Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson
“I’m mortified to learn that Monmouth has been indiscreet,” Eliza said gaily.
“All of Amsterdam, and approximately half of London and Paris, have learned of your charms. But, although the Duke’s descriptions were unspeakably vulgar—when they were not completely incoherent—cultivated gentlemen can look beyond ribaldry, and infer that you possess qualities, mademoiselle, beyond the merely gynæcological.”
“When you say ‘cultivated’ you mean ‘French’?”
“I know you are teasing me, mademoiselle. You expect me to say ‘Why yes, all French gentlemen are cultivated.’ But it is not so.”
“Monsieur d’Avaux, I’m shocked to hear you say such a thing.”
They were almost at the door to Sluys’s box. D’Avaux drew back. “Typically only the worst sort of French nobility would be in the box that you and I are about to enter, associating with the likes of Sluys—but tonight is an exception.”
“LOUIS LE GRAND—as he’s now dubbed himself—built himself a new château outside of Paris, at a place called Versailles,” Aaron de la Vega had told her, during one of their meetings in Amsterdam’s narrow and crowded Jewish quarter—which, by coincidence, happened to be built up against the Opera House. “He has moved his entire court to the new place.”
“I’d heard as much, but I didn’t believe it,” Gomer Bolstrood had said, looking more at home among Jews than he ever had among Englishmen. “To move so many people out of Paris—it seems insane.”
“On the contrary—it is a master-stroke,” de la Vega had said. “You know the Greek myth of Antaeus? For the French nobility, Paris is like the Mother Earth—as long as they are ensconced there, they have power, information, money. But Louis, by forcing them to move to Versailles, is like Hercules, who mastered Antaeus by raising him off the ground and slowly strangling him into submission.”
“A pretty similitude,” Eliza had said, “but what does it have to do with our putting a short squeeze on Mr. Sluys?”
De la Vega had permitted himself a smile, and looked over at Bolstrood. But Gomer had not been in a grinning mood. “Sluys is one of those rich Dutchmen who craves the approval of Frenchmen. He has been cultivating them since before the 1672 war—mostly without success, for they find him stupid and vulgar. But now it’s different. The French nobles used to be able to live off their land, but now Louis forces them to keep a household in Versailles, as well as one in Paris, and to go about in coaches, finely dressed and wigged—”
“The wretches are desperate for lucre,” Gomer Bolstrood had said.
AT THE OPERA, before the door to Sluys’s box, Eliza said, “You mean, monsieur, the sort of French nobleman who’s not content with the old ways, and likes to play the markets in Amsterdam, so he can afford a coach and a mistress?”
“You will spoil me, mademoiselle,” d’Avaux said, “for how can I return to the common sort of female—stupid and ignorant—after I have conversed with you? Yes, normally Sluys’s box would be stuffed with that sort of French nobleman. But tonight he is entertaining a young man who came by his endowment properly.”
“Meaning—?”
“Inherited it—or is going to—from his father, the Duc d’Arcachon.”
“Would it be vulgar for me to ask how the Duc d’Arcachon got it?”
“Colbert built our Navy from twenty vessels to three hundred. The Duc d’Arcachon is Admiral of that Navy—and was responsible for much of the building.”
The floor around Mr. Sluys’s chair was strewn with wadded scraps. Eliza would have loved to smooth some out and read them, but his hard jollity, and the way he was pouring champagne, told her that the evening’s trading was going well for him, or so he imagined. “Jews don’t go to the Opera—it is against their religion! What a show de la Vega has missed tonight!”
“ ‘Thou shalt not attend the Opera…’ Is that in Exodus, or Deuteronomy?” Eliza inquired.
D’Avaux—who seemed uncharacteristically nervous, all of a sudden—took Eliza’s remark as a witticism, and produced a smile as thin and dry as parchment. Mr. Sluys took it as stupidity, and got sexually aroused. “De la Vega is still selling V.O.C. stock short! He’ll be doing it all night long—until he hears the news tomorrow morning, and gets word to his brokers to stop!” Sluys seemed almost outraged to be making money so easily.
Now Mr. Sluys looked as if he would’ve been content to drink champagne and gaze ’pon Eliza’s navel until any number of fat ladies sang (which actually would not have been long in coming), but some sort of very rude commotion, originating from this very box, forced him to glance aside. Eliza turned to see that young French nobleman—the son of the Duc d’Arcachon—at the railing of the box, where he was being hugged, passionately and perhaps even a little violently, by a bald man with a bloody nose.
Eliza’s dear Mum had always taught her that it wasn’t polite to stare, but she couldn’t help herself. Thus, she took in that the young Arcachon had actually flung one of his legs over the railing, as if he were trying to vault out into empty space. A large and rather good wig balanced precariously on the same rail. Eliza stepped forward and snatched it. It was unmistakably the periwig of Jean Antoine de Mesmes, comte d’Avaux, who must, therefore, be the bald fellow wrestling young Arcachon back from the brink of suicide.
D’Avaux—demonstrating a weird strength for such a refined man—finally slammed the other back into a chair, and had the good grace to so choreograph it that he ended up down on both knees. He pulled a lace hanky from a pocket and stuffed it up under his nose to stanch the blood, then spoke through it, heatedly but respectfully, to the young nobleman, who had covered his face with his hands. From time to time he darted a look at Eliza.
“Has the young Arcachon been selling V.O.C. stock short?” she inquired of Mr. Sluys.
“On the contrary, mademoiselle—”
“Oh, I forgot. He’s not the sort who dabbles in markets. But why else would a French duke’s son visit Amsterdam?”
Sluys got a look as if something were lodged in his throat.
“Never mind,” Eliza said airily, “I’m sure it is frightfully complicated—and I’m no good at such things.”
Sluys relaxed.
“I was only wondering why he tried to kill himself—assuming that’s what he was doing?”
“Étienne d’Arcachon is the politest man in France,” Sluys said ominously.
“Hmmph. You’d never know!”
“Sssh!” Sluys made frantic tiny motions with the flesh shovels of his hands.
“Mr. Sluys! Do you mean to imply that this spectacle has something to do with my presence in your box?”
Finally Sluys was on his feet. He was rather drunk and very heavy, and stood bent over with one hand gripping the box’s railing. “It would help if you’d confide in me that, if Étienne d’Arcachon slays himself in your presence, you’ll take offense.”
“Mr. Sluys, watching him commit suicide would ruin my evening!”
“Very well. Thank you, mademoiselle. I am in your debt enormously.”
“Mr. Sluys—you have no idea.”
IT LED TO HUSHED INTRIGUES in dim corners, palmed messages, raised eyebrows, and subtle gestures by candle-light, continuing all through the final acts of the opera—which was fortunate, because the opera was very dull.
Then, somehow, d’Avaux arranged to share a coach with Eliza and Monmouth. As they jounced, heaved, and clattered down various dark canal-edges and over diverse draw-bridges, he explained: “It was Sluys’s box. Therefore, he was the host. Therefore, it was his responsibility to make a formal introduction of Étienne d’Arcachon to you, mademoiselle. But he was too Dutch, drunk, and distracted to perform his proper rôle. I never cleared my throat so many times—but to no avail. Monsieur d’Arcachon was placed in an impossible situation!”
“So he tried to take his own life?”
“It was the only honourable course,” d’Avaux said simply.
“He is the politest man in France,” Monmou
“You saved the day,” d’Avaux said.
“Oh, that—’twas Mr. Sluys’s suggestion.”
D’Avaux looked vaguely nauseated at the mere mention of Sluys. “He has much to answer for. This soirée had better be charmante.”
AARON DE LA VEGA, who was assuredly not going to a party tonight, treated balance-sheets and V.O.C. shares as a scholar would old books and parchments—which is to say that Eliza found him sober and serious to a fault. But he could be merry about a few things, and one of them was Mr. Sluys’s house—or rather his widening collection of them. For as the first one had pulled its neighbors downwards, skewing them into parallelograms, popping window-panes out of their frames, and imprisoning doors in their jambs, Mr. Sluys had been forced to buy them out. He owned five houses in a row now, and could afford to, as long as he was managing the assets of half the population of Versailles. The one in the middle, where Mr. Sluys kept his secret hoard of lead and guilt, was at least a foot lower than it had been in 1672, and Aaron de la Vega liked to pun about it in his native language, saying it was “embarazada,” which meant “pregnant.”
As the Duke of Monmouth handed Eliza down from the carriage in front of that house, she thought it was apt. For—especially when Mr. Sluys was burning thousands of candles at once, as he was tonight, and the light was blazing from all those conspicuously skewed window-frames—hiding the secret was like a woman seven months pregnant trying to conceal her condition with clever tailoring.
Men and women in Parisian fashions were entering the pregnant house in what almost amounted to a continuous queue. Mr. Sluys—belatedly warming to his rôle as host—was stationed just inside the door, mopping sweat from his brow every few seconds, as if secretly terrified that the added weight of so many guests would finally drive his house straight down into the mud, like a stake struck with a maul.
But when Eliza got into the place, and suffered Mr. Sluys to kiss her hand, and made a turn round the floor, gaily ignoring the venomous stares of pudgy Dutch churchwives and overdressed Frenchwomen—she could see clear signs that Mr. Sluys had brought in mining-engineers, or something, to shore the house up. For the beams that crisscrossed the ceiling, though hidden under festoons and garlands of Barock plasterwork, were uncommonly huge, and the pillars that rose up to support the ends of those beams, though fluted and capitalled like those of a Roman temple, were the size of mainmasts. Still she thought she could detect a pregnant convexity about the ceiling…
“Don’t come out and say you want to buy lead—tell him only that you want to lighten his burdens—better yet, that you wish to transfer them, forcefully, onto the shoulders of the Turks. Or something along those lines,” she said, distractedly, into Monmouth’s ear as the first galliard was drawing to a close. He stalked away in a bit of a huff—but he was moving towards Sluys, anyway. Eliza regretted—briefly—that she’d insulted his intelligence, or at least his breeding. But she was too beset by sudden worries to consider his feelings. The house, for all its plaster and candles, reminded her of nothing so much as the Doctor’s mine, deep beneath the Harz: a hole in the earth, full of metal, prevented from collapsing in on itself solely by cleverness and continual shoring-up.
Weight could be transferred from lead to floor-boards, and thence into joists, and thence into beams, and from beams into pillars, then down into footings, and thence into log piles whose strength derived from the “stick” (as Dutchmen called it) between them and the mud they’d been hammered into. The final settling of accounts was there: if the “stick” sufficed, the structure above it was a building, and if it didn’t, it was a gradual avalanche…
“It is very curious, mademoiselle, that the chilly winds of the Hague were balmy breezes to you—yet in this warm room, you alone clutch your arms, and have goose-bumps.”
“Chilly thoughts, Monsieur d’Avaux.”
“And no wonder—your beau is about to leave for Hungary. You need to make some new friends—ones who live in warmer climes, perhaps?”
No. Madness. I belong here. Even Jack, who loves me, said so.
From a corner of the room, clouded with men and pipe-smoke, a trumpeting laugh from Mr. Sluys. Eliza glanced over that way and saw Monmouth plying him—probably reciting the very sentences she’d composed for him. Sluys was giddy with hope that he could get rid of his burden, frantic with anxiety that it might not happen. Meanwhile the market was in violent motion all over Amsterdam as Aaron de la Vega sold the V.O.C. short. It would all lead to an invasion of England. Everything had gone fluid tonight. This was no time to stand still.
A man danced by with an ostrich-plume in his hat, and she thought of Jack. Riding across Germany with him, she’d had nought but her plumes, and his sword, and their wits—yet she’d felt safer then than she did now. What would it take to feel safe again?
“Friends in warm places are lovely to have,” Eliza said distractedly, “but there is no one here who would have me, monsieur. You know very well that I am not of noble, or even gentle, birth—I’m too exotic for the Dutch, too common for the French.”
“The King’s mistress was born a slave,” d’Avaux said. “Now she is a Marquise. You see, nothing matters there save wit and beauty.”
“But wit fails and beauty fades, and I don’t wish to be a house on piles, sinking into the bog a little each day,” Eliza said. “Somewhere I must stick. I must have a foundation that does not always move.”
“Where on this earth can such a miracle be found?”
“Money,” Eliza said. “Here, I can make money.”
“And yet this money you speak of is but a chimæra—a figment of the collective imagination of a few thousand Jews and rabble bellowing at one another out on the Dam.”
“But in the end I may convert it—bit by bit—into gold.”
“Is that all you want? Remember, mademoiselle, that gold only has value because some people say it does. Let me tell you a bit of recent history: My King went to a place called Orange—you’ve heard of it?”
“A principality in the south of France, near Avignon—William’s fiefdom, as I understand it.”
“My King went to this Orange, this little family heirloom of Prince William, three years ago. Despite William’s pretensions of martial glory, my King was able to walk in without a battle. He went for a stroll atop the fortifications. Le Roi paused, there along a stone battlement, and plucked out a tiny fragment of loose masonry—no larger than your little finger, mademoiselle—and tossed it onto the ground. Then he walked away. Within a few days, all the walls and fortifications of Orange had been pulled down by le Roi’s regiments, and Orange had been absorbed into France, as easily as Mr. Sluys over there might swallow a bit of ripe fruit.”
“What is the point of the story, Monsieur, other than to explain why Amsterdam is crowded with Orangish refugees, and why William hates your King so much?”
“Tomorrow, le Roi might pick up a bit of Gouda cheese and throw it to his dogs.”
“Amsterdam would fall, you are saying, and my hard-earned gold would be loot for some drunken regiment.”
“Your gold—and you, mademoiselle.”
“I understand such matters far better than you imagine, monsieur. What I do not understand is why you pretend to be interested in what happens to me. In the Hague, you saw me as a pretty girl who could skate, and who would therefore catch Monmouth’s eye, and make Mary unhappy, and create strife in William’s house. And it all came to pass just as you intended. But what can I do for you now?”
“Live a beautiful and interesting life—and, from time to time, talk to me.”
Eliza laughed out loud, lustily, drawing glares from women who never laughed that way, or at all. “You want me to be your spy.”
“No, mademoiselle. I want you to be my friend.” D’Avaux said this simply and almost sadly, and it caught Eliza up short. In that moment, d’Avaux spun smartly on the balls of his feet and trapped Eliza’s arm. She had little choice but to walk with him—and soon
Paris
SPRING 1685
Thou hast met with something (as I perceive) already; for I see the dirt of the Slough of Despond is upon thee; but that Slough is the beginning of the sorrows that do attend those that go on in that way; hear me, I am older than thou!
—JOHN BUNYAN, The Pilgrim’s Progress
JACK WAS BURIED up to his neck in the steaming manure of the white, pink-eyed horses of the duc d’Arcachon, trying not to squirm as a contingent of perhaps half a dozen maggots cleaned away the dead skin and flesh surrounding the wound in his thigh. This itched, but did not hurt, beyond the normal wholesome throbbing. Jack had no idea how many days he’d been in here, but from listening to the bells of Paris, and watching small disks of sunlight prowl around the stable, he guessed it might be five in the afternoon. He heard boots approaching, and a padlock negotiating with its key. If that lock were the only thing holding him in this stable, he would’ve escaped long ago; but as it was, Jack was chained by the neck to a pillar of white stone, with a few yards of slack so that he could, for example, bury himself in manure.
The bolt shot and John Churchill stepped in on a tongue of light. In contrast to Jack, he was not covered in shit—far from it! He was wearing a jeweled turban of shimmering gold cloth, and robes, with lots of costume jewelry; old scuffed boots, and a large number of weapons, viz. scimitar, pistols, and several granadoes. His first words were: “Shut up, Jack, I’m going to a fancy-dress ball.”