Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson
And Sir Winston was only one of the people Daniel recognized here. Daniel seemed to have inadvertently sat down along a major game trail: persons coming up from Whitehall Palace and Westminster to buy their stockings, gloves, hats, syphilis-cures, et cetera at the New Exchange, just a stone’s throw up the Strand, all passed by this coffee-house to get a last fix on what was or wasn’t in fashion.
Daniel hadn’t moved or spoken in what seemed like ten minutes…he was (glancing at the telltale coffee cup here) paralyzed, in fact! Then he solved Sir Winston’s etiquette jam by blurting something like “I say!” and attempting to stand up, which came out as a palsied spasm of the entire body—he got into a shin-kicking match with his own table and produced a disturbance that sheared cups off their saucers. Everyone looked.
“Ever the diligent Natural Philosopher, Mr. Waterhouse pursues an experiment in Intoxication by Coffee!” Sir Winston announced roundly. Simply tremendous laughter and light applause.
Sir Winston was of Raleigh’s generation and had fought in the Civil War as a Cavalier—he was a serious man and so was dressed in a way that passed for dignified and understated here, in a black velvet coat, flaring out to just above the knee, with lace handkerchiefs trailing from various openings like wisps of steam, and a yellow waistcoat under that, and God only knew what else beneath the waistcoat—the sleeves of all these garments terminated near the elbows in huge wreaths of lace, ruffles, et cetera, and that was to show off his tan kid gloves. He had a broad-brimmed Cavalier-hat fringed with fluffy white stuff probably harvested from the buttocks of some bird that spent a lot of time sitting on ice floes, and a very thin mustache, and a wig of yellow hair, expensively disheveled and formed into bobbling ringlets. He had black stockings fashionably wrinkled up his calves, and high-heeled shoes with bows of a wingspan of eight inches. The stocking/breech interface was presumably somewhere around his knees and was some sort of fantastically complex spraying phenomenon of ribbons and gathers and skirtlets designed to peek out under the hems of his coat, waistcoat, and allied garments.
Mrs. Churchill, for her part, was up to something mordant involving a Hat. It had the general outlines of a Puritan-hat, a Pilgrimish number consisting of a truncated cone mounted on a broad flat brim, but enlivened with colorful bands, trailing ribbons, jeweled badges, curious feathers, and other merchandise—a parody, then, a tart assertion of non-pilgrimhood. Everything from the brim of this hat to the hem of her dress was too complex for Daniel’s eye to comprehend—he was like an illiterate savage staring at the first page of an illuminated Bible—but he did notice that the little boy carrying her train was dressed as a Leprechaun (Sir Winston did a lot of business for the King in Ireland).
It was a lot to put on, just to nip out for a cup of coffee, but the Churchills must have known that everyone was going to be fawning over them today because of their gallant son, and decided they ought to dress for it.
Mrs. Churchill was looking over Daniel’s shoulder, toward the street. This left Daniel free to stare at her face, to which she had glued several spots of black velvet—which, since the underlying skin had been whitened with some kind of powerful cosmetic, gave her a sort of Dalmatian appearance. “He’s here,” she said to whomever she was looking at. Then, confused: “Were you expecting your half-brother?”
Daniel turned around and recognized Sterling Waterhouse, now about forty, and his wife of three years, Beatrice, and a whole crowd of persons who’d apparently just staged some type of pillaging-raid on the New Exchange. Sterling and Beatrice were shocked to see him. But they had no choice but to come over, now that Mrs. Churchill had done what she’d done. So they did, cheerfully enough, and then there was a series of greetings and introductions and other formalities (including that all parties congratulated the Churchills on the dazzling qualities of their son John, and promised to say prayers for his safe return from the shores of Tripoli) extending to something like half an hour. Daniel wanted to slash his own throat. These people were doing what they did for a living. Daniel wasn’t.
But he did achieve one insight that would prove useful in later dealings with his own family. Because Raleigh was involved in the mysterious Conspiracy of which Daniel had, lately, become vaguely aware, it probably had something to do with land. Because Uncle Thomas (“Viscount Walbrook”) Ham was mixed up in it, it must have something to do with putting rich people’s money to clever uses. And because Sterling was involved, it probably had something to do with shops, because ever since Drake had ascended into the flames over London, Sterling had been moving away from Drake’s style of business (smuggling, and traveling around cutting private deals away from markets) and towards the newfangled procedure of putting all the merchandise in a fixed building and waiting for customers to transport themselves to it. The whole thing came together complete in Daniel’s head when he sat in that coffeehouse in Charing Cross and looked at the courtiers, macaronis, swells, and fops streaming in from the new town-houses going up on land that had been incinerated, or that had been open pastures, four years earlier. They were planning some sort of real estate development on the edge of the city—probably on that few acres of pasture out back of the Waterhouse residence. They would put up town-houses around the edges, make the center into a square, and along the square Sterling would put up shops. Rich people would move in, and the Waterhouses and their confederates would control a patch of land that would probably generate more rent than any thousand square miles of Ireland—basically, they would become farmers of rich people.
And what made it extraordinarily clever—as only Sterling could be—was that this project would not even be a struggle as such. They would not have to defeat any adversary or overcome any obstacle—merely ride along with certain inexorable trends. All they—all Sterling—had to do was notice these trends. He’d always had a talent for noticing—which was why his shops were so highly thought of—so all he needed was to be in the right place to do the necessary noticing, and the right place was obviously Mrs. Green’s coffee-house.
But it was the wrong place for Daniel, who only wanted to notice what Isaac was up to. A lively conversation was underway all round him, but it might as well’ve been in a foreign language—in fact, frequently it was. Daniel divided his time between looking at the telescope and wondering when he could snatch it off the table without attracting attention; staring at the mystery-shop and at the gentleman-rider; fraternal staredowns with Sterling (who was in his red silk suit with silver buttons today, and had numerous scraps of black glued to his face, though not as many as Beatrice); and watching Sir Winston Churchill, who looked equally bored, distracted, and miserable.
At one point he caught Sir Winston gazing fixedly at the telescope, his eyes making tiny movements and focusings as he figured out how it worked. Daniel waited until Sir Winston looked up at him, ready with a question—then Daniel winked and shook his head minutely. Sir Winston raised his eyebrows and looked thrilled that he and Daniel now had a small Intrigue of their own—it was like having a pretty seventeen-year-old girl unexpectedly sit on his lap. But this exchange was fully noticed by someone of Sterling’s crowd—one of Beatrice’s young lady friends—who demanded to know what the Tubular Object was.
“Thank you for reminding me,” Daniel said, “I’d best put it away.”
“What is it?” the lady demanded.
“A Naval Device,” Sir Winston said, “or a model of one—pity the Dutch Fleet when Mr. Waterhouse’s invention is realized at full scale!”
“How’s it work?”
“This is not the place,” said Sir Winston significantly, eyes rattling back and forth in a perfunctory scan for Dutch spies. This caused all of the other heads to turn, which led to an important Sighting: an entourage was migrating out of the Strand and into Charing Cross, and someone frightfully significant must be in the middle of it. While they were all trying to figure out who, Daniel put the telescope away and closed the box.
“It’s the Earl of Upnor,” someone whispered
The answer: now that Louis Anglesey, Earl of Upnor, was in London, freed from the monastic constraints of Cambridge, and a full twenty-two years of age, he was able to live, and dress, as he pleased. Today, walking across Charing Cross, he was wearing a suit that appeared to’ve been constructed by (1) dressing him in a blouse with twenty-foot-long sleeves of the most expensive linen; (2) bunching the sleeves up in numerous overlapping gathers on his arms; (3) painting most of him in glue; (4) shaking and rolling him in a bin containing thousands of black silk doilies; and (5) (because King Charles II, who’d mandated, a few years earlier, that all courtiers wear black and white, was getting bored with it, but had not formally rescinded the order) adding dashes of color here and there, primarily in the form of clusters of elaborately gathered and knotted ribbons—enough ribbon, all told, to stretch all the way to whatever shop in Paris where the Earl had bought all of this stuff. The Earl also had a white silk scarf tied round his throat in such a way as to show off its lacy ends. Louis XIV’s Croatian mercenaries, les Cravates, had made a practice of tying their giant, flapping lace collars down so that gusts of wind would not blow them up over their faces in the middle of a battle or duel, and this had become a fashion in Paris, and the Earl of Upnor, always pushing the envelope, was now doing the cravate thing with a scarf instead of an (as of ten minutes ago) outmoded collar. He had a wig that was actually wider than his shoulders, and a pair of boots that contained enough really good snow-white leather that, if pulled on straight, they would have reached all the way to his groin, at which point each one of them would have been larger in circumference than his waist; but he had of course folded the tops down and then (since they were so long) folded them back up again to keep them from dragging on the ground, so that around each knee was a complex of white leather folds about as wide as a bushel-basket, filled with a froth of lace. Gold spurs, beset with jewels, curved back from each heel to a distance of perhaps eight inches. The heels themselves were cherry-red, four inches high, and protected from the muck of Charing Cross by loose slippers whose flat soles dragged on the ground and made clacking noises with each step. Because of the width of his boot-tops, the Earl had to swing his legs around each other with each step, toes pointed, rolling so violently from side to side that he could only maintain balance with a long, encrusted, beribboned walking-stick.
For all that, he made excellent headway, and his admirers in the garden of the coffee-house had only a few moments in which to memorize the details. Daniel secured the Reflecting Telescope and then looked across the square, wanting to regain sight of the strange gentleman who’d been following Isaac.
But that fellow was no longer sitting in the coffee-house opposite. Daniel feared that he’d lost the man’s trail—until he happened to glance back at the Earl of Upnor, and noticed that his entourage was parting to admit, and swallow up, none other than the same gentleman rider.
Daniel, unencumbered by sword, giant flaring boots, or clacking boot-protectors, very quickly rose and stepped out of Mrs. Green’s without bothering to excuse himself. He did not walk directly towards Upnor, but plotted a course to swing wide around his group, as if going to an errand on the other side of Charing Cross.
As he drew close, he observed the following: the gentleman dismounted and approached the Earl, smiling confidently. Proud of himself, showing big mossy teeth.
While the rider bowed, Upnor glanced, and nodded, at one of his hangers-on. This man stepped in from the side, bending low, and made a sweeping gesture aimed at one of Upnor’s boots. Something flew from his hand and struck the top of the boot. In the same moment, this fellow extended his index finger and pointed to it: a neat dollop of brown stuff the size of a guinea coin. Everyone except the Earl of Upnor and the gentleman rider gasped in horror. “What is it?” the Earl inquired.
“Your boot!” someone exclaimed.
“I cannot see it,” the Earl said, “the boot-tops obstruct my view.” Supporting himself with the walking-stick, he extended one leg out in front of himself and pointed the toe. Everyone in Charing Cross could see it now, including the Earl. “You have got shit on my boot!” he announced. “Shall I have to kill you?”
The rider was nonplussed; he hadn’t come close enough to get shit on anyone—but the only other people who could testify to that were the Earl’s friends. Looking around, all he could see were the rouged and black-patched faces of the Earl’s crowd glowering at him.
“Whyever would you say such a thing, my lord?”
“Fight a duel with you, I should say—which would presumably mean killing you. Everyone I fight a duel with seems to die—why should you be any exception?”
“Why a…duel, my lord?”
“Because to extract an apology from you seems impossible. Even my dog is apologetic. But you! Why can you not show that you are ashamed of your actions?”
“My actions…”
“You have got shit on my boot!”
“My lord, I fear you have been misinformed.”
Very ugly noises now from the entourage.
“Meet me tomorrow morning at Tyburn. Bring a second—someone strong enough to carry you away when I’m finished.”
The rider finally understood that claiming innocence was getting him nowhere. “But I can show that I am ashamed, my lord.”
“Really? E’en like a dog?”
“Yes, my lord.”
“When my dog gets shit in the wrong place, I rub his nose in it,” said the Earl, extending his pointed toe again, so it was nearly in the rider’s face.
Daniel was now walking nearly behind the rider, no more than twelve feet distant, and could clearly see a stream of urine form in the crotch of his breeches and pizzle out onto the road. “Please, my lord. I did as you asked. I followed the white-haired man—I sent the message. Why are you doing this to me?”
But the Earl of Upnor fixed his stare on the rider, and raised his boot an inch. The rider bowed his head—lowered his nose toward it—but then the Earl slowly lowered his boot until it was on the ground, forcing the other to bend low, then clamber down onto his knees, and finally to put his elbows into the dirt, in order to put his nose exactly where the Earl wanted it.
Then it was over, and the gentleman rider was running out of Charing Cross with his face buried in his hands, presumably never to be seen in London again—which must have been exactly what the Earl wanted.
The Earl, for his part, shed his entourage at a tavern, and went alone into the same shop as Isaac Newton. Daniel, by that point, wasn’t even certain that Isaac was still in there. He walked by the front of it once and finally saw a tiny sign in the window: MONSIEUR LEFEBURE—CHYMIST.
Daniel roamed around Charing Cross for the next half an hour, glancing into M. LeFebure’s windows from time to time, until he finally caught sight of silver-haired Isaac framed in a window, deep in conversation with Louis Anglesey, the Earl of Upnor, who only nodded, and nodded, and (for good measure) nodded again, rapt.
Much as the sun had burnt its face into Isaac’s retinas at Wools-thorpe, this image remained before Daniel long after he had turned his back upon Charing Cross and stalked away. He walked for a long time through the streets, shifting the burden of the telescope from one shoulder to the other from time to time. He was headed generally toward Bishopsgate, where there was a meeting to attend. He was pursued and harried the whole way by a feeling, difficult to identify, until at last he recognized it as a sort of jealousy. He did not know what Isaac was up to in the house/shop/laboratory/salon of M. LeFebure. He suspected Alchemy, Buggery, or some ripe warm concoction thereof: and if not, then a flirtation with same. Which was wholly Isaac’s business and not Daniel’s. Indeed, Daniel had no interest in either of those pastimes. To feel jealous was, therefore, foolish. And yet he did. Isaac had, somehow, found friends in whom he could confide things he hid from Daniel. There it was, simple and painful as a smack in the gob. But Daniel had fri
Royal Society Meeting, Gresham’s College
12 AUGUST 1670
This Club of Vertuoso’s, upon a full Night, when some eminent Maggot-monger, for the Satisfaction of the Society, had appointed to demonstrate the Force of Air, by some hermetical Pot gun, to shew the Difference of the Gravity between the Smoak of Tobacco and that of Colts-foot and Bittany, or to try some other such like Experiment, were always compos’d of such an odd Mixture of Mankind, that, like a Society of Ringers at a quarterly Feast, here sat a fat purblind Philosopher next to a talkative Spectacle-maker; yonder a half-witted Whim of Quality, next to a ragged Mathematician; on the other Side a consumptive Astronomer next to a water-gruel Physician; above them, a Transmutator of Metals, next to a Philosopher-Stone-Hunter; at the lower End, a prating Engineer, next to a clumsy-fisted Mason; at the upper End of all, perhaps, an Atheistical Chymist, next to a whimsy-headed Lecturer; and these the learned of the Wise-akers wedg’d here and there with quaint Artificers, and noisy Operators, in all Faculties; some bending beneath the Load of Years and indefatigable Labour, some as thin-jaw’d and heavyey’d, with abstemious Living and nocturnal Study as if, like Pharaoh’s Lean Kine, they were designed by Heaven to warn the World of a Famine; others looking as wild, and disporting themselves as frenzically, as if the Disappointment of their Projects had made them subject to a Lunacy. When they were thus met, happy was the Man that could find out a new Star in the Firmament; discover a wry Step in the Sun’s Progress; assign new Reasons for the Spots of the Moon, or add one Stick to the Bundle of Faggots which have been so long burthensome to the back of her old Companion; or, indeed, impart any crooked Secret to the learned Society, that might puzzle their Brains, and disturb their Rest for a Month afterwards, in consulting upon their Pillows how to straiten the Project, that it might appear upright to the Eye of Reason, and the knotty Difficulty to be rectify’d, as to bring Honour to themselves, and Advantage to the Public.