The System of the World (100 page)

A MONTH LATER
(18
SEPTEMBER
1714)

“N
OW
THERE
IS SOMETHING
you don’t see every day!” exclaimed Roger Comstock, Marquis of Ravenscar. It was the first thing he had said in a quarter of an hour—a long time, for him—and it prodded Daniel out of a sort of walking coma into which he had sunk during this, the third hour he and Roger had spent standing in this queue.

Daniel started awake and looked round.

Philosophers came to Greenwich all the time, and some even lived here, for the Observatory was up on the hill. Kings and Queens came here rarely, even though the place belonged to them. Architects came here frequently, and almost always wished they hadn’t. For building-projects at Greenwich always had money trouble, and things seemed to decay faster than they could be erected. Inigo Jones had been adroit enough to scamper in and out of this Slough of Despond and actually get a thing built and roofed before it got bogged down: this was the Queen’s House, and the secret to its success was that it was small. The bloody thing seemed to be a mile from the river. Or so it felt to Daniel and the others in the queue, whose head was lodged somewhere in Mr. Jones’s Opus and whose tail wandered all the way
to bankside. Some stone steps descended to the river there. A gaudy barge had been made fast. Beyond, anchored in a deeper part of the Thames, was the Navy ship that had fetched George, King, over from the Eurasian landmass. Daniel was only able to see these things because he and Roger had, at long last, reached the foot of, and (half an hour later) trudged to the top of, one of the curving stairways that led up to the terrace of the Queen’s House. From there a few minutes’ shuffling and doddering had got them as far as the front door. They were on the threshold. Daniel had his back to the entrance and was enjoying the view—such as it was—down to the river. Roger, with his stoat-like instinct for dark, seething, infested places, faced opposite. The open doors expired a miasma of rose-water and armpits, cut with the tang of new paint, a-throb with a sort of Beowulfian mélange of German and English. Daniel couldn’t bear to turn round and see whatever Roger found so interesting, and so he and Roger passed over the threshold in this Janus-like configuration. Daniel was convinced he had caught a glimpse of Sir Christopher Wren, about an hour behind them in the queue, and had been trying to work out some way of getting Wren’s attention, and of inducing him, by furtive gesticulations, to jump the line. But it was perfectly hopeless; this was the worst place in the world for it. Twenty-some years ago, Wren had been brought in to impose some order on this place, as only Wren could. It had been his place ever since. He was working for free—the idea was to build a hospital for Naval pensioners. Queen Mary had started flogging the plan after the battle at La Hougue in ’92, but she had expired in ’94. There was no telling when a driblet of cash might spill forth from the Royal coffers. Whenever this occurred, Wren would blow it immediately on great blocks of stone and slam them down at the corners, and later along the perimeters, of the things he proposed to build here. For he could see perfectly well that he’d be dead before it went up. Later, and lesser, architects might botch the details, but none would be able to place the actual buildings other than where Wren had flung these plinths into the earth. His deputy Nick Hawksmoor, perceiving the genius of this strategy, and very much getting into the spirit, had lately bought a great bloody block of sculpture-grade marble at some scandalously low price and arranged for it to be vomited up on to the riverbank; when they could get enough money to hire someone to beat on it with a chisel, they’d make it into a brilliant statue of whomever happened to be King or Queen then. And so the general picture that Daniel was seeing from the terrace—and that owned Wren’s attention—was one of colossal foundations, laid by giants: a tiered echelon of rectangles—a Pythagorean dream. In that it was all foundations and no actual buildings,
it seemed to confirm all that the Princess of Wales had said, a month ago, about the System, and the importance of putting it on a sound philosophical base. But what Newton and Leibniz had come up with—or failed to—seemed rickety compared to the works of Wren: further evidence that Wren had chosen wisely by turning away from pure philosophy and applying his genius to architecture.

Daniel gave up all hope of catching Wren’s eye and turned round to see what Roger was on about.

“All right,” he had to admit, after a few moments’ taking it in, “you don’t see it every day.”

Two jowls, stapled together by a grimace, and supervised by a stare: the face of George. Lots of clothing to hide his body—nothing unusual
there,
though, beyond that the clothes were nicer than those of the people massed around him: his Court. Most of these Daniel recognized from his visit to Hanover. He pointed out a few of them to Roger, who had heard of all of them—knew more about them, as it turned out, than Daniel did—but needed a sort of key by which rumors, slanders, calumnies, and salacious anecdotes could be mapped to faces. Pretty soon they were all shooting chilly looks Daniel’s way, even though he was only about the dozenth person in the queue. Perhaps it was because they had caught him pointing and muttering to Roger. More likely, though, it was because the last time they’d seen him, in Hanover, round the time of Sophie’s death, he had been pretending to be senile and useless. Then he had been named a Regent. No proof of
compos mentis,
that, but they’d read into it that he had pull over
someone
.
Certainly
not George. By process of elimination, then, he’d been influencing Princess Caroline.

Caroline did not even seem to be in the room. No, on second thought, there she was in the corner with her husband. They’d already drawn their own little shadow Court of mostly young, witty Londoners, all talking too much, laughing, and drawing evil looks from the old and not so witty, who tended to keep their faces turned toward the new King. It was weirdly obvious and bold: if you thought you’d live long enough to march in George I’s funeral procession, why then you would gravitate toward the future George II. Most had the decency and good form to hew to this general principle, but Daniel Waterhouse was fouling it up by being an old man in the young people’s camp. And here he was on the arm of the Marquis of Ravenscar!

“I’d best stop pointing and staring now, as we seem to’ve been noticed,” he said to Roger, trying to look as if he were making a remark about yesterday’s weather, “but in closing I’ll just add that you can see plainly enough the fat one and the skinny one.”

As
tout le monde
knew, these were George’s mistresses; his actual wife, of course, was still locked up in a dank Schloß somewhere beyond the Weser.

“I had already marked them, sir,” said Roger drily. “And
they
seem to have marked
me
—for death!”

“I think you altogether misinterpret their glaring,” Daniel said, after verifying that the fat one and the skinny one were, in fact, attempting to set fire to Roger’s eyebrows with the heat of their scrutiny. “A she-wolf in the Thüringerwald stares thus at her prey, before pouncing. But it is not out of
hate
that the feral bitch of the north does so, but rather a cool understanding that it’s from the hapless rabbit, sheep, or what-have-you, that she is to derive her sustenance.”

“Oh, is
that
all they want? Money?”

“In a word, yes.”

“I’d supposed that they wanted me to draw out my sword and plunge it into my own vitals, or something, from the way they were looking at me.”

“No,” Daniel confirmed, “they want your money.”

“It is good to know this.”

“Why? Are you going to give them some of your money now?”

“That would be impolite,” said Roger, blushing at the very thought. “But I see no obstacle to giving them someone else’s.”

Finally they had drawn near enough that it was no longer the done thing for them to acknowledge anyone other than their (as yet uncrowned) King. For once Daniel got precedence over Roger, because of being a Regent; and his majesty even recognized him. “Dr. Vaterhouse of der Royal Society,” he rattled off, as he allowed Daniel to kiss his hand—the very last occasion, or so Daniel hoped, that Daniel would ever give his Puritan ancestors occasion to roll over in their graves. Daniel was so consumed by the horror of what he was doing, and by wondering whether he was going to catch anything from that hand, which had already been kissed, today, by half of the syphilitics in England, that he failed to attend to what the King was saying. The problem was that his majesty had jumped over to some other language—some language, that is, that he actually spoke—and Daniel had not kept up—had not re-tuned his ear to follow it. With his unkissed left hand, George was gesturing toward the windows in the back, or south wall of the house, which provided a pleasant enough view over a rising green lawn, crossed here and there by paths, and tufted with carefully managed outbreaks of trees. Jutting from the biggest and most elevated of these, off to the right, was the queer edifice known as the Royal Observatory: two bookends imprisoning
one book. But other than that, few buildings were visible, as the whole point was for it to be a park.

Daniel, belatedly coming alive to the fact that he was being personally addressed in an as-yet-unidentified language by the King, got only a single word:
Rüben
. What did it mean? To rub something? Perhaps the King was remarking that the custodians of the Queen’s House had rubbed the windows very clean? Daniel was just beginning to nod when the King helpfully said
“navet.”
Daniel realized in some horror that he’d switched to French to make himself better understood—but Daniel still didn’t understand! Was he talking about the Navy? That would be reasonable in a way, since the activities of the Royal Observatory were of great importance to the Navy. Daniel kept nodding. Finally Bothmar intervened—Baron von Bothmar, who’d been the Hanoverian ambassador to the Court of St. James back in the days when Hanover and England had been different countries. “His majesty hates to see good land go to waste,” Bothmar translated, “and has been eyeing yonder open space all morning, wondering how it might be put to some practical use; the difficulty being that it inclines toward the north and does not, in consequence, receive good sunlight. Knowing that you, Dr. Waterhouse, are a man of great Natural-philosophick acumen, his majesty asks you whether you are in agreement with him in thinking that, in the springtime, one might, with some hope of success, plant on that ground
Rüben—navets
—turnips.”

“Tell his majesty that if I had a shovel I’d go plant some right now,” Daniel said hopelessly.

The King, having been made aware of this, blinked and nodded. He had got a distant look now in his eyes, which reflected the green light of the future turnip-patch. Daniel could almost see the man’s jowls fill up with saliva as he envisioned a grand turnip-feast in a year’s time.

Ravenscar was chuckling. “How your shovel-work would discomfit those prancing, Frenchified Tory courtiers,” he remarked, “who, seeing such an excellent plot of land as that, have not the wit to imagine any use for it save to parade about on their gaudy
chevals
.”

“The Marquis of Ravenscar,” von Bothmar explained, and Daniel now had to avert his gaze from the not especially appetizing spectacle of Roger planting a smooch on George’s hand.

When Daniel felt it was safe to look back, the King seemed to have been put in mind of something. He was casting about for an eye-line to the Duke of Marlborough, and presently got one—Marlborough was one of the few actual English people suffered to stand anywhere near the King of England. Much as iron filings stand up and get organized
in the presence of a magnet, certain facts and memories that had been scattered round the King’s periwig came into alignment when his visual cortex was stimulated by the face of Marlborough. He harrumphed and began to burp out some phrases having to do with a
soirée
and a
Vulkan
that were translated into prose, and into English, by Bothmar. “His majesty has heard from my lord Marlborough that the Duke very much enjoyed your recent party, at which the famous Volcano was made to erupt. His majesty would fain witness this amusement. Not now. Later. But my lord Marlborough spoke well of how the Royal Mint has been looked after, and of the quality of the coinage. His majesty will require good men to look after the Treasury. Good
men
—not a good man. For such is the importance of this task that he has decided to change the tradition of appointing a Lord Treasurer, and place that office in commission. His majesty is pleased to nominate my lord Ravenscar First Lord of the Treasury. And he is also pleased to nominate Daniel Waterhouse a member of that same Commission.”

All of which came as news to Daniel—though Roger had been winking at and elbowing him even more than usual in recent days, which ought to have given him a clew.

Rather a lot of bowing and scraping occurred round now, as tremendous gratitude had to be expressed,
et cetera
. Daniel happened to glance Marlborough’s way, and caught the Duke glaring at Roger. Roger, who had peripheral vision subtending a full three hundred and sixty degrees, was well aware of it; it was some sort of arranged cue. “What will be my lord’s first act as First Lord of the Treasury?” inquired Bothmar, who, too, had taken part in these silent, fevered exchanges.

“Why, to make a clean start of his majesty’s coinage!” Roger answered. “Not that there was anything wrong with that of Queen Anne—this is well established. It is more of a procedural matter—some would call it superficial pomp, but we English have a weakness for that sort of thing—there is this special box, called the Pyx, which we keep in the Tower, all locked up, and put samples of the new coins into it as they are produced. And from time to time his majesty’s council will say, ‘Let’s have a look at the old Pyx, shall we,’ just as a routine precaution, as gunners try their powder before a battle. And so out comes the Pyx, and it is carried in a sort of solemn procession to the Star Chamber at Westminster where a furnace has been set up for the occasion, and the Pyx is unlocked in the presence of his majesty’s Lords of the Council and the coins are taken out and assayed by goldsmiths from the City and compared against a trial plate, which is, as a rule, kept locked up in a crypt below Westminster
Abbey along with a lot of old saints’ bones and whatnot.” Here the new King’s attention began to drift very noticeably and Roger seemed to come aware that he might as well be a witch-doctor dancing about in a fright wig and a carven mask. “Never mind, it is
quite the rite,
and it gives the City men a warm feeling. And when they have such a feeling it is rather a good thing for your majesty’s commerce.”