Quicksilver (48 page)

“Can the same be said of the
ladies
?” Daniel asked, following Roger and the valet into Bedlam.

“These aren’t
ladies,
” Roger said, and other than that weak jest did not even try to answer the question. “Do London a favor and take those damned clothes off. I shall have my manservant burn them.”

“The shirt is not so bad,” Daniel demurred. “Oh, I agree that it is no longer fit for wearing. But it might be made into a powder-bag for the Navy.”

“No longer in demand,” Roger said, “now that the war is over.”

“On the contrary, I say that a great many of them shall have to be made up now, as so many of the old ones are known to be defective.”

“Hmm, you
are
well-informed, for a political naif. Who has been filling your head with such ideas? Obviously a supporter of Comstock.”

“I suppose that supporters of Anglesey are saying that the powder-bags are all excellent, and it’s Comstock’s cannons that were made wrong.”

“It is universally known, among the Quality.”

“That may be. But it is known among you, and me, and a few other people, that bags were made up, containing powder that was ground fine.”

Coincidentally or not, Daniel had reached the point of complete nakedness as he was saying these words. He had a pair of drawers on; but Roger tossed him fresh ones, and averted his gaze. “Daniel! I cannot bear to see you in this state, nor can I listen to any more of your needling suspicious discourse. I will turn my back on you, and talk for a while. When I turn round again, I will behold a new man, as well
informed
as he is
attired.
”

“Very well, I suppose I’ve very little choice.”

“None whatsoever. Now, Daniel. You saw me grinding the powder fine, and putting it into the bag, and there is no point in denying it. No doubt you think the worst of me, as has been your wont since we first studied together at Trinity. Have you stopped to ask yourself, how a man in my position could possibly manage to introduce bags of powder into the magazines of a ship of the Royal Navy? Quite obviously it is impossible. Someone else must have done it. Someone with a great deal more power and reach than I can even dream of possessing.”

“The Duke of Gunfl—”

“Silence. Silence! And in silence ponder the similitudes between cannons and mouths. The simpleton beholds a cannon and phant’sies it an infallible destroyer of foes. But the veteran artilleryman knows that sometimes, when a cannon speaks, it bursts. Especially when it has been loaded in haste. When this occurs, Daniel, the foe is untouched. He may sense a distant gaseous exhalation, not puissant enough to ruffle his periwig. The eager gunner,
and all his comrades,
are blown to bits. Ponder it, Daniel. And for once in your life, show a trace of discretion. It does not really matter what the gentleman’s name was who was responsible for causing those cannons to burst. What matters is that
I had no idea what I was doing.
What do
I
, of all people, know about naval artillery? All I knew was this: I met certain gentlemen at the Royal Society. Presently they became aware that I worked in Newton’s laboratory as an assistant. One of them approached me and asked if I might do him a favor. Nothing difficult. He wanted me to grind up some gunpowder very fine and deliver it to him in wee bags. This I did, as you know. I made up half a dozen of those bags over
the course of a year. One of them blew up on the spot, thanks to you. Of the other five, I now know that one was smuggled into the ‘Siege of Maestricht,’ where it caused a cannon to explode in full view of half of London. The other four went to the Royal Navy. One was detected by Richard Comstock, who sent it to his father. One exploded a cannon during a naval engagement against the Dutch. The other two have since found their way into David Jones’s Magazine. As to my culpability: I did not understand until recently why the gentleman in question had made such an odd request of me. I did not know, when I was filling those bags, that they would be used to do murder.”

Daniel, snaking his limbs through new clothes, believed every word of this. He had long ago lost count of Roger’s moral lapses. Roger, he suspected, had broken as many of the ten commandments and committed as many of the seven deadly sins as it was in his power to do, and was actively seeking ways to break and commit those he had not yet ticked off the list. This had nothing to do with Roger’s character.
Someone
was responsible for blowing up those poor gunners, as a ploy to dishonor the Earl of Epsom: as vile an act as Daniel could imagine. Thomas More Anglesey, Duke of Gun-fleet, or one of his sons must have been at the head of the conspiracy, for as Roger had pointed out, Roger couldn’t have done it all himself. The only question then was whether Roger had understood what was being done with those powder-bags. The Angleseys would never have told him, and so he’d have had to figure it out on his own. And Roger’s career at Trinity gave no grounds to expect dazzling flashes of insight.

Believing in Roger’s innocence lifted from Daniel’s shoulders an immense weight that he had not been sensible of until it was gone. This felt so good that it triggered a few moments of Puritanical self-examination. Anything that felt so good might be a trick of the devil. Was he only
feigning
trust in Roger,
because
it felt good?

“How can you go on associating with those people when you know the atrocious thing they have done?”

“I was going to ask you.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You have been associating with them since the Plague Year, Daniel, at every meeting of the Royal Society.”

“But I did not know they were doing murder!”

“On the contrary, Daniel, you have known it ever since that night at Trinity twelve years ago when you watched Louis Anglesey murder one of your brethren.” Had he been a rather different sort of chap, Roger might have mentioned this in a cruelly triumphant
way. Had he been Drake, he’d have said it sadly, or angrily. But being Roger Comstock, he proffered it as a witticism. He did it so well that Daniel let out a wee snort of amusement before coming to his senses and stifling himself.

The terms of the transaction finally were clear. Why did Daniel refuse to hate Roger? Not out of blindness to Roger’s faults, for he saw Roger’s moral cowardice as clearly as Hooke peering through a lens at a newt. Not out of Christian forgiveness, either. He refused to hate Roger because Roger saw moral cowardice in Daniel, had done so for years, and yet did not hate Daniel. Fair’s fair. They were brothers.

As much as he had to ponder in the way of moral dilemmas vis-à-vis Roger, ’twas as nothing compared to half an hour later, when Daniel emerged, booted, bewigged, cravated, and jacketed, and equipped with a second-hand watch that Roger somehow begged off of Hooke, and climbed into the coach. For one of the women in there was Tess Charter.
Thump.

When she and the other woman were finished laughing at the look on Daniel’s face, she leaned forward and got her fingers all entangled with his. She was shockingly and alarmingly
alive
—somewhat more alive, in fact, than he was. She looked him in the eyes and spoke in her French accent: “Twooly, Daniel, eet eez ze hrole of a lifetime—portraying ze
mistress
of a gentlemen who eez too pure—too spiritual—to sink zee thoughts of zee flesh.” Then a middling London accent. “But really I prefer the challenging parts. The ability to do them’s what separates me from Nell Gwyn.”

“I wonder what separates the
King
from Nell Gwyn?” said the other woman.

“Ten inches of sheepgut with a knot in one end—if the King knows what’s good for him!” Tess returned.
Thump.

This led to more in a similar vein. Daniel turned to Roger, who was sitting next to him, and said, “Sir! What on earth makes you believe I wish to appear to have a mistress?”

“Who said anything about
appearing
to have one?” Roger answered, and when Daniel didn’t laugh, gathered himself up and said, “Poh! You could no more show up at Whitehall without a mistress, than at a duel without a sword! Come, Daniel! No one will take you seriously! They’ll think you’re hiding something!”

“And that he is—though none too effectively,” Tess said, eyeing a new convexity in Daniel’s breeches.

“I loved your work in
The Dutch Strumpet,
” Daniel tried, weakly.

Thus, down London Wall and westwards, ho!—Daniel’s every attempt to say anything
serious
pre-empted by a courtly witticism—more
often than not, so bawdy he didn’t even
understand
it, any more than Tess would understand the Proceedings of the Royal Society. Every jest followed by exaltations of female laughter and then a radical, and completely irrational, change in subject.

Just when Daniel thought he had imposed a bit of order on the conversation, the coach rattled into the middle of St. Bartholomew’s Fair. Suddenly, outside the windows, bears were dancing jigs and hermaphrodites were tottering about on stilts. Devout men and well-bred ladies would avert their eyes from such sights, but Tess and the other woman (another Comedian, who gave every indication of being Roger’s
authentic,
not
imaginary,
mistress) had no intentions of averting their gazes from
anything.
They were still chattering about what they’d seen ten minutes later as the coach moved down Holborn. Daniel decided to take his cue from Roger, who rather than trying to
talk
to the ladies merely sat and watched them, face smeared with a village idiot’s grin.

They stopped by the corner of Waterhouse Square for ritual adoration of Roger’s new lot, and to make sniping comments about Raleigh’s house: that soon-to-be-o’ershadowed pile that Raleigh’s architect had (it was speculated) blown out of his arsehole during an attaque of the bloody phlux. The ladies made comments in a similar vein about the attire of the widow Mayflower Ham, who was descending from same, on her way to Whitehall, too.

Then down past any number of fields, churches, squares,
et cetera,
named after St. Giles, and a completely gratuitous detour along Piccadilly to Comstock House, where Roger had the coach stop so that he could spend several minutes savoring the spectacle of the Silver Comstocks moving out of the building that had served as their London seat since the Wars of the Roses. Colossal paintings, depicting scenes of hunting and of naval engagements, had been pulled out and leaned against the wrought-iron fence. Below them was a clutter of smaller canvases, mostly portraits, stripped of their gilded frames, which were going to auction. Making it appear that there was a whole crowd of Silver Comstocks, mostly in outmoded doublets or neck-ruffs, milling about down there and peering out grimly through the fence. “All behind bars where they should’ve been a hundred years ago!” Roger said, and then laughed at his own jest, loud enough to draw a look from John Comstock himself, who was standing in his forecourt watching some porters maneuver out the door a mainsail-sized painting of some Continental Siege. Daniel’s eye fixed on this. Partly it was because looking at the Earl of Epsom made him melancholy. But
also it was because he had been spending so much time with Leibniz, who often spoke of paintings such as this one when talking about the mind of God. On one piece of canvas, seemingly from one fixed point of view, the artist had depicted skirmishes, sallies, cavalry charges, and the deaths of several of the principals, which had occurred in different places at different times. And this was not the only liberty he had taken with the notion of time and space, for certain events—the digging of a mine beneath a bastion, the detonation of the mine, and the ensuing battle—were shown all together at once. The images stood next to each other like pickled larvae in the Royal Society’s collection, sharing the same time for all time, and yet if you let your eye travel over them in the correct order you could make the story unfold within your mind, each event in its proper moment. This great painting did not, of course, stand alone, but was surrounded by all of the other paintings that had been carried out of the house before; its perceptions were ranged alongside others, this little Siege-world nested within a larger array of other things that the House of Comstock during its long history had perceived, and thought worthy to be set down on canvas. Now they were all being aired out and reshuffled, on a gloomy occasion. But to have this moment—the fall of the Silver Comstocks—embedded in so many old ones made it seem less terrible that it might have seemed if it had happened naked, as it were, and all alone in time and space.

T
HE
E
ARL OF
E
PSOM TURNED
his head and gazed across Piccadilly at his Golden cousin, but showed no particular emotion. Daniel had shrunk far down into the coach, where he hoped he’d be enshrouded in darkness. To him, John Comstock looked almost
relieved.
How bad could it be to live in Epsom and go hunting and fishing every day? That’s what Daniel told himself—but later the sadness and haggardness in the Earl’s face would appear in his mind’s eye at the oddest times.

“Do not become stupid now, just because you are seeing his face,” Roger said to him. “That man was a Cavalier. He led cavalry charges against the Parliamentarian foot-soldiers. Do you know what that means? Do you see that great bloody awful painting there of Comstock’s great-uncle and his friends galloping after that fox? Replace the fox with a starving yeoman, unarmed, alone, and you have a fair picture of how that man spent the Civil War.”

“I know all that,” Daniel said. “And yet, and yet, somehow I still prefer him and his family to the Duke of Gunfleet and
his
family.”

“John Comstock had to be cleared out of the way, and we had to
lose a war, before
anything
could happen,” Roger said. “As to Anglesey and his spawn, I love them even less than you do. Do not fret about them. Enjoy your triumph and your mistress. Leave Anglesey to me.”

Then to Whitehall where they, and various Bolstroods and Waterhouses and many others, watched the King sign the Declaration. As penned by Wilkins, this document had given freedom of conscience to
everyone.
The version that the King signed today was not quite so generous: it outlawed certain extreme heretics, such as Arians who didn’t believe in the Trinity. Nevertheless, it was a good day’s work. Certainly enough to justify raising several pints, in several Drury Lane taverns, to the memory of John Wilkins. Daniel’s pretend mistress accompanied him on every stage of this epochal pub-crawling campaign, which led eventually to Roger Comstock’s playhouse, and, in particular, to a back-room of that playhouse, where there happened to be a bed.