Read The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and the System of the World Online
Authors: Neal Stephenson
Tags: #Fiction
For all that, he made excellent headway, and his admirers in the garden of the coffee-house had only a few moments in which to memorize the details. Daniel secured the Reflecting Telescope and then looked across the square, wanting to regain sight of the strange gentleman who’d been following Isaac.
But that fellow was no longer sitting in the coffee-house opposite. Daniel feared that he’d lost the man’s trail—until he happened to glance back at the Earl of Upnor, and noticed that his entourage was parting to admit, and swallow up, none other than the same gentleman rider.
Daniel, unencumbered by sword, giant flaring boots, or clacking boot-protectors, very quickly rose and stepped out of Mrs. Green’s without bothering to excuse himself. He did not walk directly towards Upnor, but plotted a course to swing wide around
his group, as if going to an errand on the other side of Charing Cross.
As he drew close, he observed the following: the gentleman dismounted and approached the Earl, smiling confidently. Proud of himself, showing big mossy teeth.
While the rider bowed, Upnor glanced, and nodded, at one of his hangers-on. This man stepped in from the side, bending low, and made a sweeping gesture aimed at one of Upnor’s boots. Something flew from his hand and struck the top of the boot. In the same moment, this fellow extended his index finger and pointed to it: a neat dollop of brown stuff the size of a guinea coin. Everyone except the Earl of Upnor and the gentleman rider gasped in horror. “What is it?” the Earl inquired.
“Your boot!” someone exclaimed.
“I cannot see it,” the Earl said, “the boot-tops obstruct my view.” Supporting himself with the walking-stick, he extended one leg out in front of himself and pointed the toe. Everyone in Charing Cross could see it now, including the Earl. “You have got shit on my boot!” he announced. “Shall I have to kill you?”
The rider was nonplussed; he hadn’t come close enough to get shit on anyone—but the only other people who could testify to that were the Earl’s friends. Looking around, all he could see were the rouged and black-patched faces of the Earl’s crowd glowering at him.
“Whyever would you say such a thing, my lord?”
“
Fight a duel with you,
I should say—which would
presumably
mean killing you. Everyone I fight a duel with seems to die—why should you be any exception?”
“Why a…duel, my lord?”
“Because to extract an apology from you seems
impossible.
Even my
dog
is apologetic. But you! Why can you not show that you are ashamed of your actions?”
“My actions…”
“You have got shit on my boot!”
“My lord, I fear you have been misinformed.”
Very
ugly noises now from the entourage.
“Meet me tomorrow morning at Tyburn. Bring a second—someone strong enough to carry you away when I’m finished.”
The rider finally understood that claiming innocence was getting him nowhere. “But I
can
show that I am ashamed, my lord.”
“Really? E’en like a dog?”
“Yes, my lord.”
“When my dog gets shit in the wrong place, I rub his nose in it,”
said the Earl, extending his pointed toe again, so it was nearly in the rider’s face.
Daniel was now walking nearly behind the rider, no more than twelve feet distant, and could clearly see a stream of urine form in the crotch of his breeches and pizzle out onto the road. “Please, my lord. I did as you asked. I followed the white-haired man—I sent the message. Why are you doing this to me?”
But the Earl of Upnor fixed his stare on the rider, and raised his boot an inch. The rider bowed his head—lowered his nose toward it—but then the Earl slowly lowered his boot until it was on the ground, forcing the other to bend low, then clamber down onto his knees, and finally to put his elbows into the dirt, in order to put his nose exactly where the Earl wanted it.
Then it was over, and the gentleman rider was running out of Charing Cross with his face buried in his hands, presumably never to be seen in London again—which must have been exactly what the Earl wanted.
The Earl, for his part, shed his entourage at a tavern, and went alone into the same shop as Isaac Newton. Daniel, by that point, wasn’t even certain that Isaac was still
in
there. He walked by the front of it once and finally saw a tiny sign in the window:
MONSIEUR LEFEBURE—CHYMIST.
Daniel roamed around Charing Cross for the next half an hour, glancing into M. LeFebure’s windows from time to time, until he finally caught sight of silver-haired Isaac framed in a window, deep in conversation with Louis Anglesey, the Earl of Upnor, who only nodded, and nodded, and (for good measure) nodded again, rapt.
Much as the sun had burnt its face into Isaac’s retinas at Wools-thorpe, this image remained before Daniel long after he had turned his back upon Charing Cross and stalked away. He walked for a long time through the streets, shifting the burden of the telescope from one shoulder to the other from time to time. He was headed generally toward Bishopsgate, where there was a meeting to attend. He was pursued and harried the whole way by a feeling, difficult to identify, until at last he recognized it as a sort of jealousy. He did not know what Isaac was up to in the house/shop/laboratory/salon of M. LeFebure. He suspected Alchemy, Buggery, or some ripe warm concoction thereof: and if not, then a flirtation with same. Which was wholly Isaac’s business and not Daniel’s. Indeed, Daniel had no interest in either of those pastimes. To feel jealous was, therefore, foolish. And yet he did. Isaac had, somehow, found friends in whom
he could confide things he hid from Daniel. There it was, simple and painful as a smack in the gob. But Daniel had friends of his own. He was going to see them now. Some were no less fraudulent, or foolish, than Alchemists. Perhaps Isaac was only giving him his just deserts for that.
Royal Society Meeting, Gresham’s College
12
AUGUST
1670
This Club of Vertuoso’s, upon a full Night, when some eminent Maggot-monger, for the Satisfaction of the Society, had appointed to demonstrate the Force of Air, by some hermetical Pot gun, to shew the Difference of the Gravity between the Smoak of Tobacco and that of Colts-foot and Bittany, or to try some other such like Experiment, were always compos’d of such an odd Mixture of Mankind, that, like a Society of Ringers at a quarterly Feast, here sat a fat purblind Philosopher next to a talkative Spectacle-maker; yonder a half-witted Whim of Quality, next to a ragged Mathematician; on the other Side a consumptive Astronomer next to a water-gruel Physician; above them, a Transmutator of Metals, next to a Philosopher-Stone-Hunter; at the lower End, a prating Engineer, next to a clumsy-fisted Mason; at the upper End of all, perhaps, an Atheistical Chymist, next to a whimsy-headed Lecturer; and these the learned of the Wise-akers wedg’d here and there with quaint Artificers, and noisy Operators, in all Faculties; some bending beneath the Load of Years and indefatigable Labour, some as thin-jaw’d and heavyey’d, with abstemious Living and nocturnal Study as if, like
Pharaoh’s
Lean Kine, they were designed by Heaven to warn the World of a Famine; others looking as wild, and disporting themselves as frenzically,
as if the Disappointment of their Projects had made them subject to a Lunacy. When they were thus met, happy was the Man that could find out a new Star in the Firmament; discover a wry Step in the Sun’s Progress; assign new Reasons for the Spots of the Moon, or add one Stick to the Bundle of Faggots which have been so long burthensome to the back of her old Companion; or, indeed, impart any crooked Secret to the learned Society, that might puzzle their Brains, and disturb their Rest for a Month afterwards, in consulting upon their Pillows how to straiten the Project, that it might appear upright to the Eye of Reason, and the knotty Difficulty to be rectify’d, as to bring Honour to themselves, and Advantage to the Public.
—N
ED
W
ARD,
The Vertuoso’s Club
A
UGUST 12. AT A MEETING
of the SOCIETY,
MR. NICHOLAS MERCATOR and MR. JOHN LOCKE were elected and admitted.
The rest of Mr. BOYLE’s experiments about light were read, with great satisfaction to the society; who ordered, that all should be registered, and that Mr. HOOKE should take care of having the like experiments tried before the society, as soon as he could procure any shining rotten wood or fish.
Dr. CROUNE brought in a dead parakeet.
Sir JOHN FINCH displayed an asbestos hat-band.
Dr. ENT speculated as to why it is hotter in summer than winter.
Mr. POWELL offered to be employed by the society in any capacity whatever.
Mr. OLDENBURG being absent, Mr. WATERHOUSE read a letter from a PORTUGUESE nobleman, most civilly complimenting the society for its successes in removing the spleens of dogs, without ill effect; and going on to enquire, whether the society might undertake to perform the like operation on his Wife, as she was most afflicted with splenetic distempers.
Dr. ENT was put in mind of an account concerning oysters.
Mr. HOOKE displayed an invention for testing whether a surface is level, consisting of a bubble of air trapped in a sealed glass tube, otherwise filled with water.
The Dog, that had a piece of his skin cut off at the former meeting,
being enquired after, and the operator answering, that he had run away, it was ordered, that another should be provided against the next meeting for the grafting experiment.
The president produced from Sir WILLIAM CURTIUS a hairy ball found in the belly of a cow.
THE DUKE OF GUNFLEET produced a letter of Mons. HUYGENS, dated at Paris, mentioning a new observation concerning Saturn, made last spring at Rome by one CAMPANI, viz. that the circle of Saturn had been seen to cast a shadow on the sphere: which observation Mons. HUYGENS looked on as confirming his hypothesis, that Saturn is surrounded by a Ring.
A Vagabond presented himself, who had formerly received a shot into his belly, breaking his guts in two: whereupon one end of the colon stood out at the left side of his belly, whereby he voided all his excrement, which he did for the society.
Mr. POVEY presented a skeleton to the society.
Mr. BOYLE reported that swallows live under frozen water in the Baltic.
Dr. GODDARD mentioned that wainscotted rooms make cracking noises in mornings and evenings.
Mr. WALLER mentioned that toads come out in moist cool weather.
Mr. HOOKE related, that he had found the stars in Orion’s belt, which Mons. HUYGENS made but three, to be five.
Dr. MERRET produced a paper, wherein he mentioned, that three skulls with the hair on and brains in them were lately found at Black-friars in pewter vessels in the midst of a thick stone-wall, with certain obscure inscriptions. This paper was ordered to be registered.
Mr. HOOKE made an experiment to discover, whether a piece of steel first counterpoised in exact scales, and then touched by a vigorous magnet, acquires thereby any sensible increase in weight. The event was, that it did not.
Dr. ALLEN gave an account of a person, who had lately lost a quantity of his brain, and yet lived and was well.
Dr. WILKINS presented the society with his book, intitled, An Essay Towards a Real Character and Philosophical Language.
Mr. HOOKE suggested, that it was worth inquiry, whether there were any valves in plants, which he conceived to be very necessary for the conveying of the juices of trees up to the height of sometimes 200, 300, and more feet; which he saw not how it was possible to be performed without valves as well as motion.
Sir ROBERT SOUTHWELL presented for the repository a skull of an executed person with the moss grown on it in Ireland.
THE BISHOP OF CHESTER moved, that Mr. HOOKE might be ordered to try, whether he could by means of the microscopic moss-seed formerly shewn by him, make moss grow on a dead man’s skull.
Mr. HOOKE intimated that the experiment proposed by THE BISHOP OF CHESTER would not be as productive of new Knowledge, as a great many others that could be mentioned, if there were time enough to mention them all.
Mr. OLDENBURG being absent, Mr. WATERHOUSE read an extract, which the former had received from Paris, signifying that it was most certain, that Dr. DE GRAAF had unravelled testicles, and that one of them was kept by him in spirit of wine. Some of the physicians present intimating, that the like had been attempted in England many years before, but not with that success, that they could yet believe what Dr. DE GRAAF affirmed.
THE DUKE OF GUNFLEET gave of Dr. DE GRAAF an excellent Character; attesting that, while at Paris, this same Doctor had cured the Duke’s son (now the EARL OF UPNOR) of the bite of a venomous
spyder
.
Occasion being given to speak of tarantulas, some of the members said, that persons bitten by them, though cured, yet must dance once a year: others, that different patients required different airs to make them dance, according to the different sorts of tarantulas which had bitten them.
THE DUKE OF GUNFLEET said, that the
Spyder
that had bitten his son in Paris, was not of the
tarantula
sort, and accordingly that the Earl does not under any account suffer any compulsion to dance.
The society gave order for the making of portable barometers, contrived by Mr. BOYLE, to be sent into several parts of the world, not only into the most distant places of England, but likewise by sea into the East and West Indies, and other parts, particularly to the English plantations in Bermuda, Jamaica, Barbados, Virginia, and New England; and to Tangier, Moscow, St. Helena, the Cape of Good Hope, and Scanderoon.
Dr. KING was put in mind of dissecting a lobster and an oyster.
Mr. HOOKE produced some plano-convex spherical glasses, as small as pin-heads, to serve for object-glasses in microscopes. He was desired to put some of them into the society’s great microscope for a trial.
THE DUKE OF GUNFLEET produced the skin of a Moor tanned.
Mr. BOYLE remarked, that two very able physicians of his acquaintance gave to a woman desperately sick of the iliac passion above a pound of crude quicksilver which remained several days in her body without producing any fatal symptom; and afterwards dissecting the dead corpse, they found, that part of her gut, where the excrement was stopped, gangrened; but the quicksilver lay all on a heap above it, and had not so much as discoloured the parts of the gut contiguous to it.
Mr. HOOKE was put in mind of an experiment of making a body heavier than gold, by putting quicksilver to it, to see, whether any of it would penetrate into the pores of gold.
Dr. CLARKE proposed, that a man hanged might be begged of the King, to try to revive him; and that in case he were revived, he might have his life granted him.
Mr. WATERHOUSE produced a new telescope, invented by Mr. Isaac NEWTON, professor of mathematics in the university of Cambridge, improving on previous telescopes by contracting the optical path. THE DUKE OF GUNFLEET, Dr. CHRISTOPHER WREN, and Mr. HOOKE, examining it, had so good opinion of it, that they proposed it be shown to the King, and that a description and scheme of it should be sent to Mons. HUYGENS at Paris, thereby to secure this invention to Mr. NEWTON.
The experiment of the opening of the thorax of a dog was suggested. Mr. HOOKE and Mr. WATERHOUSE having made this experiment formerly, begged to be excused for the duration of any such proceedings. Dr. BALLE and Dr. KING made the experiment but did not succeed.
A fifth Cabal, perhaps, would be a Knot of Mathematicians, who would sit so long wrangling about squaring the Circle, till, with Drinking and Rattling, they were ready to let fall a nauseous Perpendicular from their Mouths to the Chamber-Pot. Another little Party would be deeply engaged in a learned Dispute about Transmutation of Metals, and contend so warmly about turning Lead into Gold, till the Bar had a just Claim to all the Silver in their Pockets…
—N
ED
W
ARD,
The Vertuoso’s Club
A
FEW OF THEM ENDED UP
at a tavern, unfortunately called the Dogg, on Broad Street near London Wall. Wilkins (who was the Bishop of Chester now) and Sir Winston Churchill and Thomas More Anglesey, a.k.a. the Duke of Gunfleet, amused themselves
using Newton’s telescope to peer into the windows of the Navy Treasury across the way, where lamps were burning and clerks were working late. Wheelbarrows laden with lockboxes were coming up every few minutes from the goldsmiths’ shops on Thread-needle.
Hooke commandeered a small table, set his bubble-level upon it, and began to adjust it by inserting scraps of paper beneath its legs. Daniel quaffed bitters and thought that this was all a great improvement on this morning.
“To Oldenburg,” someone said, and even Hooke raised his head up on its bent neck and drank to the Secretary’s health.
“Are we allowed to know
why
the King put him in the Tower?” asked Daniel.
Hooke suddenly became absorbed in table-levelling, the others in viewing a planet that was rising over Bishopsgate, and Daniel reckoned that the reason for Oldenburg’s imprisonment was one of those things that everyone in London should simply
know,
it was one of those facts Londoners breathed in like the smoke of sea-coal.
John Wilkins brushed significantly past Daniel and stepped outside, plucking a pipe from a tobacco-box on the wall. Daniel joined him for a smoke on the street. It was a fine summer eve in Bishopsgate: on the far side of London Wall, lunaticks at Bedlam were carrying on vigorous disputes with angels, demons, or the spirits of departed relations, and on this side, the rhythmic yelping of a bone-saw came through a half-open window of Gresham’s College as a cabal of Bishops, Knights, Doctors, and Colonels removed the rib-cage from a living mongrel. The Dogg’s sign creaked above in a mild river-breeze. Coins clinked dimly inside the Navy’s lockboxes as porters worried them up stairs. Through an open window they could occasionally glimpse Samuel Pepys, Fellow of the Royal Society, making arrangements with his staff and gazing out the window, longingly, at the Dogg. Daniel and the Bishop stood there and took it in for a minute as a sort of ritual, as Papists cross themselves when entering a church: to do proper respect to the place.
“Mr. Oldenburg is the heart of the R.S.,” Bishop Wilkins began.
“I would give that honor to you, or perhaps Mr. Hooke…”
“Hold—I was not finished—I was launching a metaphor. Please remember that I’ve been preaching to rapt congregations, or at least they are
pretending
to be rapt—in any case, they
sit quietly
while I develop my metaphors.”
“I beg forgiveness, and am now pretending to be rapt.”
“Very well. Now! As we have learned by doing appalling things to stray dogs, the heart
accepts
blood returning from organs, such as the brain, through veins, such as the jugular. It
expels
blood
toward
these organs through arteries, such as the carotid. Do you remember what happened when Mr. Hooke cross-plumbed the mastiff, and connected his jugular to his carotid? And don’t tell me that the splice broke and sprayed blood all around—this I remember.”
“The blood settled into a condition of equilibrium, and began to coagulate in the tube.”
“And from this we concluded that—?”
“I have long since forgotten. That bypassing the heart is a bad idea?”
“One
might
conclude,” said the Bishop helpfully, “that an inert vessel, that merely
accepts
the circulating Fluid, but never
expels
it, becomes a stagnant back-water—or to put it otherwise, that the heart, by forcing it outwards, drives it around the cycle that in good time brings it back in from the organs and extremities. Hallo, Mr. Pepys!” (Shifting his focus to across the way.) “Starting a war, are we?”
“Too easy…winding one up, my lord,” from the window.