The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and the System of the World by Neal Stephenson Read Free Book Online

nosering, the smaller boy led the bigger one over to the nearest stone wall, which happened to be that of Grantham’s huge, ancient church, and then began to rub his prisoner’s face against it as though trying to erase it from the skull.
    Until this point the other boys had been jubilant. Even Enoch had found the early stages of the victory stirring in a way. But as this torture went on, the boys’ faces went slack. Many of them turned and ran away. The fair-haired boy had flown into a state of something like ecstasy—groping and flailing like a man nearing erotic climax, his body an insufficient vehicle for his passions, a dead weight impeding the flowering of the spirit. Finally an adult man—Clarke’s brother?—banged out through a door and stormed across the yard between school and church in the tottering gait of a man unaccustomed to having to move quickly, carrying a cane but nottouching the ground with it. He was so angry that he did not utter a word, or try to separate the boys, but simply began to cut air with the cane, like a blind man fending off a bear, as he got close. Soon enough he maneuvered within range of the fair boy and planted his feet and bent to his work, the cane producing memorable whorling noises cut off by pungent whacks. A few brown-nosers now considered it safe to approach. Two of them dragged the fair boy off of his victim, who contracted into a fetal position at the base of the church wall, hands open like the covers of a book to enfold his wrecked face. The schoolmaster adjusted his azimuth as the target moved, like a telescope tracking a comet, but none of his blows seemed to have been actually felt by the fair boy yet—he wore a look of steadfast, righteous triumph, much like Enoch supposed Cromwell must have shown as he beheld the butchering of the Irish at Drogheda.
    The boy was dragged inside for higher punishments. Enoch rode back to Clarke’s apothecary shop, reining in a silly urge to gallop through the town like a Cavalier.
    Clarke was sipping tay and gnawing biscuits, already several pages into a new alchemical treatise, moving crumb-spattered lips as he solved the Latin.
    “Who is he?” Enoch demanded, coming in the door.
    Clarke elected to play innocent. Enoch crossed the room and found the stairs. He didn’t really care about the name anyway. It would just be another English name.
    The upstairs was all one odd-shaped room with low adze-marked rafters and rough plaster walls that had once been whitewashed. Enoch hadn’t visited many children’s rooms, but to him it seemed like a den of thieves hastily abandoned and stumbled upon by a plodding constable, filled with evidence of many peculiar, ingenious, frequently unwise plots and machinations suddenly cut short. He stopped in the doorway and steadied himself. Like a good empiric, he had to see all and alter nothing.
    The walls were marked with what his eyes first took to be the grooves left behind by a careless plasterer’s trowel, but as his pupils dilated, he understood that Mr. and Mrs. Clarke’s boarders had been drawing on the walls, apparently with bits of charcoal fetched out of the grate. It was plain to see which pictures had been drawn by whom. Most were caricatures learned by rote from slightly older children. Others—generally closer to the floor—were maps of insight, manifestoes of intelligence, always precise, sometimes beautiful. Enoch had been right in supposing that the boy had excellent senses. Things that others did not see at all, or chose notto register out of some kind of mental obstinacy, this boy took in avidly.
    There were four tiny beds. The litter of toys on the floor was generally boyish, but over by one bed there was a tendency toward ribbons and frills. Clarke had mentioned one of the boarders was a girl. There was a dollhouse and a clan of rag dolls in diverse phases of ontogeny. Here there’d been a meeting of interests. There was doll furniture ingeniously made by the same regular