THE System OF THE WORLD

by Neal Stephenson

  Epicure Mammon and Surly had conceded center stage to the duellists, and now stood at the edges of the proscenium-bit players, forgotten. The painter and the carpenter were on their feet, each torn between fear of the blades, and lust to avenge the damage wreaked on their work by Jack and de Gex respectively. It presently became clear that each of the duellists had a strategy as well as tactics. De Gex was waiting for Jack to become exhausted, which must happen soon. Jack was backing de Gex towards the brink of the stage; this would put him in a position to be hacked to pieces, unless he wanted to chance a jump down into the pit. Understanding this well enough, the musicians had already gone into motion: the violins and woodwinds were crowding into the corner farthest from de Gex and filing out through a door, not far from Eliza, that gave access to the floor of the house. The cellists and bassists were trying to decide between saving themselves, and saving their instruments. Handel was absolutely disgusted. “Get back in your chairs, all of you! You are being paid for five acts, not two!” But de Gex’s boots were already at the edge of the stage, his blood was dripping onto the kettledrums, with faint sounds like reports of distant cannons, and the pit was depopulated. Handel tried to collar a fleeing cellist, and wound up holding a cello. Eliza passed its owner on his way out as she was going in. For she feared Handel did not reck the danger. She rushed across the pit and divested him of the cello and set it down on its tail-pin, cradling its narrow neck in her hand. “Let us find a way out,” she said. She reached to place her hand on his epaulet but grasped only air, for the composer was storming toward the kettledrums. “Let us leave these very dangerous men to-”

  But all was now overturned in an instant. Jack had got de Gex where he wanted him, and was winding up for a death-blow, when the painter ducked in, and flung a whole bucket of white paint into Jack’s face.

  There was a moment of stillness. Then de Gex began hopping round into a new position: he’d been ready for a leap into the percussion section, and now needed to make a lunge for Jack’s heart. He had nearly gotten ready when Handel, standing below him in the pit, tossed his staff straight up, caught the end of it in both hands, and swung it round in a mighty hay-maker, catching one of de Gex’s shins with such violence that the blood-slick foot was knocked back and off the edge of the stage. The rest of de Gex shortly followed. He made a flailing backwards fall into a kettledrum. One leg and an arm-his sword-arm-ruptured the drumhead and ended up beneath him in the immense copper kettle. The other limbs sprawled over its rim like claws of a lobster that does not wish to be cooked.

  Handel had been left off-balance by his mighty swing. De Gex lashed out with his free hand and caught the composer’s lace cravat in a bloody grip. He jerked hard, desperately trying to pull himself out. Eliza reacted before she could think. Her free hand dropped to the bridge of the cello. She raised it on high as her other hand levered the neck down toward the floor, and she launched it across the pit in a high arc. It rotated as it hurtled through apogee, and came down like a javelin, its whole weight concentrated behind the tail-pin. When it stopped, it was sitting on de Gex’s chest. It lodged there at an angle, emitting a spectral chord as the life sighed out of de Gex. He let go of Handel’s cravat.

  The composer picked up his staff from the floor and righted his periwig. “Fifth page, second bar!” he called out. But the musicians were slow to return.

  Eliza looked up and found a burst of paint where Jack had been, and a trail of white footprints leading out to backstage and Unicorn Court.

  She was thinking about the prophecy Jack had alluded to. Jack styled it a prophecy, anyway; in her mind, it had been more in the nature of a blunt promise. She had spoken it to Jack twelve years ago, in the Petit Salon of the Hotel Arcachon in Paris, with Louis XIV as witness. Most inconveniently, she had forgot the exact wording of it. It had been something along the lines of that Jack would never see her face nor hear her voice until the day he died. Eliza being something of a stickler for promises and commitments, she now reviewed the last few minutes’ events in her mind, and satisfied herself that this one had not yet been broken. At no time had Jack gotten a look at her, for his gaze had been fixed on de Gex the whole time, or at least until he’d gotten a bucket of paint in the face. And she had not spoken any words he was likely to have heard.

  And now he was gone, and could neither hear nor see her.

  She turned around to face the house. Musicians and Actors had withdrawn to the farthest corners, and were looking to her, as if for a cue.

  “It is safe now,” she announced. “Jack Shaftoe has left the building.”

  Golden Square

  THE SAME TIME

  “YOU TOLD HIM WHAT!?” said Daniel.

  “You heard me,” said Roger; then, when he had grown weary of Daniel’s gape and stare, “Really.”

  “Really? What does that mean?”

  “You are so tediously parson-like sometimes. I think it must be the lingering influence of Drake.”

  “I am being pragmatic. What if Bolingbroke demands proof that we have Jack? I haven’t the faintest idea where the man is.”

  “Daniel, look about you.”

  Daniel did. He and Roger were at a corner of Golden Square, down the way a bit from Bolingbroke’s house, in a sort of caravan-camp of pricey coaches and good horses: the field headquarters of Whigdom. Isaac had already gone home in the phaethon. Mohawks were galloping hither and cantering thither proclaiming news, and shaking encyphered writs. The house of Bolingbroke was desolate: the curtains and shutters had been drawn, most lights had been snuffed, and it was not really known whether Bolingbroke himself was still in the place. Rumor had it he’d gone to his club.

  “Behold,” Roger said, “we have won.”

  “How do you know that!?”

  “I can just tell.”

  “How?”

  “I saw it in his face.”

  Roger excused himself, not by word, or by gesture, but by somehow changing, for a moment, the way his eyes looked at Daniel. He strolled over to a little war party of Mohawks who were standing near their horses, and addressed them: “We have won. Let the word go forth; light the beacons.” He then turned round and began making his way toward some cluster of notables. The Mohawks behind him began hip-hip-hooraying, and pretty soon everyone in Golden Square was doing it.

  Daniel was slow to take up the cheer. But when he did, he meant it. This was politics. It was ugly, it was irrational, but it was preferable to war. Roger was being cheered because he had won. What did it mean to win? It meant being cheered. So Daniel huzzahed, as lustily as his dry pipes and creaky ribs would permit, and was astounded to see the way people came a-running: not only the Quality from their town-houses, but hooligans and Vagabonds from bonfire-strewn fields to the north, to throng around Roger and cheer him. Not because they agreed with his positions, or even knew who he was, but because he was plainly enough the man of the hour.

  Billingsgate Dock

  A BIT LATER

  “IT IS A WONDER,” exclaimed Johann von Hacklheber, wrapping an arm tight round Caroline’s waist, and lifting her off the brink of the wharf, “how many people will do favors for one who is expected to be the next Queen of England.” He was ankle-deep in Thames-water on Billingsgate Stair; severed fish-heads nuzzled his boot and ogled Caroline’s bum as he toddled round and got in position to set her into the waiting longboat. She had her arm round his neck very tight, as if meaning to shut him up by stuffing one of her breasts into his mouth. He did not complain, but only gripped her buttock that much tighter through her breeches. All of these mutual gropings could be excused on grounds that the Princess must not be allowed to fall into the cold stew of fish-innards that was Billingsgate Dock. It was a chancy maneuver; the night was dark and the steps slick. Johann thought he was being decorous enough. But the thirty or so men who had brought Caroline here, in a royal progress of coaches, sedan-chairs, and out-riders, were having none of it. They were all drunk as lords. As a matter of fact, to judge by the escut
cheons gilded onto their carriage-doors, most of them were lords. There was no aspect of the scene on the stairs that was not suggestive, to them, of something.

  “I smell fish!” one of them shouted. And there were a hundred other remarks, most of them a good deal more direct and to the point.

  “Gentlemen!” Johann shouted, once Caroline was in the longboat, and her tit was out of his gob. “We are at Billingsgate, it is true; but this does not mean you must try to out-do the fishwives in execration. They are not here now. Return in the day-time and woo them then.”

  “I say, who are these fishwives?” exclaimed someone, so intoxicated that his tongue was swishing around in his mouth like a mop in a bucket. “He makes them sound like very merry wenches indeed.” He snorted a great draught of that bracing fish-market atmosphere into his nostrils. “And I do fancy their perfume.”

  Johann was getting it from both directions now. “You are too cynical, love,” said Caroline from the longboat, “and now you see I am pouting like a great big fish. They are gallant, nothing more. They do not even believe I am a Princess! They think I am a whore who came for Dr. Waterhouse.”

  “They know perfectly well who you are,” said Johann. He offered a bow, sarcastically obsequious, to the men of the Kit-Cat Clubb, who stood above them at the top of the stairs, all spread out in a tableau, but difficult to make out in the dark-like a group portrait of themselves gone almost black from tobacco-smoke.

  The bow was returned many-fold, but Johann saw none of it, as he had turned to vault over the gunwale into the longboat. Caroline was waving to them-somehow even that made them think of indecent things and spew libidinous ravings up and down the dock.

  “We truly are safe from exposure now,” Johann muttered. “For those men, when they are sober, shall be ashamed to relate this story, and no one would believe it if they did.”

  The longboat was unnecessarily large for its present mission, viz. to ferry a Baron and a Princess to a ship in the Pool. It had five oars on a side, and ten stout sailors to swing them. As such it could quickly out-distance a waterman’s boat, or most other craft that might try to pursue them. Johann and Caroline sat up in the bow to stay clear of the rowers.

  “I am glad you had the wit to come here directly,” Johann said.

  “Not so directly, for I was made to be the object of several toasts in the Kit-Cat Clubb,” she said.

  Indeed, the toasting was not over yet. Enough time had elapsed, since it had become evident that she was going to depart by water, for the following to have been improvised by one of the crowd of domesticated poets who went round with Kit-Cats.

  Off the sea came Aphrodite,

  To the Greeks whose lust was mighty.

  Soft of wit and firm of P-,

  Romans worshipped foam-borne Venus.

  ’Pon the River dark as wine,

  Rides Britons’ love-queen, Caroline.

  “That is lovely,” Johann said. “It appears that Dr. Waterhouse shall have some explaining to do, at his Clubb.”

  “As shall I,” Caroline said, “to my husband.”

  From Billingsgate a lone wag was chanting

  May her Womb

  Be Popery’s Tomb

  But pray the German

  Keeps his sperm in.

  He was immediately shouted down by indignant, even scandalized Kit-Cats. Really! Some chaps knew no bounds! Someone drew a sword halfway, and made a great show of having to be restrained, all the while glancing river-wards to be sure his gallantry was being noted by Caroline. But the longboat had been swallowed by shadow, from their point of view. The sword-fight fizzled. The Kit-Cat Caravan began to mount up: and so the last they saw of the Clubb were scintillations of cut-crystal stirrup-cups and of the silver trays on which they were brought around, faint as gleaming of fish-scales on the black waters that lapped at Billingsgate Stairs.

  “I pray that we are vanishing from their ken as much as they from ours,” Johann said. “We are going downriver some miles to make rendezvous with a sloop that rides at anchor before Greenwich. If we board the sloop quickly and get underway without delay, perhaps no one shall know that your royal highness is aboard.”

  “It is all a great farce,” was Princess Caroline’s verdict. In the darkness she could not see Johann collapsing, but she could see the air coming out of him. “I am sorry,” she said.

  “On the contrary. La belle dame sans merci is a role that becomes you-’twill serve you well when you are Queen, and Greenwich is one of your country houses.”

  “I am being without mercy to myself,” Caroline said, “not just to you. It was stupid for me to have come to England.”

  “On the contrary-you were not safe, in Hanover, from that assassin.”

  “That assassin, who followed me to London without the least difficulty,” Caroline said, “and might be preying on Eliza at this very moment.”

  “She is my mother, you do not need to remind me,” Johann said. “But she knew you as a little child. When has she ever held back from letting you know her mind? If she felt, or if I did, that your being in London was unwise, we would have said so.”

  “But I am entitled to form my own views. I say that I stayed too long.”

  “Naturally it will seem so, when we are departing in such haste-it would be better if you had left a week ago, in leisurely fashion. But we could not have anticipated any of this then.”

  “How long has it been since Sophie’s funeral? Six weeks. By the time we are back in Hanover, make it seven or eight weeks.”

  “That is not such a terribly long time for a grief-stricken Princess to be absent from Court.”

  “From Court and from Husband.”

  “Husband has other ways of sating himself.”

  “I wonder about that,” said. “After what happened that night, can he have kept Henrietta Braithwaite as maitresse-en-titre? Or will he have sent her packing, and acquired a new one? Or-?”

  “Or what?”

  “Or will he be looking forward to the return of his long-absent wife? His letters, lately, have been more interesting.”

  “More interesting than what? Or than who? Stay, you need not answer, we have gone into a place where angels fear to tread.”

  “It is a place where you went, knowingly and willingly, when you wooed a married Princess.”

  Johann was silent.

  “There, you see? Now again I am la belle dame sans merci. I hope you fancy her.”

  “That I do,” Johann said, “stupid plodding knight-errant that I am.”

  “Brave magnificent shining knight,” Caroline said, “who needs to keep his visor closed, when he is whingeing.”

  That was the end of conversation for a while. The row down the Thames was long. Caroline struggled against drowsiness, and fought the urge to nestle up against Johann. Some of the time, negotiating the crowded Pool was a bit like running through a forest in the dark. At other times, watchmen on anchored ships mistook them for mudlarks, and shone lanterns at them, and aimed threats and blunderbusses their way. But as they rounded the bend before Rotherhithe and swept down along the Isle of Dogs, the ships became fewer and larger. Though the oarsmen were tired, the boat picked up speed, as it could now run down the current on a straighter course. Now that they had broken free from the noise and clutter of the city, they perceived small matters that before would have been lost among other impressions: bonfires being kindled upon hilltops, and riders galloping down the streets that flanked the river to right and left. It was impossible not to phant’sy that the fires and the riders alike bore strange information out of the city, into the country and down the river to the sea. Signal-fires on Channel cliffs might even speed news to the Continent this night. But what the news consisted of, and whether it be true or false, could not be known to the refugees on the longboat.

  The transfer to the sloop went quickly, as Johann had hoped. The anchor was taken up and sails raised to catch what feeble breeze there was. Thus began a strange night-journey down th
e river, which to Caroline was a continuation of the longboat-passage, with everything spread out on a larger field: for queues of bonfires continued to grow across the countryside, radiating outwards from the city, and not a minute went by that her ears did not collect the faint report of galloping hooves on the post-road. In the end she only lulled herself to sleep by telling herself that this sloop, gliding silently down the dark river bearing a mysterious passenger, must be as sinister and disturbing to the riders on those horses, and the watchers on the hilltops, as they were to her; and perhaps with good reason, since (as she still had to remind herself) she intended to rule the country some day.

  Sophia, Mouth of the Thames

  MORNING OF THURSDAY, 29 JULY 1714

  HANOVER WAS LANDLOCKED. Its greatest body of water was a three-mile-wide puddle. The rich might invest in, the rash might sail on, proper ships; but they had to travel abroad to Bremerhaven first. For most Hanoverians, the preferred way of getting to the other side of a body of water was to wait for it to freeze, then sprint across. Sophia, the sloop that Caroline and Johann had boarded in the dead of night off the Isle of Dogs, was technically a Hanoverian vessel, in that she carried impressive-looking documents asserting that she was. But the crew consisted mostly of boys from Friesland, the skipper was an Antwerp Protestant named Ursel, and the lads who had muscled the oars of the longboat last night had been hired, along with the boat, from a Danish whaler that was having her hull scraped in Rotherhithe. Those Danes were now waking up with sore backs in East London. Much water, some fresh and some brackish, had passed beneath Sophia’s keel in the meantime.

  Left to form her own opinions, Caroline might have judged that they were now out in the sea, and well on their way to Antwerp. The fog made it impossible to see more than a stone’s throw in any direction, but Sophia was being shouldered from one brawny roller to the next like a child being passed around by a crowd at a hanging. The temperature had dropped (which, as the Natural Philosopher in her knew, must account for the fog), and the air smelled different. But that this was pure landlubberly foolishness could be known by watching Ursel, who was no happier, here and now, than a Hanoverian, half-way across the Steinhuder Meer, when the ice he is treading on begins to crack and tilt. “This is why no one does this,” he said to Johann, in a pidgin halfway between Dutch and German.