The System of the World (99 page)

“Every duellist needs a second,” said Leibniz. “Perhaps Daniel shall act in that capacity for both of us.”

Daniel snorted. “
Isaac
may believe I was resurrected, but I did not think
you
would hold with such beliefs, Gottfried. No, if you require seconds, it now seems that there are any number of immortal personages who shall be willing to show up on the appointed date, and hold your coats: for you, Gottfried, there is Enoch Root, and for you,
Isaac, that ancient Jew who works for the Tsar and calls himself Solomon.” And so he did not take his right hand from his pocket to shake hands with them, for the ring felt terribly heavy and obvious, and he had a sort of lurid phant’sy that Gottfried and Isaac would suddenly recognize it for what it was, and fall to scuffling over it.

“B
RR, MY FATHER-IN-LAW
is frightfully cross with me,” Caroline announced, “at least, if I have made sense of his letter correctly.” She had read through it three times as Johann and Eliza watched. Leicester House resounded with booming and dragging noises: the sound of Royal baggage being packed and positioned.

“So much time has passed, and so many things have occurred, since I claimed I was going away to that Schloß to recover from June’s traumas, that I had quite forgotten that his majesty was expecting me back. But now he seems to have figured out where I am.”

“Probably some intelligence reached him after our little adventure on the Thames,” Johann suggested. His discourse had been clipped and gloomy, and he’d been supporting his head on his fingertips—or perhaps that was self-administered massage. To Caroline, being bawled out by the King of England and Elector of Hanover might have been a trivial family dust-up, but for him it was a different matter.

“Very well,” said Caroline, “it’s back to Hanover I go, then.”

“Right!” said Johann, and got up and strode out. If anyone had had the temerity to stop him and ask him
why,
he’d have said he was off to do something ever so practical and important. But as both Caroline and Eliza understood perfectly well, the fact of the matter was that he had become so agitated that he’d go mad if he spent any more time sitting and talking.

“Off to Hanover,” Caroline repeated, “only to return in a few weeks! It says here that his majesty intends to reach England late in September. Supposing that the Prince of Wales and I are to accompany him, that means that as soon as I reach Hanover I shall have to turn round and come right back.”

“Geographically, yes, you shall return to the same latitude and longitude,” said Eliza, after thinking about this one for a moment. “But you will no longer be
incognito
. And so
socially
you shall be coming to a city you have never before visited, and to a different life altogether.”

“I suppose that shall be quite true, as long as we dwell in places like St. James’s Palace, with all the courtiers and the ambassadors, and the Duke of Marlborough right next door,” said Caroline. “But if there’s one thing I learned from Sophie, it’s that there are very practical
reasons for a Princess to have more than one Palace. For her, the Leine Schloß served as St. James’s shall for me and George Augustus. But at every chance she got, she removed herself to Herrenhausen, where she could live as she pleased, and walk in the garden. That’s why I have been so keen on
this
place. It’s going to be my Herrenhausen,” Caroline announced, “and
you
are going to be its doyenne.”

“Thank God,” said Eliza, “I was afraid you were about to say, ‘dowager.’ ”

“Lady of the Bedchamber or Mistress of the Stole or something,” Caroline said, a bit absently. “We shall have to choose the right English title for you. Whatever you’re called, the point is that I’d like you to live here, at least part of the time, and walk in the garden with me, and talk to me.”

“That doesn’t sound too onerous,” said Eliza with a smile. “But know that any place where I live is liable to have a flux of odd persons running through it, connected with the work that I pursue on the abolition of Slavery, and so on.”

“So much the better! It’ll remind me that much more of the Charlottenburg back when Sophie Charlotte was still alive.”

“Some of my lot may be odder and rougher yet…”

“You have a faraway look in your eye when you say that…are you thinking of your long-lost beau?”

At this Eliza sighed and threw Caroline a mean look.

“I have not forgotten our fascinating chat in Hanover,” Caroline said.

“Let’s speak of a different fascinating chat!” said Eliza. “What tidings from the Library?”

“When I left, they were still having at each other. They are both very proud men. Newton, especially, is not of a mind to back down. The court is coming
here,
and leaving poor Leibniz behind in Hanover. Advantage Newton. Newton has won the calculus dispute, or so it is believed by the savants of the Royal Society. And the recent controversies surrounding the Mint have cleared up, or so it would seem.”

“Is that what he told you? Now
that
would be some kind of a miracle, if true,” Eliza said.

“Why do you say so?”

“Is it not the case that the Pyx is still under the control of Charles White? And is Newton not still answerable to a Trial of the Pyx?”

“That is what they tell me,” said Caroline, “but Newton seems to believe he has now got the upper hand where that is concerned, by arresting the arch-villain known as Jack the Coiner. The fiend is now utterly in Sir Isaac’s power, and doomed to be half-hanged, drawn,
and quartered at Tyburn Cross…Johann?
Johann!
Bring the smelling salts, the Duchess has got the vapors!”

Johann banged into the room only a few moments later, but by then his mother had got her color back, and prevented a slide to the floor by getting a white-knuckled grip on the arms of her chair. “It is nothing,” she said, swiveling her eyes at her first-born. “Carry on, please, as you were.”

Johann departed, seething and quizzical.

“It is just a sort of catalepsis that comes over me sometimes, when suddenly I have got rather a lot to think about all at once. Shortly it passes. I am fine. Thank you for your expression of concern, highness. Moving on—”

“We shall
not
move on!” announced the Princess of Wales. “We shall stick right here, on this, the most fascinating topic of conversation in the history of the world!
You
are in love with the most infamous Black-guard ever!”

“Stop that! It’s not like that at all,” said Eliza. “
He
happens to be in love with
me,
that is all.”

“Oh, well, that’s different altogether.”

“There is no call for sarcasm.”

“How did you meet? I love to hear stories of how true lovers met.”

“We are
not
true lovers,” said Eliza, “and as to how we met—well—it’s none of your business.”

Another door whacked open and in came Leibniz. He bowed to the ladies, looking very solemn. “I take it that a departure for Hanover is planned, and soon,” he said. “If your royal highness will have me, I will accompany you.” He turned toward Eliza. “My lady. The friendship that began in Leipzig thirty years ago, when our paths crossed at the Fair, and I shared a little adventure with you and your Vagabond beau—”

“Aha!” shouted Caroline.

“Draws now to a close. The Princess’s noble and splendid attempt to effect a philosophical reconciliation—so ably and patiently assisted by Dr. Waterhouse—has, I am sorry to say—”

“Failed?” said Caroline.

“Adjourned,” Leibniz said.

“For how long?”

“Hundreds, perhaps thousands of years.”

“Hmm,” said Caroline, “that will be of little practical utility to the House of Hanover, when it comes time to select a new Privy Council.”

“I am sorry,” said Leibniz, “but there is no rushing certain things.
While
other
matters, such as my departure from London, happen entirely too soon.”

“Where are Sir Isaac, and Dr. Waterhouse?” the Princess inquired.

“Sir Isaac has taken his leave, and forwards apologies for not having said good-bye in person,” said Leibniz, “but one gets the idea he had terribly important things to do. Dr. Waterhouse said he would await you in the garden, just in case you might be of a mind to behead him for failing in his mission.”

“By no means! I shall go and thank him for his good offices—and I’ll see you on the boat tomorrow!” said Caroline, and swept out of the place.

“Eliza,” said the savant.

“Gottfried,” said the Duchess.

*
As everyone in the room knew, Leibniz was using the word
animal
in an ancient and somewhat technical sense of something animated, i.e., possessing, or possessed by, an anima, or spirit.

THE NEXT DAY

“I
T WAS NOT HALF
so blubbery as it might have been,” said Leibniz, “when one considers how long the Duchess and I have known each other, and all we have been through, and whatnot. We shall keep in touch, of course, through letters.”

He was describing his leave-taking from Eliza at Leicester House the day before; but he might as well have been talking of the one that was happening now, on London Bridge, between him and Daniel.

“Forty-one years,” Daniel said.

“I was thinking the same thing!” Leibniz said, practically before Daniel had got the words out. “It was forty-one years ago when you and I first met, right here, on this very what-do-you-call-it.”

“Starling,” Daniel said. They were standing on the one beneath the Square, near the mid-point of the Bridge, and not awfully far from the Main-Topp where the Clubb had of late conducted its Stake-out. But Daniel’s memory of that, though only a few weeks old, was already quite washed-out and indistinct compared to what Leibniz was speaking of: the day in 1673 when a young Leibniz (no Baron
in those days) with an Arithmetickal Engine tucked under his arm had disembarked from a ship that had brought him over from Calais, and been conveyed to this starling—to this very
spot
—by a lighter, and first made the acquaintance of young Daniel Waterhouse of the Royal Society.

Leibniz’s memory was no less distinct. “I believe it was—here!” (tapping a flat rock at starling’s edge with his toe) “where I first touched down.”

“That is how I remember it.”

“Of course we are both wrong, if Absolute Space is correct,” Leibniz went on. “For during those forty-one years the Earth has rotated, and revolved about the Sun, and the Sun, for all we know, has careered for some vast distance. So I did not really touch down
here
but in some
other
place that is now far out in the interstellar vacuum.”

Daniel did not rise to this bait. He was fearful that Leibniz was about to burst out into some bitter declamation against Newton and Newton’s philosophy. But Leibniz drew back from that brink, even as he was drawing back from the stony rim of the starling. A longboat was working up towards them. It was the lighter that would take Leibniz out to the Hanoverian sloop
Sophia,
where Princess Caroline had already settled into her cabin.

“What do I remember of that day? We were espied, and glared at, by Hooke, who was over yonder surveying a wharf,” said Leibniz, pointing at the London bank. “We went to pay a call on poor old Wilkins, who lay some great responsibility on your shoulders—”

“He wanted me to ‘make it all happen,’ ” said Daniel.

Leibniz laughed. “What do you suppose the rascal meant by that?”

“I have thought about it a million times,” said Daniel. “Religious toleration? The Royal Society? Pansophism? The Arithmetickal Engine? I cannot be sure. But all of those things were linked together in Wilkins’s mind.”

“He had a prefiguring of what Caroline calls the System of the World.”

“Perhaps. At any rate, I have tried to preserve in my mind, since then, that linkage—the notion that all of those things must move together, somewhat like prisoners on a common chain—”

“A cheerful image!” Leibniz remarked.

“And if there has been any plan whatever to my life in those forty-one years, it’s been that I have tried to keep an eye out for whichever of them was lagging farthest behind, and chivvy it along. For two decades, the laggard has been Arithmetickal Engines and Logic Mills,
et cetera
.”

“And so you have toiled on that,” said Leibniz, “for which you
have my æternal gratitude. But who knows? With the support of the Tsar, and the motive Power of the Engine for Raising Water by Fire, perhaps it shall be laggardly no more.”

“Perhaps,” said Daniel. “It grieves me, now—especially since yesterday—that I went off into seclusion, and did not involve myself in the Metaphysickal rift until it was too late.”

“But if you
had,
you’d be now berating yourself over having neglected some
other
matter—good Puritan that you are.”

Daniel snorted.

“Remember that in those days Newton was known chiefly as a very clever telescope-maker,” Leibniz went on. “Wilkins could not have foreseen the rift you spoke of—and so could not have charged you with healing it. You are clear of any such burthen.”

“But the grand project of Pansophism was a thing he saw very clearly, and, I’m sure, wanted me to support in whatever way I could,” Daniel said. “I wonder now if I did the best possible job of it.”

“And I should say the answer is yes,” said Leibniz, “for that we live in the best of all possible worlds.”

“I hope that is not true,” said Daniel, “as it seems to me now that my journey here from Boston, which I confess I undertook with a certain kind of foolish and thrilling hope in my heart, has concluded in tragedy—and not even
grand
tragedy but something much more futile and ignominious.”

“After we visited Wilkins on his death-bed,” said Leibniz, “we went to a coffee-house, did we not, and talked. We spoke of Mr. Hooke’s observations of snowflakes—their remarkable property, which is that each of the six arms grows outwards from a common center, and each grows independently, of its own internal rules. One arm cannot affect the others. And yet the arms are all alike. To me this is an embodiment of the pre-established harmony. Now, Daniel, in like manner, there grows out of the core of Natural Philosophy more than one system for understanding the Universe. They grow according to their own internal principles, and one does not affect another—as Newton and I demonstrated yesterday by utterly failing to agree on anything! But if it’s true—as I believe—that they are rooted in a common seed, then in the fullness of time they must adopt a like form, and become reflections of one another, as a snowflake’s arms.”

“I hope the poor snowflake does not melt before it reaches that perfection,” said Daniel, “in the heat of those fires that Caroline dreams of.”

“That is beyond our ability to predict or prevent. We can only do all in our power to move the work forward,” said Leibniz.

“Speaking of which,” said Daniel, “here is something for you.”
During Leibniz’s remarks he had from time to time glanced up at the traffic coming out of London on the Bridge. Now he raised a hand and waved to someone up in the Square. Leibniz followed his eye-line up to behold William Ham, the banker, waving back from atop a cart that had just drawn to a halt at the head of the stairs. It was populated by a conspicuously large number of beefier-than-average porters, some of whom remained where they were, engaging all and sundry passersby in stare-downs. Others hopped off and went to work carrying several small crates down the stairs and piling them at Leibniz’s feet. At about the same time, the lighter from
Sophia
drew close enough to pelt them with rope-ends, and several watermen who loitered on the starling caught them out of the air and made the boat fast. A Hanoverian servant vaulted over the gunwale and bent to take and move the first of the crates; but Leibniz asked him in German if he would terribly mind waiting for a moment. “If these are what I think they are—” he said to Daniel.

“Indeed.”

“Then later they shall be counted by men who are ever so sharp when it comes to weights and measures; and I would that all of the numbers add up!”

So the crates accumulated until the wagon up above was empty. Each had been sealed with a medallion of wax bearing the imprint of the Bank of England—for that is where they had been stored until a few minutes ago, and one could still smell the damp of the Bank’s cellars escaping from the pores in the wood. William Ham came down with a great wallet of musty paperwork, on which was traced the provenance of what was in the crates, beginning with Solomon Kohan’s accompt of the gold taken from
Minerva,
and passing through all of the intermediate stages of rolling and cutting at the Court of Technologickal Arts and punching at Bridewell. Leibniz examined it all, and finally counted the crates (7) and counted them again (7) and asked Daniel to verify the count (7). Finally he signed the papers GOTTFRIED FREIHERR VON LEIBNIZ in diverse places, and Daniel counter-signed as Witness. At last Leibniz gave leave for the crates to be moved aboard the lighter; but he counted them as they were moved (7).

“It is a start,” Daniel said. “There are many more yet to come, as you know. But as long as you were making a journey to Hanover anyway, I thought I might as well give you all that we have managed to bang out so far.”

“It adds a most pleasing
coda
to what might otherwise be a melancholy parting,” said Leibniz, and squared off before Daniel, forcing his features into a simulacrum of a smile. “And it really ought to put
to rest any mistaken thoughts that might have been troubling your sleep as to whether you have done right by Wilkins. You have, sir, done him proud.”

Daniel was now helpless to say anything and so he stepped forward and embraced Leibniz hard. Leibniz returned the embrace, giving as good as he got, then broke away and turned his back on Daniel before Daniel could see his face and vaulted into the boat almost in the same motion. He counted the crates, or pretended to, one last time as lines were cast off and the boat fell away and yawed in the turbulent gulf of the lock.

“Seven?” Daniel shouted.

“Seven exactly!” came the answer. “I shall see you, Daniel, on Parnassus, or wherever it is that Philosophers end up!”

“I think they end up in old books,” said Daniel, “and so I shall look for you, sir, in a Library.”

“That is what I am building,” said Leibniz, “and that is where you shall find me. Good-bye, Daniel!”

“Good-bye, Gottfried!” Daniel shouted, and then stood and watched for some time as the boat became indistinct, and quite lost itself, in the welter of shipping in the Pool of London, there below the charred battlements of the Tower. It was almost a mirror image of the way Leibniz had appeared, out of nowhere, forty-one years earlier, except that the mirror was a misty and a streaky one. For much had changed in those years and Daniel could not watch with the clear eyes of a young man.