The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and the System of the World (108 page)

Eliza sensed that she had quite inadvertently gotten into danger. William had found an inconsistency in her, and if it weren’t explained to his satisfaction, he’d brand her as Enemy. And while Louis XIV kept his enemies in the gilded cage of Versailles, William probably had more forthright ways of dealing with his.

The truth wasn’t so bad after all. “I think they are interesting,” she said, finally. “They are so different from anyone else. So peculiar. But they are not ninehammers, they are formidable in the extreme; Cromwell was only a prelude, a practice. This Penn controls an estate that is stupefyingly vast. New Jersey is a place of Quakers, too, and different sorts of Puritans are all over Massachusetts. Gomer Bolstrood used to say the most startling things…overthrowing monarchy was the
least
of it. He said that Negroes and white men are equal before God and that all slavery everywhere must be done away with, and that his people would never let up until everyone saw it their way. ‘First we’ll get the Quakers on our side, for they are rich,’ he said, ‘then the other Nonconformists, then the Anglicans, then the Catholics, then all of Christendom.’”

William had turned his gaze back to the fire as she spoke, signalling that he believed her. “Your fascination with Negroes is very
odd. But I have observed that the best people are frequently odd in one way or another. I have got in the habit of seeking them out, and declining to trust anyone who has no oddities. Your queer ideas concerning slavery are of no interest to me whatever. But the fact that you harbor queer ideas makes me inclined to place some small amount of trust in you.”

“If you trust my judgment, the slender Puritan is the one to watch,” Eliza said.

“But he has no vast territories in America, no money, no followers!”

“That is
why.
I would wager he had a father who was very strong, probably older brothers, too. That he has been checked and baffled many times, never married, never enjoyed even the small homely success of having a child, and has come to that time in his life when he must make his mark, or fail. This has become all confused, in his thinking, with the coming rebellion against the English King. He has decided to gamble his life on it—not in the sense of living or dying, but in the sense of making something of his life, or not.”

William winced. “I pray you never see that deep into
me.
”

“Why? Perhaps ‘twould do you good.”

“Nay, nay, you are like some Fellow of the Royal Society, dissecting a living dog—there is a placid cruelty about you.”

“About
me?
What
of you?
To fight wars is
kindness?
”

“Most men would rather be shot through with a broad-headed arrow than be
described
by you.”

Eliza could not help laughing. “I do not think my description of the slender one is at all cruel. On the contrary, I believe he will succeed. To judge from that pile of letters, he has many powerful Englishmen behind him. To rally that many supporters while remaining close to the King is very difficult.” Eliza was hoping, now, that the Prince would let slip some bit of information about
who
those letter-writers were. But William perceived the gambit almost before she uttered the words, and looked away from her.

“It is very dangerous,” he said. “Rash. Insane. I wonder if I should trust a man who conceives such a desperate plan.”

A bit of a silence now. Then one of the logs in the fireplace gave way in a cascading series of pops and hisses.

“Are you asking me to do something about it?”

More silence, but this time the burden of response was on William. Eliza could relax, and watch his face. His face showed that he did not like being put in this position.

“I have something important for you to do at Versailles,” he admitted, “and cannot afford to send you to London to tend to
Daniel Waterhouse. But, where he is concerned, you might be more useful in Versailles anyway.”

“I don’t understand.”

William opened his eyes wide, took a deep breath, and sighed it out, listening clinically to his own lungs. He sat up straighter, though his small hunched body was still overwhelmed by the chair, and looked alertly into the fire. “I can tell Waterhouse to be careful and he will say,
‘yes,
sire,’ but it is all meaningless. He will not really be careful until he has something to live for.” William looked Eliza straight in the eye.

“You want me to give him that?”

“I cannot afford to lose him, and the men who put their signatures on these letters, because he suddenly decides he cares not whether he lives or dies. I want him to have some reason to care.”

“It is easily done.”

“Is it? I cannot think of a pretext for getting the two of you in the same room together.”

“I have another oddity, sire: I am interested in Natural Philosophy.”

“Ah yes, you stay with Huygens.”

“And Huygens has another friend in town just now, a Swiss mathematician named Fatio. He is young and ambitious and
desperate
to make contacts with the Royal Society. Daniel Waterhouse is the Secretary. I’ll set up a dinner.”

“That name Fatio is familiar,” William said distantly. “He has been pestering me, trying to set up an audience.”

“I’ll find out what he wants.”

“Good.”

“What of the other thing?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You said you had something important for me to do at Versailles.”

“Yes. Come to me again before you leave and I’ll explain it. Now I am tired, tired of talking. The thing you must do there for me is pivotal, everything revolves around it, and I want to have my wits about me when I explain it to you.”

CHRISTIAAN HUYGENS SAT
at the head of the table, the perihelion of the ellipse, and Daniel Waterhouse sat at the opposite end, the aphelion. Nicolas Fatio de Duilliers and Eliza sat across from each other in between. A dinner of roast goose, ham, and winter vegetables was served up by various members of a family that had long been servants in this house. Eliza was the author of the seating plan. Huygens and Waterhouse must not sit next to each other or they’d fuse together and never say a word to the others. This way was better: Fatio would only want to talk to Waterhouse, who would only want to talk to Eliza, who would pretend she had ears only for Huygens, and so the guests would pursue each other round the table clockwise, and with a bit of luck, an actual conversation might eventuate.

It was near the time of the solstice, the sun had gone down in the middle of the afternoon, and their faces, lit up by a still-life of candles thrust into wax-crusted bottles, hung in the darkness like Moons of Jupiter. The ticking of Huygens’s clock-work at the other end of the room was distracting at first, but later became part of the fabric of space; like the beating of their hearts, they could hear it if they wanted to, its steady process reassured them that all was well while reminding them that time was moving onwards. It was difficult to be uncivilized in the company of so many clocks.

Daniel Waterhouse had arrived first and had immediately apologized to Eliza for having taken her for a house-servant earlier. But he had not dropped the other shoe and asked what she
really
was. She’d accepted his apology with tart amusement and then declined to offer any explanation. This was light flirtation of the
most routine sort—at Versailles it would have elicited a roll of the eyes from anyone who had bothered to notice it. But it had been more than enough to plunge Waterhouse into utter consternation. Eliza found this slightly alarming.

He had tried again: “Mademoiselle, I would be less than…”

“Oh, speak English!” she’d said, in English. This had practically left him senseless: first, with surprise that she could speak English at all, then with alarm that she’d overheard his entire conversation with William Penn. “Now, what was it you were saying?”

He scrambled to remember what he had been saying. In a man half his age, to’ve been so flustered would have been adorable. As it stood, she was dismayed, wondering what would happen to this man the first time some French-trained countess got her talons into him. William had been right. Daniel Waterhouse was a Hazard to Navigation.

“Err…I’d be less than honest if, er…” he winced. “It sounded gallant in French. Pompous in English. I was wondering…the state of international relations being so troublous and relations ‘tween the sexes more so, and etiquette being an area in which I am weak…whether there was any pretext at all under which I might converse with you, or send letters, without giving offense.”

“Isn’t this dinner good enough?” she’d asked, flirtatiously mock-offended, and just then Fatio had arrived. In truth, she’d seen him coming across the Plein, and adjusted her timing accordingly. Waterhouse was obliged to stand off to one side and stew and draw up a great mental accompt of his failures and shortcomings while Eliza and Fatio enacted a greeting-ritual straight out of the Salon of Apollo at Versailles. This had much in common with a courtly dance, but with overtones of a duel; Eliza and Fatio were probing each other, emanating signals coded in dress, gesture, inflection, and emphasis, and watching with the brilliant alertness of sword-fighters to see whether the other had noticed, and how they’d respond. As one who’d lately come from the Court of the Sun King, Eliza held the high ground; the question was, what level of esteem should she accord Fatio? If he’d been Catholic, and French, and titled, this would have been settled before he came in the door. But he was Protestant, Swiss, and came from a gentle family of no particular rank. He was in his early twenties, Eliza guessed, though he tried to make himself older by wearing very good French clothes. He was not a handsome man: he had giant blue eyes below a high domelike forehead, but the lower half of his face was too small, his nose stuck out like a beak, and in general he had the exhausting intensity of a trapped bird.

At some point Fatio had to tear those eyes away from Eliza and begin the same sort of dance-
cum
-duel with Waterhouse. Again, if Fatio had been a Fellow of the Royal Society, or a Doctor at some university, Waterhouse would have had some idea what to make of him; as it was, Fatio had to conjure his credentials and
bona fides
out of thin air, as it were, by dropping names and scattering references to books he’d read, problems he’d solved, inflated reputations he had punctured, experiments he had performed, creatures he had seen. “I had half expected to see Mr. Enoch Root here,” he said at one point, looking about, “for a (ahem) gentleman of my acquaintance here, an
amateur
of (ahem) chymical studies, has shared with me a rumor—only a rumor, mind you—that a man owning Root’s description was observed, the other day, debarking from a canal-ship from Brussels.” As Fatio stretched this patch of news thinner and thinner, he flinched his huge eyes several times at Waterhouse. Certain French nobles would have winked or stroked their moustaches interestedly; Waterhouse offered up nothing but a basilisk-stare.

That was the last time Fatio had anything to say concerning Alchemy; from that point onwards it was strictly mathematics, and the new work by Newton. Eliza had heard from both Leibniz and Huygens that this Newton had written some sort of discourse that had left all of the other Natural Philosophers holding their heads between their knees, and quite dried up the ink in their quills, and so she was able to follow Fatio’s drift here. Though from time to time he would turn his attention to Eliza and revert to courtly posturing for a few moments. Fatio prosecuted all of these uphill strugglings with little apparent effort, which spoke well of his training, and of the overall balance of his humours. At the same time it made her tired just to watch him. From the moment he came in the door he controlled the conversation; everyone spent the rest of the evening reacting to Fatio. That suited Eliza’s purposes well enough; it kept Daniel Waterhouse frustrated, which was how she liked him, and gave her leisure to observe. All the same, she wondered what supplied the energy to keep a Fatio going; he was the loudest and fastest clock in the room, and must have an internal spring keyed up very tight. He had no sexual interest whatever in Eliza, and that was a relief, for she could tell that he would be relentless and probably tiresome in wooing.

Why didn’t they just eject Fatio and have a peaceful dinner? Because he had genuine merit. Confronted by a nobody so desperate to establish his reputation, Eliza’s first impulse (and Waterhouse’s, too, she inferred) was to assume he was a
poseur.
But he was not. Once he figured out that Eliza wasn’t Catholic he had
interesting things to say concerning religion and the state of French society. Once he figured out that Waterhouse was no alchemist, he began to discourse of mathematical functions in a way that snapped the Englishman awake. And Huygens, when he finally woke up and came downstairs, made it obvious by his treatment of Fatio that he rated him as an equal—or as close to equal as a man like Huygens could ever have.

“A man of my tender age and meager accomplishments cannot give sufficient honor to the gentleman who once dined at this table—”