The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and the System of the World (226 page)

The second chicken had long since been swallowed, without any tedious chewing, by a big croc. The rope was still attached—it ran up the crocodile’s gullet, out of its mouth, and several yards across the water, over the mast-raft to the floating spear. As the masts moved downstream, the spear was dragged backwards across them, and inevitably the barbs in the spear-head snagged in some of the ropes binding the raft together. As to what happened inside of the crocodile’s gut when the rope went taut and tried to pull the chicken out, Jack could only speculate—and as to what was going on in the mind of the
chicken
(which might be in some sense still alive), that was a matter for metaphysicians. The outward result was that the masts stopped moving and the crocodile became highly annoyed. Jack supposed that a very big and old crocodile must take a certain pride in his work, viz. swallowing and digesting whatever came along, and that an attempt to revoke a meal by yanking it out must be viewed, by such a Reptile, as a very serious affront. In any event it led to an amount of thrashing. And that led to a bit of good fortune Jack had not really looked for: All of the other crocodiles seemed to hear or
feel this commotion and made it their business to get there as fast as they could—which was disturbingly fast.

Jack, anyway, was not slow to take advantage of this, the only opportunity he was likely to get. He waded halfway to the masts and faltered when he felt the river-bottom falling out from under his feet, and the current trying to sweep his legs. His boots and weapons would make swimming impossible. He kicked off a boot, and was about to abandon it when something prompted him to turn around. Nostrils were headed his way. He flung the boot towards them and it vanished as quickly as the chickens had. A few moments later, the second boot joined it. Now Jack pulled off the belt that supported his sword and scabbard. The belt he flung at the crocodile; it paused for one heartbeat to consume it. The sword he flung at the mast-raft; it had the good grace to stick there. The scabbard he made as if to throw at the crocodile. Watching him through bulging slit-pupil eyes, it opened its mouth to catch it; but Jack held on to this morsel, turned it vertical, and shoved it between the crocodile’s jaws.

Now this turned out to be nothing more than a brief annoyance to the animal, and not the show-stopper Jack had been hoping for; but as Jack had demonstrated in diverse settings, sometimes it sufficed to be annoying. It took a few moments for this crocodile to shake the scabbard loose, and in that time Jack divested himself of his clothes. While another crocodile was swallowing those, naked Jack was swimming to the masts. While the two crocodiles were fighting over precedence, Jack was climbing onto the masts and retrieving his sword. A smaller crocodile came towards him with shocking speed, as if it were being towed on a rope behind a fleet ship, and made it halfway up onto the fore-mast on sheer momentum. Jack nearly took its head off and it fell into the water and became food for other crocodiles. Another stroke of the Janissary-blade severed the rope of the chicken and set the masts adrift again. The raft slowly began to move, and soon eased over the bar and into the harbor, spinning slowly in some vast unseen vortex.

The Queen’s boat was waiting there, and with a couple of throws Jack was able to get the line over to his comrades, who proceeded to reel him and the masts in like a fish.

Jack sensed that he was already badly sunburnt; yet the equatorial sun was a soothing balm compared to the glare of Queen Kottakkal.

“I perceive the wisdom of your tradition, O Queen,” Jack said as his mast-raft was brought alongside the royal barge, “for not one man in a thousand could survive the trial you set for me there. Andas near as I can make out, one in a thousand is the normal proportion
of honest men in any group…”

But here Jack’s oration was rudely interrupted by screams from nearly every man on the boat. He turned around to see a giant crocodile, twenty feet long if it was an inch. It was not so much
climbing onto
the masts as
thrusting them below
the surface of the water with its weight, and then gliding up over the submerged wood. This meant that it was advancing toward him. But then suddenly it was raining Shaftoes as Jimmy and Danny vaulted down between Jack and the reptile, each gripping a boat-paddle, and began waving these in the animal’s face. It proceeded to chew its way up the wood as if the oars were breadsticks, and was well on its way to having Jimmy and Danny Shaftoe for lunch, and Jack for dessert, when the Nayars up on the boat opened fire with their blunderbusses.

A moment later the Malabar skies were split open by a long rippling train of explosions. Jack looked across the water to see the new ship obscured in a bank of gray smoke, and light jabbing out of it in all directions: The eager crew had misunderstood, and were firing a full salute to their approaching Queen and their ship’s officers. Jack felt the masts bob upwards under his feet, and glanced over to see quite a bit of blood where the crocodile had been.

The guns of Queen Kottakkal’s castle were firing a salute of their own now, and the Queen was ascending to the top of her barge to accept all of these honors. She had been overtaken by events, which happened to all monarchs; but like a good monarch she knew when to accept the strange verdicts handed down by Fortune and by crocodiles.

J
ACK, IN A BORROWED
Nayar loincloth, raised the Champagne-bottle over his head and drew a bead on the ship’s bowsprit. “In the name of whatever passes for sacred in this hell-hole, I christen thee
Eli
—”

Halfway to its target, the bottle slapped into the suddenly out-thrust palm of Enoch Root.

“Don’t name it after her,” he said.

“Why not? That has
always
been my plan.”

“Do you really think it will go unnoticed? The lady is in a delicate position…even the figurehead bears a dangerously close resemblance to her.”

“D’you really suppose it’ll
matter
?”

“This ship is not destined to remain in Malabar forever. One day she will find her way back to some Christian port—and there are very few Christian ports
left
where Eliza is not, in some sense, embroiled.”

“Well, what the hell should we name it, then?
Electress Sophie? Queen Kottakkal?
”

“Sometimes it is better to be indirect…then each and every one of those Ladies can
suppose
that the ship is
really
named after her.”

“Not a bad idea, Enoch…but what does each of those three Ladies have in common?”

“Wisdom. Wisdom, and a kind of strength—a willingness to put her wisdom into effect.”

“Say no more,” Jack said, “I have seen the very Lady in plays.” Then, turning his attention back to the ship: “I christen thee
Minerva
.” A moment later French wine was fizzing on his sunburnt flesh, and the cannons were firing all round. Dappa was translating all to Queen Kottakkal, who looked Jack in the eye and smiled.

FEBRUARY
1696

“A
GREAT HEAP OF CORD-WOOD
and kindling, saturated with oil, was found on the brink of the cliff at Dover,” asserted Roger Comstock, Marquis of Ravenscar and Chancellor of the Exchequer, “ready to speed the news of his majesty’s assassination across the Channel.” Seated in the (more desirable) forward-facing bench of the boat, he held his head high, and gazed down the Thames as if combing the skies above the Nore for encrypted smoke-signals.

“It speaks well of the Jacobites that they have at last got their signals worked out,” was all Daniel had to say. “They have used up half of France’s wine and firewood celebrating
false
reports of William’s demise.”

Roger sighed. “You are as ever a fount of treasonous raillery. It is well that we meet on a water-taxi, where the only one who can overhear us, does not speak a word of English.” This a playful dig at the Cockney manning the oar. If Daniel had made the same jest, he’d have been pitched overboard, and the waterman would have been acquitted, at the Old Bailey, on grounds of All Too Understandable Righteous Fury. Somehow Roger said it with the wink that was as good as a one-pound tip.

“When we parley in a coffee-house,” Roger went on, “I flinch whenever you get that look on your face, and part your lips.”

“Soon I shall follow that other Seditious Libeller, Gomer Bolstrood, across the sea, and your flinching days shall be at an end.” Daniel, seated in the backward-facing seat, gazed wistfully toward Massachusetts.

“Yes, so you have been claiming, for the last ten years or so—”

“Closer seven. But to play fast and loose with
quantities numerical
is, of course, a perquisite—some would say, a necessity—of your office.” Daniel rotated his head a few degrees to the left and nodded in the direction of Westminster Palace, still and for the next few seconds
visible around the elbow of Lambeth. This was a reference to the Exchequer, an avalanche of ill-considered additions to the river-ward side of the same Palace. It was there that Daniel had gone to meet Roger, and thence that they’d departed on this boat a few minutes ago.

Roger turned around, following Daniel’s gaze, but too late.

“I was looking at your Place of Business,” Daniel said. “It seems to have disappeared behind all of those immense stacks of rotting timbers that have accumulated there in recent years, along the Lambeth river-bend, in consequence of that no one can buy anything because there is no money.”

Roger blinked very slowly, once, which was a way of letting Daniel know that the jab had quite wounded him, but that the victim was in a forgiving mood.

“I should be ever so much obliged,” Roger said, “if you would
attend
to the very important news I am projecting in the general direction of your bloody ears. Forty men—gentlemen and titled nobility of England, for the most part—gathered yesterday on Turn-ham Green to fall upon the King of England, on his way back from hunting, and murder him.”

“Say, speaking of bloody ears—”

“Yes! He was among them.”

People hated listening to Daniel and Roger converse, for they’d known each other much longer than was decent, proper, or good for them, and so were able to communicate in a stunted zargon of private allusions.
Bloody ears
was here a reference to Charles White, the Jacobite Tory who had made a habit of biting Whigs’ ears off, and (or so ’twas rumored) later displaying them, in private, to like-minded friends, as trophies.

“In Calais, in Dunkirk,” Roger continued, “you’ll see ships crammed with French troops, waiting only for that signal-fire to blaze up before they set sail.”

“I see that you are furious. I understand why. If I am
not
, it is only because this is all so bloody repetitive that I can scarcely believe I am hearing it! Did we not go through this already?”

“What an odd reaction.”

“Is it? I could say the same about the bloody
money
. When are we to have money, Roger?”

“
Some
, Daniel, would say that the regrettable phænomena to which you allude were
consistent,
or
persistent,
or
constant
menaces to our liberties as Englishmen, and thus naturally to be confronted and subdued with manly vigor. For you to roll your eyes in this way, and deride them as merely
repetitious
—as if you were watching a
play
—is
very strange.”

“That is why I am getting ready to excuse myself, and go out to the lobby for air.”

“The lobby is some labored metaphor, here, for Massachusetts Bay Colony?”

“Yes.”

“What makes you suppose Massachusetts will seem any less repetitious? The news that I get from there is just one bloody Indian-raid, and Mather-tirade, after another.”

“I shall be able to pursue work there, of an altogether novel character.”

“Yes—so you keep telling the Fellows of the Royal Society—all two dozen of us.”

“The correct figure is nearer
eight
dozen. But I take your meaning. We
have
dwindled. It is all because of Want of Novelty. I mean to fix that.”

“Here is novelty for you: When you come in sight of the French naval base at Dunkirk—”

“That is the
second
time you have spoken to me as if I were about to go on a voyage to France. What is troubling your mind, to inspire such phant’sies?”

“Troubled mind or no, I am, am I not, the sole benefactor and Chairman of the Court of Directors of the Massachusetts Bay Colony Institute of Technologickal Arts?”

“Sir, I am not aware that the said Institute has even been Instituted yet. But if it
had,
you’d be the Prime Suspect.”

“Is that a yes?”

“Yes.”

“It follows that I am entitled to some say in how the sole employee goes about his work—do you not agree?”

“
Employees
get
paid
. They get paid
money.
Of which there
is
none.”

“You are really the most exasperating chap. How have you spent the past fortnight?”

“You know perfectly well I’ve been up at Cambridge helping Isaac clean out his lodgings.”

Roger affected astonishment. “I say, that wouldn’t by any chance be Isaac Newton the savant—?—! Why ever is he leaving Cambridge?”

“Coming down here—
finally
—to run the Mint,” Daniel allowed (this had been in the works for years; the Realm’s political complications, and Isaac’s mental disorders, had made it slow).

“They say he is the most brilliant fellow who ever lived.”

“He would give that distinction to Solomon; but I am with you, sir.”

“My goodness, do you suppose he’ll be up to the task of stamping
out a few bits of metal?”

“If he is not fettered by
Politicks
.”

“Daniel, you offend me. What you have just said amounts to a suggestion that the Juncto is politically incompetent. May I remind you that Recoinage has been approved—by Commons as well as Lords? So we shall only have to put up with this rubbish for a little while longer.” The Chancellor of the Exchequer reached into his shoe and pulled out a wad of Bank of England paper money he’d stuffed into it to keep his feet warm, and waggled it in the chilly air for emphasis. Then—disgusted by the sight of it—he chucked it over his shoulder into the Thames. Neither he nor the waterman looked back.

“That was a foolish and profligate waste,” Daniel said. “We could’ve burned it to keep warm.”

“Tally-sticks make more heat, guv’nor,” volunteered the waterman, “and they are circulating at a discount of forty percent.”

“Isaac will be sworn in at the Mint at the beginning of May,” said Roger. “It is now February. How shall we occupy ourselves between now and then? Your intention is to carry forward that Comenius-Wilkins–Leibniz Pansophic Arithmetickal Engine–Logick Mill–Algebra of Ratiocination–Automatic Computation–Repository of all Knowledge project, is it not?”

“We need a better name for it,” Daniel conceded, “but you know perfectly well the answer is yes.”

“Then you really had ought to go have a chat with Leibniz first, or do you disagree?”

“Of course I don’t disagree,” said Daniel, “but even if money existed in this Realm, I should not
possess
any, and so I had not really considered it.”

“I found some old
louis d’or,
pre-debasement, in a sock,” Roger confided to him, “and should be pleased to advance them to you, while we wait for Isaac to stoke up the Mint.”

“What on earth would I do with French coins?”

“Buy things with them,” said Roger, “in France.”

“We are at war with France!”

“It has been a very slow war of late—one battle of consequence in the last two years.”

“Still—why should I go there?”

“It happens to be on the way to Germany, which is where Leibniz was, the last time anyone bothered to check.”

“It would be more prudent to
avoid
France.”

“But ever so much more convenient to go there direct—for that is where your
jacht
happens to be bound.”

“I have a
jacht
now, too?”

“Behold!” proclaimed the Marquis of Ravenscar. Daniel was obliged to swivel his head around and gaze downstream. They had, by this time, drifted past the Steelyard and were converging on the Old Swan Stairs, just above London Bridge. On the yonder side of the Bridge spread the Pool, which contained above a thousand ships.

“I haven’t the faintest idea what it is you want me to behold,” Daniel complained. “The Fishmongers?” For that was the closest thing along the azimuth that Roger was now forcibly indicating with bladelike thrusts of the hand.

“Oh, bloody hell,” said Roger, “she is at Tower Wharf, you cannot see her from here, let us go and pay her a visit.” And he alighted from the boat and stomped away up Old Swan Stairs without giving any money to, or even glancing back at, the waterman; who, however, seemed perfectly content. Roger must have an Understanding with him, as he seemed to with all London, a few Jacobites excepted.

F
ROM THE
O
LD
S
WAN,
where they bated to warm themselves with pints, they could have walked half a mile along Thames Street and then applied themselves to the lengthy and complicated work of burrowing through the Tower’s gates, bastions, causeways, and the micro-neighborhoods that had grown up around, and occluded, the same, as vegetation on infected heart-valves. But Roger was of a mind to see a thing on the river side, and so they walked only far enough to get round the end of the Bridge, then descended the terraced rectilinear cove of Lion Stairs, below the barnlike mass of the Church of St. Magnus Martyr, which Wren had rebuilt, but not got round to putting a tower or a steeple on yet. Another waterman consented to take them downriver from there. Swinging wide round the riotous congestion of Billingsgate and the broad Key before the Customs House, they pounced upon Tower Wharf. For the most part this presented itself to them as a quarter-mile-long wall jumping straight out of the river. But it was adorned here and there with cranes, guns, a wee crenellated castle, and other curios. Two stairs and one arched tunnel were cut into it, and the waterman kept guessing Roger would go to one of those; but the Marquis of Ravenscar kept exhorting him on, on to the downstream end, where two brigs and a ship had been made fast to the wharf. Daniel instinctively looked at the smaller and meaner vessels, until he recollected that he was in the company of Roger; then he had eyes only for what was high and gaudy. They were looking up at the bows of the three-master. Its figurehead was extraordinary. Not only because it was covered in many square yards of gold leaf—that was common enough—but because of its sculpture. It was a face carved into the
front of a bulbous golden sphere that seemed to be hurtling forth with utmost impetuosity, drawing behind it a vast swirling wake of golden, silver, and copper flames. It was, Daniel realized, an anthropomorphic phant’sy of a Comet or a great fiery—

“Meteor!” Roger announced. “Or
Météore,
as her former owner, Monsieur le duc d’Arcachon, would have it.” Then, to the waterman, “Take us up and down the length of her, and then, when Dr. Waterhouse has finished his inspection, we shall board her by yonder ladder. Daniel, I do hope you are in the mood for some ladder-climbing.”

“I’d climb a
rope
to see this,” Daniel returned.

“Mmm…any
sane
man, given a choice between scaling a rope, and going to France on a Duke’s
jacht
, would choose the
latter
…so I shall take your remark as a commitment to be in Dunkirk in three days’ time,” said Roger.

E
ARLIER IN HIS LIFE
D
ANIEL
would have counted the guns of
Météore,
but as it was he had eyes mostly for the woodcarving and the decoration. The shipwrights had made it appear that
Météore
was draped and festooned from stem to stern with garlands of golden laurel. Victory spread her wings across the breadth of the sterncastle, and drew all those wreaths and festoons together in one hand like so many reins, while brandishing a sword in the other. Above the spreading wings was a row of windows. “Your cabin,” Roger explained, “where refreshment awaits us.”

They dined there on a roast quail prepared in
Météore’
s galley, “which had to be gutted and re-built,” Roger said, “to remove the taint; for the late Duke had tastes abominable even to the French.” The azure tablecloth was embroidered with gold fleurs-de-lis; Daniel suspected it might have been a flag once.

“Is this ship
yours
now, then, Roger?”

“Please do not be vulgar by speaking of
ownership,
Daniel; as everyone knows, she was taken as a prize from Cherbourg the
last
time the Frogs got ready to invade us, and became a trifle for the King to dispose of as he wished; he had thoughts of bestowing her upon his Queen, and so had her repaired—”