Quicksilver (21 page)

T
HE TEMPERATURE AT NIGHT
began to fall below freezing, and so it was time to calibrate thermometers. Daniel and Charles and Hooke had been making them for some weeks out of yard-long glass tubes, filled with spirits of wine, dyed with cochineal. But they had no markings on them. On cold nights they would bundle themselves up and immerse those thermometers in tubs of distilled water and then sit there for hours, giving the tubs an occasional stir, and waiting. When the water froze, if they listened carefully enough, they could hear a faint searing, splintering noise come out of the tub as flakes of ice shot across the surface—then they’d rouse themselves into action, using diamonds to make a neat scratch on each tube, marking the position of the red fluid inside.

Hooke kept a square of black velvet outside so that it would stay cold. When it snowed during the daytime, he would take his microscope outside and spread the velvet out on the stage and peer at any snowflakes that happened to fall on it. Daniel saw, as Hooke did, that each one was unique. But again Hooke saw something Daniel missed: “in any particular snowflake, all six arms are the same—why does this happen? Why shouldn’t each of the six arms develop in a different and unique shape?”

“Some central organizing principle must be at work, but—?” Daniel said.

“That is too obvious to even
bother
pointing out,” Hooke said. “With better lenses, we could peer into the core of a snowflake and discover that principle at work.”

A week later, Hooke opened up the thorax of a live dog and removed all of its ribs to expose the beating heart. But the lungs had gone flaccid and did not seem to be doing their job.

The screaming sounded almost human. A man with an expensive voice came down from John Comstock’s house to enquire about it. Daniel, too bleary-eyed to see clearly and too weary to think, took him for a head butler or something. “I shall write an explanation, and a note of apology to him,” Daniel mumbled, looking about for a quill, rubbing his blood-sticky hand on his breeches.

“To
whom
, prithee? asked the butler, amused. Though he seemed young for a head-butler. In his early thirties. He was in a linen night-dress. His scalp glistered with a fine carpet of blond stubble, the mark of a man who always wore a periwig.

“The Earl of Epsom.”

“Why not write it to the Duke of York?”

“Very well then, I’ll write it to him.”

“Then why not dispense with writing altogether and simply tell me what the hell you are doing?”

Daniel took this for insolence until he looked the visitor in the face and realized it was the Duke of York in person.

He really ought to bow, or something. Instead of which he jerked. The Duke made a gesture with his hand that seemed to mean that the jerk was accepted as due obeisance and could they please get on with the conversation now.

“The Royal Society—” Daniel began, thrusting that word
Royal
out in front of him like a shield, “has brought a dead dog to life with another’s blood, and has now embarked on a study of artificial
breath.
”

“My brother is fond of your Society,” said James, “or
his
Society I should say, for he made it Royal.” This, Daniel suspected, was to explain why he was not going to have them all horsewhipped. “I do wonder at the noise. Is it expected to continue all night?”

“On the contrary, it has already ceased,” Daniel pointed out.

The Lord High Admiral preceded him into the kitchen, where Hooke and Wilkins had thrust a brass pipe down the dog’s windpipe and connected it to the same trusty pair of bellows they’d used to make the dead man’s head speak. “By pumping the bellows they were able to inflate and deflate the lungs, and prevent the dog
from asphyxiating,” explained Charles Comstock, after the experimenters had bowed to the Duke. “Now it only remains to be seen how long the animal can be kept alive in this way. Mr. Waterhouse and I shall spell each other at the bellows until Mr. Hooke pronounces an end to the experiment.”

At the mention of Daniel’s family name, the Duke flicked his eyes towards him for a moment.

“If it must suffer in the name of your inquiry, thank Heaven it does so quietly,” the Duke remarked, and turned to leave. The others would follow; but the Duke stopped them with a “Do carry on, as you were.” But to Daniel he said, “A word, if you please, Mr. Water-house,” and so Daniel escorted him out onto the lawn half wondering whether he was about to be carved up worse than the dog.

A few moments previously, he’d mastered a daft impulse to tackle his royal highness before his royal highness reached the kitchen, for fear that his royal highness would be disgusted by what was going on in there. But he’d not reckoned on the fact that the Duke, young though he was, had fought in a lot of battles, both at sea and on land. Which was to say that as bad as this business with the dog was, the Duke of York had seen much worse done to
humans.
The R.S., far from seeming like a band of mad ruthless butchers, were dilettantes by his standards. Further grounds (as if any were wanted!) for Daniel to feel queasy.

Daniel really knew of no way to regulate his actions other than to be rational. Princes were taught a thing or two about being rational, as they were taught to play a little lute and dance a passable ricercar. But what drove their actions was their own force of will; in the end they did as they pleased, rational or not. Daniel had liked to tell himself that rational thought led to better actions than brute force of will; yet here was the Duke of York all but rolling his eyes at them and their experiment, seeing naught that was new.

“A friend of mine brought back something nasty from France,” his royal highness announced.

It took Daniel a long time to decrypt this. He tried to understand it in any number of different ways, but suddenly the knowledge rumbled through his mind like a peal of thunder through a coppice. The Duke had said:
I have syphilis
.

“Shame, that,” Daniel said. For he was not sure, yet, that he had translated it correctly. He must be ever so careful and vague lest this conversation degenerate into a comedy of errors ending with his death by rapier-thrust.

“Some are of the opinion that mercury cures it.”

“It is also a poison, though,” Daniel said.

Which was common knowledge; but it seemed to confirm, in the mind of James Stuart, Duke of York and Lord High Admiral, that he was talking to just the right chap. “Surely with so many clever Doctors in the Royal Society, working on artificial breath and such, there must be some thought of how to cure a man such as my friend.”

And his wife and his children,
Daniel thought, for James must have either gotten it from, or passed it on to, Anne Hyde, who had therefore probably given it to the daughters, Mary and Anne. To date, James’s older brother the King had not been able to produce any legitimate children. There were plenty of bastards like Monmouth. But none eligible to inherit the throne. And so this nasty thing that James had brought back from France was really a matter of whether the Stuart dynasty was to survive.

This raised a fascinating side question. With a whole cottage full of Royal Society Fellows to choose from, why had James carefully chosen to speak with the one who happened to be the son of a Phanatique?

“It is a sensitive matter,” the Duke remarked, “the sort of thing that stains a man’s honor, if it is bandied about.”

Daniel readily translated this as follows:
If you tell anyone, I’ll send someone round to engage you in a duel
. Not that anyone would pay any notice, anyway, if the son of Drake were to level an accusation of moral turpitude against the Duke of York. Drake had been doing such things without letup for fifty years. And so the Duke’s strategy was now plain to Daniel: he had chosen Daniel to hear about his syphilis because if Daniel were so foolish as to spread rumors, no one would hear them above the roar of obloquy produced at all times by Drake. In any case, Daniel would not be able to keep it up for very long before he was found in a field outside of London with a lot of rapier wounds in his body.

“You will let me know, won’t you, if the Royal Society learns anything on this front?” said James, making to leave.

“So that you can pass the information on to your friend? Of course,” Daniel said. Which was the end of that conversation. He returned to the kitchen to get an idea of how much longer the experiment was going to go on.

The answer: longer than any of them really wanted. By the time they were finished, dawn-light was beginning to come in the windows, giving them a premonition of just how ghastly the kitchen was going to look when the sun actually rose. Hooke was sitting crookedly in a chair, shocked and morose, appalled by himself, and Wilkins was hunched forward supporting his head on a smeared fist.

They’d come here supposedly as refugees from the Black Death,
but really they were fleeing their own ignorance—they hungered for understanding, and were like starving wretches who had broken into a lord’s house and gone on an orgy of gluttonous feasting, wolfing down new meals before they could digest, or even chew, the old ones. It had lasted for the better part of a year, but now, as the sun rose over the aftermath of the artificial breath experiment, they were scattered around, blinking stupidly at the devastated kitchen, with its dog-ribs strewn all over the floor, and huge jars of preserved spleens and gall-bladders, specimens of exotic parasites nailed to planks or glued to panes of glass, vile poisons bubbling over on the fire, and suddenly they felt completely disgusted with themselves.

Daniel gathered the dog’s remains up in his arms—messy, but it scarcely mattered—all their clothes would have to be burned anyway—and walked out to the bone-yard on the east side of the cottage, where the remains of all Hooke’s and Wilkins’s investigations were burned, buried, or used to study the spontaneous generation of flies. Notwithstanding which, the air was relatively clean and fresh out here. Having set the remains down, Daniel found that he was walking directly towards a blazing planet, a few degrees above the western horizon, which could only be Venus. He walked and walked, letting the dew on the grass cleanse the blood from his shoes. The dawn was making the fields shimmer pink and green.

Isaac had sent him a letter: “Require asst. w/obs. of Venus pls. come if you can.” He had wondered at the time if this might be something veiled. But standing there in that dew-silvered field with his back to the house of carnage and nothing before him but the Dawn Star, Daniel remembered what Isaac had said years ago about the natural harmony between the heavenly orbs and the orbs we view them with. Four hours later he was riding north on a borrowed horse.

NOVEMBER
1713

D
ANIEL WAKES UP WORRIED.
The stiffness in his
masseter
muscles, the aching in his
frontalis
and
temporalis,
tells him he’s been worrying about something in his sleep. Still, being worried is preferable to being terrified, which he was until yesterday, when Captain van Hoek finally gave up on the idea of trying to sail
Minerva
into the throat of a gale and turned back to calmer waters along the Massachusetts coast.

Captain van Hoek would probably have called it “a bit of chop” or some other nautical euphemism, but Daniel had gone to his cabin with a pail to catch his vomit, and an empty bottle to receive the notes he’d been scratching out in the last few days. If the weather had gotten any worse, he’d have tossed these down the head. Perhaps some Moor or Hottentot would have found them in a century or two and read about Dr. Waterhouse’s early memories of Newton and Leibniz.

The planks of the poop deck are only a few inches above Daniel’s face as he lies on his sack of straw. He’s learned to recognize the tread of van Hoek’s boots on those boards. On a ship it is bad manners to approach within a fathom of the captain, so even when the poop deck is crowded, van Hoek’s footsteps are always surrounded by a large empty space. As
Minerva
’s quest for a steady west wind has stretched out to a week and then two, Daniel has learned to read the state of the captain’s mind from the figure and rhythm of his movements—each pattern like the steps of a courtly dance. A steady long stride means that all is well, and van Hoek is merely touring the precincts. When he’s watching the weather he walks about in small eddies, and when he’s shooting the sun with his back-staff he stands still, grinding the balls of his feet against the planks to keep his balance. But this morning (Daniel supposes it is early in the morning, though the sun hasn’t come up yet) van Hoek is doing something Daniel’s never observed before: flitting back and forth across the poop deck with brisk angry steps, pausing at one rail or another for a few seconds at a time. The sailors,
he senses, are mostly awake, but they are all belowdecks shushing one another and tending to small, intense, quiet jobs.

Yesterday they had sailed into Cape Cod Bay—the shallow lake held in the crook of Cape Cod’s arm—to ride out the tail end of that northeast gale, and to make certain repairs, and get the ship more winter-ready than it had been. But then the wind shifted round to the north and threatened to drive them against the sandbanks at the southern fringe of said Bay, and so they sailed toward the sunset, and maneuvered the big ship with exquisite care between rocks to starboard and sunken islands to port, and thus entered Plymouth Bay. As night fell they dropped anchor in an inlet, well sheltered from the weather, and (as Daniel supposed) prepared to tarry there for a few days and await more auspicious weather. But van Hoek was obviously nervous—he doubled the watch, and put men to work cleaning and oiling the ship’s surprisingly comprehensive arsenal of small firearms.

A distant boom rattles the panes in Daniel’s cabin window. He rolls out of bed like a fourteen-year-old and scurries to the exit, flailing one hand over his head in the dark so he won’t brain himself on the overhead beam. When he emerges onto the quarter-deck he seems to hear answering fire from all the isles and hillside around them—then he understands that they are merely echoes of the first explosion. With a good pocket-watch he could map their surroundings by the timing of those echoes—

Dappa, the first mate, sits crosslegged on the deck near the wheel, reviewing charts by candle-light. This is an odd place for such work. Diverse feathers and colored ribbons dangle from a string above his head—Daniel supposes it to be a tribal fetish (Dappa is an African) until a fleck of goose-down crawls in a breath of cold air, and he understands that Dappa is trying to guess what the wind will do as the sun rises. He holds up one hand to silence Daniel before Daniel’s had a chance to speak. There is shouting on the water, but it is all distant—
Minerva
is silent as a ghost ship. Stepping farther out onto the quarter-deck, Daniel can see yellow stars widely scattered across the water, blinking as they are eclipsed by rolling seas.

“You didn’t know what you were getting yourself into,” Dappa observes.

“I’ll rise to that bait—what have I gotten myself into?”

“You’re on a ship whose captain refuses to have anything to do with pirates,” Dappa says. “Hates ’em. He nailed his colors to the mast twenty years ago, van Hoek did—he would burn this ship to the waterline before handing over a single penny.”

“Those lights on the water—”

“Whaleboats mostly,” Dappa says. “Possibly a barge or two. When the sun comes up we may expect to see sails—but before we concern ourselves with those, we shall have to contend with the whaleboats. Did you hear the shouting, an hour ago?”

“I must have slept through it.”

“A whaleboat stole up towards us with muffled oars. We let her suppose that we were asleep—waited until she was alongside, then dropped a comet into her.”

“Comet?”

“A small cannonball, wrapped in oil-soaked rags and set aflame. Once it lands in such a boat, it’s difficult to throw overboard. Gave us a good look, while it lasted: there were a dozen Englishmen in that boat, and one of ’em was already swinging a grappling-hook.”

“Do you mean that they were English colonists, or—”

“That’s one of the things we aim to find out. After we chased that lot off, we sent some men out in our own whaler.”

“The explosion—?”

“‘Twas a grenade. We have a few retired grenadiers in our number—”

“You threw a
bomb
into someone else’s boat?”

“Aye, and then—if all went according to plan—our Filipinos—former pearl divers, excellent swimmers—climbed over the gunwales with daggers in their teeth and cut a few throats—”

“But that’s
mad
! This is
Massachusetts
!”

Dappa chuckles. “Aye. That it is.”

An hour later the sun rises gorgeously over Cape Cod Bay. Daniel is pacing around the ship, trying to find a place where he won’t have to listen to the screams of the pirates. Two open boats are now thudding against
Minerva
’s hull: the ship’s own longboat, freshly caulked and painted, and the pirate whaler, which was evidently in poor condition even before this morning’s action. Splinters of fresh blond wood show where a bench was snapped by the grenade, and an inch or two of blood sloshes back and forth in the bottom as the empty boat is tossed around by a rising wind. Five pirates survived, and were towed back to
Minerva
by the raiding party. Now (judging from the sounds) they are all down in the bilge, where two of
Minerva
’s largest sailors are holding their heads beneath the filthy water. When they are hauled out, they scream for air, and Daniel thinks about Hooke and Wilkins with their poor dogs.