Quicksilver (126 page)

“Oh yes,” Upnor said, “I have all.”

“Shall I make arrangements for a messenger to be sent out then?”

“I can do it myself,” said the Earl.

“Of course I am aware, my lord, that you have the power to dispatch messages. But out of a desire to make myself useful I—”

“No. I mean, I can deliver the orders myself, for I am on my way to Upnor at daybreak.”

“I beg your pardon, my lord.”

“Is there anything else, Mr. Waterhouse?”

“Not unless I may be of assistance in this house.”

Upnor looked at Newton. Newton—who’d been gazing at Daniel—seemed to detect this in the corner of his eye, and spoke: “In this house, Daniel, a vast repository of alchemical lore has accumulated. Nearly all of it is garbled nonsense. Some of it is true wisdom—secrets that ought rightly to be
kept
secret from them in whose hands they would be dangerous. Our task is to sort out one from the other, and burn what is useless, and see to it that what is good and true is distributed to the libraries and laboratories of the adept. It is difficult for me to see how you could be of any use in this, since you believe that
all
of it is nonsense, and have a well-established history of incendiary behavior in the presence of such writings.”

“You continue to view my 1677 actions in the worst possible light.”

“Not so, Daniel. I am aware that you thought you were showering favors on me. Nonetheless, I say that what happened in 1677 must be looked on as permanently disqualifying you from being allowed to handle alchemical literature around open flames.”

“Very well,” said Daniel. “Good night, Isaac. M’Lord. Monsieur.” Upnor and Fatio were both looking a bit startled by Isaac’s cryptic discourse, so Daniel bowed perfunctorily and backed out of the room.

They resumed their previous conversation as if Daniel were naught more than a servant who’d nipped in to serve tea. Upnor said, “Who can guess what notions have got into his head, living for so many years in that land, over-run with the cabals of crypto-Jews, and Indians sacrificing each other atop Pyramids?”

“You could just write him a letter and ask him,” suggested Fatio, in a voice so bright and reasonable that it annoyed even Daniel, who was rapidly backing out of earshot. He could tell, just from this, that Fatio was no alchemist; or if he was, he was new to it, and not yet inculcated to make everything much more obscure and mysterious than it needed to be.

He turned around finally, and nearly bumped into a fellow whom he identified, out of the corner of his eye, as a merry monk who had somehow got grievously lost: it was a robed figure gripping a large stoneware tankard that he had evidently taken out on loan from one of the local drinking establishments. “Have a care, Mr. Waterhouse, you look too little, for listening so well,” said Enoch Root affably.

Daniel started away from him. Locke was still standing there embracing his book; Root was the chap he’d been talking to earlier. Daniel was caught off guard for a few moments; Root took advantage of the lull to down a mouthful of ale.

“You are very rude,” Daniel said.

“What did you say? Root?”

“
Rude,
to drink alone, when others are present.”

“Each man finds his own sort of rudeness. Some burst into houses, and conversations, uninvited.”

“I was bearing important news.”

“And I am celebrating it.”

“Aren’t you afraid that drink will shorten your longevity?”

“Is longevity much on your mind, Mr. Waterhouse?”

“It is on the mind of every man. And I am a man. Who or what are
you
?”

Locke’s eyes had been going back and forth, as at a tennis
match. Now they fixed on Enoch for a while. Enoch had got a look as if he were trying to be patient—which was not the same as being patient.

“There’s a certain unexamined arrogance to your question, Daniel. Just as Newton presumes that there is some absolute space by which all things—comets even!—are measured and governed, you presume it is all perfectly natural and pre-ordained that the earth should be populated by men, whose superstitions ought to be the ruler by which all things are judged; but why might I not ask of you, ‘Daniel Waterhouse, who or what are you? And why does Creation teem with others like you, and what is your purpose?’ ”

“I’ll remind you, sirrah, that All Hallows’ Eve was more than a month since, and I am not of a humour to be baited with hobgoblin-stories.”

“Nor am I of a humour to be rated a hobgoblin or any other figment of the humane imagination; for ’twas God who imagined me, just as He did you, and thereby brought us into being.”

“Your tankard brims over with scorn for our superstitions and imaginings; yet here you are, as always, in the company of Alchemists.”

“You might have said, ‘Here you are in the center of the Glorious Revolution conversing with a noted political philosopher,’” Root returned, glancing at Locke, who flicked his eyes downward in the merest hint of a bow. “But I am never credited thus by you, Daniel.”

“I have only seen you in the company of alchemists. Do you deny it?”

“Daniel, I have only seen
you
in the company of alchemists. But I am aware that you do other things. I know you have oft been at Bedlam with Hooke. Perhaps you have seen priests there who go to converse with madmen. Do you suppose those priests to be mad?”

“I’m not sure if I approve of the similitude—” Locke began.

“Stay, ’tis just a figure!” Root laughed rather winningly, reaching out to touch Locke’s shoulder.

“A faulty one,” Daniel said, “for you
are
an alchemist.”

“I am
called
an Alchemist. Within living memory, Daniel, everyone who studied what I—and
you
—study was called by that name. And most persons even today observe no distinction between Alchemy and the younger and more vigorous order of knowledge that is associated with your club.”

“I am too exhausted to harry you through all of your evasions. Out of respect for your friends Mr. Locke, and for Leibniz, I shall give you the benefit of the doubt, and wish you well,” Daniel said.

“God save you, Mr. Waterhouse.”

“And you, Mr. Root. But I say this to you—and you as well, Mr. Locke. As I came in here I saw a map, lately taken from this house, burning in the fire. The map was empty, for it depicted the ocean—most likely, a part of it where no man has ever been. A few lines of latitude were ruled across that vellum void, and some legendary isles drawn in, with great authority, and where the map-maker could not restrain himself he drew phantastickal monsters. That map, to me, is Alchemy. It is good that it burnt, and fitting that it burnt tonight, the eve of a Revolution that I will be so bold as to call my life’s work. In a few years Mr. Hooke will learn to make a proper chronometer, finishing what Mr. Huygens began thirty years ago, and then the Royal Society will draw maps with lines of longitude as well as latitude, giving us a grid—what we call a Cartesian grid, though ’twas not his idea—and where there be islands, we will rightly draw them. Where there are none, we will draw none, nor dragons, nor sea-monsters—and that will be the end of Alchemy.”

“ ’Tis a noble pursuit and I wish you Godspeed,” Root said, “but remember the poles.”

“The poles?”

“The north and south poles, where your meridians will come together—no longer parallel and separate, but converging, and all one.”

“That is nothing but a figment of geometry.”

“But when you build all your science upon geometry, Mr. Water-house, figments become real.”

Daniel sighed. “Very well, perhaps we’ll get back to Alchemy in the end—but for now, no one can get near the poles—unless you can fly there on a broom, Mr. Root—and I’ll put my trust in geometry and not in the books of fables that Mr. Boyle and Sir Elias are sorting through below. ’Twill work for me, for the short time I have remaining. I have not time to-night.”

“Further errands await you?”

“I would fain bid a proper farewell to my dear old friend Jeffreys.”

“He is an old friend of the Earl of Upnor as well,” Enoch Root said, a bit distractedly.

“This I know, for they cover up each other’s murders.”

“Upnor sent Jeffreys a box a few hours ago.”

“Not to his house, I’ll wager.”

“He sent it in care of the master of a ship in the Pool.”

“The name of the ship?”

“I do not know it.”

“The name of the messenger, then?”

Enoch Root leaned over the baluster and peered down the middle of the stairwell. “I do not know that, either,” he said, then shifted his tankard to the other hand so that he could reach out. He pointed at a young porter who was just on his way out the door, bearing another pile of books to the bonfire. “But it was
him.
”

H
ARE
RODE AT ANCHOR, LANTERNS
a-blaze, before Wapping: a suburb crooked in an elbow of the Thames just downstream of the Tower. If Jeffreys had already boarded her, there was nothing they could do, short of hiring a pirate-ship to overhaul her when she reached blue water. But a few minutes’ conversation with the watermen loitering round the Wapping riverfront told them that no passengers had been conveyed to that ship yet. Jeffreys must be waiting for something; but he would wait close by, within view of
Hare,
so that he could bolt if he had to. And he would choose a place where he could get strong drink, because he was a drunkard. That narrowed it down to some half a dozen taverns, unevenly spaced along the riverbank from the Tower of London down to Shadwell, mostly clustered around the stairs and docks that served as gate-ways ’tween the Wet and the Dry worlds. Dawn was approaching, and any normal business ought to’ve been closed half a dozen hours ago. But these dockside taverns served an irregular clientele at irregular hours; they told time by the rise and fall of the tides, not by the comings and goings of the sun. And the night before had been as wild as any in England’s history. No sane tavernkeeper would have his doors closed now.

“Let’s be about it smartly then, guv’nor,” said Bob Shaftoe, striding off the boat they’d hired near Charing Cross and lighting on King Henry’s Stairs. “This may be nigh on the longest night of the year, but it can’t possibly be much longer; and I believe that my Abigail awaits me at Upnor.”

This was a gruff way of speaking to a tired sick old Natural Philosopher, yet an improvement on the early days in the Tower, when Bob had been suspicious and chilly, or recent times when he’d been patronizing. When Bob had witnessed John Churchill shaking Daniel’s hand on the Tower causeway a few hours earlier, he’d immediately begun addressing him as “guv’nor.” But he’d persisted in his annoying habit of asking Daniel whether he was tired or sick until just a quarter of an hour ago, when Daniel had insisted that they shoot one of the flumes under London Bridge rather than take the time to walk around.

It was the first time in Daniel’s life that he’d run this risk, the
second time for Bob, and the fourth time for the waterman. A hill of water had piled up on the upstream side of the bridge and was finding its way through the arches like a panicked crowd trying to bolt from a burning theatre. The boat’s mass was but a millionth part of it, and was of no account whatever; it spun around like a weathercock at the brink of the cataract, bashed against the pilings below Chapel Pier hard enough to stave in the gunwale, spun round the opposite way from the recoil, and accelerated through the flume sideways, rolling toward the downstream side so that it scooped up a ton or so of water. Daniel had imagined doing this since he’d been a boy, and had always wondered what it would be like to look up and see the Bridge from underneath; but by the time he thought to raise his gaze outside the narrow and dire straits of the boat, they’d been thrust half a mile downstream and were passing right by the Traitor’s Gate once more.

This act had at last convinced Bob that Daniel was a man determined to kill himself this very night, and so he now dispensed with all of the solicitous offers; he let Daniel jump off the boat under his own power, and did not volunteer to bear him piggy-back up King Henry’s Stairs. Up they trudged into Wapping, river-water draining in gallons from their clothes, and the waterman—who’d been well paid—was left to bail his boat.

They tried four taverns before they came to the Red Cow. It was half wrecked from the past night’s celebrations, but efforts were underway to shovel it out. This part of the riverfront was built up only thinly, with one or two strata of inns and warehouses right along the river, crowding in against a main street running direct to the Tower a mile away. Beyond that ’twas green fields. So the Red Cow offered Daniel juxtapositions nearly as strange as what he’d witnessed in Sheerness: viz. one milkmaid, looking fresh and pure as if angels had just borne her in from a dewy Devonshire pasture-ground, carrying a pail of milk in the back door, stepping primly over a peg-legged Portuguese seaman who’d passed out on a heap of straw embracing a drained gin-bottle. This and other particulars, such as the Malay-looking gent smoking bhang by the front door, gave Daniel the feeling that the Red Cow merited a thoroughgoing search.

As on a ship when exhausted sailors climb down from the yards and go to hammocks still warm from the men who replace them, so the late-night drinkers were straggling out, and their seats being taken by men of various watery occupations who were nipping in for a drink and a nibble.

But there was one bloke in the back corner who did not move.
He was dark, saturnine, a lump of lead on a plank, his face hidden in shadow—either completely unconscious or extremely alert. His hand was curled round a glass on the table in front of him, the pose of one who needs to sit for many hours, and who justifies it by pretending he still nurses his drink. Light fell onto his hand from a candle. His thumb was a-tremble.

Daniel went to the bar at the opposite corner of the room, which was little bigger than a crow’s nest. He ordered one dram, and paid for ten. “Yonder bloke,” he said, pointing with his eyes, “I’ll lay you a quid he is a common man—common as the air.”

The tavernkeeper was a fellow of about three score, as pure-English as the milkmaid, white-haired and red-faced. “It’d be thievery for me to take that wager, for you’ve only seen his clothes—which
are
common—while I’ve heard his voice—which is anything but.”