, or do anything else that ill suits you.”

“Some would take offense at that, Sergeant, but—”

“E’en though my chief grievance may lie with Upnor, the first
cause of it was Jeffreys, and I would not hesitate to swing my spadroon, if he should chance to show me his neck.”

“Save it for Upnor,” Daniel said, after a brief pause to make up his mind. In truth, he’d long since made it up; but he wanted to put on a show of thinking about it, so that Bob Shaftoe would not view him as a man who took such things lightly.

“You’re with me, then.”

“Not so much that
I
am with
you
as that
we
are with most of
England,
and England with us. You speak of putting Jeffreys to death with the strength of your right arm. Yet I tell you that if we must rely on your arm, strong as it is, we would fail. But if, as I believe, England is with us, why, then we need do no more than find him and say in a clear voice, ‘This fellow here is my lord Jeffreys,’ and his death will follow as if by natural law, like a ball rolling down a ramp. This is what I mean when I speak of revolution.”

“Is that a French way of saying ‘rebellion’?”

“No, rebellion is what the Duke of Monmouth did, it is a petty disturbance, an aberration, predestined to fail. Revolution is like the wheeling of stars round the pole. It is driven by unseen powers, it is inexorable, it moves all things at once, and men of discrimination may understand it, predict it, benefit from it.”

“Then I’d best go find a man of discrimination,” muttered Bob Shaftoe, “and stop wasting the night with a hapless wretch.”

“I simply have not understood, until now, how
I
might benefit from the revolution. I have done all for England, naught for myself, and I have lacked any organizing principle by which to shape my plans. Never would I have dared to imagine I might strike Jeffreys down!”

“As a mudlark, Vagabond soldier, I am always at your service, to be a bringer of base, murderous thoughts,” said Bob Shaftoe.

Daniel had receded to the outer fringes of the light and worried a candle out of a bottle on his writing-table. He hustled back and lit it from Bob’s candle.

Bob remarked, “I’ve seen lords die on battlefields—not as often as I’d prefer, mind you—but enough to know it’s not like in paintings.”

“Paintings?”

“You know, where Victory comes down on a sunbeam with her tits hanging out of her frock, waving a laurel for said dying lord’s brow, and the Virgin Mary slides down on another to—”

“Oh, yes.
Those
paintings. Yes, I believe what you say.” Daniel had been working his way along the curving wall of the Tower,
holding the candle close to the stone, so that its glancing light would deepen the scratchings made there by prisoners over the centuries. He stopped before a new one, a half-finished complex of arcs and rays that cut through older graffiti.

“I do not think I shall finish this proof,” he announced, after gazing at it for a few moments.

“We’ll not leave tonight. You shall likely have a week—maybe more. So there’s no cause for breaking off work on whatever that is.”

“It is an ancient thing that used to make sense, but now it has been turned upside-down, and seems only a queer, jumbled bag of notions. Let it bide here with the other old things,” Daniel said.

NOVEMBER
1688

From Monsieur Bonaventure Rossignol, Château Juvisy

To His Majesty Louis XIV, Versailles

21 November 1688

Sire,

It was my father’s honor to serve your majesty and your majesty’s father as cryptanalyst to the Court. Of the art of decipherment, he endeavoured to teach me all that he knew. Moved by a son’s love for his father as well as by a subject’s ardent desire to be of service to his King, I strove to learn as much as my lesser faculties would permit; and if, when my father died six years ago, he had imparted to me a tenth part of what he knew, why then it sufficed to make me more nearly fit to serve as your majesty’s cryptanalyst than any man in Christendom; a measure, not of
my
eminence (for I cannot claim to possess any) but of my father’s, and of the degraded condition of cryptography in the uncouth nations that surround France as barbarian hordes once hemmed in mighty Rome.

Along with some moiety of his knowledge, I have inherited the salary your beneficent majesty bestowed upon him, and the château that Le Nôtre built for him at Juvisy, which your majesty knows well, as you have more than once

honored it with your presence, and graced it with your wit, as you journeyed to and from Fontainebleau. Many affairs of state have been discussed in the
petit salon
and the garden; for your father of blessed memory, and Cardinal Richelieu, also were known to ennoble this poor house with their presences during the days when my father, by decyphering the communications passing into and out of the fortifications of the Huguenots, was helping to suppress the rebellions of those heretics.

Than your majesty no monarch has been more keenly alive to the importance of cryptography. It is only to this acuity on your majesty’s part, and not to any intrinsic merit of mine, that I attribute the honors and wealth that you have showered upon me. And it is only because of your majesty’s oft-demonstrated interest in these affairs that I presume to pick up my quill and to write down a tale of cryptanalysis that is not without certain extraordinary features.

As your majesty knows, the incomparable château at Versailles is adorned by several ladies who are indefatigable writers of letters, notably my friend Madame de Sévigné;
la Palatine;
and Eliza, the Countess de la Zeur. There are many others, too; but we who have the honor of serving in your majesty’s
cabinet noir
spend as much time reading the correspondence of these three as of all the other ladies of Versailles combined.

My narrative chiefly concerns the Countess de la Zeur. She writes frequently to M. le comte d’Avaux in the Hague, using the approved cypher to shield her correspondence from my Dutch counterparts. As well she carries on a steady flow of correspondence to certain Jews of Amsterdam, consisting predominantly of numbers and financial argot that, read, cannot be decyphered, and decyphered, cannot be understood, unless one is familiar with the workings of that city’s commodities markets, as vulgar as they are complex. These letters are exceptionally pithy, and of no interest to anyone save Jews, Dutchmen, and other persons who are motivated by money. Her most voluminous letters by far go to the Hanoverian savant Leibniz, whose name is known to your majesty—he made a computing machine for Colbert some years ago, and now toils as an advisor to the Duke and Duchess of Hanover, whose exertions on behalf of united Protestantism have been the cause of so much displeasure to your majesty. Ostensibly the letters of the Countess de la Zeur to this Leibniz consist of
interminable descriptions of the magnificence of Versailles and its inhabitants. The sheer volume and consistency of this correspondence have caused me to wonder whether it was not a channel of encrypted communications; but my poor efforts at finding any hidden patterns in her flowery words have been unavailing. Indeed, my suspicion of this woman is grounded, not on any flaw in her cypher—which, assuming it exists at all, is a very good one—but on what little understanding I may claim to possess of human nature. For during my occasional visits to Versailles I have sought this woman out, and engaged her in conversation, and found her to be highly intelligent, and conversant with the latest work of mathematicians and Natural Philosophers both foreign and domestic. And of course the brilliance and erudition of Leibniz is acknowledged by all. It is implausible to me that such a woman could devote so much time to writing, and such a man so much time to reading, about hair.

Perhaps two years ago, M. le comte d’Avaux, on one of his visits to your majesty’s court, sought me out, and, knowing of my position in the
cabinet noir,
asked many pointed questions about the Countess’s epistolary habits. From this it was plain enough that he shared some of my suspicions. Later he told me that he had witnessed with his own eyes an incident in which it was made obvious that this woman was an agent of the Prince of Orange. D’Avaux at this time mentioned a Swiss gentleman of the name of Fatio de Duilliers, and intimated that he and the Countess de la Zeur were in some way linked.

D’Avaux seemed confident that he knew enough to crush this woman. Instead of doing so outright, he had decided that he could better serve your majesty by pursuing a more complex and, by your majesty’s leave, risky strategy. As is well known, she makes money for many of your majesty’s vassals, including d’Avaux, by managing their investments. The price of liquidating her outright would be high; not a consideration that would ever confound your majesty’s judgment, but telling among men of weak minds and light purses. Moreover, d’Avaux shared my suspicion that she was communicating over some encrypted channel with Sophie and, through Sophie, with William, and hoped that if I were to achieve a cryptological break of this channel the
cabinet noir
might thereafter read her despatches without her being aware of it; which would be altogether more beneficial to
France and pleasing to your majesty than locking the woman up in a nunnery and keeping her incommunicado to the end of her days, as she deserves.

There had been during the first part of this year a sort of flirtation between the Countess de la Zeur and
la Palatine,
which appeared to culminate in August when the Countess accepted an invitation from Madame to join her (and your majesty’s brother) at St. Cloud. Everyone who knew of this assumed that it was a common, albeit Sapphic, love affair: an interpretation so obvious that it ought by its nature to have engendered more skepticism among those who pride themselves on their sophistication. But it was summer, the weather was warm, and no one paid it any heed. Not long after her arrival at St. Cloud, the Countess sent a letter to d’Avaux in the Hague, which has subsequently found its way back to my writing desk. Here it is.