The System of the World (51 page)

Newton straightened up and, prudently, slowed down. He glanced up and around as if wondering whether any of the over-looming angels had heard. “Where are we going, my lord?”

“Star Chamber,” Ravenscar announced, simultaneously tightening his grip on Newton’s arm lest these fell words cause the eminent Natural Philosopher to spin away and make a break for it. Sir Isaac did no such thing; but he was startled. He had expected that Roger Comstock would name one of the buildings of the Exchequer, which in recent decades had advanced far, and on a broad front, from the Hall’s northeast corner, so that they nearly filled the space between it and the River. Star Chamber, on the other hand, was small, and ancient; Kings of England had used to meet there with their Privy Councils. “Who has summoned us?” Newton asked.

As if the answer were self-evident, Roger said, “The Eel.” Saying out loud this mysterious epithet seemed to bring his concentration back. “We are only seconds away from the place. We could get more time by walking slowly; but I wish to stride into the place
enthusiastically
. The importance of this cannot be overstated. You must therefore listen carefully, Sir Isaac, as I’ll only have time to say this once.

“It seems,” Roger continued, “that I have only been given leave to distract myself with Longitude so that my honorable lord, Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, could prepare some sort of poppet-show. The invitation was sprung upon me while you were testifying. I am sure Bolingbroke would fainer have tied it round an arrow and shot it into my stomach, but such proceedings, though frequently seen in Lords, are still frowned upon in Commons. You, Sir Isaac, have been given a Backstage Pass to the poppet-show, which makes me suspect that you shall be called upon to play the lead role.”

Sir Isaac Newton now became quiet and still, which was his customary way of showing rage. “It is an affront. I came here to discourse of the Longitude. Now you say I am caught up in an
ambuscade.
”

“I beg of you, Sir Isaac, be anything but affronted. For it is when men become old and important, and peevish over the odd ambuscade, that they become most vulnerable to just such tactics. Be baffled, unconcerned, gay—what’d be best of all,
sporting
about it!”

Newton did not look very sporting just now. The portal to Star Chamber was now as large in Ravenscar’s sight, as the whale’s maw to Jonah. “Never mind,” he said, “be as affronted as you please—just don’t volunteer anything. If you see what appears to be an opening in debate, remember that it was ingeniously laid down in front of you by Bolingbroke, as coquettes drop handkerchiefs at the feet of men they would ensnare.”

“Has anyone ever actually
done
that to you, Roger?” They had
been joined by Walter Raleigh Waterhouse Weem, a.k.a. Peer, who was, like Roger, a Whig Lord. “I’ve heard of the practice, but—”

“Nay, ’twas just a figure,” Roger admitted.

But this Weem/Comstock insouciance—in truth a sort of Yogic exercise to relax nerves—misfired in Newton’s case. “What’s the point of participating in a debate if I’m to disregard every opening?” he demanded.

“This is no more a
debate
than is Hanging Day at Tyburn Cross. Viscount Bolingbroke would be our Jack Ketch. Anything
we
are allowed to say shall be strictly in the nature of Last Words. Our reply, supposing we can muster any, shall consist of deeds not words, and it shall be delivered…outside…of…this…Chamber!” Roger timed it so that he stepped over the threshold at the moment he uttered the last word. Newton dared not respond, for the Chamber was crowded with Lords Spiritual and Temporal, Knights, Courtiers, and Clerks. And it was as silent as a parish-church when the vicar has lost his place in the middle of the sermon.

“S
OMETHING MONSTROUS WAS MADE
to happen in the Tower of London a month and a half ago.”

It was terribly unkind for Roger to have dubbed one of his fellow-men “The Eel.” And yet a visitor from another place and time, blundering into Star Chamber, not knowing any of the men in the place, would have been able to pick out the one Roger meant. Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, and Secretary of State to Her Britannic Majesty, was strolling about the open center of the chamber as he talked. All others were backed up against the walls, like so many small fry sharing a tank with something toothy and sinuous.

“London’s Persons of Quality—members of the Party and of the Faction alike—have done what they could to draw a curtain over the late events in the Tower, and to promulgate the sham that it was a momentary up-welling of the Mobb, quickly suppressed by the Queen’s Own Black Torrent Guard. A stable-fire on Tower Hill distracted the locals, and laid a smoke-pall over all—fortunate, that. It shall be writ down in history-books as a civil disturbance, if it is noted at all. But it would be a moral as well as an intellectual sin to mistake the events of April 23rd for anything other than a whited sepulchre. The matter must be investigated. Those responsible must be held to accompt. My lord Oxford, in his capacity as Lord Treasurer, has disappointed me by failing to do anything about it.”

This frank and frontal assault on his fellow Tory Lord was new. It created a buzz in the room. Bolingbroke held his tongue for a few moments, and let his gaze stray over the heads of some of the wallflowers.
These reacted as if they’d been switched across the face by a horse-tail. Bolingbroke was not looking at them, however, but simply gazing in the general direction of the various offices, courts, and receipts of the Exchequer.

After that, Bolingbroke’s words poured out into a carefully maintained silence. Even men who were under attack (several of Oxford’s lieutenants had been shouldered to the front rank) said nothing. This was, in other words, no kind of Parliamentary proceeding. Depending on the diurnal velleities of Queen Anne, Bolingbroke was either the first man in England, or the second, after Oxford. Today he certainly believed he was first; he might have come here direct from the right hand of the Sovereign herself. Though Star Chamber was, like Commons and like Lords, an appendage of Westminster Hall, it had nothing to do with Parliament—which was a place to discuss things—and everything to do with Monarchy of the ancient, off-with-their-heads school. The murderous Court of Star Chamber had been abolished during Cromwell days, but this room still did service as a venue for the Privy Council to effect their plans and resolves—some dictated by primordial ceremonies and others improvised moment-by-
moment. This seemed to be one of the latter. In any case, no one spoke unless Bolingbroke asked him to; and he hadn’t asked.

“In the Tower of London is a place called the Mint,” Bolingbroke continued, allowing his gaze to slide over Newton’s face. Newton did not glance away—a detail, but a noteworthy one. Roger Comstock, or any other worldly man, would have advised Sir Isaac to lower his gaze, as this was thought to have a calming effect on mad dogs and Lords of the Council alike. But Newton spent most of his time in other worlds. Those aspects of
this
world considered most important by men like Ravenscar and Bolingbroke, Sir Isaac was most apt to find trivial and annoying.

Bolingbroke did not know Isaac Newton. Newton was a Puritan and a Whig, Bolingbroke a man of no fixed principles, but with the brainstem reflexes of a Jacobite Tory. Bolingbroke was one of those
hommes d’affaires
who had sought and obtained entry to the Royal Society because it was the done thing. Out of its recondite deliberations, certain Whigs such as Pepys and Ravenscar had summoned forth magic: Banks, Annuities, Lotteries, National Debt, and other eldritch practices that had conjured latent money and power from out of nowhere. One couldn’t blame a man like Bolingbroke for thinking that the Royal Society was, therefore, all about power and money. Newton’s abandonment of Cambridge for the Mint only confirmed as much. If Bolingbroke had known of Newton’s true reason for being
at the Mint—if full understanding of Newton could have been inserted, whole, into the mind of Bolingbroke—it would have been necessary to carry Her Majesty’s Secretary of State out of the room on a door, and give him tincture of opium for days. As it happened, he assumed that Newton had taken the job because the highest thing a man could aspire to was to be a time-serving hack with a sinecure, a pompous title, and as few responsibilities as possible.

And now Newton was staring him directly in the eye. Only a few men in all of Christendom had the kidney for a staredown with Bolingbroke, and until this moment, Bolingbroke had thought he knew who all of them were. For this was his first encounter of any significance with Newton, and his first hint that Newton was at the Mint for reasons that were not obvious.

“How stand matters in the Realm of the Coin, Sir Isaac?” Bolingbroke inquired, manipulating his snuff-box—which gave him a pretext to break contact with Newton’s blood-freezing glare.

“Her Majesty’s coinage has never been more sound, my lord—” Newton began, then stopped as Ravenscar put a hand on the small of his back. Bolingbroke had spun away as if to hide from Sir Isaac, while exhibiting to a rank of his supporters an expression of surprise and mirth that had come over his face. For as any well-brought-up person ought to discern,
Realm of the Coin
was a play on words, a mere witticism, tossed out as a sort of ice-breaker, to establish a feeling of welcome and camaraderie, while giving Newton an opening to respond with a
bon mot
of his own. Newton had missed this, which showed lack of breeding, and taken it as a literal request for information, which showed he was oddly nervous, keyed-up, trigger-happy. Odd, that! Why so defensive? Bolingbroke took snuff and composed himself, then turned back around to face Newton—but not before all of these things had been communicated to the men standing behind him, and registered on their faces, visible to everyone else in Star Chamber. All were mortified on Sir Isaac’s behalf, except for Sir Isaac, who clearly just wanted to be asked questions so that he could answer them and get away from these people.

“Of course, Sir Isaac—more on that anon. I welcome you, and only wish that more Lords of the Council had not seen fit to attend you.” This as an aside between two players on a stage. Then, a straightening and clearing of the windpipe, and a soliloquy: “Her Majesty’s coins come out of the Mint. Her Majesty’s name and her noble visage are impressed upon every one of those coins. Coinage, therefore, has ever been a State, as well as a Treasury matter. Much as Charing Cross, over yonder, is neither the Strand nor Whitehall, but rather the crux and joint of the two, so coinage is a sort of con-fusion
of State and Treasury. The Secretary of State has some interest in it,” Bolingbroke continued, meaning himself. “This marks the beginning, though ’tis far from being the end, of the
public
phase of the Secretary of State’s investigation. I have been pursuing it
quietly
for some weeks now, and had not intended to make it known so prematurely; but when I learned that Sir Isaac Newton, who has the honor to be Master of the Mint, was coming to Westminster to testify on some trifling matter ginned up by the fevered minds of the Faction, I resolved to invite him to this Chamber that his visit would not be a perfect waste of his time.”

Bolingbroke’s coiling movements about the room had now led him into a position whence he could gaze directly into Newton’s face across some yards of rather good wool carpet. “Sir Isaac,” he said, “my investigation has already established that you were absent from the Tower on the day of the assault. But no doubt your famous curiosity got the better of you when you returned and found that a small war had been conducted there while you were out. You must have looked into those events, asked questions of those who were there. What conclusions have you reached as to the
true
nature and purpose of the outrage?”

“My lord, it was an attempt—mostly successful, I am sorry to say—by a gang of Black-guards, very likely led by no less than Jack the Coiner himself, to steal the Crown Jewels,” said Sir Isaac Newton. Behind him, Ravenscar was wondering if he would get away with elbowing Newton in the throat to disable his voice-box.

“Perhaps it would help to clarify your mind as to that, if I told you that my investigators have already captured some of the Black-guards in question. Oh, they attempted to flee to Dunkirk in a boat that was overhauled and searched by a brig of the Royal Navy,” Bolingbroke explained, amused by Newton’s naïveté, but tolerant for now. “The missing jewels were recovered. The men were kept apart and questioned separately. They have testified, to a man, that even when Jack the Coiner had gained the Inmost Ward, and held the Tower in the hollow of his hand, as it were, standing within bow-shot of the open and unguarded Jewel Tower, he did ignore the lure of those baubles, and held them of no value. Instead he made straightaway for the Mint, and went to the vault where the Pyx is kept.”

“That is absurd,” Newton said. “The Pyx holds but a few samples of pennies and guineas. The Crown Jewels are infinitely more valuable.”

“The theft of the Crown Jewels was an improvisation, carried out by ignorant pawns who never knew the true purpose of the assault. This much is proved by the ease with which those men were captured. I say that Jack the Coiner went to the Pyx.”

“And I hear you saying it, my lord; but
I
say nothing was stolen from that Vault.”

“Note the careful selection of words,” Bolingbroke mused aloud to a squadron of smirking Tory admirers. “Is this a sentence, or a mathematickal riddle?” Then he whirled to face a closed door, which led not to the exit but to an inner chamber. “Bring it in!” he commanded.

The door was heaved open by a page, revealing several men who had been loitering within. The biggest led them out. He was booted and spurred, and dressed very well, complete with a cape. Dangling on his breast was a silver medallion in the shape of a greyhound. Four other men, similarly got up, followed him, each holding an end of a pole. They looked almost like porters carrying a sedan chair, and this caused a
frisson
to charge through Star Chamber as everyone phant’sied that the Queen herself was being hauled out. But the burden of those poles was smaller, yet heavier, than the Queen. It was a boxy thing hidden under a velvet cape.