Quicksilver (113 page)

His forehead was on the table. Not a good way to work. Not a good way to sleep either, unless your neck was so torn up as to make lying down impossible, in which case it was the
only
way to sleep. And Daniel
had
been sleeping. The pages under his face were a sea of awful light, the unfair light of noon.

“Truly you are an inspiration to all Natural Philosophers, Daniel Waterhouse.”

Daniel sat up. He was stiff as a grotesque. He could feel and hear the scab-work on his neck cracking. Seated two tables away, quill in hand, was Nicolas Fatio de Duilliers.

“Sir!”

Fatio held up a hand. “I do not mean to disturb you, there is no need for—”

“Ah, but there is a need for me to express my gratitude. I have not seen you since you saved the life of the Prince of Orange.”

Fatio closed his eyes for a moment. “‘Twas like a conjunction of planets, purely fortuitous, reflecting no distinction on me, and let us say no more of it.”

“I learned only recently that you were in town—that your life was in danger so long as you remained on the Continent. Had I known as much earlier, I’d have offered you whatever hospitality I could—”

“And if I were worthy of the title of gentleman, I’d have waited for that offer before making myself at home here,” Fatio returned.

“Isaac of course has given you the run of the place and that is splendid.”

Daniel now noticed Fatio gazing at him with a penetrating, analytical look that reminded him of Hooke peering through a lens. From Hooke it was not objectionable, somehow. From Fatio it was mildly offensive. Of course Fatio was wondering how Daniel knew that he’d been hobnobbing with Isaac. Daniel could have told him the story about Jeffreys and the Star Chamber, but it would only have confused matters more.

Fatio now appeared to notice, for the first time, the damage to Daniel’s neck. His eyes saw all, but they were so big and luminous that it was impossible for him to conceal what he was gazing at; unlike the eyes of Jeffreys, which could secretly peer this way and that in the shadow of their deep embrasures, Fatio’s eyes could never be used discreetly.

“Don’t ask,” Daniel said. “You, sir, suffered an honorable wound on the beach. I’ve suffered one, not so honorable, but in the same cause, in London.”

“Are you quite all right, Doctor Waterhouse?”

“Splendid of you to inquire. I am fine. A cup of coffee and I’ll be as good as new.”

Whereupon Daniel snatched up his papers and repaired to the coffee-house, which was full of people and yet where he felt more privacy than under the eyes of Fatio.

The binary digits hidden in the subtleties of Eliza’s handwriting became, in decimal notation,

4 16 6 18 16 12 17 10

which when he subtracted 3 from each (that being the key hidden in the
I Ching
reference) became

9 1 13 3 15 13 9 14
7…
which said,

I AM COMING…

THE FULL DECIPHERMENT
took a while, because Eliza provided details concerning her travel plans, and wrote of all she wanted to do while she was in London. When he was finished writing out the message he came alive to the fact that he had sat for a long time, and consumed much coffee, and needed to urinate in the worst way. He could not recall the last time he had made water. And so
he went back to a sort of piss-hole in the corner of the tiny court in back of the coffeehouse.

Nothing happened, and so after about half a minute he bent forward as if bowing, and braced his forehead against the stone wall. He had learned that this helped to relax some of the muscles in his lower abdomen and make the urine come out more freely. That stratagem, combined with some artful shifting of the hips and deep breathing, elicited a few spurts of rust-colored urine. When it ceased to work, he turned round, pulled his garments up around his waist, and squatted to piss in the Arab style. By shifting his center of gravity just so, he was able to start up a kind of gradual warm seepage that would provide relief if he kept it up for a while.

This gave him lots of time to think of Eliza, if spinning phant’sies could be named thinking. It was plain from her letter that she expected to visit Whitehall Palace. Which signified little, since any person who was wearing clothes and not carrying a lighted granadoe could go in and wander about the place. But since Eliza was a Countess who dwelt at Versailles, and Daniel (in spite of Jeffreys) a sort of courtier, when she said she wanted to visit Whitehall it meant that she expected to stroll and sup with Persons of Quality. Which could easily be arranged, since the Catholic Francophiles who made up most of the King’s court would fall all over themselves making way for Eliza, if only to get a look at the spring fashions.

But to arrange it would require planning—again, if the dreaming of fatuous dreams could be named planning. Like an astronomer plotting his tide-tables, Daniel had to project the slow wheeling of the seasons, the liturgical calendar, the sessions of Parliament and the progress of various important people’s engagements, terminal diseases, and pregnancies into the time of the year when Eliza was expected to show up.

His first thought had been that Eliza would be here at just the right time: for in another fortnight the King was going to issue a new Declaration of Indulgence that would make Daniel a hero, at least among Nonconformists. But as he squatted there he began to count off the weeks, tick, tick, tick, like the drops of urine detaching themselves one by one from the tip of his yard, and came aware that it would be much longer before Eliza actually got here—she’d be arriving no sooner than mid-May. By that time, the High Church priests would have had several Sundays to denounce Indulgence from their pulpits; they’d say it wasn’t an act of Christian toleration at all, but a stalking-horse for Popery, and Daniel Waterhouse a dupe at best and a traitor at worst. Daniel might have to go
live
at Whitehall around then, just to be safe.

It was while imagining
that—
living like a hostage in a dingy chamber at Whitehall, protected by John Churchill’s Guards—that Daniel recalled another datum from his mental ephemeris, one that stopped up his pissing altogether.

The Queen was pregnant. To date she’d produced no children at all. The pregnancy seemed to have come on more suddenly than human pregnancies customarily did. Perhaps they’d been slow to announce it because they’d expected it would only end in yet another miscarriage. But it seemed to have taken, and the size of her abdomen was now a matter of high controversy around Whitehall. She was expected to deliver in late May or early June—just the same time that Eliza would be visiting.

Eliza was using Daniel to get inside the Palace so that she, Eliza, could know as early as possible whether King James II had a legitimate heir, and adjust her investments accordingly. This should have been as obvious as that Daniel had a big stone in his bladder, but somehow Daniel managed to finish what he was doing and go back into the coffee-house without becoming aware of either.

The only person who seemed to understand matters was Robert Hooke, who was in the same coffee-house. He was
talking,
as usual, to Sir Christopher Wren. But he had been
observing
Daniel, this whole time, through an open window. He had the look on his face of a man who was determined to speak plainly of unpleasant facts, and Daniel managed to avoid him.

JULY 1688

To d’Avaux

Monsieur,

As you requested, I have changed over to the new cypher. To me it seems preposterous to imagine that the Dutch had broken the old one and read all of your letters! But, as always, you are the soul of discretion, and I will follow whatever precautions you demand of me.

It was good that you wrote me that lovely, if vaguely
sarcastic, letter of congratulations on the occasion of my being accorded my rightful hereditary title (since we are now of equal rank—whatever doubts you may harbor as to the legitimacy of my title—I hope you are not offended that I address you as Monsieur instead of Monseigneur now). Until your letter arrived, I had not heard from you in many months. At first, I assumed that the Prince of Orange’s vulgar over-reaction to the so-called abduction attempt had left you isolated in the Hague, and unable to send letters out. As months went by, I began to worry that your affection for your most humble and obedient servant had cooled. Now I can see that this was all just idle phant’sy—the sort of aimless fretting to which my sex is so prone. You and I are as close as ever. So I will try to write a good letter and entice you to write me back.

Business first: I have not tallied the numbers for the second quarter of 1688, and so please keep what follows in confidence from the other investors, but I am confident that we have made out better than anyone suspects. True, V.O.C. stock has been performing miserably, and yet the market has been too volatile to make a winning proposition out of selling it short or playing derivatives. Yet a few things—all in London, strangely enough—have saved our investments from disaster. One is traffic in commodities, particularly silver. England’s coinage is becoming more debased every day, counterfeiters are a plague on the land, and, not to bore you with details, this entails flows of gold and silver in and out of that island from which we can profit if we make the right bets.

You may wonder how I can possibly know which bets to make, living as I do in Versailles. Let me ease your concerns by explaining to you that I have made two visits to London since I last saw you, one in February and one in May, around the time that the son of King James II was born. The second visit was mandatory, of course, for everyone knew that the Queen of England was pregnant, and that the future of Britain and of Europe hinged upon her producing a legitimate male heir. The markets in Amsterdam were bound to react strongly to any news from Whitehall and so I had to be there. I have seduced an Englishman who is close to the King—so close that he was able to get me into Whitehall during the time that the Queen went into labor. Since this is a business report, Monsieur, I’ll say no more here; but allow me to mention that there are certain peculiarities surrounding
the delivery of this infant with which I’ll entertain you some other time.

The Englishman is a figure of some note in the Royal Society. He has an older half-brother who makes money in more ways than I can enumerate. The family has old connections to the goldsmith’s shops that used to be situated around Cornhill and Threadneedle, and newer connections to the
banca
that was set up by Sir Richard Apthorp after Charles II put many of the goldsmiths out of business. If you are not familiar with a
banca,
it means something akin to a goldsmith, except that they have dropped any pretense of goldsmithing
per se;
they are financiers dealing in metal and paper. Odd as it might sound, this type of business actually makes sense, at least in the context of London, and Apthorp is doing well by it. It was through this connexion that I became aware of the trends in silver and gold mentioned earlier, and was able to make the right bets, as it were.

Lacking the refinement of the French, the English have no equivalent of Versailles, so the high and mighty, the adherents of diverse religions,
commerçants,
and Vagabonds are all commingled in London. You’ve spent time in Amsterdam, which may give you some idea of what London is like, except that London is not nearly as well organized. Much of the mixing takes place in coffee-houses. Surrounding the ‘Change are diverse coffee- and chocolate-houses that, over time, have come to serve specific clientele. Birds of a feather flock together and so those who trade in East India Company stocks go to one place and so forth. Now as the overseas trade of England has waxed, the business of under-writing ships and other risky ventures has become a trade of some significance in and of itself. Those who are in the market for insurance have recently begun going to Lloyd’s Coffeehouse, which has, for whatever reason, become the favorite haunt of the underwriters. This arrangement works well for buyer and seller alike: the buyer can solicit bids from diverse underwriters simply by strolling from table to table, the sellers can distribute the risks by spontaneously forming associations. I hope I am not boring you to death, Monsieur, but it is a fascinating thing to watch, and you yourself have now made a bit of money from this quarter, which you can use to buy yourself a picaroon-romance if my discourse is too tedious.
Tout le monde
at Versailles agree that
L’Emmerdeur in Barbary
is
a good read, and I have it on high authority that a copy was spied in the King’s bedchamber.

Enough of business; now, gossip.

Madame deigns to recognize me now that I am known to be a Countess. For the longest time, she regarded me as a parasite, a strangling vine, and so I expected she would be the last person at Court to accept me as a noblewoman. But she astonished me with a welcome that was courteous and almost warm, and begrudged me a few moments’ polite conversation, when I encountered her in the gardens the other day. I believe her previous coldness toward me came from two reasons. One is that like all the other foreign royals,
la Palatine
(as Liselotte is sometimes referred to here) is insecure about her rank, and tends to exalt herself by belittling those whose bloodlines are even more questionable than hers. This is not an attractive feature but it is all too human! The second reason is that her chief rival at Court is de Main-tenon, who came up from a wretched state to become the unofficial Queen of France. And so whenever Madame sees a woman at Court who has aspirations, it reminds her of the one she hates.

Many nobles of ancient families sneer at me because I handle money. Liselotte is not, however, one of these. On the contrary, I believe it explains why she has accepted me.

Now that I have spent two years in the household of Mme. la duchesse d’Oyonnax, surrounded by the very type of ambitious young woman Madame despises so much, I can understand why she takes such care to avoid them. Those girls have very few assets: their names, their bodies, and (if they are lucky enough to have been born with any) their wits. The first of these—their names, and the pedigrees attached—suffice to get them in the gates. They are like an invitation to the ball. But most of those families have more liabilities than assets. Once one of those girls has found a position in some household at Versailles, she has only a few years to make arrangements for the remainder of her life. She is like a plucked rose in a vase. Every day at dawn she looks out the window to see a gardener driving a wagon loaded with wilted flowers that are taken out to the countryside to be used for mulch, and the similitude to her own future is clear. In a few years she will be outshined, at all the parties, by younger girls. Her brothers will inherit any assets
the family might have. If she can marry well, as Sophie did, she may have a life to look forward to; if not, she will be shipped off to some convent, as two of Sophie’s beautiful and brilliant sisters were. When that desperation is combined with the heedless irresponsible nature of young persons generally, cruelty becomes mundane.

It’s only reasonable for Madame to want to avoid young women of that type. She has always assumed that I was one of them—having no way to distinguish me from the others. But lately, as I mentioned, she has become aware that I handle investments. This sets me apart—it tells her that I have interests and assets outside of the intrigues of Court and so am not as dangerous as the others. In effect, she is treating me as if I had just married a rich handsome Duke, and gotten all my affairs in order. Instead of a cut rose in a vase, I am a rosebush with living roots in rich soil.

Or perhaps I’m reading too much into a brief conversation!

She asked me if the hunting was good on Qwghlm. Knowing how much she loves to hunt, I told her it was miserable, unless throwing stones at rats qualified—and how, pray tell, was the hunting here at Versailles? Of course I meant the vast game parks that the King has constructed around the château, but Liselotte shot back, “Indoors or out?”

“I have seen game taken indoors,” I allowed, “but only through trapping or poisoning, which are common
peasant
vices.”

“Qwghlmians are more accustomed to the
outdoor
life?”

“If only because our dwellings keep getting blown down, madame.”

“Can you ride, mademoiselle?” she asked.

“After a fashion—for I learned
bareback
style,” I answered.

“There are no saddles where you come from?”

“In olden days there were, for we would suspend them from tree-branches overnight, to prevent them from being eaten by small creatures in the night-time. But then the English cut down the trees, and so now it is our custom to ride bareback.”

“I should like to see that,” she returned, “but it is hardly proper.”

“We are guests in the King’s house and must abide by his standards of propriety,” I said dutifully.

“If you can ride well in a saddle
here,
I shall invite you to St. Cloud—that is
my
estate, and you may abide by
my
rules there.”

“Do you think Monsieur would object?”

“My husband objects to
everything
I do,” she said, “and so he objects to
nothing.
”

In my next letter, I’ll let you know whether I passed the riding-test, and got the invitation to St. Cloud.

And I will send the quarterly figures as well!

Eliza de la Zeur