What had ruined it all was the appearance of Monsieur Kohan. Most likely he was a lunatick; but indisputably he knew about the so-called Solomonic Gold, and looked forward to the day when every last ounce of it would be delivered to his custody in St. Petersburg. Whether or not Alchemy was claptrap, some believed in it, and some of them happened to be important, even dangerous. It might have been foolish for Daniel to have swallowed the phantastickal conceit that the heavy gold was infused with divine quintessence. But it would have suggested safer actions, which, had they been taken, would have led to simpler ends.
“That is a very remarkable thing, your Tsarish Majesty,” said Isaac, “and explains much that until this moment has been obscured from me.”
The front door of the tavern was kicked open. A huge man was standing there.
All went black, which Daniel, given his age, and his level of anxiety, was inclined to put down as resulting from the sort of devastating neurological event that was normally followed in a few minutes or hours by massive swelling of the brain and death.
On second thought, he was perfectly fine. Saturn had gripped the edge of the table and flung it up in the air whilst rising to his feet. The table-twelve feet long, and a hundred pounds of thick fir deals-had flipped up to create a barrier between all those sitting on that side of it, and the tavern’s entrance. But only for an instant; then, as Newton might have predicted, gravity had its way, and the table fell edge-first to the floor. The number of toes broken on impact would be difficult to estimate, for it came down in between the two rows of men who had been sitting across from each other. Daniel looked down to see a quivering shaft, eight feet long if it was an inch, embedded in the tabletop. It had struck the table with such violence that its honed steel tip (for it seemed to be some sort of spear, or harpoon) had penetrated the entire thickness of the wood, and burst out the other side for an inch or two, creating a little wigwam of splinters lit from within by the gleam of the metal. Standing up (for everyone was getting to his feet) and bending forward a bit to see the other side, Daniel got a moment’s horrifying glimpse of a human head impaled and spiked to the table. Then he understood it was nothing more than Leibniz’s periwig. For the harpoon (it was clearly a harpoon) had passed through a narrow space between the two greatest brains in the world, albeit closer to Leibniz’s, so that it had snagged the outer bulwarks of his out-moded, double-wide wig, and stripped it clean off his pate. The missile would have hurtled over the table and straight into the Tsar’s chest if Saturn had not had the presence of mind to flip the table up.
So now there was a second awkward silence. The harpooneer was still standing in the doorway, in a deflated posture. His beard was almost as long as that of Solomon Kohan. One of his arms had been truncated near the elbow and enhanced with a prosthesis, which looked heavy.
“It is him,” cried Mr. Kikin, “Yevgeny the Raskolnik! Where is my bodyguard when finally I need him!?”
“You do not need him, sir,” said Saturn, stepping over the table, and reaching down to grip the shaft of the harpoon, “for as a long-time resident of Hockley-in-the-Hole, I take it as a personal affront that such incivility has been shown to our guest.” He jerked the harpoon-shaft free from its steel head, which was going to remain embedded in the table for a long time. “I do view it as a personal obligation to now stave in the head of this Yevgeny.” Saturn took a step towards the door, and Yevgeny took a step back, to get out in the clear and gain some melee-room; but Saturn’s attack was arrested when a hand even larger than his closed over the harpoon-staff, and took it from him. “Your willingness is duly noted by his Tsarish Majesty,” Kikin explained in a hurry, “but the conflict is strictly a Russians-versus-Russians sort of affair, most difficult to explain, and honor dictates that it be settled without em-broiling our gracious hosts. Pray be seated and talk amongst yourselves.” And he rushed out the door in pursuit of the Tsar.
Further developments were obscured by the crowd that gathered instantly around any conflict in this district, be it bulls vs. terriers or Tsars vs. Raskolniks. Out the window they could see only a lot of blokes’ backs. Owing to the exceptional height of the combatants, they were from time to time able to glimpse a whirling quarter-stave, a hurtling flail, or a spray of blood silhouetted against the sky. But for the most part the progress of the duel had to be guessed at from watching the spectators, who moved in curious sympathy with the combatants. In much the same way as a man playing at lawn-bowls will twist and lean his body this way and that, as if he could thereby influence the course of a ball that has already left his hand, so those fight-watchers, almost in unison, juked and jived their shoulders and pelvises this way and that as they saw an opportunity to strike a blow, or cringed, smarted, and groaned when one was struck.
Saturn had been quite let down when Peter had disarmed him and gone forth into the fray. He did not recover for a minute or so; then, bewitched by the eldritch sympathy that conjoined all of the spectators, he squared his shoulders and headed for the exit, saying: “It has been great fun having the Tsar here incognito, but I suppose it was inevitable that word would get out and that this sort of thing would start to happen.”
Of the group who’d been sitting round the table, the only ones now left were Daniel, Isaac, Leibniz, and (in the corner, a bit removed from the others) Solomon Kohan. The table itself, of course, was still resting on one edge.
“Had I not heard it direct from the Tsar,” said Isaac to Daniel, “I could never have credited such a conceit: that, after all that has passed between us-”
“All that has passed between me and you, Isaac, is as nothing compared against the doings and machinations and skullduggery attending the damned gold. As to myself, I no longer give a fig where it goes. I would have been happy to give it all to you, until a few hours ago, for I phant’sied you were the only man on earth who knew of it, or cared.”
“And what has changed so much in the last few hours?” Isaac asked, quite shocked.
“There is now, in the Ointment, not merely a Fly, but a Praying Mantis,” said Daniel, nodding in the direction of the Peter-melee, “and one equipped with a mind that is excellent, not only by the standards of Mantises, but of men. He has claimed the Solomonic Gold. I am sorry.”
Daniel now gave a few moments’ thought to whether he should try to introduce Solomon, and how; but Isaac had got to his feet and stalked away. As Isaac went out the tavern-door he brushed past a chap who was coming in. Though this was not the most noble person who had ever set foot in the establishment (an honor that would have to go to Peter, or-who knows?-Solomon), he was unquestionably the best-dressed, and identifiable, from a thousand yards, as a courtier. Daniel, pent up behind the table, waved one arm in the air until he got the attention of the newcomer, who approached, looking befuddled. “Was that-?”
“Sir Isaac Newton? Yes. Daniel Waterhouse at your service.”
“Frightfully sorry to intrude,” said the courtier, “but word has reached the Household that an Important Man has come to London incognito.”
“It is true.”
“From Muscovy, ’tis said.”
“Also true.”
“The Lady of said Household is deathly ill. On her behalf, I have come to greet the said Gentleman, and to observe the requisite formalities.”
Daniel nodded out the window toward the melee. “As we say in Boston: get in line.”
“Look for the chap in the sable hat,” said Leibniz in French, “that is the chamberlain, you may take it up with him.”
The courtier bowed and left.
“As may be obvious,” Leibniz said, “my coming to London was brought about by force majeure, and was not part of any coherent plan. But as long as I am here, I thought I might stay on a bit, and try to patch matters up with Newton.”
“Then I am sorry to tell you,” Daniel said, “that your timing could not have been worse, for this matter of the gold will make it all much more complicated than you appreciate.”
He was afr
aid he would now have to enter into discussion of Alchemy; but Leibniz nodded and said, “I knew a gentleman in Leipzig, also very interested in this gold.”
“The heavy gold is of great political importance here, in that it could mean the difference between Newton’s surviving a Trial of the Pyx, or not.” And here he was forced to explain a great deal concerning Jack the Coiner, Bolingbroke, and the Clubb.
On balance, Leibniz seemed to take it as good news: “It sounds as if this difficulty can be cleared up, then. If this deal that you negotiated with Jack goes through as planned, Newton shall get what he requires to survive the Trial of the Pyx; and if not, why, how difficult can it possibly be to track down this gang of coiners when Newton, Waterhouse, and Leibniz are numbered among the thief-takers, and when two of the master-criminals-Edouard de Gex and Yevgeny the Thief-taker-have recently been slain in brawls?” For it was plain that the melee outside was over, and if the Tsar had lost, they probably would have heard about it by now.
“I find it difficult to believe, Gottfried, that, at this point in your career, what you really want to do is hang around the worst parts of London pursuing a band of criminals.”
“All right, I admit it’s only a pretext.”
“What then is your real reason?”
“I would attempt, one last time, to attain some reconciliation with Newton, and to settle the calculus dispute in some way that is not squalid.”
“A much sounder and nobler motive,” Daniel said. “Now, let me explain to you why it shall not work, and why you should simply go home.” And then he did, against his better judgment, discourse of Alchemy for a little while, explaining that Newton’s desire to control the Solomonic Gold arose not simply out of a practical need to survive the Trial of the Pyx but out of a quest to obtain the Philosophick Mercury and the Philosopher’s Stone.
But it was to no avail. It only confirmed Leibniz’s desire to remain in London. “If what you are saying is true, Daniel, it means that the root of the problem is a philosophical confusion on Newton’s part. And as I need not explain to you, it is the same confusion that underlies our disputes in the realm of Natural Philosophy.”
“On the contrary, Gottfried, I think that the question of who invented the calculus first is very much one of the who-did-what-to-whom type; a what-did-you-know-and-when-did-you-know-it sort of affair.”
“Daniel, it is true, is it not, that Newton kept his calculus work secret for decades?”
Daniel assented, very grudgingly. He was perfectly aware that to admit to any premise in a conversation with Leibniz would lead to a Socratic bear-trap banging shut on his leg a few minutes later.
“Who started the Acta Eruditorum, Daniel?”
“You, and that other chap. Listen, I stipulate that Newton tends to hide his work while you are very forward in publishing yours.”
“And hiding one’s results-restricting them to dissemination among a tiny fraternity-is a characteristic of what group?”
“The Esoteric Brotherhood.”
“Otherwise known as-?”
“Alchemists,” Daniel snapped.
“So the priority dispute would never have arisen if Sir Isaac Newton were not thoroughly infected with the the mentality of Alchemy.”
“Granted,” Daniel sighed.
“So it is a philosophical dispute. Daniel, I am an old man. I’ve not been in London since 1677. What are the chances I shall ever return? And Newton-who has never set foot outside of England-will not come to me. I shall not have another opportunity to meet with him. I will remain in London incognito-no one need never know I was here-and find some way to engage Newton in Philosophick discourse and help him out of the labyrinth in which he has wandered for so many years. It is a labyrinth without a roof, affording a clear view of the stars and the moon, which he understands better than any man; but behold, when Newton lowers his gaze to what is near to hand, he finds himself trapped and a-mazed in dark serpentine ways.”
Daniel gave up. “Then consider yourself a member of our Clubb,” he said. “You have my vote. Neither Kikin nor Orney shall dare with-old his support from a savant whose pate still glows with the knuckle-prints of Peter the Great. Newton would doubtless vote against you. But he came to a separate peace with the Clubb’s quarry a few evenings since, and no longer has any reason to attend our meetings.”
YEVGENY THE RASKOLNIK had fallen like a tree in the dust of Hockley-in-the-Hole. From the looks of things he had given a fine account of himself. In this posture, viz. lying on his back, his face to the sky and framed in the iron-gray burst of his hair, it was obvious that he must be close to sixty years old. Had he been closer to Peter’s age (the Tsar was forty-two) and in possession of both of his arms, the fight might have gone differently. As it was, Daniel could only interpret this as a spectacular form of suicide. He could not help but wonder whether Yevgeny knew about today’s transfer of the gold from Minerva, and had somehow taken the notion into his head that, as a result, his time in the world was finished.
“This was an odd bloke, who was loyal to Jack for many years, but went his own way in recent years, and tried to burn the Tsar’s new ships in Rotherhithe even as he was conniving with Jack to invade the Tower and sully the Pyx,” Daniel explained to Leibniz. “He was a great villain. But it is a shame to see him, or anyone, lying thus unattended.” At that moment, though, he spied Saturn approaching, with a few lads behind him and an empty wagon.
Daniel, Leibniz, and Solomon caught up with Peter and his entourage at Clerkenwell Court, just as they were mounting up to travel back to Rotherhithe. Daniel sent with them a note to Mr. Orney, giving him the news that the incendiary who had attacked his shipyard was dead. Leibniz took his leave of the Tsar, and Solomon promised to rejoin the party later at Orney’s. For it would take a few days to inspect and take delivery of the new ships, and to man them; then they would sail directly into combat against the Swedes in the Baltic. Then the Tsar and his company departed.
Daniel did not know why, but he now felt more energetic than at any time in the last few weeks. Perhaps that was what made a Tsar a Tsar: the ability to move those around him to great exertions. Perhaps the sight of the dead Yevgeny had reminded Daniel, as if he needed it, that he should not live forever. Or perhaps it was a simple desire to get the Solomonic Gold moving, to get it out of his possession as fast as he could. Others who toiled in the Court of Technologickal Arts seemed to feel likewise, for suddenly-after having avoided the place for nearly a week, because of Whig/Tory strife and Hanging-shenanigans-they began to show up and pry the planks off the fronts of their little workshops around the Court and heave the dust-cloths off their machines. Saturn came home, having seen to the transfer of Yevgeny’s body to a Russian church somewhere, and by sundown the Court was in full production. They rolled, cut, and weighed the largest batch of plates they had ever made in a single day. Then Daniel pressed half a dozen idle but relatively sober Mohawks into service as escorts, and they took the plates down the banks of the Fleet to Bridewell.
The very first cargo unloaded from Minerva upon her arrival on Thursday had been the paper cards on which Daniel had, over the course of a dozen years’ toil at the Massachusetts Bay Colony Institute of Technologickal Arts, written out the tables of the Logick Mill. These had already been forwarded to the card-punching workshop in Bridewell, which now sported half a dozen organs.
“It’s all right,” insisted Hannah Spates, upon being rousted from bed, “all the girls are accustomed to working nights anyway.” And so presently the shop was alight, and alive, with Hannah and five other nimble-fingered girls working the keys of the organs, and several pairs of big strumpets spelling each other on the bellows, fueled by beer from a barrel that Saturn fetched from a brewery across the ditch in Black Fryars. Some of the cards were punched even before he returned with this enhancement, and a good many more after-though Daniel insisted that the six women at the keys must remain dry. The entire batch was finished before three in the morning, and the ban
ker William Ham, who’d been abducted by a Mohawk raiding-party from his bed in the city, did the sums, and weighed the cards and the bits that had been punched out of them, to the evident satisfaction of Solomon Kohan. The Jew had watched all with the keenest interest, but occasionally scowled at those aspects of the operation that looked as if they might be vulnerable to theft or embezzlement.
Daniel now presented him with a tiny purse sewn of the finest kid. It was no larger than a walnut, but plumped heavily in the palm of the hand, like a globule of quicksilver. “These are the tiny disks punched from the cards by the organs,” Daniel explained. Solomon nodded; he had already observed how these motes of gold were harvested from the machines and weighed by Mr. Ham. “As a rule we take these back and melt them down to make more card-stock. Tonight I make an exception and give them to you, Monsieur Kohan, as a memento of your visit to London, and a token of my esteem.” Solomon clapped the wee purse between his hands and accepted the gift with a bow.
“Now,” Daniel continued, “if you do not mind staying awake a little longer, you may see our provisions for keeping the finished plates safe until they are ready to be shipped to St. Petersburg.”
Solomon said he didn’t mind, so they loaded the chest of new plates into an open wagon and drove it through the streets of London, which were deserted save for the circulation of Vault-wagons to and from the brink of Fleet Ditch. Through Ludgate in the shadow of St. Paul’s they entered into the city, and Daniel told the story of riding past Old St. Paul’s, before the Fire, at the height of the Plague, when the City had been as empty and quiet as it was tonight, and the doomed church surrounded by a rampart of half-buried corpses. Presently they came out of the churchyard onto Cheapside and trundled east to the threshold of the money-district where the way forked into several streets: Threadneedle, Cornhill, and Lombard. They chose Threadneedle, and went up but a short distance to the fabrique of the Bank of England.
THE System OF THE WORLD Page 82