The System of the World (89 page)

William Ham did not like this proposition at all. But he could come up with no reason to refuse. He placed it in Solomon’s hand. Solomon squatted down, felt the floor with his fingertips for some moments, then inserted the key’s handle—which looked a bit like a very ornate trowel—into the drain-hole. A bit of exploratory wiggling and prying led to the sudden appearance of a large crescent-moon-shaped crevice. Saturn stepped forward. “Careful!” Solomon continued, “it will be a well.”

“How do you know?”

“This is a Temple of Mithras, constructed by Roman soldiers,” Solomon said, “and every such temple contained a well.”

Saturn got his fingers into the crevice and pulled. A disk perhaps
two feet in diameter came up out of the floor. It had been fashioned recently out of heavy planks. A lanthorn, let down into the cavity, revealed a well-shaft, lined with stones all the way down to the level of the water, which was perhaps three fathoms below.

“Your workmen found the well, and covered it,” said Solomon. “But more for their own safety, than the Bank’s security. I would wager the contents of this Bank that I could now leave the premises and meet you out in the street in half an hour’s time without passing out through the building’s front door.”

“That is a bet I could not accept, even if the money were mine to wager,” said William Ham, “for I can smell and feel the current of air rising up from the shaft as well as you.”

“Indeed, the well has a side-channel!” exclaimed Saturn, who was on his stomach with head and shoulders thrust down into the shaft. “About halfway down. I have a mind to fetch one of the workmen’s ladders and investigate!”

This was daft. But once Saturn had proposed, none could resist, it. Ladders were all over the place. They stabbed one down the well and planted it on the floor of the side-channel that Saturn had noticed. He went down first, and reported that the masons of the Temple of Mithras had carried out their duties well.

“As how could they not,” Solomon returned, “for Mithras was the god of contracts.”

“The
god of contracts
!?” exclaimed William Ham.

“Indeed,” said Solomon, “and so it is a good thing for you that you have founded your Bank on his Temple.”

“This Mithras does not appear in any Pantheon I have ever heard of.”

“He was not a god of Olympus but one that the Greeks borrowed from the Persians, who had in their turn borrowed him from Hindoostan. From the Greeks his cult spread to the Romans, and became popular around the hundredth year of what you call
Anno Domini
. Or, as I would put it, some years after the destruction of the Temple of Solomon. Especially among soldiers, such as garrisoned Londinium, along the banks of the Walbrook.”

Solomon had been clambering onto the ladder as he spoke.

“You aren’t going down there?”

“Mr. Ham, I was sent here by the Tsar to investigate the Bank’s security,” said Solomon, “and inspect it I shall!”

Daniel followed Solomon down the ladder. Three of them now squatted together in a vaulted tunnel that ran off into the earth, sloping gently down toward the well so that it, too, acted as a drain. William Ham was left to sit sentry in the Temple of Mithras, and to
run for help if they never emerged. But after a very brief shuffle down the tunnel they sensed space above their heads, and found stone steps, which turned to the right and led them down to the level of the groundwater. A creek, perhaps eight feet in breadth, ran sluggishly off into the dark, wending round pilings, moles, and foundations one could only assume supported buildings up on the street. In rainy weather they might have had to stop and turn back. But it was the first day of August and the level did not rise above their ankles as long as they stayed along the side of the channel. So they ventured downstream, shining their lights on walls and foundations as they went, and speculating as to which belonged to which building.

“During the Plague,” Daniel said, “my uncle Thomas Ham—William’s father—enlarged the cellar of his goldsmith’s shop, which cannot be more than a stone’s throw from us. He discovered a Roman mosaic, and diverse pagan coins and artifacts. My wife in Boston is wearing one of them in her hair.”

“What did the mosaic depict?” Solomon asked.

“Some figures that called to mind Mercury. Mr. Ham styled it a Temple of Mercury and made of it a good omen. But it contained other images that would call his opinion into question—”

“Ravens?”

“Yes! How did you know?”

“
Carox,
the raven, was, to Persians, a messenger of the Gods—”

“As Mercury was to the Romans.”

“Indeed. The worshippers of Mithras believed that as the soul descended from the sphere of the fixed stars to be incarnated on Earth, it passed through all of the planetary spheres along the way, and was influenced by each in turn. In passing through the sphere of Venus the soul became amorous, and so on. The innermost sphere, and the last to wreak its influence on the soul, was that of Mercury or Corax. The practitioners of this cult believed that as the soul prepared for death, and a return to the sphere of the fixed stars, it must reverse that transmigration, shedding first the trappings of Mercury-Corax, then those of Venus,
et cetera,
and finally—”

“Saturn?” guessed Saturn.

“Indeed.”

“I am honored to be closest to the fixed stars, and least worldly of vices.”

“Accordingly, there were seven ranks. For each rank was a chamber—always subterranean. Your uncle’s cellar was that of Mercury-Corax, where new initiates were taken in. Later they would move through a gate or passage to the next chamber, which would have been decorated with images of Venus, and so on.”

“What was the big chamber under the Bank?”

“You shall be pleased to know it was the chamber of Saturn, for the highest-ranking members,” Solomon said.

“I did feel wondrously at home in the place!”

“If it is true that we are passing the foundations of the Ham goldsmith shop,” said Solomon, “then we are traversing the hierarchy in reverse order, following the same course as souls coming down from the Cœlestial Sphere to be incarnated in the World.”

“Funny that,” Daniel said, “for I have just recognized the name of an old friend of mine, who’d be pleased to know where his work stood in the hierarchy.”

They had stopped before a pile of relatively new stone-work, where heavy blocks had been laid to repair some ancient foundation, and to make it ready to support a new building. For the most part it was an uninterrupted bulwark of massive stones; but in one place a long slab had been laid like a lintel across a gap between two others, creating a low squarish opening through which the cellar on the other side could drain if need be. Carved on that lintel in spidery Roman letters was:

CHRISTOPHER WREN A.D. 1672

“This is the Church of St. Stephen Walbrook,” said Daniel.

“No better place for souls to enter the world,” Saturn mused.

They crawled up the drain—a tight fit—and emerged in the church’s tombs. The bell was tolling above. “A grim birth,” Daniel said. It took him a few moments to get his bearings, but then he led Saturn and Solomon up a stair to a room at the back of the church. They were surprised to see daylight coming in through windows—but not half so surprised as the vicar’s wife was to see
them
. Her eyes were swollen half-shut from weeping, her cries of terror were relatively subdued, and her efforts to chase the muddy interlopers out of the building were desultory. No service was in progress, yet, strangely, many of the pews were occupied by persons who had come to do nothing but sit and pray in silence. Daniel, Saturn and Solomon stumbled out into the half light of early morning. A man was shuffling down Walbrook Street, headed for the Thames, bonging a hand-bell and shouting: “The Queen is dead, long live the King!”

MORNING OF WEDNESDAY,
4
AUGUST
1714

T
HE
LEVÉE,
OR RITUALIZED
, semi-public getting-
out-of-bed-in-the-morning, was an invention of Louis XIV, and like many of the Sun King’s works was frowned upon by all right-minded Englishmen, who knew of it only from lurid yarns told of Versailles court-fops’ prostituting their daughters to wangle an invitation to hold a candlestick or carry a shirt at a
levée
of the Sun King. This was all Daniel knew of the subject as of nine of the clock on the morning of August 4th, when a messenger knocked him up at Crane Court to inform him that he, Daniel, was one of half a dozen who had been summoned to take part in the Duke of Marlborough’s first
levée
in London, which was going to commence in an hour’s time.

“But my own
levée
is not yet finished,” Daniel might have answered, wiping porridge from an unshaven chin. Instead he told the messenger to wait downstairs and that he would be along presently.

Marlborough House was invested by a crowd of several hundred Englishmen, the giddy-tired residue of an ecstatic Mobb that had sung the Duke through the streets of London yesterday: a Roman triumph thrown together on the spur of the moment by disorderly plebeians.

The Duke and his Duchess had reached Dover late on the 2nd. Yesterday had been devoted to an all-but-Royal progress through Rochester and other burgs lining the road to Londinium. So many of the Whig Quality had turned out to ride in the procession, and so
many commoners had lined Watling Street, as to rouse suspicions in Daniel’s mind that the rumors spread for so long by the Tories were true: Marlborough was the second coming of Cromwell. Now, to his very first
levée,
he had invited Daniel, who could still remember sitting on Cromwell’s knee when he was a little boy.

Next to St. James’s Palace, which was getting to look like a heap of architectural elements flung into a bin, Marlborough House shaped up as a proper building. The fence around its forecourt was a giant iron strainer, stopping everyone except for Daniel. The excluded had formed drifts of flesh on the other side, and watched eagerly, faces wedged between bars. As Daniel was helped down out of the carriage, and walked to the front door, he wondered how many of the crowd knew who he was, and of his ancient connexion to the terrible Puritan warlord.
Some
of them had to be Tory spies, who would mark Daniel, and note the connexion instantly. Daniel guessed that he had been summoned here to send a message of a vaguely threatening nature to all Torydom.

Vanbrugh had been remodeling the place in the expectation that the Duke would settle in for a long stay. Much of this work was still in its most brute stages and so Daniel had to be conducted under scaffolding and between piles of bricks and of timbers by a member of Marlborough’s household. But as they got deeper into the building, it became more finished. The Duke’s bedchamber had been done first, and the renovations propagated outwards from there. Before the Grinling Gibbons custom-carved double doors, a maid handed Daniel a large silver bowl full of steaming water, swathed in towels so it would not burn his hands. “Set it down beside my lord,” he was instructed, and the doors were pulled open.

Like a beetle on a glacier the Duke of Marlborough sat in a chair in the white immensity of his bedchamber. Next to him was a table. The stubble on his scalp was dense: obviously it was Shaving-Day, and high time for it; as everyone had now heard, the Duke and Duchess had been held back in Ostend by contrary winds for a whole fortnight. Daniel, knowing no more of
levées
than any other Englishman, feared for a moment that he was about to be asked to lather the Duke’s skull and scrape off two weeks’ growth. But then he noted a valet standing by, stropping a razor, and understood, with immeasurable relief, that the blade-work would be left to a trained artisan.

Of the half-dozen who had been summoned to the
levée,
Daniel was the last to arrive—this much he could see even though his eyes were dazzled by August sunshine glancing off many tons of new plasterwork. So lofty was the ceiling that a Natural Philosopher could be
forgiven for thinking that the festoons and friezes up along the ceiling had been carved from natural accumulations of snow and ice.

The Duke was in a dressing-gown of something that gleamed and whispered, and his neck had been swaddled in miles of linen in preparation for the shaving. It was as far from Puritan severity as one could possibly imagine. If there were any Tories without, on Pall Mall, who phant’sied that Daniel had come to pass the torch to the next Cromwell, a moment’s glimpse into this room would have extinguished their fears. If Marlborough had come back in triumph to take over the country, he’d do so not as a military dictator but as a Sun King.

Marlborough half rose from his chair and bowed to Daniel—who nearly dropped the bowl. The other five participants in the
levée
—candle-holders, shirt-bearers, wig-powderers, mostly Earls or better—bowed even deeper. Daniel could still see little, but he could hear snickers as he staggered the last few yards.

“Dr. Waterhouse does not yet know about what was found in Baron von Bothmar’s lock-box to-day,” the Duke hazarded.

“I confess utter ignorance, my lord,” Daniel said.

“The Hanoverian ambassador, Bothmar, brought with him a lock-box that was to be opened upon the death of Queen Anne. It contained orders from his majesty as to how the Realm was to be administered until such time as his majesty could come here to receive the crown, orb, and sceptre,” explained the Duke. “This morning it was opened in the presence of the Council, and read out. The King has named twenty-five Regents to act in his stead until he arrives. You, Dr. Waterhouse, are one of the twenty-five.”

“Bollocks!”

“Oh, it is quite true. And so when we bow to you, my lord, it is to acknowledge your authority as a Regent. You, and your two dozen colleagues, are the closest we have, just now, to a Sovereign.”

Daniel had never been addressed before as “my lord,” and certainly had never guessed that the first person ever to do so would be the Duke of Marlborough. It required some presence of mind not to spill the bowl. But he brought it home, with the help of a guiding hand from the valet, and stepped back, his formal duties completed. The valet rolled a sponge into the bowl, wrung it out, and placed it on the Duke’s head like a soppy crown. The Duke blinked a rivulet out of his eye, elevated his chin, and commenced going through some papers that were on his lap—for apparently one of the attractions of the
levée
was watching the great man read his mail.

“Grub Street must be ten miles long now,” the Duke remarked, tossing aside one newspaper after another.

“You may soon wish it were a good deal shorter.”

“As may you, Dr. Waterhouse—your new prominence shall make you a Butt for innumerable Shafts.” Marlborough had now cocked his head back so that soap would not run into his eyes, which placed him in the odd position of not being able to see into his own lap. He was groping through the papers there, golden cuff-tassels flailing, occasionally holding something up at arm’s length. “Ah,” he announced, finding today’s
Lens,
“I give you this, Dr. Waterhouse. Just now, I was reading it aloud to these gentlemen, as we waited for the late arrival—
you
may read it yourself.”

“Thank you, my lord, I am sure ’twas vastly more amusing than having me here on time.”

“On the contrary, my lord, it is
we
who ought to amuse
you,
” said the Duke, and jerked in his chair as the razor planed off a ridge of scar-tissue. His noggin had acquired more than its share of high and low relief as he had overseen the deaths of several hundred thousand English, French, and other soldiers in the wars against Louis XIV. They now lurked below a fortnight’s stubble like shoals under a murky tide, unseen Hazards to the blade’s Navigation.

“What is it I am to read, my lord?” Daniel inquired, reaching out to accept the proffered newspaper.

Marlborough’s eyes—which were uncommonly large and expressive—strayed for a moment to Daniel’s hand. People did not, as a rule, bother to look at Daniel’s hands—nay, neither the left nor the right. They had the full complement of fingers, they had not been branded in the Old Bailey, and they were unadorned—as a rule. But today Daniel wore, on his right hand, a simple ring of gold. Never having worn jewelry before, he was astonished at how this object caught people’s attention.

“A Meditation upon Power,
” Marlborough answered, “second page.”

“It sounds meet, if I am as powerful as you say. Pray, who wrote it?”

“That’s the thing,” said Marlborough, “the extraordinary thing. There is a chap who goes by the
nom de plume
of Peer—”

“
He
wrote it!?”

“No, but he has discovered in the Clink a Blackamoor, a most remarkable specimen. He is not, of course, a sentient being—but he possesses the singular gift of being able to write and speak exactly as if he
were
one.”

“I have met him,” Daniel said. His eyes had finally adjusted to where he could make out the byline DAPPA. He glanced up at the Duke, then glanced away, as a thick bead of blood was coming out in front of his right ear and coursing along his jaw-line to stain the linen
beneath his chin. The Duke jerked again. “Have a care, sirrah, I did not come hither to perish of lockjaw.”

Daniel scanned the other five attendees, who favored him with excruciating smiles of a sort he’d not seen directed his way since he had been semi-important in the court of James II.

The Duke was bald again. Two valets were hovering behind him with rags, occasionally darting in to stanch gore. The Duke found a hand-mirror, held it up for a moment, and grimaced. “My word,” he said, “is this a
shaving
or a
trepanning
?” He set the mirror down hastily, as if a lifetime of musket- and sword-battles had hardly prepared him for this. There was a lot of mail in his lap—more than Daniel received per decade—and it was taking him some time to find what he was looking for. Daniel studied the Duke curiously. John Churchill had been the most beautiful young man in England, perhaps even in Christendom. The divine unfairness endured even now unto the Duke’s sixty-fifth year. He was old, doughy, bald, and bleeding, but he actually did have a noble countenance—far from being true of all nobles—and his eyes were as large and beautiful as ever, unmarred by the sagging flesh and writhen brows that so oft made old Englishmen fearsome to behold.

“Here it is!” he announced, and whacked a letter against his knee a few times, as if this were necessary to get its words stacked up in the correct order. “From your fellow Regent!”

“My lord Ravenscar was also on Bothmar’s list?” Daniel asked, for he had already spotted the handwriting and the seal.

“Oh my word, yes,” said Marlborough, “odds-on favorite to be the next Lord Treasurer, you know. For who knows more about the workings of Bank, Mint, ’Chequer, and ’Change than Ravenscar?” He scanned the letter from Roger. “I shall not read it all,” he assured them. “Greetings, congratulations,
et cetera
—and he invites me and Mrs. Churchill to attend a
soirée
at his house on the first of September.” He lifted his eyes from the page and gazed at Daniel, a trace befuddled. “Do you think it is
decent
to have a party so soon after the Queen’s death, my lord?”

“A month of mourning shall have elapsed, as of September the first, my lord,” Daniel tried, “and I’ve no doubt it shall be a tasteful affair, duly restrained—”

“He promises right here to make his volcano erupt!” This elicited titters from the hitherto silent Five.

“Whilst mourning our late Queen, we must not omit to celebrate our new King, my lord.”

“Oh, well, since you put it that way, I do believe I will attend,” said the Duke. “I’ve never seen the famous Volcano, you know.”

“It is said to be worth the trip, my lord.”

“I’ve no doubt of that. I shall post an answer presently to the Temple of Vulcan. But if you should happen to see my lord Ravenscar, perhaps at one of the meetings of your Regency Council, you will tell him, won’t you?”

“It would be my pleasure.”

“Splendid! Now, may I arise, or shall it be necessary to cauterize my wounds?”

With the head-shaving, Daniel’s direct relevance to the
leveé
had ended. The Duke shifted his attention to others, whose roles it was to present him with shirt, wig, sword, &c. Each of these phases led to some chit-chat that was of essentially no interest to Daniel. Indeed, much of it was incomprehensible, because it was about people whom Daniel didn’t know, or whose identities he could only guess at, as the Duke was referring to them by their Christian names, or in even more oblique ways. Nevertheless, Daniel had the clear sense it would be bad form to excuse himself. He was offered a chair on account of his age, and accepted it. Time passed. His eye drifted to the newspaper.

A MEDITATION UPON POWER
by Dappa