Quicksilver (28 page)

“Is it going to be finished any time
soon
? Your diligence is setting an example for all of us—stop it!”

“I detect the beginnings of a lull…”

“Now, Daniel, anyone who scans the History of the Royal Society can see that, at each meeting, Mr. Oldenburg reads several letters from Continental savants, such as Mr. Huygens, and, lately, Dr. Leibniz…”

“I’m not familiar with that name.”

“You
will
be—he is a mad letter-writer and a protégé of Huygens—a devotee of Pansophism—he has lately been
smothering
us with curious documents. You haven’t heard about him because Mr. Oldenburg has been passing his missives round to Mr. Hooke, Mr. Boyle, Mr. Barrow, and others, trying to find someone who can even read them, as a first step towards determining whether or not they are nonsense. But I digress. For every letter Mr. Oldenburg
reads
, he
receives
a dozen—why so many?”

“Because, like a heart, he pumps so many
outwards
—?”

“Yes, precisely. Whole
sacks
of them crossing the Channel—driving the circulation that brings new ideas, from the Continent, back to our little meetings.”

“Damn me, and now the King’s clapped him in the Tower!” said Daniel, unable to avoid feeling a touch melodramatic—this kind of dialog not being, exactly, his metier.

“Bypassing the heart,” said Wilkins, without a trace of any such self-consciousness. “I can already feel the Royal Society coagulating. Thank you for bringing Mr. Newton’s telescope. Fresh blood! When can we see him at a meeting?”

“Probably never, as long as the Fellows persist in cutting up dogs.”

“Ah—he’s squeamish—abhors cruelty?”

“Cruelty to
animals.
”

“Some Fellows have proposed that we borrow residents of…” said the Bishop, nodding towards Bedlam.

“Isaac might be more comfortable with that,” Daniel admitted.

A barmaid had been hovering, and now stepped into the awkward silence: “Mr. Hooke requests your presence.”

“Thank God,” Wilkins said to her, “I was afraid you were going to complain he had
committed an offense
against your person.”

The patrons of the Dogg were backed up against the walls in the configuration normally used for watching bar-fights, viz. forming an empty circle around Mr. Hooke’s table, which was (as shown by the bubble instrument) now perfectly level. It was also clean, and empty except for a glob of quicksilver in the middle, with numerous pinhead-sized droplets scattered about in novel constellations. Mr. Hooke was peering at the large glob—a perfect, regular dome—through an optical device of his own manufacture. Glancing up, he twiddled a hog-bristle between thumb and index finger, pushing an invisibly tiny droplet of mercury across the table until it merged with the large one. Then more peering. Then, moving with the stealth of a cat-burglar, he backed away from the table. When he had put a good fathom between himself and the experiment, he looked up at Wilkins and said, “Universal Measure!”

“What!? Sir! You don’t say!”

“You will agree,” Hooke said, “that
level
is an absolute concept—any sentient person can make a surface level.”

“It is in the Philosophical Language,” said Bishop Wilkins—this signified
yes
.

Pepys came in the door, looking splendid, and had his mouth open to demand beer, when he realized a solemn ceremony was underway.

“Likewise mercury is the same in all places—in all worlds.”

“Agreed.”

“As is the number two.”

“Of course.”

“Here I have created a flat, clean, smooth, level surface. On it I have placed a drop of mercury and adjusted it so that the diameter
is exactly two times its height.
Anyone, anywhere
could repeat these steps—the result would be a drop of mercury
exactly
the same size as
this
one. The diameter of the drop, then, can be used as the common unit of measurement for the Philosophical Language!”

The sound of men thinking.

Pepys: “Then you could build a container that was a certain number of those units high, wide, and deep; fill it with water; and have a standard measure of weight.”

“Just so, Mr. Pepys.”

“From length and weight you could make a standard pendulum—the time of its alternations would provide a universal unit of time!”

“But water beads up differently on different surfaces,” said the Bishop of Chester. “I assume the same sorts of variations occur with mercury.”

Hooke, resentful: “The surface to be used could be stipulated: copper, or glass…”

“If the force of gravity varies with altitude, how would that affect the height of the drop?” asked Daniel Waterhouse.

“Do it at sea-level,” said Hooke, with a dollop of spleen.

“Sea-level varies with the tides,” Pepys pointed out.

“What of other planets?” Wilkins demanded thunderously.

“Other
planets
!? We haven’t finished with
this
one!”

“As our compatriot Mr. Oldenburg has said: ‘You will please to remember that we have taken to task the whole Universe, and that we were obliged to do so by the nature of our Design!’ ”

Hooke, very stormy-looking now, scraped most of the quicksilver into a funnel, and thence into a flask; departed; and was sighted by Mr. Pepys (peering through the Newtonian reflector) no more than a minute later, stalking off towards Hounsditch in the company of a whore. “He’s flown into one of his Fits of Melancholy—we won’t see him for two weeks now—then we’ll have to reprimand him,” Wilkins grumbled.

Almost as if it were written down somewhere in the Universal Character, Pepys and Wilkins and Waterhouse somehow knew that they had unfinished business together—that they ought to be having a discreet chat about Mr. Oldenburg. A triangular commerce in highly significant glances and eyebrow-raisings flourished there in the Dogg, for the next hour, among them. But they could not all break free at once: Churchill and others wanted more details from Daniel about this Mr. Newton and his telescope. The Duke of Gun-fleet got Pepys cornered, and interrogated him about dark matters
concerning the Navy’s finances. Blood-spattered, dejected Royal Society members stumbled in from Gresham’s College, with the news that Drs. King and Belle had gotten lost in the wilderness of canine anatomy, the dog had died, and they really needed Hooke—where was he? Then they cornered Bishop Wilkins and talked Royal Society politics—would Comstock stand for election to President again? Would Anglesey arrange to have himself nominated?

B
UT LATER
—too late for Daniel, who had risen early, when Isaac had—the three of them were together in Pepys’s coach, going somewhere.

“I note my Lord Gunfleet has taken up a sudden interest in
Naval
-gazing,” said Wilkins.

“As our safety from the Dutch depends upon our Navy,” Pepys said carefully, “and most of our Navy is arrayed before the Casbah in Algiers,
many
Persons of Quality share Anglesey’s curiosity.”

Wilkins only looked amused. “I did not hear him asking you of frigates and cannons,” he said, “but of Bills of Exchange, and pay-coupons.”

Pepys cleared his throat at length, and glanced nervously at Daniel. “Those who are responsible for
draining
the Navy’s coffers, must answer to those who are responsible for
filling
them,” he finally said.

Even Daniel, a dull Cambridge scholar, had the wit to know that the coffer-drainer being referred to here was the armaments-maker John Comstock, Earl of Epsom—and that the coffer-filler was Thomas More Anglesey, Duke of Gunfleet, and father of Louis Anglesey, the Earl of Upnor.

“Thus C and A,” Wilkins said. “What does the Cabal’s second syllable have to say of Naval matters?”

“No surprises from Bolstrood
^*
of course.”

“Some say Bolstrood wants our Navy in Africa, so that the Dutch can invade us, and make of us a Calvinist nation.”

“Given that the V.O.C.
^†
is paying out dividends of forty percent, I think that there are many new Calvinists on Threadneedle Street.”

“Is Apthorp one of them?”

“Those rumors are nonsense—Apthorp would rather build
his
East India Company, than invest in the
Dutch
one.”

“So it follows that Apthorp wants a strong Navy, to protect our merchant ships from those Dutch East Indiamen, so topheavy with cannons.”

“Yes.”

“What of General Lewis?”

“Let’s ask the young scholar,” Pepys said mischievously.

Daniel was dumbstruck for a few moments—to the gurgling, boyish amusement of Pepys and Wilkins.

The telescope seemed to be watching Daniel, too: it sat in its box across from him, a disembodied sensory organ belonging to Isaac Newton, staring at him with more than human acuteness. He heard Isaac demanding to know what on earth he, Daniel Water-house, could possibly be doing, riding across London in Samuel Pepys’s coach—pretending to be a man of affairs!

“Err…a weak Navy forces us to keep a strong Army, to fight off any Dutch invasions,” Daniel said, thinking aloud.

“But with a strong Navy, we can invade the Hollanders!” Wilkins protested. “More glory for General Lewis, Duke of Tweed!”

“Not without French help,” Daniel said, after a few moments’ consideration, “and my lord Tweed is too much the Presbyterian.”

“Is this the same good Presbyterian who enjoyed a secret earldom at the exile court at St. Germaines, when Cromwell ruled the land?”

“He is a Royalist, that’s all,” Daniel demurred.

What was he doing in this carriage having this conversation, besides going out on a limb, and making a fool of himself? The real answer was known only to John Wilkins, Lord Bishop of Chester, Author of both the
Cryptonomicon
and the
Philosophical Language,
who encrypted with his left hand and made things known to all possible worlds with his right. Who’d gotten Daniel into Trinity College—invited him out to Epsom during the Plague—nominated him for the Royal Society—and now, it seemed, had something else in mind for him. Was Daniel here as an apprentice, sitting at the master’s knee? It was shockingly prideful, and radically non-Puritan, for him to think so—but he could come up with no other hypothesis.

“Right, then, it all has to do with Mr. Oldenburg’s letters abroad…” Pepys said, when some change in the baroscopic pressure (or something) signified it was time to drop pretenses and talk seriously.

Wilkins: “I assumed
that
. Which
one
?”

“Does it matter? All of the GRUBENDOL letters are intercepted and read before he even sees them.”

“I’ve always wondered who does the reading,” Wilkins reflected. “He must be very bright, or else perpetually confused.”

“Likewise, all of Oldenburg’s outgoing mail is examined—you knew this.”

“And in some letter, he said something indiscreet—?”

“It is simply that the sheer
volume
of his foreign correspondence—taken together with the fact that he’s from Germany—
and
that he’s worked as a diplomat on the Continent—and that he’s a friend of Cromwell’s Puritanickal poet—”

“John Milton.”

“Yes…finally, consider that no one at court understands even a tenth of what he’s saying in his letters—it makes a certain type of person nervous.”

“Are you saying he was thrown into the Tower of London on
general principles
?”

“As a precaution, yes.”

“What—does that mean he has to stay in there for the
rest of his life
?”

“Of course not…only until certain very tender negotiations are finished.”

“Tender negotiations…” Wilkins repeated a few times, as if further information could thus be pounded out of the dry and pithy words.

And here the discourse, which, to Daniel, had been merely confusing up to this point, plunged into obscurity perfect and absolute.

“I didn’t know
he
had a tender bone in his body…oh, wipe that smirk off your face, Mr. Pepys, I meant nothing of the sort!”

“Oh, it is known that
his
feelings for
sa soeur
are most affectionate. He’s writing letters to her
all the time
lately.”

“Does she write back?”

“Minette spews out letters like a
diplomat.
”

“Keeping his
hisness
well acquainted—I am guessing—with all that is new with her beloved?”

“The volume of correspondence is such,” Pepys exclaimed, “that His Majesty can never have been so close to the man you refer to as he is today. Hoops of gold are stronger than bands of steel.”

Wilkins, starting to look a bit queasy: “Hmmm…a good thing, then, isn’t it, that
formal
contacts are being made through those two arch-Protestants—”

“I would refer you to Chapter Ten of your 1641 work,” said Pepys.