Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson
So Wilkins’s work had been undone, at least for a while. Thirteen hundred Quakers, Barkers, and other Dissenters had been clapped into prison. Thus had Daniel spent a few months in a smelly place listening to angry men sing the same hymns he’d been taught as a boy by Drake.
It had been—in other words—a reign. Charles II’s reign. He was the King, he loved France and hated Puritans and was always long on mistresses and short on money, and nothing ever really changed.
NOW DR. WATERHOUSE WAS STANDING on the King’s Privy Stairs: a rude wooden platform clinging to a sheer vertical wall of limestone blocks that plunged straight into the Thames. All of the Palace buildings that fronted on the river were built this way, so as he gazed downriver, keeping watch for the boat that carried the chirurgeons, he found himself sighting down a long, continuous, if somewhat motley wall, interrupted by the occasional window or mock bastion. Three hundred feet downstream, a dock was thrust out into the river, and several intrepid watermen were walking to and fro on it in the lock-kneed gait of men trying to avoid freezing to death. Their boats were tied up alongside, awaiting passengers, but the hour was late, the weather cold, the King was dying, and no Londoners were availing themselves of the old right-of-way that ran through the Palace.
Beyond that dock, the river curved slowly around to the right, towards London Bridge. As the midday twilight had faded to an ashy afternoon, Daniel had seen a boat shove off from the Old Swan: a tavern at the northern end of the bridge that drew its clientele from those who did not like to gamble their lives by penetrating its turbulent arches. The boat had been struggling upstream ever since, and it was close enough now that, with the aid of the spyglass in Daniel’s pocket, he could see it carried only two passengers.
Daniel had been remembering the night in 1670 when he’d come to Whitehall in Pepys’s carriage, and wandered around the Privy Garden trying to act natural. At the time he’d thought it was cheeky and romantic, but now, remembering that he had ever been that fatuous made him grind his teeth, and thank God that the only witness had been Cromwell’s severed head.
Recently he had spent a lot of time at Whitehall. The King had decided to relax his grip just a bit, and had begun letting a few Barkers and Quakers out of prison, and had decided to nominate Daniel as a sort of unofficial secretary for all matters having to do with mad Puritans: Knott Bolstrood’s successor, that is, with all the same burdens, but much less power. Of Whitehall’s two thousand or so rooms, Daniel had probably set foot in a few hundred—enough to know that it was a dirty, mildewed jumble, like the map of the inside of a courtier’s mind, a slum in all but name. Whole sections had been taken over by the King’s pack of semi-feral spaniels, who’d become inbred even by Royal standards and thus hare-brained even by Spaniel standards. Whitehall Palace was, in the end, a House: the house of a Family. It was a very strange old family. As of one week ago Daniel had already been somewhat better acquainted with that Family than anyone in his right mind would want to be. And now, Daniel was waiting here on the Privy Stairs only as an excuse to get out of the King’s bedchamber—nay, his very bed—and to breathe some air that did not smell like the royal body fluids.
After a while the Marquis of Ravenscar came out and joined him. Roger Comstock—the least promising, and so far the most successful, of the men Daniel had gone to Cambridge with—had been in the north when the King had fallen ill on Monday. He was overseeing the construction of his manor house, which Daniel had designed for him. The news must’ve taken a day or two to reach him, and he must’ve set out immediately: it was now Thursday evening. Roger was still in his traveling-clothes, looking more drab than Daniel had ever seen him—almost Puritanical.
“My lord.”
“Dr. Waterhouse.”
From the expression on Roger’s face, Daniel knew that he had stopped by the King’s bedchamber first. In case there was any doubt of that, Roger tucked the long skirts of his coat behind him, clambered down onto both knees, bent forward, and threw up into the Thames.
“Will you please excuse me.”
“Just like College days.”
“I didn’t imagine that a man could contain so many fluids and whatnot in his entire body!”
Daniel nodded toward the approaching boat. “Soon you’ll witness fresh marvels.”
“I could see from looking at His Majesty that the physicians have been quite busy?”
“They have done their utmost to hasten the King’s departure from this world.”
“Daniel! Lower your voice, I say,” Roger huffed. “Some may not understand your sense of humor—if that is the correct word for it.”
“Funny you should bring up the subject of Humours. It all began with an apoplectical fit on Monday. The King, hardy creature that he is, might’ve recovered—save that a Doctor happened to be in the very room, armed with a full complement of lancets!”
“Ugh! Worse luck!”
“Out came a blade—the Doctor found a vein—the King bade farewell to a pint or two of the Humour of Passion. But of course, he’s always had plenty of that to go round—so he lived on through Tuesday, and had the strength to fend off the gathering swarm of Doctors on into yesterday. Then, alas, he fell into an epileptical fit, and all of the Doctors burst in at once. They’d been camped in his anterooms, arguing as to which humours, and how much of ’em, needed to be removed. After going for a whole night and a day without sleep, a sort of competition had arisen among them as to who advocated the most heroic measures. When the King—after a valorous struggle—finally lost his senses, and could no longer keep ’em at bay, they fell on him like hounds. The Doctor who had been insisting that the King suffered from an excess of blood, had his lancet buried in the King’s left jugular before the others had even unpacked their bags. A prodigious quantity of blood spewed forth—”
“I believe I saw it.”
“Stay, I’m only beginning. The Doctor who had diagnosed an excess of bile, now pointed out that said imbalance had only been worsened by the loss of so much blood, and so he and a pair of bulky assistants sat the King up in bed, hauled his mouth open, and began tickling his gorge with diverse feathers, scraps of whalebone, et cetera. Vomiting ensued. Now, a third Doctor, who had been insisting, most tiresomely, that all the King’s problems were owed to an accumulation of colonic humours, rolled his Majesty over and shoved a prodigious long-necked calabash up the Royal Anus. In went a mysterious, very expensive fluid—out came—”
“Yes.”
“Now a fourth Doctor set to work cupping him all over to draw out other poisons through the skin—hence those gargantuan hickeys, ringed by circular burns. The first doctor was now in a panic, seeing that the adjustments made by the other three had led to an excess of blood—it being all relative, you know. So he opened the other jugular, promising to let out just a little. But he let out quite a bit. The other doctors became indignant now, and demanded the right to repeat all of their treatments. But here’s where I stepped in, and, exercising—some would say, abusing—my full authority as Secretary of the Royal Society, recommended a purging of Doctors rather than humours and kicked them out of the bedchamber. Threats were made against my reputation and my life, but I ejected them anon.”
“But I heard news, as I came into London, that he was on the mend.”
“After the Sons of Asclepius were finished with him, he did not really move for a full twenty-four hours. Some might’ve construed this as sleeping. He lacked the strength to pitch a fit—some might call it recovery. Occasionally I’d hold an ice-cold mirror in front of his lips and the reflection of the King’s face would haze. In the middle of the day today, he began to stir and groan.”
“His Majesty can scarcely be blamed for that!” Roger said indignantly.
“Nevertheless, more physicians got to him, and diagnosed a fever. They gave him a royal dose of the Elixir Proprietalis LeFebure.”
“Now that must’ve improved the King’s mood to no end!”
“We can only speculate.
“Then I’ll add my weight as President, to yours as Secretary, of the Royal Society, and we’ll see how long we can keep the lancets in their sheathes.”
“Interesting point you raise there, Roger…”
“Oh, Daniel, you have got that Waterhousian brooding look about you now, and so I fear you do not mean a literal point, as in lancets—”
“I was thinking—”
“Help!” Roger cried, waving his arms. But the watermen on yonder dock had all turned their backs on the Privy Stairs to watch the approach of the boat carrying those chirurgeons.
“D’you recall when Enoch Root made phosphorus from horse urine? And the Earl of Upnor made a fool of himself supposing that it must have come from royal piss?”
“I’m terrified that you’re about to say something banal, Daniel, about how the King’s blood, bile, et cetera are no different from yours. So is it all right with you if I just stipulate that Republicanism makes perfect sense, seems to work well in Holland, and thereby exempt myself from this part of the conversation?”
“That is not precisely where I was going,” Daniel demurred. “I was thinking about how easily your cousin was replaced with Anglesey—how disappointingly little difference it made.”
“Before you corner yourself, Daniel, and force me to drag you out as usual, I would discourage any further usage of this similitude.”
“Which similitude?”
“You are about to say that Charles is like Comstock and James is like Anglesey and that it will make no difference, in the end, which one is king. Which would be a dangerous thing for you to say—because the House where Comstock and Anglesey lived has been razed and paved over.” Roger jerked his head upwards towards Whitehall. “Which is not a fate we would wish on yonder house.”
“But that is not what I was saying!”
“What were you saying, then? Something not obvious?”
“As Anglesey replaced Comstock, and Sterling replaced Raleigh, I replaced Bolstrood, in a way…”
“Yes, Dr. Waterhouse, we live in an orderly society and men replace each other.”
“Sometimes. But some can’t be replaced.”
“I don’t know that I agree.”
“Suppose that, God forbid, Newton died. Who would replace him?”
“Hooke, or maybe Leibniz.”
“But Hooke and Leibniz are different. I put it to you that some men really have unique qualities and cannot be replaced.”
“Newtons come along so rarely. He is an exception to any rule you might care to name—really a very cheap rhetorical tactic on your part, Daniel. Have you considered running for Parliament?”
“Then I should have used a different example, for the point I’m wanting to make is that all round us, in markets and smithys, in Parliament, in the City, in churches and coal-mines, there are persons whose departure really would change things.”
“Why? What makes these persons different?”
“It is a very profound question. Recently Leibniz has been refining his system of metaphysics—”
“Wake me up when you are finished.”
“When I first saw him at Lion Quay these many years ago, he was showing off his knowledge of London, though he’d never been here before. He’d been studying views of the city drawn by diverse artists from differing points of view. He went off on a rant about how the city itself has one form but it is perceived in different ways by each person in it, depending on their unique situation.”
“Every sophomore thinks this.”
“That was more than a dozen years ago. In his latest letter to me he seems to be leaning towards the view that the city does not have one absolute form at all…”
“Obvious nonsense.”
“…that the city is, in some sense, the result of the sum total of the perceptions of it by all of its constituents.”
“I knew we never should have let him into the Royal Society!”
“I am not explaining it very well,” Daniel admitted, “because I do not quite understand it, yet.”
“Then why are you belaboring me with it now of all times?”
“The salient point has to do with perceptions, and how different parts of the world—different souls—perceive all of the other parts—the other souls. Some souls have perceptions that are confused and indistinct, as if they are peering through poorly ground lenses. Whereas others are like Hooke peering through his Microscope or Newton through his Reflecting Telescope. They have superior perceptions.”
“Because they have better opticks!”
“No, even without lenses and parabolic mirrors, Newton and Hooke see things that you and I don’t. Leibniz is proposing a strange inversion of what we normally mean when we describe a man as distinguished, or unique. Normally when we say these things, we mean that the man himself stands out from a crowd in some way. But Leibniz is saying that such a man’s uniqueness is rooted in his ability to perceive the rest of the universe with unusual clarity—to distinguish one thing from another more effectively than ordinary souls.”
Roger sighed. “All I know is that Dr. Leibniz has been saying some very rude things about Descartes lately—”
“Yes, in his Brevis Demonstratio Erroris Memorabilis Cartesii et Alio-rum Circa Legem Naturalem—”
“And the French are up in arms.”
“You said, Roger, that you would add your weight as President, to mine as Secretary, of the Royal Society.”
“And I shall.”
“But you flatter me by saying so. Some men are interchangeable, yes. Those two chirurgeons could be replaced with any other two, and the King would still die this evening. But could I—could anyone—fill your shoes so easily, Roger?”
“Why, Daniel, I do believe this is the first time in your life you’ve actually exhibited something akin to respect for me!”
“You are a man of parts, Roger.”
“I am touched and of course I agree with the point you were trying to make—whatever the hell it might have been.”
“Good—I am pleased to hear you agree with me in believing that James is no replacement for Charles.”
Before Roger could recover—but after he mastered his anger—the boat was in earshot and the conversation, therefore, over.
“Long live the King, m’Lord, and Doctor Waterhouse,” said one Dr. Hammond, clambering over the boat’s gunwale onto the Privy Stairs. Then they all had to say it.
Hammond was followed by Dr. Griffin, who also greeted them with “Long live the King!” which meant that they all had to say it again.
Daniel must have said it with a noticeable lack of enthusiasm, for Dr. Hammond gave him a sharp look—then turned toward Dr. Griffin as if trolling for eyewitnesses. “It is very good that you have come in time, m’Lord,” said Hammond to Roger Comstock, “as, between Jesuits on the one hand, and Puritans on t’other” (squirting long jets of glowing vitriol out of the pupils of his eyes, here, at Daniel), “some would say the King has had enough of bad advice.”
Now Roger tended to say things after long pauses. When he’d been a clownish sizar at Trinity, this had made him seem not very intelligent; but now that he was a Marquis, and President of the Royal Society, it made him seem exceedingly sober and grave. So after they’d all climbed up the steps to the balcony that led into the part of Whitehall called the King’s Apartments, he said: “A King’s mind should never want for the counsel of learned or pious men, just as his body should never want for a bountiful supply of the diverse humours that sustain life and health.”
Waving an arm at the shambling Palace above them, Dr. Hammond said to Roger, “This place is such a bazaar of rumor and intrigue, that your presence, m’Lord, will go far towards quelling any whisperings should the worst happen which Almighty God forbid.” Favoring Daniel with another fearsome over-the-shoulder glare, as he followed the Ma
“It sounds as if some have already gone far beyond whispering,” Daniel said.
“I’m certain that Dr. Hammond is solely concerned with preserving your reputation, Dr. Waterhouse,” Roger said.
“What—it’s been nigh on twenty years since His Majesty blew up my father—do people suppose I am still nursing a grudge?”
“That’s not it, Daniel—”
“On the contrary! Father’s departure from this plane was so brisk, so hot—leaving behind no physical remains—that it has been a sort of balm to my spirit to sit up with the King, night after night, imbrued in the royal gore, breathing it into my lungs, sopping it up with my flesh, and many other enjoyments besides, that
I missed out on when my Father ascended…”
The Marquis of Ravenscar and the two other Doctors had slowed almost to a standstill and were now exchanging deeply significant looks. “Yes,” Roger finally said, after another grand pause, “too much sitting up, in such a fœtid atmosphere, is not healthful for one’s body, mind, or spirit…perhaps an evening’s rest is in order, Daniel, so that when these two good Doctors have restored the King to health, you’ll be ready to offer his Majesty your congratulations, as well as to re-affirm the profound loyalty you harbor, and have always harbored, in your breast, notwithstanding those events of two decades hence, which some would say have already been alluded to more than enough…”
He did not finish this sentence for a quarter of an hour. Before putting it to a merciful death, he’d managed to work in several enconiums for both Drs. Hammond and Griffin, likening one to Asclepius and the other to Hippocrates, while not failing to make any number of cautiously favorable remarks about every other Doctor who had come within a hundred yards of the King during the last month. He also (as Daniel noted, with a kind of admiration) was able to make it clear, to all present, just what a morbid catastrophe it would be if the King died and turned England over into the hands of that mad Papist the Duke of York whilst, practically in the same phrases—with the same words—asserting that York was really such a splendid fellow that it was almost imperative that all of them rush straight-away to the King’s Bedchamber and smother Charles II under a mattress. In a sort of recursive fugue of dependent clauses he was, similarly, able to proclaim Drake Waterhouse to’ve been the finest Englishman who’d ever boiled beef whilst affirming that blowing him up with a ton of gunpowder had been an absolute touchstone of (depending on how you looked at it) monarchical genius that made Charles II such a colossal figure, (or) rampant despotism that augured so favorably for his brother’s reign.