The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and the System of the World (302 page)

Sophie nodded. “And the English have grown so used to this that they use ‘currency’ as a synonym for ‘money’ as if no distinction need be observed between them.”

Caroline said, “Is this the answer to your question—how does a poor country defeat rich ones?”

“Indeed. The answer is, not by acquiring wealth, in the sense that France has it—”

“Meaning vineyards, farms, peasants, cows—”

“But rather to play a sort of trick, and redefine wealth to mean something novel.”

“Currency!”

“Indeed. Baron von Hacklheber says that the idea is not wholly new, having been well understood by the Genoese, the Florentines, the Augsburgers, the Lyonnaise for many generations. The Dutch built a modest empire on it. But the English—having no other choices—perfected it.”

“You have given me new food for thought.”

“Oh? And what think you? What think you now of our prospects, Caroline?”

To Sophie’s generation of royals, this question was shocking, absurd. One who was heir to a throne did not have to think about his prospects. Royal succession just happened, like the tide coming in. But it was different now; and Sophie deserved credit for having adjusted to this new state of affairs, where many of her contemporaries had passed from ignorance to indignation to senility.

Caroline answered: “I am pleased by the cleverness of this trick that the English have played, to win wars against their betters by tinkering with what wealth is. Because of it, I do not have to marry some inbred Bourbon, as poor Eliza did, and live out my days at Versailles, or in the Escorial. But I am troubled by the uncertainty that all of this brings. To paraphrase a wise man I know, it is as though a new System of the World has been drawn up. And not by us but by some strange Natural Philosophers in a smoky room in London. Now we must live by the rules of that System. But it is not perfectly understood; and I fear that where the English have played a trick with money, to gain a temporary advantage, some other trick might be played upon them to reverse the field.”

“Just so! And now you have come round to the meaning of Anne’s letter!” Sophie proclaimed, and flogged the parchment several times with her ivory fan. At the same time, the tree-wall behind them let out a gasp as it was struck by a fist of cold air. The wind had changed from south to west; new weather was coming; Herr Schwartz’s joints had not misled him. The tree-wall flexed toward them as if trying to spread shelter above their heads, and a dry sleet of brown leaves and twigs made the air and the ground restless with tiny itchings and fidgetings. Sophie—who of all persons was least disposed to take a fart for a thunderclap—paid this no heed whatever. Perhaps she was too absorbed in conversation to care. Or perhaps she was so comfortable in this place that she could not muster any sense of concern.

If Sophie did not wish to speak of the weather, ’twere hopeless, as well as rude, to force the topic, and so Caroline contented herself with gestures: she arched her back against the cool breeze, clasped her hands together on her knee, and glanced skyward. Then she responded, “The Queen’s letter has to do with money?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, she doesn’t know what money
is
. And would never write of anything so vulgar even if she did. The letter concerns family matters. Several paragraphs are devoted to your husband.”

“That is even more chilling to me than this recent change in the wind.”

“She refers to him by his English titles: Duke of Cambridge, Earl of Milford Haven, Viscount Northallerton, Baron Tewkesbury,” said Sophie, reading the outlandish names from the letter with parched amusement.

“Now you are teasing me, by not reading what the letter says.”

“I am not teasing you but doing you a favor, dear heart.”

“Is it that bad?”

“It is the worst yet.”

“Has my father-in-law seen it yet?”

“George Louis has not read it.”

“My husband and I would be in England now,” Caroline complained, “and he would be sitting in the House of Lords, if George Louis merely had the backbone to let us go. Another such letter from Queen Anne only cows him all the more, and delays our departure another month.”

Sophie smiled, showing sympathy. “George Louis cannot read this letter if you and I get caught in a rain-shower, and the ink is dissolved.”

A cold drop came through the sleeve of Caroline’s dress and sent a thrill up her arm. She laughed. Sophie did not move. A raindrop pocked into the letter. “However,” Sophie continued, “you must not deceive yourself. My son won’t let you go to England, it is true. But this is not simply because Queen Anne hates the idea. George Louis has his shortcomings. No one knows this better than his mama. But spinelessness is not among them! He keeps you and George Augustus pent up in Hanover, because he is envious of his son—his poise, his battle-glory—and distrustful of his son’s women.”

“You mean Mrs. Braithwaite?”

Sophie flinched. “She is a dust-mote. Everyone knows that except you. You, Eliza, the late Sophie Charlotte, and I—the women who walk in the garden—are to George Louis like some witch-coven. He is appalled that his son and heir is comfortable among us, and shares intelligence with us. For this reason he will never give George Augustus, and you, leave to move to England. He may use this as an excuse—” and she held up the letter so that many collected raindrops, black with dissolved abuse, tumbled down over the Queen of England’s signature “—but you must never be deceived.”

A strong wind-burst came through now, and cracked a branch somewhere. All the rainwater that had gathered on the leaves above was knocked loose and rushed down around them. Sophie looked around herself for the first time, becoming aware that this might develop into something more than a June shower. Her starched
fontange
was beginning to wilt.

But now it was Caroline’s turn to be oblivious to weather. “When we sat down here you said that the letter had some import, having to do with currency—?”

“Not the
substance
but the
tone
of it,” Sophie returned, raising her voice to match the volume of the wind. “Her previous letters, you know, written after the Whigs invited your husband to England, were petulant. Bitter. But this one is—or was—written in a haughty tone. Triumphant.”

“Something has changed in the last month or two—?”

“That is what she believes, I fear.”

“She phant’sies we are never coming at all. She’s going to give the throne to the Pretender.”

Sophie said nothing.

“But the throne is not all hers to give away. Parliament has some say in the matter. What could have occurred in the last few weeks to give the Jacobites such confidence?”

“A blow has been struck against the currency. An interruption in the flow.”

“That is just the sort of thing I was talking about a moment ago.”

“Perhaps you
are
a witch, dear, with powers of divination.”

“Perhaps I receive unscheduled visits from ‘horrid Englishmen.’ ”

“Aha!” Sophie glanced in the direction of the great fountain.

“Something must have gone awry at the English Mint.”

“But Sir Isaac Newton has charge of the Mint! I have been studying it,” Sophie said proudly. “When I’m Queen of England we shall all go to the Tower of London and see it.” Then she slapped her knee, meaning it was time to get up. For it was absolutely raining now, and search parties had probably been sent out from the Palace. Caroline got to her feet and gave Sophie an arm, helping her up off the bench. Meanwhile Sophie went on, “Sir Isaac has reformed the English coinage, which was the world’s worst, and now it is the best.”

“But this proves my point! All you are saying is that English coins have an excellent reputation…Let’s get out of here.” Caroline led the way this time, ushering Sophie out the nearest gate and onto one of the radiating paths. But then she pulled up short. The way back to the Palace was not obvious, even to one who knew the garden well. Sophie sensed her hesitation. “Let us wait it out in the pavilion,” she decreed, inclining her ruined
fontange
toward a diagonal path that would conduct them to the edge of the garden, where a stone dome overlooked the canal.

Caroline did not favor this idea because it would take them to a distant and unfrequented corner, and the way was hemmed in by dense wooded plots that were black and opaque and loud in the rain.

“Don’t you think we should return to the great fountain? Someone should be looking for us there.”

“If someone finds us, we shall have to stop talking!” Sophie answered, very provoked.

That was that. They turned their backs on the fountain and entered into a cleft between stands of trees. “It’s only water,” Caroline said philosophically. But Sophie seemed to have had quite enough of it, for she yanked on Caroline’s arm and began pulling her onwards, trying to quicken their pace. Caroline let herself be pulled.

“I take your point,” Sophie said. “A coinage based upon silver and gold has a sort of absolute value.”

“Like Sir Isaac’s absolute space and time,” Caroline mused. “You can assay it.”

“But if value is based upon reputations—like stocks in Amsterdam—or upon this even more nebulous concept of
flow
—”

“Like the dynamics of Leibniz in which space and time inhere in relationships among objects—”

“Why, then, it becomes unknowable, plastic, vulnerable. For
flow
may have some value in a market-place—and that value might even be real—”

“Of course it is real! People make money from it all the time!”

“—but that sort of value cannot survive the refiner’s fire at a Trial of the Pyx.”

“What on earth is a Pyx?” Caroline asked. But no answer was coming. Sophie pulled sharply on her arm and at the same moment fell into her. Caroline had to bend her knees and whip her free arm round Sophie’s shoulders to avoid falling down. “Grandmama? You wish to go in this way?” She glanced at the dark stand of trees to the left side of the path. “You wish to visit the Teufelsbaum?” Perhaps Sophie had changed her mind, and wished to take shelter under the trees instead of going all the way to the pavilion.

Some sound came out of Sophie’s mouth that could not really be understood. The clatter of raindrops on leaves made it difficult to hear even well-spoken words. But this utterance of Sophie’s had not been well spoken. Caroline doubted that it was even words. Relying on Caroline for support, Sophie shuffled and hopped on one leg until she had brought them face to face with an iron gate. For the plot of the Teufelsbaum, the Devil’s Tree, was surrounded by a wrought-iron fence as if it needed to be kept in a cage.

Sophie nodded at the gate, then looked up at Caroline with a kind of lopsided sneer: half of her face pleading, the other half sagging and vacant. Caroline reached out for the handle of the gate. At the same moment that the cold wet iron touched her skin she knew that Sophie had suffered a stroke. For this was not the first half-paralyzed face Caroline had ever seen. The symptoms were more difficult to recognize in a face she knew so well and loved so much. For a moment she froze with a hand on the gate-latch, as if some spell had turned her own flesh to cold iron. She ought to go for help, to find the doctors.

But then Sophie did something telling, which was that she looked up and down the garden path, and she did it furtively. This from someone who had never been furtive in her life.

Sophie could not speak and could hardly stand up, but she knew what was happening. She was afraid of being seen. Afraid of being rushed to the Palace, bled by the surgeons, pitied to her face and mocked behind her back. Her instinct was to hie to the deepest and darkest part of the garden and to die there.

Caroline shoved the gate open and they stepped into the dark.

The Teufelsbaum was a curiosity that Sophie had brought back from the family holdings in the Harz Mountains: a worthless tree that crawled along the ground and climbed up things, with all the mass and might of a great tree, but the writhing habit of a vine, enclosing other things and growing round them. Its boughs twisted round and divided and forked and kinked bizarrely. The bends looked something like elbows and knees, and the smooth bark and sinewy shape of the wood made the whole thing look like unidentifiable limbs of strange animals, melted into one another. The woodcutters of the Harz hated it, and cut it back wherever they could, but here Sophie had given it leave to spread. Now the Teufelsbaum returned the favor by embracing Sophie and Caroline in its sinuous arms. Caroline settled Sophie down in a crook of the tree, up off the cold ground, and then sat on a flat place and cradled Sophie’s head in her lap. The rain-shower had now abated somewhat, or perhaps the leaves gentled it. Time became stretched and immeasurable as they listened to the rain, Caroline stroking Sophie’s white hair, and holding the one hand that had not lost its power to grip back. But the garden was a place of quiet and of relaxation. Presently Sophie relaxed her grip on Caroline’s hand, and on the world.

Caroline had a long list of questions she had been meaning to ask Sophie, concerning how to be a Queen. She could have asked them there under the Teufelsbaum, but it would have been tactless, and Sophie would not have been able to answer.

Or rather she couldn’t have answered with words. Her true answer, the one that mattered, had been arranged long in advance: it was this moment and this place. Sophie’s dying here was the last thing she said to Caroline.

“I am the Princess of Wales,” Caroline said. She said it to herself.

11
JUNE
1714

I
N
W
ESTMINSTER, A
H
ALL
darkened Thames-
bank, like a load of gloaming spilt by a sloppy sky-god during the primordial rush to raise the vault of the stars. Efforts had been made to pretty it up, or at least screen it behind new work. The marshes from which it had upheaved had been filled and flattened to support the Hall’s contagions and encrustations. Some of these were styled as minsters, some as forts, others as houses—all mere words, since none was ever put to its builders’ purpose. A man debarking on that Bank and tunneling into the Pile, if he had a compass, and became not a-mazed in the gaudy labyrinth of out-buildings, might penetrate to the Hall.

It was empty. Oh, law-courts, screened behind plank barricades, had colonized the southern corners, and shop-stalls ran like baseboards along the sides, so that the persons who came and went through the emptiness could buy books, gloves, snuff, and hats. But these only pointed to the problematic immensity of the Hall; for what was the point of putting up a building so large that it could not be used until smaller buildings were erected within it? The carven angels at the ends of the out-thrust hammer-beams looked out on a tub of gray space. The bareness of the place, the splintery time-stained reach of its roof-timbers, betrayed it as a somewhat oversized
Dark Ages Viking-Hall. Beowulf could have strode in to the place at any moment and called for a horn of mead. He would have felt and looked more at home there than any of the periwigged Persons of Quality who darted across its stone floor, nervously, like stoats trying to make it across a darkling sandbar before owls could stoop on them. The smaller buildings huddled against Westminster Hall, stealing integrity from its flying buttresses, were better suited for plots, machinations, skullduggery, and arcane rites: the timeless occupations of men. So into the peripheral warrens they scurried, abandoning the hall to those bleak angels.

If this grave void at the heart of Westminster had any purpose, it was like the empty chamber that made up most of a violincello. The strings, bridge, bow, and the player itself were all to the outside. Nothing moved, nothing happened in the dark cavity; yet none of it would work unless it were built around a central emptiness that held the parts in their proper relation to one another, and withstood the relentless pulling of the strings while sympathizing with their tiniest stirrings.

There was only one man on this day who did not quicken his steps to cross that floor. It was an elderly knight who had arrived at the north end of the place in a black sedan chair, and bid his porters let him off there. He alit near the pillory, where a fat man was being whipped, writhing and hopping as each new stripe decorated his back, but refusing to cry out. The old man from the sedan chair swung wide of the post so he wouldn’t be flecked by hurtling blood, and stepped into a gap between a pair of coffee-houses that had been troweled onto the ancient façade of the hall, nearly hiding its main entrance. He needed no wig, for his hair, though thin, still grew long and straight, and smallpox had left little mark on him. And he needed no powder, for his hair had been white as salt for half a century. He strolled the length of the Hall slowly, raising his protruberant eyes to meet the gaze of certain of those omniscient angels, paying others no mind. He glanced about from time to time, as if his ears could detect echoes and discern resonances to which all others were deaf. In time he reached the south end of the vault where traffic was funneled between the two makeshift law-courts. With a visible hardening of his face he forced himself into a dissolving noise beyond. He was gone from the Hall. Perhaps he had changed it in his passage, added some faint strain that echoed after he was gone, and echoes there still.

Tribes, clans, factions, sects, classes, houses, and dynasties had raised their standards, and seen them thrown down, in the Hall’s out-buildings for six hundred years. It was to Power what Covent Garden
was to vegetables. No point in trying to follow the ins and outs, until you stepped over the threshold. At the moment, as for the past centuries, there was here a thing called Parliament, consisting of two parallel or alternate renderings named Commons and Lords, each the ground of an on-going war between Tories and Whigs, the sons and heirs of Cavaliers and Roundheads, the sons and heirs of Anglicans and Puritans, &c., &c. Each styled itself The Party and the other The Faction. Milling about in the gloom behind them, brandishing money and weapons, were descendants of ancient warlords, currently going by the names of Jacobites and Hanoverians. The battle itself was carried forward daily with words as many as granules of gunpowder on a battle-field.

The silver-haired knight had been summoned into a high-walled Gothick chapel that for quite some few years had been claimed, occupied, and defended against all comers by the body calling itself Commons. It was dominated by the Tories just now. His summoners were a committee or subset of Commons that happened to consist largely of Whigs. Why had a body of Tories suffered a band of Whigs to form a committee that could arrogate to itself the power to summon Knights into this hallowed Chapel that they used as their Clubb-house? Why, only because the subject of that committee’s deliberations was so abstruse, so recondite, and, in a word, so boring that they were only too pleased to let Whigs expend their powder on it.

“I
HAVE BEEN
made aware of four diverse Projects for discovering the Longitude,” said Sir Isaac Newton.

“Only
four
?” asked Roger Comstock, the Marquis of Ravenscar: a Whig, and the bloke who had invited Newton here. He belonged to Lords, not Commons, and was therefore a guest in this chamber. “At the Royal Society, it seems we are exposed to four
a week
.”

That Roger did not belong to this body at all, would seem to call in question the propriety of his having invited a stranger to come and address them. But he had many friends in the room willing to overlook this and other enormities.

“I know of only four, my lord, that are true
in theory
. Of the others I make no account.”

“Is that of Messieurs Ditton and Wiston among the fortunate four, or the phantastickal multitude?” asked Ravenscar.

Everyone in the chapel began barking like a dog except for him, Newton, and Messrs. Ditton (who had turned the color of a pomegranate seed, and begun moving his lips) and Whiston (whose eyelids thrummed like hummingbirds’ wings as sweat coursed in
gleaming rills from under his wig and pincered in on the corners of his eyes).

“Their
theory
is as
correct
as their
ambitions
are
feeble
,” answered Newton.

The House of Commons became silent, not out of shock at Newton’s cruelty, but out of professional admiration. “Supposing their scheme could be executed—a supposition that might be debated, at the Royal Society, as long and as fiercely as the late War was in this House—I say, disregarding all of the practical difficulties entailed in their Project, and supposing it were effected by some latter-day Dædalus—it would not suffice to navigate across an ocean, but only to enable the most diligent mariners to avoid running aground, when they wandered close to a Shore.”

General amusement in the Chapel now, occasioned by the facial expressions of Messrs. Ditton and Whiston, who were no longer even putting forth the effort to be angry or agitated. They now looked as if they were resting on slabs at the College of Physicians, about halfway through their own autopsies.

Not partaking of the entertainment was the Marquis of Ravenscar, who had just been handed a slip of paper by a page. He opened and read it, and for only a moment looked as dismayed as Ditton and Whiston. Then he got the better of himself. Like the deaf dinner-guest pretending that he heard the
bon mot,
he adopted a knowing grin, and allowed the mood of the House to infiltrate his phizz. He glanced down to review the documents spread out on the table before him, as if he had forgotten the subject of this hearing and needed to jog his memory. Then he spoke: “Merely to avoid ramming the odd continent is a low bar. What of the other three Projects that are true
in theory
? For it seems to me that if such Herculean efforts are to be made to practice a scheme, they were better directed to schemes that should enable our sea-captains to discover the Longitude
anywhere
.”

Sir Isaac Newton’s answer comprised many many words, but contained no more than the following information: that one could do it by telling the time with an excellent sea-going chronometer, which no one knew how to make yet; or by watching the satellites of Jupiter through an excellent sea-going telescope, which no one knew how to make yet; or by looking at the position of the moon and comparing it against calculations derived from his, i.e., Sir Isaac Newton’s, lunar theory, which was not quite finished yet but would be coming out any minute now in a book. In the timeless and universal manner of authors conversing in public places, he did not fail to mention its title: Volume III of
Principia Mathematica,
entitled
The System of the World,
available shortly where books are sold.

The Marquis of Ravenscar only heard this peroration in its general outlines because he spent the whole time jetting notes onto scraps of paper and stuffing them into minions’ hands. But when his ears detected a lengthy silence, he said: “These, er, calculations—would they be similar to what are already used for finding latitude? Or—”

“Infinitely more complex.”

“Oh, bother,” said Ravenscar distractedly, still scribbling notes, like the naughtiest schoolboy in the entire history of the world. “I suppose every ship would then require an extra deck crowded with
computers
, and a flock of geese to keep ’em in quills.”

“Or else we should need every ship to carry an
Arithmetickal Engine,
” Newton returned. Then, not trusting the House to detect his sarcasm, he went on: “—a chimærical phant’sy of the Hanoverian dilettante and plagiarist, Baron von Leibniz, which he has abjectly failed to complete lo these many years.” And it seemed as if Newton were prepared to enumerate the Baron’s defects at much greater length, but he was interrupted, and distracted, by the hot arrival in his palm of a note still damp from Ravenscar’s quill.

“So the lunar method
too
requires an apparatus we do not know how to make yet,” Ravenscar said, moving to sum up with an abruptness, a dispatch, that had not been seen in this House since the last time a Papist had tried to blow it up. The benches rustled with the stirrings of many expensively clad arses. A positive start was running through the Chapel.

“Yes, my lord—”

“And so it is your testimony that our ships shall persist in running aground and slaughtering our brave mariners until we shall learn how to make certain things we do not know how to make yet.”

“Yes, my—”

“Who shall invent these remarkable devices?”

“Projectors, entrepeneurs, adventurers, my—”

“What incentive could lead such a man to wager years of his life on attempting to devise a new Technology—if I may borrow a word from Dr. Waterhouse—that may turn out to be infeasible?” Ravenscar asked, standing up, and holding out his hand to let it be known that it was now permissible for someone to hand him his walking-stick. Someone did.

“My lord, some monetary—” testified Sir Isaac Newton, standing up as well—for he had read the note.

“A monetary prize—a Reward! To be awarded to such Person or Persons as shall discover a more certain and practical Method of ascertaining the Longitude? Is that your testimony? Yes? Sir Isaac, once
again the Heavens resound with your brilliance and all Britannia gapes in awe at your lapidary ingenuity.” Ravenscar was crossing the floor while he thus orated, a novelty that roused to full wakefulness many a senior back-bencher who had lost, or never found, the faculty of walking and talking at the same time. “ ’Twere a crime to waste any more of the time of the world’s foremost savant on details,” Ravenscar proclaimed, arriving at Newton’s side and snatching his arm. “I have unbounded confidence that Mr. Halley, Dr. Clarke, and Mr. Cotes can bat down any further questions from Commons—as for myself, I have business with certain troublous Lords—I may as well see you out, Sir Isaac, as we go the same way!” By that time he and Sir Isaac were out the door, leaving a House of more or less dumbfounded Commons; Ditton and Whiston, half-murdered but still breathing; and the three lesser savants mentioned, who had been summoned as mere acolytes to the High Priest, and been left in charge of the Rite.

N
EWTON NEARLY LOST AN ARM
in the lobby of Commons, for he moved left—towards Lords—as Roger Comstock, the Marquis of Ravenscar, who had possession of the arm, moved right—towards Westminster Hall. “We are summoned
by
Lords,” Ravenscar explained, re-socketing Newton’s shoulder-joint, and trying it with a wiggle, “but not
to
Lords.” Dodging round a few bends and negotiating diverse stair-flights they came into the cleft between the two plank law-courts, and entered the great Hall again—just as devoid of Vikings, and strewn with inappropriate modern-day Englishmen, as ever. A man in quasi-genteel clothes browsed a bookshop, to let all the world know he was literate; a straw projected from his shoe, as a signal to barristers that he would give false testimony in exchange for money. A stirring in the air created a serial heaving down rows of sunfaded, smoke-stained, bullet-holed banners: the colors of French regiments that had been taken by Marlborough at Blenheim and other places. These had been hung on the walls to add a bit of color, and been promptly forgotten. A fair bit of noise was coming into the north end of the Hall from the New Palace Yard. The man who’d received the whipping there earlier had been left in the pillory, and a few score common Londoners had gathered in his sight, to fling handfuls of mud and horse-manure at his face in hopes that they might induce suffocation. This sort of thing was common enough in London that most persons could will themselves not to see it. Ravenscar, uncharacteristically, was gazing directly at the scene. His eyes were too old, and too far away, to resolve the details; but he knew what it was. “Ah, fortunate man!” he said wistfully, “if only I could trade places with him for the next hour!”