The System of the World (88 page)

“I find it difficult to believe, Gottfried, that, at this point in your career, what you really want to do is hang around the worst parts of London pursuing a band of criminals.”

“All right, I admit it’s only a pretext.”

“What then is your
real
reason?”

“I would attempt, one last time, to attain some reconciliation with Newton, and to settle the calculus dispute in some way that is not squalid.”

“A much sounder and nobler motive,” Daniel said. “Now, let me explain to you why it shall not work, and why you should simply go home.” And then he did, against his better judgment, discourse of Alchemy for a little while, explaining that Newton’s desire to control the Solomonic Gold arose not simply out of a practical need to survive the Trial of the Pyx but out of a quest to obtain the Philosophick Mercury and the Philosopher’s Stone.

But it was to no avail. It only confirmed Leibniz’s desire to remain in London. “If what you are saying is true, Daniel, it means that the root of the problem is a philosophical confusion on Newton’s part. And as I need not explain to you, it is the same confusion that underlies our disputes in the realm of Natural Philosophy.”

“On the contrary, Gottfried, I think that the question of who invented the calculus first is very much one of the who-did-what-to-whom type; a what-did-you-know-and-when-did-you-know-it sort of affair.”

“Daniel, it is true, is it not, that Newton kept his calculus work secret for decades?”

Daniel assented, very grudgingly. He was perfectly aware that to admit to any premise in a conversation with Leibniz would lead to a Socratic bear-trap banging shut on his leg a few minutes later.

“Who started the
Acta Eruditorum,
Daniel?”

“You, and that other chap. Listen, I stipulate that Newton tends to hide his work while you are very forward in publishing yours.”

“And hiding one’s results—restricting them to dissemination among a tiny fraternity—is a characteristic of what group?”

“The Esoteric Brotherhood.”

“Otherwise known as—?”

“Alchemists,” Daniel snapped.

“So the priority dispute would never have arisen if Sir Isaac Newton were not thoroughly infected with the the mentality of Alchemy.”

“Granted,” Daniel sighed.

“So it
is
a philosophical dispute. Daniel, I am an old man. I’ve not been in London since 1677. What are the chances I shall ever return? And Newton—who has never set foot outside of England—will not come to
me
. I shall not have another opportunity to meet with him. I will remain in London
incognito
—no one need never know I was here—and find some way to engage Newton in Philosophick discourse and help him out of the labyrinth in which he has wandered for so many years. It is a labyrinth without a roof, affording a clear view of the stars and the moon, which he understands better than any man; but behold, when Newton lowers his gaze to what is near to hand, he finds himself trapped and a-mazed in dark serpentine ways.”

Daniel gave up. “Then consider yourself a member of our Clubb,” he said. “You have my vote. Neither Kikin nor Orney shall dare with-old his support from a savant whose pate still glows with the knuckle-prints of Peter the Great. Newton would doubtless vote against you. But he came to a separate peace with the Clubb’s quarry a few evenings since, and no longer has any reason to attend our meetings.”

Y
EVGENY THE
R
ASKOLNIK
had fallen like a tree in the dust of Hockley-in-the-Hole. From the looks of things he had given a fine account of himself. In this posture, viz. lying on his back, his face to the sky and framed in the iron-gray burst of his hair, it was obvious that he must be close to sixty years old. Had he been closer to Peter’s age (the Tsar was forty-two) and in possession of both of his arms, the fight might have gone differently. As it was, Daniel could only interpret this as a spectacular form of suicide. He could not help but wonder whether Yevgeny knew about today’s transfer of the gold from
Minerva,
and had somehow taken the notion into his head that, as a result, his time in the world was finished.

“This was an odd bloke, who was loyal to Jack for many years, but went his own way in recent years, and tried to burn the Tsar’s new ships in Rotherhithe even as he was conniving with Jack to invade the Tower and sully the Pyx,” Daniel explained to Leibniz. “He was a great villain. But it is a shame to see him, or anyone, lying thus unattended.” At that moment, though, he spied Saturn approaching, with a few lads behind him and an empty wagon.

Daniel, Leibniz, and Solomon caught up with Peter and his entourage at Clerkenwell Court, just as they were mounting up to travel back to Rotherhithe. Daniel sent with them a note to Mr. Orney, giving him the news that the incendiary who had attacked his shipyard was dead. Leibniz took his leave of the Tsar, and Solomon promised to rejoin the party later at Orney’s. For it would take a few days to inspect and take delivery of the new ships, and to man them; then they would sail directly into combat against the Swedes in the Baltic. Then the Tsar and his company departed.

Daniel did not know why, but he now felt more energetic than at any time in the last few weeks. Perhaps that was what made a Tsar a Tsar: the ability to move those around him to great exertions. Perhaps the sight of the dead Yevgeny had reminded Daniel, as if he needed it, that he should not live forever. Or perhaps it was a simple desire to get the Solomonic Gold moving, to get it out of his possession as fast as he could. Others who toiled in the Court of Technologickal Arts seemed to feel likewise, for suddenly—after having avoided the place for nearly a week, because of Whig/Tory strife and Hanging-shenanigans—they began to show up and pry the planks off the fronts of their little workshops around the Court and heave the dust-cloths off their machines. Saturn came home, having seen to the transfer of Yevgeny’s body to a Russian church somewhere, and by sundown the Court was in full production. They rolled, cut, and weighed the largest batch of plates they had ever made in a single day. Then Daniel pressed half a dozen idle but relatively sober Mohawks into service as escorts, and they took the plates down the banks of the Fleet to Bridewell.

The very first cargo unloaded from
Minerva
upon her arrival on Thursday had been the paper cards on which Daniel had, over the course of a dozen years’ toil at the Massachusetts Bay Colony Institute of Technologickal Arts, written out the tables of the Logick Mill. These had already been forwarded to the card-punching workshop in Bridewell, which now sported half a dozen organs.

“It’s all right,” insisted Hannah Spates, upon being rousted from bed, “all the girls are accustomed to working nights anyway.” And so presently the shop was alight, and alive, with Hannah and five other nimble-fingered girls working the keys of the organs, and several pairs of big strumpets spelling each other on the bellows, fueled by beer from a barrel that Saturn fetched from a brewery across the ditch in Black Fryars. Some of the cards were punched even before he returned with this enhancement, and a good many more after—though Daniel insisted that the six women at the keys must remain dry. The entire batch was finished before three in the morning, and
the banker William Ham, who’d been abducted by a Mohawk raiding-party from his bed in the city, did the sums, and weighed the cards and the bits that had been punched out of them, to the evident satisfaction of Solomon Kohan. The Jew had watched all with the keenest interest, but occasionally scowled at those aspects of the operation that looked as if they might be vulnerable to theft or embezzlement.

Daniel now presented him with a tiny purse sewn of the finest kid. It was no larger than a walnut, but plumped heavily in the palm of the hand, like a globule of quicksilver. “These are the tiny disks punched from the cards by the organs,” Daniel explained. Solomon nodded; he had already observed how these motes of gold were harvested from the machines and weighed by Mr. Ham. “As a rule we take these back and melt them down to make more card-stock. Tonight I make an exception and give them to you, Monsieur Kohan, as a memento of your visit to London, and a token of my esteem.” Solomon clapped the wee purse between his hands and accepted the gift with a bow.

“Now,” Daniel continued, “if you do not mind staying awake a little longer, you may see our provisions for keeping the finished plates safe until they are ready to be shipped to St. Petersburg.”

Solomon said he didn’t mind, so they loaded the chest of new plates into an open wagon and drove it through the streets of London, which were deserted save for the circulation of Vault-wagons to and from the brink of Fleet Ditch. Through Ludgate in the shadow of St. Paul’s they entered into the city, and Daniel told the story of riding past Old St. Paul’s, before the Fire, at the height of the Plague, when the City had been as empty and quiet as it was tonight, and the doomed church surrounded by a rampart of half-buried corpses. Presently they came out of the churchyard onto Cheapside and trundled east to the threshold of the money-district where the way forked into several streets: Threadneedle, Cornhill, and Lombard. They chose Threadneedle, and went up but a short distance to the fabrique of the Bank of England.

After a brief conversation with William Ham, the night porter suffered them to enter, and even offered to relieve Saturn of the burden in his arms: a strangely heavy locked chest. Saturn politely declined. William Ham dismissed the porter and sent him back to his bed. Lanthorns were distributed. Monsieurs Kohan, Waterhouse, Hoxton, and Ham moved through the Bank in their own pool of light, quickly leaving behind the parts of the establishment that looked like a bank (finished rooms with windows and furniture) and descending into its cellar.

By no stretch of the imagination could this be understood as a proper and rational basement. The ground under the Bank was a foam of cavities, some recent, some ancient, but mostly ancient. Most were connected to at least one other. This made it possible to navigate through the foam without resorting to shovels and blasting-powder, provided only that one understood the graph of their connexions. This was a job for a banker if ever there was one. Mr. Ham changed direction incessantly, but gave them all some reassurance by only rarely stopping to think, and only once backtracking. Anyone who had even a layman’s knowledge of structures could see at a glance that, over the ages, more than one building had been erected on this site, and many a builder had stayed up late at night worrying about whether the foam could support it. The diverse vaults, arches, timbers, pilings, footings, and rubble-walls that threw back the light of their lanthorns, and forced William Ham into catastrophic reversals, were what those builders had effected when they had gotten worried enough. The timbered tunnels, linteled doorways, and arched passageways through which William conducted them were evidence that other builders had gambled that the inter-locking foundation-works were strong enough, and would not give way if judiciously undermined.

“It is just the sort of hidden mare’s nest about which one has bad dreams when putting one’s money in a Bank,” Saturn reflected, at a moment when he and Daniel were several convolutions behind Mr. Ham and Monsieur Kohan. But a moment later they caught up to find William Ham looking a bit huffy. He was directing their attention to a Gothik arch sealed off by a new portcullis of iron bars. Pyramidal beams of lanthorn-light, shining through the interstices, careered around the space on the other side. Slivers of gold and silver winked between the planks of crates. “The inherited complexities of the property,” said Mr. Ham, “are, as you can see, giving way to a steady programme of rationalization. Where weaknesses are found, they are made strong. Several entire chambers have been infilled. Where sound vaults are discovered, they are fortified, as here.” Mr. Ham then took them on a lengthy detour intended to bolster these and other assertions with evidence visual and anecdotal. By this point Daniel could no more have made his way out to the street than he could have balanced the Bank’s accounts on his fingers. But he did feel that they were on average descending, for the air got damper and colder as they went, and the architecture changed. There was less wood, and what there was of it was rotten, and being replaced by masonry. They passed through a Gothik stratum into a Romanesque, or perhaps Roman—boundaries were ambiguous, as the site might
have gone unchanged for half a millennium after the Romans had pulled out. Evidence of dampness was all round, though actual standing water was rare. It looked, in other words, as though they had found a way to channel groundwater and drain it out of the place—probably to Walbrook, a local creek that was famous because, at some point after the Fall of Rome, it had gone missing.

They came at some length to a chamber, sealed by a massive ironbound door, which William unlocked with a key big enough to double as a bludgeon should the Bank come under attack. It was large for a subterranean vault, small for a parish church. Like a church, it had an aisle up the center, which had been made useful as a gutter. A trickle of groundwater two fingers wide meandered through crevices between close-set paving-stones. To either side of the aisle was a raised platform, also paved. Crates, lock-boxes, and money-bags had been piled up on these. William Ham led them up to the far end of the room, where the platforms gave way to a clear open space, and the trickle of aisle-water disappeared into a hole in the floor. He identified an open space at the end of a platform, and by a gesture indicated that Saturn should set the chest down there. Saturn did; but Solomon did not witness it, as he was inspecting the room.

Solomon shoved a sack of money aside to make a clear space on the platform, into which he spat, and then rubbed the saliva with a thumb until he had smeared away the patina of dust and congealed slime to reveal, in the light of Daniel’s lanthorn, a few chips of colored stone set into the surface. A glimpse of a Mosaic.

“Roman?” Daniel guessed. Solomon nodded.

“As I think I have now demonstrated, the plates will be perfectly safe in this sealed vault until the time has come to ship them to St. Petersburg,” William said to Solomon, as the ancient Jew came up to join them at the head of the chamber. But Solomon was staring at the floor. “Pray lend me your key,” he said, holding out a hand.