Quicksilver (89 page)

“That if they unsheathed their lancets, I’d have their testicles for tennis-balls,” Roger said. “I have an errand for you, Daniel: go to the Duke of York and report on his brother’s condition.”

Daniel took a breath, and held it. He could scarcely believe, all of a sudden, how tired he was. “I could say something obvious here, such as that
anyone
could do that, and
most
would do it better than
I,
and then you’d answer with something that’d make me feel a bit dim, such as—”

“In our concern for the
previous
king we must not forget to maintain good relations with the
next
.”

“ ‘We’ meaning—in this case—?”

“Why, the Royal Society!” said Roger, miffed to have been asked.

“Righto. What shall I tell him?”

“That London’s finest physicians have arrived—so it shouldn’t be much longer.”

H
E MIGHT HAVE SHIELDED HIMSELF
from the cold and the wind by walking up the length of the Privy Gallery, but he’d had quite enough of Whitehall, so instead he went outside, crossed a couple of courts, and emerged at the front of the Banqueting House, directly beneath where Charles I had had his head lopped off, lo these many years ago. Cromwell’s men had kept him prisoner in St. James’s and then walked him across the Park for his decapitation. Four-year-old Daniel, sitting on Drake’s shoulders in the plaza, had watched every one of the King’s steps.

This evening, thirty-nine-year-old Daniel would be retracing that King’s final walk—except backwards.

Now, Drake, twenty years ago, would have been the first to admit that most of Cromwell’s work had been rolled back by the Restoration. But at least Charles II was a Protestant—or had the decency to pretend to be one. So Daniel oughtn’t to make too much of an omen out of this walk—God forbid he should start thinking like Isaac, and find occult symbols in every little thing. But he couldn’t help imagining that time was being rolled back even farther now, even past the reign of Elizabeth, all the way back to the days of Bloody Mary. In those days John Waterhouse, Drake’s grandfather, had fled over the sea to Geneva, which was a hornets’ nest of Calvinists. Only after Elizabeth was on the throne had he returned, accompanied by his son Calvin—Drake’s father—and many other English and Scottish men who thought the way he did about religion.

In any event, now here was Daniel crossing the old Tilt Yard and descending the stairs into St. James’s Park, going to fetch the man who had all the earmarks of the next Bloody Mary. James, the Duke of York, had lived at Whitehall Palace with the King and Queen until the tendency of Englishmen to riot and burn large objects in the streets at the least mention of his name had given the
King the idea to pack him off to places like Brussels and Edinburgh. Since then he’d been a political comet, spending almost all of his time patrolling the liminal dusk, occasionally swooping back to London and scaring the hell out of everyone until the blaze of bonfires and burning Catholic churches drove him off into the darkness. After the King had finally lost patience, suspended Parliament, kicked out all the Bolstroods, and thrown the remaining Dissenters into jail, James had been suffered to come back and settle his household—but at St. James’s Palace.

From Whitehall it was five minutes’ walk across several gardens, parks, and malls. Most of the big old trees had been uprooted by the Devil’s Wind that had swept over England on the day Cromwell had died. As a lad wandering up and down Pall Mall handing out libels, Daniel had watched new saplings being planted. He was dismayed, now, to see how large some of them had grown.

In spring and summer, royals and courtiers wore ruts in the paths that wound between these trees, going out for strolls that had become ritualized into processions. Now the terrain was empty, an unreadable clutter of brown and gray: a crust of frozen mud floating on a deep miasma of bog and horse-manure. Daniel’s boots kept breaking through and plunging him into the muck. He learned to avoid stepping near the crescent-shaped indentations that had been made a few hours ago by the hooves of John Churchill’s regiment of Guards drilling and parading on this ground, galloping hither and yon and cutting the heads off of straw men with sabers. Those straw men had not been dressed up as Whigs and Dissenters, but even so the message had been clear enough, for Daniel and for the crowds of Londoners gathered along the limit of Charing Cross burning bonfires for their King.

One Nahum Tate had recently translated into English a hundred-and-fifty-year-old poem by the Veronese astronomer Hieronymus Fracastorius, entitled (in the original)
Syphilis, Sive Morbvs Gallicvs
or (as Tate had it)
“Syphilis: or, a poetical history of the French Disease.”
Either way, the poem told the tale of a shepherd named Syphilus who (like all shepherds in old myths) suffered a miserable and perfectly undeserved fate: he was the first person to be struck down by the disease that now bore his name. Inquiring minds might wonder why Mr. Tate had troubled himself to translate, at this moment, a poem about a poxy shepherd that had languished in Latin for a century and a half without any Englishman’s feeling its lack: a poem about a disease, by an astronomer! Certain Londoners of a cynical turn of mind believed that the answer to this riddle might be found in certain uncanny similarities between
the eponymous shepherd and James, the Duke of York. Viz. that all of said Duke’s lovers, mistresses, and wives ended up with the said pestilence; that his first wife, Anne Hyde, had apparently died of it; that Anne Hyde’s daughers, Mary and Anne, both had difficulties with their eyes, and with their wombs; that the Duke had obvious sores on his face and that he was either unbelievably stupid or out of his fucking mind.

Now (as Daniel the Natural Philosopher understood only too well) people had a habit of over-burdening explanations, and to do so was a bad habit—a kind of superstition. And yet the parallels between Syphilus the Shepherd and James the Heir to the English Throne were hard to ignore—and as if that weren’t enough, Sir Roger L’Estrange had recently been leaning on Nahum Tate, asking him to perhaps find some
other
mildewy old Latin poems to translate. And everyone
knew
that L’Estrange was doing so, and understood why.

James was Catholic, and wanted to be a Saint, and that all fit together because he had been born in the Palace
of St. James’s
some fifty-two years ago. It had always been his true home. In his tender years he’d been taught princely rudiments in this yard: fencing and French. He had been spirited up to Oxford during the Civil War, and more or less raised himself from that point on. Occasionally Dad would swing by and swoop him up and take him off to some battle-front to get creamed by Oliver Cromwell.

James had spent quite a bit of time hanging about with his cousins, the offspring of his aunt Elizabeth (the Winter Queen), a fecund but hapless alternate branch of the family. When the Civil War had been lost, he’d gone back to St. James’s and lived there as a pampered hostage, wandering about this park and mounting the occasional boyish escape attempt, complete with encyphered letters spirited out to loyal confederates. One of those letters had been intercepted, and John Wilkins had been called in to decypher it, and Parliament had threatened to send James off to live in the decidedly less hospitable Tower. Eventually he’d slipped out across this park, disguised himself as a girl, and fled down the river and across the sea to Holland. Therefore he’d been out of the country when his father had been marched across this park to have his head lopped off. As the English Civil War had slowly ground to a halt, James had grown into a man, bouncing around between Holland, the Island of Jersey, and St. Germain (a royal suburb of Paris) and busying himself with the princely pastimes of riding, shooting, and screwing high-born Frenchwomen. But as Cromwell had continued to crush the Royalists at every turn, not only in
England but Ireland and France as well, James had finally run out of money and become a soldier—a rather good one—under Marshal Turenne, the incomparable French general.

A
S HE TRUDGED ALONG
Daniel occasionally swiveled his head to gaze north across Pall Mall. The view was different every time, as per the observations of Dr. Leibniz. But when the parallax of the streets was just right, he could see between the bonfires built there by nervous Protestants, up the lengths of the streets-named-after-royal-bastards, and all the way up to the squares where Roger Comstock and Sterling Waterhouse were putting up new houses and shops. Some of the larger ones were being made with great blocks of stone taken from the rubble of John Comstock’s house—blocks that Comstock, in turn, had salvaged from the collapsed south transept of Old St. Paul’s. Lights were burning in windows up there, and smoke drifting from chimneys. Mostly it was the mineral smoke of coal, but on the north wind Daniel caught the occasional whiff of roasting meat. Crunching and squelching across this wasted park, stepping over stuffed heads that had been lopped from straw men a few hours before, had given Daniel his appetite back. He wanted to be up there with a tankard in one hand and a drumstick in the other—but here he was, doing the sort of thing that he did. Which was what, exactly?

St. James’s Palace was getting close, and he really ought to have an answer before he got there.

A
T SOME POINT CROMWELL HAD
, improbably, formed an alliance with the French, and then young James had had to go north to an impoverished, lonely, boring existence in the Spanish Netherlands. In the final years before the Restoration he’d knocked about Flanders with a motley army of exiled Irish, Scottish, and English regiments, picking fights with Cromwell’s forces around Dunkirk. After the Restoration he’d come into his hereditary title of Lord High Admiral, and taken part in some rousing and bloody naval engagements against the Dutch.

However: the tendency of his siblings to die young, and the failure of his brother Charles to produce a legitimate heir, had made James the only hope for continuance of his mother’s bloodline. While Mother had been living a good life in France, her sister-in-law, the Winter Queen, had been kicked around Europe like a stuffed pig’s bladder at a county fair. Yet Elizabeth had pumped out babies with inhuman efficiency and Europe was bestrewn with
her offspring. Many had come to naught, but her daughter Sophie seemed to have bred true, and was carrying on the tradition with seven surviving children. So, in the royal propagation sweepstakes, Henrietta Maria of France, the mother of James and Charles, seemed to be losing, in the long run, to the miserable Winter Queen. James was her only hope. And consequently, during James’s various adventures she had used all of her wiles and connexions to keep him out of danger—leaving James with a simmering feeling of never having destroyed as many armies or sunk as many fleets as he
could
have.

Stymied, he’d spent much of the time since about 1670 doing—what, exactly? Mining Africa for gold, and, when that failed, Negroes. Trying to persuade English noblemen to convert to Catholicism. Sojourning in Brussels, and then in Edinburgh, where he had made himself useful by riding out to wild parts of Scotland to suppress feral Presbyterians in their rustic conventicles. Really he had been wasting his time, just waiting.

Just like Daniel.

A dozen years had flown by, dragging him along like a rider with one foot caught in the stirrup.

What did it mean? That he had best take matters in hand and get his life in order. Find something to do with his allotted years. He had been too much like Drake, waiting for some Apocalypse that would never come.

The prospect of James on the throne, working hand-in-glove with Louis XIV, was just sickening. This was an emergency, every bit as pressing as when London had burnt.

The realizations just kept coming—or rather they’d all appeared in his mind at once, like Athena jumping out of his skull in full armor, and he was merely trying to sort them out.

Emergencies called for stern, even desperate measures, such as blowing up houses with kegs of gunpowder (as King Charles II had personally done) or flooding half of Holland to keep the French out (as William of Orange had done). Or—dare he think it—overthrowing Kings and chopping their heads off as Drake had helped to. Men such as Charles and William and Drake seemed to take such measures without hesitation, while Daniel was either (a) a miserably pusillanimous wretch or (b) wisely biding his time.

Maybe this was why God and Drake had brought him into this world: to play some pivotal role in this, the final struggle between the Whore of Babylon, a.k.a. the Roman Catholic Church, and Free Trade, Freedom of Conscience, Limited Government, and
diverse other good Anglo-Saxon virtues, which was going to commence in about ten minutes.

Romanists now swarming at Court with greater confidence than had ever been seen since the Reformation.

—
John Evelyn’s Diary

A
LL OF THESE THOUGHTS
terrified him so profoundly as to nearly bring him to his knees before the entrance of St. James’s Palace. This wouldn’t have been as embarrassing as it sounded; the courtiers circulating in and out of the doors, and the Grenadier Guards washing their hands in the blue, wind-whipped flames of torchières, probably would have pegged him as another mad Puritan taken in a Pentecostal fit. However, Daniel remained on his feet and slogged up stairs and into the Palace. He made muddy footprints on the polished stone: making a mess of things as he went and leaving abundant evidence, which seemed a poor beginning for a conspirator.

St. James’s was roomier than the suite in Whitehall where James had formerly dwelt, and (as Daniel only now apprehended) this had given him the space and privacy to gather his own personal Court, which could simply be marched across the Park and swapped for Charles’s at the drop of a crown. They’d seemed a queer swarm of religious cultists and second-raters. Daniel now cursed himself for not having paid closer attention to them.
Some
of them were players who’d end up performing the same roles and prattling the same dialogue as the ones they were about to replace, but (if Daniel’s ruminations on the Privy Stairs were not completely baseless)
others
had unique perceptions. It would be wise for Daniel to identify these.