Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson
Mercifully, the urge to sprint over and take a swing at the royal gob had passed. A semi-comatose man, slumped on a bench against the wall, was eyeing Daniel in a way that was not entirely propitious. Daniel reflected that if it was considered meet and proper for a well-heeled stranger to be beaten up and robbed on the mere suspicion that he was a Jesuit, things might not go all that well for Daniel Waterhouse the Puritan.
He drained about half the pint and turned round in the middle of the tavern so that his cloak fell open, revealing the sword. The weapon’s existence was noted, with professional interest, by the tavernkeeper, who didn’t look directly at it; he was one of those blokes who used peripheral vision for everything. Give him a spyglass, he’d raise it to his ear, and see as much as Galileo. His nose had been broken at least twice and he’d endured a blowout fracture of the left eye-socket, which made it seem as if his face were a clay effigy squirting out between the fingers of a clenching fist. Daniel said to him, “Let your friends understand that if serious harm comes to that gentleman, there lives a witness who’ll tell a tale to make a judge’s wig uncurl.”
And then Daniel stepped out onto a deal boardwalk that might’ve answered to the name of verandah or pier, depending on whence you looked at it. In theory boats of shallow draught might be poled up to it and made fast, in practice they’d been drawn up on the muck about a horseshoe-throw away from the crusty ankles of its pilings. The tracks of the boatmen were swollen wounds in the mudflat, and spatterings across the planks. Half a mile out, diverse ships were riding at anchor in the wide spot where the Medway exhausted into the Thames. It was low tide! James, the sea-hero, the Admiral who’d fought the Dutch, and occasionally beaten ’em, who’d made Isaac Newton’s ears ring with the distant roar of his cannons, had galloped out from London at exactly the wrong moment. Like King Canute, he would have to wait for the tide. It was simply too awful. Exhausted from the ride, left with no choice but to kill a few hours, the King must’ve wandered into this tavern—and why not? Every place he’d ever entered into, people had served him on bended knee. But James, who did not drink and did not curse, who stuttered, who couldn’t speak the English of fishermen, might as well have been in a Hindoo temple. He’d switched to a dark wig from the usual blond one, and it had been knocked from his head early in the scuffle, revealing a half-bald head, thin yellow-white hair in a Caesar cut, shellacked to his pocked pate by sweat and grease. Wigs enabled one to avert one’s attention from the fact of the wearer’s age. Daniel had seen an odd-looking chap, fifty-five years old, lost.
Daniel was beginning to feel he had more in common with this syphilitic Papist despot than with the people of Sheerness. He did not like where his feelings were taking him. So he had his feet take him elsewhere—to what passed for the high street of Sheerness, to an inn, where an uncommon number of well-dressed gentlemen were milling about, wringing their hands and kicking at the chickens. These men, Daniel included, had come out from London post-haste, only a few hours behind their fleeing King, on the presumption that if the Sovereign had left London, then they must all be missing something important by tarrying in the city. Wrong!
HE WENT IN AND TOLD the tale to Ailesbury, the Gentleman of the Bedchamber, then turned to leave; but practically ended up with spur-marks in his back, as every courtier wanted to be first on the spot. In the stable-yard a horse was brought out for Daniel. Climbing into the saddle, and ascending to the same plane as all the other equestrians, he noted diverse faces turned his way, none of them looking very patient. So without sharing in any of the sense of romantic drama that animated all of the others, he rode out into the street, and led them on a merry gallop back down to the river. To uninformed bystanders, it must have looked like a Cavalier hunting-party pursuing a Roundhead, which Daniel hoped was no prefiguring of events to follow.
When they reached the tavern, an astounding number of Persons of Quality packed themselves inside, and commenced making stentorian announcements. One might’ve expected drunks and ne’er-do-wells to flood out through windows and trap-doors, like mice fleeing when the lantern is lit, but not a soul left the building, even after it was made known that they were all in the Presence. There seemed, in other words, to be a general failure, among the waterfront lowlives of Sheerness, to really take the notion of monarchy seriously.
Daniel lingered outside for a minute or two. The sun was setting behind a gapped cloud-front and shoving fat rays of gaudy light across the estuary of the Medway: a big brackish sump a few miles across, with a coastline as involuted as a brain, congested with merchant and naval traffic. Most of the latter huddled sheepishly down at the far end, behind the chain that was stretched across the river, below the sheltering guns of Upnor Castle. James had for some reason expected William of Orange’s fleet to attack there, in the worst possible place. Instead the Protestant Wind had driven the Dutchman all the way to Tor Bay, hundreds of miles to the west—almost Cornwall. Since then the Prince had been marching steadily eastwards. English regiments marched forth to stand in his path, only to defect and about-face. If William was not in London yet, he would be soon.
The waterfront people were already reverting to a highly exaggerated Englishness: womenfolk were scurrying toward the tavern, hitching up their skirts to keep ’em out of the muck, so that they glissaded across the tidelands like bales on rails. They were bringing victuals to the King! They hated him and wanted him gone. But that was no reason to be inhospitable. Daniel had reasons to tarry—he felt he should go in and say good-bye to the King. And, to be pragmatic, he was fairly certain he could be charged with horse-thievery if he turned this mount towards London.
On the other hand, he had another hour of twilight, and the low tide could cut a few hours off the time it would take him to work his way round the estuary, cross the river, and find the high road to London. He had the strongest feeling that important things were happening there; and as for the King, and his improvised Court here at Sheerness: if the local pub scum couldn’t bring themselves to take him seriously, why should the Secretary of the Royal Society? Daniel aimed his horse’s backside at the King of England and then spurred the animal forward into the light.
Since the time of the Babylonian astronomers, solar eclipses had from time to time caused ominous shadows to fall upon the land. But England in winter sometimes afforded its long-suffering populace a contrary phenomenon, which was that after weeks of dim colorless skies, suddenly the sun would scythe in under the clouds after it had seemed to set, and wash the landscape with pink, orange, and green illumination, clear and pure as gems. Empiricist though he was, Daniel felt free to ascribe meaning to this when it went his way. Ahead all was clear light, as if he were riding into stained glass. Behind (and he only bothered to look back once) the sky was a bruise-colored void, the land a long scrape of mud. The tavern rose up from the middle of the waste on a sheave of pilings that leaned into each other like a crowd of drunks. Its plank walls pawed a bit of light out of the sky, its one window glowed like a carbuncle. It was the sort of grotesque sky-scape that Dutchmen would come over to paint. But come to think of it, a Dutchman had come over and painted it.
MOST TRAVELERS WOULD TAKE LITTLE note of Castle Upnor. It was but a stone fort, built by Elizabeth a hundred years ago, but looking much older—its vertical stone walls obsolete already. But since the Restoration it had been the nominal seat of Louis Anglesey, the Earl of Upnor, and owner of the fair Abigail Frome (or at least Daniel presumed she was fair). As such it gave Daniel the shudders; he felt like a little boy riding past a haunted house. He’d have gone wide of it if he could, but the ferry next to it was by far the most expeditious way of crossing the Medway, and this was no time to let superstition take him out of his way. The alternative would’ve been to ride a few miles up the east bank to the huge naval shipyard of Chatham, where there were several ways of getting across. But passing through a naval base did not seem the most efficient way of getting around, during a foreign invasion.
He pretended
When the Dutch had sailed up here in ’67 and, over the course of a leisurely three-day rampage, stolen some of Charles II’s warships and burned diverse others, Castle Upnor had acquitted itself reasonably well, declining to surrender and taking pot-shots at any Dutchmen who’d come anywhere near close enough. The Earl of Upnor, whose travails with gambling debts and Popish Plot hysteria still lay in the future, had picked up some reflected luster. But to have one’s chief Navy Yard infested with Dutchmen was embarrassing even to a foreign-policy slut like Charles II. So modern defenses with proper earthworks had since been put up in the neighborhood, and Upnor had been demoted to the status of a giant powder-magazine, sort of an outlying gunpowder depot for the Tower of London—the unspoken message being that no one cared if it blew up. Powder-barges came hither frequently from the Tower and moored in the place claimed, tonight, by that two-master. Daniel knew only a little of ships, but even a farmer could see that this one had several cabins astern, well-appointed with windows, and lights burning behind their drawn curtains and closed shutters. Louis Anglesey hardly ever came to this place, as why should any Earl in his right mind go to a dank stone pit to sit upon powder-kegs? And yet in times of trouble there were worse places to bolt. Those stone walls might not stop Dutch cannonballs, but they would keep Protestant mobs at bay for weeks, and the river was only a few steps away; once he stepped off the quay and boarded his boat, Upnor was as good as in France.
There were a few watchmen posted about the place, hugging their pikes to their chests so they could keep their hands stuffed into their armpits, shooting the breeze, mostly gazing outwards towards the Roman road, occasionally turning round to enjoy some snatch of domestic comedy playing itself out within the walls. Potato peels and chicken feathers were bobbing in the river’s backwaters, and he caught whiffs of yeast on the breeze. There was, in other words, a functioning household there. Daniel decided that Upnor was not here at the moment, but that he was expected. Perhaps not tonight, but soon.
He left Castle Upnor behind him and went back to riding around England by himself in the dark, which seemed to be how he had spent half of his life. Now that he’d crossed over the Medway there were no real barriers between him and London, which was something like twenty-five miles away. Even if there hadn’t been a Roman road to follow, he probably would have been able to find the route by riding from one fire to the next. The only hazard was that some mob might take him for an Irishman. That Daniel bore no resemblance to an Irishman was of no account—rumors had spread that James had shipped in a whole legion of Celtic avengers. No doubt many an Englishman would agree, tonight, that strange riders should be burnt first and identified on the basis of their dental peculiarities after the ashes had cooled.
So it was boredom and terror, boredom and terror, all the way. The boring bits gave Daniel some leisure to ponder the quite peculiar family curse he seemed to be living under, namely, this marked tendency to be present at the demise of English Kings. He’d literally seen Charles I’s head roll, and he’d watched Charles II being done in by his physicians, and now this. If the next Sovereign knew what was good for him, he’d make sure Daniel was assigned, by the Royal Society, to spend the rest of his life taking daily measurements of the baroscopic pressure in Barbados.
The last bit of his route ran within view of the river, which was a pleasant sight, a snaking constellation of ships’ lanterns. By contrast the flat countryside was studded with pylons of streaming fire that warmed Daniel’s face from half a mile away, like the first uncontrollable flush of shame. Mostly these were simply bonfires, which were the only way Englishmen had of showing emotion. But in one town that he rode through, the Catholic church was being not merely burnt but pulled down, its very bricks prised apart by men with sharpened bars—men made orange by the fire-light, not people he recognized, any more, as countrymen.
The river attracted him. At first he told himself that it did so because it was cool and serene. When he got finally to Greenwich he turned aside from the road and rode onto the lumpy pasture of the Park. He couldn’t see a damned thing, which was funny because the place was supposed to be an Observatory. But he kept to a policy of insisting that his horse go the way it didn’t want to—which meant uphill. This had more than a little in common with trying to get a large and basically prosperous country to revolt.
A saltbox of a building perched on the edge of a precipice in the midst of this little range of hills out in the middle of nowhere: a house, queer-looking and haunted. Haunted by philosophers. Its pedestal—a brick of living-space—was surrounded by trees in a way that obscured the view out its windows. Any other tenant would have chopped them down. But Flamsteed had let them grow; they made no difference to him, as he slept all day, and his nights were devoted to looking not out but up.
Daniel reached a place where he could see the light of London shining through gaps among trees. The lambent sky was dissected by the spidery black X of the sixty-foot refracting telescope, supported by a mast scavenged from a tall ship. As he neared the crest he diverted to the right, instinctively avoiding Flamsteed, who exerted a mysterious repulsive force all his own. He was likely to be awake, but unable to make observations because of the light in the sky, therefore more irritable than usual, perhaps scared. His apartment’s windows had solid wooden shutters that he had clapped shut for safety. He was holed up in one of the tiny rooms, probably unable to hear anything save the ticking of diverse clocks. Upstairs, in the octagonal saltbox, were two Hooke-designed, Tompion-built clocks with thirteen-foot pendulums that ticked, or rather clunked, every two seconds, slower than the human heartbeat, a hypnotic rhythm that could be felt everywhere in the building.
Daniel led his horse on a slow traverse round the top of the hill. Below, along the riverbank, the brick ruins of Placentia, the Tudor palace, swung gradually into view. Then the new stone buildings that Charles II had begun to put up there. Then the Thames: first the Greenwich bend, then a view straight upriver all the way into the east end. Then all of London was suddenly unrolled before him. Its light shone from the wizened surface of the river, interrupted only by the silhouettes of the anchored ships. If he had not long ago seen the Fire of London with his own eyes, he might have supposed that the whole city was ablaze.
He had entered into the upper reaches of a little wood of oak and apple trees that gripped the steepest part of the hill. Flamsteed’s apartments were only a few yards above and behind him along the Prime Meridian. The fragrance of fermenting apples was heady, for Flamsteed had not bothered to collect them as they dropped from the trees during the autumn. Daniel did not bother to tie his horse, but let it forage there, getting fed and drunk on the apples. Daniel moved to a place where he could see London between trees, dropped his breeches, squatted down on his haunches, and began experimenting with various pelvic settings in hopes of allowing some urine to part with his body. He could feel the boulder in his bladder, shifting from side to side like a cannonball in a poke.
London had never been so bright since it had burned to the ground twenty-two years ago. And it had never sounded thus in all its ages. As Daniel’s ears adjusted themselves to this quiet hill-top he could hear a clamor rising up from the city, not of guns or of cart-wheels but of human voices. Sometimes they were just babbling, each to his own, but many times they came together in dim choruses that swelled, clashed, merged, and collapsed, like waves of a tide probing and seeking its way through the mazy back-waters of an estuary. They were singing a song, Lilliburlero, that had become universal in the last few weeks. It was a sort of nonsense-song but its meaning was unders
If the scene in the tavern hadn’t made it clear enough, the very appearance of the city tonight told him that the thing had happened—the thing that Daniel had been calling the Revolution. The Revolution was done, it had been Glorious, and what made it glorious was that it had been an anticlimax. There’d been no Civil War this time, no massacres, no trees bent under the weight of hanged men, no slave-ships. Was Daniel flattering himself to suppose that this could be put down to his good work?
All his upbringing had taught him to expect a single dramatic moment of apocalypse. Instead this had been slow evolution spread all round and working silently, like manure on a field. If anything important had happened, it had done so in places where Daniel wasn’t. Buried in it somewhere was an inflection point that later they’d point to as the Moment It All Happened.
He was not such an old tired Puritan that he didn’t get joy out of it. But its very anticlimactitude, if that was a word, its diffuseness, was a sort of omen to him. It was like being an astronomer, up in that tower behind him, at the moment that the letter arrived from the Continent in which Kepler mentioned that the earth was not, in fact, at the center of the universe. Like that astronomer, Daniel had much knowledge, and only some of it was wrong—but all of it had to be gone over now, and re-understood. This realization settled him down a bit. As when a queer wind-gust comes down chimney and fills a room of merry-makers with smoke, and covers the pudding with a black taste. He was not quite ready for life in this England.
Now he understood why he’d felt so attracted to the river earlier: not because it was serene, but because it had the power to take him somewhere else.
He left the horse there, with an explanatory note for Flamsteed, who’d be apoplectic. He walked down to the Thames and woke up a waterman he knew there, a Mr. Bhnh, the patriarch of a tiny Qwghlmian settlement lodged in the south bank. Mr. Bhnh had grown so accustomed to the nocturnal crossings of Natural Philosophers that someone had nominated him, in jest, as a Fellow of the Royal Society. He agreed to convey Daniel across to the Isle of Dogs on the north bank.