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

by Neal Stephenson

  Norman Orney—a heavy-built man, but strong and even spry from working in his ship-yard—was able to catch the smaller and frailer Mr. Threader before he struck the floor.

  Assisted by one of the younger Saxons, he carried Threader upstairs and heaved him on to a bed. Hankies were waved, hands rubbed, feet propped up, &c., and presently blood seeped back in to the old money-scrivener’s face and he woke up. But, plainly enough, he wished he hadn’t.

  “Oh, Sir Isaac,” he said, and began flailing for a handhold. “Help me to rise,” he said to no one.

  “I think you should stay down,” said Daniel.

  “That moment has arrived I prayed would never come,” said Threader. “I must get down on my knees and pray to Sir Isaac Newton for my life—or, barring that, an honorable death—or if that is not feasible, an expeditious.”

  “Then you admit collusion with coiners?” said Isaac, quite as bored as the others were astonished.

  “You figured it out ages ago, didn’t you, Sir Isaac? Yes. Collusion with coiners. With the coiner. Now, mind you, in the beginning—”

  “It seemed like nothing,” said Isaac, and waved his hand as if shooing off a wasp. “Forgive me, but I detect the onset of a long and well-rehearsed narration, for which I have no sufferance. The longer you make the story, the more gradual, insensible, and innocent seems your descent into…High Treason.”

  Threader jumped, if such a thing was possible for a man lying flat on his back.

  “But no matter how you stretch it, the beginning and the end are the same, are they not?” Isaac continued. “At the beginning you fall into the seemingly harmless practice of weighing guineas, and culling out those that are infinitesimally heavier. At the end you have been thoroughly compromised by Jack the Coiner. He has placed his agents in your company—he owns you so completely that he can even place an Infernal Device in your luggage-wagon, in the hope of assassinating the Master of the Mint at the Royal Society.”

  “Oh, Sir Isaac, I did not know about that!”

  “That much I believe. Jack would have had no reason to warn you—on the contrary. Yet even if the matter of the Infernal Device is left out of the accompt, you too are guilty of High Treason!”

  “Oh, but what if I testify? Put me before a magistrate, Sir Isaac! No counter-tenor at the Italian Opera ever sang as I shall!”

  “I do not need to hear you sing,” said Isaac. “Your offer has come too late. With no assistance from you, I have obtained all I wished for.”

  “What if I could give you Jack the Coiner?” said Mr. Threader. Which struck Daniel and the others as frightfully dramatic; but Newton smiled thinly, like a chess-master who always knew that his foe would bring his Queen out eventually.

  “Then there is an opportunity for negotiation,” said Newton. “Give me what you have.”

  “Every Sunday evening, it is my lord Bolingbroke’s habit to go to a certain Clubb frequented by Tories. There is a back room, a private salon with a servants’ door leading back into the kitchens. At a certain signal Bolingbroke withdraws to that room on some pretext or other. Meanwhile Jack has entered the same Clubb through the back, in the guise of a knife-grinder who has come to whet the cooks’ cutlery. He comes into that salon through the servants’ door and doffs his disguise, and there the two villains hatch their plots and coordinate their schemes. It should happen again, just as I’ve said, in only a few hours, this being Sunday.”

  “Perhaps Jack will have heard about what has happened this morning, and will know better than to attend the meeting,” said Isaac.

  “Who shall bring him intelligence of it? The estate has been sealed off.”

  “Everyone in the county saw the top of the hill explode.”

  “Perhaps news of it shall reach Jack, perhaps not,” said Mr. Threader. “He must still meet with Bolingbroke from time to time. If this fails, why, I know other things about Jack, and can suggest other stratagems.”

  “Then let us go to London so that the snare may be laid,” said Newton; and with that, the Clubb’s most eventful meeting (to date anyway) was adjourned, and its Treasurer manacled.

  Library of Leicester House

  MORNING OF 18 AUGUST 1714

  For the sovereign is the public soul, giving life and motion to the commonwealth; which expiring, the members are governed by it no more, than the car-case of a man, by his departed, though immortal, soul.

  —HOBBES, Leviathan

  THE PLACE HAD NOT been fixed up in more than a hundred years, and was irredeemably Tudor: one could easily imagine Gloriana calling Sir Walter Raleigh on the carpet in here. No books by living authors were in evidence. The coastlines on the globe were hopelessly out of fashion.

  Sir Isaac Newton did not have leisure to peruse this convex Artifact, however. He had been escorted to the library by young Johann von Hacklheber—a Leipziger baron. And so he was not extremely surprised to recognize a second North German baron—Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz—rising from a chair to bid him welcome. Newton’s face showed that he was annoyed to have been ensnared into yet another extraordinary and irregular meeting with his Nemesis, but that he would stiffen his upper lip and get through it. He glanced for only a moment at the young woman seated in an armchair near the globe. His eyes then snapped back to Leibniz. “I was led to believe I should be paying a call on the Duchess of Arcachon-Qwghlm,” he began. But his protest trailed off as his eyes wandered back to behold the young woman. It was not just that she was good looking, though she more or less was. It was rather that she was turned out in clothing and jewels—especially, jewels—the likes of which Newton had not feasted his protruberant eyes on since the last time he had been summoned into the presence of Royalty. The woman was, in fact, wearing an actual tiara, and something in her bearing told Newton that it was no affectation, and that the sparkly bits were no rhinestones.

  Johann von Hacklheber had already ducked out. Leibniz had the floor. “Your royal highness,” he said to the young woman, “this is Sir Isaac Newton. Sir Isaac, it is my honor to present Her Royal Highness Caroline, Princess of Wales, Electoral Princess of Hanover, et cetera, et cetera.”

  “Stay! Do not move, Sir Isaac,” said Caroline, causing the savant to freeze in the opening of what promised to be a deep and lengthy formal bow. “We have heard already the story of how you were injured in our service—an inadvertent consequence of Baron von Leibniz’s heroics. You are in no condition for courtly bowing. Pray sit down.”

  “You need not narrow your eyes thus at Freiherr von Leibniz,” said another voice, from the corner. Newton looked over to see Daniel Waterhouse, who had been delving into a brown and crusty Tome. “It is I, not the Baron, who related the story to her royal highness, and I who ought to be blamed for any misapprehensions I may have planted in her mind. True, it’s not every day that a German Baron has a go at Sir Isaac Newton with a great stick. Some might be tempted to make something out of it; but I suffered the same, and have forgiven him, and thanked him.”

  “As do I,” said Newton easily, and then sat down—with conspicuous stiffness—in the side chair indicated by Caroline. Now it was Caroline in the big throne-like armchair next the globe, symmetrically flanked by Newton and Leibniz. Waterhouse prowled about the dim periphery, like a furtive librarian or, as it were, a philosophick Butler.

  Caroline broke the ice—which was passing thick and cold—with small talk of the last days’ events in London. Were the rumors true?

  This was just the gambit to use on Sir Isaac, who desired more than anything to set the new Dynasty’s mind at ease about the coinage of their Realm.

  “Jack Shaftoe is ours!” he proclaimed. “The Coiner shall coin no more in this world.”

  “If our understanding of the thing is correct,” said Caroline, “then this is momentous news indeed, and I am surprised I have not heard more of it.”

  “Ah, but your royal highness, I did not know you were in London until I stepped over the threshold of this room—otherwise your royal highn
ess should have been notified within the hour of Mr. Shaftoe’s arrest.”

  “That is not what I meant. I refer to the fact that we have not heard anything of it from Grub Street.”

  “He was taken in the back room of a certain Clubb, only a few minutes’ walk from here, frequented by Tories—many of whom, you may be sure, are sorely embarrassed. Certain Whigs would make political hay of it—and presently shall. I bear most of the men of this Clubb no ill-will and did not wish to expose them to obloquy. The true villain of the piece is a certain Tory Lord who was the first man in England for a time—”

  “I know who you mean.”

  “He may deserve exposure and shame, but this is not to be achieved without grave embarrassment to the entire Realm. The matter is delicate—” and here Isaac looked, uncharacteristically, to one who would know more about it: Daniel Waterhouse, Lord Regent.

  Daniel responded by raising his voice in the direction of a side door of the library, which stood ajar. “Bring it in,” he commanded.

  The door was drawn open by some unseen servant. Another servant, a butler, came in gripping a tray mostly covered by a blue velvet cushion. Bedded in that were two ingots of metal, deeply wrought with intricate circular depressions, made so that they could be clapped together like a huge locket. These were borne over to the Princess so that she could inspect them; Newton and Leibniz stole sidelong glances. “It is my honor,” said Daniel, “to present to your royal highness the Seals that are used by His Majesty’s Secretary of State on his official correspondence. Until yesterday these were, of course, in the possession of my lord Bolingbroke. But as your royal highness may have heard, Bolingbroke has decided to spend more time with his family.”

  “Yes—in France,” said Caroline drily.

  “He was last seen southbound at a speed normally seen only among men who have been projected from high cliffs,” Daniel allowed. “Of course, being a man of honor, he first gave the Seals of his former office to one of His Majesty’s Regents. I had the privilege of catching them when they slipped from his sweaty and trembling hands, and now present them to your royal highness. They are your family property. You may take them back to Hanover or—”

  “They shall be ever so much more useful here,” said Caroline. “You and the other Regents will look after them, won’t you?”

  “We shall consider it our honor and our privilege, highness.”

  “Very well. Then since Bolingbroke appears to have departed the stage, I would that these be set aside, and I would hear more of Jack Shaftoe. Did he fight?”

  The butler backed away and set the Seals on a library table near Daniel, then backed out of the room bowing. This gave Newton some moments to frame a response. Isaac, who until now had been at pains to respond instantly to the Princess’s every word and gesture, bated for a moment before answering. Daniel searched his face and thought he perceived a quiver of triumph—a rare self-indulgence for a Puritan. He was sitting at the right hand of the Princess of Wales telling the tale of how he’d caught the arch-villain Jack the Coiner, and, as a soupçon, the Seals of his most terrible persecutor had been brought in as a sort of trophy. Only Bolingbroke’s scalp on a stick would have given satisfaction more complete.

  “Fight? No. Rather, he feigned a sort of boredom, or so I am told by the bailiffs who arrested him.”

  “Boredom?”

  “Yes, highness, as if he had known all along that he was walking into a trap.”

  “Is he in the Tower of London, then?”

  Isaac could not prevent a patronizing smile from spreading across his face. “As Mr. Shaftoe is a traitor and an important one, your royal highness anticipates, correctly, that he shall be held in the Tower. In this case, however, there are extenuating circumstances that have dictated a less conventional accommodation. Jack the Coiner and his gang seized the Tower complex in an elaborate coup de main some months ago. It was hushed up, explained away. But the fact is that he did it; from which we may conclude that he had, and has, many confederates among the people who dwell there, and that he knows its secrets all too intimately. Effective control of the Tower is still vested in Charles White, captain of the King’s Messengers, and he is an old crony of Bolingbroke.”

  “I should have thought the Regents might have found another man for such a position,” said Caroline, shifting her attention to Daniel.

  “In England such changes are not made lightly or swiftly,” said Daniel, “and rarely without cause. We have no firm evidence against Mr. White—though this might change—”

  “If Jack talks to us, and tells us what he knows,” Newton concluded.

  “I see,” said Caroline, “which is yet another reason to keep him out of the Tower, and out of the Power, of Charles White. Where then is he?”

  “He is in Newgate Prison,” said Newton, “and others of his gang are in Fleet Prison. We deemed it wisest not to put all of them together in one building.”

  “Indeed,” said Caroline, looking a little dismayed. “But is Newgate not a very common pit? Can he be kept close in such a place?”

  “Newgate is several prisons lumped into one,” said Daniel. “The most notorious part of it is indeed an execrable dungeon. But connected with it is the Press-Yard and Castle, where Persons of Quality are held, if they can afford it.”

  “We are paying the Gaolers of Newgate to keep him in an apartment there, heavily ironed,” Newton announced.

  “Can Jack not pay them even more?”

  “Perhaps. But if they collude in his escape, the gaolers lay themselves open to charges of High Treason. And, working as they do at Newgate, and discoursing with Jack Ketch every day, they know better than most what is the penalty for that crime.”

  “I thank you, Sir Isaac, and Dr. Waterhouse, for acquainting me with these things,” said Caroline, in a tone of voice, and with a shift of posture, that made it plain that this part of the conversation was at an end. “Now I would hear of matters far more important.” She settled back in her chair, letting its padded arms support her elbows, and as she talked, her right hand strayed over to rest upon the antique globe and nudge it this way and that in its felt-lined cradle. Her pose recalled that of a Monarch with one hand on an Orb, though the other hand seemed to be missing its Sceptre. “As you may know, Sir Isaac, I have known Baron von Leibniz for many years, and learned from him much of what I know of Mathematicks, Metaphysicks, and the younger discipline of Natural Philosophy. Concerning the first of these, reports have reached me of an unpleasant dispute concerning the origin of the Calculus. The particulars are tedious. Lesser minds, confronted with such complexities, have seized on simple explanations. One such is that you stole the calculus from Freiherr von Leibniz; another is that he stole it from you. I find both of these hypotheses unconvincing.”

  During Caroline’s remarks Daniel had observed a change in the weather pass across Isaac’s face. If he had expected lavish thanks and praise, he had been disappointed; Caroline had found the news of Jack and Bolingbroke interesting but, in the end, not all that remarkable. ’Twas as if the exhausted and bloodied Knight had dragged a pair of freshly slain dragons into the forecourt of the Princess’s castle, and after a look-see and a polite question or two, she had gone back to filing her nails. Isaac had been irked for a moment, then resigned himself to it. ’Twas ever thus, for Isaac. Everything he had done had been under-appreciated and over-criticized. The pink flush of victory, which earlier had been so plain on his face, had vanished, to be replaced by the visage he was used to wearing: gray and stiff as the figurehead on a worn-out ship.

  “Your royal highness knows Leibniz better than I,” said Newton. “As you have confided your view in me, highness, I shall accept it, and say nothing against it, either here, or in public. Of course, I have no power to compel other philosophers to adopt that, or any other, view.”

  “Then let us wash our hands of the Calculus Dispute and move on to Metaphysicks and Natural Philosophy. For I have long suspected—and Dr. Waterhouse will sup
port me on this—that the Calculus Dispute was really an epiphenomenon of a far more profound, interesting, and momentous debate. Baron von Leibniz has served my House well as court philosopher; Sir Isaac, I trust, is desirous of doing likewise.”

  “It is chief among my aspirations, highness,” Newton responded. This elicited a slight eye-roll from Leibniz, who glanced toward Daniel for support, but Daniel affected not to notice, and remained grave of aspect.

  “I wonder if any royal House in the history of this world has enjoyed the distinction of being served, at the same time, by two such eminent philosophers! It is a rare thing, and I mean to make the most of it. You are both Christians, believers in a living and active God. You both hold that humans are made in God’s image, possessing free will. In Mathematicks and Natural Philosophy, your interests run on very similar lines. And yet there is between you a schism as deep as that between Scylla and Charybdis—a fundamental divergence of views that makes it impossible for you to collaborate with each other. Which were not such a bad thing, perhaps, if I were still Princess of Ansbach or some other tiny place, and you, sir, a Librarian and you, sir, a Vicar. But I am Princess of Wales. The House you both now serve is a great one—some would say, second only to the House of Bourbon. If the philosophy of that House is confused, why, it shall have dreadful consequences, dificult to foretell. A year ago, I asked Dr. Waterhouse to journey hither from Boston, that we might go to work healing this breach. That you, Sir Isaac, and you, Baron von Leibniz, are here together in this room now, is all his doing; but he did it at my command. His part in the thing is done and he has my gratitude forever. Your parts, gentlemen, begin now.”