THE System OF THE WORLD

by Neal Stephenson

  Clooney’s head drew back into the house. A brief exchange of murmurs could be heard through the open window. Then floor-boards cracked and door-locks snapped. Yeoman Clooney opened his front door and nodded in a confidence-inspiring way to the Sentinel. “His lordship will see you,” he proclaimed, in a trumpety heraldic tone that reminded Dart what an honor it was to mow an Earl’s scalp, and how unworthy Dart was of it. Dart hunched over, picked up his bag, and hustled into the house, tipping his hat at the Sentinel, then making a nod at Yeoman Clooney.

  The house had a front parlour looking out on the Parade through the very window Clooney had been using to exchange words with the Sentinel. The light was good there, and so that was where Dart spread out his drop-cloth. He set a chair in the middle of it.

  The Earl of Hollesley was spending the twilight of his life in this house because he had been entrusted with some of H. M. Government’s money during the War of the Spanish Succession, and had used it to put a new roof on his country house, instead of buying saltpeter in Amsterdam. He was near sixty, and as far as Dart knew, his entire life consisted of sitting in a chair and having his hair cut. Other prisoners strolled round the Liberty, killed themselves, or staged spectacular, improbable escapes; the Earl of Hollesley spent all his time in No. 4. Except for Dart, once a fortnight, he rarely entertained visitors. When he did they tended to be Catholic priests, for the Earl had gone Popish in his dotage. When he entered the room on Yeoman Clooney’s arm, Dart said to him, “M’lord,” which was all he was encouraged to say.

  Yeoman Clooney had the easy, but unfathomably tedious job of keeping an eye on the Earl twenty-four hours a day. He took a chair in the corner while Dart got the Earl seated and tarped. “Sir,” said Dart in a kind of stage-whisper to the yeoman, “I’ll take the liberty of shutting the window, as the day’s a bit gusty, and I don’t want hair blowing round your tidy abode.”

  Clooney feigned interest in the window for a few moments, then drifted off. Dart went to it, looked out across the Parade, and found Tom the Black-guard gazing back at him. Before pulling down the sash Dart drew his rag from his pocket, loudly and distinctly hacked into it, then spat on the ground.

  It went without saying that the Earl of Hollesley wore a periwig. But he still had to be shorn every so often. He preferred to have his head shaved. It ruled out lice.

  By the time Dart had got his brushes and razors organized, and taken up his tonsorial post beside the Earl, Tom the Black-guard was half-way across the Parade, and staring at him curiously through the window. Which was well. For otherwise Dart could never have done, nay, even contemplated it. An Earl, or even a Yeoman Warder, was so great, so potent, so terrible to an insect like Dart. But there was a cold power behind Tom the Black-guard that overbalanced even an Earl. Dart might evade a Justice of the Peace, but blokes like Tom could nose him out even if he ran all the way to Barbados. If Dart did not do as he’d been instructed, he’d forever be a rabbit, trapped in a warren, pursued by an army of ferrets. Which is what gave him the courage-if courage was the right word for it-to announce: “Yeoman Clooney, I say that I have a blade to my lord Hollesley’s throat.”

  “Er-what?” Clooney had been very close to drowsing off.

  “A blade to his throat.”

  The Earl was reading The Examiner. He was hard of hearing.

  “So, you are giving him a shave as well as a haircut?”

  This was unexpected. Clooney was supposed to understand a blade to the throat of a Lord.

  “I am giving him neither, sir. I am making a threat to kill my lord.”

  The Earl stiffened, and rattled his Examiner. “The Whigs will be the death of this country!” he announced.

  “What possible reason could you have for doing such a mad thing?” Clooney wanted to know from the corner.

  “The Juncto!” the Earl went on. “Why don’t they come out and call it by its real name, a Cabal, a Conspiracy! They are trying to drive Her Majesty into her grave! It is assassination by another name.”

  “I know naught of reasons. Reasons are for Tom. Tom is at the door,” Dart said.

  “It’s all right here!” the Earl continued, and leaned forward suddenly, so that he’d have cut his own throat if Dart hadn’t reacted in time. “The Duke of Cambridge. What, his German title isn’t good enough for him? You’d think he was a proper Englishman, wouldn’t you?”

  There came a knock at the door from the Sentinel. “Boot-black,” came the call.

  “Admit him, sir,” Dart said, “and make no sign of distress to the Sentinel, for Tom shall be watching you avidly. Tom shall explain all.”

  “No wonder Her Majesty is wroth! ’Tis a calculated insult-calculated by Ravenscar. Where Age and Ague have failed to bring down our Queen, he shall do it with Aggravation, may God forbid!”

  Clooney left the parlour. Dart stood for a few moments with his blade-hand a-tremble, expecting that the Sentinel would appear in a moment to blow his head off with a pistol-shot. But the door opened and closed without any commotion, and Dart could now hear the slithering voice of Tom the Black-guard, speaking to Clooney in the entrance-hall.

  “That Sophie is a circling vulture,” Lord Hollesley proclaimed. “Not content to wait for a dignified succession-she sends her grandson before her, like a kite to peck at our Sovereign’s withered cheeks!”

  Dart was straining to hear the conversation between the Black-guard and the Yeoman, but the Earl’s fulminations and paper-rattling drowned out all but a few words: “Muscovite…Wakefield Tower…vertebrae…Jacobites…”

  Then all of a sudden Tom thrust his head into the parlour and gave him a flat inspection, like a coroner viewing a corpse. “Stay here,” he said, “until it happens.”

  “Until what happens?” Dart asked. But Tom was already on his way out the door, and Yeoman Clooney beside him.

  Dart stood there, resting his tired blade-hand on the Earl’s collar-bone, and watched the two of them angling across the green toward Wakefield Tower-where, according to scuttle-butt, a one-armed Russian had been chained up the night before.

  There was nothing else to do. So he began to soap the Earl’s head. Presently he began to hear the ardent tolling of several bells on the north side of Tower Hill. This was a fire-alarm. Somewhere beyond the moat, a building was burning. Normally Dart would’ve been one of the first on the scene, for he loved a good fire. But he had solemn obligations here.

  Sloop Atalanta, the Hope

  LATE AFTERNOON

  HAVING TAKEN DELIVERY of some Enlightenment, for which he’d have had to pay handsomely at Oxford or Cambridge, Colonel Barnes could hardly deny Daniel a look at the map. They descended to the upperdeck and spread it out on a barrel-head so that Sergeant Bob Shaftoe could brood over it in company with them. ’Twas not one of your noble maps hand-penned on gilded parchment, but a common thing, a woodcut stamped out on foolscap.

  He could see a cartographer making a strong case that this part of the world did not rate mapping, for nothing was there but muck, and what features it had changed from hour to hour. The map was pocked with such place-names as Foulness, Hoo, the Warp, and Slede Ooze. ’Twas as if England, when she had worn out certain words, threw them into the gutter-like a man discarding his clay-pipe when its stem was broke down to a nub-and the Thames carried those words down-country along with litter, turds, and dead cats, and strewed them up and down the estuarial flats and bars.

  The ever-widening flow swept round to the left just ahead of them. The map told Daniel that a mile or two later it would right its course again and shortly lose itself in the sea. This stretch of river was named the Hope, and an apt name it might be for Sir Isaac.

  The Hope limned a hammerhead-shaped protrusion of Kent with no particular boundary between marsh and water, but instead a mile-wide zone between high and low tide-the river halved its width at ebb. Because Daniel knew where they were going, he traced the flat top of the hammerhead eastwards until he reached the semicircular peen at its seaward end. T
his was labeled the Isle of Grain. The Thames flowed along its northern cheek, the Medway along its southern. The two rivers met just off the Isle’s eastern tip. And like a couple of porters who drop their loads in the middle of the street to engage in a fist-fight over which had right-of-way, these two rivers, at the place where they came together, let go of all the muck they’d been carrying out to the sea. In this way was built up a vast bank, a bulge growing eastwards from the Isle of Grain’s indefinite shore, and as that bulge reached out into the sea, mile after mile, it narrowed, converged, refined itself into a slim prod sticking far out into brackish water between Foulness Sand on the north and the Cant on the south. At the extremity of that bar was the Buoy of the Nore. The estuary yawned east like a viper’s mouth, the Nore spit thrust out in its middle like a barbed tongue. It was in that cursed in-between depth, too shallow for most vessels and too deep for any beast.

  But far short of the Buoy, just off the Isle of Grain’s coast, was a place that might be reached by boat or beast, depending upon the tide. It was a tiny thing, like a gnat crawling on the page. Daniel did not have to bend down and squint at those crabbed letters to know it was Shive Tor.

  Raising his eyes from the map to scan this indistinct coastline he saw a few places where the old bones of the earth almost poked out, knuckle-like, through the flesh spread over them by the rivers. The Shive, which lay a mile off the high-tide line of the Isle of Grain, was one of those. It even had its own system of pools and bars, echoing the greater system of which it was a part. Daniel guessed that some daft person had long ago seen fit to convey stones out to this stony Hazard and pile them up, making a cairn from which to watch for Vikings or light signal-fires, and later generations of the daft had used it as the foundations of a permanent tower.

  He glanced up to find Colonel Barnes gone-called away to lay plans on the quarterdeck-and Bob Shaftoe favoring him with what was very nearly an evil look.

  “Do you blame me for something, Sergeant?”

  “When last you slept in Tower, guv,” Bob returned-referring to something that had happened on the eve of the Glorious Revolution-“you told me the following tale: namely that you had with your own eyes seen a certain babe emerging from the Queen of England’s vagina in Whitehall Palace. You, and a roomful of other notables.”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, now that babe is all growed up and living at St.-Germain and phant’sies he’s to be our next King, is it not so?”

  “That is what they keep saying.”

  “And yet the Whigs call this same bloke the Changeling, and say he’s a common bastard orphan smuggled into Whitehall in a warming-pan, and never passed through the vagina of a Queen at all-at least not until he got old enough to do it t’other way.”

  “Indeed, they never leave off saying it.”

  “Where’s that put you, guv?”

  “Where I ever was. For my father was running about London a hundred years ago proclaiming that all Kings and Queens were common bastards, and worse, and that the very best of ’em was not fit to reign over a haystack. I was raised in such a household.”

  “It matters not to you.”

  “Their bloodlines matter not. Their habits and policies-that is different.”

  “And that is why you consort with Whigs,” said Bob, finally gaining a measure of ease, “for the policies of Sophie are more to your liking.”

  “You did not suppose I was a Jacobite!?”

  “I had to ask, guv.” Bob Shaftoe finally broke off staring at Daniel’s face, and looked about. They had been traveling northwards down the Hope, but were reaching the point where they could see to the east around the river’s final bend and discover the startling prospect of water stretching unbroken to the horizon.

  “My lord Bolingbroke, now, he is a Jacobite,” Bob remarked. Which was like opining that Fleet Ditch was unwholesome.

  “Been seeing a lot of him?” Daniel inquired.

  “Been seeing a lot of him,” Bob said, turning his head slightly toward the quarterdeck and glancing up at the banner that flew at the mizzen, carrying the arms of Charles White. “And you must know he is the whip that Bolingbroke cracks.”

  “I did not know it,” Daniel confessed, “but it rings very true.”

  “Bolingbroke is the Queen’s pet,” Bob continued, “and has been ever since he drove Marlborough out of the country.”

  “Even a Bostonian knows as much.”

  “Now the Whigs-your friend in particular-they have been raising a private army, they have.”

  “When we met some weeks ago on London Bridge, you alluded to that, very darkly,” Daniel said. He was now beginning to experience fear, for the first time since he had awoken. Not the bracing, invigorating fear of shooting under London Bridge in a small boat, but the vague smothering dread that had kept him bedridden the first few weeks he’d been back in London. It was familiar, and in that, oddly comforting.

  “Whigs’ve been whispering in a lot of ears,” Bob continued, glancing at the place where Colonel Barnes had stood a moment earlier. “Are you with us or against us? Will you stand up and be counted? When the Hanovers reign, shall they know you as one who was loyal, who can be trusted with command?”

  “I see. Hard to resist that sort of talk.”

  “Not so hard, when there is Marlborough, just over there,” nodding at the eastern horizon, “but contrary pressure, even greater, comes now from Bolingbroke.”

  “What has my lord Bolingbroke done?”

  “He’s not come out and done anything just yet. But he is making ready to do something that will make some of us uneasy.”

  “What is he making ready to do?”

  “He’s drawing up a list of all the captains, the colonels, and the generals. And according to White-who lets things slip, for effect, when he is pretending to be drunker than he really is-Bolingbroke will soon order those officers to sell their companies and their regiments, unless they sign a pledge that they will serve their Queen unconditionally.”

  “Sell them to Jacobite captains and colonels, one presumes.”

  “One presumes,” Bob returned, a bit mockingly.

  “So that if the Queen were to decide, on her deathbed, that the crown should go to her half-brother (I’ll dispense with the pretense of calling him the Changeling), the army would stand ready to enforce that decree and welcome the Pretender to England.”

  “That is how it looks. And it puts a bloke like Colonel Barnes in a bit of a spot. The Marquis of Ravenscar’s entreaties may be shrugged off, provided it is done civilly. But Bolingbroke offers a choice, like the Buoy of the Nore-we must go one way or t’other, and there’s no going back once the decision’s made.”

  “Yes,” Daniel said. And he held back from saying what was obvious: that Barnes, with his loyalty to Marlborough, would never go Bolingbroke’s way. But as Bob had pointed out, he had to choose one path or the other. He could not say no to Bolingbroke without saying yes to Ravenscar.

  Daniel stood for a time brooding and fuming over the stupidity of Bolingbroke, who would force men like Barnes into the arms of the opposing camp. It was an act of panic. Panic was notoriously catchy; and the questions Barnes and Shaftoe had been directing his way suggested it was beginning to spread.

  Which raised the question of why on earth they would think of him. Barnes owned a regiment of dragoons, for Christ’s sake, and if a tenth of the hints dropped by him and Sergeant Bob held true, they were in communication with Marlborough.

  What was it Barnes had said just a few minutes ago? Everyone is scared to death just now. On its face this was about Isaac and his fears concerning Leibniz. But perhaps Barnes was really speaking of himself.

  Or of anyone. Obviously Bolingbroke was scared. Roger Comstock, the Marquis of Ravenscar, was too outward merry to let on that he was scared; but then he was apparently deep into mustering a Whiggish army, which was not the act of a man who had been sleeping soundly.

  Who wasn’t scared? The only person Daniel c
ould think of who wasn’t, was Sir Christopher Wren.

  If the Duchess of Arcachon-Qwghlm was scared, she was not letting on.

  Perhaps Marlborough wasn’t scared. There was no telling as long as he remained in Antwerp.

  Those were the only ones he could think of.

  Then he had one of those moments where he suddenly stood outside of his own body and beheld himself, as from a seagull’s perspective, standing on the deck of Mr. Charles White’s sloop running down the tide in the Hope. And he came to ask, why was he, who had little time left on earth, devoting these minutes to drawing up a tedious inventory of who was, and was not, scared? Was there nothing better for a Doctor and Fellow of the Royal Society to do with his time?

  The answer was all around him, buoying him up and keeping him and the others from drowning: Hope. According to myth, the last thing to emerge from Pandora’s Box. Feeling Fear’s clammy arms reaching around him, Daniel had an almost physical longing for Hope. And perhaps Hope was no less contagious than Fear. He wanted to be infected with Hope and so he was trying to think of someone, like Wren or Marlborough, who would give it him.

  It was an hypothesis, anyway. And it described the actions of others as well as it did his own. Why had Princess Caroline summoned him from Boston? Why had Mr. Threader wanted to make a Clubb with him? Why did Roger want him to find the Longitude and Leibniz want him to make a thinking machine? Why did the likes of Saturn trail him through Hockley-in-the-Hole, asking for spiritual direction? Why did Isaac solicit his aid? Why did Mr. Baynes expect Daniel to look after his wayward daughter in Bridewell? Why were Colonel Barnes and Sergeant Shaftoe asking him these pointed questions today?

  Because they were all scared, and, just like Daniel, they longed for Hope, and sought anyone who might give it to them; and when they drew up their mental inventories of who was and wasn’t scared, why, somehow-through what was either a grotesque error or a miracle-they put Daniel in the “wasn’t scared” column.