Quicksilver (5 page)

The boy was dragged inside for higher punishments. Enoch rode back to Clarke’s apothecary shop, reining in a silly urge to gallop through the town like a Cavalier.

Clarke was sipping tay and gnawing biscuits, already several pages into a new alchemical treatise, moving crumb-spattered lips as he solved the Latin.

“Who is he?” Enoch demanded, coming in the door.

Clarke elected to play innocent. Enoch crossed the room and found the stairs. He didn’t really care about the name anyway. It would just be another English name.

The upstairs was all one odd-shaped room with low adze-marked rafters and rough plaster walls that had once been whitewashed. Enoch hadn’t visited many children’s rooms, but to him it seemed like a den of thieves hastily abandoned and stumbled upon by a plodding constable, filled with evidence of many peculiar, ingenious, frequently unwise plots and machinations suddenly cut short. He stopped in the doorway and steadied himself. Like a good empiric, he had to see all and alter nothing.

The walls were marked with what his eyes first took to be the grooves left behind by a careless plasterer’s trowel, but as his pupils dilated, he understood that Mr. and Mrs. Clarke’s boarders had been drawing on the walls, apparently with bits of charcoal fetched out of the grate. It was plain to see which pictures had been drawn by whom. Most were caricatures learned by rote from slightly older children. Others—generally closer to the floor—were maps of insight, manifestoes of intelligence, always precise, sometimes beautiful. Enoch had been right in supposing that the boy had excellent senses. Things that others did not see at all, or chose not
to register out of some kind of mental obstinacy, this boy took in avidly.

There were four tiny beds. The litter of toys on the floor was generally boyish, but over by one bed there was a tendency toward ribbons and frills. Clarke had mentioned one of the boarders was a girl. There was a dollhouse and a clan of rag dolls in diverse phases of ontogeny. Here there’d been a meeting of interests. There was doll furniture ingeniously made by the same regular mind and clever hands that had woven the net round the stone. The boy had made stalks of grass into rattan tables, and willow twigs into rocking-chairs. The alchemist in him had been at work copying recipes from that old corrupter of curious youths, Bates’s
The Mysteries of Nature & Art,
extracting pigments from plants and formulating paints.

He had tried to draw sketches of the other boys while they were sleeping—the only time they could be relied on to hold still and not behave abominably. He did not yet have the skill to make a regular portrait, but from time to time the Muse would take hold of his hand, and in a fortunate sweep of the arm he’d capture something beautiful in the curve of a jawbone or an eyelash.

There were broken and dismantled parts of machines that Enoch did not understand. Later, though, perusing the notebook where the boy had been copying out recipes, Enoch found sketches of the hearts of rats and birds that the boy had apparently dissected. Then the little machines made sense. For what was the heart but the model for the perpetual motion machine? And what was the perpetual motion machine but Man’s attempt to make a thing that would do what the heart did? To harness the heart’s occult power and bend it to use.

The apothecary had joined him in the room. Clarke looked nervous. “You’re up to something clever, aren’t you?” Enoch said.

“By that, do you mean—”

“He came your way by chance?”

“Not precisely. His mother knows my wife. I had seen the boy.”

“And seen that he had promise—as how could you not.”

“He lacks a father. I made a recommendation to the mother. She is steady. Intermittently decent. Quasi-literate…”

“But too thick to know what she has begotten?”

“Oh my, yes.”

“So you took the boy under your wing—and if he’s shown some interest in the Art you have not discouraged it.”

“Of course not! He could be the one, Enoch.”

“He’s not the one,” Enoch said. “Not the one you are thinking
of. Oh, he will be a great empiricist. He will, perhaps, be the one to accomplish some great thing we have never imagined.”

“Enoch, what can you possibly be talking about?”

It made his head ache. How was he to explain it without making Clarke out to be a fool, and himself a swindler? “Something is happening.”

Clarke pursed his lips and waited for something a little more specific.

“Galileo and Descartes were only harbingers. Something is happening now—the mercury is rising in the ground, like water climbing up the bore of a well.”

Enoch couldn’t get Oxford out of his mind—Hooke and Wren and Boyle, all exchanging thoughts so quickly that flames practically leaped between them. He decided to try another tack. “There’s a boy in Leipzig like this one. Father died recently, leaving him nothing except a vast library. The boy began reading those books. Only six years old.”

“It’s not unheard-of for six-year-olds to read.”

“German, Latin, and Greek?”

“With proper instruction—”

“That’s just it. The boy’s teachers prevailed on the mother to lock the child out of the library. I got wind of it. Talked to the mother, and secured a promise from her that little Gottfried would be allowed free run of the books. He taught himself Latin and Greek in the space of a year.”

Clarke shrugged. “Very well. Perhaps little Gottfried is the one.”

Enoch then should’ve known it was hopeless, but he tried again: “We are empiricists—we scorn the Scholastic way of memorizing old books and rejecting what is new—and that is good. But in pinning our hopes on the Philosophick Mercury we have decided in advance what it is that we seek to discover, and that is never right.”

This merely made Clarke nervous. Enoch tried yet another tack: “I have in my saddlebags a copy of
Principia Philosophica,
the last thing Descartes wrote before he died. Dedicated to young Elizabeth, the Winter Queen’s daughter…”

Clarke was straining to look receptive, like a dutiful university student still intoxicated from last night’s recreations at the tavern. Enoch remembered the stone on the string, and decided to aim for something more concrete. “Huygens has made a clock that is regulated by a pendulum.”

“Huygens?”

“A young Dutch savant. Not an alchemist.”

“Oh!”

“He has worked out a way to make a pendulum that will always go back and forth in the same amount of time. By connecting it to the internal workings of a clock, he has wrought a perfectly regular time-piece. Its ticks divide infinity, as calipers step out leagues on a map. With these two—clock and calipers—we can measure both extent and duration. And this, combined with the new method of analysis of Descartes, gives us a way to describe Creation and perhaps to predict the future.”

“Ah, I see!” Clarke said. “So this Huygens—he is some kind of astrologer?”

“No, no, no! He is neither astrologer nor alchemist. He is something new. More like him will follow. Wilkins, down in Oxford, is trying to bring them together. Their achievements may exceed those of alchemists.” If they did not, Enoch thought, he’d be chagrined. “I am suggesting to you that this little boy may turn out to be another one like Huygens.”

“You want me to steer him away from the Art?” Clarke exclaimed.

“Not if he shows interest. But beyond that do not steer him at all—let him pursue his own conclusions.” Enoch looked at the faces and diagrams on the wall, noting some rather good perspective work. “And see to it that mathematics is brought to his attention.”

“I do not think that he has the temperament to be a mere computer,” Clarke warned. “Sitting at his pages day after day, drudging out tables of logarithms, cube roots, cosines—”

“Thanks to Descartes, there are other uses for mathematics now,” Enoch said. “Tell your brother to show the boy Euclid and let him find his own way.”

T
HE CONVERSATION MIGHT NOT HAVE
gone precisely this way. Enoch had the same way with his memories as a ship’s master with his rigging—a compulsion to tighten what was slack, mend what was frayed, caulk what leaked, and stow, or throw overboard, what was to no purpose. So the conversation with Clarke might have wandered into quite a few more blind alleys than he remembered. A great deal of time was probably spent on politeness. Certainly it took up most of that short autumn day. Because Enoch didn’t ride out of Grantham until late. He passed by the school one more time on his way down towards Cambridge. All the boys had gone home by that hour save one, who’d been made to stay behind and, as punishment, scrub and scrape his own name off the various windowsills and chair-backs where he’d inscribed it. These
infractions had probably been noticed by Clarke’s brother, who had saved them up for the day when the child would need particular discipline.

The sun, already low at mid-afternoon, was streaming into the open windows. Enoch drew up along the northwest side of the school so that anyone who looked back at him would see only a long hooded shadow, and watched the boy work for a while. The sun was crimson in the boy’s face, which was ruddy to begin with from his exertions with the scrub-brush. Far from being reluctant, he seemed enthusiastic about the job of erasing all traces of himself from the school—as if the tumbledown place was unworthy to bear his mark. One windowsill after another came under him and was wiped clean of the name I. NEWTON.

OCTOBER
12, 1713

How are these Colonies of the
English
increas’d and improv’d, even to such a Degree, that some have suggested, tho’ not for Want of Ignorance, a Danger of their revolting from the
English
Government, and setting up an Independency of Power for themselves. It is true, the Notion is absurd, and without Foundation, but serves to confirm what I have said above of the real Encrease of those Colonies, and of the flourishing Condition of the Commerce carried on there.

—D
ANIEL
D
EFOE
,
A Plan of the English Commerce

S
OMETIMES IT SEEMS AS IF
everyone’s
immigrating to America—sailing-ships on the North Atlantic as thick as watermen’s boats on the Thames, more or less wearing ruts in the sea-lanes—and so, in an idle way, Enoch supposes that his appearance on the threshold of the Massachusetts Bay Colony Institute of Technologickal Arts will come as no surprise at all to its founder. But Daniel Waterhouse
nearly swallows his teeth when Enoch walks through the door, and it’s not just because the hem of Enoch’s cloak knocks over a great teetering stack of cards. For a moment Enoch’s afraid that some sort of apoplectic climax is in progress, and that Dr. Waterhouse’s final contribution to the Royal Society, after nearly a lifetime of service, will be a traumatically deranged cardiac muscle, pickled in spirits of wine in a crystal jug. The Doctor spends the first minute of their interview frozen halfway between sitting and standing, with his mouth open and his left hand on his breastbone. This might be the beginnings of a courteous bow, or a hasty maneuver to conceal, beneath his coat, a shirt so work-stained as to cast aspersions on his young wife’s diligence. Or perhaps it’s a
philosophick
enquiry, viz. checking his own pulse—if so, it’s good news, because Sir John Floyer just invented the practice, and if Daniel Waterhouse knows of it, it means he’s been keeping up with the latest work out of London.

Enoch takes advantage of the lull to make other observations and try to judge empirically whether Daniel’s as unsound as the faculty of Harvard College would have him believe. From the Doctors’ jibes on the ferry-ride, Enoch had expected nothing but cranks and gears. And indeed Waterhouse does have a mechanic’s shop in a corner of the—how will Enoch characterize this structure to the Royal Society? “Log cabin,” while technically correct, calls to mind wild men in skins. “Sturdy, serviceable, and in no way extravagant laboratory making ingenious use of indigenous building materials.” There. But anyway, most of it is given over not to the hard ware of gears, but to softer matters: cards. They are stacked in slender columns that would totter in the breeze from a moth’s wings if the columns had not been jammed together into banks, stairways, and terraces, the whole formation built on a layer of loose tiles on the dirt floor to (Enoch guesses) prevent the card-stacks from wicking up the copious ground-water. Edging farther into the room and peering round a bulwark of card-stacks, Enoch finds a writing-desk stocked with blank cards. Ragged gray quills project from inkpots, bent and broken ones crosshatch the floor, bits of down and fluff and cartilage and other bird-wreckage form a dandruffy layer on everything.

On pretext of cleaning up his mess, Enoch begins to pick the spilled cards off the floor. Each is marked at the top with a rather large number, always odd, and beneath it a long row of ones and zeroes, which (since the last digit is always 1, indicating an odd number) he takes to be nothing other then the selfsame number expressed in the binary notation lately perfected by Leibniz.
Underneath the number, then, is a word or short phrase, a different one on each card. As he picks them up and re-stacks them he sees:
Noah’s Ark; Treaties terminating wars; Membranophones (e.g., mir-litons); The notion of a classless society; The pharynx and its outgrowths; Drawing instruments (e.g., T-squares); The Skepticism of Pyrrhon of Elis; Requirements for valid maritime insurance contracts; The Kamakura
bakufu;
The fallacy of Assertion without Knowledge; Agates; Rules governing the determination of questions of fact in Roman civil courts; Mummification; Sunspots; The sex organs of bryophytes (e.g., liverwort); Euclidean geometry—homotheties and similitudes; Pantomime; The Election & Reign of Rudolf of Hapsburg; Testes; Nonsymmetrical dyadic relations; the Investiture Controversy; Phosphorus; Traditional impotence remedies; the Arminian heresy;
and—

“Some of these strike one as being too complicated for monads,” he says, desperate for some way to break the ice. “Such as this—‘The Development of Portuguese Hegemony over Central Africa.’ ”

“Look at the number at the top of that card,” Waterhouse says. “It is the product of five primes: one for
development,
one for
Portuguese,
one for
Hegemony,
one for
Central,
and one for
Africa.
”

“Ah, so it’s not a monad at all, but a composite.”

“Yes.”

“It’s difficult to tell when the cards are helter-skelter. Don’t you think you should organize them?”

“According to what scheme?” Waterhouse asks shrewdly.

“Oh, no, I’ll not be tricked into
that
discussion.”

“No linear indexing system is adequate to express the multi-dimensionality of knowledge,” Dr. Waterhouse reminds him. “But if each one is assigned a unique number—prime numbers for monads, and products of primes for composites—then organizing them is simply a matter of performing computations…
Mr. Root.
”

“Dr. Waterhouse. Pardon the interruption.”

“Not at all.” He sits back down, finally, and goes back to what he was doing before: running a long file back and forth over a chunk of metal with tremendous sneezing noises. “It is a welcome diversion to have you appear before me, so unlooked-for, so
implausibly well-preserved,
” he shouts over the keening of the warm tool and the ringing of the work-piece.

“Durability is preferable to the alternative—but not always convenient. Less hale persons are forever sending me off on errands.”

“Lengthy and tedious ones at that.”

“The journey’s dangers, discomforts, and tedium are more than compensated for by the sight of you, so productively occupied, and
in such good health.” Or something like that. This is the polite part of the conversation, which is not likely to last much longer. If he had returned the compliment, Daniel would have scoffed, because no one would say he’s well preserved in the sense that Enoch is. He looks as old as he ought to. But he’s wiry, with clear, sky-blue eyes, no tremors in his jaw or his hands, no hesitation in his speech once he’s over the shock of seeing Enoch (or, perhaps,
anyone
) in his Institute. Daniel Waterhouse is almost completely bald, with a fringe of white hair clamping the back of his head like wind-hammered snow on a tree-trunk. He makes no apologies for being uncovered and does not reach for a wig—indeed, appears not to
own
one. His eyes are large, wide and staring in a way that probably does nothing to improve his reputation. Those orbs flank a hawkish nose that nearly conceals the slot-like mouth of a miser biting down on a suspect coin. His ears are elongated and have grown a radiant fringe of lanugo. The imbalance between his organs of input and output seems to say that he sees and knows more than he’ll say.

“Are you a colonist now, or—”

“I’m here to see you.”

The eyes stare back, knowing and calm. “So it is a social visit! That is heroic—when a simple exchange of letters is so much less fraught with seasickness, pirates, scurvy, mass drownings—”

“Speaking of letters—I’ve one here,” Enoch says, taking it out.

“Great big magnificent seal. Someone dreadfully important must’ve written it. Can’t say how impressed I am.”

“Personal friend of Dr. Leibniz.”

“The Electress Sophie?”

“No, the other one.”

“Ah. What does Princess Caroline want of me? Must be something appalling, or else she wouldn’t’ve sent you to chivvy me along.”

Dr. Waterhouse is embarrassed at having been so startled earlier and is making up for it with peevishness. But it’s fine, because it seems to Enoch that the thirty-year-old Waterhouse hidden inside the old man is now pressing outward against the loose mask of skin, like a marble sculpture informing its burlap wrappings.

“Think of it as coaxing you forward. Dr. Waterhouse! Let’s find a tavern and—”

“We’ll find a tavern—after I’ve had an answer. What does she want of me?”

“The same thing as ever.”

Dr. Waterhouse shrinks—the inner thirty-year-old recedes, and
he becomes just an oddly familiar-looking gaffer. “Should’ve known. What other use is there for a broken-down old computational monadologist?”

“It’s remarkable.”

“What?”

“I’ve known you for—what—thirty or forty years now, almost as long as you’ve known Leibniz. I’ve seen you in some unenviable spots. But in all that time, I don’t believe I’ve ever heard you whine, until just then.”

Daniel considers this carefully, then actually laughs. “My apologies.”

“Not at all!”

“I thought my work would be appreciated here. I was going to establish what, to Harvard, would’ve been what Gresham’s College was to Oxford. Imagined I’d find a student body, or at least a protégé. Someone who could help me build the Logic Mill. Hasn’t worked out that way. All of the mechanically talented sorts are dreaming of steam-engines. Ludicrous! What’s wrong with water-wheels? Plenty of rivers here. Look, there’s a little one right between your feet!”

“Engines are naturally more interesting to the young.”

“You needn’t tell me. When I was a student, a
prism
was a wonder. Went to Sturbridge Fair with Isaac to buy them—little miracles wrapped in velvet. Played with ‘em for months.”

“This fact is now widely known.”

“Now the lads are torn every direction at once, like a prisoner being quartered. Or eighthed, or sixteenthed. I can already see it happening to young Ben out there, and soon it’ll happen to my own boy. ‘Should I study mathematics? Euclidean or Cartesian? Newtonian or Leibnizian calculus? Or should I go the empirical route? Will it be dissecting animals then, or classifying weeds, or making strange matters in crucibles? Rolling balls down inclined planes? Sporting with electricity and magnets?’ Against that, what’s in my shack here to interest them?”

“Could this lack of interest have something to do with that everyone knows the project was conceived by Leibniz?”

“I’m not doing it his way. His plan was to use balls running down troughs to represent the binary digits, and pass them through mechanical gates to perform the logical operations. Ingenious, but not very practical. I’m using pushrods.”

“Superficial. I ask again: could your lack of popularity here be related to that all Englishmen believe that Leibniz is a villain—a plagiarist?”

“This is an unnatural turn in the conversation, Mr. Root. Are you being devious?”

“Only a little.”

“You and your Continental ways.”

“It’s just that the priority dispute has lately turned vicious.”

“Knew it would happen.”

“I don’t think you appreciate just how unpleasant it is.”

“You don’t appreciate how well I know Sir Isaac.”

“I’m saying that its repercussions may extend to here, to this very room, and might account for your (forgive me for mentioning this) solitude, and slow progress.”

“Ludicrous!”

“Have you seen the latest flying letters, speeding about Europe unsigned, undated, devoid of even a printer’s mark? The anonymous reviews, planted, like sapper’s mines, in the journals of the savants? Sudden unmaskings of hitherto unnamed ‘leading mathematicians’ forced to own, or deny, opinions they have long disseminated in private correspondence? Great minds who, in any other era, would be making discoveries of Copernican significance, reduced to acting as cat’s-paws and hired leg-breakers for the two principals? New and deservedly obscure journals suddenly elevated to the first rank of learned discourse, simply because some lackey has caused his latest stiletto-thrust to be printed in its back pages? Challenge problems flying back and forth across the Channel, each one fiendishly devised to prove that Leibniz’s calculus is the original, and Newton’s but a shoddy counterfeit, or vice versa? Reputations tossed about on points of swords—”

“No,” Daniel says. “I moved here to get away from European intrigues.” His eyes drop to the Letter. Enoch can’t help looking at it, too.

“It is purely an anomaly of fate,” Enoch says, “that Gottfried, as a young man, lacking means, seeking a position—anything that would give him the simple freedom to work—landed in the court of an obscure German Duke. Who through intricate and tedious lacework of marryings, couplings, dyings, religious conversions, wars, revolutions, miscarriages, decapitations, congenital feeblemindedness, excommunications,
et cetera
among Europe’s elite—most notably, the deaths of all seventeen of Queen Anne’s children—became first in line to the Throne of England and Scotland, or Great Britain as we’re supposed to call it now.”

“
Some
would call it fate. Others—”

“Let’s not get into
that.
”

“Agreed.”

“Anne’s in miserable health, the House of Hanover is packing up its pointed helmets and illustrated beer-mugs, and taking English lessons. Sophie may get to be Queen of England yet, at least for a short while. But soon enough, George Louis will become Newton’s King and—as Sir Isaac is still at the Mint—his boss.”

“I take your point. It is most awkward.”

“George Louis is the embodiment of awkwardness—he doesn’t care, and scarcely knows, and would probably think it amusing if he did. But his daughter-in-law the Princess—author of this letter—in time likely to become Queen of England herself—is a friend of Leibniz. And yet an admirer of Newton. She wants a reconciliation.”

“She wants a dove to fly between the Pillars of Hercules. Which are still runny with the guts of the previous several peace-makers.”