Quicksilver (123 page)

He pretended to give his horse a few minutes’ rest at the ferry landing, and did what half-hearted spying he could. The sun was
positively down now and everything was dark blue on a backdrop of even darker blue. The Castle fronted on the west bank of the river and was buried in its own shadow. However, lights were burning in some of the windows, and particularly in the outbuildings. A sharp two-masted vessel was anchored in the dredged channel nearby.

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 understood by all: down with the King, down with Popery, out with the Irish.

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.

Of late, reductions in the cost of window-glass, and improvements in the science of architecture, had made it possible to build whole blocks of shops with large windows facing the street, so that fine goods could be set out in view of passers-by. Shrewd builders such as Sterling (the Earl of Willesden) Waterhouse and Roger (the Marquis of Ravenscar) Comstock had built neighborhoods where courtiers went to do just that. The noun “shop” had been verbed; people went “shopping” now. Daniel of course never lowered himself to this newfangled vice—except that as he crossed the river he seemed to be doing it with ships. And he was a discriminating shopper. The watermen’s boats, the smacks and barges of the estuary were beneath his notice altogether, and the coasting vessels—anything with a fore-and-aft rig—were scarcely more than impediments. He raised his eyes up out of the clutter to scan for the great ships thrusting their yards up, like High Church priests exalting the sacraments above the rabble, into the sky where the wind blew straight and brave. The sails hung from those yards like vestments. There were not many such ships in the Pool tonight, but Daniel sought them all out and appraised each one shrewdly. He was shopping for something to take him away; he wanted to voyage out of sight of land for once in his life, to die and be buried on another continent.

One in particular caught his eye: trim, clean-lined, and sharply managed. She was taking advantage of the in-coming tide to make her way up-stream, ushered forward by a faint southerly breeze. The movement of the air was too faint for Daniel to feel it, but the crew of this ship,
Hare,
had seen flickers of life in the streamers dangling from her mastheads, and spread out her topsails. These stopped a bit of air. They stopped some of the fire-light from the city, too, projecting long prismatic shadows off into the void. The sails of
Hare
hovered above the black river, glowing like curtained windows. Mr. Bhnh tracked them for half a mile or so, taking advantage of the lead that the great ship forced among the smaller vessels. “She’s fitted out for a long voyage,” he mused, “probably sailing for America on the next tide.”

“Would I had a grapnel,” Daniel said, “I’d climb aboard like a pirate, and stow away on her.”

This startled Mr. Bhnh, who was not used to hearing such
flights of fancy from his clientele. “Are you going to America, Mr. Waterhouse?”

“Someday,” Daniel allowed, “there is tidying-up to do in this country yet.”

Mr. Bhnh was loath to discharge Daniel in the fiery wilds of East London, which tonight was thronged with drunken mudlarks lighting out in torrid pursuit of real or imaginary Jesuits. Daniel gave no heed to this good man’s worries. He had made it all the way from Sheerness without any trouble. Even in the tavern there, he had been left alone. Those who took any notice of him at all, soon lost their interest, or (strange to relate) lost their nerve and looked away. For Daniel carried now the unstudied nonchalance of a man who knew he’d be dead in a year no matter what; people seemed to smell the grave about him, and were happy to leave him alone.

On the other hand, a man with little time to live, and no heirs, need not be so miserly. “I shall give you a pound if you take me direct to the Tower,” Daniel said. Then, observing a wary look on Mr. Bhnh’s face, he teased his purse open and tossed a handful of coins beside the boat’s lantern until he found one that shone a little, and was nearly round. In the center was a battered and scratched plop of silver that with careful tilting and squinting and use of the imagination could be construed as a portrait of the first King James, who had died sixty-some odd years ago, but who was held to have managed the Mint competently. The waterman’s hand closed over this artifact and almost as quickly Daniel’s eyelids came to with an almost palpable slamming noise. He was remotely aware of massive wool blankets being thrown over his body by the solicitous Mr. Bhnh, and then he was aware of nothing.