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

by Neal Stephenson

  Here Henry Arlanc paused to sweep his gaze around the table. He gave each Clubb member a searching look in the eye, until he came to Sean Partry, who sat closest to him. Then he dropped his eyelids and bowed his head slightly, showing the thief-taker more respect than any other man in the room—even Sir Isaac. Perhaps this was for the simple reason that Partry had on his ring the keys to the manacles that now encircled Arlanc’s wrists, and the fetters around his ankles. Arlanc raised his hands up out of his lap, which required some exertion as they were linked by twenty pounds of chain, and closed them round a mug of chocolate that his wife had brought to him.

  Mrs. Arlanc had been horrified but not the least bit surprised when, at the beginning of the Clubb’s meeting, as the first item of New Business, Sean Partry had stormed into the room and clapped her husband in irons. The prisoner, by contrast, had been astonished; but once this had faded he had shown no strong emotion, seeming to accept his personal ruin with true Huguenot fatalism. If anything, he seemed relieved.

  “Explain to the Clubb how you became a minion of Jack Shaftoe,” Sir Isaac demanded, “and do you speak slowly and clearly, that every word may be pricked down.” For in lieu of Arlanc—who had, until minutes ago, been the Clubb’s Secretary—they had brought in a Clerk from the Temple, who was scratching away with a quill as fast as he could, writing in shorthand.

  “Very well. You will already have heard many tales of the horrors visited upon the French Calvinists after the Edict of Nantes in 1685, and so I shall spare you another, save to say that my father was caught up in a dragonnade and made a galley-slave—but not before he had contrived to smuggle me and Calvin across the Manche to England, packed in barrels, like herring. Later the galley on which my father served was destroyed in a battle against a Dutch fleet in the Mediterranean.”

  “But that must have occurred several years after the Edict,” said Mr. Kikin, ever the student of history.

  “Indeed, sir,” said Arlanc, “for the War began, by most reckonings, in 1688, when Louis took the Palatinate and William took England.”

  “We prefer to say that England took William,” Orney corrected him.

  “Be that as it may, sir, the engagement that destroyed the galley of my father was a part of the said war, and it took place in the summer of 1690, off Crete.”

  “He was lost at sea, then, as I take it?” asked Mr. Threader, in a touchingly genteel and delicate way.

  “On the contrary, sir—he was rescued by a pirate-galley commanded by none other than Jack Shaftoe.”

  At this claim, Kikin rolled his eyes, and Orney let out a “Poh!” Isaac took no note of them, but sharpened his gaze, which remained locked on Arlanc’s face. “It is consistent,” he announced. “Jack Shaftoe turned Turk in the late 1680s. His Corsairs are known to have raided Bonanza during the summer of 1690. Thence they fled through the Gates of Hercules into the Mediterranean. By late summer they had reached Cairo, as all the world now knows. Mr. Arlanc’s account is plausible.”

  “Thank you, sir,” said Henry Arlanc. “Jack and his band of corsairs rescued my father, and other galériens, from the wrack of that galley. This much Calvin and I knew from letters we received in Limerick. But beyond that—”

  “Hold. How did you and your brother get to Limerick?” asked Orney.

  “I was getting to that, sir. When we were let out of our barrels in England, a pair of young lads, not yet fully grown, we could, I’m ashamed to say, muster very little interest in following our father’s example and becoming merchants. We lusted after revenge—preferably violent, and if possible, glorious. We joined one of the Huguenot cavalry regiments forming in the Dutch Republic. By the time that William and Mary had come to England, we had risen in the ranks a bit—Calvin had become an assistant Chaplain and I was a non-commissioned officer. Our regiment was one of those that were despatched to Ireland during the early years of the war, to drive out the Pretender. We participated in the Siege of Limerick during the winter of ’90 and ’91, and that is where we received the miraculous tidings that our father—whom we had given up for dead—had been pulled out of the sea by the King of the Vagabonds.”

  “Did you receive any further communication from him?” asked Isaac.

  “Not for several years, sir, as we were all so much on the move.”

  “If your father remained in the service of Jack Shaftoe, he would have called at such places as Mocha and Bandar-Congo during 1691 and followed the monsoon to Surat the year after,” Newton said. “Beyond that it is difficult to reconstruct Jack’s movements for several years. It is well known that he participated in a battle somewhere between Surat and Shahjahanabad in late 1693, and that in 1695 he had begun to organize a ship-building project.”

  “In February of 1698 our father posted us a letter from Batavia, where that ship had called to take on spices,” Arlanc said. “We did not receive it until late in the year. By that time the war was over.”

  Orney snorted.

  “Or so everyone believed at the time,” Arlanc hastened to add. “In retrospect, of course, this was nothing more than a brief respite in a war that extended over twenty-five years. But few foresaw this, and so our regiment, like so many others, was disbanded the following year, when the Treaty of Partition was signed by William and Louis.

  “It was difficult to find work in London with so many discharged veterans about, and dangerous to be there for the same reason. Calvin and I were more fortunate than some, for enough time had passed since the Edict of Nantes that the Huguenots had established themselves in England, and begun to prosper. Calvin secured a position as a pastor in a Huguenot church just outside of the city, and has been there ever since. I took jobs here and there as a servant to Huguenot businessmen.

  “The last letter we received from our father was posted from Manila in August of the year of our Lord 1700, and it stated—”

  “That Jack’s ship was about to attempt the crossing of the Pacific,” said Sir Isaac, “and he would be aboard it.”

  “Just so, sir. It is uncanny how much you know of Jack’s movements about the world. Father said he would write to us again from Acapulco. But he died of scurvy en route, may God have mercy on his soul.”

  At this little prayer everyone in the room observed a respectful silence. Even Partry seemed moved. The first to speak was Sir Isaac. “And how, precisely, were you delivered this unhappy news?”

  “Jack told me,” said Arlanc.

  This information silenced Isaac for a bit longer. Mrs. Arlanc could be heard indistinctly, sobbing into the shoulder of a scullery maid in the Royal Society’s kitchen. But presently Isaac stirred again and said, “This would have occurred after his return to London in the last months of 1702.”

  “Again you are correct, sir.”

  “Do you phant’sy that Jack Shaftoe arranged this interview with you solely to deliver word of your father’s passing?”

  Here Henry Arlanc looked discomfited for the first time—odd, considering he was heavily ironed, and on his way to Newgate. He cast an uncertain glance at Sean Partry, and another at Sir Isaac. Then he answered: “Of course not, sir. However, I must tell you something you ought to know about Jack Shaftoe, which is that he is not utterly black-hearted. Did he have a selfish motive for paying a call on me? Of course, and I shall address that next. But his affection for my father was unfeigned, and when he told the tale of my father’s passing, and his burial at sea, almost within sight of California, he shed tears. And I believe that the affection may even have been mutual, for by Jack’s account, my father’s dying words included certain warnings for Jack—warnings he’d have been well-advised to have heeded.”

  “How touching,” Isaac said, very much as if he wanted to skip over this part as quickly as possible. But curiosity had already got the better of Daniel, who asked: “What did these warnings concern?”

  This earned him a glare from Isaac, and so Daniel went on: “Forgive me, but it is clear that my father and yours had much in common with ea
ch other, Mr. Arlanc, and I cannot guess what sort of warnings a man like my father would have issued to a man like Jack, unless it was that his immortal soul was doomed to the Lake of Fire!”

  Orney slapped the table and chuckled silently.

  “My father implored Jack to beware of a certain passenger whom they’d plucked out of the Pacific following the wrack of the Manila Galleon. A Jesuit priest he was—an agent of the Inquisition, named Father Édouard de Gex.”

  Isaac, who had barely been able to hold back a sneer moments ago, was distinctly taken a-back. After a moment to compose himself he asked Partry to take the prisoner out of the room (which he did, a bit roughly) and out of earshot (which was seen to by Mrs. Arlanc, who rushed forth to embrace her husband and wail).

  “He knows nothing of what happened yesterday on the Bridge,” Daniel insisted.

  “It is too soon for accounts to have appeared in newspapers,” observed Mr. Kikin, an astute reader of all that spewed forth from Grub Street.

  “Could Partry have mentioned anything to him? A slip of the tongue, perhaps?”

  “Impossible,” said Orney. “Partry and I spent all afternoon, and evening, scouring the banks of the Thames for evidence of de Gex.”

  “And I came here with Saturn, specifically to keep an eye on Arlanc,” Daniel said. “He received no visitors.”

  “This is a singular piece of news, if it is to be credited,” Isaac said. “For years it has been assumed, by many at Court, that de Gex—who spends much time in London—was an agent of the King of France. And many rumors have reached my ears that he was entangled, somehow, with Jack the Coiner. I had assumed that de Gex and Shaftoe operated hand-in-glove.” He nodded at the place where Arlanc had just been sitting. “But this talk of a warning that went unheeded hints at a conflict of fourteen years’ standing between the two of them.”

  “It hints at something else, too,” Orney said. “If it is true that this de Gex survived the destruction of a ship on the open ocean, and stayed afloat long enough to be rescued, it implies that he knows how to swim—which means we cannot simply assume that he drowned in the Thames yesterday.”

  “Let us continue the interview,” Isaac said.

  “WHEN JACK FIRST RETURNED to London, the war had resumed under its new name of the War of the Spanish Succession. But the armies had not yet been fully mobilized, and so many unemployed soldiers and sailors were still about, making the city infamously perilous. Jack had the wit to see that these men would presently be called back into service, and so he recruited as many as he could during his first months back. His interview with me was partly with an eye towards getting me to work for him.”

  “In what capacity? And did he succeed?” asked Isaac.

  “Anyone who has paid the least notice to the newspapers, and to the discourse of Parliament, during the last decade, will know that war breeds corruption as flesh breeds maggots. The vast movements of men and matériel entailed by the maneuvers of the Allied Powers afforded Jack opportunities for profit that were almost inconceivably vast. For every case of peculation that was talked about openly in London, you may be certain there were a hundred others that went unremarked upon—and of those, Jack was probably involved, somehow, in fifty. His method was simple: he recruited soldiers and sailors before the Crown did, and he treated them better.”

  “You have answered my first question,” Isaac said, “namely, in what capacity did Jack wish to hire you. But you have not touched on the second.”

  “Only because the answer is obvious,” Arlanc said, and held up his manacles. “Oh, I did not do terrible things. But I am ashamed to say that I did look the other way when my regiment’s deliveries of gunpowder, and other commodities, came up a bit short. This I did less out of a desire for profit than fear of a certain suttler who I’m sure would not have hesitated to cut my throat, or arrange for me to be shot in the back, had I raised any objection. God in his mercy took me out of this peril, for in ought-five I suffered a wound that forced me to retire from Her Majesty’s service. I came back to London and, after I recovered, went to work as a porter for Monsieur Nevers, the horologist—”

  “Which led in due course to your knowing several Fellows of the Royal Society, who hired Monsieur Nevers to make instruments,” said Daniel.

  “Yes, sir, and that is how I ended up working here.”

  “But you were also working for Jack,” Isaac pointed out.

  “Yes, sir, after a fashion,” Arlanc admitted. “Though it hardly seemed like work. From time to time—perhaps once or twice a year—I was invited to go and meet a certain gentleman at a certain pub, and have a chat with him.”

  “If the work was all that trivial, why did you bother?” Isaac asked.

  “Jack had power over me, as a result of our previous dealings,” said Arlanc. “With a word he could destroy my marriage or blacken the reputation of my brother Calvin. What he asked of me seemed harmless—so I did it.”

  “What did you and this man talk about when you met in the pub?” asked Orney.

  “He was an educated Frenchman. He professed to be a sort of Enthusiast, an amateur of Natural Philosophy. He simply wanted to know what the Royal Society was like. He asked all sorts of questions about what happened during the meetings, and what the Fellows were like—Sir Christopher Wren, Edmund Halley, and especially Sir Isaac Newton.”

  “Did you ever mention to this amateur that Sir Isaac made a practice of coming to Crane Court on Sunday evenings, and working late?” asked Daniel.

  “I don’t remember for certain, sir, but it is quite possible—that is the sort of thing this fellow loved to hear about, sir.” Arlanc then paused, for everyone in the room had exhaled, and some who’d been studying his phizz for the last several minutes were now looking at their fingernails or gazing out the window. “Did I do wrong, sir?” asked Henry Arlanc. He was addressing the question to Daniel. “Foolish question! I know perfectly well I did wrong. But was it a crime? A crime for which a man can be charged, and brought before a magistrate?”

  Daniel, moved by sympathy, looked him in the eye and got ready to say, Of course not! but Isaac was quicker: “You are guilty of Conspiracy, and to prove as much before a judge shall be simple enough. Mr. Partry, you may take this man away to Newgate Prison.”

  With no more ceremony than that, Partry loomed over Arlanc’s shoulder and gathered up a fistful of lapel at the nape of the Huguenot’s neck, by which he hauled him to his feet. Partry kicked Arlanc’s chair aside and began to drag him backwards out of the room, leg-chains raking across the floor-boards. Approaching the exit the pair halted for a moment so that Partry could open the door with his free hand. Arlanc took this opportunity to say: “Beg pardon, sirs, but if I could add a word or two, concerning the man you seek—?”

  “You may,” answered Isaac, with a confirmatory nod at Partry. Partry remained in the doorway, watching over Arlanc’s shoulder, while keeping a loose grip on the scruff of the other’s neck. It seemed then to Daniel that this pair looked like a ventriloquist at a country fair, and his marionette. Arlanc began to speak. “I’ve been a student, you might say, of Jack for some years now—as Mr. Halley watches the movements of comets, and understands their nature without being able to alter their courses, why, so it is with me and Jack Shaftoe. And I say that if you think Jack is a slave of Le Roi, and dreams only of doing the bidding of Louis, why, you are underestimating the man. That hypothesis—if I may borrow a Royal Society word—does not do the man sufficient credit, and does not explain his actions.”

  “And what is your hypothesis, Mr. Arlanc?” asked Daniel.

  “He’s gone around the world, Jack has. He’s had a pile of gold, lost it, got it back, and lost it again. He’s been a Vagabond, a King, and everything in between. He has more swag now than a man could ever need. You must ask yourselves: what could move such a man? When Jack gets up in the morning, what does he think of? What does he desire?”

  “You have been given leave to supply us with answers�
�not to ply us with questions,” Sir Isaac pointed out.

  “Very well then, sir, I’ll tell you the answer. It is love that Jack seeks. The love of a woman. A certain particular woman, whom he loved once, and has never forgotten.” Arlanc was looking Daniel in the eye. “She is known to some of you. Her name is—”

  “I know her name,” Daniel said, to cut off Arlanc’s maudlin discourse before he could sully the name of some blameless lady or other; but he needn’t have bothered, for Partry at the same instant had jerked back on Arlanc’s shoulder so violently as to throttle his wind-pipe and draw him back through the door.

  “Thank you, Mr. Partry,” Isaac called out as Arlanc was removed with a fantastic cacophony: scraping and clanking of chains, gagging and coughing of the prisoner, curses from Partry, and above all the wailing and sobbing redux of Mrs. Arlanc. Doors up and down the hall were being hauled open, and diverse savants and vertuosos were thrusting their heads out to see what was the meaning of this. Kikin did the Clubb the favor of closing the door on that scene. This muffled the sound to the point where it was mere noises off: distracting but ignorable. There was a pause for the Clubb to regain its composure. Then Mr. Orney, who was running the meeting, said: “Right. Are there any other items of new business?”

  “I have one,” said Mr. Kikin, “which is that we all lie down and take a damned nap.”

  IF THE OTHERS WENT to sleep, Isaac did not, and neither did Daniel, for Isaac wanted to have words with him. They met in a study off the Library, where Isaac was wont to hold forth as President of the Royal Society.

  “You will have seen the deficiency in Arlanc’s account,” was how Isaac opened the conversation.