The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and the System of the World (12 page)

Yes, beating someone over the head is the
entire
point.

Banks of the River Cam

1665

I
T WAS LESS THAN AN
hour’s walk to the Fair, strolling along gently sloped green banks with weeping willows, beneath whose canopies were hidden various prostrate students. Black cattle mowed the grass unevenly and strewed cow-pies along their way. At first the river was shallow enough to wade across, and its bottom was carpeted with slender fronds that, near the top, were bent slightly downstream by the mild current. “Now, there is a curve whose fluxion in the downstream direction is nil at the point where it is rooted in the bottom—that is to say, it rises vertically from the mud—but increases as it rises.”

Here Daniel was a bit lost. “Fluxion seems to mean a flowing over time—so it makes perfect sense when you apply the word to the position of a punt on a river, which is, as a matter of fact, flowing over time. But now you seem to be applying it to the shape of a weed, which is not flowing—it’s just standing there sort of bent.”

“But Daniel, the virtue of this approach is that it
doesn’t matter
what the actual physical situation
is,
a curve is
ever a curve,
and whatever you can do to the curve of a
river
you can do just as rightly to the curve of a
weed
—we are free from all that old nonsense now.” Meaning the Aristotelian approach, in which such easy mixing of things with obviously different natures would be abhorrent. All that mattered henceforth, apparently, was what form they adopted when translated into the language of analysis. “Translating a thing into the analytical language is akin to what the alchemist does when he extracts, from some crude ore, a pure spirit, or virtue, or
pneuma.
The fœces—the gross external forms
of things—which only mislead and confuse us—are cast off to reveal the underlying spirit. And when this is done we may learn that some things that are superficially different are, in their real nature, the same.”

Very soon, as they left the colleges behind, the Cam became broader and deeper and instantly was crowded with much larger boats. Still, they were not boats for the ocean—they were long, narrow, and flat-bottomed, made for rivers and canals, but with far greater displacement than the little punts. Stourbridge Fair was already audible: the murmur of thousands of haggling buyers and sellers, barking of dogs, wild strains from bagpipes and shawms whipping over their heads like twists of bright ribbon unwinding in the breeze. They looked at the boat people: Independent traders in black hats and white neck-cloths, waterborne Gypsies, ruddy Irish and Scottish men, and simply Englishmen with complicated personal stories, negotiating with sure-footed boat-dogs, throwing buckets of mysterious fluids overboard, pursuing domestic arguments with unseen persons in the tents or shacks pitched on their decks.

Then they rounded a bend, and there was the Fair, spread out in a vast wedge of land, bigger than Cambridge, even more noisy, much more crowded. It was mostly tents and tent people, who were not their kind of people—Daniel watched Isaac gain a couple of inches in height as he remembered the erect posture that Puritans used to set a better example. In some secluded parts of the Fair (Daniel knew) serious merchants were trading cattle, timber, iron, barrelled oysters—anything that could be brought upriver this far on a boat, or transported overland in a wagon. But this wholesale trade
wanted
to be invisible, and
was.
What Isaac
saw
was a
retail
fair whose size and gaudiness was all out of proportion to its importance, at least if you went by the amount of money that changed hands. The larger avenues (which meant sluices of mud with planks and logs strewn around for people to step on, or at least push off against) were lined with tents of rope-dancers, jugglers, play-actors, puppet shows, wrestling-champions, dancing-girls, and of course the speciality prostitutes who made the Fair such an important resource for University students. But going up into the smaller byways, they found the tables and stalls and the cleverly fashioned unfolding wagons of traders who’d brought goods from all over Europe, up the Ouse and the Cam to this place to sell them to England.

Daniel and Isaac roamed for the better part of an hour, ignoring
the shouts and pleadings of the retailers on all sides, until finally Isaac stopped, alert, and sidestepped over to a small folding display-case-on-legs that a tall slender Jew in a black coat had set up. Daniel eyed this Son of Moses curiously—Cromwell had readmitted these people to England only ten years previously, after they’d been excluded for centuries, and they were as exotic as giraffes. But Isaac was staring at a constellation of gemlike objects laid out on a square of black velvet. Noting his interest, the Kohan folded back the edges of the cloth to reveal many more: concave and convex lenses, flat disks of good glass for grinding your own, bottles of abrasive powder in several degrees of coarseness, and prisms.

Isaac signalled that he would be willing to open negotiations over two of the prisms. The lens-grinder inhaled, drew himself up, and blinked. Daniel moved round to a supporting position behind and to the side of Isaac. “You have pieces of eight,” the circumcised one said—midway between an assertion and a question.

“I know that your folk once lived in a kingdom where that was the coin of the realm, sir,” Isaac said, “but…”

“You know nothing—my people did not come from Spain. They came from Poland. You have French coins—the louis d’or?”

“The louis d’or is a beautiful coin, befitting the glory of the Sun King,” Daniel put in, “and probably much used wherever you came from—Amsterdam?”

“London. You intend to compensate me, then, with what—Joachimsthalers?”

“As you, sir, are English, and so am I, let us use English means.”

“You wish to trade cheese? Tin? Broadcloth?”

“How many
shillings
will buy these two prisms?”

The Hebraic one adopted a haggard, suffering look and gazed at a point above their heads. “Let me see the color of your money,” he said, in a voice that conveyed gentle regret, as if Isaac
might
have bought some prisms today, and instead would only get a dreary lesson in the unbelievable shabbiness of English coinage. Isaac reached into a pocket and wiggled his fingers to produce a metallic tromping noise that proved many coins were in there. Then he pulled out a handful and let the lens-grinder have a glimpse of a few coins, tarnished black. Daniel, so far, was startled by how good Isaac was at this kind of thing. On the other hand, he had made a business out of lending money to other students—maybe he had talent.

“You must have made a mistake,” said the Jew. “Which is perfectly
all right—we all make mistakes. You reached into the wrong pocket and you pulled out your black money
^*
—the stuff you throw to beggars.”

“Ahem, er, so I did,” Isaac said. “Pardon me—where’s the money for paying merchants?” Patting a few other pockets. “By the way, assuming I’m not going to offer you black money, how many shillings?”

“When you say shillings, I assume you mean the new ones?”

“The James I?”

“No, no, James I died half a century ago and so one would not normally use the adjective
new
to describe pounds minted during his reign.”

“Did you say
pounds
?” Daniel asked. “A pound is rather a lot of money, and so it strikes me as not relevant to this transaction, which has all the appearances of a shilling type of affair
at most
.”

“Let us use the word
coins
until I know whether you speak of the new or the old.”

“
New
meaning the coins minted, say, during our lifetimes?”

“I mean the Restoration coinage,” the Israelite said, “or perhaps your professors have neglected to inform you that Cromwell is dead, and Interregnum coins demonetized these last three years.”

“Why, I believe I
have
heard that the King is beginning to mint new coins,” Isaac said, looking to Daniel for confirmation.

“My half brother in London knows someone who
saw
a gold
CAROLUS II DEI GRATIA
coin once, displayed in a crystal case on a silken pillow,” Daniel said. “People have begun to call them Guineas, because they are made of gold that the Duke of York’s company is taking out of Africa.”

“I say, Daniel, is it true what they say, that those coins are perfectly circular?”

“They are, Isaac—not like the good old English hammered coins that you and I carry in such abundance in our pockets and purses.”

“Furthermore,” said the Ashkenazi, “the King brought with him a French savant, Monsieur Blondeau, on loan from King Louis, and that fellow built a machine that mills delicate ridges and inscriptions into the edges of the coins.”

“Typical French extravagance,” Isaac said.

“The King really did spend more time than was good for him in Paris,” Daniel said.

“On the contrary,” the forelocked one said, “if someone clips or
files a bit of metal off the edge of a round coin with a milled edge, it is immediately obvious.”

“That must be why everyone is melting those new coins down as fast as they are minted, and shipping the metal to the Orient…?” Daniel began,

“…making it impossible for the likes of me and my friend to obtain them,” Isaac finished.

“Now there is a good idea—if you can show me coins of a bright silver color—not that black stuff—I’ll weigh them and accept them as bullion.”

“
Bullion!
Sir!”

“Yes.”

“I have heard that this is the practice in China,” Isaac said sagely. “But here in England, a shilling is a shilling.”

“No matter how little it weighs!?”

“Yes. In principle, yes.”

“So when a lump of metal is coined in the Mint, it takes on a magical power of shillingness, and even after it has been filed and clipped and worn down to a mere featureless nodule, it is still worth a full shilling?”

“You exaggerate,” Daniel said. “I have here a fine Queen Elizabeth shilling, for example—which I carry around, mind you, as a souvenir of Gloriana’s reign, since it is far too fine a specimen to actually
spend.
But as you can see, it is just as bright and shiny as the day it was minted—”

“Especially where it’s recently been clipped there along the side,” the lens-grinder said.

“Normal, pleasing irregularity of the hand-hammered currency, nothing more.”

Isaac said, “My friend’s shilling, though magnificent, and arguably worth two or even three shillings in the market, is no anomaly. Here I have a shilling from the reign of Edward VI, which I obtained after an inebriated son of a Duke, who happened to have borrowed a shilling from me some time earlier, fell unconscious on a floor—the purse in which he carried his finest coins fell open and this rolled out of it—I construed this as repayment of the debt, and the exquisite condition of the coin as interest.”

“How could it roll when three of its edges are flat? It is nearly triangular,” the lens-grinder said.

“A trick of the light.”

“The problem with that Edward VI coinage is that for all I knew it might’ve been issued during the Great Debasement, when, before Sir Thomas Gresham could get matters in hand, prices doubled.”

“The inflation was not because the coins were debased, as some believe,” Daniel said, “it was because the wealth confiscated from the Papist monasteries, and cheap silver from the mines of New Spain, were flooding the country.”

“If you would allow me to approach within ten feet of these coins, it would help me to appreciate their numismatic excellence,” the lens-grinder said. “I could even use some of my magnifying-lenses to…”

“I’m afraid I would be offended,” Isaac said.

“You could inspect this one as closely as you wanted,” Daniel said, “and find no evidence of criminal tampering—I got it from a blind innkeeper who had suffered frostbite in the fingertips—had no idea what he was giving me.”

“Didn’t he think to bite down on it? Like so?” said the Judaic individual, taking the shilling and crushing it between his rear molars.

“What would he have learned by doing that, sir?”

“That whatever counterfeit-artist stamped it out, had used reasonably good metal—not above fifty percent lead.”

“We’ll choose to interpret that as a wry jest,” Daniel said, “the likes of which you could never direct against
this
shilling, which my half brother found lying on the ground at the Battle of Naseby, not far from fragments of a Royalist captain who’d been blown to pieces by a bursting cannon—the dead man was, you see, a captain who’d once stood guard at the Tower of London where new coins are minted.”

The Jew repeated the biting ceremony, then scratched at the coin in case it was a brass clinker japanned with silver paint. “Worthless. But I owe a shilling to a certain vile man in London, a hater of Jews, and I would drive a shilling’s worth of satisfaction from slipping this slug of pig-iron into his hand.”

“Very well, then—” said Isaac, reaching for the prisms.

“Avid collectors such as you two must also have pennies—?”