Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson
One afternoon Jack came by the Maiden to pick Eliza up at the end of her hard day’s drinking coffee and spending the Shaftoes’ inheritance. The place was busy, and Jack reckoned he could slip in the door without attracting any bailiffs. It was a rich airy high-ceilinged place, not at all tavernlike, hot and close, with clever people yammering in half a dozen languages. In a corner table by a window, where northern light off the Ij could set her face aglow, Eliza sat, flanked by two other women, and holding court (or so it seemed) for a parade of Italians, Spaniards, and other swarthy rapier-carrying men in big wigs and bright clothes. Occasionally she’d reach for a big round coffee-pot, and at those moments she’d look just like the Maid of Amsterdam on the stern of a ship—or for that matter, as painted on the ceiling of this very room: loosely draped in yards of golden satin, one hand on a globe, one nipple poking out, Mercury always behind and to the right, and below her, the ever-present Blokes with Turbans, and feather-bedecked Negroes, presenting tributes in the form of ropes of pearls and giant silver platters.
She was flirting with those Genoese and Florentine merchants’ sons, and Jack could cope with that, to a point. But they were rich. And this was all she did, every day. He lost the power of sight for a few minutes. But in time his rage cleared away, like the clouds of ash washing away from the amalgam, clearing steadily to reveal a pretty gleam of silver under clear running water. Eliza was staring at him—seeing everything. She glanced at something next to him, telling him to look at it, and then she locked her blue eyes on someone across the table and laughed at a witticism.
Jack followed her look and discovered a kind of shrine against the wall. It was a glass-fronted display case, but all gold-leafed and decked out with trumpet-tooting seraphs, as if its niches had been carved to house pieces of the True Cross and fingernail-parings of Archangels. But in fact the niches contained little heaps of dull everyday things like ingots of lead, scraps of wool, mounds of saltpeter and sugar and coffee-beans and pepper-corns, rods and slabs of iron, copper and tin, and twists of silk and cotton cloth. And, in a tiny crystal flask, like a perfume bottle, there was a sample of quicksilver.
“So, I’m meant to believe that you’re transacting business in there?” he asked, once she had extricated herself, and they were out on the Damplatz together.
“You believed that I was doing what, then?”
“It’s just that I saw no goods or money changing hands.”
“They call it Windhandel.”
“The wind business? An apt name for it.”
“Do you have any idea, Jack, how much quicksilver is stored up in these warehouses all around us?”
“No.”
“I do.”
She stopped at a place where they could peer into a portal of the Stock Exchange. “Just as a whole workshop can be powered by a mill-wheel, driven by a trickle of water in a race, or by a breath of air on the blades of a windmill, so the movement of goods through yonder Weigh-House is driven by a trickle of paper passing from hand to hand in there” (pointing to the Stock Exchange) “and the warm wind that you feel on your face when you step into the Maiden.”
Movement caught Jack’s eye. He imagined for a moment that it was a watch-tower being knocked down by a sudden burst of French artillery. But when he looked, he saw he’d been fooled for the hundredth time. It was a windmill spinning. Then more movement out on the Ij: a tidal swell coming through and jostling the ships. A dredger full of hapless Hollandgänger moved up a canal, clawing up muck—muck that according to the Doctor would swallow and freeze things that had once been quick, and turn them to stone. No wonder they were so fastidious about dredging. Such an idea must be anathema to the Dutch, who worshipped motion above all. For whom the physical element of Earth was too resistant and inert, an annoyance to traders, an impediment to the fluid exchange of goods. In a place where all things were suffused with quicksilver, it was necessary to blur the transition from earth to water, making out of the whole Republic a gradual shading from one to the other as they neared the banks of the Ij, not entirely complete until they got past the sandbanks and reached the ocean at Texel.
“I must go to Paris.”
“Why?”
“Partly to sell Turk and those ostrich plumes.”
“Clever,” she said. “Paris is retail, Amsterdam wholesale—you’ll fetch twice the price there.”
“But really it is that I am accustomed to being the one fluid thing in a universe dumb and inert. I want to stand on the stone banks of the Seine, where here is solid and there is running water and the frontier between ’em is sharp as a knife.”
“As you wish,” Eliza said, “but I belong in Amsterdam.”
“I know it,” Jack said, “I keep seeing your picture.”
The Dutch Republic
1684
JACK RODE WEST OUT OF Amsterdam, through Haarlem, and then found himself suddenly alone, and perilously close to being under water: autumn rains had submerged the pastures, leaving the walled towns as islands. Soon he reached the line of dunes that fenced the country off from the North Sea. Not even Dutchmen could find a use for this much sand. Turk was unsettled by the change in the ground, but then he seemed to remember how to go on it—perhaps his Turkish master had used to take him for gallops in some Mohametan desert. With a plodding and swimming kind of gait he took Jack up to the crest of a dune. Below them, a mile away, Alp-sized green waves were hurling themselves up onto the sand with monstrous roaring and hissing. Jack sat there and stared until Turk grew annoyed. To the horse it was cold and foreign, to Jack it was just this side of cozy. He was trying to count the years since he’d seen open salt water.
There had been the voyage to Jamaica—but after that, his life (he began to think) had been impossibly confusing. Either that, or else the French Pox had amazed and riddled his memories. He had to count on his fingers. Nay, he had to dismount and use his crutch-tip to draw family trees and maps on the sand.
His return from Jamaica was a good place to start: 1678. He had bedded the fair Mary Dolores, six feet of Irish vigor, and then fled to Dunkirk to avoid a warrant, and then there’d been the penis incident. While he’d been recovering from that, Bob had showed up with news: Mary Dolores was pregnant. Also, that John Churchill fellow, improbably, was married, and had been made a Colonel—no, wait, a Brigadier—and had any number of regiments under him now. He was avidly recruiting, and still remembered the Shaftoes—did Jack want a steady job, perhaps, so that he could wed Mary Dolores and raise his offspring?
“Just the sort of tidy plan that Bob would come up with,” Jack shouted at the waves, still annoyed, six or seven years later. Turk was becoming edgy. Jack decided to talk to him, as long as he was speaking out loud anyway. Did horses understand what was going on, when you spoke to people who weren’t there? “So far, simple enough—but here it becomes very deep,” he began. “John Churchill was in the Hague—then he was in Brussels—why? Even a horse can see the contradiction in that—but I forget you’re an Ottoman horse. All right, then: all of this land—” (stomping the dune for emphasis) “was part of Spain—you heard me—Spain! Then these fucking Dutchmen turned Calvinist and revolted, and drove the Spanish away, down south of the Maas and a bunch of other rivers with hard-to-remember names—past Zeeland, anyway—we’ll be seeing more than we want to of those rivers soon. Leaving only a wedge of Papist Spain trapped between the Dutch Republic on its north, and France on its south. This Spain-wedge contains Brussels and Antwerp and a large number of battlefields, basically—it is like the jousting-ground where Europe goes to have its wars. Sometimes the Dutch and the English ally against France, and they have battles in the Spanish Netherlands. Sometimes England and France ally against the Dutch, and they have battles in the Spanish Netherlands. Anyway—at this particular time, I believe, it was England and the Dutch against France, for the reason that all England was up in arms against Popery. Importation of French goods had been outlawed—that’s why I was in Dunkirk—obvious opportunities
“So far it makes sense, then. But why—an intelligent horse might ask—why was John Churchill also in Brussels—part of Spain’s, and therefore the Pope’s, dominions? Why, it’s because—thanks to the maneuverings of his daddy Winston—ever since John had been just a lad, he’d been in the household of James, King Chuck’s brother, the Duke of York. And York—then, and now, first in line for the throne—was, and is today—you’ll like this—a fanatical Papist! Now do you understand why London was, and probably still is, nervous? The King decided it’d be better if his brother took a long vacation out of the country, and naturally James chose the Catholic city that was closest at hand: Brussels! And John Churchill, being in his household, was obliged to follow him, at least part of the time.
“Anyway—Bob took the King’s shilling and I did not. From Dunkirk, he and I rode together through the no-man’s-land—which, not to repeat myself, you’ll soon be seeing plenty of—by Ypres, Oudenaarde, Brussels, and as far as Waterloo, where we parted ways. I went down to Paris, he went back to Brussels, and probably spent a lot of his time, thereafter, scurrying to and fro carrying messages, as when he was a boy.”
During this recital, Jack had been unwinding his crutch: a curved stick with a padded crossbar at the top to go under his armpit, all lashed together with a mile of crude twine. When he’d undone the windings, he was left with two pieces of wood and some rags he’d used for padding. But protruding from the top of the long crutch-pole was the pommel of a Janissary-sword.
He had searched half of the Harz Mountains to find a stick whose curve matched that of the sword. Having found it, he’d split it in half, and hollowed out a space in the middle big enough to contain the scabbard. The pommel and guard still stuck out the top, but when he added the crutch’s cross-bar, then swaddled it in rags, and bound all in twine, he had a crutch that seemed innocuous enough—and if a border-guard threatened to unmake it, Jack could always cup a hand under his armpit and complain about the painful black swellings that had recently flared up there.
The crutch was a convenience in settled places where only Gentlemen had the right to bear arms—but between here and northern France, he hoped to see as little of that sort of country as possible. He belted on the sword and strapped the crutch-pole alongside Turk’s saddle, and then Jack the crippled vagrant was suddenly Jack the armed rider, galloping down the sea-coast on the back of a Turkish war-horse.
DOWN PAST THE HAGUE, around the Hook of Holland, Jack paid a visit on certain boat-owning fellows of his acquaintance, and learned, from them, that the French had banned the inexpensive cloth coming out of Calicoe in India. Naturally the Dutch were now smuggling it down the coast, and there was a steady traffic of the small cargo-vessels called flutes. Jack’s friends ferried him, Turk, and a ton of Calicoe across Zeeland, which was the name the Dutch gave to the huge sandy morass where such rivers as the Maas and the Schelde emptied into the North Sea. But an autumn storm was blowing up in the Channel, and they had to take shelter in a little privateers’ cove in Flanders. From there, Jack took advantage of a fortuitous low tide to make a night gallop down the coast to Dunkirk, and the hospitality of the dear old Bomb & Grapnel.
But from Mr. Foot, the proprietor of the Bomb, Jack got an earful about how, ever since King Looie had bought Dunkirk from King Chuck, things weren’t the same: the French had enlarged the harbor so that it could harbor the big warships of that arch-privateer Jean Bart, and these changes had driven away the small Channel pirates and smugglers who had once made Dunkirk such a prosperous and merry town.
Disgusted and dismayed, Jack left immediately, striking inland into Artois, where he could still go armed. It was hard up against the frontier of the Spanish Netherlands, and the soldiers who’d been sent up to prosecute King Looie’s wars there had not been slow to grasp that there was more to be made by robbing travelers on the London-Paris route—who were still so grateful to’ve survived the Channel crossing that they practically gave it away—than from dutiful soldiering.
Jack made himself look like one of these highwaymen—no great feat, since he had been one for a year or two—and that brought him swift and more or less safe passage down into Picardy: the home of a famous Regiment, which, since they were not there when Jack arrived, he reckoned that they must be up laying waste to the Spanish Netherlands. A few changes in attire (his old floppy musketeer-hat, e.g.) gave him the look of a deserter, or scout, from same.
In one of those Picard villages the church-bell was clanging without letup. Sensing some kind of disorder, Jack rode toward it, across fields crowded with peasants bringing in the harvest. They rotated their crops so that one-third of the fields had wheat, one-third oats, and the remaining third were fallow, and Jack tended to ride across the ones that were fallow. These wretches looked at him with fear that was abject even by the standard of French peasants. Most of them scanned the northern sky, perhaps looking for clouds of smoke or dust, and some dropped to the ground and put their ears against it, listening for hoofbeats, and Jack concluded that it wasn’t him personally they feared, so much as what might be behind him.
He assessed this village as one where he could get away with being armed, and rode into it, because he needed to buy oats for Turk. The only person he saw was a barefoot boy in coarse dirty linen, visible from the waist down through a low doorway in the base of the bell-tower, his raggedy ass thrusting out rudely with each jerk on the bell-rope.
But then Jack encountered a rider in good but plain clothing who had apparently come up from the direction of Paris. They drew up, a safe distance apart, in the town’s deserted market-square, circled round each other once or twice, and then began shouting at each other over the din of the bell, and settled on a mixture of English and French.
Jack: “Why are they ringing the bell?”
“These Catholics think it wards off thunderstorms,” said the Frenchman. “Why are they so—?” he then asked and, not trusting his English or Jack’s French, pantomimed a furtive cringing peasant.
“They’re afraid that I’m a forerunner of the Picardy Regiment, coming home from the wars,” Jack guessed. He intended this as a wry jest about the tendency of regiments to “live off the land,” as the euphemism went. But it was quite significant to this Huguenot.
“Is it true? Is the regiment coming?”
“How much would it be worth to you?” Jack asked.
Everything about this Huguenot reminded him of the Independent traders of England, who’d ride out to remote districts in harvest-time to buy up goods at better than market price. And both Jack and this trader—who introduced himself as Monsieur Arlanc—understood that the price would drop still further if the sellers believed, rightly or wrongly, that the Picardy Regiment was coming to eat it out from under them.
So there was, inadvertently, a sort of business proposition on the table. Vagabond and Huguenot rode around each other a few more times. All around them, the peasants labored at the harvest. But they were keeping an eye on the two strangers, and soon a village elder came hustling in from the fields on a donkey.
But in the end, Monsieur Arlanc could not bring himself to do it. “We are already hated enough,” he said, apparently meaning the Huguenots, “without spreading false panics. These peasants have enough to be afraid of already—that is why my sons and I ride out to such dangerous marches.”
“Fine. But incidentally, I don’t intend to rob you,” Jack said irritably, “you needn’t make up phant’sies about your supposed pack of heavily armed sons, just over the rise.”
“Tales don’t offer sufficient protection in these times, I’m afraid,” said Monsieur Arlanc, tucking his cloak back to divulge no fewer than four separate firearms: two conventional pistols, and two more c
“Well played, Monsieur—Protestant practicality and French savoir-faire united.”
“I say, are you sure you’ll be all right riding to the Inn at Amiens armed with nothing but a sword? The highways—”
“I do not stay at Inns of the French sort, nor do I generally ride on highways,” Jack said. “But if that is your habit, and if you are going that way…”
So they rode to Amiens together, after purchasing oats from the head man of the village. Jack bought enough to fill Turk’s belly, and Monsieur Arlanc bought the rest of the year’s harvest (he would send wagons later to take delivery). Jack told no lies—just lounged on the rim of the town well, looking like a Volunteer, as the local deserters and highwaymen were called. After that it was a good stiff ride to Amiens, where there was a large establishment throttling a crossroads: livery stables nearly buried in hay, and paddocks crowded with oxen; queues of empty wagons lining the road (some soon to be hired by M. Arlanc); several smithys, some geared for shoeing horses, others for putting rims on wagon-wheels. As well, harness-shops, and various carpenters specializing in wheels, ox-yokes, cart-frames, and barrel-making. Trains of harvest-laden carts filling the roadway, waiting to be inspected, and to pay tolls. Somewhere, a lodging for traders and travelers that accounted for its being called an Inn. From a distance, it was a great dark smoking knot, clearly recognizable as not Jack’s sort of place—he unbelted his sword, slid it back into its concealment in the crutch-pole, and began winding it up again.