The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and the System of the World (46 page)

The City of London

1673

D
ANIEL HAD NEVER
been an actor on a stage, of course, but when he went to plays at Roger Comstock’s theatre—especially when he saw them for the fifth or sixth time—he was struck by the sheer oddity of these men (and women!) standing about on a platform prating the words of a script for the hundredth time and trying to behave as if hundreds of persons weren’t a few yards away goggling at them. It was strangely mannered, hollow, and false, and all who took part in it secretly wanted to strike the show and move on to something new. Thus London during this the Third Dutch War, waiting for news of the Fall of Holland.

As they waited, they had to content themselves with such smaller bits of news as from time to time percolated in from the sea. All London passed these rumors around and put on a great pompous show of reacting to them, as actors observe a battle or storm said to be taking place off-stage.

Queerly—or perhaps not—the only solace for most Londoners was going to the theatre, where they could sit together in darkness and watch their own behavior reflected back to them.
Once More into the Breeches
had become very popular since its Trinity College debut. It had to be performed in Roger Comstock’s theatre after its first and second homes were set on fire owing to lapses in judgment on the part of the pyrotechnicians. Daniel’s job was to simulate lightning-flashes, thunderbolts, and the accidental detonation of Lord Brimstone without burning down Roger’s investment. He invented a new thunder-engine, consisting of a cannonball rolling down a Spiral of Archimedes in a wooden barrel, and he abused his privileges at the world’s leading alchemical research facility to formulate a new variant of gunpowder that made more flash and
less bang. The pyrotechnics lasted for a few minutes, at the beginning of the play. The rest of the time he got to sit backstage and watch Tess, who always dazzled him like a fistful of flash-powder going off right in the face, and made his heart feel like a dented cannonball tumbling down an endless hollow Screw. King Charles came frequently to watch his Nellie sing her pretty songs, and so Daniel took some comfort—or amusement at least—in knowing that he and the King both endured this endless Wait in the same way: gazing at the cheeks of pretty girls.

The small bits of news that
did
come in, while they waited for the
big
one, took various forms at first, but as the war went on they seemed to consist mostly of death-notices. It was not quite like living in London during the Plague; but more than once, Daniel had to choose between two funerals going on at the same hour. Wilkins had been the first. Many more followed, as if the Bishop of Chester had launched a fad.

Richard Comstock, the eldest son of John, and the model for the stalwart if dim Eugene Stopcock in
Breeches,
was on a ship that was part of a fleet that fell under the guns of Admiral de Ruyter at Sole Bay. Along with thousands of other Englishmen, he went to David Jones’s Locker. Many of the survivors could now be seen hobbling round London on bloody stumps, or rattling cups on street-corners. Daniel was startled to receive an invitation to the funeral. Not from John, of course, but from Charles, who had been John’s fourth son and was now the only one left (the other two had died young of smallpox). After his stint as laboratory assistant during the Plague Year at Epsom, Charles had matriculated at Cambridge, where he’d been tutored by Daniel. He had been well on his way to being a competent Natural Philosopher. But now he was the scion of a great family, and never could be aught else, unless the family ceased to be great, or he ceased being a part of it.

John Comstock got up in front of the church and said, “The Hollander exceeds us in industry, and in all things else, but envy.”

King Charles shut down the Exchequer one day, which is to say that he admitted that the country was out of money, and that not only could the Crown not repay its debts, but it couldn’t even pay
interest
on them. Within a week, Daniel’s uncle, Thomas Ham, Viscount Walbrook, was dead—of a broken heart or suicide, no one save Aunt Mayflower knew—but it scarcely made a difference. This led to the most theatrickal of all the scenes Daniel witnessed in London that year (with the possible exception of the re-enactment of the Siege of Maestricht): the opening of the Crypt.

Thomas Ham’s reliable basement had been sealed up by court officials immediately upon the death of its proprietor, and musketeers had been posted all round to prevent Ham’s depositors (who had, in recent weeks, formed a small muttering knot that never went away, loitering outside; as others held up libels depicting the atrocities of King Looie’s army in Holland, so these held up Goldsmiths’s Notes addressed to Thomas Ham) from breaking in and claiming their various plates, candlesticks, and guineas. Legal maneuverings began, and continued round the clock, casting a queer shadow over Uncle Thomas’s funeral, and stretching beyond it to two days, then three. The cellar’s owner was already in the grave, his chief associates mysteriously unfindable, and rumored to be in Dunkirk trying to buy passage to Brazil with crumpled golden punch-bowls and gravy-boats. But those were rumors. The
facts
were in the famously safe and sturdy Ham Bros. Cellar on Threadneedle.

This was finally unsealed by a squadron of Lords and Justices, escorted by musketeers, and duly witnessed by Raleigh, Sterling, and Daniel Waterhouse; Sir Richard Apthorp; and various stately and important Others. It was three days exactly since King Charles had washed his hands of the royal debts and Thomas Ham had met his personal Calvary at the hands of the Exchequer. That statistic was noted by Sterling Waterhouse—as always, noticer of details
par excellence.
As the crowd of Great and Good Men shuffled up the steps of Ham House, he muttered to Daniel: “I wonder if we shall roll the stone aside and find an empty tomb?”

Daniel was appalled by this dual sacrilege—then reflected that as he was now practically living in a theatre and mooning over an actress every night, he could scarcely criticize Sterling for making a jest.

It turned out not to be a jest. The cellar was empty.

Well—not empty. It was full, now, of speechless men, standing flatfooted on the Roman mosaic.

R
ALEIGH
: “I knew it would be bad. But—my God—there’s not even a
potatoe.
”

S
TERLING
: “It is a sort of anti-miracle.”

L
ORD
H
IGH
C
HANCELLOR OF THE
R
EALM
: “Go up and tell the musketeers to go and get more musketeers.”

They all stood there for quite a while. Attempts to make conversation flared sporadically all round the cellar and fizzled like flashes in damp pans. Except—strangely—among Waterhouses. Disaster had made them convivial.

R
ALEIGH
: “Our newest tenant informs me you’ve decided to turn architect, Daniel.”

S
TERLING
: “We thought you were going to be a savant.”

D
ANIEL
: “All the other savants are doing it. Just the other day, Hooke figured out how arches work.”

S
TERLING
: “I should have thought that was
known
by now.”

R
ALEIGH
: “Do you mean to say all existing arches have been built on
guesswork
?”

S
IR
R
ICHARD
A
PTHORP
: “Arches—and Financial Institutions.”

D
ANIEL
: “Christopher Wren is going to re-design all the arches in St. Paul’s, now that Hooke has explained them.”

S
TERLING
: “Good! Maybe the
new
one won’t become all bow-legged and down-at-heels, as the old one did.”

R
ALEIGH
: “I say, brother Daniel—don’t you have some
drawings
to show us?”

D
ANIEL
: “Drawings?”

R
ALEIGH
: “In the w’drawing room, perhaps?”

Which was a bad pun and a cryptickal sign, from Raleigh the patriarch (fifty-five years comically aged, to Daniel’s eyes seeming like a young Raleigh dressed up in rich old man’s clothes and stage-makeup), that they were all supposed to Withdraw from the cellar. So they did, and Sir Richard Apthorp came with them. They wound up on the upper floor of Ham House, in a bedchamber—the very same one that Daniel had gazed into from his perch atop Gresham’s College. A rock had already come in through a window and was sitting anomalously in the middle of a rug, surrounded by polygons of glass. More were beginning to thud against the walls, so Daniel swung the windows open to preserve the glazing. Then they all retreated to the center of the room and perched up on the bed and watched the stones come in.

S
TERLING
: “Speaking of Guineas, or lack thereof—shame about the Guinea Company, what?”

A
PTHORP
: “Pfft! ’Twas like one of your brother’s theatrickal powder-squibs. Sold my shares of it long ago.”

S
TERLING
: “What of you, Raleigh?”

R
ALEIGH
: “They owe me money, is all.”

A
PTHORP
: “You’ll get eight shillings on the pound.”

R
ALEIGH
: “An outrage—but better than what Thomas Ham’s depositors will get.”

D
ANIEL
: “Poor Mayflower!”

R
ALEIGH
: “She and young William are moving in with me anon—and so you’ll have to seek other lodgings, Daniel.”

S
TERLING
: “What fool is buying the Guinea Company’s debts?”

A
PTHORP
: “James, Duke of York.”

S
TERLING
: “As I said—what dauntless hero is,
et cetera…
”

D
ANIEL
: “But that’s nonsense! They are
his own
debts!”

A
PTHORP
: “They are the Guinea Company’s debts. But he is winding up the Guinea Company and creating a new Royal Africa Company. He’s to be the governor and chief shareholder.”

R
ALEIGH
: “What, sinking our Navy and making us slaves to Popery is not sufficient—he’s got to enslave all the Neegers, too?”

S
TERLING
: “Brother, you sound more like Drake every day.”

R
ALEIGH
: “Being surrounded by an armed mob must be the cause of sounding that way.”

A
PTHORP
: “The Duke of York has resigned the Admiralty…”

R
ALEIGH
: “As there’s nothing left to be Admiral
of…
”

A
PTHORP
: “And is going to marry that nice Catholic girl
^*
and compose his African affairs.”

S
TERLING
: “Sir Richard, this must be one of those things that you know before anyone else does, or else there would be rioters in the streets.”

R
ALEIGH
: “There
are,
you pea-wit, and unless I’m having a Drakish vision, they have set fire to this very house.”

S
TERLING
: “I meant they’d be rioting ’gainst the Duke, not our late bro-in-law.”

D
ANIEL
: “I personally witnessed a sort of riot ’gainst the Duke the other day—but it was about his religious, not his military, political, or commercial shortcomings.”

S
TERLING
: “You left out ‘intellectual and moral.’”

D
ANIEL
: “I was trying to be concise—as we are getting a bit short of that spiritous essence, found in
fresh
air, for which fire competes with living animals.”

R
ALEIGH
: “The Duke of York! What bootlicking courtier was responsible for naming New York after him? ’Tis a perfectly acceptable
city.
”

D
ANIEL
: “If I may change the subject…the reason I led us to this room was yonder
ladder
, which in addition to being an excellent Play Structure for William Ham, will also convey us to the roof—where it’s neither so hot nor so smoky.”

S
TERLING
: “Daniel, never mind what people say about you—you always have your
reasons.
”

[Now a serio-comical musical interlude: the brothers Waterhouse break into a shouted, hoarse (because of smoke) rendition of a Puritan hymn about climbing Jacob’s Ladder.]

S
CENE
: The rooftops of Threadneedle Street. Shouts, shattering of glass, musket-shots heard from below. They gather round the mighty Ham-chimney, which is now venting smoke of burning walls and furniture below.

S
IR
R
ICHARD
A
PTHORP
: “How inspiring, Daniel, to gaze down the widened and straightened prospect of Cheapside and know that St. Paul’s will be rebuilt there anon—’pon
mathematick
principles—so that it’s likely to
stay up
for a bit.”

S
TERLING
: “Sir Richard, you sound ominously like a
preacher
opening his sermon with a commonplace observation that is soon to become one leg of a tedious and strained
analogy.
”

A
PTHORP
: “Or, if you please, one leg of an arch—the other to be planted, oh, about
here.
”

R
ALEIGH
: “You want to build, what, some sort of triumphal arch, spanning that distance? May I remind you that
first
we want some sort of
triumph
!?”

A
PTHORP
: “It is only a similitude. What Christopher Wren means to do
yonder
in the way of a Church, I mean to do
here
with a
Banca.
And as Wren will use Hooke’s principles to build that Church soundly, I’ll use modern means to devise a
Banca
that—without in any way impugning your late brother-in-law’s illustrious record—will not have armed mobs in front of it burning it down.”