The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and the System of the World (285 page)

“Is very much usquebaugh produced in Glen Coe?”

“ ’Tis odd that ye should ask, for I believe
none
is produced there
now
, or for many years. Aye, the only bottles o Glen Coe ye ir like to hae in yeir collection, shall be very auld ones.”

“What—?”

“The still was shivered. No one hae made it guid.”

“Then the MacIan MacDonalds must have fallen upon hard times indeed,” Throwley said gravely.

“ ’Tis more right to say, hard times fell on thaim. Whan all of us in this room were laddies, an order went oot frae King William that the chiefs o the Highland clans maun all sign a muckle oath o loyalty, spurnin all allegiance to the Stewart—that ye call the Pretender. Alastair MacIan MacDonald, ma chief, did sign that pledge. But dwellin as he was in the back of beyond, and it bein the deid of a vicious winter, he did miss a certain deidline. Now, no long efter, a great doon-come of snow fell ding on in oor glen. The bothies an barns were smoored under it. An then wha should appear but a company o soldiers frae Fort William, that had gang agley in the spindrift. Vagand like a band o runagates they war, fagged half to deeth, sterving, blae—a company o kirkyaird deserters! They dinna hae to beg us. A sakeless hill-run lot we wes, dacent and soothfast, goodwillie toward fellow-men. Shelter we gied them, no in oor barns, mind ye, but in oor own homes, humble as they war. For these war na outdwellars to us, though they war o a different clan. They war fellow-Scotsmen. We
turned it into a ceilidh. That’s whaur all o our usquebaugh went! Down the throttles o those ramscallions! But we dinna mind.”

Now an extraordinary thing happened, which was that the sound of bagpipes became audible.

The Lieutenant’s Lodging was packed into the corner of the Inner Ward. Indeed, though the front wall was half-timbered, the back was simply the ancient curtain-wall of the Tower of London, looking down over Water Lane. Windows had been made in the upper reaches of that wall so that the Lieutenant could see out over the Lane, and the outer fortifications, wharf, and river beyond. Both Water Lane and the Wharf were open to the public during the day-time. It seemed likely that Throwley’s housekeeper had opened those rear windows to let April breezes air out the bedchambers, and haply a strolling bagpiper had wandered by, playing a Highland melody in hopes that strollers or soldiers would toss coins at him. It was the same tune that Lord Gy had been humming a few minutes previously.

Strong emotion had begun to tell on MacIan’s face as he related the tale of the lost soldiers and the impromptu ceilidh that his kin had thrown for them in the snowdrifts of Glen Coe. When the bagpipe’s snarl drifted through the room, his eye became watery, and he began to paw at the patch that covered the other. “Och, a need a dram,” he confessed. “Ir ye havin difficulty, sir, gettin that open?”

“I must confess with all these layers of wax, lead, and wire, the contents of this bottle are as closely guarded as this Tower!”

“Haud yeir tung, much more so!” said Lord Gy dismissively. “Gie it me, there is a trick to getting it open, a’l hae oor drams poured out smairtly.” He accepted the bottle back from Throwley.

Downs had been looking queasy these last few minutes. “I do confess, my lord, your tale has struck a chord, a melancholy one, in my memory. The details escape me. But I doubt its ending.”

“Then a’l make it quick, and make an end o it. Efter twae weeks o dwelling amang us as blude-friends, gutting our winter victuals, burning up oor peat-bings, an dancin the reel o Bogie wi our lasses, those mangrels waukened one day at five in the morning and put the MacIan MacDonalds to the fire and the sword. Our glen they made into a knacker’s midden. Some of us fled to the crags, yawin an yammerin, heart-scalded. We lived on snow an wrake-lust until the murthering wichts had gaen away. Only then durst we gae doon amang the bones an cinders to hack common graves into the frozened erd o Glen Coe.”

Yeoman Downs and Lieutenant-General Throwley were sitting gobsmacked. They were petrified for now, though a harsh word or
sudden movement from Rufus MacIan might have scattered them from the house.

Noting this, he closed his eye for a moment, then opened it, and managed a wry smile.

That, to the Englishman, seemed the moral to the story. It said that in spite of the horror he had witnessed as a boy, Rufus MacIan had grown up into a gentleman, and found a kind of solace in the self-control and civility that was expected of such.

“Now,” he said, “wuid ye care for a dram?”

“My lord,” said Throwley huskily, “ ’twere disrespectful to refuse.”

“Then let me get the damned thing open,” said Rufus MacIan of MacDonald. He rubbed moisture from his eye on the shoulder of his coat, and drew in a big snuffle before it could escape from his nostrils. “Mr. Downs, as a mentioned, there’s a trick to it. Shards o glass may fly. A entreat ye to look the other way—unless ye want me to leave ye this eye-patch in ma last will and testament!”

Mr. Downs permitted himself a controlled smile at this faint jest, and averted his gaze.

Lord Gy gripped the bottle by its neck and swung it sideways until it exploded against Downs’s temple.

He was left holding only the neck of the bottle. But projecting from it was a steel dirk nine inches long, dripping usquebaugh. He was up on the table before Lieutenant-General Throwley could rise from his chair.

From the next room could be heard the sound of the red-headed maidservant throwing the door bolts to.

Rufus MacIan of MacDonald was squatting in the middle of the dining table now, giving Throwley a clear and close view of whatever it was he kept underneath his kilt. It seemed to have paralyzed the Lieutenant of the Tower. Which made his visitor’s next move a simple matter. “Can ye understand
this
?” MacIan asked, and rammed the dirk into Throwley’s eyeball until it stopped hard against the back of his skull.

AFTERNOON

T
HEY DREW ALONGSIDE A WHARF
at Gravesend. It was near where the tilt-boat ran up the river to London, and so a sizable and curious crowd was there watching them, and calling out questions. Perhaps Isaac thought his outburst about “the German” really was an intelligible end to the conversation, or perhaps he did not care to stand in the open on the poop and be peered at.

Daniel sensed
he
was being peered at from
another
quarter. A certain gentleman had been haunting the corner of Daniel’s eye for above a quarter of an hour. From his dress, he was an officer of the Queen’s Own Black Torrent Guards.

“Colonel Barnes,” the man said, in response to what must have been a lapse in Daniel’s mean, flinty outlook.

“I am Dr. Daniel Waterhouse,” Daniel returned, “and I have heard
criminals
introduce themselves to me with greater formality and courtesy than what you have just shown.”

“I know,” said Colonel Barnes, “one of them came up to me and did just that, a few hours ago, on Tower Wharf.”

“Colonel Barnes, ’twould seem you have duties ashore, I’ll not delay you—”

Barnes glanced out over the sloop’s upperdeck, which had now been joined to the wharf by gangplanks in two places. Dragoons were streaming across, driven by cursing sergeants on the deck and exhorted by lieutenants on the wharf; as they came ashore they clustered by platoon.

“On the contrary, Dr. Waterhouse, I’m to stay ’board ship. Suits me better.” He made a loud rapping noise on the deck, and Daniel looked down to discover that one of the colonel’s legs was a rod of carven ebony with a steel tip.

“You are a Black Torrent man to the bone,” Daniel remarked. Every regiment had its own type of wood, used to make swagger sticks and the like, and ebony was the trade-mark of the Black Torrent Guards.

“Indeed, been with them since the Revolution.”

“Surely you need to supervise the disembarkation—”

“Dr. Waterhouse, you do not understand Delegation of Authority,” Barnes returned. “Here’s how it works: I tell my subordinates to get all but two platoons off the boat, and they do it.”

“Who has delegated you to harry me round the poop deck?”

“Why, the aforementioned very polite criminal.”

“A colonel commands a regiment, is it not so?”

“That is correct.”

“Do you mean to tell me that a colonel, in turn, is commanded by a Black-guard?”

“That is the custom in most armies,” Barnes returned dead-pan. “True, ’twas sometime different under my lord Marlborough, but since he was stripped of command, why, it has been Black-guards all the way to the top.”

Daniel had a natural impulse here to laugh; but some other part of him was recommending that he proceed cautiously with this Barnes. What the colonel had just said was witty, but it was also reckless.

Most of the Guards were off the ship now, leaving only two platoons of some fourteen men each, each under its own sergeant. One of them had congregated at the forward end of the deck, the other aft, directly below where Colonel Barnes and Daniel were standing. This left a large clear space amidships, claimed by Sergeant Bob Shaftoe. He was facing toward the wharf, so Daniel was viewing him in profile; but now he adjusted his posture slightly toward them and glanced, for a quarter of a second, in Barnes’s direction.

“Your sloop, Cap’n,” Barnes sang out.

The skipper retaliated with a series of histrionic commands that caused the gangplanks to be drawn back onto the wharf, and the sloop’s lines to be cast off.

“You and Sergeant Bob make war together,” Daniel said. “It is what you do.”

“If that’s true, our life’s work has been a failure!” Barnes answered, mock-offended. “I should prefer to say, we make peace, and have achieved success.”

“Say it however you like. Either way, you’ve spent a quarter-century marching around with him, and have heard every joke and anecdote he knows how to tell, a thousand times over.”

“ ’Tis a common outcome in our line of work,” Barnes allowed.

“Now you phant’sy you know everything about me, because ten or twenty years ago, in a tent along the Rhine or a bothy in Ireland, Sergeant Bob told you a tale about me. You suppose you may approach me in a companionable way, and divulge things to me, and
thereby make me your bound accomplice, as when two boys cut their thumbs on purpose and bleed on each other and then say that they are brothers. Please do not be offended if I recoil from your tender. There is a reason why old men are aloof, and it has nothing to do with being pompous.”

“You should renew your acquaintance with Marlborough,” Barnes said, putting on a little show of being impressed. “The two of you would get along famously.”

“An unfortunate choice of adverb, that.”

Barnes was silent for a while now. The two horse-barges were coming up to the wharf at Gravesend to discharge the loads. The Queen’s Own Black Torrent Guard were dragoons, meaning that they fought on foot, using the tactics and the arms of infantry. But they maneuvered round the field of battle on horseback. To put it crudely, they were shock troops. Clearly the companies that had disembarked had orders to mount, get on the turnpike that paralleled the river, and ride east, pacing the sloop.

“Everyone is scared to death just now,” Barnes said. He sidled up to Daniel along the rail and offered him half a small loaf of bread, which Daniel practically lunged at. “Why, to listen to certain Whigs, a Jacobite invasion is just over the horizon, driven on a Popish wind. And yet Sir Isaac fears the arrival of the German! ’Tis an impossibility for both the Hanovers and the Jacobites to occupy the same space. Yet the Whigs’ fears, and Sir Isaac’s, are equally real.”

When he alluded to the impossibility of two objects occupying the same space, Barnes was resorting to a verbal tic that had its origins in Descartes. He had, in other words, been to Oxford or Cambridge. He ought to be a vicar, or even a Dean, in some church. What was he doing here?

“When Sir Isaac refers, with such trepidation, to the German, he does not mean George Louis.”

Barnes looked startled, then fascinated. “Leibniz—?”

“Yes.” And this time Daniel could not prevent himself smiling a bit.

“So it’s not that Sir Isaac is a Jacobite…”

“Far from it! He fears the arrival of the Hanovers, only in that Leibniz is the advisor to Sophie, and to Princess Caroline.” Daniel wasn’t entirely certain he ought to be telling Barnes so much, but it was better for Barnes to understand the truth than to harbor the suspicion that Isaac was a covert supporter of the Changeling.

“You skipped a generation,” Barnes said puckishly. Or as puckish as a maimed colonel of dragoons could be.

“If George Louis has any interest whatever in philosophy—for that matter, in
anything at all
—’tis a secret close kept,” Daniel returned.

“So am I to understand that the present expedition has its origins in a
philosophical dispute
?” Barnes asked, looking about himself as if seeing the sloop in a new light.

Atalanta
had reached the middle of the channel now and, freed from the slow horse-barges, spread more canvas to the wind than she had done before. They were sailing due east on Gravesend Reach. On their right, the chalky hills would draw back from the river, widening the marshes that spread at their feet. The town of Tilbury was on the left. It was the last port on that bank of the river, for beyond it the Thames sloshed between mud-flats instead of streaming between proper banks. Even at their improved pace, they had a few hours’ sail ahead of them; and Isaac was nowhere to be seen. There was no harm, Daniel concluded, in conversing with a philosophy-hobbyist.

He glanced around the sky, looking for a convenient Cœlestial Body, but the day had slowly become overcast. Instead he fastened upon the river-water rippling along the hull-planks, and glanced too at the mud-flats below Tilbury. “I cannot see the sun—can you, Colonel Barnes?”

“We are in England. I have heard rumors of it. In France I saw it once. But not today.”

“And the moon?”

“She is full, and she set over Westminster as we were loading on Tower Wharf.”

“The moon’s behind the world, the sun’s behind clouds. Yet the water that buoys us is obeying the dictates of both, is it not?”

“I have it on good authority that the tides are operational today,” Barnes allowed, and checked his watch. “Sheerness expects a low tide at seven o’clock.”

“A spring tide?”

“Uncommon low. Why, feel how the river’s current bears us along, hastening to the sea.”

“Why does the tide rush out to sea?”

“The influence of the sun and the moon.”

“Yet you and I cannot see the sun
or
the moon. The water does not have senses to see, or a will to follow them. How then do the sun and moon, so far away, affect the water?”

“Gravity,” responded Colonel Barnes, lowering his voice like a priest intoning the name of God, and glancing about to see whether Sir Isaac Newton were in earshot.

“That’s what everyone says now. ’Twas not so when I was a lad. We used to parrot Aristotle and say it was in the nature of water to be drawn up by the moon. Now, thanks to our fellow-passenger, we say ‘gravity.’ It seems a great improvement. But is it really? Do you
understand
the tides, Colonel Barnes, simply because you know to say ‘gravity’?”

“I’ve never claimed to
understand
them.”

“Ah, that is very wise practice.”

“All that matters is,
he
does,” Barnes continued, glancing down, as if he could see through the deck-planks.

“Does he then?”

“That’s what you lot have been telling everyone.”

“Meaning the Royal Society?”

Barnes nodded. He was eyeing Daniel with some alarm. Daniel, cruelly, said nothing, and let Barnes simmer until he could stand it no more, and continued, “Sir Isaac’s working on Volume the Third, isn’t he, and that’s going to settle the lunar problem. Wrap it all up.”

“He is working out
equations
that ought to agree with Mr. Flamsteed’s
observations.
”

“From which it would follow that Gravity’s a solved problem; and if Gravity predicts what the moon does, why, it should apply as well to the sloshing back and forth of the water in the oceans.”

“But is to
describe
something to
understand
it?”

“I should think it were a good first step.”

“Yes. And it is a step that Sir Isaac has taken. The question now becomes, who shall take the second step?”

“You mean, is it to be he or Leibniz?”

“Yes.”

“Leibniz has not done any work with Gravity, has he?”

“You mean, it seems obvious that Sir Isaac, having taken the first step, should be better positioned to take the second.”

“Yes.”

“One would certainly think so,” Daniel said sympathetically. “On the other hand, sometimes he who goes first wanders into a cul-de-sac, and is passed by.”

“How can his theory be a cul-de-sac if it describes everything perfectly?”

“You heard him, a short time ago, expressing concern about Leibniz,” Daniel pointed out.

“Because Leibniz has Sophie’s ear! Not because Leibniz is the better philosopher.”

“I beg your pardon, Colonel Barnes, but I have known Sir Isaac since we were students, and I say to you, he does not strain at gnats. When he is at such pains to gird for battle, you may be sure that his foe is a Titan.”

“What weapon could Leibniz possibly have that would do injury to Sir Isaac?”

“To begin with, a refusal to be over-awed, and a willingness, not shared at this time by any Englishman, to ask awkward questions.”

“What sort of awkward questions?”

“Such as I’ve already asked: how does the water know where the moon is? How can it perceive the Moon through the entire thickness of the Earth?”

“Gravity goes through the earth, like light through a pane of glass.”

“And what form does Gravity take, that gives it this astonishing power of streaming through the solid earth?”

“I’ve no idea.”

“Neither does Sir Isaac.”

Barnes was stopped in his tracks for a few moments. “Does Leibniz?”

“Leibniz has a completely different way of thinking about it, so different as to seem perverse to some. It has the great advantage that it avoids having to talk rubbish about Gravity streaming through Earth like light through glass.”

“Then it must have as great disadvantages, or else he, and not Sir Isaac, would be the world’s foremost Natural Philosopher.”

“Perhaps he
is
, and no one knows it,” Daniel said. “But you are right. Leibniz’s philosophy has the disadvantage that no one knows, yet, how to express it mathematically. And so he cannot predict tides and eclipses, as Sir Isaac can.”

“Then what good is Leibniz’s philosophy?”

“It might be the truth,” Daniel answered.