Quicksilver (2 page)

“In our studies we more often speak of wars
among
Protestants.”

“Ah, yes—a phenomenon restricted to England. That is natural, for your parents came here because of such a conflict.”

“The Civil War,” says Ben.

“Your side won the Civil War,” Enoch reminds him, “but later came the Restoration, which was a grievous defeat for your folk, and sent them flocking hither.”

“You have hit the mark, Mr. Root,” says Ben, “for that is just why my father Josiah quit England.”

“What about your mother?”

“Nantucket-born sir. But her father came here to escape from a wicked Bishop—a loud fellow, or so I have heard—”

“Finally, Ben, I have found a limit to your knowledge. You are speaking of Archbishop Laud—a terrible oppressor of Puritans—as some called your folk—under Charles the First. The Puritans paid him back by chopping off the head of that same Charles in Charing Cross, in the year of our lord sixteen hundred and forty-nine.”

“Cromwell,” says Ben.

“Cromwell. Yes. He had something to do with it. Now, Ben. We have been standing by this millstream for rather a long while. I grow cold. My horse is restless. We have, as I said, found the place where your erudition gives way to ignorance. I shall be pleased to hold up my end of our agreement—that is, to teach you things, so that when you go home to-night you may claim to Josiah that you were in school the whole day. Though the schoolmaster may give him an account that shall conflict with yours. However, I do require certain minor services in return.”

“Only name them, Mr. Root.”

“I have come to Boston to find a certain man who at last report was living here. He is an old man.”

“Older than you?”

“No, but he might
seem
older.”

“How old is he, then?”

“He watched the head of King Charles the First being chopped off.”

“At least threescore and four then.”

“Ah, I see you have been learning sums and differences.”

“And products and dividends, Mr. Root.”

“Work this into your reckonings, then: the one I seek had an excellent view of the beheading, for he was sitting upon his father’s shoulders.”

“Couldn’t have been more than a few years old then. Unless his father was a sturdy fellow indeed.”

“His father was sturdy in a sense,” says Enoch, “for Archbishop Laud had caused his ears and his nose to be cut off in Star Chamber some two decades before, and yet he was not daunted, but kept up his agitation against the King. Against all Kings.”

“He was a Barker.” Again, this word brings no sign of contempt to Ben’s face. Shocking how different this place is from London.

“But to answer your question, Ben: Drake was not an especially big or strong man.”

“So the son on his shoulders was small. By now he should be, perhaps, threescore and eight. But I do not know of a Mr. Drake here.”

“Drake was the father’s
Christian
name.”

“Pray, what then is the name of the family?”

“I will not tell you that just now,” says Enoch. For the man he wants to find might have a very poor character among these people—might already have been hanged on Boston Common, for all Enoch knows.

“How can I help you find him, sir, if you won’t let me know his name?”

“By guiding me to the Charlestown ferry,” Enoch says, “for I know that he spends his days on the north side of the River Charles.”

“Follow me,” says Ben, “but I hope you’ve silver.”

“Oh yes, I’ve silver,” says Enoch.

T
HEY ARE SKIRTING A KNOB
of land at the north end of the city. Wharves, smaller and older than the big one, radiate from its shore. The sails and rigging, spars and masts to his starboard combine into a tangle vast and inextricable, as characters on a page must do in the eyes of an unlettered peasant. Enoch does not see van Hoek or
Minerva.
He begins to fear that he shall have to go into taverns and make inquiries, and spend time, and draw attention.

Ben takes him direct to the wharf where the Charlestown Ferry is ready to shove off. It is all crowded with hanging-watchers, and Enoch must pay the waterman extra to bring the horse aboard. Enoch pulls his purse open and peers into it. The King of Spain’s coat of arms stares back at him, stamped in silver, variously blurred, chopped, and mangled. The Christian name varies, depending on which king reigned when each of these coins was hammered out in New Spain, but after that they all say
D. G. HISPAN ET IND REX
. By the grace of God, of Spain and the Indies, King. The same sort of bluster that all kings stamp onto their coins.

Those words don’t matter to anyone—most people can’t read them anyway. What does matter is that a man standing in a cold breeze on the Boston waterfront, seeking to buy passage on a ferry run by an Englishman, cannot pay with the coins that are being stamped out by Sir Isaac Newton in the Royal Mint at the Tower of
London. The only coinage here is Spanish—the same coins that are changing hands, at this moment, in Lima, Manila, Macao, Goa, Bandar Abbas, Mocha, Cairo, Smyrna, Malta, Madrid, the Canary Islands, Marseilles.

The man who saw Enoch down to the docks in London months ago said: “Gold knows things that no man does.”

Enoch churns his purse up and down, making the coins-fragments fly, hoping to spy a single pie-slice—one-eighth of a Piece of Eight, or a bit, as they are called. But he already knows he’s spent most of his bits for small necessaries along the road. The smallest piece he has in his purse right now is half of a coin—four bits.

He looks up the street and sees a blacksmith’s forge only a stone’s throw away. Some quick work with a hammer and that smith could make change for him.

The ferryman’s reading Enoch’s mind. He couldn’t see into the purse, but he could hear the massive gonging of whole coins colliding, without the clashing tinkle of bits. “We’re shoving off,” he is pleased to say.

Enoch comes to his senses, remembers what he’s doing, and hands over a silver semicircle. “But the boy comes with me,” he insists, “and you’ll give him passage back.”

“Done,” says the ferryman.

This is more than Ben could have hoped for, and yet he
was
hoping for it. Though the boy is too self-possessed to say as much, this voyage is to him as good as a passage down to the Caribbean to go a-pirating on the Spanish Main. He goes from wharf to ferry without touching the gangplank.

Charlestown is less than a mile distant, across the mouth of a sluggish river. It is a low green hill shingled with long slender haymows limned by dry-stone fences. On the slope facing toward Boston, below the summit but above the endless tidal flats and cattail-filled marshes, a town has occurred: partly laid out by geometers, but partly growing like ivy.

The ferryman’s hefty Africans pace short reciprocating arcs on the deck, sweeping and shoveling the black water of the Charles Basin with long stanchion-mounted oars, minting systems of vortices that fall to aft, flailing about one another, tracing out fading and flattening conic sections that Sir Isaac could probably work out in his head.
The Hypothesis of Vortices is pressed with many difficulties.
The sky’s a matted reticule of taut jute and spokeshaved tree-trunks. Gusts make the anchored ships start and jostle like nervous horses hearing distant guns. Irregular waves slap curiously at the
lapping clinkers of their hulls, which are infested with barefoot jacks paying pitch and oakum into troublesome seams. The ships appear to glide this way and that as the ferry’s movement plays with the parallax. Enoch, who has the good fortune to be a bit taller than most of the other passengers, hands the reins to Ben and excuses his way around the ferry’s deck trying to read the names.

He knows the ship he’s looking for, though, simply by recognizing the carved Lady mounted below the bowsprit: a gray-eyed woman in a gilded helmet, braving the North Atlantic seas with a snaky shield and nipples understandably erect.
Minerva
hasn’t weighed anchor yet—that’s lucky—but she is heavy-laden and gives every appearance of being just about to put to sea. Men are walking aboard hugging baskets of loaves so fresh they’re steaming. Enoch turns back toward the shore to read the level of the tide from a barnacled pile, then turns the other way to check the phase and altitude of the moon. Tide will be going out soon, and
Minerva
will probably want to ride it. Enoch finally spies van Hoek standing on the foredeck, doing some paperwork on the top of a barrel, and through some kind of action-at-a-distance wills him to look up and notice him, down on the ferry.

Van Hoek looks his way and stiffens.

Enoch makes no outward sign, but stares him in the eye long enough to give him second thoughts about pushing for a hasty departure.

A colonist in a black hat is attempting to make friends with one of the Africans, who doesn’t speak much English—but this is no hindrance, the white man has taught himself a few words of some African tongue. The slave is very dark, and the arms of the King of Spain are branded into his left shoulder, and so he is probably Angolan. Life has been strange to him: abducted by Africans fiercer than he, chained up in a hole in Luanda, marked with a hot iron to indicate that duty had been paid on him, loaded onto a ship, and sent to a cold place full of pale men. After all of that, you’d think that nothing could possibly surprise him. But he’s astonished by whatever this Barker is telling him. The Barker’s punching at the air and becoming quite exercised, and not just because he is inarticulate. Assuming that he has been in touch with his brethren in London (and that is a very good assumption), he is probably telling the Angolan that he, and all of the other slaves, are perfectly justified in taking up arms and mounting a violent rebellion.

“Your mount is very fine. Did you bring him from Europe?”

“No, Ben. Borrowed him in New Amsterdam. New
York,
I mean.”

“Why’d you sail to New York if the man you seek’s in Boston?”

“The next America-bound ship from the Pool of London happened to be headed thither.”

“You’re in a terrible hurry, then!”

“I shall be in a terrible hurry to toss you over the side if you continue to draw such inferences.”

This quiets Ben, but only long enough for him to circle round and probe Enoch’s defenses from another quarter: “The owner of this horse must be a very dear friend of yours, to lend you such a mount.”

Enoch must now be a bit careful. The owner’s a gentleman of quality in New York. If Enoch claims his friendship, then proceeds to make a bloody hash of things in Boston, it could deal damage to the gentleman’s repute. “It is not so much that he is a friend. I’d never met him until I showed up at his door a few days ago.”

Ben can’t fathom it. “Then why’d he even admit you to his house? By your leave, sir, looking as you do, and armed. Why’d he lend you such a worthy stallion?”

“He let me in to his house because there was a riot underway, and I requested sanctuary.” Enoch gazes over at the Barker, then sidles closer to Ben. “Here is a wonder for you: When my ship reached New York, we were greeted by the spectacle of thousands of slaves—some Irish, the rest Angolan—running through the streets with pitchforks and firebrands. Lobsterbacks tromping after them in leapfrogging blocks, firing volleys. The white smoke of their muskets rose and mingled with the black smoke of burning warehouses to turn the sky into a blazing, spark-shot melting-pot, wondrous to look at but, as we supposed, unfit to support life. Our pilot had us stand a-loof until the tide forced his hand. We put in at a pier that seemed to be under the sway of the redcoats.

“Anyway,” Enoch continues—for his discourse is beginning to draw unwanted notice—“that’s how I got in the door. He lent me the horse because he and I are Fellows in the same Society, and I am here, in a way, to do an errand for that Society.”

“Is it a Society of Barkers, like?” asks Ben, stepping in close to whisper, and glancing at the one who’s proselytizing the slave. For by now Ben has taken note of Enoch’s various pistols and blades, and matched him with tales his folk have probably told him concerning that fell Sect during their halcyon days of Cathedral-sacking and King-killing.

“No, it is a society of philosophers,” Enoch says, before the boy’s phant’sies wax any wilder.

“Philosophers, sir!”

Enoch had supposed the boy should be disappointed. Instead he’s thrilled. So Enoch was correct: the boy’s dangerous.

“
Natural
Philosophers. Not, mind you, the other sort—”

“Unnatural?”

“An apt coinage.
Some
would say it’s the unnatural philosophers that are to blame for Protestants fighting Protestants in England and Catholics everywhere else.”

“What, then, is a Natural Philosopher?”

“One who tries to prevent his ruminations from straying, by hewing to what can be observed, and proving things, when possible, by rules of logic.” This gets him nowhere with Ben. “Rather like a Judge in a Court, who insists on facts, and scorns rumor, hearsay, and appeals to sentiment. As when your own Judges finally went up to Salem and pointed out that the people there were going crazy.”

Ben nods. Good. “What is the name of your Clubb?”

“The Royal Society of London.”

“One day I shall be a Fellow of it, and a Judge of such things.”

“I shall nominate you the moment I get back, Ben.”

“Is it a part of your code that members must lend each other horses in time of need?”

“No, but it is a rule that they must pay dues—for which there is
ever
a need—and this chap had not paid his dues in many a year. Sir Isaac—who is the President of the Royal Society—looks with disfavor on such. I explained to the gentleman in New York why it was a Bad Idea to land on Sir Isaac’s Shit List—by your leave, by your leave—and he was so convinced by my arguments that he lent me his best riding-horse without further suasion.”

“He’s a beauty,” Ben says, and strokes the animal’s nose. The stallion mistrusted Ben at first for being small, darting, and smelling of long-dead beasts. Now he has accepted the boy as an animated hitching-post, capable of performing a few services such as nose-scratching and fly-shooing.