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

of it, and a Judge of such things.”
    “I shall nominate you the moment I get back, Ben.”
    “Is it a part of your code that members must lend each other horses in time of need?”
    “No, but it is a rule that they must pay dues—for which there is ever a need—and this chap had not paid his dues in many a year. Sir Isaac—who is the President of the Royal Society—looks with disfavor on such. I explained to the gentleman in New York why it was a Bad Idea to land on Sir Isaac’s Shit List—by your leave, by your leave—and he was so convinced by my arguments that he lent me his best riding-horse without further suasion.”
    “He’s a beauty,” Ben says, and strokes the animal’s nose. The stallion mistrusted Ben at first for being small, darting, and smelling of long-dead beasts. Now he has accepted the boy as an animated hitching-post, capable of performing a few services such as nose-scratching and fly-shooing.
    The ferryman is more amused than angry when he discovers a Barker conspiring with his slave, and shoos him away. The Barker identifies Enoch as fresh meat, and begins trying to catch his eye. Enoch moves away from him and pretends to study the approaching shore. The ferry is maneuvering around a raft of immense logs drifting out of the estuary, each marked with the King’s Arrow—going to build ships for the Navy.
    Inland of Charlestown spreads a loose agglomeration of hamlets conjoined by a network of cowpaths. The largest cowpath goes all the way to Newtowne, where Harvard College is. But most of it just looks like a forest, smoking without being burned, spattered with muffled whacks of axes and hammers. Occasional musket shots boom in the distance and are echoed from hamlet to hamlet—some kind of system for relaying information across the countryside. Enoch wonders how he’s ever going to find Daniel in all that.
    He moves toward a talkative group that has formed on the center of the ferry’s deck, allowing the less erudite (for these must be Harvard men) to break the wind for them. It is a mix of pompous sots and peering quick-faced men basting their sentences together with bad Latin. Some of them have a dour Puritan look about them, others are dressed in something closer to last year’s London mode. A pear-shaped, red-nosed man in a tall gray wig seems to be the Don of this jury-rigged College. Enoch catches this one’s eye and lets him see that he’s bearing a sword. This is not a threat, but an assertion of status.
    “A gentleman traveler from abroad joins us. Welcome, sir, to our humble Colony!”
    Enoch goes through the requisite polite movements and utterances. They show a great deal of interest in him, a sure sign that not much new and interesting is going on at Harvard College. But the place is only some three-quarters of a century old, so how much can really be happening there? They want to know if he’s from a Germanic land; he says not really. They guess that he has come on some Alchemical errand, which is an excellent guess, but wrong. When it is polite to do so, he tells them the name of the man he has come to see.
    He’s never heard such scoffing. They are, to a man, pained that a gentleman should’ve crossed the North Atlantic, and now the Charles Basin, only to spoil the journey by meeting with that fellow.
    “I know him not,” Enoch lies.
    “Then let us prepare you, sir!” one of them says. “Daniel Waterhouse is a man advanced in years, but the years have been less kind to him than you.”
    “He is correctly addressed as Dr. Waterhouse, is he not?”
    Silence ruined by stifled gurgles.
    “I do not presume to correct any man,” Enoch says, “only to be sure that I give no offense when I encounter the fellow in person.”
    “Indeed, he is accounted a Doctor,” says the pear-shaped Don, “but—”
    “Of what?” someone asks.
    “Gears,” someone suggests, to great hilarity.
    “Nay, nay!” says the Don, shouting them down, in a show of false goodwill.