The System of the World (6 page)

“My purse need not enter into it, Mr. Threader. I have not undertaken this journey without backing. My banker in the City will not hesitate to advance you an equitable sum, on the credit of the Person who has underwritten my travels.”

Now Mr. Threader was, at least, interested; he stopped looking out the window, and turned his attention to Daniel. “I’ll not take
anyone’s
money—yours, your banker’s, or your backer’s, sir. And I’ll not ask who your backer
is
, for it has gradually become obvious to me that your errand is—like a bat—dark, furtive, and delicate. But if you would be so good as to indulge my professional curiosity on one small matter, I should consider your account paid in full.”

“Name it.”

“
Who
is your banker?”

“Living as I do in Boston, I have no need of a bank in London—but I am fortunate enough to have a family connexion in that business, whom I can call upon as the occasion demands: my nephew, Mr. William Ham.”

“Mr. William Ham! Of Ham Brothers! The money-goldsmiths who went bankrupt!”

“You are thinking of his
father
. William was only a boy then.” Daniel began to explain young William’s career at the Bank of England but he bated, seeing a glassy look on Mr. Threader’s face.

“The money-goldsmiths!” Mr. Threader reiterated, “The money-goldsmiths.” Something in his tone put Daniel in mind of Hooke identifying a parasite under a microscope. “Well, you see then, it’s of no account anyway, Dr. Waterhouse, as I do not think that Mr. Ham’s money would have any
utility
for me.”

Daniel understood now that Mr. Threader had set a trap by asking for the name of his banker. Saying to Mr. Threader, a money-scrivener,
My banker is a money-goldsmith
, was like mentioning to an Archbishop
I attend church in a barn
: proof that he belonged to the Enemy. The trap had sprung on him now; and, whether by design or no, it happened at the moment they trundled through Tyburn Cross, where limbs of freshly quartered criminals were spiked to the scaffold, festooned with unraveled bowels. Mr. Threader proclaimed, “Coiners!” with the finality of a Norn.

“They’re drawing and quartering people for
that
now?”

“Sir Isaac is determined to root them out. He has brought the judicial Powers round to his view, which is that counterfeiting is not just a petty crime—
it is high treason!
High treason, Dr. Waterhouse. And every coiner that Sir Isaac catches, ends up
thusly
, torn by flies and ravens at Tyburn Cross.”

Then, as if it were the most natural Transition imaginable, Mr. Threader—who had leaned far forward and screwed his head around to contemplate, at greater length, the festering shreds of Sir Isaac’s latest kills—fell back into his repose with a contented sigh, and fastened the same sort of look on the tip of Daniel’s nose. “You were there when Charles the First was decapitated?”

“That is what I told you, Mr. Threader. And I was
startled,
to say the least, to enter a church three score and five years later, and be confronted with evidence that these High Church folk have not yet recovered from the event. Do you have any idea, Mr. Threader, how many Englishmen perished in the Civil War? In accordance with our norms, I shall not even mention Irishmen.”

“No, I’ve no idea…”

“Precisely! And so to make such a bother about one chap seems as bizarre, idolatrous, fetishistic, and beside the point to me, as Hindoos venerating Cows.”

“He lived in the neighborhood,” said Mr. Threader, meaning Windsor.

“A local connexion that was not even mentioned in the homily—not,
I say, in the first, the second, or the third hour of it. Rather, I heard much talk that sounded to me like
politics.
”

“
To you.
Yes. But
to me
, Dr. Waterhouse, it sounded like
church.
Whereas, if we were to go there—” and Mr. Threader pointed at a barn in a field to the north side of Tyburn Road, surrounded by carriages, and emanating four-part harmony; i.e., a Meeting-House of some Gathered Church “—we would hear much that would sound like church to
you
, and politics to
me
.”

“To
me
it would sound like common sense,” Daniel demurred, “and I hope that in time you would come round to the same opinion—which would be an impossibility for
me
, in
there
—” Fortuitously, they had just crossed over some important new street that had not existed, or had been just a cow-path, in Daniel’s day; but never mind, as looking north he saw Oxford Chapel just where it had always been, and so he was able to thrust his finger at an Anglican church-steeple, which was all he wanted to illustrate his point. “—in that there is no sense to it whatever, only mindless ritual!”

“It is naturally the case that Mysteries of Faith do not lend themselves to commonsensical explanation.”

“You, sir, might as well be a Catholic, if that is what you believe.”

“And you, sir, might as well be an Atheist—unless, like so many of the Royal Society, you have, on your way to Atheism, chosen to pause for refreshment at the Spring of Arianism.”

Daniel was fascinated. “Is it widely known—or
supposed
, I should say—that the Royal Society is a nest of Arianism?”

“Only among those capable of recognizing the
obvious,
sir.”

“Those capable of recognizing the
obvious
might conclude from the service you and I have just been subjected to, that this country is ruled by Jacobites—and ruled, I say, thusly from the very
top
.”

“Your powers of perception put mine to shame, Dr. Waterhouse, if you know the Queen’s mind on this question. The Pretender may be a staunch Catholic, and he may be in France, but he
is
her brother! And at the end of a poor old lonely woman’s life, to expect that she’ll not be swayed by such considerations is inhumane.”

“Not nearly as inhumane as the welcome her brother would receive if he came to these shores styling himself King. Consider the example just cited, so tediously, in church.”

“Your candor is bracing. Among my circle, one does not allude so freely to Decapitation of Kings by a Mobb.”

“I am glad that you are braced, Mr. Threader. I am merely hungry.”

“To me you seem
thirsty
—”

“For blood?”

“For
royal
blood.”

“The blood of the Pretender is not royal, for he is no King, and never will be. I saw his father’s blood, streaming out of his nostrils in a gin-house at Sheerness, and I saw his uncle’s blood being let from his jugulars at Whitehall, and his grandfather’s plashing all round the scaffold at the Banqueting House, sixty-five years ago today, and none of it looked different from the blood of convicts that we put up in jars at the Royal Society. If spilling the Pretender’s blood prevents another Civil War, why spill it.”

“You really should moderate your language, sir. If the Pretender did come to the throne, the words you just spoke would be high treason, and you would be dragged on a sledge to the place we have just put behind us, where you would be half-hanged, drawn, and quartered.”

“I simply find it inconceivable that that man would ever be suffered to reign over England.”

“We call it the United Kingdom now. If you were fresh from New England, Dr. Waterhouse, which is a hot-bed of Dissidents, or if you had been dwelling too long in London, where Whigs and Parliament lord it over ordinary sensible Englishmen, then I should understand why you feel as you do. But during our journey I have showed you England
as it is,
not as Whigs phant’sy it to be. How can a man of your intelligence not perceive the wealth of this country—the wealth
temporal
of our commerce and the wealth
spiritual
of our Church? For I say to you that if you did comprehend that wealth you would
certainly
be a Tory,
possibly
even a Jacobite.”

“The
spiritual
side of the account is balanced, and perhaps o’er-balanced, by the congregations who gather together in Meeting-Houses, where one does not need to sign a lease, to sit on a pew. So we may leave Church-disputes out of the reckoning. Where
money
is concerned, I shall confess, that the prosperity of the countryside quite overtopped my expectations. But it comes to little when set against the wealth of the City.”

Timing once again favored Daniel, for they were now on Oxford Street. To the carriage’s left side, the Green Lane stretched northwards across open country, threading its way between parks, gardens and farms, darting into little vales and bounding over rises. To the right side it was all built-up: a development that had been only a gleam in Sterling’s
*
eye twenty years ago: Soho Square. Gesturing
first this way, then that, Daniel continued: “For the country draws its revenue from a fixed stock: sheep eating grass. Whereas, the City draws its wealth from foreign trade, which is ever-increasing and, I say, inexhaustible.”

“Oh, Dr. Waterhouse, I am so pleased that Providence has given me the opportunity to set you right on that score, before you got to London and embarrassed yourself by holding views that stopped being true while you were gone. For look, we are come to Tottenham Court Road, the city begins in earnest.” Mr. Threader pounded on the roof and called out the window to the driver, “High Street is impassable for re-paving, jog left and take Great Russell round to High Holborn!”

“On the contrary, Mr. Threader. I know that the Tories have established their own Bank, as a rival and a counterpoise to the Bank of England. But the Bank of England is capitalized with East India shares. The equity of the Tories’ Land Bank is, simply, land. And East India trade grows from year to year. But of land there is a fixed quantity, unless you mean to emulate the Dutch, and manufacture your own.”

“This is where you need to be set to rights, Dr. Waterhouse. The Land Bank is an antiquarian folly, for just the reasons you have set forth. But this in no way signifies that the Bank of England holds a monopoly. On the contrary. With all due respect to the busy, but misguided men of the Juncto, their Bank’s health is as precarious as the Queen’s. The war we have just brought to an end was a Whig war, pressed upon a reluctant Queen by the importunities of a warlike Parliament, led by a Juncto intoxicated by dreams of adventures on foreign soil. They got the money by taxing the people of the country—and I know whereof I speak, for they are my friends!—and they got that money into the coffers of the Duke of Marlborough’s army by means of loans, brokered in the City, at great personal profit, by Whig bankers and money-goldsmiths. Oh, it was very lucrative for a time, Mr. Waterhouse, and if you were to believe the representations made by my lord Ravenscar, why, you might be forgiven for thinking it was all profitable to the Bank of England. There is his house, by the way,” Mr. Threader remarked, as he peered at a spreading Barock pile on the north side of Great Russell Street. “Unspeakably vulgar, quintessentially
nouveau
…”

“I was the architect,” Daniel said mildly.

“Of the
first
bit,” said Mr. Threader after only a moment’s break, “which was admirable, a jewel-box. Pity what has been inflicted on it since you left. You know both the Golden, and the Silver, Comstocks. Fascinating! Ravenscar is no longer in a position to afford the best, and so, as you can plainly see, he makes up in ostentation and volume
what he cannot have in taste and quality. His mistress seems to find it pleasing.”

“Oh.”

“You do know who my lord Ravenscar’s mistress is?”

“I’ve no idea, Mr. Threader; when I knew him, he had a different whore every week, and sometimes three at once. Who is his whore presently?”

“The niece of Sir Isaac Newton.”

Daniel could not bear this and so he said the first thing that came into his head: “That is where we used to live.”

He nodded southwards across Waterhouse Square, and slipped far down in his seat so that he could get a look at the house that brother Raleigh had built on the rubble of the one where Drake had been blown up. This change of position brought him knee-to-knee with Mr. Threader, who seemed to know the story of Drake’s demise, and observed a respectful silence as they circumvented the square. Gazing, from his low-down position, over the skyline of the city, Daniel was shocked by a glimpse of an enormous dome: the new St. Paul’s. Then the carriage rounded a turn onto Holborn and he lost it.

“You were making some comment about banks, earlier?” Daniel inquired, in a desperate bid to purge his mind of the image of Roger Comstock putting his poxy yard into Isaac’s niece.

“It went poorly for the Whigs, very poorly indeed, in the last years of the war!” Mr. Threader answered, grateful to’ve been given the opportunity to recount the misfortunes of the Juncto. “Bankruptcy forced England to do what France could not: sue for peace, without having accomplished the chief goals of the war. No wonder Marlborough fled the country in disgrace, no wonder at all!”

“I cannot believe East India trade will be depressed for very long, though.”

Mr. Threader leaned forward, ready with an answer, but was tripped up by an interruption, of a professional nature, from the driver.

“Dr. Waterhouse, if you would be so good as to specify any destination in greater London, it would be my honor and privilege to convey you to it; but we are approaching Holborn Bridge, the gates and wall of the ancient City are within view, and you must decide now, unless you really want to accompany me all the way to Change Alley.”

“That is very kind of you, Mr. Threader. I shall lodge at the Royal Society to-night.”

“Right, guv’nor!” said the driver, who could overhear conversations when he needed to. He turned his attention to his horses, then, and addressed them in altogether different language.

“Bad luck that that the Royal Society has moved out of Gresham’s College,” Mr. Threader asserted.