The System of the World (73 page)

“Your pint, sirrah.”

“That is very kind of you, Saturn,” said Daniel, setting the quill into its pot, and glancing once more at the distant window where Partry was puffing on his pipe. “How did you guess I was in the mood for a pint?”

“
I
am in the mood for one,” Saturn said.

“Then why didn’t you bring up two?”

“You forget that I am a Paragon of Sobriety. I shall derive my pleasure from watching you drink yours.”

“I am happy to oblige,” Daniel said, and took a swallow. “There has been no signal from Mr. Partry,” he said, for Saturn’s dark eyes had strayed to the page of the Log, still dewy with unblotted ink. “I was merely refreshing the account.”

“I must ask, why you do not write it in the Real Character,” Saturn teased him, “if it is as excellent as all that.”

“It
is
excellent. A much better way of setting down knowledge than Latin or English. Which is why I have devoted some years to making it more excellent yet, by transliterating it into numbers.”

“Ah,” said Saturn, “are you saying, then, that the cypher in which the women of Bridewell punch the cards, is a descendant of the Real Character?” By now he had changed places with Daniel, and taken up that position on the balcony of which they had all grown so weary in the last eleven days.

Daniel moved the Log over to its customary station on a crate-top, and busied himself blotting the latest entry with sand. “Not so much a
descendant
as a
sibling,
” he said. “The father of both is the Philosophic Language, which is a system of classification of ideas. Once an idea has been enrolled or registered in the tables of the Philosophic Language, it may be addressed with a number, or a set of numbers—”

“Cartesian coordinates,” Saturn mused, “for plotting the wand’rings of our thoughts, like.”

“The similarity only holds to a point,” Daniel cautioned him. “To avoid ambiguity, the Philosophic Language—Leibniz’s version of it, anyway—employs only prime numbers. In this, it is quite different from the number-lines of Descartes. In any case, the Language, as it consists of ideas and numbers, may be writ down using any scheme one may care to choose. The binary cypher of our Logic Mill is one such. But when I was a young man, John Wilkins devised another—the Real Character—which for a time was all the rage in the Royal Society. Hooke and Wren used it fluently.”

“Who uses it now?”

“No one.”

“Then how is the Dark Philosopher able to read it?”

“The same question has been bedeviling me.”

“This Wilkins cove must have published a dictionary or key—”

“Yes. I helped write it, during the Plague. The page-proofs were burnt up in the Fire. But it
was
published, and can be found in any number of libraries. But in order for our mysterious Buyer to go to such a library, and consult the book, he must first
recognize
the outlandish glyphs on the page as belonging to something called the Real Character. Think—if I shewed you, Peter, a page writ in the script of Malabar, would you know to consult a Malabar-Dictionary?”

“No—for these eyes, though they’ve seen much, have never seen Malabar-letters, and would not know ’em from Japanese or Æthiopian.”

“Just so. Yet our buyer seems to have known the Real Character on sight.”

“But is that really so extraordinary, when one considers that the same buyer knew that Hooke-stuff was to be found hidden in the walls of Bedlam? From which it’s evident he knows much of your Society.”

“I believe that the knowledge of where to look for the stuff came to the buyer through Henry Arlanc: the Royal Society’s porter.”

“I know who he is.”

“Oh really? How do you know him?”

“He worked for a Huguenot watch-maker, with whom I had professional contacts before I turned to drink, and fell on black days. Several Fellows of the Royal Society patronized this horologist—that is how they got to know Henry Arlanc, and that is how Arlanc got the position at Crane Court.”

“Until recently,” Daniel said, “I had supposed that Arlanc was passing intelligence to Jack the Coiner, or someone in his organization, who was, at bottom, ignorant of Natural Philosophy.”

“There’s a hole in that hypothesis, Doc. Why’d such a cull want to rake through the mouse-eaten leavings of a dead Vertuoso?”

“Ignorant men have fanciful notions of what may be found in such residue. Alchemists frequently work with gold. Perhaps—”

“Still, the hypothesis does not hold up well under close examination.”

“I agree!” said Daniel, exasperated. “I no longer believe in it.”

“Well,
now
is a fine time to say so,” said Saturn. “What’s the
new
hypothesis?”

“That the buyer is a Fellow of the Royal Society, or else has made a close study of the Society’s early years. He knows a great deal about Hooke and about the Real Character, and…” Daniel paused.

“And?”

“And about poison,” Daniel said. “An attempt was recently made on the life of Princess Caroline. The weapon was a poniard smeared with nicotine, excellently prepared.”

“Bloody peculiar,” reflected Peter Hoxton, “when this benighted world doth so abound in simpler means of killing.”

“During the ’sixties—Hooke’s heyday, and the æra of the Real Character—several Fellows of the Royal Society took an interest in nicotine.”

“It’s obvious then, isn’t it?” Saturn said.

“What is obvious?”

“The villain must be Sir Christopher Wren!” Saturn clearly meant this as a preposterous jest, and so he was appalled
to see Daniel considering it seriously. “Because he is one of the very few still living from that æra, you mean,” Daniel finally said. “It is a good thought. But no. This is not being done by Wren, or Halley, or Roger Comstock, or any of the others who were in the Royal Society in those days. Supposing
I
wanted to kill someone—would I brew up nicotine? No. No, Peter, this is being done by someone of a more recent generation. He has conceived a diseased Fascination with the Royal Society of the 1660s. He has poured an unhealthy amount of time into studying what we did, and reading our annals.”

“Why?”

“Why? When a young man falls under the spell of a particular young woman, and will not leave her alone, though her father and brothers menace him with daggers drawn, ask you why?”

“But this is different.”

“Perhaps.”

“Trust me, ’tis different. The buyer desires something. I believe you know what the something is. Will you please let me in on the secret?”

“I have held it back, not because I wish to keep secrets from you,” Daniel sighed, “but because I find the entire subject painfully embarrassing. The buyer seeks the Philosopher’s Stone.”

Saturn slapped his forehead theatrically. “Why’d I even take the trouble to ask?”

“He has heard at least part of the story about the man who died in Bedlam when Hooke cut him for the stone, and who was (some would say) resurrected by the elixir of Enoch Root.”

“Ah, that is the name of—?”

“Of the Alchemist in that story, yes. If you are the sort of chap who believes in Alchemy, then it is implicit, in that story, that the elixir must have been made using something akin to the Philosopher’s Stone. Now, according to the lore of the Alchemists, that Stone is made by combining the Philosophic Mercury with the Philosophic Sulphur. Where, might you ask, does a bloke get his hands on such ingredients? The answers are many and various, depending on which Alchemist you talk to. But many believe that King Solomon was an Alchemist, who knew how to get, or to make, the Philosophic Mercury, and who used it to turn lead into gold.”

“Ah, that would explain why he was so rich!”

“Just so. Now, the story goes that if you could find some of King Solomon’s gold and put it in a crucible, you could extract from it minute traces of the Philosophic Mercury. I believe that our buyer somehow got wind of this yarn about the Alchemical Resurrection in
Bedlam twenty-five years ago, and reckoned that the shortest and quickest way for him to get his hands on a sample of the Philosophic Mercury was—”

“To ransack London for Hooke’s old notes and knick-knacks.”

“Yes. Now, consider that, when I got back to London at the end of January, the first thing I did was to begin searching for Hooke’s old notes and equipment. Arlanc was the first man I questioned. He must have mentioned this to his contact in Jack’s organization. Shortly, word must have got round to our buyer.”

“Who was already disposed to believe that this thing of infinite value had been hidden away, somewhere, by Hooke.”

“Yes. Imagine the effect the news must have had upon him!”

“He must have been frantic,” Saturn said, “believing that you were in quest of the same goods, and would get to them first.”

“Indeed. As we now know, this led to the series of burglaries. I had only a dim and fragmentary understanding of these matters until a fortnight ago, when we found that document in the wall at Bedlam. Then all became clear. But, too, it was clear that the buyer’s search was doomed to failure, for Hooke’s receipt
mentions
a certain ingredient without offering any explanation of
how to obtain
it. For that reason, the document was useless as bait for the Stake-out.”

“Which is why you and Sir Isaac had to produce the fake.”

“The fake, and the box that it came in,” Daniel said. “The buyer believes that a small amount of the Solomonic Gold is locked in the compartment in the bottom of that chest.”