The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and the System of the World (70 page)

In the end, it took Jack several minutes’ looking to allow himself to believe that he was viewing all of the world’s ships at one time—their individual masts, ropes, and spars merging into a horizon through which a few churches and windmills on the other side of it could be made out as dark blurs. Ships entering from, or departing toward, the Ijsselmeer beyond, fired rippling gun-salutes and were answered by Dutch shore-batteries, spawning oozy smoke-clouds that clung about the rigging of all those ships and seemingly glued them all into a continuous fabric, like mud daubed into a wattle of dry sticks. The waves of the sea could be seen as slow-spreading news.

Once Jack had a few hours to adjust to the peculiarity of Amsterdam’s buildings, its water-streets, the people’s aggressive cleanliness, their barking language, and their inability to settle on this or that Church, he understood the place. All of its quarters and neighborhoods were the same as in any other city. The knife-grinders might dress like Deacons, but they still ground knives the
same way as the ones in Paris. Even the waterfront was just a stupendously larger rendition of the Thames.

But then they wandered into a neighborhood the likes of which Jack had never seen
anywhere
—or rather the neighborhood wandered into
them,
for this was a rambling Mobb. Whereas most of Amsterdam was divided among richer and poorer in the usual way, this roving neighborhood was indiscriminately mixed-up: just as shocking to Vagabond Jack as it would be to a French nobleman. Even from a distance, as the neighborhood came up the street towards Jack and Eliza, he could see that it was soaked with tension. They were like a rabble gathered before palace gates, awaiting news of the death of a King. But as Jack could plainly see when the neighborhood had flowed round them and swept them up, there
were
no palace gates here, nor anything of that sort.

It would have been nothing more than a passing freak of Creation, like a comet, except that Eliza grabbed Jack’s hand and pulled him along, so that they became part of that neighborhood for half an hour, as it rolled and nudged its way among the buildings of Amsterdam like a blob of mercury feeling its way through a wooden maze. Jack saw that they were anticipating news, not from some external source, but
from within
—information, or rumors of it, surged from one end of this crowd to the other like waves in a shaken rug, with just as much noise, movement, and eruption of debris as that would imply. Like smallpox, it was passed from one person to the next with great rapidity, usually as a brief furious exchange of words and numbers. Each of these conversations was terminated by a gesture that looked as if it might have been a handshake, many generations in the past, but over time had degenerated into a brisk slapping-together of the hands. When it was done properly it made a sharp popping noise and left the palm glowing red. So the propagation of news, rumors, fads, trends, &c. through this mob could be followed by listening for waves of hand-slaps. If the wave broke over you and continued onwards, and your palm was not red, and your ears were not ringing, it meant that you had missed out on something important. And Jack was more than content to do so. But Eliza could not abide it. Before long, she had begun to ride on those waves of noise, and to gravitate towards places where they were most intense. Even worse, she seemed to understand what was going on. She knew some Spanish, which was the language spoken by many of these persons, especially the numerous Jews among them.

Eliza found lodgings a short distance south and west of the Damplatz. There was an alley just narrow enough for Jack to touch
both sides of it at one time, and someone had tried the experiment of throwing a few beams across this gap, between the second, third, and fourth stories of the adjoining buildings, and then using these as the framework of a sort of house. The buildings to either side were being slurped down into the underlying bog at differing rates, and so the house above the alley was skewed, cracked, and leaky. But Eliza rented the fourth story after an apocalyptic haggling session with the landlady (Jack, who had been off stabling Turk, only witnessed the final half-hour of this). The landlady was a hound-faced Calvinist who had immediately recognized Eliza as one who was predestined for Hell, and so Jack’s arrival and subsequent loitering scarcely made any impression. Still, she imposed a strict rule against visitors—shaking a finger at Jack so that her silver rings clanked together like links in a chain. Jack considered dropping his trousers as proof of chastity. But this trip to Amsterdam was Eliza’s plan, not Jack’s, and so he did not consider it meet to do any such thing. They had a place, or rather Eliza did, and Jack could come and go via rooftops and drainpipes.

They lived in Amsterdam for a time.

Jack expected that Eliza would begin to
do
something, but she seemed content to while away time in a coffee-house alongside the Damplatz, occasionally writing letters to the Doctor and occasionally receiving them. The moving neighborhood of anxious people brushed against this particular coffee-house, The Maiden, twice a day—for its movements were regular. They gathered on the Dam until the stroke of noon, when they flocked down the street to a large courtyard called the Exchange, where they remained until two o’clock. Then they spilled out and took their trading back up to the Dam, dividing up into various cliques and cabals that frequented different coffee-houses. Eliza’s apartment actually straddled an important migration-route, so that between it and her coffee-house she was never out of earshot.

Jack reckoned that Eliza was content to live off what they had, like a Gentleman’s daughter, and that was fine with Jack, who enjoyed spending more than getting. He in the meantime went back to his usual habit, which was to spend many days roaming about any new place he came into, to learn how it worked. Unable to read, unfit to converse with, he learned by watching—and here there was plenty of excellent watching. At first he made the mistake of leaving his crutch behind in Eliza’s garret, and going out as an able-bodied man. This was how he learned that despite all of those Hollandgänger coming in from the East, Amsterdam was still ravenous for labor. He hadn’t been out on the street for an hour
before he’d been arrested for idleness and put to work dredging canals—and seeing all the muck that came off the bottom, he began to think that the Doctor’s story of how small creatures got buried in river-bottoms made more sense than he’d thought at first.

When the foreman finally released him and the others from the dredge at day’s end, he could hardly climb up onto the wharf for all the men crowded around jingling purses of heavy-sounding coins: agents trying to recruit sailors to man those ships on the Ij. Jack got away from them fast, because where there was such a demand for sailors, there’d be press-ganging: one blunder into a dark alley, or one free drink in a tavern, and he’d wake up with a headache on a ship in the North Sea, bound for the Cape of Good Hope, and points far beyond.

The next time he went out, he bound his left foot up against his butt-cheek, and took his crutch. In this guise he was able to wander up and down the banks of the Ij and do all the looking he wanted. Even here, though, he had to move along smartly, lest he be taken for a vagrant, and thrown into a workhouse to be reformed.

He knew a few things from talking to Vagabonds and from examining the Doctor’s expansive maps: that the Ij broadened into an inland sea called Ijsselmeer, which was protected from the ocean by the island called Texel. That there was a good deep-water anchorage at Texel, but between that island and Ijsselmeer lay broad sandbanks that, like the ones at the mouth of the Thames, had mired many ships. Hence his astonishment at the size of the merchant fleet in the Ij: he knew that the
great
ships could not even
reach
this point.

They had driven lines of piles into the bottom of the Ij to seal off the prongs of the U and prevent French or English warships from coming right up to the Damplatz. These piles supported a boardwalk that swung across the harbor in a flattened arc, with drawbridges here and there to let small boats—ferry kaags, Flemish pleyts, beetle-like water-ships, keg-shaped smakschips—into the inner harbor; the canals; and the Damrak, which was the short inlet that was all that remained of the original river Amstel. Larger ships were moored to the outside of this barrier. At the eastern end of the Inner Harbor, they’d made a new island called Oostenburg and put a shipyard there: over it flew a flag with small letters O and C impaled on the horns of a large V, which meant the Dutch East India Company. This was a wonder all by itself, with its ropewalks—skinny buildings a third of a mile long—windmills grinding lead and boring gun-barrels, a steam-house, perpetually obnubilated, for bending wood, dozens of smoking and clanging smithys including
two mighty ones where anchors were made, and a small tidy one for making nails, a tar factory on its own wee island so that when it burnt down it wouldn’t take the rest of the yard with it. A whole warehouse district of its own. Lofts big enough to make sails larger than any Jack had ever seen. And, of course, skeletons of several big ships on the slanted ways, braced with diagonal sticks to keep ’em from toppling over, and all aswarm with workers like ants on a whale’s bones.

Somewhere there must’ve been master wood-carvers and gilders, too, because the stems and sterns of the V.O.C. ships riding in the Ij were decorated like Parisian whorehouses, with carved statues covered in gold-leaf: for example, a maiden reclining on a couch with one shapely arm draped over a globe, and Mercury swooping down from on high to crown her with the laurel. And yet just outside the picket of windmills and watch-towers that outlined the city, the landscape of pastures and ditches resumed. Mere yards from India ships offloading spices and calico into small boats that slipped through the drawbridges to the Damrak, cattle grazed.

The Damrak came up hard against the side of the city’s new weigh-house, which was a pleasant enough building almost completely obscured by a perpetual swarm of boats. On the ground floor, all of its sides were open—it was made on stilts like a Vagabond-shack in the woods—and looking in, Jack could see its whole volume filled with scales of differing sizes, and racks and stacks of copper and brass cylinders engraved with wild snarls of cursive writing: weights for all the measures employed in different Dutch Provinces and the countries of the world. It was, he could see, the third weigh-house to be put up here and still not big enough to weigh and mark all of the goods coming in on those boats. Sloops coming in duelled for narrow water-lanes with canal-barges taking the weighed and stamped goods off to the city’s warehouses, and every few minutes a small heavy cart clattered away across the Damplatz, laden with coins the ships’ captains had used to pay duty, and made a sprint for the Exchange Bank, scattering wigged, ribboned, and turbaned deal-makers out of its path. The Exchange Bank was the same thing as the Town Hall, and a stone’s throw from there was the Stock Exchange—a rectangular courtyard environed by colonnades, like the ones in Leipzig but bigger and brighter.

One afternoon Jack came by the Maiden to pick Eliza up at the end of her hard day’s drinking coffee and spending the Shaftoes’ inheritance. The place was busy, and Jack reckoned he could slip
in the door without attracting any bailiffs. It was a rich airy high-ceilinged place, not at all tavernlike, hot and close, with clever people yammering in half a dozen languages. In a corner table by a window, where northern light off the Ij could set her face aglow, Eliza sat, flanked by two other women, and holding court (or so it seemed) for a parade of Italians, Spaniards, and other swarthy rapier-carrying men in big wigs and bright clothes. Occasionally she’d reach for a big round coffee-pot, and at those moments she’d look just like the Maid of Amsterdam on the stern of a ship—or for that matter, as painted on the ceiling of this very room: loosely draped in yards of golden satin, one hand on a globe, one nipple poking out, Mercury always behind and to the right, and below her, the ever-present Blokes with Turbans, and feather-bedecked Negroes, presenting tributes in the form of ropes of pearls and giant silver platters.

She was flirting with those Genoese and Florentine merchants’ sons, and Jack could cope with that, to a point. But they were rich. And this was all she did, every day. He lost the power of sight for a few minutes. But in time his rage cleared away, like the clouds of ash washing away from the amalgam, clearing steadily to reveal a pretty gleam of silver under clear running water. Eliza was staring at him—seeing everything. She glanced at something next to him, telling him to look at it, and then she locked her blue eyes on someone across the table and laughed at a witticism.

Jack followed her look and discovered a kind of shrine against the wall. It was a glass-fronted display case, but all gold-leafed and decked out with trumpet-tooting seraphs, as if its niches had been carved to house pieces of the True Cross and fingernail-parings of Archangels. But in fact the niches contained little heaps of dull everyday things like ingots of lead, scraps of wool, mounds of saltpeter and sugar and coffee-beans and pepper-corns, rods and slabs of iron, copper and tin, and twists of silk and cotton cloth. And, in a tiny crystal flask, like a perfume bottle, there was a sample of quicksilver.

“So, I’m meant to believe that you’re transacting business in there?” he asked, once she had extricated herself, and they were out on the Damplatz together.

“You believed that I was doing
what,
then?”

“It’s just that I saw no goods or money changing hands.”

“They call it
Windhandel.
”

“The wind business? An apt name for it.”

“Do you have any idea, Jack, how much quicksilver is stored up in these warehouses all around us?”

“No.”

“I do.”

She stopped at a place where they could peer into a portal of the Stock Exchange. “Just as a whole workshop can be powered by a mill-wheel, driven by a trickle of water in a race, or by a breath of air on the blades of a windmill, so the movement of goods through yonder Weigh-House is driven by a trickle of paper passing from hand to hand in
there
” (pointing to the Stock Exchange) “and the warm wind that you feel on your face when you step into the Maiden.”