The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and the System of the World Read Free

name them, Mr. Root.”
    “I have come to Boston to find a certain man who at last report was living here. He is an old man.”
    “Older than you?”
    “No, but he might seem older.”
    “How old is he, then?”
    “He watched the head of King Charles the First being chopped off.”
    “At least threescore and four then.”
    “Ah, I see you have been learning sums and differences.”
    “And products and dividends, Mr. Root.”
    “Work this into your reckonings, then: the one I seek had an excellent view of the beheading, for he was sitting upon his father’s shoulders.”
    “Couldn’t have been more than a few years old then. Unless his father was a sturdy fellow indeed.”
    “His father was sturdy in a sense,” says Enoch, “for Archbishop Laud had caused his ears and his nose to be cut off in Star Chamber some two decades before, and yet he was not daunted, but kept up his agitation against the King. Against all Kings.”
    “He was a Barker.” Again, this word brings no sign of contempt to Ben’s face. Shocking how different this place is from London.
    “But to answer your question, Ben: Drake was not an especially big or strong man.”
    “So the son on his shoulders was small. By now he should be, perhaps, threescore and eight. But I do not know of a Mr. Drake here.”
    “Drake was the father’s Christian name.”
    “Pray, what then is the name of the family?”
    “I will not tell you that just now,” says Enoch. For the man he wants to find might have a very poor character among these people—might already have been hanged on Boston Common, for all Enoch knows.
    “How can I help you find him, sir, if you won’t let me know his name?”
    “By guiding me to the Charlestown ferry,” Enoch says, “for I know that he spends his days on the north side of the River Charles.”
    “Follow me,” says Ben, “but I hope you’ve silver.”
    “Oh yes, I’ve silver,” says Enoch.
    T HEY ARE SKIRTING A KNOB of land at the north end of the city. Wharves, smaller and older than the big one, radiate from its shore. The sails and rigging, spars and masts to his starboard combine into a tangle vast and inextricable, as characters on a page must do in the eyes of an unlettered peasant. Enoch does not see van Hoek or Minerva. He begins to fear that he shall have to go into taverns and make inquiries, and spend time, and draw attention.
    Ben takes him direct to the wharf where the Charlestown Ferry is ready to shove off. It is all crowded with hanging-watchers, and Enoch must pay the waterman extra to bring the horse aboard. Enoch pulls his purse open and peers into it. The King of Spain’s coat of arms stares back at him, stamped in silver, variously blurred, chopped, and mangled. The Christian name varies, depending on which king reigned when each of these coins was hammered out in New Spain, but after that they all say D. G. HISPAN ET IND REX . By the grace of God, of Spain and the Indies, King. The same sort of bluster that all kings stamp onto their coins.
    Those words don’t matter to anyone—most people can’t read them anyway. What does matter is that a man standing in a cold breeze on the Boston waterfront, seeking to buy passage on a ferry run by an Englishman, cannot pay with the coins that are being stamped out by Sir Isaac Newton in the Royal Mint at the Tower ofLondon. The only coinage here is Spanish—the same coins that are changing hands, at this moment, in Lima, Manila, Macao, Goa, Bandar Abbas, Mocha, Cairo, Smyrna, Malta, Madrid, the Canary Islands, Marseilles.
    The man who saw Enoch down to the docks in London months ago said: “Gold knows things that no man does.”
    Enoch churns his purse up and down, making the coins-fragments fly, hoping to spy a single pie-slice—one-eighth of a Piece of Eight, or a bit, as they are called. But he already knows he’s spent most of his bits for small necessaries along the road. The smallest piece he has in his purse right now is half of a