The System of the World (74 page)

“Not for long,” Saturn remarked. He was gazing fixedly out the window.

“Why do you say so?”

“Because Sean Partry is waving his arms at me from below the Window in Question.”

Daniel’s arm jerked and spilt his ink-bottle. It slicked the page of the log-book with a black parabola that streamed over the edge and spattered to the floor.

Saturn was on his feet. He waved back, but did not take his eye off the Tatler-Lock.

“Which direction is Partry indicating?” Daniel asked backing carefully away from the mess. The ink had already found a crevice between floor-planks. Sounds of havoc and dismay were coming up from the tap-room.

“He points toward the Bridge,” said Saturn, and finally glanced away from Partry so that he could give his watch a study.

“Then the buyer ought to be coming our way—”

“In no more than two minutes,” Saturn agreed. “But traffic is
heavier now than when I clocked him before. I shall loap along the Bridge a-foot, and may out-pace him. Do you try to summon a hackney, or a sedan.” And he preceded Daniel out the door, and down stairs. Which was fortunate for Daniel, as several ink-spattered Main-Topp patrons had by now formed up at the base of the stairs, in a retaliatory mood. Their ardor cooled when Saturn sallied forth, and through the little Mobb broke a path that Daniel was not slow to follow. “Our work above is concluded,” Saturn announced, over his shoulder, as he went out, “and all losses shall be compensated anon—but not now.” And with that he burst out the front door of the Main-Topp and into the streaming crowd of the Bridge.

Saturn glanced left—towards Southwark and the Tatler-Lock—but turned right, anticipating that the buyer’s carriage would overtake him presently. By the time Daniel made it out the door, Saturn had already advanced several long strides in the direction of London. Daniel followed his example and glanced left—but it availed him nothing. He lacked both Peter Hoxton’s
height,
which would have enabled him to see over the crowd as far as the Great Stone Gate, and his
youth,
which made eyes quicker to adjust to the sudden brightness of the unroofed street.

All he had was a vague instruction to hire a coach or a sedan. No hackney of sound mind would await customers in front of the Main-Topp. Daniel guessed there might be chairs or coaches for hire in the Square, a short distance to the north. So he turned right, and began to thread his way through the jostling crowd.

Like the captain of a brittle ship hemmed in on all sides by massive ice-floes, Daniel could not make his own path, but had to move along with the general flow, and avail himself of any leads that snaked open before him before they drew shut and crushed his ribs. He made feeble progress compared to Saturn. Before he had progressed so far as the vault of the Chapel, he had lost sight of Saturn’s black head.

The artificial isles that supported the Bridge were called Starlings; the chutes between the Starlings, through which the divided River coursed, were denominated Locks. Daniel, unable to see much but heads and shoulders, estimated, by a kind of dead reckoning, that he must be passing over Long Entry Lock, which was the narrowest, hence most dangerous of them all, as the Chapel Pier to its north side had grown so fat over the centuries as to nearly pinch it shut. Then, looking up, he saw a stone vault overhead, and knew he was passing under the Chapel. Next (counting the Locks and Starlings in his head, like a Papist going through the Rosary) would be Chapel Lock—also quite narrow—but then St. Mary’s Lock, one of the widest
on the whole bridge, hence, popular among watermen. Directly over St. Mary’s was the open fire-break called The Square. And it was there, Daniel reasoned, that hackney-drivers and sedan-porters would flock in hopes of swopping passengers with the watermen below.

Such was his plan. But as commonly happened to clever Natural Philosophers who have hatched elaborate schemes, he was overtaken by simple events. The crowd, hemmed in under the vault of the Chapel, suddenly pressed him from all sides. It was like being an atom of a gas in Boyle’s Rarefying Engine when the piston was slammed down by a terrific weight. A carriage was trying to force its way through—and succeeding. The crowd, sensing danger not so much from the carriage itself as from its bow-wave of panic, surged out from the dangerous confines of the vault, and Daniel, like a wine-cork tossed into Long Entry Lock, was spewed forth.

He was in the open now, tottering, looking about warily lest some eddy of the Mobb-rush take him unawares and crush him against a store-front. So he saw the carriage that had caused the trouble as it emerged from the vault, pressing on toward London.

He did not doubt that this was the one. Its window-curtains had all been drawn and its driver had evidently been paid to force his way to the other end of the Bridge with no concern for life, limb, or liability.

They were over Chapel Lock. The Square was only ten yards farther along—but this hackney had already passed Daniel by, and at its mad pace would soon overtake Saturn as well. Daniel still nursed some hope that he might be able to summon a carriage or a chair in the Square—but it would not be easy to persuade a strange driver to light out in hot pursuit of a hackney being driven as recklessly as this one. They needed to keep the buyer in sight as long as they possibly could; for there was no way of telling how long he would wait to put the key he had just paid for into the key-hole in the bottom of the chest, and turn it.

Daniel had, by default, staggered into the sudden open space left in the wake of the hackney. He was so close that he almost could have reached out and climbed aboard, if he’d been that spry. So he could hear—or so he phant’sied—a muffled pop from within, like a musket misfiring. Then flickering light shone through the curtains, and he heard from within a man shouting
“Sacré bleu!”

Without being aware of how fast he was moving—for if anyone had asked, he’d have insisted he was too old to run—Daniel had followed the hackney right into the Square. The way widened slightly here. He saw Saturn standing to one side. He’d been conversing with a sedan-porter, but had broken off to stare at the buyer’s hackney.

Indeed
many
were now staring at it, for it was
smoking
. And it was
making booms as the passenger flailed against the roof, signalling the driver to stop. The door on the right side flew open and disgorged a cloud of brown-gray smoke. So dense and voluminous was this, that a long and careful inspection was needed to see that there was a man in the middle of it. He was staggering away from the carriage, headed for the parapet that surrounded the Square to limit the number of pedestrians who toppled into St. Mary’s Lock. The passenger looked like a figure from Ovid: a Cloud metamorphosing into a Man. For the smoke had saturated the long hooded cloak that he wore, and was still billowing out of it. Gagging, he shuffled toward the parapet. The hackney-driver scrambled round to the open door, probed into the smoke with his whip-handle, and after a bit of scratching about, dragged out a blackened carapace: a burnt box, still sputtering and jetting a sturdy plume of thick yellowish smoke. Its lid was open to reveal a sheaf of pages, still legible though they’d been burnt to gray leaves of ash; these tumbled onto the pavement and Daniel, only a fathom away, saw the angular glyphs of the Real Character. But then he turned his attention back to the buyer, who had finally cast off his raiment of smoke, and stood at the parapet, feet spread wide, hands planted to support him as he retched into St. Mary’s Lock. Like a monk or wizard out of medieval times he looked in that robe. Then he was joined by a larger man who stepped in from the left and clapped his right hand on the other’s left shoulder.

The response of the hooded man was immediate—too quick for Daniel, who had a foreboding of what was about to happen, to shout a warning. The hooded man spun toward Saturn, pivoting around the shoulder that Saturn had gripped. Much was hidden by the robe and by smoke; but the movements of his shoulders told that he was driving his right hand toward Saturn’s belly.

But Peter Hoxton, by luck or by foresight, was ready for this. There had been something in the man’s stance at the parapet that had looked posed, and poised: perhaps it had roused in Saturn’s mind the same suspicions as in Daniel’s. Saturn got his left arm well inside of the other’s attack, and shouldered it aside. But then he jumped back. For as was now plain to everyone in the Square, the robed man was holding a small dagger in his hand. And as was clear to Daniel and to Saturn, the blade had been smeared with something.

In this brief melee the hood had fallen from the buyer’s head to reveal his face. It was not burnt or pox-marked. On the contrary, it was a well-formed head of noble bearing. He had black hair going silver, and a goatee. That much was obvious as he surveyed the crowd
on the Square, which had formed a ring around him and Saturn, well beyond dagger-range. Daniel recognized him (though it took a few moments) as Édouard de Gex.

De Gex made a move toward the parapet. Saturn, not very prudently, reached out and grabbed him. That stopped de Gex in his tracks. Or so it seemed for an instant until Daniel stepped forward through a shoal of smoke and perceived that de Gex had gone over the edge into St. Mary’s Lock, leaving Saturn standing there alone, holding an empty robe.

*
Partry.

24
JULY
1714

“W
HEN
I
WAS A BOY,
traveling the roads of France with my father—may God have mercy on his soul—and my brother Calvin, we would from time to time overtake a traveling knife-grinder, sweating with the labor of shoving his rig, which was very heavy because of the massive round grindstone. My father, God rest him, was a trader. A merchant. Everything he needed to conduct his business he carried in his head, or in his purse. This Calvin and I considered to be the normal state of affairs. How strange it was, therefore, to see these knife-sharpeners, who could not earn their bread without a great heavy stone! One day Father heard me and Calvin make some mocking comments after we had passed one of these poor hard-working men. He chided us for our arrogance, and gave us a lesson: the grindstone was set in motion by a shove, and kept turning by occasional slaps of the grinder’s hand. If it lacked weight, it would run down so quickly as to be useless. But because of its tremendous mass, it continued to turn with the greatest impetuosity once set in motion. The stone acted, my father said, as a sort of
banca,
storing up the work that the grinder did sporadically with hand-slaps, and releasing it steadily. This faculty was so essential to the knife-grinder’s work that he willingly pushed that heavy stone up and down hills every day of his life, like Sisyphus.

“When Jack Shaftoe came back to London, he had in his pocket
some money given him by the King of France to finance certain schemes and intrigues that Jack was supposed to set afoot here. And, too, there was the promise that more money would be sent to Jack from time to time if
Le Roi
was pleased with his work. The gold he had in his pocket was like the first great shove that sets the grindstone in motion, and the sums promised later would be like the hand-slaps that keep it from losing its speed. But Jack had the wit to understand that he needed a
banca,
a store-house of wealth and power in London, so that his operations would run smooth and steady, even when the subsidies were balky and sporadic. It was not possible for him to rely upon proper
bancas,
and so he had to create one of his own, tailored to his designs. Making the acquaintance of a Mr. Knockmealdown—who in those days was a modestly successful fence, running a Lock in Limehouse, buying goods that had been rifled from ships by mudlarks—he offered up the following Proposition: that he, Jack Shaftoe, would use his ‘French gold and English wits’ to make Mr. Knockmealdown into a Colossus among receivers, vastly expanding his holdings, and building up his inventory. Mr. Knockmealdown would become a rich man, and his Irish East London Company, as ’twas waggishly called, would become, for Jack, the grindstone that would store up the produce of his labours.

“For the first several years that Jack was back in London, he applied himself to little else. And his wisdom in doing so was demonstrated presently, when the War of the Spanish Succession began to go badly for France, what with all the great blows struck at the armies of
Le Roi
by Marlborough and Prince Eugene. You may be sure that Louis sent Jack very little gold in those grim years. Jack should have been reduced to the estate of a Vagabond, and been rendered useless to
Le Roi,
had he not been able to sustain himself from the profits of the East London Company. As it was, Jack prospered even as Louis declined, and by the time that Marlborough crushed the French at Ramillies, and stood poised to drive into the heart of France (or so it seemed), Jack had built Mr. Knockmealdown up into the most powerful Receiver in Christendom: a sort of Pirate-King, able to absorb into his warehouses the entire contents of a stolen ship as a dog swallows a fly, and, on the same tide, to load the same ship to the gunwales with swag. The East London Company thereby became the Foundation upon which Jack could build his dark Edifice. Only in recent years has he built it high enough for men such as you to note it; but you may be certain it was a-building for many a year before then.”

Here Henry Arlanc paused to sweep his gaze around the table. He gave each Clubb member a searching look in the eye, until he came
to Sean Partry, who sat closest to him. Then he dropped his eyelids and bowed his head slightly, showing the thief-taker more respect than any other man in the room—even Sir Isaac. Perhaps this was for the simple reason that Partry had on his ring the keys to the manacles that now encircled Arlanc’s wrists, and the fetters around his ankles. Arlanc raised his hands up out of his lap, which required some exertion as they were linked by twenty pounds of chain, and closed them round a mug of chocolate that his wife had brought to him.

Mrs. Arlanc had been
horrified
but not the least bit
surprised
when, at the beginning of the Clubb’s meeting, as the first item of New Business, Sean Partry had stormed into the room and clapped her husband in irons. The prisoner, by contrast, had been astonished; but once this had faded he had shown no strong emotion, seeming to accept his personal ruin with true Huguenot fatalism. If anything, he seemed relieved.

“Explain to the Clubb how you became a minion of Jack Shaftoe,” Sir Isaac demanded, “and do you speak slowly and clearly, that every word may be pricked down.” For in lieu of Arlanc—who had, until minutes ago, been the Clubb’s Secretary—they had brought in a Clerk from the Temple, who was scratching away with a quill as fast as he could, writing in shorthand.

“Very well. You will already have heard many tales of the horrors visited upon the French Calvinists after the Edict of Nantes in 1685, and so I shall spare you another, save to say that my father was caught up in a
dragonnade
and made a galley-slave—but not before he had contrived to smuggle me and Calvin across the Manche to England, packed in barrels, like herring. Later the galley on which my father served was destroyed in a battle against a Dutch fleet in the Mediterranean.”

“But that must have occurred several years after the Edict,” said Mr. Kikin, ever the student of history.

“Indeed, sir,” said Arlanc, “for the War began, by most reckonings, in 1688, when Louis took the Palatinate and William took England.”

“We prefer to say that England took William,” Orney corrected him.

“Be that as it may, sir, the engagement that destroyed the galley of my father was a part of the said war, and it took place in the summer of 1690, off Crete.”

“He was lost at sea, then, as I take it?” asked Mr. Threader, in a touchingly genteel and delicate way.

“On the contrary, sir—he was rescued by a pirate-galley commanded by none other than Jack Shaftoe.”

At this claim, Kikin rolled his eyes, and Orney let out a “Poh!”
Isaac took no note of them, but sharpened his gaze, which remained locked on Arlanc’s face. “It is consistent,” he announced. “Jack Shaftoe turned Turk in the late 1680s. His Corsairs are known to have raided Bonanza during the summer of 1690. Thence they fled through the Gates of Hercules into the Mediterranean. By late summer they had reached Cairo, as all the world now knows. Mr. Arlanc’s account is plausible.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Henry Arlanc. “Jack and his band of corsairs rescued my father, and other
galériens,
from the wrack of that galley. This much Calvin and I knew from letters we received in Limerick. But beyond that—”

“Hold. How did you and your brother get to Limerick?” asked Orney.

“I was getting to that, sir. When we were let out of our barrels in England, a pair of young lads, not yet fully grown, we could, I’m ashamed to say, muster very little interest in following our father’s example and becoming merchants. We lusted after revenge—preferably violent, and if possible, glorious. We joined one of the Huguenot cavalry regiments forming in the Dutch Republic. By the time that William and Mary had come to England, we had risen in the ranks a bit—Calvin had become an assistant Chaplain and I was a non-commissioned officer. Our regiment was one of those that were despatched to Ireland during the early years of the war, to drive out the Pretender. We participated in the Siege of Limerick during the winter of ’90 and ’91, and that is where we received the miraculous tidings that our father—whom we had given up for dead—had been pulled out of the sea by the King of the Vagabonds.”

“Did you receive any further communication from him?” asked Isaac.

“Not for several years, sir, as we were all so much on the move.”

“If your father remained in the service of Jack Shaftoe, he would have called at such places as Mocha and Bandar-Congo during 1691 and followed the monsoon to Surat the year after,” Newton said. “Beyond that it is difficult to reconstruct Jack’s movements for several years. It is well known that he participated in a battle somewhere between Surat and Shahjahanabad in late 1693, and that in 1695 he had begun to organize a ship-building project.”

“In February of 1698 our father posted us a letter from Batavia, where that ship had called to take on spices,” Arlanc said. “We did not receive it until late in the year. By that time the war was over.”

Orney snorted.

“Or so everyone believed at the time,” Arlanc hastened to add. “In retrospect, of course, this was nothing more than a brief respite in a
war that extended over twenty-five years. But few foresaw this, and so our regiment, like so many others, was disbanded the following year, when the Treaty of Partition was signed by William and Louis.

“It was difficult to find work in London with so many discharged veterans about, and dangerous to be there for the same reason. Calvin and I were more fortunate than some, for enough time had passed since the Edict of Nantes that the Huguenots had established themselves in England, and begun to prosper. Calvin secured a position as a pastor in a Huguenot church just outside of the city, and has been there ever since. I took jobs here and there as a servant to Huguenot businessmen.

“The last letter we received from our father was posted from Manila in August of the year of our Lord 1700, and it stated—”

“That Jack’s ship was about to attempt the crossing of the Pacific,” said Sir Isaac, “and he would be aboard it.”

“Just so, sir. It is uncanny how much you know of Jack’s movements about the world. Father said he would write to us again from Acapulco. But he died of scurvy en route, may God have mercy on his soul.”

At this little prayer everyone in the room observed a respectful silence. Even Partry seemed moved. The first to speak was Sir Isaac. “And
how,
precisely, were you delivered this unhappy news?”

“Jack told me,” said Arlanc.

This information silenced Isaac for a bit longer. Mrs. Arlanc could be heard indistinctly, sobbing into the shoulder of a scullery maid in the Royal Society’s kitchen. But presently Isaac stirred again and said, “This would have occurred after his return to London in the last months of 1702.”

“Again you are correct, sir.”

“Do you phant’sy that Jack Shaftoe arranged this interview with you
solely
to deliver word of your father’s passing?”

Here Henry Arlanc looked discomfited for the first time—odd, considering he was heavily ironed, and on his way to Newgate. He cast an uncertain glance at Sean Partry, and another at Sir Isaac. Then he answered: “Of course not, sir. However, I must tell you something you ought to know about Jack Shaftoe, which is that he is not utterly black-hearted. Did he have a selfish motive for paying a call on me? Of course, and I shall address that next. But his affection for my father was unfeigned, and when he told the tale of my father’s passing, and his burial at sea, almost within sight of California, he shed tears. And I believe that the affection may even have been mutual, for by Jack’s account, my father’s dying words included certain warnings for Jack—warnings he’d have been well-advised to have heeded.”

“How touching,” Isaac said, very much as if he wanted to skip over this part as quickly as possible. But curiosity had already got the better of Daniel, who asked: “What did these warnings concern?”

This earned him a glare from Isaac, and so Daniel went on: “Forgive me, but it is clear that my father and yours had much in common with each other, Mr. Arlanc, and I cannot guess what sort of warnings a man like my father would have issued to a man like Jack, unless it was that his immortal soul was doomed to the Lake of Fire!”

Orney slapped the table and chuckled silently.

“My father implored Jack to beware of a certain passenger whom they’d plucked out of the Pacific following the wrack of the Manila Galleon. A Jesuit priest he was—an agent of the Inquisition, named Father Édouard de Gex.”

Isaac, who had barely been able to hold back a sneer moments ago, was distinctly taken a-back. After a moment to compose himself he asked Partry to take the prisoner out of the room (which he did, a bit roughly) and out of earshot (which was seen to by Mrs. Arlanc, who rushed forth to embrace her husband and wail).

“He knows nothing of what happened yesterday on the Bridge,” Daniel insisted.

“It is too soon for accounts to have appeared in newspapers,” observed Mr. Kikin, an astute reader of all that spewed forth from Grub Street.

“Could Partry have mentioned anything to him? A slip of the tongue, perhaps?”

“Impossible,” said Orney. “Partry and I spent all afternoon, and evening, scouring the banks of the Thames for evidence of de Gex.”

“And I came here with Saturn, specifically to keep an eye on Arlanc,” Daniel said. “He received no visitors.”

“This is a singular piece of news, if it is to be credited,” Isaac said. “For years it has been assumed, by many at Court, that de Gex—who spends much time in London—was an agent of the King of France. And many rumors have reached my ears that he was entangled, somehow, with Jack the Coiner. I had assumed that de Gex and Shaftoe operated hand-in-glove.” He nodded at the place where Arlanc had just been sitting. “But this talk of a warning that went unheeded hints at a conflict of fourteen years’ standing between the two of them.”

“It hints at something else, too,” Orney said. “If it is true that this de Gex survived the destruction of a ship on the open ocean, and stayed afloat long enough to be rescued, it implies that he knows how
to swim—which means we cannot simply assume that he drowned in the Thames yesterday.”