Quicksilver (19 page)

“A man such as the Earl of Epsom would not suffer a money-goldsmith to draw within a mile of his house!” Wilkins said indignantly. “A money-scrivener is different altogether! And yet he does something very much the same.”

“Could you explain that, please?” Daniel said, but they were interrupted by Hooke, shouting from another room:

“Daniel! Fetch a cannon.”

In other circumstances this demand would have posed severe difficulties. However, they were living on the estate of the man who had introduced the manufacture of gunpowder to Britain, and provided King Charles II with many of his armaments. So Daniel went out and enlisted that man’s son, young Charles Comstock, who in turn drafted a corps of servants and a few horses. They procured a field-piece from John Comstock’s personal armoury and towed it out into the middle of a pasture. Meanwhile, Mr. Hooke had caused a certain servant, who had long been afflicted with deafness, to be brought out from the town. Hooke bade the servant stand in the same pasture, only a fathom away from the muzzle of the cannon (but off to one side!). Charles Comstock (who knew how to do such things) charged the cannon with some of his father’s finest powder, shoved a longish fuse down the touch-hole, lit it, and ran away. The result was a sudden immense compression of the air, which Hooke had hoped would penetrate the servant’s skull and knock away whatever hidden obstructions had caused him to become deaf. Quite a few window-panes in John Comstock’s manor house were blown out of their frames, amply demonstrating the soundness of the underlying idea. But it didn’t cure the servant’s deafness.

“As you may know, my dwelling is a-throng, just now, with persons from the city,” said John Comstock, Earl of Epsom and Lord Chancellor of England.

He had appeared, suddenly and unannounced, in the door of the cottage. Hooke and Wilkins were busy hollering at the deaf servant, trying to see if he could hear anything at all. Daniel noticed the visitor first, and joined in the shouting: “Excuse me! Gentlemen! REVEREND WILKINS!”

After several minutes’ confusion, embarrassment, and makeshift stabs at protocol, Wilkins and Comstock ended up sitting across the table from each other with glasses of claret while Hooke and Water-house and the deaf servant held up a nearby wall with their arses.

Comstock was pushing sixty. Here on his own country estate, he had no patience with wigs or other Court foppery, and so his silver hair was simply queued, and he was dressed in plain simple riding-and-hunting togs. “In the year of my birth, Jamestown was founded, the pilgrims scurried off to Leyden, and work commenced on the King James version of the Bible. I have lived through London’s diverse riots and panics, plagues and Gunpowder Plots. I have
escaped from burning buildings. I was wounded at the Battle of Newark and made my way, in some discomfort, to safety in Paris. It was not my last battle, on land or at sea. I was there when His Majesty was crowned in exile at Scone, and I was there when he returned in triumph to London. I have killed men. You know all of these things, Dr. Wilkins, and so I mention them, not to boast, but to emphasize that
if I were living a solitary life
in that large House over yonder, you could set off cannonades, and larger detonations, at all hours of day and night, without warning, and for that matter you could make a pile of meat five fathoms high and let it fester away beneath my bedchamber’s window—
and none of it would matter to me.
But as it is, my house is crowded, just now, with Persons of Quality. Some of them are of
royal
degree. Many of them are
female
, and some are of
tender years.
Two of them are
all three
.”

“My lord!” Wilkins exclaimed. Daniel had been carefully watching him, as who wouldn’t—the opportunity to watch a man like Wilkins being called on the carpet by a man like Comstock was far more precious than any Southwark bear-baiting. Until just now, Wilkins had
pretended
to be mortified—though he’d done a very good job of it. But now, suddenly, he really
was.

Two of them are all three
—what could
that
possibly mean? Who was royal, female, and of tender years? King Charles II didn’t have any daughters, at least
legitimate
ones. Elizabeth, the Winter Queen, had
littered
Europe with princes and princesses until she’d passed away a couple of years ago—but it seemed unlikely that any Continental royalty would be visiting England during the Plague.

Comstock continued: “These persons have come here seeking refuge, as they are terrified
to begin with,
of the Plague and other horrors—including, but hardly limited to, a possible
Dutch
invasion. The violent compression of the air, which you and I might think of as a possible cure for deafness, is construed, by such people, entirely differently…”

Wilkins said something fiendishly clever and appropriate and then devoted the next couple of days to abjectly humbling himself and apologizing to every noble person within ear- and nose-shot of the late Experiments. Hooke was put to work making little wind-up toys for the two little royal girls. Meanwhile Daniel and Charles had to dismantle all of the bad-smelling experiments, and oversee their decent burials, and generally tidy things up.

It took days’ peering at Fops through hedges, deconstructing carriage-door scutcheons, and shinnying out onto the branches of diverse noble and royal family trees for Daniel to understand what Wilkins had inferred from a few of John Comstock’s pithy words
and eyebrow-raisings. Comstock had formal gardens to one side of his house, which for many excellent reasons were off-limits to Natural Philosophers. Persons in French clothes strolled in them. That was not remarkable. To dally in gardens was some people’s life-work, as to shovel manure was a stable-hand’s. At a distance they all looked the same, at least to Daniel. Wilkins, much more conversant with the Court, spied on them from time to time through a prospective-glass. As a mariner, seeking to establish his bearings at night, will first look for Ursa Major, that being a constellation of exceptional size and brightness, so Wilkins would always commence his obs’v’ns. by zeroing his sights, as it were, on a particular woman who was easy to find because she was twice the size of everyone else. Many furlongs of gaily dyed fabrics went into her skirts, which shewed bravely from a distance, like French regimental standards. From time to time a man with blond hair would come out and stroll about the garden with her, moon orbiting planet. He reminded Daniel, from a distance, of Isaac.

Daniel did not reck who that fellow was, and was too abashed to discover his ignorance by asking, until one day a carriage arrived from London and several men in admirals’ hats climbed out of it and went to talk to the same man in the garden. Though first they all doffed those hats and bowed low.

“That blond man who walks in the garden, betimes, on the arm of the Big Dipper—would that be the Duke of York?”

“Yes,” said Wilkins—not wishing to say more, as he was breathing shallowly, his eye peeled wide open and bathed in a greenish light from the eyepiece of his prospective-glass.

“And Lord High Admiral,” Daniel continued.

“He has many titles,” Wilkins observed in a level and patient tone.

“So those chaps in the hats would be—obviously—”

“The Admiralty,” Wilkins said curtly, “or some moiety or faction thereof.” He recoiled from the scope. Daniel phant’sied he was being proffered a look-see, but only for a moment—Wilkins lifted the instrument out of the tree-crook and collapsed it. Daniel collected that he had seen something Wilkins wished he hadn’t.

The Dutch and the English were at war. Because of the Plague, this had been a desultory struggle thus far, and Daniel had forgotten about it. It was midwinter. Cold had brought the Plague to a stand. Months would pass before the weather permitted resumption of the sea-campaign. But the time to lay plans for such campaigns was now. It ought to surprise no one if the Admiralty met
with the Lord High Admiral now. It would be surprising if they
didn’t.
What struck Daniel was that Wilkins
cared
that he, Daniel, had seen something. The Restoration, and Daniel’s Babylonian exile and subjugation at Cambridge, had led him to think of himself as a perfect nobody, except perhaps when it came to Natural Philosophy—and it was more obvious every day that even within the Royal Society he was nothing compared to Wren and Hooke. So why should John Wilkins give a fig whether Daniel spied a flotilla of admirals and collected, from that, that John Comstock was hosting James, Duke of York, brother of Charles II and next in line to the throne?

It must be (as Daniel realized, walking back through a defoliated orchard alongside the brooding Wilkins) because he was the son of Drake. And though Drake was a retired agitator of a defeated and downcast sect, at bay in his house on Holborn,
someone
was still afraid of him.

Or if not of him, then of his sect.

But the sect was shattered into a thousand claques and cabals. Cromwell was gone, Drake was too old, Gregory Bolstrood had been executed, and his son Knott was in exile—

That was it. They were afraid of
Daniel.

“What is funny?” Wilkins demanded.

“People,” Daniel said, “and what goes on in their minds sometimes.”

“I say, you’re not referring to
me
by that—?—!”

“Oh, perish the thought. I would not mock my betters.”

“Pray, who on this estate is
not
your better?”

A hard question that. Daniel’s answer was silence. Wilkins seemed to find even that alarming.

“I forget you are a Phanatique born and bred.” Which was the same as saying,
You recognize no man as your better, do you?

“On the contrary, I see now that you have
never
forgotten it.”

But something seemed to have changed in Wilkins’s mind. Like an Admiral working his ship to windward, he had suddenly come about and, after a few moments’ luffing and disarray, was now on an altogether novel tack: “The lady used to be called Anne Hyde—a close relation of John Comstock. So, far from common. Yet too common for a Duke to marry. And yet still too noble to send off to a Continental nunnery, and too fat to move far, in any case. She bore him a couple of daughters: Mary, then Anne. The Duke finally married her, though not without many complications. Since Mary or Anne could conceivably inherit the throne one day, it
became a State matter. Various courtiers were talked, bribed, or threatened into coming forward and swearing on stacks of Bibles that they’d fucked Anne Hyde up and down, fucked her in the British Isles and in France, in the Low Countries and the Highlands, in the city and in the country, in ships and palaces, beds and hammocks, bushes, flower-beds, water-closets, and garrets, that they had fucked her drunk and fucked her sober, from behind and in front, from above, below, and both the right and left sides, singly and in groups, in the day and in the night and during all phases of the moon and signs of the Zodiac, whilst also intimating that any number of blacksmiths, Vagabonds, French gigolos, Jesuit provocateurs, comedians, barbers, and apprentice saddlers had been doing the same whensoever they weren’t. But despite all of this the Duke of York married her, and socked her away in St. James’s Palace, where she’s grown like one of our
entomologickal
prodigies in the cellar.”

Daniel had heard a good bit of this before, of course, from men who came to the house on Holborn to pay court to Drake—which gave him the odd sense that Wilkins was paying court to
him.
Which could not be, for Daniel had no real power or significance at all, and no prospects of getting any.

It seemed more plausible that Wilkins felt sorry for Daniel, than afraid of him; and as such was trying to shield him from those dangers that were avoidable while tutoring him in how to cope with the rest.

Which meant, if true, that Daniel ought at least to attend to the lesson that Wilkins was trying to give him. The two Princesses, Mary and Anne, would, respectively, be three and one years old now. And as their mother was related to John Comstock, it was entirely plausible that they might be visitors in the house. Which explained Comstock’s remark to Wilkins: “Two of them are
all three.
” Female, of tender years, and royal.