The System of the World (101 page)

Bothmar had taken to raising his eyebrows at Roger so violently that it seemed they might fly off and stick to the ceiling. “
Anyway,
” Roger concluded, “time to clean out the Pyx! It is half full of most excellent coins bearing the stamp of the late Queen Anne, R.I.P. One Charles White has been looking after it—you may inquire among others as to the man’s character. In fact, you’ll probably meet him today!”

“In about ten minutes,” said Bothmar, and glanced over toward the door. “That is, if you’ll
finish
.” Daniel couldn’t help following Bothmar’s gaze, and had his day ruined by the sight of Mr. White, just inside the threshold, staring at him interestedly.

Roger polished it off thus: “To put to rest any possible confusion, I say, before we begin throwing new King George guineas into the Pyx, and mixing them up with Anne’s, why, let’s have a Trial of the Pyx, empty the thing out, kill the rumors, and start off your majesty’s reign with a lot of sparkling new coins.”

“For a while the schedule is terribly busy—”

“Not to worry,” Roger assured him, “the Mint would not go into production anyway until after the coronation, which I’m told is scheduled for the twentieth of October. Give us, then, say, a week for the festivities to subside…”

“Sir Isaac Newton suggests Friday, the twenty-ninth.”

“Worst
possible
day, I am afraid. That is a Hanging-Day at Tyburn. Impossible to move.”

“Sir Isaac is aware of the fact,” said Bothmar, “but says it is good, because on that day the Coiner shall be executed.”

“I see. Yes. Yes. On one day—practically at the same moment—the Pyx shall be put to the trial, Sir Isaac shall be vindicated, and the most notorious of all coiners shall be put to death before an audience of, oh, half a million. Practicalities aside, Sir Isaac’s proposal is, come to think of it, very clever.”

“Well,” Bothmar pointed out, “he
is
a genius.”

“That he is!”

“And,” Bothmar added, “his majesty thinks highly of Sir Isaac’s philosophickal prowess.”

“Did Sir Isaac have an opinion about the turnips?” Daniel inquired, but Roger stepped on his foot and Bothmar politely omitted to translate it.

“So,” said Bothmar, “unless you object—”

“Not in the least! Friday, October the twenty-ninth, it is! Get the Privy Council to wave a quill over it, and we shall make ready for a Trial of the Pyx!”

R
OGER AND
D
ANIEL
were permitted to stay and mingle. But Daniel hated mingling worse than anything. He launched a desperate escape attempt via the terrace in the back, but could not work out how to get round to the Thames side and flag down a passing Ship without making a spectacle of himself. He stared across the Lawn and pretended to philosophize about the turnip farm. When he felt this pretense might be wearing a bit thin, he stared up the hill at the Observatory and wondered if Flamsteed was awake yet, and whether he’d raise objections if Daniel went up there to tinker with the equipment. This too was wearing thin when haply he came across that old last resort of introverts at cocktail parties: a document that he could pretend to be utterly absorbed in. It was a broadside, lying face down on the stone pavement of the terrace with gentlemen’s boot-prints all over it. Daniel raked it up over his toe with the tip of his walking-stick and from there was able to coax it up into a hand, and flip it over.

At the top of the sheet were two portraits of equal size, arrayed next to each other. One looked like an ink-blot. It was a miserable rendering of a black-haired black man in a black suit with two white eyes poking out. Beneath was a caption:
Dappa as rendered in April 1714 by the renown’d portraitist, Charles White
. The other was a rather good engraving of an African gentleman with silvery dreadlocks and a beard, dusky, of course, but with a range of skin tones suggested by the hatchures and other tricks of the engraver’s art. It was captioned
DAPPA as rendered in September 1714 by
—, and here was given the name of a highly regarded artist. Looking more closely Daniel saw, in the background of the picture, a barred window, through which could be espied the skyline of London rising above the Thames. It was the view from the Liberty of the Clink.

The title was ADDITIONAL REMARKS on FAME by DAPPA. Daniel began to read it. It took the form of a sugary and, Daniel suspected, sarcastic encomium to the Duke of Marlborough.

“That was inadvertent,” remarked a man who had been standing nearby, smoking a pipe. From the corner of his eye, Daniel had already marked this chap as a military man, for he was wearing an officer’s uniform. Reckoning him to be a fellow non-Mingler, he had had the simple decency to ignore him. Now this general or colonel or whatever he was had shown the poor form to irrupt in on Daniel while he was pretending to read something so as not to have to talk
to anyone. Daniel looked up and saw, first, that the facings, piping, cuffs, &c. of the uniform were those of the King’s Own Black Torrent Guard. Second, that this was Marlborough.

“What was inadvertent, my lord?”

“When you came to call on me at my
levée,
just after I returned to this city, a month and a half ago, I had been reading some of this chap’s work,” said Marlborough. “Must have made some remark. Those other chaps must have gone forth and spread the rumor that I was a devotee of Mr. Dappa’s work. It seems he has only become more popular since. People have sent him money—he lives now in the finest apartment that the Clink has to offer, and strolls on a private balcony there, and is called on by fops and whatnot. He says in the document you are holding in your hand there, that he has all but become a white man as a result, and presents these portraits as evidence. He still wears chains; but those are less restrictive than the chains of the mind that bind some to out-moded ideas such as Slavery. So he deems himself a Gentleman now, and has begun to place donations in escrow, in the hopes that he may purchase Charles White as soon as the price drops low enough.”

“My word! You practically have the thing memorized!” Daniel exclaimed.

“I have had to spend many hours of late waiting for his majesty to wax talkative. Dappa writes well.”

“You have command of your old regiment again, I gather?”

“Yes. The details are quite unfathomable. Others are toiling away at them. Colonel Barnes has been located, and put in charge of rounding up certain elements who were scattered during the amusements of the summer. I am glad I was not here. It all would have vexed me to no end. I understand congratulations are in order for you.”

“Thank you,” said Daniel. “I have no idea what are the duties of a member of the Treasury Commission—”

“Keep an eye on my lord Ravenscar. See to it that the Trial of the Pyx goes rather well.”

“That, my lord, hangs on what is in the Pyx.”

“Yes. I was meaning to ask you. Does
anyone
really know what’s in the bloody thing?”

“Perhaps
he
does,” said Daniel, and inclined his head toward a nearby window. A red-wigged gentleman was in there, mingling with Germans, but glancing frequently at them.

“Charles White,” said Marlborough, “is, it’s true, still in command of the King’s Messengers, who pretend to guard the Pyx. I am pleased to let you know that they are now surrounded, and carefully
observed, by the King’s Own Black Torrent Guard. So Mr. White cannot make any more mischief with the Pyx. And Colonel Barnes has related to me that White was downriver with you and Sir Isaac Newton at the moment that the Pyx was molested in April.”

“Very well,” said Daniel, since, plainly enough, Marlborough had figured this all out on his own: “The only one who really knows what is in the Pyx is Jack Shaftoe.”

“Hmm. If that is the case, then I am astonished that there is not a queue before Newgate Prison quite as long as that yonder.”

“Perhaps there is,” Daniel said.

White came out on the terrace and bowed. “My lord,” he said to Marlborough. “Doctor Waterhouse.”

“Mr. White,” they both said. Then they all took turns saying, “God save the King.”

“I trust you’ll be
even more busy
than usual,” White said to Daniel, “now that you’ve two Mints to look after.”

“Two Mints? I do not understand, Mr. White. There is only one Mint that I know of.”

“Oh, perhaps I was misinformed,” said White, mock-confused. “People are saying there is another.”

“Do you mean Jack Shaftoe’s coining house in Surrey? The
Tory
Mint?” Daniel asked, and let the handbill snap in the breeze, hoping that White would notice it. He did.

“You really ought to have better sources of information. Don’t read that rubbish. Listen to what Persons of Quality are saying.”

Marlborough turned his back, which was a rude thing to do; but the way this was going, it would soon become a duelling matter unless the Duke pretended he wasn’t hearing it.

“And what are Persons of Quality saying, Mr. White?”

“That Ravenscar is coining, too.”

“People are accusing the Marquis of Ravenscar of committing High Treason? Seems audacious.”

“Everyone knows he raised a private army. ’Tis a small step from that, to a private Mint.”

“Bored toffs in drawing-rooms may believe any phant’sies they please! Such accusations require at least some evidence.”

“They say that evidence may be found in abundance,” said White, “at Clerkenwell Court, and at Bridewell, and in the cellars of the Bank of England. Good day.” And he left. Which was fortunate for Daniel. A few seconds ago he had been amused at the sheer idiocy of the notion that Roger had been coining. Now he had become too flustered to speak.

“What was that about?” Marlborough very much wanted to know.

“It is a philosophical project I have been undertaking with Leibniz,” said Daniel, “that, to make a long story—” and he gave a sketchy account of the thing to the Duke, explaining the movement of the gold from Clerkenwell to Bridewell to the Bank to Hanover. “Someone seems to have gathered rather a lot of information about it,” Daniel concluded, “and spreads now a twisted version according to which it is a
coining
operation.”

“We know who is
spreading
it—we have just been conversing with him,” said Marlborough. “It matters not where the rumor originated.” To this Daniel said nothing, for a sickening awareness had come over him that this might all have originated with Isaac.

“What
does
matter—very much—is that two members of the new Treasury Commission are mixed up in it,” said Marlborough.

“Mixed up in
what
? A science experiment?”

“In something that looks a bit dodgy.”

“I can’t help it if it looks dodgy
to an ignoramus
!”

“But you
can
help that you are mixed up in it.”

“What do you mean, my lord?”

“I mean that your experiment is at an end, sir. It must stop. And the moment it has stopped, responsible persons, trusted by the King and the City alike, must go to this Clerkenwell Court, and to Bridewell, and into the vaults of the Bank, and inspect them, and find
nothing
of what Mr. White has been talking of.”

“It could be
stopped
at any time,” Daniel said, “but to wind it up properly and cast away the residue is impossible in a day, or a week.”

“How long will it take then?”

“October twenty-ninth,” said Daniel, “is the date that has just been set for the Trial of the Pyx, the execution of Jack the Coiner, and the elimination of all doubt as to the soundness of his majesty’s coinage. No later than that date, my lord, you’ll be able to visit the places mentioned with as many inspectors as you might care to bring along with you—including even Sir Isaac himself—and you shall find nothing save Templar-tombs at Clerkenwell, hemp-pounders at Bridewell, and Coin of the Realm at the Bank.”

“Done,” said the Duke of Marlborough, and strode away, pausing to bow to a young lady crossing the terrace alone: the Princess of Wales.

“Dr. Waterhouse,” Caroline said, “I need something from you.”

3:30
A.M., FOUR DAYS LATER
(22
SEPTEMBER
1714)

D
ANIEL HAD BARELY GOT
in the front door when the most exquisite body in Britain was pressed up against him, hard. He wondered, not for the first time, how the world might have been different had said body been united in one person with her uncle’s mind. Not much was separating him from Catherine Barton; having been rousted by a most urgent message, he’d come over in his nightshirt.
She
was wearing something diaphanous that he only glimpsed in the fraction of a second before she impacted on him. She smelled good: not an easy thing to accomplish in 1714. Daniel began to get his first erection since—since—well, since the
last
time he’d seen Catherine Barton. It was most inappropriate, as she was distraught. She was most certainly the sort of girl who would notice—but not the sort who would take it the wrong way.

She took him by the hand and led him back through the courtyard, round the fountain, and into the Ballroom, which smelled of oil, and was eerily lit up by the white-green glow of
kaltes feuer:
Phosphorus. A new thing had been added to the place. Seen from the entrance it looked like the rounded prow of a ship that happened to be made of silver, wreathed and festooned with garlands smitten of gold. Some manner of bas-relief Classical frieze had been molded into it. A sort of ram projected up and out of the thing, explicitly Priapic; Daniel recoiled and edged round this, for its tip was like to have caught him in the face. Iron rings, straps, &c., dangled from it. Coming now round the side of the object he discovered that it sat between a pair of wheels, made of wood but covered in gold leaf. This solved the mystery of how so heavy an object could have been moved into the ballroom. It was nothing less than a chariot—a huge one, eight feet wide. It was, he realized, a Chariot of the Gods. Coming finally around the open back of it, which faced towards the Volcano only a few yards away, he saw that the whole floor of the vehicle was a tongue-shaped expanse of Bed: as wide as the Chariot and ten feet
long, upholstered in crimson silk and bestrewn with furs, and silk- and velvet-covered pillows in diverse glandular shapes. Sprawled in the middle of it was Roger Comstock, the Marquis of Ravenscar. A laurel wreath was awry on his bald head. Mercifully, his purple toga had not been altogether torn off, but the middle of it was poked up, producing a Turkish tent effect that echoed the shape of the nearby Volcano. But the Volcano, mechanism that it was, still pumped away faithfully, its hidden Screw sending spurt after spurt of Oil of Phosphorus down its slopes. Whereas Roger was, or had been, animated by what Newton would call a Vegetative Spirit, which had quite fled his body. The toga-lifter was rigor mortis. He’d have to be buried in a special coffin.

“He was sworn in today as First Lord of the Treasury,” said Miss Barton—who, bless her, had the presence of mind to know that
some
explanation was wanting. “And so we celebrated the Rites of Vulcan.”

“Of course you did,” said Daniel, who was crawling on all fours up the treacherous (because silky as well as oily) slope of the stupendous Bed, glancing up from time to time to navigate by the landmark of the Pole Star.

“It is a thing Roger liked to do, to celebrate a great triumph. The
last
time was after he crushed Bolingbroke. The Rites are lengthy and elaborate—”

“I had already inferred that,” Daniel said. He had finally got to the place where he could behold Roger’s face in softly pulsing phosphorus-light.

“Just at the moment of the—Eruption—he suffered an attack—”

“Stroke, probably.”

“He said, ‘Get Daniel! No Bleeders—I don’t want to go out like King Chuck.’ I ran out to send you the message. When I returned, he was—like he is now.”

“You mean, dead?” said Daniel. For he had completed the rite of checking for a pulse. It was superfluous—no man had ever looked more dead than Roger. But his engorged Member had raised doubts.

D
ANIEL REMAINED STRANGELY CALM UNTIL
servants sledded Roger’s corpse down to the Chariot’s threshold, transferred him to a litter, and took him away. Even when he was dead, it seemed, Roger’s presence had some chymical power to reassure Daniel, to make him feel sure everything would come out all right. But something in the way Roger’s limbs tumbled as he was being moved, cruelly struck Daniel as proof that Roger’s adroitness, his intelligence, his force were all flown. By the time the ballroom doors had slammed behind the retreating litter, Daniel had already begun to dissolve.

The Chariot, as it turned out, had a cover: a sort of brocaded tarpaulin that could be drawn over its open top and rear, probably to catch dust and bird-shit when it was languishing in Roger’s stables awaiting a Triumph. This had been reefed and tied about the vehicle’s rim with many tasseled golden ropes. The Priestess of Vulcan went round undoing these, and presently unfurled the cover, and drew it down to envelop the whole bed. Daniel was sitting up in the middle of it, elbows on knees, hands clamped over his phizz, tears leaking out.

“I do not wish to live in a world that does not have Roger in it,” he heard himself saying; and then he thanked God that Roger was not alive to hear him talking this way. “He was my Complement—my protector—my partner—my patron—it’s almost as if he were my wife or something.”

“Or you his,” said Miss Barton. Having finished with this project of enclosing Daniel in the womb-like interior of the Chariot of Vulcan, she hitched up her skirts and knee-walked up the slope of the bed until she reached Daniel’s side, then put a comforting hand on his shoulder.

“God! I really am on the wrong Planet henceforth!” Daniel exclaimed. “What am I going to do?”

“Roger has made out the most exacting Will. He showed it to me. There is money for the Royal Society. For a Museum he wishes to have made here. For the Kit-Cat Clubb, the Italian Opera, and the Massachusetts Bay Colony of Technologickal Arts.”

Daniel did not say what he was thinking, which was that for every asset Roger could claim, there would be equal or greater liabilities. He had held his creditors at bay by amazing them, threatening them, distracting them, and drinking them under the table. But now, like ants swarming a defenseless carcass, they would come.

Daniel pulled his hands from his face and made himself leave off blubbering. “No. It is not that sort of thing I am thinking of. I have much to do before the twenty-ninth of October. Much to do! It seemed nearly impossible even when Roger was about to do most of it
for
me. The others on the Treasury Commission are mountebanks and time-servers. So it is
I
who must organize the Trial of the Pyx. What do I know of it? Nothing! Clerkenwell Court and Bridewell must be shut down, liquidated. The Institute of Technologickal Arts has got to be considered dead—I’ll send word to Enoch to sell the cabin. What else!? Oh, yes. The Princess of Wales wants me to help a dear friend of hers sort out her love life—which happens to be more fraught with dangers and complexities than, let us say, the foreign policy of the Venetian Republic.”

“I am sorry to laugh, on such a sad occasion,” said the Priestess of Vulcan, “but
that
strikes me as most absurd!”

Which Daniel might have taken in a resentful spirit, had she not begun to knead the tight muscles at the base of his neck and between his scapulae.

“In some things you are a very clever chap, or so Roger always used to say. But what would a man such as you know of affairs of the heart? Why, your muscles tie themselves up in knots at the very mention of these things! Roll over on your belly, sir, or else the oil will run down your back.”

“Oil? What oil!?”

“
This
oil…”

“Oh, my word!”

“
That’s
better. Now I can straddle you—your buttocks can take most of my weight—thus—and it becomes easier for me to reach those parts of you that are most in need of lubrication and a good stiff massage.”

“Is
this
how Roger did it?” Daniel said wonderingly, a long time later.

“No, Roger liked to get up on all fours like a—”

“No, no, no, Miss Barton. I meant something different. Is this how Roger managed to—to keep so many balls in the air—as it were—and not go mad?”

“Now you ask me to speculate on matters quite beyond my scope, Dr. Waterhouse. Roll over on your back!”

“I was just reflecting that those affairs that so troubled my mind only a little while ago, seem to have quite fled my mind—oh, my goodness, Miss Barton!”

“It sounded as if your troubles were beginning to sneak back into your awareness,” she explained, “and so I rather phant’sied some drastic action was called for.”

“What…what…what troubles, Miss…Miss…Miss Barton?”

“My point exactly. Tilt your pelvis t’other way, if you please, sir…there! Much better, you’ll admit. Now, leave the rest to me, sir—the balance of this chariot can be a bit…
tricky
…the ride…a bit rough.”

Indeed, the axle-bearings of the Chariot of Vulcan presently began to creak as it got to rocking forward and back, forward and back, on its wheels. Daniel was old, and the ride was correspondingly long. But the
primum mobile
—the Body of Miss Barton—was young and, as everyone in London agreed, in the most superb condition, and more than equal to the work. Daniel felt a-drift in Absolute Space, and phant’sied that the Chariot had worked its way out
the ballroom doors, off the property, down Tottenham Court Road, and was gliding across the dewy turf of Lambs Conduit Fields…on and on…until suddenly it toppled down a well. He opened his eyes. It was over. She executed a back-somersault off of him, and rolled to her feet, poking up the tarpaulin with her head, and artfully stuffed a fistful of Roman priestess vestments up between her thighs.

“Perhaps your uncle knows something after all,” Daniel said. “It seems so obvious, when one contrasts a dead Roger with a live Daniel, that there is something one lacks and the other has!”

“You have a bit less of it now,” Miss Barton said playfully. Then she turned her head to one side, attending to some subtle noise without, that Daniel had not heard. “Who is there?” she called, and gathered up an arm-load of tarp, ready to give it a heave. “Don’t!” Daniel called, for he was most indecent.

“The servants have seen ever so much worse!” she returned with a roll of the eyes, and heaved. The curtain flew back and ended up creased over Daniel’s head like a little roof. He gazed out upon the face of Sir Isaac Newton, who was standing there with his back to the volcano, beaming lanthorn-light at him.

“I came as soon as I heard the dreadful news,” he announced crisply, at some point during the approximately half an hour during which Daniel was rendered speechless. Isaac had not evinced the slightest surprise at seeing Daniel here, in this pose. This raised interesting questions. Had he been eavesdropping the entire time, and therefore had ample time to master his rage and astonishment? Or was his opinion of Daniel’s character now so abyssal that he simply felt nothing at all?

“It seems, however,” Isaac went on, “that matters are well in hand here.”

“That they are, uncle,” said Miss Barton, and glided down off the bed of the chariot to give her kinsman a chaste peck on the cheek.

“Is there any way that I might be of assistance?” Isaac was desirous of knowing.

Daniel could not think of anything to say. He would have ample time to re-live the moment later, to savor and amplify his embarrassment. What struck him now, as he sat there in a half-ripped-off night-shirt, gazing upon fully dressed Isaac, was that word of Roger’s death must be out; and all over the metropolis at this instant, people were awake, and out-maneuvering Daniel in ways that he probably would never even know about.