The System of the World (93 page)

It finally occurred to him to look at Isaac to see how the arch-Alchemist reacted to this glimpse of the Art writ large. Daniel saw in Isaac’s face neither fascination nor disgust but a kind of pensive bewilderment: the look he got when he was drawing connexions in his mind that were beyond Daniel’s powers. But he looked suddenly at Daniel and remarked, “Clarke’s house.”

Which was a reference to a thing he had taken Daniel to see fifty years earlier, on a visit to Grantham, Lincolnshire: an apothecary’s house where Isaac had boarded as a schoolboy. Clarke had dabbled in Alchemy and had filled a side yard of the house with wreckage of his experiments. It was much smaller than what they had just seen, but to young Isaac must have seemed as large, and as glamourous with hazards, and as seething with mystery. In the half-century since, all things Alchemical had become familiar to Isaac; but what he had just seen must have jolted him with the same emotions he had known as a boy making illicit forays into Mr. Clarke’s laboratory.

For Daniel’s part, he wanted to loathe what Jack had made of this good old farm, and to be outraged, and to hate Jack all the more for it. But none of these feelings came to him. They would never come, because Daniel had already seen in Devon the works of Mr. Thomas Newcomen, which were like a harbinger of this thing. Or perhaps the Engine for Raising Water by Fire, and Jack’s phosphorus-mill, were both harbingers of something else, which he could scarce picture in his mind—and scarcely wished to. He had once said to Mr. Threader, in a very self-righteous way, that England did not need
Slaves, if she could learn to make Engines, and that Engines, being clever, were a more English sort of thing than toiling Negroes; but now he was beginning to think that he ought to be more careful of what he wished for. The
first
phosphorus laboratory ever made—that of the Alchemist Heinrich Brand—had been
so
clever that it had inspired Leibniz to write a poem about it. But Daniel could see from the look on Leibniz’s face that he’d be writing no poems about
this
place, unless it was a supplementary Canto of Dante’s
Inferno
.

They debarked from the carriage, for the horses would on no account draw any nearer to the noisome Works. They knew that the dog was tethered, for they had nearly run over it, and they knew that no humans would be about, because who could or would sleep atop such a hell-mouth? So Newton, Leibniz, and Waterhouse strode rather than crept toward the Factory, and when they heard hoofbeats coming up behind, none of them paid it much mind, knowing that it was the young Mohawk who had been detailed to keep an eye out for them.

The last breaths of the fog had at last blown off from this hilltop, though the low places among the downs were still gloomed under fat gray rivers. One could see ten miles from this place—and anyone save a Natural Philosopher would turn his back to the ugly scene in the center to enjoy the prospect. But these men, who thought nothing of dissecting a beautiful corpse to examine a necrotic ulcer, had eyes only for the phosphorus-works.

The compound was ringed by an old hedgerow that had been viciously trimmed back by its new tenants, and cut down to the height of a man’s mid-section. Newton, Leibniz, and Waterhouse passed through a gap where it was pierced by a little side-track, and the Mohawk, who was angling in from another direction, jumped it easily on his mount, wheeled round, and trotted toward them. Waterhouse, well knowing his place, assumed the tedious duty of talking to the rider so that the great ones’ observations would not be disturbed. “Never mind what orders you have been given,” said Daniel, “this place is the objective of the day—it is why we have all come here.”

“Shall I go and summon others?”

“I do not think it necessary—they’ll find us anon.”

“I meant, sir, in case we should meet with resistance.”

“There will be none,” said Daniel, “except for
that
!” And he pointed toward the dog, who was sprinting for them.

It turned out that this animal’s tether was very long indeed, so that it could range over the entire hilltop, provided it did not commit the classic error of getting the rope wound around anything—and it was one of those dogs who was clever enough to avoid that. Having (or so
it imagined) chased off the carriage of Newton, Leibniz, et al., it had found employment on the opposite side of the compound, barking at some untoward noises. But now it was coming for them, angling in on their larboard quarter. It faltered as it perceived a choice between going for Newton and Leibniz—who were several paces ahead—or Daniel and the mounted Mohawk. Wisely, it chose the former. Newton and Leibniz, so different in matters of high philosophy, were absolutely the same when it came to being chased across a farm-yard by a huge ravening mastiff. They cheated to the right, and got up against the hedgerow, prepared to clamber over it if they had to—but this was a last resort, at their age. Then they hustled forward, hoping to get out of the tether’s fatal radius. But that tether simply kept uncoiling—just when it looked as if it were about to jerk taut, fresh miles of it would appear, as if by some conjuror’s trick. Newton almost tripped over something, and Leibniz bent down and picked it up: it was a long wooden paddle, chymically gnawed and stained, its handle snapped off at one end, but still a fathom long. For they had drawn nigh the boiler where such implements were used to stir and test the thickening coction. Leibniz waved this find around, sending a message that the dog collected instantly; it broke off the frontal assault and shifted fluidly into a feinting-and-lunging style of flank-attack. Daniel caught up with the others about now, and, passing behind Leibniz’s defense, went to haul Isaac Newton up off the ground. Meanwhile the Mohawk had ridden up behind the dog and was shouting to draw its attack: a plan his mount well understood and little favored, so that this rider must devote all his powers to managing the mental states of the dog on one hand and the horse on the other.

Isaac was down, not because he had tripped, but because he had gotten interested in something. He held out his hand. A reddish nodule lay in the middle of his palm. “Behold,” he announced, “Jack has learnt the art of making
red
phosphorus. It is scattered all about.”

“That would be the source of ignition for the Infernal Devices, then,” said Leibniz over his shoulder. He was still
en garde
with the paddle, protecting the other two, who were crouched behind him at the base of the hedgerow. But this was less and less necessary, as the Mohawk now had the dog’s undivided attention. The horse kept rearing so that it might bring down its hooves on the mastiff’s head.

The rider had his pistol out.

“Hold your fire, sir,” said Daniel, who long ago had grown sick of seeing dogs killed in the name of Natural Philosophy. He stood up, and pulled Newton to his feet. Something in that word
fire
was troubling him.

“Hold your fire!”
cried Leibniz, who had glanced down to see red
phosphorus all over the ground. But the Mohawk heard them not. The dog’s tether had come round to touch the horse’s hind legs, and made it panic. The cavalryman leveled his gun at the dog. Leibniz whirled about, turning his back on what was about to happen. Seeing the others a few paces away, side by side, he spun the paddle round to make it horizontal, and held it before him at chest height. Then he hurled himself forward. The implement caught Daniel just below the collar-bone and forced him back until the stiff old vegetation of the murdered hedgerow chopped him just below the buttocks. His last clear impression was of a bolt of fire jerking out of the muzzle of the pistol. Then the sky spun round him—a Ptolemaic illusion, of course, as in truth he was executing a backward somersault over the hedgerow. He—and Newton beside him—tumbled all the way over on the other side, and ended up sprawled face down in the lee of the hedge. The backs of his calves were being broiled by a sea of white flame that had reached over the wall like sunrise.

B
OB HAD LOST THE FACULTY
of hearing sounds of a high sharp timbre, but had grown very keen to thuds, bumps, and rumbles, which he heard not with his ears but with his feet and his ribs. What he listened for, with said organs, was hoofbeats, door-slams, gunfire, &c. Of guns he had heard only a little thus far. Hooves were spattering the earth to their rear: the Whig Association cavalry, dashing across the back of the line. Bob was leading his company across a pasture toward a hedgerow that bordered its up-hill side. Like all the other hedgerows on this estate, it had been trimmed short, which Bob looked on as a military preparation; the height was good for men to kneel behind and shoot over.

Three such hedgerows, dividing perhaps a quarter mile of more or less open ground, stood between Bob’s line and a hilltop farm that seemed to be the source of the barking. Bob glimpsed a carriage careering to and fro up among its buildings but could make no sense of this, and so forced himself to ignore it. His line had instinctively wheeled so that it was parallel to the next hedgerow. When they were just reaching it, and slinging arms and breaking stride to clamber over, Bob felt something in his feet, and shouted, “Cavalry! Less than a squadron—much less. Hold the line. They are coming from beyond those trees.” Which was merely a reasonable guess, based on the fact that he could not see them yet. His men’s heads all turned—they were hearing something he couldn’t. Following their eye-line, Bob locked his gaze upon the edge of the little copse ahead of them—it was growing in a little pocket of the landscape—and saw
horses’ legs, lit by the orange-amber sun of early morning, scissoring against tree-trunks.

A moment later three riders tore around the corner of the wood and made straight for them. They’d been apt in their timing—waiting for the moment when the approaching foot broke stride to address the hedge-climbing project. “About face—backs against the hedge!” Bob commanded, and they did it.

The three riders had formed a diagonal spread as a result of wheeling round the corner of the wood—the one who’d taken the outside track now trailed. The one in the middle was—his eyes had to be deceiving him—black. Had he been burned? A weapon burst in his face? No time to ponder it now. Bob drew out his sword in case he needed to parry a saber-cut from above. But none of the riders had drawn. The foremost jumped the hedgerow very near Bob, and Bob was almost felled, not by any physical contact but by dizzy awe at the magnificence of the horse and the power of its movement. The black man made the jump just behind Bob. At the same moment a flash lit up the top of the hill, and a moment later came a roaring whoosh and a clatter of booms. The third rider was just fixing to jump the hedgerow when all of this occurred; his mount faltered, clipped the top of the hedge, landed awry, and broke a leg.

The rider tumbled free and rolled to his feet only a little hurt. But two platoons of Foot were crouching with their backs to the hedgerow, all aiming their muskets at him from such short range that his riddled corpse would be scorched by powder-burns if Bob gave the order to fire.

“Take that bloody thing out of my face and shoot my horse,” said this fellow to the nearest.

The other two riders—first the black man, then the white—wheeled about in the middle of the pasture, a stone’s throw away. In the distance Bob saw several Whig cavalry rounding to intercept them. “Jimmy! Tomba!” shouted the dismounted man. “Go! You can get through ’em! It’s a few fops on some nags, and they don’t know the territory, and they won’t fight!”

All of which, Bob suspected, was true. If “Jimmy” and “Tomba” had kept on at a gallop they could, with a bit of luck, have survived a volley from Bob’s musketeers and probably shot through the Whig line. But they showed no gust for it. They exchanged a look, then turned back, and began riding toward their comrade. Bob came out from the shade of the hedgerow, glancing back one time—unnecessarily—to verify that all three of the men had muskets trained on them. A word from Bob and they were dead. They knew this. But
they took no notice of Bob or anyone else. As the white rider approached, he said, “Don’t be such a tosser, Danny. We are not a devil-take-the-hindmost sort of family, are we?”

Bob now recognized these two—Jimmy and Danny—as his nephews, whom he had not seen in about twenty years.

“Oh, Jesus Christ!” he said.

It was an expression of disgust and chagrin—hardly of surprise. He had been running into too many Shaftoes lately to be surprised by anything. Hearing the oath, they turned to look his way, and knew him in turn. “Aagh! Shit!” exclaimed Danny.

“I knew ’twould come to this sooner or later, uncle,” said Jimmy, with a sad, wise shake of the head, “if you kept trafficking with the
legitimate authorities
.”

“You know this man!?” said the black fellow, his mop-like hairdo all a-swing.

“He’s our friggin’ uncle,” said Danny. “Hope you’re
satisfied,
Bob.”

Bob’s heart was thudding. His feet were, too; that because of the cavalry, who were charging across the pasture, having perceived, in all of this, an opportunity to lop some heads, or at least limbs—the sort of entertainment Horse-men lived for. This clear and present danger unfroze Bob’s tongue, and his legs. He stumbled out into the path of the cavalry, and held up a hand to stay them; their captain had the good sense to call off the attack. They dropped to a canter and came on in a line to seal off any possible escape.

“You boys have been Absent Without Leave from the King’s, and then the Queen’s, and then the King’s Own Black Torrent Guard for twenty years,” said Bob.

“Don’t be such a prick!” was Danny’s response; but Jimmy—dismounting—said: “
You
don’t be such a friggin’
idiot,
brother of mine. Our Uncle Bob phant’sies he’s doing us a
boon
by bringing us under
military
justice, so’s we’ll be hanged
fast
instead of drawn and quartered at Tyburn Cross.”

Danny was impressed. “Good one, uncle! Sorry I called you a prick. But just as Jimmy and Tomba would not abandon
me,
so me and Jimmy won’t leave Tomba behind to be gutted by Jack Ketch all by his lonesome, will we, Jimmy? Jimmy? Jimmy?
Seamus Shaftoe
, I be talking to ye, shite-for-brains!”