Quicksilver (46 page)

R
ALEIGH
: “Our late brother-in-law was ruined, because the King borrowed all of his deposits—presumably at gunpoint—and then declined to pay ’em back—what
mathematick
principle will you use to prevent
that
?”

A
PTHORP
: “Why, the same one that you and your co-religionists have used in order to maintain your faith: tell the King to leave us alone.”

R
ALEIGH
: “Kings do not love to be told that, or
anything.
”

A
PTHORP
: “I saw the King yesterday, and I tell you that he loves being bankrupt even less. I was
born
in the very year that the King seized the gold and silver that Drake and the other merchants had deposited in the Tower of London for safekeeping. Do you recall it?”

R
ALEIGH
: “Yes, ’twas a black year, and made rebels of many who only wanted to be merchants.”

A
PTHORP
: “Your brother-in-law’s business, and the practice of goldsmith’s notes, arose as a result—no one trusted the Tower any more.”

S
TERLING
: “And after today no one will trust goldsmiths, or their silly notes.”

A
PTHORP
: “Just so. And just as the Empty Tomb on Easter led, in the fullness of time, to a Resurrection…”

D
ANIEL
: “I am stopping up mine ears now—if the conversation turns Christian, wave your hands about.”

T
HE KNOWLEDGE THAT THE
D
UTCH
had won the war percolated through London invisibly, like Plague. Suddenly everyone had it. Daniel woke up in Bedlam one morning knowing that William of Orange had opened the sluices and put a large part of his Republic under water to save Amsterdam. But he couldn’t recall
whence
that knowledge had come.

He and his brothers had worked their way up Threadneedle by assailing one rooftop after another. They’d parted company with Apthorp on the roof of
his
goldsmith’s shop, which was still solvent—yet there was an armed mob in front of
it
, too, and in front of the
next
goldsmith’s, and the next. Far from
escaping
a riot, they understood, somewhat too late, that they were working their way toward the center of a much
larger
one. The obvious solution was to turn round and go back the way they’d come—but now a platoon of Quakers was coming toward them over the rooftops gripping matchlocks, each Quaker trailing a long thread of smoke from the smoldering punk in his fingers. Looking north across Threadneedle they could see a roughly equivalent number of infantrymen headed over the rooftops of Broad Street, coming from the direction of Gresham’s College, and it seemed obvious enough that Quakers and Army men would soon be swapping musket-balls over the heads of the mob of Quakers, Barkers, Ranters, Diggers, Jews, Huguenots, Presbyterians, and other sects down below.

So it was down to the street and into the stone-throwing fray. But when they got down there, Daniel saw that these were not the young shin-kickers and head-butters of Drake’s glory days. These were paunchy mercers who simply wanted to know where all of their money had got to. The answer was that it had gone to wherever it goes when markets crash. Daniel kept treading on wigs. Sometimes a hundred rioters would turn around and flee
en bloc
from sudden musket-fire and all of their wigs would fall off at once, as though this were a practiced military drill. Some of the wigs had dollops of brain in them, though, which ended up as pearly skeins on Daniel’s shoes.

They pushed their way up Broad Street, away from the ’Change, which seemed to be the center of all disturbance. Those mock-Polish grenadiers were formed up in front of the building that had been the Guinea, and was soon to be the Royal Africa, Company. So the Waterhouses squirted past on the far side of the street, looking
back to see whether any of those fatal spheres were trajecting after them. They tried to get in at Gresham’s College. But many offices of the City of London had been moved into it after the fire, and so it was shut up and almost as well guarded as the Royal Africa Company.

So they had kept moving north and eventually reached Bedlam, and found an evening’s refuge there amid piles of dressed stone and splats of mortar. Sterling and Raleigh had departed the next morning, but Daniel had remained: encamped, becalmed, drained, and feeling no desire to go back into the city. From time to time he would hear a nearby church-bell tolling the years of someone who’d died in the rioting.

Daniel’s whereabouts became known, and messengers began to arrive, several times a day, bearing invitations to more funerals. He attended several of them, and was frequently asked to stand up and say a few words—not about the deceased (he scarcely knew most of them), but about more general issues of religious tolerance. In other words, he was asked to parrot what Wilkins would’ve said, and for Daniel that was easy—much easier than making up words of his own. Out of a balanced respect for his own father, he mentioned Drake, too. This felt like a slow and indirect form of suicide, but after his conversation with John Comstock he did not feel he had much of a life to throw away. He was strangely comforted by the sight of all those pews filled with men in white and black (though sometimes Roger Comstock would show up as a gem of color, accompanied by one or two courtiers who were sympathetic, or at least curious). More mourners would be visible through open doors and windows, filling the church-yard and street.

It reminded him of the time during his undergraduate days when the Puritan had been murdered by Upnor, and Daniel had traveled five miles outside of Cambridge to the funeral, and found his father and brothers, miraculously, there. Exasperating to his mind but comforting to his soul. His words swayed their emotions much more than he wanted, or expected—as two inert substances, mixed in an Alchemist’s mortar, can create a fulminating compound, so the invocation of Drake’s and Wilkins’s memories together.

But this was not what he wanted and so he began to avoid the funerals after that, and stayed in the quiet stone-garden of Bedlam.

Hooke was there, too, for Gresham’s College had become too crowded with scheming fops. Bedlam was years away from being done. The masons hadn’t even begun work on the wings. But the middle part was built, and on top of it was a round turret with windows on all sides, where Hooke liked to retreat and work, because
it was lonely and the light was excellent. Daniel for his part stayed down below, and only went out into the city to meet with Leibniz.

D
OCTOR
G
OTTFRIED
W
ILHELM
L
EIBNIZ
picked up the coffee-pot and tipped it into his cup for the third time, and for the third time nothing came out of it. It had been empty for half an hour. He made a little sigh of regret, and then reluctantly stood up. “I beg your pardon, but I begin a long journey tomorrow. First the Channel crossing—then, between Calais and Paris, we shall have to dodge French regiments, straggling home, abject, starving, and deranged.”

Daniel insisted on paying the bill, and then followed the Doctor out the door. They began strolling in the direction of the inn where Leibniz had been staying. They were not far from the ’Change. Paving-stones and charred firebrands still littered the unpaved streets.

“Not much divine harmony in evidence, here in London,” Daniel said. “I can only hang my head in shame, as an Englishman.”

“If you and France had conquered the Dutch Republic, you would have much more to be ashamed of,” Leibniz returned.

“When, God willing, you get back to Paris, you can say that your mission was a success: there is no war.”

“It was a failure,” Leibniz said, “we did not prevent the war.”

“When you came to London, Doctor, you said that your philosophick endeavours were nothing more than a cover for diplomacy. But I suspect that it was the other way round.”

“My philosophick endeavours were a failure, too,” Leibniz said.

“You have gained
one
adherent…”

“Yes. Oldenburg pesters me every day to complete the Arithmetickal Engine.”

“Make that
two
adherents, then, Doctor.”

Leibniz actually stopped in his tracks and turned to examine Daniel’s face, to see if he was jesting. “I am honored, sir,” he said, “but I would prefer to think of you not as an
adherent
but as a
friend.
”

“Then the honor is all mine.”

They linked arms and walked in silence for a while.

“Paris!” Leibniz said, as if it were the only thing that could get him through the next few days. “When I get back to the Bibliothèque du Roi, I will turn all of my efforts to mathematics.”

“You don’t want to complete the Arithmetickal Engine?”

It was the first time Daniel had ever seen the Doctor show annoyance. “I am a philosopher, not a watchmaker. The
philosophickal
problems associated with the Arithmetickal Engine have already been solved…I have found my way out of
that
labyrinth.”

“That reminds me of something you said on your first day in London, Doctor. You mentioned that the question of free will versus predestination is one of the two great labyrinths into which the mind is drawn. What, pray tell, is the other?”

“The other is the composition of the continuum, or: what is space? Euclid assures us that we can divide any distance in half, and then subdivide each of them into smaller halves, and so on,
ad infinitum.
Easy to say, but difficult to understand…”

“It is more difficult for
metaphysicians
than for
mathematicians,
I think,” Daniel said. “As in so many other fields, modern mathematics has given us tools to work with things that are infinitely small, or infinitely large.”

“Perhaps I am too much of a metaphysician, then,” Leibniz said. “I take it, sir, that you are referring to the techniques of infinite sequences and series?”

“Just so, Doctor. But as usual, you are overly modest. You have already demonstrated, before the Royal Society, that you know as much of those techniques as any man alive.”

“But to me, they do not resolve our confusion, so much as give us a way to think about how confused we are. For example—”

Leibniz gravitated toward a sputtering lamp dangling from the overhanging corner of a building. The City of London’s new program to light the streets at night had suffered from the fact that the country was out of money. But in this riotous part of town, where (in the view of Sir Roger L’Estrange, anyway) any shadow might hide a conspiracy of Dissidents, it had been judged worthwhile to spend a bit of whale-oil on street-lamps.

Leibniz fetched a stick from a pile of debris that had been a goldsmith’s shop a week earlier, and stepped into the circle of brown light cast on the dirt by the lamp, and scratched out the first few terms of a series:

“If you sum this series, it will slowly converge on pi. So we have a way to
approach
the value of pi—to
reach toward
it, but never to
grasp
it…much as the human mind can approach divine things, and gain an imperfect knowledge of them, but never look God in the face.”

“It is not necessarily true that infinite series must be some sort
of concession to the unknowable, Doctor…they can clarify, too! My friend Isaac Newton has done wizardly things with them. He has learned to approximate any curve as an infinite series.”

Daniel took the stick from Leibniz, then swept out a curve in the dirt. “Far from
detracting
from his knowledge, this has
extended
his grasp, by giving him a way to calculate the tangent to a curve at any point.” He carved a straight line above the curve, grazing it at one point.

A black coach rattled up the street, its four horses driven onwards by the coachman’s whip, but veering nervously around piles of debris. Daniel and Leibniz backed into a doorway to let it pass; its wheels exploded a puddle and turned Leibniz’s glyphs and Daniel’s curves into a system of strange canals, and eventually washed them away.

“Would that
some
of our work last longer than
that,
” Daniel said ruefully. Leibniz laughed—for a moment—then walked silently for a hundred yards or so.

“I thought Newton only did Alchemy,” Leibniz said.

“From time to time, Oldenburg or Comstock or I cajole him into writing out some of his mathematical work.”

“Perhaps I need more cajoling,” Leibniz said.

“Huygens can cajole you, when you get back.”

Leibniz shrugged violently, as if Huygens were sitting astride his neck, and needed to be got rid of. “He has tutored me well, to this point. But if all he can do is give me problems that have already been solved by some Englishman, it must mean that he knows no more mathematics than I do.”

“And Oldenburg is cajoling you—but to do the wrong thing.”

“I shall endeavour to have an Arithmetickal Engine built in Paris, to satisfy Oldenburg,” Leibniz sighed. “It is a worthy project, but for now it is a project for a mechanic.”