The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and the System of the World (320 page)

Peter Hoxton had been carrying out a rough sort of the booty from the wall. Which was to say, he had raked out all that was of Saturnine interest and put the discards in another, larger pile. He had
already culled out enough to keep him rapt for weeks: for the trunks were packed with small wooden chests, and the chests with fine instruments wrought of brass, and even of gold. Many of these were obviously clock-work. Saturn, wary of the dust, peered quickly at these, then closed them up and stacked them out of harm’s way, covering them with a large drawing which he pressed into service as a tarpaulin. But the drawing itself—a phantastickal rendering of the skeleton of a bird—had now cozened him into rigid fascination. Isaac too was drawn to it. “I thought it were a rendering of a bird, at first,” Saturn said, “until I spied this cull—” and he pointed to a snarl of lines that Hooke had, over the course of a few seconds’ lazy yet furious drawing, scrawled and slashed onto the page. These by some miracle added up to a perfectly intelligible rendering of a man in breeches, waistcoat, and periwig, standing with arms raised above his head to support one joint of the wing. If this was supposed to be a bird, it would have a wingspan several times that of the largest albatross. But where a bird would have muscles to pull, this skeleton had pistons and cylinders to push, the great bones of the wings. It was inside-out and backwards, exoskeletal.

Daniel’s gaze fell on a great leather wallet, gnawed at the corners by rodents, but still intact. He unwound the ribbon that held it closed, and spread it out on the lid of a trunk. It was a stack of foolscap sheets rising to the thickness of three fingers, creased and compressed from long immurement, but still perfectly legible. It contained notes, written in Hooke’s hand, and illustrated with more admirable diagrams, on divers subjects:

Implicit was that Hooke had concealed these in the walls of Bedlam because he would not entrust the Royal Society—specifically, Newton—with his legacy. And so Daniel began to read these titles aloud as a sort of rebuke to Isaac. But having started in on such a Litany, he found it difficult to stop. This was a sort of concentrated essence of that quicksilver spirit that had animated Daniel’s, and the Royal Society’s, halcyon days. To handle these pages was to drink deep from the Fountain of Youth.

What eventually stopped him was a page written, not in English like most of the others, and not in Latin like some of them, but in a wholly different alphabet. The characters on this page bore no relationship to any from the Roman, Greek, or Hebrew script; they were not Cyrillic, not Arabic, and yet bore no connection to any of the writing-systems of Asia. It was an admirably simple, clean, and lucid
way of writing—if only one could understand it. And Daniel almost could. The sight of it stopped him cold for a minute. He was just beginning to decipher the glyphs of the title when Saturn put in: “I have already come across several of those, Doc—what tongue is that?”

Isaac, gazing at the leaf in Daniel’s hand from three yards away, answered the question: “It is the Real Character,” he said, “a language invented by the late John Wilkins, on
philosophical
principles, in hopes that it would drive out Latin. Hooke and Wren adopted it for a time. Can you still read it, Daniel?”

“Can you, Isaac?” Daniel asked; for it might be important for him to know this.

“Not without revising Wilkins’s book.”

“It is a receipt,” Daniel said, elevating the page slightly, “for a restorative medicine, made from gold.”

“Then pray do not waste time translating it,” Isaac said, “for we all know of the late Mr. Hooke’s susceptibility to quackery.”

“This is not
Hooke’s
receipt,” Daniel said. “He wrote it out, but did not invent it. He gives credit to the same fellow who shewed the Royal Society how to make Phosphorus.” To Saturn and diverse other eavesdroppers this signified nothing, but to Isaac it was as good as saying
Enoch the Red
. As such it drew Isaac’s full and disconcertingly sharp attention. “Pray go on, Daniel.”

“It begins with a sort of narration. An account of something Hooke witnessed somewhere…” A long pause now for difficult translation, then sudden knowledge: “No, here! Just here, where we are standing. The date given is…if my arithmetick is to be credited…
anno domini
1689.”

“The same year, and place, as your
strangely premature
going-away party,” Saturn reflected.

This tripped Daniel up for a moment, being an acute observation on Saturn’s part, and one that Daniel had entirely missed. But Isaac urged him to go on, and so he did, haltingly: “It began with a medical—no, a
surgical
procedure on a subject—human—male—aged two score and three.”

“Ah, a contemporary of you two gentlemen!” Saturn put in. “Perhaps you knew him.”

“He was quite ill because of a stone. A stone in his bladder. Hooke performed a lithotomy.”

“What,
here
!?” Saturn exclaimed, looking about.

“I have seen them done in the
street,
” Daniel said.

“It would not be the strangest thing Hooke did here,” Isaac assured Saturn.

“That becomes the clearer, the more we go through his leavings,” Saturn mused.

“Pray continue, Daniel!”

“The procedure went normally. However, the patient…the patient died,” Daniel translated. He had begun to feel unaccountably woozy, and took a moment now to sit down atop a dusty trunk, lest he lose consciousness and topple over the balustrade into Bedlam’s Well of Souls. “I beg your pardon…the patient died, as often happens, of shock. No pulse was evident. Whereupon the learned fellow I spoke of earlier emerged from a place of concealment, from which he had been observing the procedure.”

“How convenient!” Saturn scoffed. “What, are we to believe this Alchemist lurks in Bedlam’s shadows just waiting for someone to give up the ghost during an impromptu tabletop lithotomy?”

“The truth is not so fanciful. He had been present, earlier in the evening, for a social gathering. He overstayed to keep an eye on the procedure,” Daniel said. This much was not written down on the page—it came from Daniel’s memory.

“A social gathering—the oft-mentioned premature going-away party, perhaps!” Saturn said. He meant it as a jest. But neither Daniel nor Isaac laughed.

Daniel continued with the translation: “Hooke had in this room a Reverberatory Furnace, which was already hot for another experiment. The Alchemist went to work in some haste, using some chymicals from Hooke’s own cupboard—which I can testify was well-stocked. For example, he used something that is rendered, on this page, as a bone-cube-cup…”

“Hooke must have meant a cupel.”

“Ah, well done, Isaac. A cupel, and certain materials that he carried on his person in a small wooden chest. The receipt is not easy to translate—I too shall have to revise Wilkins.” He skipped a page, then another. “The result: a small quantity of a light-bearing compound. Placed in the mouth of the dead patient, it caused his heart to resume beating, and cured him of his shock. Several minutes after, he came awake, and professed to have no memory of what had transpired. The Alchemist had by then departed, taking all the residues of the receipt with him. Hooke set it down as best he could from his recollections.”

“This explains much,” said Sir Isaac Newton, eyeing Daniel very oddly indeed. Daniel hardly cared; he had leaned back flaccid against the wall, and was gazing mindlessly at the oculus of silver light in the cupola. He felt no more alive than stone Melancholy.

“Yes, it does!” Saturn returned, “we now know what John Doe was
looking for!” Then he shut up and swallowed hard, noting the odd, wordless tension joining Daniel to Isaac. “Or were you referring to something else?”

I
N
B
OSTON
D
ANIEL
had known many Barbadian slaves, bred in the Caribbean from stock imported, a generation earlier, by the Duke of York’s Royal Africa Company. They were the most superstition-ridden people he had ever met. It seemed that the most flimsy and volatile elements of African culture had survived the Middle Passage, even as the ballast of history and wisdom had been chucked overboard. Exported to northerly outposts, these slaves stepped off the gangplanks bedizened with
voudoun
fetishes and spouting the most bizarre words and phrases—’twas as if they lived in a perpetual hallucination. When such persons were placed in the households of literal-minded Puritans inclined to see devils and imps everywhere, the result was poisonous—as several Salemites had learned.

One phrase that Daniel had heard, more than once, from some such slaves, was
dead man walking
. It came out of a belief, endemic to the Caribbean, that corpses could be re-animated through sorcery, and made into sleep-walking Myrmidons who would do the sorcerer’s bidding.

It was impossible for Daniel to bar such thoughts from his mind for a little while. He was as helpless, as susceptible, as a man being tumbled in the Machine for Calming Violent Lunaticks. He was, if not a Dead Man Walking, then a Dead Man Sitting on his Arse for at least a quarter of an hour, as Saturn and his lads began to pack up the Hooke treasure and make it ready for shipment.

Gradually, that part of his mind where Enlightenment virtues were enshrined got the better of that part where grotesque supersitions waited for opportunities to jump out of the shadows and shout, “Boo!”

Precisely what Enoch Root
was,
was not known to Daniel. But Root most certainly was not a
voudoun
sorcerer. If he had ministered, in some wise, to Daniel following his lithotomy, he had not done so by necromancy. More likely, Daniel had not actually died, but gone into a coma, and Root had brewed up a stimulant to bring him back. It might have been as simple as smelling salts. Seeing which, Hooke—who
was
gullible about quack medicines—had let his imagination carry him off.

It was amusing, though, that Daniel had written Root a letter, just the other day, stating his opinion that he, Daniel, was not likely to survive the next few weeks.

Isaac’s repetition of the phrase “Crane Court” broke in on
Daniel’s reverie. While Daniel had drifted away, Isaac had stepped in and begun issuing writs. He was telling them to take all of Hooke’s treasures away to the headquarters of the Royal Society—precisely what Hooke had
not
wanted.

“Speaking as one who
lives
in the attic of the Royal Society,” Daniel said, “I can witness that there is no room there. None.”

“We can always make room,” Isaac pointed out, “by rubbishing some beetles.”

“But we do not wish to in this case,” Daniel insisted.

“Where do you propose to take it, then?” Isaac asked, and sharp was his gaze on the document in Daniel’s hands.

Before he forgot about this, Daniel folded it up the middle and slipped it into his breast pocket. “I propose it be stored at my lord Ravenscar’s house,” he said. “I go there frequently on Longitude and other business, so I can always get to it there. And as your niece is mistress of the household, you too may visit whenever you please.”