He took a seat in a coffee-house and amused himself watching flushed and sweaty ferry-passengers appear at the head of the stairs, as if they’d been spontaneously generated from the f?tid waters of the Thames. They’d crawl into the nearby tavern for a pint, fortifying themselves for the traversal of the Bridge’s twelve-foot-wide roadway, where passengers were crushed between carts a few times a week. If they survived that, then they’d pop into the glover’s or the haberdasher’s for a bit of recreational shopping, and then perhaps dart into this coffee-house for a quick mug of java. The remainder of London Bridge was getting down at the heels, because much more fashionable shops were being put up in other parts of the city by the likes of Sterling, but the Square was prosperous and, because of the continual threat of boat-wrack and drowning, the merriest part of town.
And in these days it tended to be crowded, especially when ships came across the Channel, and dropped anchor in the Pool, and their Continental passengers were ferried hither in watermen’s boats.
As one such boat drew near the Bridge, Daniel finished his coffee, settled his bill, and ventured out onto the street. Cartage and drayage had been baffled by a crowd of pedestrians. They all wanted to descend to the starling on the downstream side, and had formed a sort of bung that stopped not only the stairs but the street as well. Seeing that they were by and large City men, intent on some serious purpose, and not Vagabonds intent on his purse, Daniel insinuated himself into this crowd and was presently drawn in to the top of the stairs and flushed down to the top of the starling along with the rest. He supposed at first that all of these well-dressed men had come to greet specific passengers. But as the boat drew within earshot, they began to shout, not friendly greetings, but questions, in several languages, about the war.
“As a fellow Protestant-albeit Lutheran-it is my hoping that England and Holland shall become reconciled and that the war you speak of will no more exist.”
The young German was standing up in a boat, wearing French fashions. But as the boat drew closer to the turbulence downstream of the Bridge, he came to his senses, and sat down.
“So much for hopes-now what of your observations, sir?” someone fired back-one of a few dozen who had by now crowded onto the starling, trying to get as close to the incoming boats and ferries as they could without falling into the deadly chute. Others were perched up on the edge of the Square, like gargoyles, still others were out on the river in boats plotting intercept courses, like boca-neers in the Caribbean. None of them was having any of this Lutheran diplomacy. None even knew who the young German was-just a passenger on a boat from abroad who was willing to talk. There were several other travelers on the same boat, but all of them ignored the shouting Londoners. If these had information, they would take it to the ‘Change, and tell the tale with silver, and propagate it through the chthonic channels of the Market.
“What ship were you on, sir?” someone bellowed.
“ Ste-Catherine,sir.”
“Where did that ship come from, sir?”
“Calais.”
“Had you any conversation with Naval persons?”
“A little, perhaps.”
“Any news, or rumor, of cannons bursting on English ships?”
“Oh, sometimes it happens. By everyone in the ships of the melee, it is seen, for the whole side of the hull is out-blown, and out the bodies fly, or so they say. To all of the sailors, friend and enemy, it is a lesson of mortality, perhaps. Consequently they all talk about it. But in the present war it happens no more than usual, I think.”
“Were they Comstock cannons?”
The German took a moment to understand that, without even having set foot on English soil yet, he had talked himself into deep trouble. “Sir! The cannons of my lord Epsom are reckoned the finest in the world.”
But no one wanted to hear that kind of talk. The topic had changed.
“Whence came you to Calais?”
“Paris.”
“Did you see troops moving on your journey across France?”
“A few ones, exhausted, south-going.”
The gentlemen on the starling hummed and vibrated for a few moments, assimilating this. One broke away from the crowd, toiling back towards the stairs, and was engulfed in barefoot boys jumping up and down. He scribbled something on a bit of paper and handed it to the one who jumped highest. This one spun, forced a path through the others, took the stairs four at a time, broke loose onto the Square, vaulted over a wagon, spun a fishwife, and then began to build speed up the bridge. From here to the London shore was a hundred and some yards, from there to the ‘Change was six hundred-he’d be there in three minutes. Meanwhile the interrogation continued: “Did you see Ships of Force in the Channel, mein Herr? English, French, Dutch?”
“There was-” and here the man’s English gave way. He made a helpless, encompassing gesture.
“Fog!”
“Fog,” he repeated.
“Did you hear guns?”
“A few-but very likely they were only signals. Coded data speeding through the fog, so opaque to light, but so transparent to sound-” and here he lost control of his intellectual sphincters and began to think out loud in French, fortified with Latin, working out a system for sending encrypted data from place to place using explosions, building on ideas from Wilkins’s Cryptonomicon but marrying them to a practical plan that, in its lavish expenditure of gunpowder, would be sure to please John Comstock. In other words, he identified himself (to Daniel anyway) as Dr. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. The watchers lost interest and began aiming their questions at another boat.
Leibniz set foot on England. He was closely followed by a couple of other German gentlemen, somewhat older, much less talkative, and (Daniel could only suppose) more important. They in turn were pursued by a senior servant who headed up a short column of porters lugging boxes and bags. But Leibniz had burdened himself with a wooden box he would not let go of. Daniel stepped forward to greet them, but was cut off by some brusque fellow who shouldered in to hand a sealed letter to one of the older gentlemen, and whispered to him for a moment in Low-Dutch.
Daniel straightened up in annoyance. As luck would have it, he looked toward the London shore. His eye lingered on a quay just downstream of the Bridge: a jumbled avalanche of blackened rubble left over from the Fire. It could have been rebuilt years ago, but hadn’t, because it had been judged more important to rebuild other things first. A few men were doing work of a highly intellectual nature, stretching lines about and drawing sketches. One of them-incredibly-just happened to be Robert Hooke, City Surveyor, whom Daniel had quietly abandoned at Gresham’s College an hour ago. Not so incredibly (given that he was Hooke), he’d noticed Daniel standing there on the starling in the middle of the river, greeting what was quite obviously a foreign delegation, and was therefore glaring and brooding.
Leibniz and the others discussed matters in High-Dutch. The interloper turned round to glance at Daniel. It was one of the Dutch Ambassador’s errand-boys- cum-spies. The Germans formed some sort of a plan, and it seemed to involve splitting up. Daniel stepped in and introduced himself.
The other Germans were introduced by their names but what mattered was their ancestry: one of them was the nephew of the Archbishop of Mainz, the other the son of Baron von Boineburg, who was the same Archbishop’s Minister. In other words very important people in Mainz, hence rather important ones in the Holy Roman Empire, which was more or less neutral in the French/English/Dutch broil. It had all the signs of being some sort of peace-brokering mission, i.e.