The System of the World (70 page)

This notion produced frigid silence among the Clubb. Before the others could recover their wits and throw Daniel overboard, he continued: “Fortunately we have already an understanding with Mr. Partry, who is as comfortable in such kens as Mr. Orney is in church. He has agreed to act as our representative in the auction.”

“That is even
worse
!” Kikin cried. “Partry hunts and prosecutes thieves
for a living
!”

“No, no, no. You still don’t understand,” said Mr. Threader, finding Kikin’s slowness just a bit distasteful. “
The whole point
of thief-takers is that
they are themselves criminals
—else, how could they get anything accomplished?”

“So you are going to give some valuables to a thief, entrusting him to take them to the most colossal thieves’ market in Christendom, where he will sell them at auction to another thief—?”

“He is a very reputable thief,” returned Mr. Threader. “I really do not understand you, sir—
you
are the one who recruited him.”

At this Kikin could only roll his eyes, in the universal manner of foreigners in collision with Anglo-Saxon logic. He sighed and withdrew to his end of the plank.

“The Stake-out commences to-day,” Daniel announced, patting a wooden chest on his lap. “We are going to make rendezvous with Partry at our head-quarters on London Bridge.”

“That’s
another
thing—I see that you have arrogated to yourself the authority to lease real estate on behalf of the Clubb!” Threader said.

It was Daniel’s turn to roll his eyes. “Mr. Partry and Mr. Hoxton have, on our behalf, evicted a whore and twenty million bedbugs from a room above a tavern. If
that
is
leasing real estate,
then
Prudence
is the Spanish Armada.”

“For the amount you have spent, we could have
gotten
the Spanish Armada,” Orney returned, “but I supposed good old
Prudence
were less apt to draw fire from the Tower.”

T
HE MEN WHO WERE PASSING
the time of day under umbrellas and shed-roofs on and around Chapel Pier were oblivious to the charms and virtues of
Prudence,
and some even ventured out into the rain and tried to wave her off. Most of them were watermen who envisioned that the bulky launch would block half the Pier and create an Impediment to Commerce for some indefinite number of hours. They had ample opportunity to say so, by words and gestures, as Mr. Orney’s stolid oarsmen fought up-current, closing on the Pier’s butt at slower than walking speed. But after a little while the inhospitable watermen were joined by a man bigger than the rest, who ambled to and fro along the brink of the Pier, striking up a chat with each waterman he found. These exchanges tended to be brief, and always ended in the same manner: the obstreperous waterman turned away and withdrew to the shelter of the Bridge. By the time
Prudence
worked close enough for Orney to cast a line onto the Pier, this bulky cove was the only man left. He intercepted the lead with a flailing arm, passed it thrice around a bitt, and leaned back on it, inexorably ratcheting
Prudence
forward until she bumped against pier-side.

“Mind the Gap,” Saturn suggested. The passengers did, and crossed
it without any fatalities. Orney sent
Prudence
back to Rotherhithe. Saturn led them over the stony lid of the Pier to an uneven stair, perhaps under desultory repairs, perhaps ne’er finished. They ascended it in the hunched, splay-armed gait of drunks on ice. This got them to the upper world of the Bridge: an ordinary London shop-street that just happened to be thrust up into the air on stone stilts. To their left it was vaulted over, which is to say, the Bridge itself was bridged, by an ancient Chapel. To their right spread the open fire-break called The Square. Following Saturn’s lead, they turned their backs on this and on London, and proceeded southwards, as if they were going off to the Borough to inspect the Tatler-Lock from the street. But far short of this—only a few score paces beyond the Chapel—Saturn sidestepped into a medieval doorway too narrow to admit him square-shouldered. Bracketed to the front of the building above this was a contraption consisting of a wooden platform, about the size of a cutting-board, impaled on a vertical spar, all cobwebbed with lank strands and net-works of hempen cord: a copy in miniature of ship’s rigging, rotted by weather and deranged by nest-building birds. Standing on the platform was a miniature figure of a man, raising a grog-ration; and painted below upon the wall, for the entertainment of literate customers, was the name of the establishment: Ye Main-Topp.

Pursuing Saturn through this door, the Clubb found themselves in a public house, whose floor had been strewn with fresh hop-vines in a plucky but hopeless bid to freshen the air. Some half a dozen patrons were scattered against the walls as if they’d been blown into their current positions by the explosion of a shell in the center of the room. They were not mere seamen, for they had shoes; but neither were they Captains, for they wanted wigs. It could be inferred that the Main-Topp catered to the low middle class of Bridge people: ships’ mates, watermen, hackney-drivers, &c. Several conversations were put in recess so that drinkers could devote all their powers of concentration to the newcomers. The barkeep, barricaded in his corner fortress, gave them all a nod. The Clubb nodded back and muttered diffident greetings, having no idea what sort of story Saturn had told the proprietor about the strange guests who’d soon be arriving. A door in the back of the room led to a steep and lightless staircase, which had no need of a banister, as a normal man could arrest his fall simply by squaring his shoulders against both sides and inhaling. In some way Saturn squirted to the top of it and through another elf-door into a room.

Though in truth ’twas not the Room they saw first, but what lay
beyond its windows, which faced to the east: the Pool of London, so crowded with vessels of all sizes and descriptions that it struck the eye not so much as a body of liquid water as a morass, congested and nearly rafted over by floating wood. Aboard
Prudence
they had been maneuvering through it—which was to say, they’d been part of it—for a few hours, and so one might not expect the scene to’ve drawn their notice as strongly as it did. But viewed from above, and framed thusly in the lattice-work of the windows, it gave an entirely different impression; the hundreds of ships, variously bobbing, rocking, steaming, smoking, loading, unloading, undergoing diverse mendings, splicings, paintings, caulkings, and swabbings, shrugging off the rain from above while holding back and riding upon Thames-pressure from below, seemed as if they had been arrayed thus solely to be viewed by the Clubb from these windows. As if some tyrant prince had conceived an enthusiasm for seascape-painting and commanded that all the Realm’s trees be cut and all its men pressed into service to create a striking Scene below his easel.

The room’s floor was simply the obverse of the tavern’s ceiling. It was fashioned of planks, generously spaced, so that stripes of light and fumaroles of tobacco-smoke leaked up through the fissures.

Over them was the roof of the building. It was thatched—a quaint touch never seen any more in parts of the city that had been reached by the Fire. This drew undue notice, for some moments, from the Clubb, who stood gaping up at it as if to say,
Ah yes, I have heard that once we made shelters out of grass
.

Buildings on London Bridge tended to be made by trial and error. Starting with a scheme that was more or less sane, in the broad sense that it had not fallen down yet, proprietors would enlarge their holdings by reaching out over the water with cantilevered add-ons, buttressed with diagonal braces. This was the
trial
phase. In the next, or
error
phase, the additions would topple into the Thames and wash up days later in Flanders, sometimes with furniture and dead people in them. Those that did not fall into the river were occupied, and eventually used to support further enhancements. Countless such iterations, spread thick over centuries, had made the Bridge as built-up as the laws of God and the ingenuity of Man would allow.

Daniel, venturing across springy floor-planks to this room’s eastern extremity, found himself embraced by windows—for this had originally been a sort of experimental balcony that had been encased in glass after it had failed to collapse for several consecutive years. Like a curd held up out of the whey by a strainer, he was being kept
out of the Thames by perhaps a finger’s thickness of gappy planking. Between the boards he could see a gut of the river clashing and foaming along the edge of a starling. Vertigo—Hooke’s nemesis—claimed his attention for a few moments. Then he got the better of it and turned to gaze southeast at the Borough. A few moments sufficed to identify the Tatler-Lock, whose façade of blackened bricks rose up from the bank no more than two hundred yards away. For the better viewing of which, a perspective-glass lay on the windowsill. Above it, a single diamond-shaped pane had been punched out to allow for clear viewing. Hidden as it was beneath the furry, dribbling brow of the thatched eave, this would never be noted from the Tatler-Lock.

“Enjoy a good look, then,” said a new voice. “The glass is as good as any at your Society.”

Daniel turned to spy Sean Partry sitting crosslegged in a back corner, surrounded by ironmongery, tamping tobacco into a pipe.

Daniel picked up the glass, telescoped it to full length, and set its wide end into the vee of the missing diamond, which had thoughtfully been lined with a rag. This held it perfectly steady, while allowing him to swivel the narrow end to and fro. Putting his eye to it, and making some small adjustments, he was rewarded with a magnified view of some windows on the upper storey of the Tatler-Lock. Several were boarded over, or else veiled with remnants of sails. One was but a vacant window-frame. Through this could be seen the floor-boards of an empty room, starry with bird-shit.

“There is little to see,” Partry admitted. “Mr. Knockmealdown has a violent aversion to eavesdroppers.”

“It is very good,” was Daniel’s verdict. “The hunter who stakes out bait, must establish a nearby blind, from which to observe his quarry. But not too close, lest the beast nose him, and be put on his guard. This room shall do. And you are correct, Mr. Partry, about the glass. The opticks were ground by a master.”

A concentration of dust-bunnies and feather-shards marked the location of the previous tenant’s Bed and Engine of Revenue. This had been cast into the river and supplanted by more furniture of the plank-and-cask school, on which Threader and Kikin had already claimed seats. Orney moved towards the windows to mark
Prudence
’s progress downriver but pulled up short as he felt the balcony losing altitude under his weight.

“What have you told the proprietor about who we are, and what we are doing?” Mr. Threader was asking Saturn.

“That you are Royal Society men making observations of the daily currency of the river.”

“He’s not going to believe
that,
is he?”

“You didn’t ask me what he
believes
. You asked me what I
told
him. What he
believes,
is that you are City men investigating a case of insurance fraud by spying on a certain ship anchored out in the Pool.”

“Fine—our true purpose shall not be suspected as long as he is telling people
that
.”

“Oh no, he’s not
telling
people that. He’s
telling
them that you are a Sect of Dissenters forced to meet in secret because of the recent passage of Bolingbroke’s Schism Act.”

“Let the blokes in the tap-room think we are Dissenters then, is all I’m trying to say.”

“That’s not what they think. They think that you are Sodomites,” Partry said. This silenced Threader for a while.

“No wonder we are paying such exorbitant rent,” reflected Mr. Kikin, “considering the vast scope of activities going on in this one room.”

Partry had spread a trapezoid of sail-cloth over the planks in the corner of the room and was sitting on it. He’d have looked like a tailor, except that he was working with the tools of the thief-taker’s trade: an array of manacles, fetters, neck-rings, chains, bolts, and padlocks, which he was sorting, inspecting, and oiling. Probably this had done nothing to improve their reputation among the regulars drinking porter six feet below.

“What is it we are to put up for auction to-day?” Partry inquired.

Daniel stepped away from the window, handing the glass to Mr. Orney, and retrieved a small wooden chest he had earlier set down on a barrel-head. “Since you are a connoisseur of Opticks, Mr. Partry, you’ll find this of interest. It is a collection of lenses, some no larger than mouse’s eyes, but ground to perfection.”

Partry narrowed his eyes. “You think Jack the Coiner has gone to so much trouble to get a box of lenses?”

“I think he desires Hooke-stuff. I know not what, or why. By proffering these, we show him our
bona fides
. That is, we prove that we have Hooke-stuff to sell, for only Hooke made lenses like these. Whether Jack buys them or not, we’ll have his attention after to-day.”

“To-day, or tomorrow, or a week hence,” Partry corrected him. “There is no telling how long this will sit in the Tatler-Lock before Jack, or his deputy, comes round to appraise it.” With that Partry accepted the box from Daniel, and tucked it under a sort of pea-coat he had put on as protection from the rain. He descended the stairs. Saturn followed after, and through the floor the Clubb could hear him asking the proprietor to send up four mugs of flip.

And so the Stake-out commenced. Daniel dragged an empty crate over to the balcony and sat down where he could keep an eye on the Tatler-Lock. It was unlikely there’d be anything to see, but he felt he ought to do this for the sake of form. Four mugs of steaming flip arrived on the shoulder of a fascinated bar-maid. It was, as a rule, a winter beverage, but suited them in to-day’s weather. Orney produced an octavo Bible from his pocket and began memorizing it, oblivious to displays of withering scorn being directed his way by Mr. Threader. Kikin put on glasses and began to read an impressive document in Cyrillic letters. Threader grubbed a pencil out of his pocket and began to dash off notes using a barrel-head as desk. Daniel had not thought to bring anything to pass the time. Partry’s hobby of fetters and chains held no allure. But Peter Hoxton, who was avidly literate, had already strewn reading materials about the place, viz. an English translation of Spinoza. This was too weighty for Daniel’s mood. He picked up a libel instead.