The System of the World: Volume Three of the Baroque Cycle

by Neal Stephenson

  After which her Majesty was pleased to make a most gracious Speech to both Houses of Parliament:

  And afterwards the Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain, by her Majesty’s Command, said

  It is her Majesty’s Royal Will and Pleasure, That this Parliament be prorogued to Tuesday the Tenth Day of August next: And this Parliament is accordingly prorogued to Tuesday the Tenth Day of August next.

  Veneris, 9° die Julii; Anno 13° Annæ Reginæ, 1714

  A PAIR OF RAVENSCAR’S strangely brawny aides had knocked Daniel up at Crane Court this morning, and bundled him into a sedan chair with such urgency that he could not discern whether he was being summoned or abducted. Encased in this box like a desiccated Specimen—a curious relic of the Cromwellian Epoch—he had been delivered up to Westminster’s Old Palace Yard, and ejected in front of Waghorn’s. A chap with a keen ear, if he’d sidled up close to Daniel about then, could have heard him muttering diverse outrageous calumnies and execrations against the Marquis of Ravenscar. For Daniel had been quite content at Crane Court with his pot of tea, one of Mrs. Arlanc’s pastries, and a stack of vile newspapers. This place was dirty, crowded, and riotous. Not with the merry riotousness of Hockley-in-the-Hole on the eve of a Hanging-Day, but the snitty, bitchy sort practiced by men who were animated by the same base passions but who had too much to lose by giving them free rein. Everyone was in a hurry save Daniel. Most were in a hurry to get inside. They hustled along at cross-purposes to a small but troublesome moiety who were trying to move laterally between Commons and Lords, using the Old Palace Yard as a short-cut to circumvent the galleries and chambers within—which, it could be inferred, were too crowded to permit movement. There were scattered outbreaks of courtesy. But the third time Daniel saw some outraged second-rate hanger-on reach, in a theatrical manner, for his sword, he concluded that the place was not merely unpleasant but dangerous. He turned on his heel and began to walk away. Once he broke free of the crowd he could be at the Kit-Cat Clubb in half an hour…but then this lovely phant’sy was shivered by the words: “Dr. Waterhouse! I feared I should never reach you! If you’d care to follow me, we have saved a place for you at Waghorn’s.”

  Daniel knew the voice. He had forgotten the name; but no matter, the chap’s hairstyle was extremely memorable. He turned around expecting to see a young man coiffed as a Mohawk warrior. Alas, all he could make out were a lot of blokes in white periwigs. But one of them was staring right at him. If the wig were mentally subtracted, and the Mohawk added, the result was one of those young Whig gallants who were always prancing around on Roger-errands. Today’s errand: rescue the doddering Doctor, frogmarch him into the Palace.

  In Waghorn’s, he sipped coffee and held a newspaper in front of his face, partly to read it, and partly as a barrier to conversation—for what he most dreaded was that the Mohawk had also been charged with keeping him company. Parliamentary babble surged and crashed about him like waves on rocks. They talked of everything save what was really going on. Mostly it was the Acts and Bills that had clogged their registers in recent weeks: Preventing the Growth of Schism (Bolingbroke’s pet bill), Finding the Longitude (Roger’s), the perennial issues of Woollen Manufacture, Quieting Corporations, endless Inclosures, and diverse Divorces, contested estates, and Insolvent Debtors; and what had come to be known as the Six R’s: Raising the Militia, Running Brandy, Reducing Interest, Revenues of Scotch Bishops, Restraining the Growth of Popery, and (awkwardly) laws Relating to Vagrants. It was all hogwash. Either that, or they were speaking in a substitution code wherein every Act mentioned was a veiled reference to its sponsor.

  The smoke and babble became too much for him at about the same time that his bladder—never his strongest organ—began to complain of all the coffee. He dropped the paper to discover that his Mohawk had vanished on some other errand—perhaps called away to a raiding-party on the upper Hudson River. So Daniel went out and found a place he could urinate (which actually was easier than finding a place he couldn’t) and then took to strolling up and down the Painted Chamber and the Long Gallery. Consequently, he was swept up in the portentous series of room-clearings and gallery-evacuations ordered by Commons. Indeed, he was on the verge of being flushed clean off the Palace grounds when a different Mohawk found him, and escorted him, via circuitous back-passages, closets, and committee-rooms, into the House of Lords itself, and encouraged him to stand in Ravenscar’s cheering-section, and to act as if he belonged there.

  This gave Daniel over to grave forebodings. He had seen Charles I’s head spurt and roll. He had attended Charles II almost to the moment of his death, fighting a bitter rear-guard action to keep the royal physicians at bay. He had watched, and been tempted to take part in, a tavern brawl that bloodied James II’s nose, and more or less signalled the end of his reign. Quite prudently, he had absented himself from the country during the deaths of William and of Mary. But now he was back, and they were bringing the Queen to him. If she chose this time and place to give up the ghost, would every wigged head in the room turn and look at him? Would they tear him limb from limb on the spot, or ship him downriver for a proper beheading at the Tower? Would it come out that he had lately been riding round town in a carriage with a certain foreign Princess who was here incognito and uninvited?

  These and other broodings so preoccupied him that he scarce noted a sudden silence, and the entry into the House of a rather gaudy sedan chair. He (and, admittedly, as many others as could be packed into the room) was in the Presence! ’Twas a Historick Moment! Or, at least, the sort of moment so apt to be writ down in History-Books. Yet despite this—or perhaps because of it—Daniel was afflicted by a maddening inability to attend to it. His own broodings were of greater interest—a sign of unforgivable arrogance?

  Other men seemed to’ve been blessed with the ability to live in the moment, and to have experiences (Daniel imagined) in the raw vivid way that animals did. But not he. How would the ceremony, the pageantry of the Queen’s visit to Parliament look, to one who could see them thus? Colorful, magnificent, mesmerizing, Daniel supposed. He’d never know. Daniel could only see this as a sick old lady paying a call on a room full of anxious blokes who hadn’t bathed in a while.

  The Kit-Cat Clubb

  AN HOUR LATER

  ISAAC NEWTON MUST THINK every room silent, for every room went silent when he walked into it. Even this one!

  Daniel had recovered from the strange absence of mind that had troubled him during the Queen’s address to Parliament. He was fully engaged in the moment. It must have had something to do with that here he could drink chocolate. Moreover, he could move about, talk to people, and attend to what he found interesting. Until Isaac hushed the place by walking in, this had been the spectacle of Roger—holding court at his favorite table—receiving the thanks, in the form of bad poetry, and the congratulations, in the form of expensive gifts, of Great Britain, one Briton at a time. Because this was the Kit-Cat Clubb, all of these encomia had to be delivered in verse: pithy epigrams if Roger were lucky, rambling trains of heroic couplets otherwise. One of the formal constraints observed in the Kit-Cat school of doggerel was that no one could be referred to by name. Classical allusions were de rigueur. Roger was almost always Vulcan.

  Thus some viscount or other:

  Vulcan* in his smoaky Forge† did smite

  of Gold bright Bolts‡ to fortify his Better§

  And, lest the Captives of the Gods take Flight,

  Titanic manacles and Olympian Fetters.

  Prometheus** who unwisely played with Fire

  Is bolted to a crag now all Alone

  When Juno †† did incite young Vulcan’s ire

  His clever hand’work chained her to her Throne‡‡

  This particular Viscount, as everyone understood, could never have crafted such lines himself. He was accompanied by one of the young poets who loitered about the Clubb tossing off epigrams in exchange for pies and wine. Sir Isaac Newton broke in upon the touching exchange and began
speaking to Roger. He had not gotten out of bed for a fortnight after his bludgeoning in Star Chamber, but he was now walking about as spry as a twenty-year-old scholar gamboling on the banks of the Cam. He was completely unaware that he was jumping to the head of a snaking and redoubling queue of men who out-ranked him. Daniel had made slower head-way through the revelers because, unlike Isaac, he bothered to excuse himself as he went. So he could not hear Isaac’s words at first. But he knew that Isaac must have been drawn hither by the news, and that he must be congratulating Roger on having so backed Bolingbroke into a corner that he had been forced to call for Mummy to come and rescue him. Substantial men, one after another, had been saying as much to Roger for hours now, and he had been receiving each plaudit with a nod so perfunctory it had dwindled to a vestigial tic. And yet when Isaac Newton said much the same sort of thing to him, Ravenscar took it with (if a play on words could be permitted) the utmost gravity. As if other men went about congratulating people almost at random, but Newton really meant it. Perhaps it helped that he was speaking in prose.

  Daniel had thought that Roger seemed a bit distracted, even melancholy, as he’d sat there receiving the adulatory versifications of Whigdom. And Daniel thought he knew why. Roger loved the counterattack. He’d spent the last month readying one, but now it was spent. He was in the position of a pistol-duellist who has discharged his weapon, and now stands defenseless, not knowing whether the foe is wounded mortally; merely dazed; or relishing the power to blow his brains out. He needed to be readying himself for Bolingbroke’s riposte; instead he had to sit here and listen to bad poetry.

  Roger took Isaac companionably by the arm and led him toward Daniel. By way of excusing himself he shouted: “Gentlemen—a moment, if you please—I have heard that the Queen to-day hath given the Royal Assent to the posting of a reward for him who finds out the Longitude!” He was feigning amazement at this turn of events. “And it is rumored that Sir Isaac knows something about it.

  “If you would hope to find the Longitude,

  “Find Newton first—and give him Food!”

  Roger improvised, to light applause and heavy drinking. “Mr. Cat! If you would! Mutton-pies, please.”

  But by the time Daniel effected his rendezvous with Roger and Isaac, they had moved on to altogether different topics. “You are looking in the pink—splendid!—does this mean I shall get Catherine back? My household has gone to ruin since its Mistress went off to nurse her nuncle.”

  “Indeed, my lord, she has already gone back to resume her duties,” Newton returned, bored, and a bit uneasy, with this subject.

  “The house will be glowing in a few days, if she tends to it as well as she has to you.”

  “She has done well by her uncle,” Newton allowed, “but in truth, the recent news from Westminster, and the prospect that Bolingbroke would be baffled, and a Trial of the Pyx put off indefinitely, were the physic that cured me.”

  “Then do you and Dr. Waterhouse carpe diem and place your new-found vigor in service of some well-wrought plan of attack,” Roger suggested, “for Parliament is only prorogued until the tenth of August, and that is more than enough time for such as Bolingbroke to dig a counter-counter-mine, and blow us all up to the sky.”

  “Dr. Waterhouse and I are accustomed to people attempting to blow us up,” Newton returned. It was hard to make out whether this was a dry witticism or a clinical observation. Isaac startled Daniel, now, by looking him dead in the eye. “It is good that you are here. I wish to speak to you.”

  “Then with your indulgence I shall withdraw,” Roger said, “that the two of you may speak. Please, speak of weighty matters, and keep your discourse to the matter at hand—for there is no more potent weapon for the Jacobites than to make the City, the Country, and the Mobb believe that the Whigs—and by extension the Hanovers—have secretly debased the coinage to make themselves rich!”

  This was an awfully blunt thing to say to the Master of the Mint. Newton was shocked, which had probably been Roger’s intention. Roger hovered just long enough to be certain that Newton was not going to collapse twitching on the floor. But instead Newton just glared at him. Daniel caught Roger’s eye and threw him a wink. For Daniel had seen Isaac in this mood many times before, and it usually meant that he was going to work for forty-eight hours at a stretch until some problem or other was solved. Roger bowed and withdrew—depositing the whole burden on the shoulders of Daniel, who could already feel himself sagging.

  “WE MUST HUNT DOWN JACK the Coiner, clap him in irons, and force him to testify that he adulterated a Pyx that, until he put his filthy hands into it, was filled with sound coins,” said Sir Isaac Newton. He and Daniel had found a table in the corner. “What would be even better than his testimony, we might compel him to yield up any good guineas that he might have stolen from the Pyx, which would exonerate me beyond even the powers of Jesuits.”

  “If that is your wish, Isaac, I am pleased to let you know that the pursuit of Jack has been underway for some months, and that it is being pressed forward by—”

  “Your Clubb—yes, I know about your Clubb,” Isaac said. “I shall require membership.”

  “The bylaws require a vote on such matters,” Daniel said.

  This was a jest. Isaac in this mood was not very receptive to it. “It should not be an obstacle. I propose, in effect, to merge the Mint’s investigation of coiners with your Clubb’s pursuit of those who wrought the Infernal Devices, since we have abundant reasons to believe that they are the same. The advantages to the Clubb are obvious.”

  “Then let us anticipate the Clubb’s vote, and act as if you were already a member in good standing,” Daniel said, placing both palms flat on the tabletop, and pressing himself up to his feet. Isaac rose, too. The mutton pies were coming toward them on a silver platter; Daniel redirected the waiter to an exit.

  “The timing is felicitous,” Daniel continued. “Haply, I have become aware of an important witness who wishes to have an interview with me.”

  Isaac was already in movement toward the exit. “I have hired a carriage for the day,” he threw back over one shoulder. “Where shall I tell the driver we wish to go?”

  “Tell him,” Daniel returned, “that we are going to Bedlam.”

  *Roger Comstock, Marquis of Ravenscar.

  †The Kit-Cat Clubb.

  ‡An allusion to the lightning-bolts forged by Vulcan; alternately, perhaps, golden guineas turned out by the Mint, which was no longer under Roger’s direction since Oxford and Bolingbroke had overthrown the Whig Juncto, but still run by men associated with Roger, such as Newton.

  §Jupiter, to whom Vulcan supplied lightning-bolts; but possibly a cheeky allusion to George Louis of Hanover, for whom, it was hoped, the Mint would soon be turning out guineas.

  **Bolingbroke.

  ††Queen Anne.

  ‡‡An allusion to a myth in which an angry Vulcan fashioned a trick throne containing hidden restraints, and gave it to his mother, Juno; when she sat on it, she was trapped, and only Vulcan could release her.

  The Carriage

  MINUTES LATER

  “…AND SO WE HAVE MADE an arrangement with Mr. Partry—but not disbursed any money to him, of course—nor do we expect to, until the end of this month,” Daniel said. He’d given Isaac an account of the Clubb’s late doings, mercilessly abbreviated because of the aroma of the mutton pies, which were waiting on a platter in his lap. The platter was a twenty-pound slab of silver done up in full Barock style and engraved with miles of tangled script: a paean to the sexual powers of Newton’s niece. Here she was referred to as Aphrodite, a code that Isaac was not likely to penetrate.

  In an apt demonstration of the principle of Relativity, as propounded by Galileo, the bawdy platter, and the steaming morsels thereon, remained in the same position vis-à-vis Daniel, and hence were, in principle, just as edible, as if he had been seated before, and the pies had been resting upon, a table that was stationary with respect to the fixed stars. This wa
s true despite the fact that the carriage containing Daniel, Isaac Newton, and the pies was banging around London. Daniel guessed that they were swinging round the northern limb of St. Paul’s Churchyard, but he had no real way of telling; he had closed the window-shutters, for the reason that their journey to Bedlam would take them directly across the maw of Grub Street, and he did not want to read about today’s adventure in all tomorrow’s papers.

  Isaac, though better equipped than Daniel or any other man alive to understand Relativity, shewed no interest in his pie—as if being in a state of movement with respect to the planet Earth rendered it somehow Not a Pie. But as far as Daniel was concerned, a pie in a moving frame of reference was no less a pie than one that was sitting still: position and velocity, to him, might be perfectly interesting physical properties, but they had no bearing on, no relationship to those properties that were essential to pie-ness. All that mattered to Daniel were relationships between his, Daniel’s, physical state and that of the pie. If Daniel and Pie were close together both in position and velocity, then pie-eating became a practical, and tempting, possibility. If Pie were far asunder from Daniel or moving at a large relative velocity—e.g., being hurled at his face—then its pie-ness was somehow impaired, at least from the Daniel frame of reference. For the time being, however, these were purely Scholastic hypotheticals. Pie was on his lap and very much a pie, no matter what Isaac might think of it.

  Mr. Cat had lent them silver table-settings, and Daniel, as he spoke, had tucked a napkin into his shirt-collar—a flag of surrender, and an unconditional capitulation to the attractions of Pie. Rather than laying down arms, he now picked them up—knife and fork. Isaac’s question froze him just as he poised these above the flaky top-crust. “Is it the Clubb’s intention to remain idle for the entire month of July?”