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

by Neal Stephenson

  Sergeant Shaftoe let it be seen that he did not think much of the other’s wit. “You’d be Comstock,” he said, after a suitably uncomfortable silence had passed.

  “I would draw nigh and shake your hand—”

  “ ’Tis all right, my hand does not work just now.”

  “—but I do not trust myself on this animal.”

  Shaftoe shook off a brief urge to smile. “Not to your liking, is he?”

  “Oh, as an arse-warmer, he has done splendid service. But God help us all if I should essay to ride him.”

  “I s’pose it’s you I have to thank for my liberty, then,” Shaftoe remarked.

  “From the fact that you are here, and alive, I collect that all went off as planned?”

  “En route from the dungeon to the cooperage were some misadventures. Without those, it would have been as routine as removal of horse-dung. The Regiment is under new, not very competent direction.”

  “What of the Queen’s Messengers?”

  “All they do is stand in a Mobb around the Pyx day and night.”

  Comstock permitted himself a dry chuckle. “You are a man of many words but few specifics. You’d do well in Parliament.”

  Shaftoe shrugged. “I’m old. Your hirelings, who broke me out of the Tower, they are young lads, and were moved greatly by each little happening. Ask them to relate the story to you, and you shall hear a yarn far longer and more diverting than any I would tell.”

  “And less strictly true, I suspect,” said Comstock.

  “What’s it to be now, guv’nor?” Shaftoe asked, and decided to try standing up. This he accomplished with a rolling tocsin of cracks and pops.

  “Sergeant Shaftoe, ’twere absurd for me to go to the trouble of making you a free man, only to take away your liberty in the next instant by telling you what to do.”

  “My mistake, guv’nor. I am accustomed by long habit to being in a chain of command.”

  “Then, if it would be of any comfort to you, know that your longtime superior, Colonel Barnes, is now my guest. Oh, not here in London! He is at my seat, Ravenscar, on the North York Moors, above the sea.”

  Shaftoe looked to the two dragoons who had pulled him out of the barrel. They confirmed it with nods.

  “Am I to gather that Colonel Barnes is not alone there?” Shaftoe asked.

  “I daresay the best part of your regiment is drinking up my wine-cellar.”

  One of the dragoons could be heard supplementing Comstock’s account, muttering about “three companies.” Sergeant Shaftoe was not the sort who would admit to being startled or impressed by anything; but at least he did not look bored or contemptuous—a signal achievement for Roger Comstock.

  “I know all about your Whig Association,” Shaftoe said. He had advanced now to walking, and tottered a few steps in Comstock’s direction. “I have heard the rumors about all the money you have raised from the merchants of the City. And as to your efforts to recruit soldiers away from Her Majesty’s regiments, and sign them up in your private army: I recruited them first, and trained them, so do not think that a single one has escaped my attention.”

  “I shouldn’t dare to, Sergeant Shaftoe.”

  “I am too young to’ve witnessed the Civil War with these eyes, but as a lad I heard tales of it from ones who managed to survive. And I have seen all of the improvements that War made in Ireland and Belgium and other places. I could not be less inclined to take part in such an action on English soil.”

  “Then don’t.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Don’t take part, Sergeant Shaftoe. Oh, by all means go to Ravenscar—” and here Comstock launched into the procedure of dismounting from his horse—so evidently fraught with perils for man and beast alike that the sergeant stepped forward to intervene. “Take this steed—yes—there—oh, no! I beg your pardon—thank you—that was most painful—I am in your debt—may I please have my teeth back—there! Whew! I say, take this steed, Sergeant Shaftoe, which is as glad to be rid of me, as ridden by you—ha—these two fine dragoons who, as I believe, are known to you, shall accompany you all the way to Ravenscar. Go there, drink Colonel Barnes’s health, recuperate, trout-fish, as you like. There is not going to be another Civil War, Sergeant Shaftoe, if I have aught to say about it—which, as it happens, I do.”

  “What if you are wrong?”

  “Then you are welcome, nay, encouraged to retire from military service.”

  “And in what way does this benefit you?”

  “Always an important question to ask. I am presently engaged in a sort of duel with the Viscount Bolingbroke—the same chap you have to thank for your recent travails in Tower-dungeons. In a duel, it is customary for each participant to have a second: a friend to stand behind him to back him up. The second rarely has to do anything. You may think of the Whig Association’s battalions as my second. As for Bolingbroke, he has always had the Queen’s Messengers, and now, too, he has much of your old Regiment in his pocket. Most of the other regiments are too cowed to stand against him. It is important that I not be cowed, Sergeant Shaftoe. Having an army in Ravenscar gives me a warm feeling.”

  “But what’s the end of it? Mr. Charles White was asking of me a lot of odd questions concerning the Pyx, and the Mint, and my ex-brother. He is planning something—”

  “Oh, he planned it ages ago. Presently he is doing it. It is I who am planning something.”

  “A war?”

  “Much nastier: a Parliamentary inquiry. Today I have punched Bolingbroke in the nose by causing his favorite witness—you—to vanish from the Tower. Tomorrow at Westminster I shall hit him over the head with a sledgehammer. He’ll be frightfully angry with me. I shall fear his anger the less if I know, and if he knows, that you and others like you are drilling on the North York Moors.” Ravenscar now forcibly put the horse’s reins into Shaftoe’s stiff and swollen hand.

  “What in God’s name are you going to do to him?” asked Shaftoe.

  “Let us say I have told all of my friends to sell South Sea Company stock short.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “It means that grim days lie ahead for that Company. We shall be here all day if I try to explain all—go! Be off! The Hanging-March shall cover your movements, but only for so long! Mount up!”

  Shaftoe did. Then he sat grimacing for a few moments as various parts of his body registered their protests. The two dragoons converged on either side of his horse and set to work lengthening the stirrups.

  A dozen Barkers emerged from the fog, singing a hymn—bound for Tyburn to protest something. The two Mohawks rode out to herd them off in another direction. One of the Barkers was pushing a wheelbarrow that, because it was heavy-laden with libels, kept getting stuck in the muck.

  “I wish I could be there to see it—whatever you’re doing to Bolingbroke, that is, guv’nor,” said Sergeant Shaftoe, sounding as close to wistful as a man of his character could.

  “No,” Ravenscar assured him, “no, you don’t. Believe you me, the great happenings of Parliament are better to hear about than to suffer through. But make no mistake, it shall be a great event. After I have let the World know what I know concerning Bolingbroke, and what he has been doing with the Asiento money, we’ll hear no more about a Trial of the Pyx, at least for a little while.” Roger took a step back and slapped the horse’s croup. It began to trudge forward. The two dragoons, who had mounted up, fell in behind. Roger shouted after them: “And I daresay I’ll get my Longitude Act passed as a soupçon!”

  Clerkenwell Court

  19 JUNE 1714

  Ordered, That the Directors of the South Sea Company do lay before this House an Account of all Proceedings in the said Company relating to the Assiento trade; together with all Orders, Directions, Letters or Informations which the Directors, or any Committee of Directors, have received concerning the same.

  —Journals of the House of Commons, VENERIS, 18° DIE JUNII; ANNO 13° ANNÆ REGINÆ, 1714

  A QU
ARTER OF A MILE south of the dogleg in the road where Roger Comstock had met Bob Shaftoe, the frontier of London could be discerned by the Wise in the Ways of Real Estate. The most infallible sign of which was that, here, the track leading to Black Mary’s Hole had been improved with a name, Coppice Row, devised to conjure forth, from the fevered brains of would-be buyers, phant’sies of a cozy and bucolic character, be they never so removed from Truth. Along Coppice Row, buildings were going up, or had gone up so recently that they were still redolent of the horse-hair mixed into their damp plaster. On the left side of the road, as one departed from London, the sprawl had been baffled for the time being by the stand of trees, and root-ball of ancient property-rights, surrounding Sir John Oldcastle’s. On the right were a few indifferent buildings, all made of red brick still warm from the kilns. These had shop-arcades facing the street, and flats above. The largest of these buildings commanded a frontage of some hundred feet, sliced into a dozen shop-fronts of various widths. Most were quite narrow, and most still wanted tenants.

  One of them had been rented by a clock-maker. Or so it might be guessed from the new-made sign that had been hung out over the street on a clever wrought-iron cantilever. This sign had been constructed around the carcass of an ancient clock that looked to have been salvaged from a bell-tower in some Continental town—perhaps a Belgian hôtel de ville laid low by a mortar-bomb during the late war. At any rate it had been very old even before whatever sequence of fiery disasters, salvagings, soakings in brine, and rough trans-shipments had brought it to Clerkenwell. With its bent, gap-toothed gears and its scabrous corrosions it served better as an Emblem, than as a Keeper, of Time. All by itself it might have served as a conversation-piece, like a Roman ruin. But to it had been added a muscular figure, put together of wood and plaster, and styled after a God, who was with one hand supporting the clock and with the other reaching up to adjust its hour-hand. All this to advertise a shop so small that its proprietor could stand in the middle of it and touch both side-walls with his fingertips.

  Clerkenwell Court—as this edifice was styled—was not badly situated, for it was along a way that holiday-makers might traverse en route to the tea-gardens and Spaws of Lambs Conduit Fields. And it was not too distant from Gray’s Inn and diverse Squares round which wealthy persons had built their town-houses. But it was not especially well situated, either, for the place was difficult to reach without passing through one or more infamous Dens of Iniquity, Nests of Vipers, Pits of Degradation, &c., viz. Hockley-in-the-Hole and Smithfield.

  None of which had prevented one noble Lady from making the trip out in her carriage early of a Saturday morn. She was well escorted, with a driver, two footmen, and a dog on the outside of the coach, and, on the inside, a young armigerous gentleman and a female attendant. Accompanied by the latter two, she passed through the door below the outlandish clock-sign and pulled on a bell-rope. A distant jingling was audible off beyond the back wall of the shop. She pulled again, and again. Presently a door in the back was opened. Through it the visitors glimpsed, not the expected store-room, but an expansive, crowded, noisy, complicated Yard. Then the whole aperture of the doorway was blocked by the form of a great hulking dark bloke, coming towards them. He entered the shop, stopped, and looked straight over their heads and out the shop’s front window to the carriage waiting there along Coppice Row. A moment sufficed to read the coat of arms on the door. Then he pivoted out of the way and extended an arm toward the back door. “Enter,” he rumbled. Then, in case this had not been a sufficiently florid, courtly greeting, he added, “Welcome.”

  Johann von Hacklheber—that being the sole visitor who was male and visibly armed—had stepped in front of the two women when the big dark man had appeared. His left or dagger hand was looking a bit twitchy. This detail did not escape the perception of their host, who flung his great hands up in the air as proof that he was not armed, or as a gesture of exasperation, or both. Then he turned his back on them and vanished the way he had come.

  A minute later, his place was taken by Daniel Waterhouse.

  “Saturn says that he has all but scared you away,” he began. “He forwards his apologies. He has gone off to brood over his unfitness as a retailer. Please come back. There is nothing here, save a pretense of a horologist’s shop, which does not pay its rent.”

  Greetings and salutations of a more formal nature also passed among them, but these were so rote that they made little impression on anyone. Save one detail: Eliza, indicating her young woman attendant, made the following claim: “I present to you Fraülein Hildegard von Klötze.”

  “A familiar name—”

  “As she would tell you, if she spoke more English, she is a half-sister of Gertrude von Klötze.”

  “The nurse who accompanied me on my journey from Hanover. That explains why her eyes are likewise shockingly familiar to me,” said Daniel. “Welcome to London, Fraülein,” he said with a bow—a rather deeper and more formal bow than would normally be directed to a lady-in-waiting. “And welcome, all of you, to the Court of Technologickal Arts. If you would only be so good as to follow me.”

  “WHEN I WAS A GIRL in Constantinople,” Eliza said, “I one day worked up the nerve to venture out from the harim of the Topkapi Palace and to explore certain reaches of that motley Pile that ought to have been forbidden to me. This I did by climbing up grape-vines, clambering over rooftops, and the like. And after a while I arrived at a place whence I could look down into a court-yard. This place was occupied by men of a mystickal sect called Darwayshes, who wore costumes, and observed rites, setting them apart from the rest of al-Islam. I lurked there for a few minutes, watching them, and then, having had my fill of strange sights, crept back to the harim.”

  “The similitude is a good one,” said Daniel Waterhouse. “Yes, now you are in another court full of Dervishes, as queer in their own way, yet as easy around their own kind, as those you spied in Constantinople.” He and Eliza had paused in a relatively stagnant corner of the court. Above them, a beam had been thrown across a gap to make a lifting-point. Suspended from its middle was an elephant’s tusk, an ivory crescent eight feet in diameter if it was an inch. Diverse clever baffles and charms had been fixed to its rope to prevent rodents from abseiling down for midnight picnics; the only creature allowed to gnaw at this treasure was a journeyman ivory-carver who was having at it with a fine-toothed saw. Nor was this the only oddity or wonder in the Court of Technologickal Arts. The yard was an irregular pentagon a hundred feet in breadth. It was closed in by an arcade of work-stalls, each little more than a lean-to sheltering some odd collection of tools. At a glance Eliza saw a glass-blower, a goldsmith, a watch-maker, and a lens-grinder, but there were many others who had their own collections of specialized lathes, mills, hand-tools, and paraphernalia that were every bit as particular, especial, and jealously looked-after. Perhaps that old Jew with the stubby telescopes strapped to his face had once called himself a jeweler, and the obese German overflowing yon tiny stool had been a toy-maker, turning out music-boxes. Now whatever they did had been subsumed in a larger and more obscure purpose. Others simply could not be classified at all. There was a bloke who had a stall to himself, off in the corner—an exile even among Dervishes—where he had mounted a glass sphere on an axle. Spinning this around with the aid of a wan, jittery apprentice, he produced unearthly crackling noises and summoned forth small lightning-bolts.

  The open space of the court had mostly been claimed by one faction or another and filled up with works both prodigal and practical. There were too many furnaces and forges to count at a glance, all of them quite small, and devoted to some sub-sub-specialty. These were fashioned of brick and mortar, each to a particular shape, reminding the visitors of so many shells cast up on some outlandish beach. There was a crane, moved by two men each trudging along in a great wooden wheel. This was situated in the back of the court where a gate led in from a warren of country cowpaths, none of which had yet been ennobled with a picturesque name. The c
ourt was further enlivened by diverse derricks, rigs, presses, frames, and Overhead Lifting Devices of unknown nature and purpose. There was even a barrow: a stony hummock that might have deserved the appellation of Ruin half a millennium ago, but had by now been mostly resorbed by the earth.

  “Your budget for stationery must be generous,” Eliza said. For another curious feature of the place was that scraps of paper were blowing round it like autumn leaves, and each had something scribbled on it. “I am put in mind of the ’Change.” She snatched a scrap that had been dancing in a current of air in front of her, and stretched it out: it had been slashed, scribbled, and cross-hatched with furious pen-strokes. Once it might have been a fair rendition, in perspective, of something three-dimensional. But other hands had added, subtracted, modified, and annotated it so many times that half of the page was covered by ink. Perfected, it had been thrown away.

  “We do spend a good bit on ink and paper,” Daniel admitted, “but men such as these cannot think without them.”

  “I suppose I am meant to be impressed; but instead I confess myself bewildered,” was the verdict of Johann von Hacklheber, who had never strayed more than arm’s length from “Hildegard,” but had never touched her, as they strolled round the court.

  “The difficulty lies in the fact that there is little, so far, in the way of finished work,” Daniel said, “and what has been finished has been shipped to Bridewell Palace.” Then there was a respite as Johann attempted to explain the concept of Bridewell to the German girl, a project that did not seem to go very well.

  “Allow me to demonstrate,” Daniel said. He strode off across the court. Johann, “Hildegard,” and Eliza followed, forming a queue that snaked and wended among forges, furnaces, and less namable constructs until it stopped at the foot of the barrow-mound.

  This had been endowed with a set of wrought-iron gates, exceptionally massive, and closed with a lock the size of a Folio Bible, as might be seen on an Arsenal-Gate. Daniel had the key: a pound of brass wrought and carved into a lacy labyrinth. He blew on it, then inserted it into a hatch on the lock’s front with the care of a surgeon lancing a King’s boil. Snicking and clicking noises emanated from the penetralia of the device as it issued mechanical challenges, which were rebutted by the key; finally Daniel was given leave to spin a brass wheel that drew back several bolts. The gates came a-jar. Daniel excused himself and stepped through the opening. Peering round him the guests could just make out a sort of vestibule within: a small stone-paved landing at the top of a pit. Some torches were soaking in an oil-pot. Daniel drew one out, shook off lashings of excess oil, and handed it to Johann. “If you would be so kind,” he said. Johann had no difficulty finding an open flame in this court, and handed it back, a-blaze, in a few moments. “I shall be back soon,” Daniel announced. “If not, send down a search party in half an hour.” With that, he stepped over the brink of the pit. “Hildegard” gasped, thinking that he was about to plummet straight down some old well-shaft. But it presently became obvious from the nature of Daniel’s movements that he was in fact descending a stairway, hidden in shadow. Soon he was gone from view, and they were left to watch a quivering rectangle of fiery light, and to hear diverse scraping, squealing, and clanking noises. Then the light again became concentrated into a bobbing fire-brand, followed at a short interval, first by the face of Daniel Waterhouse, and then by a gleaming quadrilateral that he was carrying under one arm like a book.