Quicksilver (43 page)

And so Daniel was presented with a choice between telling Roger the truth, and assenting to the lie that Roger had conveniently
proffered: namely, that Daniel had spied Roger in the street before Roger had departed for Amsterdam. Telling the truth held no danger, so far as he could see. The lie was attended with a small peril that Roger—who was cunning, in a way—might be dangling it before him as some sort of test.

“I thought you knew,” Daniel said, “I was in the laboratory when it happened. Had gone there to fetch Isaac’s paper on tangents. Nearly got blown to bits myself!”

Astonishment and revelation came out of Roger’s face like sudden flame. But if Daniel had owned a Hooke watch, he would have counted only a few seconds of time before the old look came back down over his face. As when a candle-snuffer pounces on a wild flame and the errant brilliance that had filled one’s vision a moment ago is in an instant vanished, the only thing left in its place a dull sight of old silver-work, frozen and familiar.

“I
phant’sied
I’d heard someone moving about in there!” Roger exclaimed. Which was obviously a lie; but it made the conversation move along better.

Daniel was keen to ask Roger what he’d been doing with the gunpowder. But perhaps it would be better to wait for Roger to volunteer something. “So it was to Amsterdam you went, to recuperate from the excitements of that evening,” Daniel said.

“Here first.”

“Here to London?”

“Here to the Angleseys’. Lovely family. And socializing with them has its benefits.” Roger reached up as if to stroke his wig—but dared not touch it.

“What, you’re not in their
employ
—?”

“No, no! It’s much better. I
know
things. Certain of the Golden Comstocks immigrated—all right, all right, some would say
fled
—to Holland in the last century. Settled in Amsterdam. I went and paid them a visit. From them, I knew that de Ruyter was taking his fleet to Guinea to seize the Duke of York’s slave-ports. So I sold my Guinea Company shares while they were still high. Then from the Angleseys I learned that King Looie was making preparations to invade the Dutch Republic—but could never stage a campaign without purchasing grain first—purchasing it you’ll never guess
where.
”

“No!”

“Just so—the Dutch sold France the grain that King Looie is using to conquer them! At any rate—I took my money from the Guinea Company shares, and took a large position in Amsterdam-grain just before King Looie bid the price up! Voilà! Now I’ve a
Hooke-watch, a big wig, and a lot on fashionable Waterhouse Square!”

“You own—” Daniel began, and was well on his way to saying
You own some of my family estate!?
when they were interrupted by Leibniz, stalking through a flower-bed, hugging his brain-in-a-box.

“Dr. Leibniz—the Royal Society were quite taken with your Arithmetickal Engine,” Roger said.

“But they did not like my
mathematickal
proofs,” said one dejected German savant.

“On the contrary—they were acknowledged to be unusually elegant!” Daniel protested.

“But there is no honor in
elegantly
proving a theorem in 1672 that some Scotsman proved
barbarously
in 1671!”

“You could not possibly have known that,” Daniel said.

“Happens all the time,” said Roger, a-bristle with bogus authority.

“Monsieur Huygens should have known, when he assigned me those problems as exercises,” Leibniz grumbled.

“He probably
did,
” Daniel said. “Oldenburg writes to him every week.”

“It is well-known that GRUBENDOL is a trafficker in foreign intelligence!” announced Robert Hooke, crashing through a laurel bush and tottering onto a marble bench as vertigo seized him. Daniel gritted his teeth, waiting for a fist-fight, or worse, to break out between Hooke and Leibniz, but Leibniz let this jab at Oldenburg pass without comment, as if Hooke had merely farted at High Table.

“Another way of phrasing it might be that Mr. Oldenburg keeps Monsieur Huygens abreast of the latest developments from England,” Roger said.

Daniel picked up the thread: “Huygens probably heard about the latest English theorems through that channel, and gave them to you, Doctor Leibniz, to test your mettle!”

“Never anticipating,” Roger tidily concluded, “that fortunes of War and Diplomacy would bring you to the
Britannic
shore, where you would innocently present the same results to the Royal Society!”

“Entirely the fault of Oldenburg—who steals my latest watch-designs, and despatches ’em to that same Huygens!” Hooke added.

“Nonetheless—for me to present theorems to the Royal Society—only to have some gentleman in a kilt stand up in the back of the room, and announce that he proved the same thing a year ago—”

“Everyone who matters knows it was innocent.”

“It is a blow to my reputation.”

“Your reputation will outshine any, when you finish that Arithmetickal Engine!” announced Oldenburg, coming down a path like a blob of mercury in a trough.

“Any
on the Continent,
perhaps,” Hooke sniffed.

“But all of the Frenchmen who are competent to
realize
my conception, are consumed with vain attempts to match the work of Mr. Hooke!” Leibniz returned. Which was a reasonably professional bit of flattery, the sort of thing that greased wheels and made reputations in small Continental courts.

Oldenburg rolled his eyes, then straightened abruptly as a stifled belch pistoned up his gorge.

Hooke said, “I have a design for an arithmetickal engine of my own, which I have not had the
leisure
to complete yet.”

“Yes—but do you have a design for what you shall
do
with it, when it’s finished?” Leibniz asked eagerly.

“Calculate logarithms, I suppose, and outmode
Napier’s
bones…”

“But why concern yourself with anything so tedious as logarithms!?”

“They are a tool—nothing more.”

“And for what purpose do you wish to
use
that tool, sir?” Leibniz asked eagerly.

“If I believed that my answer would remain within the walls of this fair garden, Doctor, I would say—but as matters stand, I fear my words will be carried to Paris with the
swiftness
—though surely not the
grace
—of the winged-footed messenger of the gods.” Staring directly at Oldenburg.

Leibniz deflated. Oldenburg stepped closer to him, whilst turning his back on Hooke, and began trying to cheer the Doctor up—which only depressed him more, as being claimed, by Oldenburg, as an ally, would condemn him forever in Hooke’s opinion.

Hooke removed a long slim deerskin wallet from his breast pocket and unrolled it on his lap. It contained a neat row of slim objects: diverse quills and slivers of cane. He selected a tendril of whalebone—set the wallet aside—spread his knees wide—leaned forward—inserted the whalebone deep into his throat—wiggled it—and immediately began to vomit up bile. Daniel watched with an empiric eye, until he had made sure the vomit contained no blood, parasites, or other auspices of serious trouble.

Oldenburg was muttering to Leibniz in High-Dutch, of which Daniel could not understand a single word—which was probably
why. But Daniel could make out a few names: first of Leibniz’s late patron in Mainz, and then of various Parisians, such as Colbert.

He turned round hoping to continue his conversation with Roger, but Roger had quietly removed himself to make way for his distant cousin the Earl of Epsom—who was stalking directly toward Daniel looking as if he would be happy to settle matters with a head-butting duel. “Mr. Waterhouse.”

“My Lord.”

“You loved John Wilkins.”

“Almost as a father, my lord.”

“You would have him revered and respected by future generations of Englishmen.”

“I pray that Englishmen will have the wisdom and discernment to give Wilkins his due.”

“I say to you that those Englishmen will dwell in a country with one Established Church. If, God willing, I have my way, it will be Anglican. If the Duke of Gunfleet has his, it will be the Roman faith. Deciding
which
might require another Civil War, or two, or three. I might kill Gunfleet, Gunfleet might kill me—my sons or grandsons might cross swords with his. And despite these fatal differences, he and I are
as one
in the conviction that no nation can exist without one Established Church. Do you imagine that a few Phanatiques can overcome the combined power of all the world’s Epsoms and Gunfleets?”

“I was never one for vain imaginings, my lord.”

“Then you admit that England will have an Established Church.”

“I confess it is likely.”

“Then what does that make those who stand in opposition to an Established Church?”

“I don’t know, my lord—eccentric Bishops?”

“On the contrary—it makes them heretics and traitors, Mr. Waterhouse. To change a heretic and a traitor into an eccentric Bishop is no mean task—it is a form of Transmutation requiring many Alchemists—hooded figures working in secret. The last thing they need is for a sorcerer’s apprentice to stumble in and begin knocking things over!”

“Please forgive my ineptitude, my lord. I responded impulsively, because I thought he was being attacked.”

“
He
was not being attacked, Mr. Waterhouse—
you
were.”

D
ANIEL LEFT
A
NGLESEY
H
OUSE
and wandered blindly along Piccadilly, realized he was in front of Comstock House, veered away from that, and fled into St. James’s Fields—now parted into neat
little squares where grass was trying to establish itself on the muck of construction. He sat on a plank bench, and slowly became aware that Roger Comstock had been following him the entire way, and that he’d (presumably) been talking the entire time. But he pointedly declined to bring his breeches into contact with the bench, a splintery improvisation strewn with pasty-flakes, pipe-ashes, and rat-shite.

“What were Leibniz and Oldenburg on about? Is German among the many things that you understand, Daniel?”

“I think it was that Dr. Leibniz has lost his patron, and needs a new one—with any luck, in Paris.”

“Oh, most difficult for such a man to make his way in the world without a patron!”

“Yes.”

“It seems as if John Comstock is cross with you.”

“Very.”

“His son is captain of one of the invasion-ships, you know. He is nervous, irritable just now—not himself.”

“On the contrary, I think I have just seen the real John Comstock. It’s safe to say that my career in the Royal Society is at an end—as long as he remains President.”

“Informed opinion is that the Duke of Gunfleet will be president after the next election.”

“That’s no better—for in their hatred of me, Epsom and Gunfleet are one man.”

“Sounds as though
you
need a patron, Daniel. One who sympathizes.”

“
Is
there anyone who sympathizes?”

“I do.”

This took a while to stop seeming funny, and to percolate inwards. The two of them sat there silently for a while.

Some sort of parade or procession seemed to be headed this general direction from Charing Cross, with beating of drums, and either bad singing or melodious jeering. Daniel and Roger got up and began wandering down towards Pall Mall, to see what it was.

“Are you making me some sort of proposal?” Daniel finally asked.

“I made a penny or two this year—still, I’m far from being an Epsom or a Gunfleet! I put most of my
liquid
capital into buying that parcel of land from your brothers…”

“Which one is it?”

“The large one on the corner there, just next to where Mr. Raleigh Waterhouse built
his
house…what think you of it, by the way?”

“Raleigh’s house? It’s, er…big, I suppose.”

“Would you like to put it in the shade?”

“What can you possibly mean?”

“I want to erect a bigger house. But I didn’t study my mathematics at Trinity, as you know only too well, Daniel—I need
you
to design it for me, and oversee the construction.”

“But I’m not an architect—”

“Neither was Mr. Hooke, before he was hired to design Bedlam and diverse other great Fabricks—you can bang out a house as well as he, I wager—and certainly better than that block-head who slapped Raleigh’s together.”

They’d come out into Pall Mall, which was lined with pleasant houses. Daniel was already eyeing their windows and roof-lines, collecting ideas. But Roger kept his eye on the procession, which was nearly upon them: several hundred more or less typical Londoners, albeit with a higher than usual number of Dissident, and even a few Anglican, preachers. They were carrying an effigy, dangling from the top of a long pole: a straw man dressed in ecclesiastical robes, but whorishly colored and adorned, with a huge mitre affixed to his head, and a long bishop’s crook lashed to one mitt. The Pope. Daniel and Roger stood to one side and watched for (according to Roger’s watch) a hundred and thirty-four seconds as the crowd marched by them and drained out of the street into St. James’s Park. They chose a place in clear view of both St. James’s Palace and Whitehall Palace, and planted the pole in the dirt.

Soldiers were already headed toward them from the Horse Guards’ compound between the two Palaces: a few forerunners on horseback, but mostly formations of infantrymen that had spilled out too hastily to form up into proper squares. These were in outlandish fantastickal attire, with long peaked caps of a vaguely Polish style.
^*
Daniel at first took them for dragoons, but as they marched closer he could see nippled cannonballs—granadoes!—dangling from their ox-hide belts and bandoliers, thudding against their persons with each step.

That detail was not lost on the crowd of marchers, either. After a few hasty words, they held torches to the hem of the Pope’s robe and set it afire. Then the crowd burst, granadoe-like. By the time those grenadiers arrived, the procession had been re-absorbed by London. There was nothing for the grenadiers to do but knock the

effigy down and stamp out the flames—keeping them well away from the grenades, of course.