The System of the World (111 page)

It was answered a moment later by a second boom, for it seemed that a spark had flown close enough to their Haubitz to ignite the powder in the touch-hole, and fired the weapon prematurely. Dappa and van Hoek were both several moments getting to their feet, as each had suffered survivable wounds from shell-fragments or pebbles, and both were a bit stunned. They saw their shell explode over the Thames.

The blast of White’s shell had knocked their Haubitz askew. A trail of smouldering sticks and grass was, however, spread down the hillside like a road of fire, and Woodruff could be seen kicking furiously at something that emitted dense smoke, and kept adhering to his foot in a way that made him very cross: the wig. White meanwhile was making preparations to re-load.

It was then that they ceased to exist. Dappa’s and van Hoek’s view of the Bulwark was eliminated, replaced by a sphere of flame with ugly dark bits spiraling out of it. Once again they threw themselves to the ground. Burning debris began to shower their position. They jumped up and ran, putting distance between themselves and their stock-piles of explodables. They made rendezvous at the scaffold, which was gaily decorated by the prostrate forms of several Beefeaters who had all sought cover there. About then a ripping
BABABA
sounded from below as all of White’s shells detonated. This was the signal for Dappa and van Hoek to depart at a sprightly pace for the waterfront. If any of the Yeomen of the Guard lifted his head to watch, he saw them simply disappear into a storm-front of powder-smoke that now obnubilated the lower reaches of the Hill.

Within that immense pall, however, it was possible to see for short distances. And so Dappa and van Hoek paused, or at least slowed down, as they passed by the erstwhile position of White and Woodruff. They did not see anything identifiable as a body; though Dappa was fairly certain he had tripped over someone’s spine.

“Here’s a marvel,” van Hoek said reflectively. He was staring at something down on the scorched earth, using his hook in lieu of an index finger to count several small objects, over and over again. “One, two, three, four,
five
! One, two, three, four,
five
!”

“What is it?”

“There are too many ears!” van Hoek exclaimed.

Dappa went over and touched heads with him. There were, indeed,
five ears: four all together, all wizened, and, off to one side, a fifth, which looked fresh, as it had blood on it.

“This is explainable, actually,” said Dappa, kicking some dirt over the four dry ones, “but not now. Let’s back to my ship, if you please. The Yeomen, the Watch, the Dragoons: they’ll be all over us!”

“They’ll all be scared shitless.”

“The point is granted; but I really am eager to see my ship again.”

Dappa and van Hoek still could not see far, but they both stumbled down-hill: an infallible trick for locating oceans. “I hope this means you have finally put an end to this writing foolishness. It has grown most tiresome.”

“I have discharged my cannonball. I shan’t be quick to re-load. As a writer, however, I am ever a devoted slave to the Muse, whose privilege it is to command me…”

“Then let’s
do
get to the ship,” said van Hoek, quickening his pace, “and prepare to sail out on to the high seas where the bitch won’t be able to reach you with any such directions.”

23
OCTOBER
1714

S
TRANGE WHAT A DIFFERENCE
was made by moving twenty feet. For that was the distance separating Jack’s four-posted feather-bed in the Castle from the middle of the Press-Room, which happened to be situated just on the other side of the apartment’s back wall. A few days earlier, he’d lain naked on a stone floor with a box of weights on his chest; now, clad in a clean linen nightshirt, he reclined on goose-down.

A month or two ago, Jack could have bought his way into this apartment without difficulty. But since then most of his assets had been spent. And what hadn’t been spent had been seized, or otherwise put out of his reach, by his febrile Persecutor, Sir Isaac Newton.

There was no fixed rent for the apartments of the Press-Yard and Castle. Rather, the Keeper applied a sliding scale, depending upon the Degree of the personage imprisoned. A Duke—let us say, a rebel
Scottish lord—would be expected to pay a premium of five hundred guineas upon admission to the gaol, simply to escape from the Common-Side and Master-Side. Having got over that hurdle he would, each week, then have to pay the gaoler about a mark, or thirteen shillings and change, for the privilege of staying in a room such as this one.

Now Jack was going to be dead in a week, and so the rent would not add up to much—not even a pound. But the
premium
was a different matter. A commoner with means, having no other distinctions to his name, would be charged at a much lower rate than a Duke—say twenty pounds. What, then, would be the rate for a Jack Shaftoe? Some would say he was less than a commoner, and ought to pay fewer than twenty pounds sterling. But others—probably to include the Gaoler of Newgate—would insist he was greater, in his way, than a Duke, and ought to pay a king’s ransom.

In sum, he could not possibly have been sprung from the Condemned Hold for less than several hundred pounds. He did not have such money, not any more. Neither did any of his surviving friends. Where had it come from?

This was
not
part of the deal he’d struck the other night with Sir Ike in the Condemned Hold. Newton had asked for Jack to dictate an affidavit, stating that evidence of a Whig coining-ring was to be found in a subterranean vault in one of the late Roger Comstock’s real estate developments in Clerkenwell. Newton had tediously rehearsed the statement with him all night long, it seemed, and Jack had prattled it back to a Stenographer and a line-up of dumbfounded worthies the next morning. But Newton had not offered to put Jack back into his Castle apartment, and Jack hadn’t asked, because he sensed that Newton was running low on money. The
quid pro quo,
rather, was that Jack’s punishment might be reduced: at the very least, to a conventional (and speedy) hanging, perhaps even to a fine he’d never be able to pay, so that he’d spend the rest of his life on the Master Debtor’s side of Newgate.

No, someone else—someone with lots of money—had caused Jack to be moved here. It was a further step on the road to Faith that de Gex had prated about: Jack had nothing, but he was somehow being cared for and looked after. It hurt his pride, yes, but not as much as some things he could mention.

It seemed unlikely that his benefactress (for Jack liked to indulge himself in the phant’sy that it was a female) had done so only to make Jack more comfortable during this, his final week on Earth. Jack preferred to suppose that this had been meant as some way of sending him a message. To decypher that message was now the only
thought in his mind; but he soon stopped making any progress on the riddle, and postponed further work on it, pending arrival of fresh clews.

Instead he divided his time between thinking about Eliza and cursing himself for being so fatuous as to think of her. On the other hand, he had to admit, there was no great harm in it. It could no longer lead him astray, as it had done in years past. He was now as astray as it was possible for anyone to be in this world. He was at a pole. Van Hoek had explained to him once that if you went to the South Pole, then east and west and south would cease to exist, and any direction you went would be north. Thus Jack’s current status in the world.

MORNING OF
23
OCTOBER
1714

R
OGER WOULD SOMEHOW HAVE
got advance intelligence of this raid. Roger would have confronted them—no, strike that, he would have had coffee and hot cross buns waiting, and he would have served them up to Isaac Newton, the Earl of Lostwithiel, and the King’s Messengers, so that by the time they invaded the Court, the whole affair would have been re-conjured into a guided tour, invitation-only.

But Daniel was not Roger, and so, by the time he arrived, the raid had already been in progress for two hours. It would have been over and done with, had it been better managed. But more than one apparatus of His Majesty’s Government had become interested, and so it had waxed cumbersome, and been both over- and under-planned. There had been meetings; that much was obvious. Bright young things had attended them, shaped the agendas, had their say, been noted down in the minutes. Someone had anticipated a need to remove the doors of the Vault by main force. Petards, winches, ox-teams had been concatenated to the Bill of Necessaries. Delays and misunderstandings had propagated. No one had showed up at exactly the right time. Important men had missed opportunities to see
the humorous side. Obstinacy and indignation were the order of the day. The foot-soldiers cooled their heels, awaiting orders, and shook their heads incredulously.

This, in sum, was what Daniel walked in to at about nine of the clock. Walked because the raid and its unintended consequences had blocked traffic on Coppice Row and forced him to abandon his sedan chair a quarter of a mile short of the destination. This was for the better. The sedan chair would have dumped him into the midst of the broil; he’d have been noticed, and men who’d been to those meetings would have been keen to exchange words with him. As it was, he approached the thing gradually and quietly.

With one exception: halfway there, he passed the carriage of the Duchess of Arcachon-Qwghlm, stuck in traffic.

“Coming to look in on your investment, my lady?” he inquired, as if talking to himself, as he walked past the helpless vehicle.

There was a rustle within; he guessed she was at her correspondence.

“Good morning, Dr. Waterhouse. May I call on you there, in a few minutes’ time?”

“I invite you to let yourself in to the vacant apartment on the first floor, above the clock-shop,” Daniel called back over his shoulder. “Think of it as a private box from which you may view the Comedy of Errors.”

A minute later, he was there. He went in through a side-wicket and got in to the middle of the thing before anyone had recognized him; then they all wanted to know how long he’d been there. “Dr. Waterhouse!” exclaimed the Earl of Lostwithiel, “how long have you been here?”

“Long enough,” said Daniel, trying to be oracular.

“It’s a bit of a shame,” said the Earl. Which Daniel found most irritating, until he recollected that the Earl was a man of breeding, and tended to understate things to the point where they were nearly subliminal. He was trying to let Daniel know that he was very sorry. Daniel tried to respond in kind. “It must have been awkward for you.”

“Not at all,” said the Earl, meaning
it has been a living hell
.

“The thing became complicated, didn’t it,” Daniel went on. “Your responsibilities as Captain of the King’s Messengers, of course, supersede all other considerations. I see you have discharged them well.”

“God save the King,” said the Earl, which, Daniel guessed, was a way of saying
you have got it right and thank you for not being cross with me
.

“…save the King” said Daniel, meaning
you’re welcome
.

“Sir Isaac is…below,” said the Earl, looking down toward the
gates of the Templar-tomb, which stood open and, as far as Daniel could make out, unwrecked.

“How did you get them open?” Daniel asked.

“We stood about them, discussing the use of force, until finally a great big chap showed up and undid the lock for us.”

Daniel took his leave and walked towards the gates, ignoring two different Persons of Quality who spotted him and demanded to know how long he had been there.

“H
OW LONG HAVE YOU
been here?” asked Sir Isaac Newton.

The Templar-tomb was a bubble of warm, oily smoke, for many candles and lanthorns had been brought down. The steam pulsing from the nostrils of half a dozen shovel-and-rake-wielding workmen, and the moist vapors rising from all of those lights, condensed on the chilly stone and brass of the sarcophagi and streaked them with rivulets.

“Long enough,” Daniel snapped. There was much here for him to be peevish about, but the worst of it was that Isaac, who was capable of being so interesting, had, by involving himself in these worldly doings, made himself so dull.

But it was all for the most ethereal of reasons. Daniel must keep reminding himself of that.

“This cannon-duel that was fought on Tower Hill the other day: it’s all about that, isn’t it?” Daniel tried.

“That, and the escape of the Shaftoes,” Isaac admitted. “My witnesses have a way of disappearing when they are most needed. Only Jack now remains.”

“You are not going to find anything by digging up these poor Templars,” Daniel said. “It must be obvious to you that what was here, has been moved.”

“Of course it is,” Isaac said, “but other Powers have involved themselves in the thing, as you can see, and they are not as quick to notice what is
obvious,
as you and I.”

This sounded almost like a compliment: Isaac reaching down to pull Daniel up to his plane for a moment. Daniel was pleased, then wary.

“It is all White’s fault,” Isaac went on. “I do think that he meant to die—to put himself beyond the grasp of Justice. But the
manner
of his death he could not have foreseen—and it has wrought in my favor.”

“By throwing the new government into a sort of panic, you mean.”

By way of an answer, Isaac spread his hands, and looked about at all of the perfervid diggers. “When they have grown as bored as I am with the ransacking of this place, they’ll move on to Bridewell,
and if nothing is found there, they’ll follow the trail to the Bank of England.”

Daniel knew that there was an appendix to this sentence, which need hardly be spoken aloud:
unless you help me by giving me some of what I need
. And for a moment Daniel was ready to nip down to the Bank and fetch out a bit of Solomonic Gold for good old Isaac. Why not? Solomon Kohan would notice that it had gone missing, and Peter the Great would wax wroth, but there would probably be a way to patch it up.

Then Isaac spoke: “They say that to hide the escape of the Shaftoes from the strong-room of the Fleet, an old gager got the Mobb drunk, and told them tall tales of buried gold.”

This curdled the whole thing. Daniel remembered, now, why he had good reason to hold on to every grain of the gold: because people wanted it, and so having it gave Daniel power he might need. And, too, he was reminded of the farcical nature of the whole Alchemical world-view. So he said nothing more of substance, but excused himself, and went up above ground, and a minute later had joined the Duchess of Arcachon-Qwghlm in that vacant apartment above what had been the Court of Technologickal Arts.

“Y
OU SHOULD NEVER HAVE LEFT
me alone here,” she said to him.

Somehow Daniel did not get the idea that she was complaining of a social
faux pas.
“Your grace?”

She was standing at a window that looked out over the Court, and talking over her shoulder at him. He approached, and drew up next to her, but well off to the side, so that the scurrying big-wigs below would not see them together in the window.

“Something has been troubling me about this investment ever since I agreed to it,” she continued.

These words, had they been spoken in anger, might have made Daniel spin on his heel and run all the way to Massachusetts. But she was bemused and a little distracted, with the makings of a smile on her lips.

She explained, “It came clear to me when I looked out this window. The last time I saw your Court of Technologickal Arts, it was a bazaar of the mind—all those clever men, each in his own wee shop, pursuing his peculiar interests, but exchanging ideas with the others when he went to fetch a cup of coffee or to use the House of Office. That seemed to work very well, didn’t it? And because I am curious about the same things, I was cozened by it—I admit that I was! And yet as enchanted as I was, a little voice kept whispering to me that it was not,
au fond,
a sound investment.
Today
I came here
and found it all gone. All the clever fellows have packed up their tools and absconded. Only the land and the building remain. For those, your investors have overpaid. This place is destined to be just another suburban shop-block, of no greater value than the ones to the left and to the right.”

“As to the value of the property, I agree,” Daniel said. “Does that mean it was not a sound investment for you and for Roger Comstock?”

“Yes,” she said, again with a smile, “that is what it means!”

“In an accompt-book, maybe that is true—”

“Oh, believe me. It is.”

“But Roger never set much store by strict accompts, did he? He pursued more than strictly financial gain.”

“That is perfectly all right,” Eliza said. “You misunderstand me. I too have many goals that cannot be assessed or rendered in an accompt-book. But it has been my practice to keep those separate, in my head, from the sorts of projects that would make sense to
any
investor. In the case of the Court of Technologickal Arts, I made the error of confusing one with the other. That is all. I do not think one can ever
own
the quicksilver spirit that circulates among the minds of philosophers and
ingénieurs
. It is like trying to catch in a bucket the electrickal fluid of Mr. Hauksbee.”

“So it is hopeless, then?”

“Is
what
hopeless, Dr. Waterhouse?”

“Trying to support, to invest in such projects?”

“Oh, no. Not hopeless. I think it could be done. I got it wrong the first time. That’s all.”

“Is there to be a second time?”

Silence. Daniel tried again. “What is to be the final accounting, then? Even if I did not have any interest in the thing, I should need to know, for I am involved in the settling of Roger’s estate.”

“Oh. You need to know what this is all worth,” Eliza said.

“Yes. Your grace. Thank you.”

“It is worth whatever the building next to it is worth. You could, then, pursue claims on the value of the discoveries that were made here. Conceivably. For example, if six months from now a horologist who was once a tenant here builds a clock that wins the Longitude Prize, then Roger’s estate could lay claim to some part of the money. But it would be a fool’s errand. It would only enrich lawyers.”

“Very well. We shall write it off. But what of the Logic Mill—?”

“I heard that the card-punching organs had been torn out of Bridewell, and cast into the river.”

“Oh, yes. I made sure of that. Everything is gone from Bridewell.”

“The cards themselves—?”

“Are to be shipped to Hanover, and thence to the Tsar’s Academy in St. Petersburg.”

“So they neither add to nor subtract from the balance-sheet. What is it, then, that you are asking me about?”

Daniel was appalled, in some sense, by the pitiless brutality of this financial discourse. But he was also fascinated. It was a bit like vivisection: savage, but just interesting enough to keep him from slinking out of the room and going straight to the nearest boozing-ken. “I suppose I am asking you about the whole structure of ideas that gives the cards of the Logic Mill their value,” he said.

“Value?”

“Power, then. Power to effect computations.”

“You are asking, what are those ideas worth?”

“Yes.”

“That depends on how soon a true Logic Mill can be made. You have not made one, have you?”

“No,” Daniel admitted. “We learned much from making the card-punching organs—”

“
We
meaning—” and Eliza cocked her head out the window, reminding him of the vacant stalls being pillaged by soldiers and Messengers.

“All right,” Daniel admitted, “the
we
no longer exists.
We
have been scattered. It shall be most difficult to re-assemble the
we
.”

“And the organs are on the bottom of the river.”

“Yes.”

“You have drawings? Plans?”

“Mostly in our heads.”

“Here’s what I would say, then,” Eliza began, “if I were rendering this accompt. The ideas are very good ones. The quality of the work, excellent. However, they are Leibniz’s ideas, and they stand or fall with the Doctor and his reputation. His repute is very low with his House, the House of Hanover, which is now the sovereign power in this Realm. Caroline loves the Doctor, and has tried to effect a reconciliation between him and Sir Isaac, but this came to naught. Even when she is Queen she will have little power to change this—so irreconcilable are Leibniz’s ideas with Newton’s. It would be different if Leibniz’s ideas were useful, but they are not—not yet, not compared to Newton’s. It might be a long time before a Logic Mill can be constructed—a hundred years or more. And so the answer is that it is all devoid of
monetary
value at this time.”

“Hmm. My life’s work, devoid of value. That’s hard to hear.”

“I am only saying that you’ll never find anyone who’ll give you money for it. But you have a great Prince in the East who is happy to support the work. Ship it all to him. The golden cards, your notes and drawings, all that Enoch Root shipped over from Boston—send it all into the East, where someone values it.”

“Very well. I have been arranging to do just that.”

Eliza had turned away from the window and made Daniel Waterhouse the object of her scrutiny. She had, in fact, quite backed him into a corner. Something had occurred to her just now: a wild idea she did not like very much. “You phant’sy that’s all there is, don’t you? When you, Daniel, speak of your life’s work, the only thing you include in that is what you have done on the Logic Mill.”