The System of the World

Roger Comstock’s House

3:30 A.M., FOUR DAYS LATER (22 SEPTEMBER 1714)

DANIEL HAD BARELY GOT in the front door when the most exquisite body in Britain was pressed up against him, hard. He wondered, not for the first time, how the world might have been different had said body been united in one person with her uncle’s mind. Not much was separating him from Catherine Barton; having been rousted by a most urgent message, he’d come over in his nightshirt. She was wearing something diaphanous that he only glimpsed in the fraction of a second before she impacted on him. She smelled good: not an easy thing to accomplish in 1714. Daniel began to get his first erection since-since-well, since the last time he’d seen Catherine Barton. It was most inappropriate, as she was distraught. She was most certainly the sort of girl who would notice-but not the sort who would take it the wrong way.

She took him by the hand and led him back through the courtyard, round the fountain, and into the Ballroom, which smelled of oil, and was eerily lit up by the white-green glow of kaltes feuer: Phosphorus. A new thing had been added to the place. Seen from the entrance it looked like the rounded prow of a ship that happened to be made of silver, wreathed and festooned with garlands smitten of gold. Some manner of bas-relief Classical frieze had been molded into it. A sort of ram projected up and out of the thing, explicitly Priapic; Daniel recoiled and edged round this, for its tip was like to have caught him in the face. Iron rings, straps, amp;c., dangled from it. Coming now round the side of the object he discovered that it sat between a pair of wheels, made of wood but covered in gold leaf. This solved the mystery of how so heavy an object could have been moved into the ballroom. It was nothing less than a chariot-a huge one, eight feet wide. It was, he realized, a Chariot of the Gods. Coming finally around the open back of it, which faced towards the Volcano only a few yards away, he saw that the whole floor of the vehicle was a tongue-shaped expanse of Bed: as wide as the Chariot and ten feet long, upholstered in crimson silk and bestrewn with furs, and silk- and velvet-covered pillows in diverse glandular shapes. Sprawled in the middle of it was Roger Comstock, the Marquis of Ravenscar. A laurel wreath was awry on his bald head. Mercifully, his purple toga had not been altogether torn off, but the middle of it was poked up, producing a Turkish tent effect that echoed the shape of the nearby Volcano. But the Volcano, mechanism that it was, still pumped away faithfully, its hidden Screw sending spurt after spurt of Oil of Phosphorus down its slopes. Whereas Roger was, or had been, animated by what Newton would call a Vegetative Spirit, which had quite fled his body. The toga-lifter was rigor mortis. He’d have to be buried in a special coffin.

“He was sworn in today as First Lord of the Treasury,” said Miss Barton-who, bless her, had the presence of mind to know that some explanation was wanting. “And so we celebrated the Rites of Vulcan.”

“Of course you did,” said Daniel, who was crawling on all fours up the treacherous (because silky as well as oily) slope of the stupendous Bed, glancing up from time to time to navigate by the landmark of the Pole Star.

“It is a thing Roger liked to do, to celebrate a great triumph. The last time was after he crushed Bolingbroke. The Rites are lengthy and elaborate-”

“I had already inferred that,” Daniel said. He had finally got to the place where he could behold Roger’s face in softly pulsing phosphorus-light.

“Just at the moment of the-Eruption-he suffered an attack-”

“Stroke, probably.”

“He said, ‘Get Daniel! No Bleeders-I don’t want to go out like King Chuck.’ I ran out to send you the message. When I returned, he was-like he is now.”

“You mean, dead?” said Daniel. For he had completed the rite of checking for a pulse. It was superfluous-no man had ever looked more dead than Roger. But his engorged Member had raised doubts.

DANIEL REMAINED STRANGELY CALM UNTIL servants sledded Roger’s corpse down to the Chariot’s threshold, transferred him to a litter, and took him away. Even when he was dead, it seemed, Roger’s presence had some chymical power to reassure Daniel, to make him feel sure everything would come out all right. But something in the way Roger’s limbs tumbled as he was being moved, cruelly struck Daniel as proof that Roger’s adroitness, his intelligence, his force were all flown. By the time the ballroom doors had slammed behind the retreating litter, Daniel had already begun to dissolve.

The Chariot, as it turned out, had a cover: a sort of brocaded tarpaulin that could be drawn over its open top and rear, probably to catch dust and bird-shit when it was languishing in Roger’s stables awaiting a Triumph. This had been reefed and tied about the vehicle’s rim with many tasseled golden ropes. The Priestess of Vulcan went round undoing these, and presently unfurled the cover, and drew it down to envelop the whole bed. Daniel was sitting up in the middle of it, elbows on knees, hands clamped over his phizz, tears leaking out.

“I do not wish to live in a world that does not have Roger in it,” he heard himself saying; and then he thanked God that Roger was not alive to hear him talking this way. “He was my Complement-my protector-my partner-my patron-it’s almost as if he were my wife or something.”

“Or you his,” said Miss Barton. Having finished with this project of enclosing Daniel in the womb-like interior of the Chariot of Vulcan, she hitched up her skirts and knee-walked up the slope of the bed until she reached Daniel’s side, then put a comforting hand on his shoulder.

“God! I really am on the wrong Planet henceforth!” Daniel exclaimed. “What am I going to do?”

“Roger has made out the most exacting Will. He showed it to me. There is money for the Royal Society. For a Museum he wishes to have made here. For the Kit-Cat Clubb, the Italian Opera, and the Massachusetts Bay Colony of Technologickal Arts.”

Daniel did not say what he was thinking, which was that for every asset Roger could claim, there would be equal or greater liabilities. He had held his creditors at bay by amazing them, threatening them, distracting them, and drinking them under the table. But now, like ants swarming a defenseless carcass, they would come.

Daniel pulled his hands from his face and made himself leave off blubbering. “No. It is not that sort of thing I am thinking of. I have much to do before the twenty-ninth of October. Much to do! It seemed nearly impossible even when Roger was about to do most of it for me. The others on the Treasury Commission are mountebanks and time-servers. So it is I who must organize the Trial of the Pyx. What do I know of it? Nothing! Clerkenwell Court and Bridewell must be shut down, liquidated. The Institute of Technologickal Arts has got to be considered dead-I’ll send word to Enoch to sell the cabin. What else!? Oh, yes. The Princess of Wales wants me to help a dear friend of hers sort out her love life-which happens to be more fraught with dangers and complexities than, let us say, the foreign policy of the Venetian Republic.”

“I am sorry to laugh, on such a sad occasion,” said the Priestess of Vulcan, “but that strikes me as most absurd!”

Which Daniel might have taken in a resentful spirit, had she not begun to knead the tight muscles at the base of his neck and between his scapulae.

“In some things you are a very clever chap, or so Roger always used to say. But what would a man such as you know of affairs of the heart? Why, your muscles tie themselves up in knots at the very mention of these things! Roll over on your belly, sir, or else the oil will run down your back.”

“Oil? What oil!?”

“This oil…”

“Oh, my word!”

“That’s better. Now I can straddle you-your buttocks can take most of my weight-thus-and it becomes easier for me to reach those parts of you that are most in need of lubrication and a good stiff massage.”

“Is this how Roger did it?” Daniel said wonderingly, a long time later.

“No, Roger liked to get up on all fours like a-”

“No, no, no, Miss Barton. I meant something different. Is this how Roger managed to-to keep so many balls in the air-as it were-and not go mad?”

“Now you ask me to speculate on matters quite beyond my scope, Dr. Waterhouse. Roll over on your back!”

“I was just reflecting that those affairs that so troubled my mind only a little while ago, seem to have quite fled my mind-oh, my goodness, Miss Barton!”

“It sounded as if your troubles were beginning to sneak back into your awareness,” she explained, “and so I rather phant’sied some drastic action was called for.”

“What…what…what troubles, Miss…Miss…Miss Barton?”

“My point exactly. Tilt your pelvis t’other way, if you please, sir…there! Much better, you’ll admit. Now, leave the rest to me, sir-the balance of this chariot can be a bit…tricky…the ride…a bit rough.”

Indeed, the axle-bearings of the Chariot of Vulcan presently began to creak as it got to rocking forward and back, forward and back, on its wheels. Daniel was old, and the ride was correspondingly long. But the primum mobile-the Body of Miss Barton-was young and, as everyone in London agreed, in the most superb condition, and more than equal to the work. Daniel felt a-drift in Absolute Space, and phant’sied that the Chariot had worked its way out the ballroom doors, off the property, down Tottenham Court Road, and was gliding across the dewy turf of Lambs Conduit Fields…on and on…until suddenly it toppled down a well. He opened his eyes. It was over. She executed a back-somersault off of him, and rolled to her feet, poking up the tarpaulin with her head, and artfully stuffed a fistful of Roman priestess vestments up between her thighs.

“Perhaps your uncle knows something after all,” Daniel said. “It seems so obvious, when one contrasts a dead Roger with a live Daniel, that there is something one lacks and the other has!”

“You have a bit less of it now,” Miss Barton said playfully. Then she turned her head to one side, attending to some subtle noise without, that Daniel had not heard. “Who is there?” she called, and gathered up an arm-load of tarp, ready to give it a heave. “Don’t!” Daniel called, for he was most indecent.

“The servants have seen ever so much worse!” she returned with a roll of the eyes, and heaved. The curtain flew back and ended up creased over Daniel’s head like a little roof. He gazed out upon the face of Sir Isaac Newton, who was standing there with his back to the volcano, beaming lanthorn-light at him.

“I came as soon as I heard the dreadful news,” he announced crisply, at some point during the approximately half an hour during which Daniel was rendered speechless. Isaac had not evinced the slightest surprise at seeing Daniel here, in this pose. This raised interesting questions. Had he been eavesdropping the entire time, and therefore had ample time to master his rage and astonishment? Or was his opinion of Daniel’s character now so abyssal that he simply felt nothing at all?

“It seems, however,” Isaac went on, “that matters are well in hand here.”

“That they are, uncle,” said Miss Barton, and glided down off the bed of the chariot to give her kinsman a chaste peck on the cheek.

“Is there any way that I might be of assistance?” Isaac was desirous of knowing.

Daniel could not think of anything to say. He would have ample time to re-live the moment later, to savor and amplify his embarrassment. What struck him now, as he sat there in a half-ripped-off night-shirt, gazing upon fully dressed Isaac, was that word of Roger’s death must be out; and all over the metropolis at this instant, people were awake, and out-maneuvering Daniel in ways that he probably would never even know about.