The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and the System of the World

by Neal Stephenson

  “As Roger liked to say, ’tis a good thing to be educable.”

  “Very well!” she said, and clapped her hands. “But there are details for us to attend to, aren’t there, before we become distracted by these grand schemes?”

  “We have a way to keep the cards safe from men of that type,” said Daniel, gesturing with his head in the direction of the authorities sacking the Court.

  “I had guessed as much. I was thinking of Friday.”

  “Two things are happening on Friday: the Trial of the Pyx, and the Hanging-March,” Daniel reminded her. “Which of them do you mean?”

  Eliza got that rueful half-smile again. “Both,” she said simply, “for they are one thing now.”

  “Then you and I have arrived at the same conclusion,” Daniel said. “It is between Isaac and Jack. For Jack almost certainly placed base metal in the Pyx. If he testifies to that effect, Newton is absolved, and the currency is upheld.”

  “Would there be any way to save Newton, and the Currency, without such testimony from Jack?”

  “Wouldn’t it be easier to persuade Jack to testify? That would have the added benefit of saving Jack from execution, supposing a deal could be struck—”

  “A very questionable supposition, that,” she pointed out, “and at any rate, I don’t want him to make any such deal. I want him to be executed on Friday.”

  Daniel was so dumbfounded by this bald utterance that he kept on talking, like a man who has been shot through the head but keeps walking a stride or two before he crumples. “Er—well—even if that is what you want—why not strike a deal that would give him a quick merciful hanging, at least?”

  “The original sentence,” she insisted, “is what I want to be carried out against Jack Shaftoe on Friday.”

  “So—” Daniel blinked and shook his head, unable to fathom her placid cruelty. “So you are asking me, is there a way for Newton to triumph, in a Trial of the Pyx, even without testimony from Jack?”

  “That is what I am asking you, as a Natural Philosopher.”

  “You are asking me, then, if the Trial of the Pyx can be rigged!”

  “Good day, Dr. Waterhouse; both of us have many things to tend to before Friday,” said Eliza, and walked out of the room.

  The Chapel, Newgate Prison

  24 OCTOBER 1714

  I beseech you, Brethren, by the Mercies of God, that you present your Bodies a Living Sacrifice, Holy, Acceptable unto God; which is your Reasonable Service.

  —ROMANS 12:1

  ENGLAND’S POWERS TEMPORAL WERE NOT precisely finished with Jack Shaftoe. But they’d done everything to him that was within their scope, found him guilty of the worst of all crimes, thrown him in the worst of all places, sentenced him to the worst of all punishments. They were spent. Their Avenging Sword needed a good working-over with a whetstone, and their terrible quiver was empty. And so they had turned him over to the Powers Spiritual of the Realm, viz. the Church of England. This was the first time—and quite obviously the last—in Jack’s life that he had attracted the notice of that organization. He did not know how to behave under its strange gaze.

  The Vagabond-camps of his youth had been more than amply supplied with lunaticks. Indeed Newgate was the only place he had ever been since that contained a higher proportion of madmen.

  He and Bob had learnt very early that the Nation of the Insane comprised diverse classes, sects, and parties, each of which must be treated with in a different way. A matched pair of starving ragamuffins, roving around a camp in the middle of some ducal game-park, exerted a powerful draw on maniacs of many types. But for those boys to survive, they had to learn to distinguish between, say, the religious Phanatiques and the pædophiles. For the consequences of being caught by them were wholly different. A Phanatique might even take it upon himself to defend a couple of boys from the sort of mad Vagabond who was bent on buggery. For this service he might exact a price, namely, to make them hear a sermon. It was in his nature to give sermons, just as it was to lambaste sodomites. As these two behaviors expressed the same nature, they could not be teased apart. The boys had to accept one with the other. From such sermons had the Shaftoe boys learned everything there was to know about the Anglican Church.

  Later in his life, Jack was to recollect those open-air sermons with the skepticism of a world-weary adult. The sermonizers were religious maniacs who’d liefer rove the countryside in the company of pestilential Vagabonds than submit to the authority of Anglicans; and so how could such be expected to give a fair and impartial account of what went on in the Church of England? Of the slanders and calumnies that they flung against that Church’s shiny red door, most were probably hallucinations; the remainder might have a germ of truth, but must still consist mostly of perfervid phant’sies. It was not that Jack had any affinity for the Church, any need to hold up their end of the argument. It was rather that he got sick of preachers early on. If he were to give credit to their ravings about the Anglican Church, he must give equal credit to their assertions, so tediously repeated, that he was bound for Hell. He preferred to take a dim view of everything they said, rather than picking and choosing.

  This chapel he was sitting in now made him think that everything those Phanatiques told him might have been literally true.

  The Phanatiques said that Anglican churches—unlike the open-air conventicles and simple barnlike meeting-houses of the Nonconformists—were divided up into boxes called pews. And lest this sound too attractive to a lot of bored Vagabonds who were standing in the mud or, at best, sitting on logs, they likened those pews to livestock pens, in which the churchgoers were pent up like so many sheep waiting to be fleeced, or slaughtered.

  Now, here Jack sat, in his first ever Anglican service, and what did he observe but that the floor of the chapel—which was situated on the uppermost storey of Newgate Prison—was indeed divided into boxes. These were pens, and then some. Pens were open to the sky; but these pews (as they were styled by the management) had stout lids on them, to prevent Malefactors from vaulting over the top, or Dissident holy men from ascending directly into Heaven without the intermediation of a deputized representative of the Church of England.

  The Phanatiques said that in Anglican churches, Persons of Quality got the best seats; the classes could not mingle freely, as they did in a Gathered church. Sure enough, the pews of Newgate chapel were strictly segregated according to degree. Prisoners from the Common Side were penned on one side of the aisle, to the left hand of the Ordinary as he stood in his corner pulpit. Those from the Master Side went to the right. Debtors were boxed separately from Felons, Males walled off from Females. But the very best seats in the house, directly below the pulpit, were reserved for the aristocracy: persons lately condemned to die at Tyburn. These were granted the luxury of an open pew, though they were chained to it, like galley-slaves to their bench.

  The Phanatiques said that the Anglican Church was a place of death, a portal to Hell. Which sounded like lunacy; but this place was hung in black, swathed in funeral-shrouds. Directly before the Condemned pew, between it and the pulpit, was a stout altar; but what rested upon the Lord’s Table was not a breakfast of bread and wine, but a coffin. And lest they fail to apprehend the message, the lid of that coffin had been removed, to make it plain that it was vacant, and wanted a lodger. It yawned at them through the service, and the Ordinary wasted no chance to direct their attention thither.

  The Phanatiques said that people went to Anglican churches, not to hear and heed the Word of God, but to see and be seen. That it was a Show, nothing better than a play in a theatre, and probably worse, in that plays made no bones about being vile and bawdy, while Anglican services arrogated to themselves a sort of holiness. It was a claim difficult to make about the front of this chapel, which was full of smelly persons in boxes, peering out through grates. But when Jack tired of staring at the open coffin on the altar, and let his attention wander up the aisle, he noted that the back half of the church was supplied with sev
eral rows of open pews, and that they were packed full of churchgoers. Not “parishioners,” mind you, for that would mean people who lived in or near Newgate, but “churchgoers,” meaning, in this case, free Londoners who had got out of bed this morning, put on their Sunday best, and made a positive decision to travel here—a place so miasmic, that passersby had been known to drop dead in the street from breathing what wafted out of its gratings—and sit in a place draped all in black and listen to a gaol-house preacher rant about Death for a couple of hours.

  Never one to affect false modesty, or any sort of modesty at all for that matter, Jack knew perfectly well that they had come to stare at the Condemned, and particularly at him. He stared right back. The Ordinary had been explicating a paltry few lines from Paul’s Epistle to the Romans for more than an hour. No one was paying attention. Jack screwed himself around, looked back, and met the eye of each churchgoer in turn, challenging him or her to a stare-down, and he won every one, knocking them down one pew at a time like archery targets pinned to a fencerail. Except, that is, for one whose gaze he could not meet, because her face was hidden behind a veil. It was the same woman who had gone to the Gate of Janus the other day, just to get a look at him. On that occasion, she had flashed by so quickly that he hadn’t fixed her clearly in his memory. This Sunday morning, he had a good hour to stare at her. Her face might be hidden, but he could see plainly enough she was rich; there was a lacy fontange perched atop her head, adding six inches to her height, and serving as a sort of mainmast from which the veil was deployed. Her dress was far from gaudy, being almost as dark and dour as mourning weeds, but he could see the sheen on the silk from here; the fabric alone probably cost as much as the whole contents of an average Londoner’s wardrobe. And she’d brought a bloke, a young man, bit of a bruiser, blond and blue-eyed. Not a husband and not a beau, but a bodyguard. Jack lost the stare-down with him, but only because he, Jack, was distracted. Something was afoot.

  Halfway Along Cheapside

  DAWN, MONDAY, 25 OCTOBER 1714

  “DID ROGER COME TO YOU in a dream, or something?”

  “I beg your pardon!?”

  Saturn opened his eyes for the first time since he had upended his body into the carriage, back at Clerkenwell Court, a quarter of an hour ago. Since then he had only made himself more comfy with every bump and swerve. Confronted now with evidence that his companion had been conscious, and cogitating, the entire time, Daniel was mildly indignant.

  Saturn pushed himself up a notch. “It is so unlike you to know of something before it happens. I wondered if you had had a spectral Visitation from the Shade of the late Marquis of Ravenscar.”

  “My intelligence came from another source.”

  “The Earl of Lostwithiel?”

  “Shut up!”

  “I thought so. Mortification was writ all over his lordship’s face the other day, at the Sack of Clerkenwell.”

  “It’ll be worse if word gets round that he has been talking to me, and so please curtail this!”

  “Hmph. I do not think that Ravenscar got people to be discreet by shushing them. I think rather he was an ingénieur of a sort, who balanced interests.”

  “What is your point, other than that I am no substitute for Roger?”

  “Clerkenwell Court was to me what a Gathered Church was to your dad’s lot. Now what you Gathered has been Scattered by the Powers that Be. Just as certain of your co-religionists, in such a pickle, would abscond to Massachusetts to erect a City on a Hill or something, I phant’sy that I shall get out of this bloody town and go to what, for a Mechanick, will be what Plymouth Rock was for Puritans.”

  “And where, pray tell, is that?”

  “Another place called Plymouth, but older, and easier to get to.”

  The carriage, following Daniel’s instructions, had managed a right turn; Daniel had lost track of where they were, and was disoriented for a moment, until he saw the Church of St. Stephen Walbrook go by to their left. A light or two was already burning in a window there; good.

  Saturn seemed a little provoked that Daniel had not risen to this most excellent bait. “Plymouth is where Mr. Newcomen is building his Engine, is it not?”

  “Close enough,” Daniel said. “I shall buy you a map of the west country as a going-away present, and on the journey you can master the fine distinctions between Plymouth, Dartmouth, Teignmouth, et cetera.”

  “ ’Sblood, the place has as many Mouths as Parliament,” Saturn muttered, and watched Daniel carefully—warily, even. Perhaps he had been worried as to how Daniel would react.

  Daniel said, “I shall give Mr. Newcomen an excellent character of you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I’ll not say a word about Infernal Devices, or bursting out of whores’ toilets in the dead of night.”

  “I would be indebted.”

  “Please don’t think of it in that light…look on it rather as a selfish deed on my part,” Daniel said. “Newcomen needs fewer smiths, and more men like you.”

  “I heard he was banging out great bloody monstrosities.”

  “That he is. But where he wants help is in the fabricating of the small clever bits—the valves, and so on. Just the job for a Horologist Gone Bad.”

  “Right! Let’s sort this, then!” said a radically more energetic Peter Hoxton, rolling out the carriage door even though it had not yet come to a full stop. Daniel smelled River, and felt it condensing on his brow; they’d pulled round on the Three Cranes, a wharf not far from where the lost river of Walbrook buried itself in the Thames. A row of warehouses fronted on it, running parallel to the riverbank and a stone’s throw back from the water. Separating two of these buildings was a narrow chink that anyone might have overlooked in the dark and the fog. Daniel was only able to pick it out because a light was burning some distance along this alley-way, on its right side. As Saturn shambled toward this, his head or shoulders would occult it from time to time. After a minute this stopped happening. Daniel heard a door opening, and eroded stumps of a few words, and then the door closing again.

  The alley would broaden, after some distance, into the spacious back-court of the Vintners’ Hall. Many of the establishments around it, including the one Saturn had gone into, were cooperages.

  “Back to the Church of St. Stephen Walbrook,” Daniel said to the coachman.

  WILLIAM HAM WAS WAITING FOR them there, out front of the church where he’d been baptized. He climbed through the carriage door and settled into Saturn’s former perch with a grunt. “Never has a church been put to such uses,” he remarked.

  “I’ve explained to the vicar—and will gladly explain again if need be—that it is all in pursuit of a righteous and Christian undertaking.”

  “Pray don’t speak of undertaking, uncle. Not today.”

  That got them as far as the front entrance of the Bank of England, all of seven hundred feet away.

  “I would like you to know something,” Daniel said, as William was fumbling with his keys. For Daniel had the sense that William’s slowness, his clumsiness, were not due to cold fingers alone.

  “What is that, uncle?”

  “I’ve never spoken of this to you before, as I know it is delicate. But after your father passed away, and his Vault was opened—forcibly—by order of the Lord Chancellor, I was among the party that went down into it, and found that it was empty.”

  “It is a very odd time for you to bring that up,” William said, right snappishly, and smacked the Bank’s door open. His irritation had at least got the blood running through his fingers, and perhaps to his brain. There was now a short interlude in the foyer while he soothed the porter’s nerves, and urged him to get back in bed. Then he began to lead Daniel down into the labyrinthine basements and sub-basements of the Bank. While they walked, Daniel talked.

  “Your choler is up, William. And no wonder! King Charles took from your father the plate, specie, and bullion that had been entrusted to the House of Ham by its depositors. The House was ruined
. Your father died of shame. Others in the goldsmith trade had suffered likewise—though not as much—and understood that your father had been given no choice. The King had taken the gold by invoking his divine right to it. That’s why you’ve never wanted for a position in the banking trade—because the story is proverbial among money-goldsmiths, and you are a living link to it.

  “Anyway,” Daniel continued, “after we found your father’s vault empty we went up on the roof of your house—”

  “We?”

  “Your uncles Raleigh and Sterling and I, and Sir Richard Apthorp. And do you know what happened up there on the roof?”

  “Can’t imagine.”

  “Sir Richard founded the Bank of England.”

  “What do you mean!? This was not founded until twenty years later! And in any case, how can one man found a bank on the roof of a goldsmith’s shop that is being burned down by the Mobb?”

  “I mean he saw it all together in his head. He saw that banks would never work right if the King could sack their vaults whenever he ran low on revenue. This was a revolutionary thought. Probably would not have entered his mind had he not been thrown together with the sons of Drake the King-killer, the enemy of Divine Right, the champion of Enterprise. But when Sir Richard put those elements together in his mind, he created—all this.”

  “Bully for him,” said William. “Wish I’d been the one to do that. You know. Redeem the family honour and whatnot.” He had stopped before the door to the vault where the Logic Mill cards had been accumulating, as they had been brought in from Bridewell. There would be more messing about with keys now. Daniel relieved his nephew of the lanthorn and stood there Diogenes-like, shining light on his hands while he worked.

  “As you know perfectly well, you were too young to found a Bank,” Daniel reminded him. “Instead, you are redeeming the family honour now. At this moment.”

  “How do you reckon?” William said, gingerly pushing a gaudy key into one of the door-locks.