THE System OF THE WORLD

by Neal Stephenson

  “No time for it. You hesitate on the threshold,” Bob said, “one part of you saying go with Jack, another saying you’ve no need of such a Vagabond wretch in your life. My voice bids you go in, Eliza, if a Sergeant may command a Duchess. The rabble beyond the fires, there, does not have the discipline or the discretion of these Jacobite riders. In a moment we may have open war here. Get inside! Stay near an exit. If you smell smoke, drop to your hands and knees, crawl out of the building, and run in any direction as fast as you can.”

  Bolingbroke’s House, Golden Square

  THE SAME TIME

  “WE POLITICIANS,” quoth Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, re-filling his goblet with port for the eleventh time, “are like men who live in frosty climes. It is the habit of such men that whenever they have nothing else to take up their time, they hie to the chopping-block, take up the axe, and set to work splitting and stacking cord-wood. They do it even in the heat of August, for they are ever driven by the memory of having been cold once. You and I have each had our days of bitter cold, Roger, and so whenever we are not otherwise busy, we go to work stacking up our political cord-wood. Each of us has a mountain of it. Other men, seeing the size of the woodpile, would call it enough, and leave off chopping. But you and I know ’tis meant to be burned, and shall burn quickly once lit. This whole Realm that we call the United Kingdom is one great pile of cord-wood now, or rather two piles, one called Whig and one called Tory. They are so near to each other that one cannot be lit without setting fire to the other. All that is wanted is tinder, and a spark. London is packed with tinder to-night, which is your doing, and mine: the militias, and the Mobb. They have been gathering round their bonfires in Hay Market, Holbourn, Smithfield, and Charing Cross, as we have stood here and watched them.”

  As Bolingbroke said this he drew Roger’s attention to the districts named, sweeping his arm from one great intersection to another. He spoke truly, for once. Overhead, the stars had come out. One minute they weren’t visible, the next they were. But they did not flare out all of a sudden, but asserted themselves quietly, as shoals rose from the sea while the tide ebbed. London this evening had become a constellation of bonfires in like fashion; they had not been lit at any one instant, yet every time Roger turned around and looked, there were more of them. Entire districts were dark, but between and among them was laced a flickering and pulsing net-work of fire, strewn, stretched, and rent like an old cobweb. Roger knew that like an old cobweb it was rooted, sticky, tenacious, no easy thing to sweep away. Really it had been present all the time, but invisible, like the strands of spider-silk one walks into in the dark. Fire only lit it up, and made glorious its immensity.

  He gazed far downriver, past the dome of St. Paul’s and the Monument to an old citadel by the side of the river, with a high, four-turreted keep in the middle: the Tower of London. It was dim and quiet tonight, for the Mint was idle. Tower Hill, the belt of open ground surrounding the moat, was speckled with bonfires. Roger lifted his gaze from that distraction and found the dark bulk of Legge Mount, thrust out toward the troublous City like a fist. Thence he indexed round the Tower walls anti-clockwise until he found Bloody Tower and Wakefield Tower, which were joined together side-by-side like misshapen conjoined twins, looking out over the Pool of London from the center of the southern wall. On the roof of each, a signal-fire had been kindled. Two fires, small sparks, easily resolved from this distance. One might have been just a fire. But two were a signal, sent by one who had an excellent view of goings-on in the Pool.

  “I don’t much care for your firewood similitude, Henry,” Roger said, “for it is too obviously meant to affright me. And moreover, I know what you are about to say next: that your pile of firewood is greater than mine. You cannot deter me now with such loose hobgoblin-talk about civil war. For as bad as that would be, what you propose in its place is worse: you would take us all the way back to the days of Bloody Mary.”

  “Not so, Roger, not so! His Royal Highness is a Catholic, true, but-”

  “As to the other thing, I am not yet overawed by your forces and your powers. Princess Caroline, whatever you might phant’sy about her, is not in London.”

  Bolingbroke laughed. “But, Roger, you told me, only an hour ago, that you had seen her through my telescope!”

  “But, Henry, I was lying.” It was Roger’s turn to take up the de-canter and replenish his glass. As he did, he turned his gaze south toward Hay Market. A contagion of bonfires had lately been spreading up and down its length, threatening to link up with a larger nexus in Charing Cross. They were particularly hot around the Italian Opera, which troubled Roger, for he’d put a lot of money into it, and did not want it burned down by a Mobb. His old eyes could not resolve individual figures from here, but he could see patterns: round and among the fires, dark currents swelled, ebbed, swirled, and splashed: the Mobb, yet wanting any clear purpose. But currents of order and purpose moved through the chaos, like rivers in the sea: disciplined groups, probably militia. The sight of it, so near to his beloved Opera, threw him into a woozy fit, and reminded him how much easier it would be to surrender to Bolingbroke.

  But then his eyes picked out a black corpuscle, moving up Hay Market with implacable purpose, gleaming like a bead of lacquer as it slalomed round bonfires. At the great cross with Piccadilly it made the turn that would angle it up Shug Lane toward Golden Square. He knew then that this was his phaethon, hurtling across London like a black panther through a forest fire. He could not know what message it conveyed; but something in its desperate speed gave him hope it might be good news.

  “We shall soon enough see whether you were lying then or now,” said Bolingbroke-who had taken a moment to regain his hauteur. “But I would speak to you of the other matter-of the Prince.”

  “George Louis of Hanover? Splendid chap.”

  “No, Roger. His royal highness James Stuart, who by right, even if not by law, is our next King.” He held up a hand. “The Queen has made up her mind, Roger. She cannot, will not abandon her own flesh and blood. She will make him her heir.”

  “Then let him have the china, the silver, the furniture for all I care. But not Great Britain. We are past this, Henry.”

  “We are never past what is right.”

  “Sometimes I phant’sy I am speaking to a medieval relic, when I talk to a Tory,” Roger said. “What magical quintessence do you suppose it is that imbues a Stuart with the right to reign over a country that hates him and that espouses a different religion!?”

  “The question is, shall we be ruled by Money, and the Mobb-which are one and the same to me, as neither serves any fixed principle-or by one who serves a higher good? That is the point of Royalty, Roger.”

  Roger paused. “ ’Tis an attractive prospect,” he said. “And I do understand, Henry. We are at a fork in the road just now. One way takes us to a wholly new way of managing human affairs. It is a system I have helped, in my small way, to develop: the Royal Society, the Bank of England, Recoinage, the Whigs, and the Hanoverian Succession are all elements of it. The other way leads us to Versailles, and the rather different scheme that the King of France has got going there. I am not blind to the glories of the Sun King. I know Versailles is better than anything we have here, in many ways that count. But for every respect in which we are inferior to France, some compensation is to be found in the new System a-building here.”

  “It is a bankrupt System already,” said Bolingbroke. “Come, it grows chilly up here, I have certain matters to attend to in my study.”

  He insisted that Roger precede him through the door and down the attic stairway. Presently they came to a small study on the second floor of the house, which had a view over Golden Square that must be pleasant in the daytime. Now, Golden Square had a view of them, for Bolingbroke had left the curtains open, and many lights burning. On the rooftop observatory they’d had privacy; it had been like the backstage of a theatre, where actors banter, out of character, before they go on.

  But n
ow they were on. Their audience was everyone in Golden Square. This included some late arrivals, who’d just drawn up in a phaethon. Roger could hear an argument beginning to catch fire between one who had just emerged from the carriage, and a servant of Bolingbroke’s who had gone out to meet them. Clasping his hands behind his back Roger ambled over to a window and looked down to see Sir Isaac Newton saying something peremptory to Bolingbroke’s butler, who was nodding and shrugging a lot-but not budging. Daniel Waterhouse paced slowly back and forth behind Newton, seeming at once agitated and bored.

  Meanwhile Bolingbroke had gone straight to a standing desk-which had been situated directly in front of another window-where a gloriously ingrossed document was laid out, complete in every particular save that it wanted a signature.

  “Gentlemen do not speak of money, as a rule…”

  “Beg pardon, Henry?”

  “I was remarking a minute ago that your System is already bankrupt. I did not wish you to think me uncouth.”

  “Furthest thing from my mind. But I do say, it is a bit stuffy with all these lights burning-mind if I open a window?”

  “Please make yourself comfortable here, Roger. It will soon be very warm for you everywhere else. I have here a warrant, to be issued by the Privy Council to-morrow, calling for a Trial of the Pyx.”

  Roger was standing sideways to Bolingbroke, sliding up the window-sash. It shuddered as it rose, and caught the attention of Daniel Waterhouse outside. Daniel glanced away for an instant, then snapped back to stare at Roger.

  “It pains me to stoop to this, Roger. But the bankruptcy of the Whigs is financial as well as moral and intellectual; and the insolvency of their accounts and the debasement of their money is a menace to the Realm. It must out.”

  Roger scarcely heard this. It was more speech than conversation, and besides, he knew what Bolingbroke was going to say before he said it. Roger was trying to work out a way to exchange a few words, at least, with good old Daniel, who was but a dozen feet below and twenty distant. Daniel had a preoccupied look, and was moving about curiously on the street, apparently trying to work clear of some shrubs and tree-branches that reached between him and Roger’s window.

  “I am placing my signature upon the warrant now,” said Bolingbroke above scratching noises. “You may be my witness.”

  Roger turned his head to watch Bolingbroke marring the parchment, making the quill hop and skip across the page, like a dancer en pointe, as he dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s.

  Then something whacked Roger on the side of the face. It thudded to the floor.

  “What did you say, Roger?”

  Roger blinked haze out of the impacted eye, and squatted down to pluck the missile off the floor. He knew it immediately. Hefting it in the palm of his hand, he strolled over to the desk, where Bolingbroke was blotting ink.

  “Henry, since you have such a fascination with coins and coining, I thought you might like to have this as a souvenir of this evening. You might like to take it off to exile in France.”

  “Exile in France? What on earth are you talking about?”

  “Your future, Henry, and mine.” Roger clapped the object-still warm from Daniel’s pocket-down atop the gaudy Warrant. It was a leathern bundle, sewn shut, written on in ink, and heavy as only gold could be.

  “A Sinthia from the Pyx,” Roger announced. “There are more, many more, where this came from. Jack the Coiner is ours. He has yielded all, and told all.”

  The Italian Opera

  THE SAME TIME

  SERGEANT BOB HAD given her good counsel, which was to seek refuge in the Opera, and not be swayed one way or the other by the knowledge that Jack was in the place. She moved quickly through the lobby, trying not to spy herself in any of the mirrors. The pins that had held her hair up underneath the Caroline-wig had either been torn out, or had gotten skewed around so that they dug at her scalp and tugged at her hair. She drew them out as she ran and let them tinkle to the floor, then gathered up her loose hair and whipped it around into a loose overhand knot behind her neck. Music beckoned: a strange sound on a night such as this. It meant Order and Beauty, two items that were in short supply in London generally, tonight particularly. She moved toward it, skidding on a thin spoor of blood that, she guessed, had dribbled from de Gex’s wounded hand. It led away through a little door in the corner of the lobby. This blood-trail had already been smudged, here and there, by footprints: Jack pursuing de Gex. So, if her desire was to watch those two men fight with swords, she knew which way to go. But more appealing was the music of violins and violincellos: the modern instruments that could fill a whole opera-house with sound, be the acoustics never so wretched. She passed through a grand gilded door and into a dim foyer, redolent of Mr. Allcroft’s Royal Essence for the Hair of the Head and Perriwigs. From there she entered into the back of the auditorium.

  The house was sixty feet wide, and fifty from where Eliza came in to the front of the orchestra pit, where a man in a wig was standing with his back to her, moving a staff up and down in time with the music. The floor was scored into semicircular tracks by low walls that sprang in concentric arcs from one side-wall to the other, all focused inwards on center front stage. It recalled a Greek amphitheatre, without the weather and without the Greeks. An aisle ran down the middle in a straight line connecting Eliza to the man with the staff. She began to walk down that aisle. Bob had recommended she stay near an exit, in case the theatre should be torched by the Mobb; but the musicians did not suspect they were in any peril, and she ought to warn them. It would have been reasonable to shout out an alarum from the back of the house. But theatre-etiquette had somehow taken over from street-instincts, and she was disinclined to make a fuss. By the time she reached the place where she could rest her arms on the top of the little parapet that enclosed the orchestra pit, the music seemed to be drawing to some sort of coda; the up-and-down movement of the conductor’s staff became more pronounced, and when he feared that matters were getting out of hand, he allowed it to slip down in his grip, so that it produced an audible thump on the floor with every beat.

  The music stopped.

  “Herr Handel,” Eliza said, for she had recognized the conductor, “pardon me, but-”

  She was interrupted by a voice from the stage, incredibly loud. It was Sir Epicure Mammon in the latest fashions, prancing across a London square with his dodgy sidekick, Surly.

  Come on, sir. Now, you set your foot on shore

  In novo orbe; here’s the rich Peru;

  And there within sir,

  [gesturing at the front of a noble town-house fronting on the square] are the golden mines, Great Solomon’s Ophir!

  Eliza cowered for a moment-those theatre-going habits again. Then she returned to the pit wall to discover Georg Friedrich Handel looking at her, a bit slack-jawed. Having confirmed that this really was the Duchess of Arcachon-Qwghlm, albeit in a state of deshabille only dreamed of by most gentlemen, he executed a perfect court-bow, deploying his conducting-staff as counterbalance.

  “I am sorry, I did not understand that this was a full rehearsal!” she exclaimed.

  Behind Epicure Mammon and Surly, a carpenter was kneeling down to tack a bit of stage-dressing in place, and to one side, a painter was daubing away at a trompe l’?il sky. Mammon scowled at her. She raised a hand to her mouth in apology.

  “My lady,” exclaimed Handel, reverting, in his astonishment, to German, “what has brought you here?”

  “This night,” insisted Mammon, “I’ll change all that is metal in thy house, to gold. And early in the morning, will I send to all the plumbers, and the pewterers, and buy their tin, and lead up; and to Lothbury, for all the copper.”

  “What, and turn that, too?” asked Surly, expertly feigning amazement, but at the same time, somehow managing to favor Eliza with a wink; Mammon might scorn her, but Surly knew a beautiful woman when he saw one.

  “Yes,” said Sir Epicure Mammon, “and I’ll purchase Devonshire, and Cornwall, a
nd make them perfect Indies! You admire now?”

  “No, faith,” said Surly. But he muttered the line distractedly. Having Eliza below was bad enough; but, too, it was impossible to ignore the uncouth noises off from stage right: blurted exclamations, grunts, and ring of steel on steel. Even the musicians, who had been transfixed, for a few moments, by the apparition of a Duchess, had begun turning their heads to look.

  The stage of the Italian Opera was uncommonly deep, making it famous among those who loved magnificent sets, and infamous among those who wanted to hear the words. A vast canvas had been stretched across the back of it, and painted to look like an idealized vision of Golden Square, stretching off into a hazy distance; before it, model town-houses had been erected, to perfect the illusion. It tricked the eye very well until a bloody, slashed-up man vaulted over the parapets and rolled to the ground in the deep upstage; he looked like a giant, thirty feet tall, fe-fi-fo-fumming around Golden Square and bleeding on the bowling-green. Which was most inexplicable, until a moment later the very fabric of the Universe was rent open; for a blade of watered steel had been shoved through the taut canvas upstage, and slashed across it in a great arc, tearing the heavens asunder. Through the gap leapt Jack Shaftoe; and then giants duelled in Golden Square.

  Jack had a blade that would slash through limbs as if they were melons, but it was heavy and slow. With his tiny small-sword, de Gex could not slash, but he could poke a man through in five places before the victim could say “ouch.” Jack kept humming his scimitar through the space separating him from de Gex, to keep the other from advancing in range for a fatal lunge. De Gex maneuvered round those terrifying cuts, though diverse slashes on his arms suggested he had only just avoided some. He was studying Jack, awaiting the one mistake that would give him an opening to lunge through.