“But we may strengthen his hand immeasurably,” Isaac said, “and at the same instant weaken Bolingbroke’s, by capturing Jack the Coiner, and exonerating the Pyx. It is very clear to me now. Thank you for the walk, Daniel.”
“IT WILL NOT BE an easy negotiation,” Sean Partry said, after giving the matter thorough consideration. “For it matters nothing, to this condemned wretch in Newgate, how high the political stakes may be. A civil war? Why should he care, when his boiled and tarred head shall watch the battle from the top of the Treble Tree?”
“Has he any family?” asked Daniel.
“Dead of the smallpox. Only one thing in all the world matters to this cull, and that is, how much pain shall he suffer on Friday?”
“Then it is a simple affair of bribing Jack Ketch,” Daniel said. “I fail to see—”
“It is a not-so-very-simple affair,” said Partry, “of bribing him most and last, even as Jack’s men—who, as we’ve seen, infest Newgate Prison—are disputing the issue with us. This is why I was keen to do it on Thursday night. ’Twould afford Jack less time to offer a counter-bribe. But to do it on Tuesday evening—” He shook his head.
“Let us forget about today, then, and have a go at it on Wednesday,” Daniel suggested.
“That will help—a little.”
“But it must be in the afternoon—we cannot wait until the evening.”
Partry mooted it, and finally gave up a shrug. “Anything is worth a try,” he said. “But you had better show up with pounds sterling in your purse, and be ready to buy your information a word at a time.”
“If it is simply a matter of showing up with pounds sterling,” Isaac said, “then I know where I can get some.”
Golden Square
LATE AFTERNOON, 28 JULY 1714
“HOW MUCH HARM COULD a stiff drink possibly do you, at this stage of the game?” asked Roger Comstock, the Marquis of Ravenscar. “You and I are already off the charts of the Royal Society’s annuity tables—living affronts to the Actuarial Profession.”
“Hadn’t you better go in there sober?” Daniel asked. He was facing, and Roger was showing his arse to, the best house on the Square. It put Daniel in mind of the stage of a theatre: not the new opera-house style, in which the actors were pent up behind a proscenium arch, but the W. Shakespeare wooden O, consisting of a flat patch of dirt (here the Square) walled in by galleries crowded with well-heeled voyeurs (the houses all round) and dominated by one magnificent edifice thrust out and over all (Bolingbroke’s place) and cunningly shot through with passages, chutes, ladders, and stairs interconnecting diverse balconies, cupolas, windows, &c., where, at any moment, important personages might pop up for a conversation, tryst, complot, or sword-fight that would in some way move the drama along. An Arsenal of Possibilities it was. The groundlings salted about the Square could not take their eyes off of it. Except for Roger. But then, Roger was not a groundling. He was no mere spectator, but a leading man—a Capulet or a Montague, take your pick—who was using the Square as a sort of Green Room. He was making ready to enter stage left, and begin his performance; but his lines had not been written yet.
No wonder he was drinking. “You’ve been hoisting tankards in the Black Dogg. Fair is fair.”
The mere idea of putting his lips against any of the available receptacles in the Black Dogg sent exquisite shudders up and down the length of Daniel’s alimentary tract. “I would not even sit down there, much less drink.”
“We’re not sitting down here,” Roger pointed out, “and that’s not stopping me.” One of his less dangerous-looking servants had drawn nigh, bearing a tray, desolate save for two amber thimbles. Roger pinched one off and projected its contents into his ivory-decked maw. Daniel snatched the other, only to prevent Roger from having a double.
“Your unwillingness to come right out and say how the negotiations are going is a kind of torture to me,” Roger explained. Then, to the servant: “Another round, please, to dull the pain inflicted on me by my reticent chum.”
“Stay,” Daniel said, “we have not spoken to the prisoner yet.”
Roger went into an orgasm of coughing.
“It is good news!” Daniel assured him. Which was so brazenly false that it silenced Roger, and straightened him up.
“You toy with me, sirrah.”
“Not at all. Why should our prisoner be so apprehensive that he’ll not even consent to show his face in the Black Dogg?”
“Because he’s a bloody coward?”
“Even a coward should have naught to fear from Jack—unless he possessed information that was dangerous to Jack in the extreme.”
“I have a question for you, Daniel.”
“Pray ask it then, Roger.”
“Have you ever participated in a negotiation in your entire life? For a quality oft found in persons who have, is an ability to look past some of the more fanciful assertions made by the adversary.”
“Roger—”
“Like Cloudesley Shovell, seeing the Rocks of Scilly emerging from the murk, only after ’twas too late to turn his Fleet aside from its fatal Course, I now, on the very threshold of Bolingbroke’s den, perceive my error in despatching you and that other Natural Philosopher to parley with this wily Black-guard.”
“It is not quite as dismal as all that, Roger.”
“Tell me something, then, that is not perfectly and utterly abominably bad news.”
“We got an early start this afternoon, and have worked through all of the preliminary rounds of the Negotiation, using Sean Partry as our go-between. All of the posturing, bluffing, and nonsense is behind us. Now we are down to the final exchange. The prisoner holds out. We are taking a little recess, now, so that he may cool his heels and contemplate the terrors that await him on Friday. Meanwhile I come to you, wanting to know: what is the most we could offer this man, supposing he could bring us information, today, that should enable us to catch Jack—or at least prove that Jack tampered with the Pyx?”
“If it came down to that—Daniel, look me in the eye,” Roger said. “You must not offer this save as a last, desperate measure, and then only if it is sure to bring about our victory.”
“I understand.”
“If this chap can help me bring down Bolingbroke, I’ll break him out of Newgate Prison and set him up with a farm in Carolina.”
“Splendid, Roger.”
“Not a manor, mind you, but a patch of dirt, a pointed stick, and a chicken.”
“It is more than he deserves, and more than I’d hoped for.”
“Now get thee gone to the Black Dogg. I can only draw out the evening’s game for so long.” Roger finally permitted himself a glance toward Bolingbroke’s house. At least three Viscounts were looking back at him, from different windows. This reminded Daniel of something.
“We are to re-convene in an hour,” said Daniel, checking his watch.
“An hour!?”
“Then all should go quickly. And I shall use that hour to our advantage. Enjoy your dinner, Roger, and don’t drink too much.”
“All I need do is drink less than my opponent. Easy.”
“But I would that you were sober enough to enjoy your victory.”
“I would that you were drunk enough to act a little less deliberately.”
But Daniel was already scurrying up the portable steps of the phaethon that Roger had lent him. “Leicester Fields,” he said to the driver.
Leicester House
HALF AN HOUR LATER
“IN THIS COUNTRY, as you may know, there is a tacit rule, observed by all the Nobility and Quality, Tory and Whig alike, forbidding the use of the Mobb in politics.”
“I had no idea,” said Princess Caroline, “but then I suppose that is what makes a thing tacit.” Her English had gotten rather better during her weeks in London.
“No doubt when your royal highness shall reign over a peaceful and contented Britain, the rule shall be observed without fail,” Daniel continued, “as it has been now f
or at least a quarter of a century.”
“Except for during Parliamentary elections, of course,” put in the Duchess of Arcachon-Qwghlm.
“Naturally,” Daniel said, “and the odd church-burning or assassination. But I cannot be certain that it shall be obeyed tonight. On both sides of the Whig-Tory division I have lately seen a worrisome want of discretion. Bolingbroke’s position, just now, is at once formidable, and fatally precarious. He is like a man who has scaled most of a stone wall with his fingernails and reached the point where he can just peek over the top, and see a safe place to stand—even as the danger of losing his grip and falling to the rocks below has never been greater. Now he will flail about and grasp at anything that might enable him to heave himself to safety. Why should he stick at violating this rule concerning the Mobb, just this once?”
They were in a chamber in Leicester House that had probably been styled a Grand Salon on the architect’s drawings, æons ago. By the time the plaster had dried and the Stuarts had moved in, it had probably been called a salon; nowadays it would be a salle, or a walk-in closet. None of your froth of Rokoko plasterwork here. It was lined with wooden panels that never stopped popping. They were a shade of brown that was darker than black. Its several windows looked out over Leicester Fields, but these had been annihilated by clever shutters that could not be distinguished from wall-panels without assiduous knuckle-rapping. It was small, dark, and mean, but Eliza seemed to like it, and Daniel had to admit that on an evening such as this one there was something comforting about the place.
“This Mobb is oft spoken of, but never seen,” said the Princess.
Daniel Waterhouse and Johann von Hacklheber, at the same instant, filled their lungs and opened their mouths to explain to her that she was wrong. But each hesitated, thinking to let the other speak first, and so the next voice heard was Caroline’s. “You are about to curdle my blood with Mobb-tales, I know,” she said. “But to me the notion is philosophically offensive. Doctor Leibniz has given much deep thought to the question of collective entities, such as a herd of sheep, and concluded that these must be regarded as aggregations of monads. What is true of a herd of sheep is more true of a Mobb of Londoners. They are all individual souls. This Mobb is a fabrication of minds too lazy to treat them as such.”
“Yet I have seen the Mobb,” said Daniel. “Some would say, I have been it.”
“And yet you are as intelligent a man as ever God made,” Caroline said. “This proves that the Mobb is an incoherent concept.”
“I got a taste of the Mobb, the day Dappa was chased down Threadneedle Street with a bounty on his head,” said Johann von Hacklheber. “Though made up of individual souls, it did have a sort of collective will about it.”
“Pfui!”
“This is idle,” said Eliza, “you can take it up with the Doctor in Hanover. We must tend to matters at hand. Johann, on the day that Dappa was taken, the Mobb had been incited by hand-bills printed and distributed by Charles White. How do you suppose Bolingbroke might animate the Mobb in the present crisis?”
“Understand, your grace, that ninety out of a hundred in the Mobb are simply criminals who want only the lamest of pretexts to run riot,” Daniel said. “They are like the charge of coarse powder in a musket’s barrel. It is detonated by a pinch of fine powder in the weapon’s pan. Which is to say that one provocateur, moved by Party Malice, might incite ten or a hundred of the rabble to run amok. Bolingbroke will have such provocateurs posted in squares and streets where they can sway as many as possible. In order to inspire them—to put fire to the pan-powder—he needs only some small scandal or incident. Among other things, he might expose the presence of Hanoverian spies in London.”
“I see,” said the Princess. “It was foolish for me to have come, then.”
“No, for it may have spared your royal highness’s life from the assassins of de Gex,” said Daniel.
“It would have been foolish,” said Johann, “to have come here without having been prepared for this night.” He locked eyes with his mother as he said this. Eliza stood up.
“Mother and son have been cleverly at work,” Caroline guessed, “while the silly Princess has been delighting in her naughty adventure.”
“ ’Twas ever thus, and ever shall be, as long as we have Royals,” said Eliza. “You may repay our labours by doing deeds that are beyond our scope.”
“Easily said,” said the Princess. “At this moment, what can I—”
“You can fly, and fly well,” Eliza said. “Royal flight is a grand tradition. Elizabeth, Charles II, Louis XIV, the Winter Queen, all had to fly at some point in their lives, and all carried it off well.”
“James II did it poorly,” Daniel reflected. Then, not to be a party-pooper, recovered with: “But you are made of better stuff.”
“And unlike him, the Princess has friends, and a plan,” said Johann, “though she doesn’t know it. I can set this plan in motion with a word. Is that what you recommend, Dr. Waterhouse?”
Now this was a rather weighty matter to have placed on Daniel’s shoulders. As a younger man he’d have been paralyzed by the responsibility. But all decisions had come to him easier, somehow, since he had learnt that he was supposed to be dead anyway. “Oh, by all means,” he said. “You must fly. But I would have a word with her grace, if the plan permits it.”
Eliza smiled. “The plan calls for Johann and Caroline to change clothes first of all,” she said, and excused the two of them with a smile, and a flicker of the eyelids. Johann turned away, blindly thrusting a hand behind him, and Caroline’s hand dove into it like a falcon stooping on game, and thus they made for the door, he striding, bent forward, and she floating, erect as a Princess was supposed to be. As they gained the anteroom, Johann began to distribute commands, in German, to various persons who had quietly convened there during the quarter of an hour since Daniel had arrived. One of these thrust his head and arm into the room, favored Eliza with a deferential nod, and Daniel with a flash of the whites of his eyes, and pulled the door to so sharply that every panel in the room gave a sympathetic pop.
“You are alone with me,” Eliza observed. “A scenario oft sung of by the poets of the Kit-Cat Clubb.”
Daniel smiled. “If they sing of this, I shall be likened to Tithonus, who was granted æternal life, and turned into a cricket.”
“As a ploy,” Eliza said, “your modesty serves. I see how it must work on those who are young, vain, and do not know you well. To me who know you better, it is grating. Please speak plainly, without flattering me or deprecating yourself; we do not have time.”
Daniel inhaled deeply, like a man who has just been doused with icy water. Then he said: “I bring you news concerning Jack Shaftoe.”
It was Eliza’s turn to gasp. She turned her back on him so quickly that the hem of her skirt sawed at his ankles. She retreated several steps, then arranged herself on a bench between two of the shuttered windows. Daniel stood sideways to her, so as not to dwell on the pinkness of her face.
“I was led to believe you were pursuing him. How can—”
“I am doing so, and I will catch him,” Daniel said, “but this has not prevented him, clever chap that he is, from contriving a way to place in my ear certain words that were plainly intended for you.”
“And what are those words, sir?”
“That everything he has been doing lately, he has been doing out of love for you.”
“That is a very strange way of showing love,” she returned. “Making counterfeit money for the King of France, and blowing people up.”
“He has not actually blown anyone up,” Daniel reminded her, “and as for the King of France, some would point out that he is also the liege-lord of Arcachon.”
“Thank you for pointing it out,” she said. “Is that the entire message?”
“That he loves you? Yes, I believe that is it.”
“Well, when you catch him, you may give him my answer,” she said, rising to her feet, “which
is that the decision he made at the wharf in Amsterdam was the sort that cannot be unmade; and as proof, one need only behold what Jack has become in the thirty years since—all of which might have been predicted from the choice he made on that day.”
“I have an inkling that Jack is now striving to become something rather different,” Daniel said, “which you may not have predicted.”
“That is what young Jack—who, I must admit, was a dreamy lad—would have done,” Eliza said. “The wretch that he is now is not capable of it.”
“Never was a mailed and spiked gauntlet more harshly thrown down. I am off to the Black Dogg now,” Daniel said, excusing himself with a careful bow, “and I shall deliver that fell challenge to Jack, if fortune leads me to him.”
Newgate Prison
HALF AN HOUR LATER
WHATEVER THE PLAN WAS that Johann von Hacklheber had laid for the extraction of Princess Caroline from the snares of London, it evidently did not rely on stealth. Such was the crowd and the commotion that Daniel half feared that the much-discussed Mobb had already conquered the stables of Leicester House. But not to worry, they were loyal servants and retainers all. Daniel found his phaethon and commanded the driver to take it round Leicester Fields and collect Sir Isaac Newton. This was achieved shortly and in absurdly conspicuous style. The diverse spies planted in and around Leicester Fields by political factions, foreign governments, nervous speculators, and Grub Street newspapers, would all report to their masters that a cricket-like geezer had scurried out of the London home of the Duchess of Arcachon-Qwghlm, hopped into an inappropriately seductive and libidinous Mode of Transport, swung round to snatch the World’s Greatest Natural Philosopher, and thundered off in the direction of—Newgate Prison. What the recipients would make of this information was anyone’s guess. Daniel was past caring.
The System of the World: Volume Three of the Baroque Cycle Page 71