Quicksilver

“Then Pepys got too enigmatic even for Wilkins,” Daniel said. “He said, ‘I refer you to Chapter Ten of your 1641 work.’”

“The Cryptonomicon? ”

“So I assume. Chapter Ten is where Wilkins explains steganography, or how to embed a subliminal message in an i

“Ho, ho, ho!” Oldenburg bellowed, the laughter bouncing like ca

The raven cocked its head, opened its beak, and made a long gagging noise. Oldenburg sighed and opened his hand. “I have been trying to teach him words,” he explained, “but that one is too much of a mouthful, for a raven.” The bird’s beak struck the bread out of Oldenburg’s hand, and it hopped back out of reach, in case Oldenburg should change his mind.

“Wilkins’s confusion is understandable-but Pepys’s meaning is clear. There are some suspicious-minded persons upriver” (waving in the general direction of Whitehall) “who think I’m a spy, communicating with Continental powers by means of subliminal messages embedded in what purport to be philosophickal discourses-it being beyond their comprehension that anyone would care as much as I seem to about new species of eels, methods for squaring hyperbolae, et cetera. But Pepys was not referring to that- he was being ever so much more clever. He was telling Wilkins that the not-very-secret negotiations being carried on by Buckingham and Shaftesbury are like the i

“God in Heaven,” Daniel said, and felt obliged to lean back against a battlement so that his spi

“An agreement whose details we can only guess at-except for this: it causes gold to appear there in the middle of the night.” Oldenburg pointed to the Tower’s water-gate along the Thames. Discretion kept him from speaking its ancient name: Traitor’s Gate.

“Pepys mentioned in passing that Thomas More Anglesey was responsible for filling the Navy’s coffers… I didn’t understand what he meant.”

“Our Duke of Gunfleet has much warmer co

And because silver and gold have their value from the matter itself; they have first this privilege, that the value of them ca

-HOBBES,Leviathan

OLDENBURG GENTEELLY KICKEDhim out not much later, eager to get into that pile of mail. Under the politely curious gaze of the Beefeaters and their semi-tame ravens, Daniel walked down Water Lane, on the southern verge of the Tower complex. He walked past a large rectangular tower planted in the outer wall, above the river, and realized too late that if he’d only turned his head and glanced to the left at that point, he could’ve looked through the giant arch of Traitor’s Gate and out across the river. Too late now-seemed a poor idea to go back. Probably just as well he hadn’t gawked-then whoever was watching him would suspect that Oldenburg had mentioned it.

Was he thinking like a courtier now?

The massive octagonal pile of Bell Tower was on his right. As he got past it he dared to look up a narrow buffer between two layers of curtain-walls no more than fifty feet apart. Half of that width was filled up by the Mint’s indifferent low houses and workshops. Daniel glimpsed furnace-light radiating from windows, warming high stone walls, making silhouettes of a congestion of carts bringing coal to burn. Men with muskets gazed coolly back at him. Mint workers crossed from building to building in the shambling gait of the exhausted.

Then he was underneath the great arch of the Byward Tower, an elevated building thrown over Water Lane to control the Tower’s land approach. A raven perched on a gargoyle and screeched “Cromwell!” at him as he passed through onto the drawbridge that ran from Byward Tower out to Middle Tower, over the moat. Middle Tower gave way to Lion Tower-but the King’s menagerie were all asleep and he did not hear the lions roar. From there he crossed over a last little backwater of the moat, over another drawbridge, and came into a little walled-in yard called the Bulwark-finally, then, through one last gate and into the world, though he had a lonely stroll over an empty moonlit glacis, past a few scavenging rats and copulating dogs, before he was among buildings and people.

But then Daniel Waterhouse was right in the City of London-slightly confused, as some of the streets had been straightened and simplifed after the Fire. He pulled a fat gold egg from his pocket-one of Hooke’s experimental watches, a failed stab at the Longitude Problem, adequate only for landlubbers. It told him that the Phosphorus Demo’ was not quite finished at Whitehall, but that it was not too late to call on his in-laws. Daniel did not especially like to just call on people-seemed presumptuous to think they’d want to open the door and see him- but he knew that this was how men like Pepys got to become men like Pepys. So to the house of Ham.

Lights burned expensively, and a coach and pair dawdled out front. Daniel was startled to discover his own family coat of arms (a castle bestriding a river) painted on the door of this coach. The house was smoking like a heavy forge-it was equipped with oversized chimneys, projecting tubes of orange light into their own smoke. As Daniel ascended the front steps he heard singing, which faltered but did not stop when he knocked: a very current melody making fun of the Dutch for being so bright, hard-working, and successful. Viscount Walbrook’s*butler opened the door and recognized Daniel as a social caller-not, as sometimes happened, a nocturnal customer brandishing a goldsmith’s note.

Mayflower Ham, nee Waterhouse-tubby, fair, almost fifty, looking more like thirty-gave him a hug that pulled him up on tiptoe. Menopause had finally terminated her fantastically involved and complex relationship with her womb: a legendary saga of irregular bleeding, eleven-month pregnancies straight out of the Royal Society proceedings, terrifying primal omens, miscarriages, heartbreaking epochs of barre