The System of the World: Volume Three of the Baroque Cycle

by Neal Stephenson

  They did not own Minerva. The owners were, in order of precedence, Queen Kottakkal of Malabar, Electress Sophie of Hanover, van Hoek, Dappa, Jack Shaftoe, and some old comrades of theirs who at last report were dwelling on the isle of Queenah-Kootah, off Borneo. For the most part these investors were far away and had not the faintest idea of how to reach them, which were good investors to have. Even Sophie reigned over a land-locked Electorate. But in time they received a message written in her hand and bearing her seal, letting them know that she was naming Eliza, Duchess of Arcachon and of Qwghlm, as her proxy, and that they should report to her whenever they dropped anchor in the Pool of London, to hand over Sophie’s share of the profits, and to be managed.

  Dappa had gone to the first such meeting with dim expectations. He and the others had heard so much of this Duchess’s beauty from Jack, and, at the same time, had learned to harbor such grave reservations as to Jack’s powers of discernment, that he could only expect to be confronted with some one-toothed, poxy hag.

  The event was rather different. To begin with, the woman had been all of about thirty-five years old. She had all of her teeth and had come through smallpox with only moderate scarring. So she was, for a start, not loathsome. She had keen blue eyes and yellow hair, which of course looked bizarre to Dappa. But he’d grown used to van Hoek, a red-head, which proved he could adjust to anything. Her small nose and mouth would have been considered beautiful among the Chinese, and in due time he understood that many European men’s tastes ran along similar lines. If her nose and cheeks had not been disfigured by freckles, Dappa might have been able to bring himself round to thinking she was attractive. But she was small-waisted and bony. In every way, Eliza was the opposite of voluptuous. Voluptuous was what Dappa liked, and from the looks of the sculptures and frescoes he observed round London and Amsterdam, his tastes seemed to be shared by many a European man.

  The topic of their first meeting had been Accounting. And so even if Dappa had felt the slightest attraction for the woman at the beginning of the day, it would long since have vanished when he stumbled out the door of her town-house twelve hours later. Eliza, it turned out, had a vicious head for numbers, and wanted to know where every farthing had gone since Minerva’s keel had been laid. Considering all they’d been through, her questions had been impertinent. Many a man would have back-handed her across the face, most would have stormed out. But Eliza was representing one of the most powerful persons in Christendom, a woman who could destroy Minerva in so many different ways, that her only difficulty would lay in choice of weapon. Dappa had checked his temper partly because of that, but also partly because he knew in his heart that Minerva ought to keep her books more carefully. They had lost their two members who knew how to keep accounts: Moseh de la Cruz, who had gone to colonize the country north of the Rio Grande, and Vrej Esphahnian, who had given his life revenging himself on the ones who had ensnared them. Since then, the books had become a mess. He’d known for a long time that a settling of accounts would have to come some day and that it would be ugly and painful. It could have come about in worse ways than over a table with this funny-looking young Duchess.

  In the years since, they’d met from time to time to settle accounts. She’d learned of his strange habit of collecting and writing down slave-stories (“Why do you spend so much of our money on paper and ink!? What are you doing, throwing it overboard?”) and she had become his publisher (“We can at least endeavour to make your hobby pay its own way.”). Years had gone by. He had wondered how she would age. Unable to think of her as a woman (for to him Queen Kottakkal, six feet tall and three hundred pounds, was a woman), he had made up his mind, after seeing a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in London, that she was a færy. What did an old, or even a middle-aged, færy-queen look like?

  THEY SAT DOWN now in a little upstairs chamber of Leicester House, less formal than a Withdrawing Room, and she fearlessly took a seat facing a window. Moreover, a west-facing window that was admitting red sunset-light. Dappa studied her.

  “What do you see?” she asked, studying him back.

  “I can no longer see you as anything other than my friend, patroness, and Lady, Eliza,” he answered. “Marks of age, health, experience, and character, which a stranger might phant’sy he perceived in your face, are invisible to me.”

  “But what do you really see?”

  “I have not looked at enough skinny white women to be an apt judge. But I see that bone structure is a good thing to have, and that you have it; lo, the Creator hung you on an excellent frame.”

  She found this curiously amusing. “Have you ever seen an Arcachon, or an honest rendering of one?”

  “Only you, my lady.”

  “I mean, an hereditary Arcachon. Suffice it to say that they are not hung on good frames, and they well know it. And I owe my position in the world today, not to wit or courage or goodness, but to my being hung on a good frame, and being able to propagate it. And what think you of that, Dappa?”

  “If it provides you with a sort of purchase on the sheer cliff that the world is, from which to make use of your abundant wit, courage, and goodness, why, here’s to bone structure!” Dappa returned, raising a teacup high.

  She lost a struggle with a smile. Creases flourished around her eyes and mouth, but they did not look bad on her; they looked well earned and fairly won. She raised her own teacup and clinked it against Dappa’s. “Now you really do sound like the Apology of a book,” she said, and sipped.

  “Are we back to talking of that, my lady?”

  “We are.”

  “I’d hoped I could ask you about those Hanoverian Countesses who seem to’ve joined your household in Antwerp.”

  “What makes you think they are only Countesses?”

  Dappa gave her a sharp look, but she had a glimmer in her eye to suggest that she was only baiting him. “ ’Twas only a guess,” he said.

  “Then go on guessing, for I’ll tell you no more than you’ve already discerned.”

  “Why Antwerp? Meeting with the Duke of Marlborough?”

  “The less I tell you, the less likely you are to be interrogated by the sort of men who loiter in my front lawn with spyglasses.”

  “Very well…if you put it that way…perhaps we should speak of my book!” Dappa said nervously.

  She got a contented look, as if to say that this was a much more satisfactory topic of conversation, and settled herself for a moment—which gave Dappa a warning that she was about to unburden herself of a little address she’d composed ahead of time. “What you must never forget, Dappa, is that I myself might not be opposed to Slavery, had I not myself been a slave in Barbary! To most English people, it seems perfectly reasonable. The slavers put out the story that it is not so very cruel, and that the slaves are happy. Most in Christendom are willing to believe these lies, absurd as they are to you and me. People believe Slavery is not so bad, because they have no personal experience of it—it takes place in Africa and America, out of sight and out of mind to the English, who love sugar in their tea and care not how ’twas made.”

  “I notice you do not sweeten yours,” Dappa mentioned, raising his cup.

  “And from the fact that I still have teeth attached to my excellent bone structure, you may infer that I have never used sugar,” she returned. “Our only weapon against this willful ignorance is stories. The stories that you alone are writing down. I have in one of my boxes down stairs a little packet of letters from English men and women that all go something like this: ‘I have never had the least objection to Slavery, however your book recently fell under my eye, and, though most of the slave-narratives contained in it were mawkish and dull, one in particular struck a chord in my heart, and I have since read it over and over, and come to understand the despicable, nay execrable crime that Slavery is…’ ”

  “Which one? Which of the stories do these letters refer to?” Dappa asked, fascinated.

  “That is the problem, Dappa: each of them refers t
o a different one. It seems that if you put enough stories out before the public, many a reader will find one that speaks to him. But there is no telling which.”

  “What we’ve been doing, then, is a bit like firing grapeshot,” Dappa mused. “Chances are that a ball will strike home—but there’s no telling which—so, best fire a lot of ’em.”

  “And grapeshot is a useful tactic sometimes,” Eliza said, “but it never sank a ship, did it?”

  “No, my lady, grapeshot can never do that.”

  “I say we have now fired enough grapeshot. It has had all the effect it is ever going to have. What we need now, Dappa, is a cannonball.”

  “One slave-tale, that everyone will take note of?”

  “Just so. And that is why it does not trouble me that you failed to sweep up any more grapeshot in Boston. Oh, write down what you have. Send it to me. I’ll publish it. But after that, no more scatter-shot tactics. You must begin to use your critical faculties, Dappa, and look for the slave-story that has something to it beyond the bathos that they all have in common. Look for the one that will be our cannonball. It is time for us to sink some slave-ships.”

  The Kit-Cat Clubb

  THAT EVENING

  “I AM QUITE CERTAIN THAT we are being watched,” Daniel said.

  Dappa laughed. “Is that why you were at such pains to sit facing the window? I venture that no one in the history of this Clubb has ever desired a view of yonder alley.”

  “You might do well to come round the table, and sit beside me.”

  “I know what I’d see: a lot of Whigs gaping at the tame Neeger. Why don’t you come and sit beside me, so that we may enjoy a view of that naked lady reclining in that strangely long and narrow painting above your head?”

  “She’s not naked,” Daniel retorted crossly.

  “On the contrary, Dr. Waterhouse, I see incontrovertible signs of nakedness in her.”

  “But to call her naked sounds prurient,” Daniel objected. “She is professionally attired, for an odalisque.”

  “Perhaps all the eyeballs you phant’sy are watching us, are, truth be told, fixed on her. She is a new painting, I can still smell the varnish. Perhaps we should instead go sit ’neath yonder dusty sea-scape,” Dappa suggested, waving in the direction of another long narrow canvas that was crowded with stooped and shivering Dutch clam-diggers.

  “I happened to see you greeting the Duchess of Arcachon-Qwghlm earlier,” Daniel confessed.

  “She goes by de la Zeur—’tis less formal that way,” Dappa broke in.

  Daniel was brought up short for a moment, then finally got a wry look on his face, and shook his head. “You are strangely giddy. I should never have ordered you usquebaugh.”

  “Too long on land.”

  “When do you sail for Boston?”

  “Ah, to business! We’d hoped to depart in the second half of April. Now, we think early May. What do you wish us to fetch from there?”

  “Twenty years’ work. I do hope you shall have a care with it.”

  “In what form is the work? Manuscripts?”

  “Yes, and machinery.”

  “That is an odd word. What does it mean?”

  “I beg your pardon. It is theatre-jargon. When an angel descends, or a soul lights up to heaven, or a volcano erupts, or any other impossible thing seems to happen on the stage, the people behind the scenes, who’ve made it happen, give the name machinery to the diverse springs, levers, rigging, et cetera used to create the illusion.”

  “I did not know you ran a theatre in Boston.”

  “You jest, sir, the Bostonians would never have allowed it—they’d have sent me packing to Providence.”

  “Then how comes it you have machinery in Boston?”

  “I used the term ironically. I built a machine there—across the river actually, in a shack about halfway ’tween Charlestown and Harvard—a machine that has nothing to do with theatrical illusions. I need you to bring it to me.”

  “Then I must know, in order: Is it dangerous? Is it bulky? Is it delicate?”

  “In order: yes, no, yes.”

  “In what wise is it dangerous?”

  “I’ve no idea. But I’ll tell you this, ’tis only dangerous if you turn the crank, and give it something to think on.”

  “Then I’ll take the crank off and keep it in my cabin, and use it only to bash pirates on the head,” announced Dappa. “And I shall forbid the crew to hold conversations with your machinery, unless they are devoid of intellectual stimulation: nothing beyond a polite ‘Good day, machinery, how goes it with thee, does the stump of thy crank ache of a damp morning?’ ”

  “I suggest you pack the parts in barrels, stuffed with straw. You shall also find many thousands of small rectangular cards with words and numbers printed on them. These are likewise to be sealed in watertight casks. Enoch Root may already have seen to it by the time you reach Charlestown.”

  At the mention of Enoch’s name, Dappa glanced away from Daniel’s face, as if the older man had committed an indiscretion, and picked up his dram to take a sip. And that was all the opening needed for the Marquis of Ravenscar to irrupt upon their conversation. He appeared so suddenly, so adroitly, it was as if some machinery had injected him into the Kit-Cat Clubb through a trap-door.

  “From one odalisque to another, Mr. Dappa! Haw! Is it not so! For I take it that you are the writer.”

  “I am a writer, my lord,” Dappa answered politely.

  “I hope I do not offend by confessing I’ve not read your books.”

  “On the contrary, my lord,” Dappa said, “there is nothing quite so civilized as to be recognized in public places as the author of books no one has read.”

  “If my good friend Dr. Waterhouse were polite enough to make introductions, I should not have to rely ’pon guess-work; but he was raised by Phanatiques.”

  “It is too late for formalities now,” Daniel answered. “When another begins a conversation with a cryptickal outburst on odalisques, what is there for a polite gentleman to do?”

  “Not cryptickal at all! Not in the slightest!” protested the Marquis of Ravenscar. “Why, ’tis known to all London now, at” (checking his watch) “nine o’clock, that at” (checking his watch a second time) “four o’clock, Mr. Dappa was on hand to greet the Duchess of Arcachon and of Qwghlm!”

  “I told you!” Daniel said, in an aside to Dappa, and put his two fingers to his eyes, then pointed them across the room toward the phant’sied spies and observers.

  “You told him what!?” Roger demanded.

  “That people were watching us.”

  “They’re not watching you,” Roger said, highly amused. Which told Daniel, infallibly, that they were. “Why should anyone watch you? They’re watching Dappa, making the rounds of the odalisques!”

  “There you go again—what on earth—?” Daniel demanded.

  Dappa explained, “He alludes to a sort of legend, only whispered by discreet well-bred Londoners, but openly bandied about by drunken merry lords, that the Duchess was once an odalisque.”

  “Figuratively—?”

  “Literally a harem-slave of the Great Turk in Constantinople.”

  “What a bizarre notion—Roger, how could you?”

  Roger, slightly nettled by Dappa, raised his eyebrows and shrugged.

  Dappa proclaimed, “England being a nation of clam-diggers and sheep-shearers, must forever be a net importer of fantastickal tales. Silk, oranges, perfume, and strange yarns must all be supplied from across the seas.”

  “If only you knew,” Daniel returned.

  “I agree with Mr. Dappa!” Roger said forcefully. “The story of his tête-à-tête with the Duchess is racing up and down Grub Street like cholera, and will be in newspapers tomorrow at cock-crow!”

  And then he was gone, as if by trap-door.

  “You see? If you were more discreet—”

  “Then Grub Street would be unawares. Nothing would be written, nothing printed, concerning me, or t
he Duchess. No one would hear of us—no one would buy my next book.”

  “Ah.”

  “Light dawns ’pon your phizz, Doctor.”

  “ ’Tis a novel, strange form of commerce, of which I was unawares until just now.”

  “Only in London,” Dappa said agreeably.

  “But it is not the strangest form of commerce that goes on in this city,” Daniel pressed on.

  Dappa visibly put on an innocent face. “Do you have some strange yarn to set beside my lord Ravenscar’s?”

  “Much stranger. And, note, ’tis a domestic yarn, not imported. Dappa, do you recollect when we were being harried in Cape Cod Bay by the flotilla of Mr. Ed Teach, and you put me to work, down in the bilge?”

  “You were in the hold. We do not put elderly doctors in the bilge.”

  “All right, all right.”

  “I remember that you obliged us by smashing up some old crockery to make ammunition for the blunderbusses,” Dappa said.

  “Yes, and I remember that the location of that old crockery was pricked down, with admirable clarity, on a sort of bill posted on a beam next the staircase. A diagram, shewing how the hold, and the bilge, were packed with diverse goods.”