Quicksilver (26 page)

“Why, if it isn’t Daniel Waterhouse! God save the King!”

“God save the King!” Daniel murmured reflexively, looking up into a vast bursting confusion of clothing and bought hair, within which, after a brief search, he was able to identify the face of Sir Winston Churchill—Fellow of the Royal Society, and father of that John Churchill who was making such a name for himself in the fighting before Algiers.

There was a moment of exquisite discomfort. Churchill had remembered, a heartbeat too late, that the aforementioned King had personally blown up Daniel’s father. Churchill himself had many anti-Royalists in his family, and so he prided himself on being a little defter than
that
.

Now Drake’s pieces had never been found. Daniel’s vague
recollection (vague because he’d just been shot with a blunderbuss, at the time) was that the explosion had flung him in the general direction of the Great Fire of London, so it was unlikely that anything was left of him except for a stubborn film of greasy ash deposited on the linens and windowsills of downwind neighbors. Discovery of shattered
YOU AND I ARE BUT EARTH
crockery in remains of burnt houses confirmed it. John Wilkins (still distraught over the burning of his Universal Character books in the Fire) had been good enough to preside over the funeral, and only a bridge-builder of his charm and ingenuity could have prevented it from becoming a brawl complete with phalanxes of enraged Phanatiques marching on Whitehall Palace to commit regicide.

Since then—and since most of Drake’s fortune had passed to Raleigh—Daniel hadn’t seen very much of the family. He’d been working on optics with Newton and was always startled, somehow, to find that the other Waterhouses were doing things when he wasn’t watching. Praise-God, Raleigh’s eldest son, who had gone to Boston before the Plague, had finally gotten his Harvard degree and married someone, and so everyone (Waterhouses and their visitors alike) had been talking about him—but they always did so mischievously, like naughty children getting away with something, and with occasional furtive glances at Daniel. He had to conclude that he and Praise-God were now the last vestiges of Puritanism in the family and that Raleigh was discreetly admired, among the coffee-house set, for having stashed one of them away at Cambridge and the other at Harvard where they could not interfere in whatever it was that the other Waterhouses were up to.

In this vein: he had gotten the impression, from various tremendously significant looks exchanged across tables at odd times by his half-siblings, their extended families, and their overdressed visitors, that the Waterhouses and the Hams and perhaps a few others had joined together in some kind of vast conspiracy the exact nature of which wasn’t clear—but to them it was as huge and complicated as, say, toppling the Holy Roman Empire.

Thomas Ham was now called Viscount Walbrook. All of his gold had melted in the Fire, but none had leaked out of his newly refurbished cellar—when they came back days later they found a slab of congealed gold weighing tons, the World’s Largest Gold Bar. None of his depositors lost a penny. Others hastened to deposit their gold with the incredibly reliable Mr. Ham. He began lending it to the King to finance the rebuilding of London. Partly in recognition of that, and partly to apologize for having blown up his father-in-law, the King had bestowed an Earldom on him.

All of which was Context for Daniel as he sat there gazing upon the embarrassed face of Sir Winston Churchill. Now if Churchill had only
asked,
Daniel might have told him that blowing up Drake was probably the correct action for the King to have taken under the circumstances. But Churchill didn’t ask, he
assumed.
Which was why he’d never make a real Natural Philosopher. Though the Royal Society would tolerate him as long as he continued paying his dues.

Daniel for his part was aware, now, that he was surrounded by the Quality, and that they were all peering at him. He had gotten himself into a Complicated Situation, and he did not like those. The Reflecting Telescope was resting on the table right in front of him, as obvious as a severed head. Sir Winston was too embarrassed to’ve noticed it yet, but he
would
, and given that he’d been a member of the Royal Society since before the Plague, he would probably be able to guess what it was—and even if Daniel lied to him about it, the lie would be discovered this very evening when Daniel presented it, on Isaac’s behalf, to the Royal Society. He felt an urge to snatch it away and hide it, but this would only make it more conspicuous.

And Sir Winston was only
one
of the people Daniel recognized here. Daniel seemed to have inadvertently sat down along a major game trail: persons coming up from Whitehall Palace and Westminster to buy their stockings, gloves, hats, syphilis-cures,
et cetera
at the New Exchange, just a stone’s throw up the Strand, all passed by this coffee-house to get a last fix on what was or wasn’t in fashion.

Daniel hadn’t moved or spoken in what seemed like ten minutes…he was (glancing at the telltale coffee cup here) paralyzed, in fact! Then he solved Sir Winston’s etiquette jam by blurting something like “I
say
!” and attempting to stand up, which came out as a palsied spasm of the entire body—he got into a shin-kicking match with his own table and produced a disturbance that sheared cups off their saucers. Everyone looked.

“Ever the diligent Natural Philosopher, Mr. Waterhouse pursues an experiment in Intoxication by Coffee!” Sir Winston announced roundly. Simply
tremendous
laughter and light applause.

Sir Winston was of Raleigh’s generation and had fought in the Civil War as a Cavalier—he was a serious man and so was dressed in a way that passed for dignified and understated here, in a black velvet coat, flaring out to just above the knee, with lace handkerchiefs trailing from various openings like wisps of steam, and a yellow waistcoat under that, and God only knew what else beneath the waistcoat—the sleeves of all these garments terminated near the
elbows in huge wreaths of lace, ruffles,
et cetera,
and that was to show off his tan kid gloves. He had a broad-brimmed Cavalier-hat fringed with fluffy white stuff probably harvested from the buttocks of some bird that spent a lot of time sitting on ice floes, and a very thin mustache, and a wig of yellow hair, expensively disheveled and formed into bobbling ringlets. He had black stockings fashionably wrinkled up his calves, and high-heeled shoes with bows of a wingspan of eight inches. The stocking/breech interface was presumably somewhere around his knees and was some sort of fantastically complex spraying phenomenon of ribbons and gathers and skirtlets designed to peek out under the hems of his coat, waistcoat, and allied garments.

Mrs. Churchill, for her part, was up to something mordant involving a Hat. It had the general outlines of a Puritan-hat, a Pilgrimish number consisting of a truncated cone mounted on a broad flat brim, but enlivened with colorful bands, trailing ribbons, jeweled badges, curious feathers, and other merchandise—a parody, then, a tart assertion of non-pilgrimhood. Everything from the brim of this hat to the hem of her dress was too complex for Daniel’s eye to comprehend—he was like an illiterate savage staring at the first page of an illuminated Bible—but he did notice that the little boy carrying her train was dressed as a Leprechaun (Sir Winston did a lot of business for the King in Ireland).

It was a lot to put on, just to nip out for a cup of coffee, but the Churchills must have known that everyone was going to be fawning over them today because of their gallant son, and decided they ought to dress for it.

Mrs. Churchill was looking over Daniel’s shoulder, toward the street. This left Daniel free to stare at her face, to which she had glued several spots of black velvet—which, since the underlying skin had been whitened with some kind of powerful cosmetic, gave her a sort of Dalmatian appearance. “He’s here,” she said to whomever she was looking at. Then, confused: “Were you expecting your half-brother?”

Daniel turned around and recognized Sterling Waterhouse, now about forty, and his wife of three years, Beatrice, and a whole crowd of persons who’d apparently just staged some type of pillaging-raid on the New Exchange. Sterling and Beatrice were shocked to see him. But they had no choice but to come over, now that Mrs. Churchill had done what she’d done. So they did, cheerfully enough, and then there was a series of greetings and introductions and other formalities (including that all parties congratulated the Churchills on the dazzling qualities of their son John, and
promised to say prayers for his safe return from the shores of Tripoli) extending to something like half an hour. Daniel wanted to slash his own throat. These people were doing what they did for a
living.
Daniel
wasn’t.

But he did achieve one insight that would prove useful in later dealings with his own family. Because Raleigh was involved in the mysterious Conspiracy of which Daniel had, lately, become vaguely aware, it probably had something to do with land. Because Uncle Thomas (“Viscount Walbrook”) Ham was mixed up in it, it must have something to do with putting rich people’s money to clever uses. And because Sterling was involved, it probably had something to do with shops, because ever since Drake had ascended into the flames over London, Sterling had been moving away from Drake’s style of business (smuggling, and traveling around cutting private deals away from markets) and towards the newfangled procedure of putting all the merchandise in a fixed building and waiting for customers to transport themselves to it. The whole thing came together complete in Daniel’s head when he sat in that coffeehouse in Charing Cross and looked at the courtiers, macaronis, swells, and fops streaming in from the new town-houses going up on land that had been incinerated, or that had been open pastures, four years earlier. They were planning some sort of real estate development on the edge of the city—probably on that few acres of pasture out back of the Waterhouse residence. They would put up town-houses around the edges, make the center into a square, and along the square Sterling would put up shops. Rich people would move in, and the Waterhouses and their confederates would control a patch of land that would probably generate more rent than any thousand square miles of Ireland—basically, they would become farmers of rich people.

And what made it extraordinarily clever—as only Sterling could be—was that this project would not even be a
struggle
as such. They would not have to defeat any adversary or overcome any obstacle—merely ride along with certain inexorable trends. All they—all Sterling—had to do was
notice
these trends. He’d always had a talent for noticing—which was why his shops were so highly thought of—so all he needed was to be in the right place to do the necessary noticing, and the right place was obviously Mrs. Green’s coffee-house.

But it was the wrong place for Daniel, who only wanted to notice what Isaac was up to. A lively conversation was underway all round him, but it might as well’ve been in a foreign language—in fact, frequently it was. Daniel divided his time between looking at the
telescope and wondering when he could snatch it off the table without attracting attention; staring at the mystery-shop and at the gentleman-rider; fraternal staredowns with Sterling (who was in his red silk suit with silver buttons today, and had numerous scraps of black glued to his face, though not as many as Beatrice); and watching Sir Winston Churchill, who looked equally bored, distracted, and miserable.

At one point he caught Sir Winston gazing fixedly at the telescope, his eyes making tiny movements and focusings as he figured out how it worked. Daniel waited until Sir Winston looked up at him, ready with a question—then Daniel winked and shook his head minutely. Sir Winston raised his eyebrows and looked
thrilled
that he and Daniel now had a small Intrigue of their own—it was like having a pretty seventeen-year-old girl unexpectedly sit on his lap. But this exchange was fully noticed by someone of Sterling’s crowd—one of Beatrice’s young lady friends—who demanded to know what the Tubular Object was.

“Thank you for reminding me,” Daniel said, “I’d best put it away.”

“What is it?” the lady demanded.

“A Naval Device,” Sir Winston said, “or a model of one—pity the Dutch Fleet when Mr. Waterhouse’s invention is realized at full scale!”

“How’s it work?”

“This is not the place,” said Sir Winston significantly, eyes rattling back and forth in a perfunctory scan for Dutch spies. This caused all of the
other
heads to turn, which led to an important Sighting: an entourage was migrating out of the Strand and into Charing Cross, and someone frightfully significant must be in the middle of it. While they were all trying to figure out
who,
Daniel put the telescope away and closed the box.

“It’s the Earl of Upnor,” someone whispered, and then Daniel had to look, and see what had become of his former roommate.

The answer: now that Louis Anglesey, Earl of Upnor, was in London, freed from the monastic constraints of Cambridge, and a full twenty-two years of age, he was able to live, and dress, as he pleased. Today, walking across Charing Cross, he was wearing a suit that appeared to’ve been constructed by (1) dressing him in a blouse with twenty-foot-long sleeves of the most expensive linen; (2) bunching the sleeves up in numerous overlapping gathers on his arms; (3) painting most of him in glue; (4) shaking and rolling him in a bin containing thousands of black silk doilies; and (5) (because King Charles II, who’d mandated, a few years earlier, that all courtiers wear black and white, was getting bored with it, but
had not formally rescinded the order) adding dashes of color here and there, primarily in the form of clusters of elaborately gathered and knotted ribbons—enough ribbon, all told, to stretch all the way to whatever shop in Paris where the Earl had bought all of this stuff. The Earl also had a white silk scarf tied round his throat in such a way as to show off its lacy ends. Louis XIV’s Croatian mercenaries,
les Cravates,
had made a practice of tying their giant, flapping lace collars down so that gusts of wind would not blow them up over their faces in the middle of a battle or duel, and this had become a fashion in Paris, and the Earl of Upnor, always pushing the envelope, was now doing the
cravate
thing with a scarf instead of an (as of ten minutes ago) outmoded collar. He had a wig that was actually wider than his shoulders, and a pair of boots that contained enough really good snow-white leather that, if pulled on straight, they would have reached all the way to his groin, at which point each one of them would have been larger in circumference than his waist; but he had of course folded the tops down and then (since they were so long) folded them back up again to keep them from dragging on the ground, so that around each knee was a complex of white leather folds about as wide as a bushel-basket, filled with a froth of lace. Gold spurs, beset with jewels, curved back from each heel to a distance of perhaps eight inches. The heels themselves were cherry-red, four inches high, and protected from the muck of Charing Cross by loose slippers whose flat soles dragged on the ground and made clacking noises with each step. Because of the width of his boot-tops, the Earl had to swing his legs around each other with each step, toes pointed, rolling so violently from side to side that he could only maintain balance with a long, encrusted, beribboned walking-stick.