Quicksilver (40 page)

“I am twenty-six.”

“So am I. We were born about sixteen forty-six. The Swedes took Prague that year, and invaded Bavaria. The Inquisition was burning Jews in Mexico. Similar terrible things were happening in England, I assume?”

“Cromwell crushed the King’s army at Newark—chased him out of the country—John Comstock was wounded—”

“And we are speaking only of kings and noblemen. Imagine the sufferings of common people and Vagabonds, who possess equal stature in God’s eyes. And yet you ask me whether my mission is
philosophick
or
diplomatic,
as if those two things can neatly be separated.”

“Rude and stupid I know, but it is my duty to make conversation. You are saying that it should be the goal of all natural philosophers to restore peace and harmony to the world of men. This I cannot dispute.”

Leibniz now softened. “Our goal is to prevent the Dutch war from growing into a general conflagration. Please do not be offended by my frankness now: the Archbishop and the Baron are followers of the Royal Society—as am I. They are Alchemists—which I am
not
, except when it is
politic.
They hope that through pursuit of Natural Philosophy I may make contacts with important figures in this country, whom it would normally be difficult to reach through
diplomatic
channels.”

“Ten years ago I might have been offended,” Daniel said. “Now, there’s nothing I’ll not believe.”

“But my interest in meeting the Lord Bishop of Chester is as pure as any human motive
can
be.”

“He will sense that, and be cheered by it,” Daniel said. “The last few years of Wilkins’s life have been sacrified entirely to politics—he has been working to dismantle the framework of theocracy, to prevent its resurgence, in the event a Papist ascends to the throne—”

“Or already
has
done so,” Leibniz said immediately.

The offhanded way in which Leibniz suggested that King Charles II might be a crypto-Catholic hinted to Daniel that it was common knowledge on the Continent. This made him feel hopelessly dull, naïve, and provincial. He had suspected the King of many crimes and deceptions, but never of baldly lying about his religion to the entire Realm.

He had plenty of time to conceal his annoyance as they were passing through the heart of the city, which had turned into a single vast and eternal building-site even as the normal business of the ‘Change and the goldsmiths’ shops continued. Paving-stones were whizzing between Daniel and the Doctor like cannonballs, shovels slicing the air around their heads like cutlasses, barrows laden with gold and silver and bricks and mud trundling like munition-carts over temporary walk-ways of planks and stomped dirt.

Perhaps reading anxiety on Daniel’s face, Leibniz said, “Just like the Rue Vivienne in Paris,” with a casual hand-wave. “I go there frequently to read certain manuscripts in the Bibliothèque du Roi.”

“I’ve been told that a copy of every book printed in France must be sent to that place.”

“Yes.”

“But it was established in the same year that we had our Fire—so I ween that it must be very small yet, as it’s had only a few years to grow.”

“A few very good years in mathematics, sir. And it also contains certain unpublished manuscripts of Descartes and Pascal.”

“But none of the classics?”

“I had the good fortune to be raised, or to raise myself, in my father’s library, which contained all of them.”

“Your father was
mathematickally
inclined?”

“Difficult to say. As a traveler comprehends a city only by viewing pictures of it drawn from differing standpoints, I know my father only by having read the books that he read.”

“I understand the similitude now, Doctor. The Bibliothèque du Roi then gives you the closest thing that currently exists to God’s understanding of the world.”

“And yet with a bigger library we could come ever so much closer.”

“But with all due respect, Doctor, I do not understand how
this
street could be anything
less
like the Rue Vivienne—we have no such Bibliothèque in England.”

“The Bibliothèque du Roi is just a
house,
you see, a house Colbert happened to buy on the Rue Vivienne—probably as an investment, because that street is the center of goldsmiths. Every ten days, from ten in the morning until noon, all of the merchants of Paris send their money to the Rue Vivienne to be counted. I sit there in Colbert’s house trying to understand Descartes, working the mathematical proofs that Huygens, my tutor, gives me, and looking out the windows as the street fills up with porters staggering under their back-loads of gold and silver, converging on a few doorways. Are you beginning to understand my riddle now?”

“Which riddle was that?”

“This box! I said it contained something infinitely more valuable than gold, and yet it could not be stolen. Which way do we turn here?”

For they’d come out into the hurricane where Threadneedle, Cornhill, Poultry, and Lombard all collided. Message-boys were flying across that intersection like quarrels from crossbows—or (Daniel suspected) like broad Hints that he was failing to Get.

LONDON CONTAINED A HUNDRED LORDS,
bishops, preachers, scholars, and gentlemen-philosophers who would gladly have provided Wilkins with a comfortable sick-bed, but he had ended up in his stepdaughter’s home in Chancery Lane, actually rather close to where the Waterhouses lived. The entrance to the place, and the street in front, were choked with sweating courtiers—not the sleek top-level ones but the dented, scarred, slightly too old and slightly too ugly ones who actually got everything done.
^*
They were milling in the street around a black coach blazoned with the arms of Count Penistone. The house was an old one (the Fire had stopped a few yards short of it). It was one of those slump-shouldered, thatch-roofed, half-timbered Canterbury Tales productions, completely outmoded by the gleaming coach and the whip-thin rapiers.

“You see—despite the purity of your motives, you’re immersed in politics already,” Daniel said. “The lady of the house is Cromwell’s niece.”

“What!?
The
Cromwell?”

“The same whose skull gazes down on Westminster from the end of a stick. Now, the owner of that excellent coach is Knott Bolstrood, Count Penistone—his father founded a sect called the Barkers, normally lumped in with many others under the pejorative term of Puritans. The Barkers are
gratuitously
radical, however—for example, they believe that Government and Church should have naught to do with each other, and that all slaves in the world should be set free.”

“But the gentlemen in front are dressed like courtiers! Are they getting ready to siege the Puritan-house?”

“They are Bolstrood’s hangers-on. You see, Count Penistone is His Majesty’s Secretary of State.”

“I had heard that King Charles the Second made a Phanatique his Secretary of State, but could not believe it.”

“Consider it—could Barkers exist in any other country? Save Amsterdam, that is.”

“Naturally not!” Leibniz said, lightly offended by the very idea. “They would be extinguished.”

“Therefore, whether or not he feels any loyally toward the King, Knott Bolstrood has no choice but to stand for a free and independent England—and so, when Dissenters accuse the King of being too close to France, His Majesty need only point to Bolstrood as the living credential of his independent foreign policy.”

“But it’s all a farce!” Leibniz muttered. “All Paris knows England’s in France’s pocket.”

“All London knows it, too—the difference is that we have three dozen theatres here—Paris has only one of them—”

Leibniz’s turn, finally, to be baffled. “I don’t understand.”

“All I am saying is that we happen to
enjoy
farces.”

“Why is Bolstrood visiting the niece of Cromwell?”

“He’s probably visiting Wilkins.”

Leibniz stopped and considered matters. “Tempting. But the protocol is impossible. I cannot enter the house!”

“Of course you can—with me,” Daniel said. “Just follow.”

“But I must go back and fetch my companions—for I do not have the
standing
to disturb the Secretary of State—”

“I do,” Daniel said. “One of my earliest memories is of watching him destroy a pipe organ with a sledgehammer. Seeing me will give him a warm feeling.”

Leibniz stopped and looked aghast; Daniel could almost see,
reflected in his eyes, the stained-glass windows and organ-pipes of some fine Lutheran church in Leipzig. “Why would he commit such an outrage!?”

“Because it was in an Anglican cathedral. He would have been about twenty—a high-spirited age.”

“Your family were followers of Cromwell?”

“It is more correct to say that Cromwell was a follower of my father—may God rest both of their souls.” But now they were in the midst of the courtier-mob, and it was too late for Leibniz to obey his instincts, and run away.

They spent several minutes pushing among progressively higher-ranking and better-dressed men, into the house and up the stairs, and finally entered a tiny low-ceilinged bedchamber. It smelled as if Wilkins had already died, but most of him still lived—he was propped up on pillows, with a board on his lap, and a fine-looking document on the board. Knott Bolstrood—forty-two years old—knelt next to the bed. He turned round to look as Daniel entered. During the ten years Knott had survived on the Common-Side of Newgate Prison, living in a dark place among murderers and lunaticks, he had developed a strong instinct for watching his back. It was as useful for a Secretary of State as it had been for a marauding Phanatique.

“Brother Daniel!”

“My lord.”

“You’ll do as well as anyone—better than most.”

“Do for what, sir?”

“Witnessing the Bishop’s signature.”

Bolstrood got a quill charged with ink. Daniel wrapped Wilkins’s puffy fingers around it. After a bit of heavy breathing on the part of its owner, the hand began to move, and a tangle of lines and curves began to take shape on the page, bearing the same relationship to Wilkins’s signature as a ghost to a man. It was a good thing, in other words, that several persons were on hand to verify it. Daniel had no idea what this document was. But from the way it was engrossed he could guess that it was meant for the eyes of the King.

Count Penistone was a man in a hurry, after that. But before he left he said to Daniel: “If you have any stock in the Duke of York’s Guinea Company, sell it—for that Popish slave-monger is going to reap the whirlwind.” Then, for maybe the second or third time in his life, Knott Bolstrood smiled.

“Show it to me, Dr. Leibniz,” Wilkins said, skipping over all of the formalities; he had not urinated in three days and so there was a certain urgency about everything.

Leibniz sat gingerly on the edge of the bed, and opened the box.

Daniel saw gears, cranks, shafts. He thought it might be a new sort of timepiece, but it had no dial and no hands—only a few wheels with numbers stamped on them.

“It owes much to Monsieur Pascal’s machine, of course,” Leibniz said, “but this one can
multiply
numbers as well as add and subtract them.”

“Make it work for me, Doctor.”

“I must confess to you that it is not finished yet.” Leibniz frowned, tilted the box toward the light, and blew into it sharply. A cockroach flew out and traced a flailing parabola to the floor and scurried under the bed. “This is just a demo’. But when it is finished, it will be
magnifique.
”

“Never mind,” Wilkins said. “It uses denary numbers?”

“Yes, like Pascal’s—but binary would work better—”

“You needn’t tell
me
,” Wilkins said, and then rambled for at least a quarter of an hour, quoting whole pages from relevant sections of the
Cryptonomicon.

Leibniz finally cleared his throat and said, “There are mechanical reasons, too—with denary numbers, too many meshings of gears are necessary—friction and backlash play havoc.”

“Hooke! Hooke could build it,” Wilkins said. “But enough of machines. Let us speak of Pansophism. Tell me, now—have you met with success in Vienna?”

“I have written to the Emperor several times, describing the French king’s Bibliothèque du Roi—”

“Trying to incite his Envy—?”

“Yes—but in his hierarchy of vices, Sloth would appear to reign unchallenged by Envy or anything else. Have you met with success here, my lord?”

“Sir Elias Ashmole is starting a brave library—but he’s distracted and addled with Alchemy. I have had to attend to more fundamental matters—” Wilkins said, and gestured weakly toward the door through which Bolstrood had departed. “I believe that binary arithmetickal engines will be of enormous significance—Oldenburg, too, is most eager.”

“If I could carry your work forward, sir, I would consider myself privileged.”

“Now we are only being polite—I have no time. Waterhouse!”

Leibniz closed up his box. The Bishop of Chester watched the lid closing over the engine, and his eyelids almost closed at the same moment. But then he summoned up a bit more strength. Leibniz backed out of the way, and Daniel took his place.

“My Lord?”

It was all he could get out. Drake had been his father, but John Wilkins really
was
his lord in almost every sense of the word. His lord, his bishop, his minister, his professor.

“The responsibility now falls upon you to make it all happen.”

“My Lord? To make
what
happen?”

But Wilkins was either dead or asleep.

THEY STUMBLED THROUGH
a small dark kitchen and out into the maze of yards and alleys behind Chancery Lane, where they drew the attention of diverse roosters and dogs. Pursued by their hue and cry, Mr. Waterhouse and Dr. Leibniz emerged into a district of theatres and coffee-houses. Any one of those coffee-houses would have sufficed, but they were close to Queen Street—another of Hooke’s paving-projects. Daniel had begun to feel like a flea under the Great Microscope. Hooke subtended about half of the cosmos, and made Daniel feel as if he were flitting from one place of refuge to another, even though he had nothing to hide. Leibniz was hale, and seemed to enjoy exploring a new city. Daniel got them turned back in the direction of the river. He was trying to make out what responsibility, specifically, had just been placed on his shoulders by Wilkins. He realized—after a quarter of an hour of being a very poor conversationalist—that Leibniz might have ideas on the subject.