Quicksilver

“I arrived from the land, as you can see, but there shall be many who shall say that I passed through the same portal as you.”

  “Which puts us in the same boat,” Daniel proclaimed. “Now they say that there’s no honor among thieves—I wouldn’t know—but perhaps there may be a kind of honor among traitors. If I’m a traitor, I’m an honorable one; my conscience is clear, if not my reputation. So now I am holding my hand out to you, John Churchill, and you may stand there eyeing it all night long if you please. But if you would care to stand behind me and shore me up as I look into this question of Alchemy, I should like it very much if you took that hand in yours and shook it, as a gentleman; for as you have noticed the esoteric brotherhood is powerful, and I cannot work against it without a brotherhood of sorts to stand with me.”

  “You have entered into contracts before, Mr. Waterhouse?” asked Churchill, still appraising Daniel’s out-stretched hand. Daniel could sense Bob Shaftoe looking at them from one end of the causeway.

  “Yes, as when working as an architect, et cetera.”

  “Then you know every contract involves obligations reciprocal. I might agree to ‘shore you up’ when you are undermined—but in return I may call upon you from time to time.”

  Daniel’s hand did not move.

  “Very well, then,” said Churchill, reaching out across smoke, damp, and dark.

  CHARING CROSS was strewn with bonfires. But it was the green one that caught Daniel’s eye.

  “M’Lord Upnor’s town-house lies this way,” shouted Bob Shaftoe, pointing insistently in the direction of Piccadilly.

  “Work with me, Sergeant,” Daniel said, “as if I were a guide taking you on a hunt for strange game of which you know nothing.” They began to push their way across the vast cosmos of the square, which was crowded with dark matter: huge mobs pressing in round bonfires, singing Lilliburlero, and diverse knaves who’d come up out of Hogs-den to prey upon ’em, and patchwork mutts fighting over anything that escaped the attention of the knaves. Daniel lost sight of the green flames for a while and was about to give up when he saw red flames shooting up in the same place—not the usual orange-red but an unnatural scarlet. “If we should become separated, I shall meet you at the northern end of the Tilt Yard where King Street loses itself in the Cross.”

  “Right you are, Guv.”

  “Who was that boy I saw you talking to before the Bulwark, as we were leaving the Tower?”

  “A messenger from Bob Carver.”

  “Ah, what news from him?”

  “The house of Jeffreys is boarded up, and dark.”

  “If he went to the trouble of having it boarded up, then he’s done a proper job.”

  “It’s as we reckoned it, these many weeks ago, Guv,” Bob answered, “Jeffreys planned his departure well.”

  “Well for us. If he fled in a panic, how would we find him? Has Mr. Carver any other news?”

  “The intent was not to supply us with news, so much as to impress on us what a hard-working and diligent bloke he is.”

  “That’s what I was afraid of,” Daniel said, distracted by a rage of blue flame up ahead.

  “Fireworks?” Bob guessed.

  “Some plan their departures better than others,” Daniel answered.

  Finally they reached the southwestern margin of the square, where King Street bent round into Pall Mall, and the view of the park and the Spring Garden was screened by an arc of town-houses that seemed to bulge out into Charing Cross, like a dam holding back pressure behind. The bonfire that kept changing its color was planted before those houses, a bow-shot away. This one was not surrounded by any crowd. This might’ve been because the true center of drinking, singing, and sociability lay elsewhere, up towards Hay-market, or perhaps it could be laid to the fact that this fire sputtered evilly and let off vile smells. Daniel fell into orbit round it, and saw books, maps, and wooden boxes being dismantled and dissolved in the flames. A chest was being devoured, and small glass phials spilled out of it a few at a time, bursting in the heat to release jets of vapor that sometimes exploded in brilliant-colored flames.

  Bob Shaftoe nudged him and pointed toward one of the town-houses. The front door was being held open by a servant. Two younger servants were lugging a portmanteau out and down the front steps. The lid was half open and papers and books were spilling out. The servant who had held the door open let it fall to and then scurried after the others, picking up what they’d let drop, and stuffing it all together in a great wad, a double armload, which rested comfortably on his belly as he waddled across the dirt towards the fire. It looked as if he were planning to fling himself headlong into the particolored inferno, but he stopped just short and with a final grand belly-thrust projected the load of goods into the flames. A moment later the other two caught up with him and heaved the portmanteau right into perdition. The fire dimmed for a minute, seeming taken aback, but then the flames began to get their teeth into the new load of fuel, and to whiten as they built heat.

  Still circling round, Daniel stopped to stare at a map, drawn with inks of many colors upon excellent vellum. The hottest part of the fire was behind it, so the light shone through the empty places on the map—which were many, as it was a map of some mostly uncharted sea, the voids decorated with leviathans and dread-locked cannibals. There was a scattering of islands literally gilded onto the page with some sort of golden ink, labelled “Ye Islands of King Solomon.” As Daniel gazed at them, the ink finally burst into flames and burnt like trails of gunpowder; the words vanished from the world but were committed to his memory in letters of fire.

  “It is the house of M. LeFebure,” Daniel explained, walking towards it with Bob in tow. “Mark those three great windows above the entrance, glowering blood-red as the light shines through their curtains. Once I spied on Isaac Newton through those windows, using his own telescope.”

  “What was he doing?”

  “Making the acquaintance of the Earl of Upnor—who wanted to meet him so badly that he’d made arrangements for him to be followed.”

  “What is that house, then? A den of sodomites?”

  “No. It has been the chief nest of Alchemists in the city ever since the Restoration. I’ve never set foot in it, but I go there now; if I fail to come out, go to the Tower and tell your master the time has come to make good on his end of our contract.”

  The big-bellied servant had seen Daniel approaching and was standing warily at the door. “I am here to join them,” Daniel snapped, brushing past into the entrance hall.

  The place had been decorated in the Versailles way, all magnificent, as expensive as possible, and calculated to overawe the Persons of Quality who came here to buy powders and philtres from M. LeFebure. He was not here, having fled the country already. This went a long way toward explaining the fact that the house, tonight, was about as elegant as a fish-market. Servants, and two gentlemen, were bringing goods down from the upper floors, and up from the cellar, dumping them out on tables or floors, and messing through them. After a few moments Daniel realized that one of the gentleman was Robert Boyle and the other Sir Elias Ash-mole. Nine things out of ten were tossed in the general direction of the entrance to be hauled out to the fire. The rest were packed in bags and boxes for transport. Transport where, was the question. In the kitchen, a cooper was at work, sealing ancient books up inside of barrels, which suggested a sea-voyage was contemplated by someone.

  Daniel ascended the stairs, moving purposefully, as if he actually knew his way around the place. In fact, all he had to go on was vague memories of what he’d spied through the telescope twenty years ago. If they served, the room where Upnor and Newton had met was dark-paneled, with many books. Daniel had been having odd dreams about that room for two decades. Now he was finally about to enter it. But he was dead on his feet, so exhausted that everything was little different from a dream anyway.

  At least a gross of candles were burning in the stairs and the upstairs hall: little point in conserving them now. Cobwebby can
delabras had been dragged out of storage, and burdened with mismatched candles, and beeswax tapers had been thrust into frozen wax-splats on expensive polished banisters. A painting of Hermes Trismegistus had been pulled down from its hook and used to prop open the door of a little chamber, a sort of butler’s pantry at the top of the stairs, which was mostly dark; but enough light spilled in from the hall that Daniel could see a gaunt man with a prominent nose, and large dark eyes that gave him a sad preoccupied look. He was conversing with someone farther back in the room, whom Daniel could not see. He had crossed his arms, hugging an old book to himself with an index finger thrust into it to save his place. The big eyes turned Daniel’s way and regarded him without surprise.

  “Good morning, Dr. Waterhouse.”

  “Good morning, Mr. Locke. And welcome back from Dutch exile.”

  “What news?”

  “The King is run to ground at Sheerness. And what of you, Mr. Locke, shouldn’t you be writing us a new Constitution or something?”

  “I await the pleasure of the Prince of Orange,” said John Locke patiently. “In the meantime, this house is no worse a place to wait than any other.”

  “It is certainly better than where I have been living.”

  “We are all in your debt, Dr. Waterhouse.”

  Daniel turned round and walked five paces down the hall, moving now towards the front of the house, and paused before the large door at the end.

  He could hear Isaac Newton saying, “What do we know, truly, of this Viceroy? Supposing he does succeed in conveying it to Spain—will he understand its true value?”

  Daniel was tempted to stand there for a while listening, but he knew that Locke’s eyes were on his back and so he opened the door.

  Opposite were the three large windows that looked over Charing Cross, covered with scarlet curtains as big as mainsails, lit up by many tapers in sconces and candelabras curiously wrought, like vine-strangled tree-branches turned to solid silver. Daniel had a dizzy sensation of falling into a sea of red light, but his eyes adjusted, and with a slow blink his balance recovered.

  In the center of the room was a table with a top of black marble shot through with red veins. Two men were seated there, looking up at him: on Daniel’s left, the Earl of Upnor, and on his right, Isaac Newton. Posed nonchalantly in the corner of the room, pretending to read a book, was Nicolas Fatio de Duilliers.

  Daniel immediately, for some reason, saw this through the suspicious eyes of a John Churchill. Here sat a Catholic nobleman who was more at home in Versailles than in London; an Englishman of Puritan upbringing and habits, lately fallen into heresy, the smartest man in the world; and a Swiss Protestant famous for having saved William of Orange from a French plot. Just now they’d been interrupted by a Nonconformist traitor. These differences, which elsewhere sparked duels and wars, counted for naught here; their Brotherhood was somehow above such petty squabbles as the Protestant Reformation and the coming war with France. No wonder Churchill found them insidious.

  Isaac was a fortnight shy of his forty-sixth birthday. Since his hair had gone white, his appearance had changed very little; he never stopped working to eat or drink and so he was as slender as he had always been, and the only symptom of age was a deepening translucency of his skin, which brought into view tangles of azure veins strewn around his eyes. Like many College dwellers he found it a great convenience to hide his clothing—which was always in a parlous state, being not only worn and shabby but stained and burnt with diverse spirits—underneath an academic robe; but his robe was scarlet, which made him stand out vividly at the College, and here in London all the more so. He did not wear it in the street, but he was wearing it now. He had not affected a wig, so his white hair fell loose over his shoulders. Someone had been brushing that hair. Probably not Isaac. Daniel guessed Fatio.

  For the Earl of Upnor it had been a challenging couple of decades. He’d been banished once or twice for slaying men in duels, which he did as casually as a stevedore picked his nose. He had gambled away the family’s great house in London and been chased off to the Continent for a few years during the most operatic excesses of the so-called Popish Plot. He had, accordingly, muted his dress somewhat. To go with his tall black wig and his thin black moustache he was wearing an outfit that was, fundamentally, black: the de rigueur three-piece suit of waistcoat, coat, and breeches, all in the same fabric—probably a very fine wool. But the whole outfit was crusted over with embroidery done in silver thread, and thin strips of parchment or something had been involved with the needle-work to lift it off the black wool underneath and give it a three-dimensional quality. The effect was as if an extremely fine network of argent vines had grown round his body and now surrounded him and moved with him. He was wearing riding-boots with silver spurs, and was armed with a Spanish rapier whose guard was a tornadic swirl of gracefully curved steel rods with bulbous ends, like a storm of comets spiraling outwards from the grip.

  Fatio’s attire was relatively demure: a many-buttoned sort of cassock, a middling brown wig, a linen shirt, a lace cravat.

  They were only a little surprised to see him, and no more than normally indignant that he’d burst in without knocking. Upnor showed no sign of wanting to run him through with that rapier. Newton did not seem to think that Daniel’s appearing here, now, was any more bizarre than any of the other perceptions that presented themselves to Isaac in a normal day (which was probably true), and Fatio, as always, just observed everything.

  “Frightfully sorry to burst in,” Daniel said, “but I thought you’d like to know that the King’s turned up in Sheerness—not above ten miles from Castle Upnor.”

  The Earl of Upnor now made a visible effort to prevent some strong emotion from assuming control of his face. Daniel couldn’t be certain, but he thought it was a sort of incredulous sneer. While Upnor was thus busy, Daniel pressed his advantage: “The Gentleman of the Bedchamber is in the Presence as we speak, and I suppose that other elements of Court will travel down-river tomorrow, but for now he has nothing—food, drink, a bed are being improvised. As I rode past Castle Upnor yesterday evening, it occurred to me that you might have the means, there, to supply some of His Majesty’s wants—”

  “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.