The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and the System of the World (252 page)

OCTOBER
1702

T
HE
K
ING WAS TOO POLITE
to mention the opposite face of the bargain, which was that if Jack failed, consequences would fall on Eliza; but Jack had plenty of time to work that out on the voyage down the Seine and across the Channel. Before the end of the next day, he was on an ostensibly Danish brig pretending to smuggle French wine to England.

The last time he’d been in these waters, seventeen years ago, he’d been bound the other way, harpoon-gashed, and half out of his mind with fever. On this the return trip, his body was sound, but his mind wasn’t. The full monstrousness of everything that had happened to Jack in the last weeks finally struck home, and rendered him sub-human for a long time.

The ability of sailing-ships to survive storms and tides depended on starving, drenched, terrified wretches’ carrying out certain rote procedures even though their minds were absent. Jack had not sailed around the world without acquiring a few such instincts, and that probably explained how he passed the next day or so. The weather was fine; the storm was in his mind. When he came back to awareness, a day had gone by, but it seemed that he had been eating and drinking and eliminating in the meantime. He soon wished that he had remained in that semi-conscious state, because awareness brought pain.

Even so, tears did not finally come to his eyes and begin to roll down his face until the middle of the next day, when the downs of England thickened the horizon, all treeless and green, and as alien-looking as any landscape Jack had viewed during his travels. That went double for the Dover cliffs. The brig was turning now, bearing round to the north, and one morning she finally came round to a westerly heading and began to ride an incoming tide, skimming above the vast sands of the Thames, all tangled with the wracks of ships, looking like harpsichords that had yielded to the tension of their strings and imploded to black snarls. She picked her way up the estuary for the whole day, past Gravesend and Erith and various
places on the Long Reach that the Shaftoe brothers, Jack and Bob and Dick, had once thought of as being extremely far away.

The river was crowded with ships far downstream of where it had been in the days of Jack’s boyhood, and so Jack kept thinking that he had passed over Dick’s watery death-site, only to learn they’d not be reaching it for quite some time yet. But as evening fell the captain issued blunderbusses to certain crewmen and told them to be on the lookout for mudlarks, and then Jack knew he had come full circle at last. It was strangely comforting to him. Home, as miserable as it was and had been, had some power to balm his wounds. It was all he could do not to jump overboard and wade ashore to lose himself in some Limehouse gin hole.

But that would’ve been irresponsible. Jack had a job that needed doing. He was a man of affairs now, a City man, and no mudlark. He told the captain to keep making way upstream until the lights of London Bridge were in view.

When they rounded the last river-bend at Wapping, light broke across the mile of water between them and the Bridge, outlining every spar and line of the countless ships riding at anchor in the Pool. Jack had remembered the Bridge as a gleaming dam of light across the Thames, but now he could scarcely make it out for the radiance of the rebuilt city piled up behind it. It was almost as if London had caught fire again, just in time for Jack’s homecoming.

But the most brilliant object in Jack’s vision was neither the Bridge nor the City. On the northern bank of the river, downstream of the Bridge, rose the Tower. Jack recalled this as a dull stone pile with the occasional candle gleaming through an embrasure. But on this night, anyway, the Tower was a massive stone plinth supporting a pillar of airborne light, and all the ships in the Pool below it seemed to have collected around its radiance like gnats besieging a lanthorn. Actually the eastern end of the place was as dark as ever, but at its western edge hot fires had been kindled. Piles of smoke and steam were rising up to black out the stars, and sparks careered through those clouds like meteors. The flames were concealed behind Tower walls, but they lit up their own smoke from beneath, and made of it a screen to project boiling and flaring light across the water. “Closer, closer,” Jack kept demanding—it had become obvious that the captain was under orders to do Jack’s bidding no matter what. So sailors were sent below to work the sweeps, and, like a many-legged insect crawling through a crowded burrow, the brig felt its way among anchored ships for hours, shrugging off curses and threats from men on other vessels who did not want to see their anchor cables fouled.

Jack could hear now the rumble of coal-carts inside the Tower, and the steady pounding beat of some giant machine inside the Mint: some massive trip-hammer coining golden guineas. When the brig had shouldered up to the front rank of ships, affording Jack an unobstructed view, he gave the signal to drop anchor, directly before the sprawling span of the Traitor’s Gate. The ship swung around to point upstream and, as it did, Jack performed a slow pirouette on the foredeck so that the heat of the Mint shone always on his face.

High above, on one of the ancient towers, he could see a gentleman who had gone up there for a stroll, perhaps to get some fresh air and clear his head after too long spent down in the broiling Mint. This fellow stopped on the parapet to look out over the river, silhouetted against the burning cloud behind him, and a sea-breeze caught his long hair and blew it back like a banner. Jack could see that the man’s hair was snow-white.

“That must be him, then,” he said to no one, “him that was put in charge of the Mint.” Raising his voice a bit he said, “Enjoy your perch up there, Mister Newton, because Jack the Coiner has come back to London-town, and he aims to knock you down; the game has begun, and may the best man win!”