The System of the World (59 page)

“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!”

19
JUNE
1714

A
QUARTER 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.”

“W
HEN
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 court 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.

“This was lent to me by a friend who suffered from an embarrassment of riches,” Daniel explained after the torch had been extinguished and stowed, and the gate locked. They were examining a squarish plate of what appeared to be gold. It had been treated very disrespectfully and was scraped, battered out of plane, salt-caked, and tar-stained. But it was still obviously gold, hand-hammered to a thickness of perhaps an eighth of an inch. “As you have probably guessed, there are more of them stowed below; but we only withdraw as much as can be wrought in a single day.”

For some minutes they followed Daniel around the court as he carried this treasure to several stations. A workman scrubbed it in a barrel of water to get rid of the salt. A goldsmith grasped it with tongs and thrust it into a furnace; for a few moments it was enveloped in fumes and colored flames as impurities were burnt off. Then it resolved to a pure glowing slab. He tugged it out, quenched it in water, and snipped off a corner for assay. Then Daniel took it to a weigher who tediously balanced it on a scale, and noted it in a book. Then it was across the yard to a mill consisting of two great brass rollers, one above the other like a mangle. A man fed the plate into the crevice between these as a boy whirled a crank on an elaborate gear-train. The rollers turned almost as slowly as minute-hands. What emerged from them was no longer a neat square: it had been mashed to an irregular oval blob, like pie-crust under a rolling-pin, thinner than a fingernail. It came out onto a kind of skid that had been fashioned from a whole ox-hide stretched over a frame the size of a dining-table. The plate lay on this like a lake of molten gold, almost smooth enough to bear reflections. Four men—one at each corner—now bore this across the court to a stall where a large shearing-machine had been established. The ox-hide pallet was mated to this, so that the golden sheet could be slid directly
into the jaws of the shear. Two men now went to work slicing the lozenge of gold into a large number of strips, each about a hand-span in width. When this was finished they rotated the strips ninety degrees and fed them through a second time, cutting them into squares. Some of the cuttings, from near the edge, came out imperfectly shaped, and were pitched into a discard basket. The rest were piled into a neat stack. When they ran out of gold the shear-men twice counted and re-stacked the cards (for the gold squares resembled nothing so much as a deck of great playing-cards). All of the proceeds—including the basket of scraps—were given back to Daniel. He took them back to the weigher, who accounted for every iota of gold. Daniel then returned the scraps to the locked crypt.