The System of the World (7 page)

“The delicacy of your discourse is a continual wonder to me, sir.” Daniel sighed, for in truth, the Royal Society had been thrown out of that mouldering pile after Hooke—who, for many years, had defended their lease with his usual vicious tenacity—had died in 1703. Without Hooke, they had only been able to delay the eviction. And they had delayed it superbly, but as of four years ago they were in new quarters off Fleet Street. “Those of us who sank our money into the bonds that paid for the new building, might employ stronger language than ‘bad luck.’ ”

“It is apropos, sir, that you should bring up the topic of investments. I had been about to mention that, should we have taken you to Gresham’s College, we should have passed by the front of a new edifice, at Threadneedle and Bishopsgate, that might fairly be called a new Wonder of the World.”

“What—your offices, Mr. Threader?”

Mr. Threader chuckled politely. Then he got a distracted look, for the carriage had slowed down, and tilted slightly, depressing him and elevating Daniel. They were climbing a gentle grade. Mr. Threader’s gaze bounced from the left window to the right, and stuck there, fixed on the sight of St. Andrew’s church-yard, a huddled mob of gray head-stones fading into the twilight of the absurdly truncated mid-winter day. Daniel, who even in daylight would have been at some difficulty to keep track of where they were in this new London, realized that they were still rattling eastwards down High Holborn; they had missed several turns, viz. Chancery Lane and Fetter Lane, that would have taken them down toward Fleet Street. As St. Andrew’s fell away aft, they missed yet another: Shoe Lane. They were climbing the approaches to the bridge where Holborn, like a country gentleman stepping over a turd-pile, crossed the Fleet Ditch.

Mr. Threader rapped on the roof. “The Royal Society is no longer at Gresham’s College!” he explained to the driver. “They have moved to a court off of Fleet Street—”

“Crane Court,” Daniel said. “Near Fetter Lane, or so I am informed.”

The driver now murmured something, as if he were ashamed to speak it aloud.

“Would you be offended, affrighted, sickened, or in any wise put out, if we were to go down the Fleet?”

“As long as we do not attempt it in a
boat,
Mr. Threader.”

Mr. Threader put the tips of his fingers to his mouth, lest the mere suggestion should cause him to throw up. Meanwhile with his
other hand he made a coded rap on the ceiling. The driver immediately guided his team toward the right edge of the street. “The brink of our Cloaca Maxima has been shored up since you last, er—”

“Made a Deposit into a Vault?”

“As it were, Dr. Waterhouse. And it is still early enough that the nocturnal traffic shall not have built to the pitch of activity one would so desperately wish to avoid, later.”

Daniel could not see where they were going, but he could smell it now, and he could feel the carriage swerving away from the foot of the Holborn Bridge, and slowing to negotiate the turn southwards. He leaned forward and looked out the window down the length of the Fleet Ditch, a black and apparently bottomless slot in a long slab of unspeakably stained pavement, running due south to the Thames. The sky above the river shed a flinty twilight on this gap, from which the buildings of the city seemed to draw back in dismay. In defiance of Mr. Threader’s optimistic prediction, an ox-cart, consisting of a giant barrel on wheels, had backed up to the edge of the ditch and opened a large orifice in its rear to spew a chunky brown cataract into this, the least favored tributary of the Thames. The sounds coming up from the depths below, indicated that it was striking something other than clear running water. Making a quick scan of the length of the Ditch between them and the Fleet Bridge, about a quarter of a mile downstream—if “downstream” had any meaning here—Daniel saw two other such carts doing the same thing, or getting ready to. Other than the usual crew of idlers, vagrants, thieves, shake-rags, and disgraced preachers selling instant weddings, there was no traffic, other than a single sedan-chair, which was just emerging from an alley on the opposite bank of the ditch, and in the act of turning north towards Holborn. As Daniel caught sight of it, it faltered and stopped. The faces of the two men carrying it waxed like a pair of moons as they turned to look at Mr. Threader’s train. Then the carriage in which Daniel was riding executed its turn. The Ditch swung out of Daniel’s view, and was replaced by the first in a various row of cookeries and market-stalls, not all that bad here, close to Holborn, but bound to degenerate rapidly as they moved on. Daniel turned his head the other way to look out at the Ditch. A slablike wall rose from the opposite bank, ventilated by a few windows barred with heavy grids: the front of the Fleet Prison. His view was then blocked by the nostrils of an ox towing a vault-wagon. A whiff came in the window that paralyzed him for a few moments.

“Deposits must be down to-day, and vaults empty, as so many are fasting in remembrance of the Royal Martyr,” Daniel observed sourly, for he could tell that Mr. Threader wanted to continue talking about Financial Institutions.

“If I were coming to London a-fresh, Dr. Waterhouse, and wished to align my personal interests with a bank, I should pass the Bank of England by—pass it right by, I say! For your own sake! And keep right on going.”

“To the Royal Exchange, you mean…one or two doors down, on the opposite side…”

“No, no, no.”

“Ah, you are speaking of Change Alley, where the stock-jobbers swarm.”

“That is off Cornhill. Therefore, in a strictly cartographic sense, you are getting colder. But in another, you are getting warmer.”

“You are trying to interest me in some security that is traded in Change Alley. But it issues from an Eighth Wonder of the World that is on Threadneedle, near Gresham’s College. It is a most imposing riddle, Mr. Threader, and I am ill-equipped to answer it, as I’ve not frequented that busy, busy neighborhood for twenty years.”

Daniel now leaned to one side, planting his elbow on an arm-rest and supporting his chin on his hand. He did so, not because he was tired and weak from hunger (though he was), but so that he could see round Mr. Threader’s head out the rear window of the carriage. For he had glimpsed a peculiar apparition overtaking them. A rustic person would have guessed it to be a coffin levitating through the air. And considering the number of corpses that had been disposed of in Fleet Ditch over the centuries, there was no better place in London for a haunting. But Daniel knew it was a sedan chair, probably the same one that had emerged, a few moments ago, from the alley across the way. Looking across the Ditch Daniel could see directly into that alley, or one like it, and it seemed to him like the vertical equivalent of the Fleet Ditch itself, a black slot filled with who knew what sort of vileness. What had a sedan chair been doing in such a place? Perhaps taking a gentleman to an unspeakably perverse tryst. At any rate it was now gaining ground on them, coming up along one side. It got close enough that Daniel could sit up straight and view it directly out the carriage’s side window. The windows of the sedan chair—assuming it had windows—were screened with black stuff, like a confession-booth in a Papist church, and so Daniel could not see into it. He could not even be certain that anyone was inside, though the ponderous jouncing of the box on its poles, and the obvious strain on the two massive blokes who were carrying it, suggested that something was in there.

But after several moments these porters seemed to hear some command from inside the box, and then they gratefully slackened their pace and allowed Mr. Threader’s carriage to pull away from them.

Mr. Threader, meanwhile, had resorted to complicated hand-gestures, and was staring at a distant point above Daniel’s head.

“Proceed to the fork in the road, there, where Pig Street leads away from Threadneedle. Whether you go right, toward Bishopsgate, or left up Pig toward Gresham’s College, you will in a few moments come to the offices of the South Sea Company, which, though it is only three years old, already spans the interval between those two ways.”

“And what do you propose I should do there?”

“Invest! Open an account! Align your interests!”

“Is it just another Tory land bank?”

“Oh, on the contrary! You are not the only one to perceive the wisdom of investing in the future increase of foreign trade!”

“The South Sea Company, then, has such interests…where? South America?”

“In its original conception, yes. But, as of a few months ago, its true wealth lies in Africa.”

“Africa! That is very strange. It puts me in mind of the Duke of York’s Africa Company, fifty years ago, before London burned.”

“Think of it as the Royal Africa Company, risen from the ashes. Just as the capital stock of the Bank of England is the East India Company, that of the South Sea Company is the Asiento.”

“Even I know that this word Asiento is linked somehow to the Peace, but I’ve been terribly distracted—”

“We could not win the war—could not dislodge the grandson of Louis XIV from the Throne of Spain—but we did extract certain concessions from him. One of which was the entire right of shipping slaves from Africa to the New World. Mr. Harley, our Lord Treasurer, made arrangements for this Asiento to become an asset, as it were, of the South Sea Company.”

“How splendid.”

“As the commerce of America grows, so the demand for slaves from Africa will grow apace with it, and so there can be no sounder investment than the Asiento, no surer foundation for a bank, for a fortune—”

“Or for a political party,” Daniel said.

Mr. Threader raised his eyebrows. Then they passed by another vault-wagon, forcing them to keep their mouths, and even their eyes, closed for a few moments.

Mr. Threader recovered quicker, and said: “
Steam,
on the other hand, sir, I would hold in very low
esteem,
if you’ll indulge me in a spot of word-play.”

“It is lamentably late in this journey, and this conversation, sir, for you to be divulging this to me.”

“Divulging what, Dr. Waterhouse?”

“That you think the Earl of Lostwithiel is launching a mad enterprise, and that you believe your clients should put their money, rather, into the Asiento.”

“I shall put their money where they have directed me to put it. But I cannot help observing, that the nearly limitless coast of Africa is crowded with slaves, driven out from the interior by their more ferocious cousins, and virtually free for the picking. If I wish to pump water from a Cornish tin-mine, Dr. Waterhouse, I need not pay Mr. Newcomen to erect a frightful Engine; now that we have the Asiento, I need only send a ship southwards, and in a few weeks’ time I shall have all the slaves I need, to pump the water out by stepping on tread-mills, or, if I prefer, to suck it out through hollow straws and spit it into the sea.”

“Englishmen are not used to seeing their mines and pastures crowded with Blackamoors toiling under the lash,” Daniel remarked.

“Whereas,
steam-engines
are a
familiar sight
!?” asked Mr. Threader triumphantly.

Daniel was overcome with tiredness and hunger, and leaned his head back with a sough, feeling that only a miracle could get him out of this conversation whole. At the same moment, they arrived at the Fleet Bridge. They turned right and began back-tracking westwards, since the driver had over-shot their destination. Daniel, who, as always, had a view out the rear window of the vehicle, was confronted suddenly by the astonishing sight of a colossal stone egg rising up out of the street less than half a mile away, reigning over the low buildings of London like a Khan over a million serfs. This was by a wide margin the largest building Daniel had ever seen, and something about it replenished his energies.

“Nothing about the English landscape is forever fixed. Just as you have probably grown used to the presence of that Dome,” Daniel said, nodding down Fleet to St. Paul’s, and obliging Mr. Threader to turn around and rediscover it, “we might grow accustomed to multitudes of black slaves, or steam-engines, or both. I speculate that the
character
of England is more constant. And I flatter us by asserting, furthermore, that
ingenuity
is a more essential element of that character than
cruelty
. Steam-engines, being a product of the former virtue, are easier to reconcile with the English scene than slavery, which is a product of the latter vice. Accordingly, if I had money to bet, I’d bet it on steam-engines.”

“But slaves
work
and steam-engines
don’t
!”

“But slaves can
stop
working. Steam-engines, once Mr. Newcomen has got them going, can never stop, because unlike slaves, they do not have free will.”

“But how is an ordinary investor to match your level of confidence, Dr. Waterhouse?”

“By looking at
that,
” Daniel answered, nodding at St. Paul’s, “and noting that it does not fall down. Go and examine its arches, Mr. Threader, and you will see that they are in the shape of parabolas. Sir Christopher Wren made them thus, on the advice of Hooke; for Hooke shewed that it should be so.”

“You have quite wandered away from me. It is an excellent church. I see no connection to steam-engines.”

“Both church-domes and engines are subject to physical laws, which are, in turn, amenable to mathematickal calculations; and we know the laws,” Daniel announced. “It is at least as well-founded as what you do for a living.”

They had come to a halt before the mouse-hole in the north side of Fleet Street that led to Crane Court. The driver maneuvered his team into it, giving directions to the other drivers that the baggage-cart alone should follow; the remainder of the train, consisting by this point of two large carriages and a second baggage-wain, were to remain in Fleet Street, and to get themselves turned around and aimed in the direction of Ludgate.

Getting the horses, their tack, and the carriage to pass through that archway was a bit like funneling a model ship, rigging a-luff, through the neck of a jug. At one point they drew to a full stop and Daniel, glancing out a side-window, found himself within kissing range of a pedestrian—gawky, post-smallpox, perhaps thirty years of age—whose advance down Fleet Street had been barred by all of Mr. Threader’s maneuvers. This fellow, who affected a ratty horse-hair wig, and who carried a smoky lanthorn in one hand and a staff in the other, peered in on them with frank curiosity that Mr. Threader found unseemly. “Go to, go to, sirrah, we are no concern of the Watch!”