Quicksilver (14 page)

“But with the End of Days drawing so near—”

“Only a few months ago, at one of the last meetings of the Royal Society, Mr. Daniel Coxe said that mercury had been found running like water in a chalk-pit at Line. And Lord Brereton said that at an Inn in St. Alban’s, quicksilver was found running in a saw-pit.”

“And you suppose this means—what.”

“Perhaps this flourishing of so many kinds—natural philosophy, plague, the power of King Louis, orgies at Whitehall, quicksilver welling up from the bowels of the earth—is a necessary preparation for the Apocalypse—the generative spirit rising up like a tide.”

“That much is obvious, Daniel. I wonder, though, whether there is any point in furthering your studies when we are so close.”

“Would you admire a farmer who let his fields be overrun with weeds, simply because the End was near?”

“No, of course not. Your point is well taken.”

“If we have a duty to be alert for the signs of the End Times, then let me go, Father. For if the signs are comets, then the first to know will be the astronomers. If the signs are plague, the first to know—”

“—will be physicians. Yes, I understand. But are you suggesting that those who study natural philosophy can acquire some kind of occult knowledge—special insight into God’s Creation, not available to the common Bible-reading man?”

“Er…I suppose that’s
quite clearly
what I’m suggesting.”

Drake nodded. “That is what I thought. Well, God gave us brains for a reason—
not
to use those brains would be a sin.” He got up and carried his plate to the kitchen, then went to a small desk of many drawers in the parlor and broke out all of the gear needed to write on paper with a quill. “Haven’t much coin just now,” he mumbled, moving the quill about in a sequence of furious scribbles separated by long flowing swoops, like a sword-duel. “There you are.”

Mr. Ham pray pay to the bearer one pound I say £1—of that money of myne which you have in your hands upon sight of this Bill

Drake Waterhouse London

“What is this instrument, Father?”

“Goldsmith’s Note. People started doing this about the time you left for Cambridge.”

“Why does it say ‘the bearer’? Why not ‘Daniel Waterhouse’?”

“Well, that’s the beauty of it. You could, if you chose, use this to pay a one-pound debt—you’d simply hand it to your creditor and he could then nip down to Ham’s and get a pound in coin of the realm. Or he could use it to pay one of
his
debts.”

“I see. But in this case it simply means that if I go into the City and present this to Uncle Thomas, or one of the other Hams…”

“They’ll do what the note orders them to do.”

It was, then, a normal example of Drake’s innate fiendishness. Daniel was perfectly welcome to flee to Epsom—the seat of John Comstock, the arch-Anglican—and study Natural Philosophy until, literally, the End of the World. But in order to obtain the
means
, he would have to demonstrate his faith by walking all the way across London at the height of the Plague. Trial by ordeal it was.

The next morning: on with a coat and a down-at-heels pair of riding-boots, even though it was a warm summer day. A scarf to breathe through.
^*
A minimal supply of clean shirts and drawers (if he was feeling well when he reached Epsom, he’d send for more). A rather small number of books—tiny student octavo volumes of the usual Continental savants, their margins and interlinear spaces now caulked with his notes. A letter he’d received from Wilkins, with an enclosure from one Robert Hooke, during a rare spate of mail last week. All went into a bag, the bag on the end of a staff, and the staff over his shoulder—made him look somewhat Vagabondish, but many people in the city had turned to robbery, as normal sources of employment had been shut down, and there were sound reasons to look impoverished and carry a big stick.

Drake, upon Daniel’s departure: “Will you tell old Wilkins that I do not think the less of him for having become an Anglican, as I have the most serene confidence that he has done so in the interest of
reforming
that church, which as you know has been
the steady goal of those of us who are scorned by others as Puritans.”

And for Daniel: “I want that you should take care that the plague should not infect you—not the Black Plague, but the plague of Skepticism so fashionable among Wilkins’s crowd. In some ways your soul might be safer in a brothel than among certain Fellows of the Royal Society.”

“It is not skepticism for its own sake, Father. Simply an awareness that we are prone to error, and that it is difficult to view anything impartially.”

“That is fine when you are talking about comets.”

“I’ll not discuss religion, then. Good-bye, Father.”

“God be with you, Daniel.”

H
E OPENED THE DOOR,
trying not to flinch when outside air touched his face, and descended the steps to the road called Hol-born, a river of pounded dust (it had not rained in a while). Drake’s house was a new (post-Cromwell) half-timbered building on the north side of the road, one of a line of mostly wooden houses that formed a sort of fence dividing Holborn from the open fields on its north, which stretched all the way to Scotland. The buildings across the way, on the south side of Holborn, were the same but two decades older (pre-Civil War). The ground was flat except for a sort of standing wave of packed dirt that angled across the fields, indeed across Holborn itself, not far away, off to his right—as if a comet had landed on London Bridge and sent up a ripple in the earth, which had spread outwards until it had gone just past Drake’s house and then frozen. These were the remains of the earth-works that London
^*
had thrown up early in the Civil War, to defend against the King’s armies. There’d been a gate on Holborn and a star-shaped earthen fort nearby, but the gate had been torn down a long time ago and the fort blurred into a grassy hummock guarded by the younger and more adventurous cattle.

Daniel turned left, towards London. This was utter madness. But the letter from Wilkins, and the enclosure from Hooke—a Wilkins protégé from his Oxford days, and now Curator of Experiments of the Royal Society—contained certain requests. They were phrased politely. Perhaps not so politely in Hooke’s case. They had
let Daniel know that he could be of great service to them by fetching certain items out of certain buildings in London.

Daniel could have burned the letter and claimed it had never arrived. He could have gone to Epsom without any of the items on the list, pleading the Bubonic Plague as his excuse. But he suspected that Wilkins and Hooke did not care for excuses any more than Drake did.

By going to Trinity at exactly the wrong moment, Daniel had missed out on the first five years of the Royal Society of London. Lately he had attended a few meetings, but always felt as if his nose were pressed up against the glass.

Today he would pay his dues by walking into London. It was hardly the most dangerous thing anyone had done in the study of Natural Philosophy.

He put one boot in front of the other, and found that he had not died yet. He did it again, then again. The place seemed eerily normal for a short while as long as you ignored the continuous ringing of death-knells from about a hundred different parish churches. On a closer look, many people had adorned the walls of their houses with nearly hysterical pleas for God’s mercy, perhaps thinking that like the blood of the lambs on Israel’s door-posts, these graffiti might keep the Angel of Death from knocking. Wagons came and went on Holborn only occasionally—empty ones going into town, stained and reeking, with vanguards and rearguards of swooping birds cutting swaths through the banks of flies that surrounded them—these were corpse-wains returning from their midnight runs to the burial-pits and churchyards outside the town. Wagons filled with people, escorted by pedestrians with hand-bells and red sticks, crept out of town. Just near the remains of those earth-works where Holborn terminated at its intersection with the road to Oxford, a pest-house had been established, and when it had filled up with dead people, another, farther away, to the north of the Tyburn gallows, at Marylebone. Some of the people on the wagons appeared normal, others had reached the stage where the least movement caused them hellish buboe-pain, and so even without the bells and red sticks the approach of these wagons would have been obvious from the fusillade of screams and hot prayers touched off at every bump in the road. Daniel and the very few other pedestrians on Holborn backed into doorways and breathed through scarves when these wagons passed by.

Through Newgate and the stumps of the Roman wall, then, past the Prison, which was silent, but not empty. Towards the square-topped tower of Saint Paul’s, where an immense bell was
being walloped by tired ringers, counting the years of the dead. That old tower leaned to one side, and had for a long time, so that everyone in London had stopped noticing that it did. In these circumstances, though, it seemed to lean more, and made Daniel suddenly nervous that it was about to fall over on him. Just a few weeks ago, Robert Hooke and Sir Robert Moray had been up in its belfry conducting experiments with two-hundred-foot-long pendulums. Now the cathedral was fortified within a rampart of freshly tamped earth, the graves piled up a full yard above ground level.

The old front of the church had become half eaten away by coal-smoke, and a newfangled Classical porch slapped onto it some three or four decades ago. But the new columns were already decaying, and they were marred from where shops had been built between them during Cromwell’s time. During those years, Round-head cavalry had pulled the furniture up from the western half of the church and chopped it up for firewood, then used the empty space as a vast stable for nearly a thousand horses, selling their dung as fuel, to freezing Londoners, for 4d a bushel. Meanwhile, in the eastern half Drake and Bolstrood and others had preached three-hour sermons to diminishing crowds. Now King Charles was supposedly fixing the place up, but Daniel could see no evidence that anything had been done.

Daniel went round the south side of the church even though it was not the most direct way, because he wanted to have a look at the south transept, which had collapsed some years ago. Rumor had it that the bigger and better stones were being carted away and used to build a new wing of John Comstock’s house on Piccadilly. Indeed, many of the stones had been removed to somewhere, but of course no one was working there now except for gravediggers.

Into Cheapside, where men on ladders were clambering into upper-story windows of a boarded-up house to remove limp, exhausted children who’d somehow outlived their families. Down in the direction of the river, the only gathering of people Daniel had seen: a long queue before the house of Dr. Nathaniel Hodges, one of the only physicians who hadn’t fled. Not far beyond that, on Cheapside, the house of John Wilkins himself. Wilkins had sent Daniel a key, which turned out not to be necessary, as his house had already been broken into. Floorboards pried up, mattresses gutted so that the place looked like a barn for all the loose straw and lumber on the floor. Whole ranks of books pawed from the shelves to see if anything was hidden behind. Daniel went round
and re-shelved the books, holding back two or three newish ones that Wilkins had asked him to fetch.

Then to the Church of St. Lawrence Jewry.
^*
“Follow the Drainpipes, find the
Amphib’ns
,” Wilkins had written. Daniel walked round the churchyard, which was studded with graves, but had not reached the graves-on-top-of-graves stage—Wilkins’s parishioners were mostly prosperous mercers who’d fled to their country houses. At one corner of the roof, a red copper vein descended from the downhill end of a rain-gutter, then ducked into a holed window beneath. Daniel entered the church and traced it down into a cellar where dormant God-gear was cached to expect the steady wheeling of the liturgical calendar (Easter and Christmas stuff, e.g.) or sudden reversals in the prevailing theology (High Church people like the late Bishop Laud wanted a fence round the altar so parish dogs couldn’t lift their legs on the Lord’s Table, Low Church primitives like Drake didn’t; the Rev. Wilkins, more in the Drake mold, had stashed the fence and rail down here). This room hummed, almost shuddered, as if a choir of monks were lurking in the corners intoning one of their chants, but it was actually the buzzing of a whole civilization of flies, so large that many of them seemed to be singing bass—these had grown from the corpses of rats, which carpeted the cellar floor like autumn leaves. It smelled that way, too.

The drain-pipe came into the cellar from a hole in the floor above, and emptied into a stone baptismal Font—a jumbo, total-baby-immersion style of Font—that had been shoved into a corner, probably around the time that King Henry VIII had kicked out the Papists. Daniel guessed as much from the carvings, which were so thick with symbols of Rome that to remove them all would have destroyed it structurally. When this vessel filled with rain-water from the drain-pipe it would spill excess onto the floor, and it would meander off into a corner and seep into the
earth—perhaps this source of drinking-water had attracted the sick rats.

In any case the top of the font was covered with a grille held down by a couple of bricks—from underneath came contented croaking sounds. A gout of pink shot through an interstice and speared a fly out of midair, paused humming-taut for an instant, then snapped back. Daniel removed the bricks and pulled up the grille and looked at, and was looked at by, half a dozen of the healthiest frogs he’d ever seen, frogs the size of terriers, frogs that could tongue sparrows out of the air. Standing there in the City of Death, Daniel laughed. The generative spirit ran amok in the bodies of rats, whose corpses were transmuted into flies, which gave up their spirit to produce happy blinking green frogs.

Faint ticks, by the thousands, merged into a sound like wind-driven sleet against a windowpane. Daniel looked down to see it was just hordes of fleas who had abandoned the rat corpses and converged on him from all across the cellar, and were now ricocheting off his leather boots. He rummaged until he found a bread-basket, packed the frogs into it, imprisoned them loosely under a cloth, and walked out of there.