Quicksilver (34 page)

The handbill was a cartoon depicting King Louis XIV of France with his breeches piled up round his ankles and hairy buttocks thrust out, shitting an immense turd into the mouth of an English sailor.

“Let’s take it to Wilkins! It’ll cheer him up enormously,” Pepys suggested, and pounded on the ceiling. The coachman drove the horses forward. Daniel made his body go limp so that he would not accrue lacerations from the continual battering onslaughts of the vehicle’s benches and bulkheads.

“Did you bring it?”

“I always have it with me,” Pepys said, producing an irregular nodule about the size of a tennis ball, “as you have all
your
parts.”

“To remind you of your own mortality?”

“Once a man’s been cut for the stone, ’tis hardly
necessary.”

“Why, then?”

“It is my conversation-starter of last resort. It gets
anyone
talking: Germans, Puritans, Red Indians…” He handed the object to Daniel. It was heavy. Heavy as a stone.

“I cannot believe this came out of your bladder,” Daniel said.

“You see? Never fails!” Pepys answered.

But Daniel got no further response from Pepys, who’d already unrolled one of the large documents, creating a screen that divided the carriage in half. Daniel had assumed that they were all diagrams of men-of-war. But when they turned west on Cheapside the sun came in the carriage window and shone through the paper, revealing a grid of numbers. Pepys muttered things to his assistant, who jotted them down. Daniel was left to rotate the
bladder-stone in his hand and gaze out at London, so different when seen at street-level. Passing through St. Paul’s Churchyard, they saw the whole contents of a printer’s shop turned out into the street—several bailiffs, and one of Sir Roger L’Estrange’s lieutenants, pawing through stacks of unbound sheets, and holding wood-blocks up to mirrors.

Within a few minutes, anyway, they were at Wilkins’s house. Pepys left his assistant and his papers below in the carriage and pounded up stairs holding the bladder-stone in his hand like a questing knight brandishing a fragment of the Cross.

He shook it in Wilkins’s face. Wilkins only laughed. But it was good that he did, because his room was otherwise a horror—his dark breeches couldn’t conceal that he had been pissing blood, sometimes sooner than he could get to the chamber-pot. He was both wizened and bloated at the same time, if that were possible, and the smell that came out of his flesh seemed to suggest his kidneys weren’t keeping up their end of the bargain.

While Pepys exhorted the Bishop of Chester to allow himself to be cut for the stone, Daniel looked about, and was dispirited but not surprised to see several empty bottles from the apothecary shop of Monsieur LeFebure. He gave one a sniff. It was
Elixir Pro-prietalis LeFebure
—the same stuff Hooke swallowed when headaches had brought him to the brink of suicide—the fruits of LeFebure’s researches into certain remarkable properties of the poppy family. It was hugely popular at Court, even among those not afflicted with headaches or the Stone. But when Daniel saw Wilkins go into a bladder spasm—reducing the Lord Bishop of Chester, and Founder of the Royal Society, to a dumb animal for several minutes, convulsing and howling—he decided perhaps Monsieur LeFebure was not such a sinister fellow after all.

When it was over, and Wilkins was Wilkins again, Daniel showed him the handbill, and mentioned L’Estrange’s raid on the printing-shop.

“The same men doing the same things as ten years ago,” Wilkins pronounced.

From that—
the same men
—Daniel knew that the originator of the handbills, and ultimate target of L’Estrange’s raids, must be Knott Bolstrood.

“And that is why I cannot stop what I am doing to be cut for the Stone,” Wilkins said.

D
ANIEL ERECTED A BLOCK AND TACKLE
above the Gresham shaft, Hooke put the rebuilding of London on hold for a day, and they
put the long telescope into place, Hooke cringing and screaming every time it was bumped, as if the instrument were an extension of his own eyeball.

Meanwhile Daniel could never keep his attention fixed on the heavens, for the warm mutterings and nudgings of London would not leave him alone—notes slipped under his door, raised eyebrows in coffee-shops, odd things witnessed in the street all captured his attention more than they should’ve. Outside the city, scaffolding rose up from the glacis of those mysterious fortifications, and long benches began to shingle it.

Then, one afternoon, Daniel and all London’s Persons of Quality and most of her pickpockets were there, sitting on those benches or milling about in the fields. The Duke of Monmouth rode out, in a Cavalier outfit whose magnificence was such as to refute and demolish every sermon ever preached by a Calvinist—because if those sermons were true, Monmouth ought to be struck dead on the spot by a jealous God. John Churchill—possibly the only man in England handsomer than Monmouth—therefore wore slightly less thrilling clothes. The King of France could not attend this event, as he was so busy conquering the Dutch Republic just now, but a strapping actor pranced out in his stead, dressed in royal ermine, and took up a throne on an artificial hillock, and occupied himself with suitable bits of stage-business, viz. peering at events through a glass; pointing things out to diverse jewelled mistresses draped all about his vicinity; holding out his Sceptre to order his troops forward; descending from his throne to speak a few kind words to wounded officers who were brought up to him on litters; standing up and striking a grave defiant pose during moments of crisis, whilst holding out a steady hand to calm his jittery
femmes.
Likewise an actor had been hired to play the role of D’Artagnan. Since everyone knew what was about to happen to him, he got the most applause when he was introduced—to the visible chagrin of the (real) Duke of Monmouth. In any event: cannons were discharged picturesquely from the ramparts of “Maestricht,” and “Dutchmen” struck defiant poses on the battlements, creating among the spectators
a frisson
of righteous anger (how dare those insolent Dutchmen defend themselves!?)—rapidly transmuted into patriotic fervor as, at a signal from “Louis XIV,” Monmouth and Churchill led a charge up the slope of the demilune work. After a bit of thrilling swordplay and much spattering-about of stage-blood, they planted French and English flags side by side on the parapet, shook hands with “D’Artagnan,” and exchanged all manner of fond and respectful gestures with the “King” on his hillock.

There was an ovation. Daniel could hear nothing else, but he
saw
some odd sort of pratfall directly in front of him: a young man in severe dark clothing, who’d been standing in front of Daniel and blocking his view with a sort of Pilgrim-hat, turned round and splayed his limbs out like a squashed bug, let his head loll back on his white collar, stuck his tongue out, and rolled his eyes back in their sockets. He was mocking the pose of several “Dutch” defenders who were now
hors de combat
up on the demilune. He did not make a very pretty picture. Something was grievously wrong with his face: a dermatological catastrophe about the cheeks.

Behind him, a scene-change was underway: the dead defenders were resurrecting themselves and scurrying round back of the ramparts to prepare for the next act. Likewise the man in front of Daniel now recovered his balance and turned out not to be a dead Dutchman at all, just a young English bloke with a sour look about him. His attire was not just
any
drab garb but the
specific
drab garb worn, nowadays, by Barkers. But (now that Daniel thought about it slightly harder) it was very like the clothing worn by the mock-Dutchmen pretending to defend Maestricht. Come to think of it, those “Dutchmen” had looked a great deal more like English religious Dissenters than they had like actual Dutchmen, who (if the grapevine was to be believed) had long ago ditched their old Pil-grimish togs (which had been inspired by Spanish fashions anyway) and now dressed like everyone else in Europe. So in
addition
to being a re-enactment of the Siege of Maestricht, this show was
also
a parable about well-dressed rakes and blades overcoming dull severe Calvinists in the streets of London town!

The slowness with which Daniel realized all this was infuriating to the young Barker in front of him—who had the cannonball head and mighty jawbone of an authentic Bolstrood.

“Is that Gomer?” Daniel exclaimed, when the ovation had died away into a thrum of thirsty squires calling for beer. Daniel had known the son of Knott Bolstrood as a little boy, but hadn’t set eyes on him in at least a decade.

Gomer Bolstrood answered the question by staring Daniel full in the face. On the front of each of his cheeks, just to either side of his nose, was an old wound: a complex of red trenches and fleshy ramparts, curved round into the crude glyph “S.L.” These marks had been made by a branding iron in the open-air court before the Sessions House at the Old Bailey, a few moments after Gomer had been pronounced guilty of being a Seditious Libeller.

Gomer Bolstrood could not be more than twenty-five years old,
but that munition-like head, combined with those brands, gave him the presence of a much older man. He aimed his chin significantly towards a location off behind the stands.

Gomer Bolstrood, son of His Majesty’s Secretary of State Knott, son of ur-Barker Gregory, led Daniel into a Vagabond-camp of tents and wagons set up to serve and support this gala re-enactment. Some of the tents were for the actors and actresses. Gomer led Daniel between a couple of those, which meant fighting their way against a flood tide of “French Mistresses” coming back from the “Sun King’s” throne. Even as the sensitive eyes of Isaac Newton had been semi-permanently branded with the image of the solar disk during his colors experiments, so Daniel’s retinas were now stamped with a dozen or more cleavages. All of those cleavages must have had heads up above them somewhere—but the only one he
noticed
was speaking to one of the other girls in a French accent. From which he reckoned (in retrospect, somewhat simple-mindedly) that she must be French. But before Daniel could drift off into a full reverie, Gomer Bolstrood had grabbed his upper arm and pulled him ’tween the flaps of an adjoining beer tent.

The beer was Dutch. So was the man sitting at the table. But the
waffle
that the man was eating was indisputably Belgian.

Daniel sat in the chair indicated, and watched the Dutch gentleman eat the waffle for a while. He aimed his eyes in that direction, anyway. The image that still persisted before his eyes was cleavages, and the face of that “French” lass. But after a while this, sadly, faded, and was replaced by a waffle that had been put in front of him on a Delft china plate. And none of your crude heavy Pilgrim-ware, but the good stuff, export-grade.

He sensed an implicit demand that he should Partake. So he dissected a corner from the waffle, put it in his mouth, and began to chew it. It was good. His eyes were adjusting to the dimness of the tent, and he was noticing stacks of handbills piled up in the corners, neatly wrapped up in old proof-sheets. The words on the proof-sheets were in every language save English—these bills had been printed in Amsterdam and brought over on a beer-ship or perhaps a waffle-barge. Every so often the tent-flaps would part, and Gomer, or one of the taciturn, pipe-smoking Dutchmen in the corners, would peer out and thrust a brick of hand-bills through the gap.

“Whaat doo Belgian waffles and the cleavages of those girls haave in common?” said the Dutch Ambassador; for it was none other. He dabbed butter from his lips with a napkin. He was blond, and pyramidal, as if he consumed a lot of beer and waffles. “I saaw you staaring at them,” he added, apologetically.

“I haven’t the
merest
idea—sir!”

“Negateev Spaace,” the Dutch Ambassador intoned, letting those double vowels resonate as only a heavyweight Dutchman could. “Have you heard of thees? It is an
aart woord.
Wee know about
negateev spaace
because we like
peectures soo muuch
.”

“Is it anything like negative numbers?”

“Eet ees the spaace between twoo theengs,” said the other, and put his hands on his chest and forced his pectorals together to create a poor impression of cleavage. Daniel watched with polite incredulity, and tried not to shudder. The Dutchman plucked a fresh waffle off a plate and held it up by one corner, like a rag soaked with something unpleasant. “Likewise—the waffle of Belgium is shaaped and defiined, not by its own essential naatuure, but by the hot plaates of haard iron that encloose it on toop and boottom.”

“Oh, I see—you’re making a point about the Spanish Netherlands!”

The Dutch Ambassador rolled his eyes and tossed the waffle back over his shoulder—before it struck the ground, a stout, disconcertingly monkey-like dog sprang into the air and snatched it, and began to masticate it—
literally
—for the sound it made was like a homunculus squatting on the floor muttering, “masticate masticate masticate.”

“Traaped between Fraance and the Dutch Republic, the Spanish Netherlands is raapidly consuumed by Louis the Quatorze Bourbon. Fine. But when
Le Roi du Soleil
reaches Maestricht he touches—what?”

“The political and military equivalent of a hot iron plate?”

The Dutch Ambassador probed negative space with a licked finger, seemed to touch something, and drew back sharply, making a sizzling noise through his teeth. Perhaps by Dutch luck, perhaps by some exquisite sense of timing, Daniel felt the atmosphere socking him in the gut. The tent clenched inwards, then inflated. Waffle-irons chattered and buzzed in the dimness, like skeletons’ teeth. The monkey-dog scurried under the table.

Gomer Bolstrood pulled back a tent-flap to provide a clear view to the top of the demilune-work, which had been ruptured by detonation of a vast internal store of gunpowder. It looked like a steaming loaf that had been ripped in half. Resurgent Dutchmen were prancing around on the top, trampling and burning those French and English flags. The spectators were on the brink of riot.