The System of the World

Sir Isaac Newton’s House in St. Martin’s
EVENING, THURSDAY, 28 OCTOBER 1714

“MR. THREADER,” the butler announced.

Daniel looked up, and turned around.

Mr. Threader stood in the laboratory doorway, hat in hand, decidedly cringing, looking about the room as if expecting Sir Isaac Newton to spring out from behind a glowing furnace and turn him into a newt.

“He is not here,” Daniel said gently. “He is at his niece’s house.”

“Recuperating-or so ’tis rumored-from an attaque of some sort-?” Mr. Threader, emboldened, stepped over the threshold. The butler closed the door behind him and walked away.

“We shall help him recuperate, you and I. Please, please, come in!” Daniel beckoned with one, then both hands. Mr. Threader obeyed with extreme reluctance. He was not accustomed to Alchemical laboratories. The glowing furnaces, the smells, the open flames, the jars and retorts with their cryptic labels, were all vaguely threatening to him. Seeing as much, Daniel felt, for a moment, what a second-rate Alchemist must feel when a gullible person ventures into his shop: a smug self-satisfaction in the bamboozlement and bewilderment of one’s fellow-man, and a perverse urge to milk the wretch for all he is worth.

But alas, he had other errands, and must needs put Mr. Threader at ease.

“It must all seem quite foreign to you. I was fortunate: I was chumming with Isaac during the years that he turned our domicile into one great smoking Lab. So, all the stuff you see around you here was moved in to our house one bit at a time, and I could ask Isaac what it was, and how to use it.” Daniel laughed. “I am more at home here than I should care to admit!”

Mr. Threader permitted himself a dry chuckle. “I must say that you look quite at home here, which is quite amusing after all of the unkind remarks you have made about Alchemy.”

Daniel wondered what Mr. Threader would make of it if Daniel were to let him know that tomorrow he, Daniel, might be the most eminent Alchemist since King Solomon went in to the East. But he shook it off as being too uncanny to speak of just now.

“Is Sir Isaac expected to be in any condition to attend the Trial?”

“He would not miss it for anything.”

“It is good to know his condition improves.”

Daniel said nothing. Isaac’s condition was not improving; he suspected that the gaol-fever was creating a lesion on Isaac’s heart. As a boy Isaac had tried to make perpetual motion machines, seeing in them a model of the heart. But Isaac’s heart, Daniel suspected, was about to give out. Men had not been able to fashion perpetual motion machines because men were mechanics who only knew how to work with inert matter. Hearts pumped longer than any machine could, because the matter of which they were made-or so Alchemists supposed-was suffused with the vegetative spirit.

“Let’s make some money!” Daniel said. “Did you bring the molds?”

What Daniel had mentioned was so perilous that Mr. Threader, by way of an answer, could only flinch. “Do you have a bit of gold?” he returned.

Daniel flourished his right hand, then pulled off the gold ring and tossed it without ceremony into a small crucible. Picking this up with a pair of tongs, he made to thrust it into a small, keening, and radiating furnace. “Is it fine gold?” Mr. Threader wanted to know.

“It is finer than fine,” Daniel said, and maneuvered the crucible into the glowing heart of the furnace. “It is heavier than pure gold.”

Mr. Threader blinked. “I’m afraid that is quite impossible.”

“You may verify it in a minute or two.”

“How can such a thing be?”

“A divine quintessence fills its pores, which, in ordinary gold, are vacant cavities.”

Mr. Threader stared at him, to see if Daniel was having him on; but Daniel himself was not certain. In the end Mr. Threader believed it, not because of weighing the gold or because he found Alchemy convincing, but because of the political, the human logic of the thing. “I say! I say! You want me to-to-you are up to something! Aren’t you!”

“We are all up to something,” Daniel said, and gave Mr. Threader what was meant to be a chilly look. He was afraid that the other was about to launch into some self-righteous peroration. But Mr. Threader had the decency to stifle himself.

“You have been chosen by the Jury of the Citizens to serve in the role of Pesour tomorrow, have you not?”

“Dr. Waterhouse, you are strangely well-informed about what is supposed to have been a secret, and so I shall not make a fool of myself denying it.”

“You are, therefore, the adversary-the challenger-of the Master of the Mint.”

“That is how the avarice of the Mint-men has been kept in check since ancient days,” Mr. Threader said agreeably. “It is the goldsmiths’ duty and their honour.”

“It poses a curious conflict of interests,” Daniel remarked, “when one considers that Sir Isaac had it in his power, a few weeks ago, to send you to Tyburn along with Jack Shaftoe, but elected not to.”

Mr. Threader only made a seething noise at that, which was nearly lost in like noises emitted by the furnace. In August he had been pitiable, abject, almost a little disgusting. But now he’d got used to the whole affair’s having been swept under the rug, and considered it very bad manners indeed for Daniel to have revisited it. Daniel was distracted now, for a moment, by the curious sight of the ring beginning to melt: most of it was yet unchanged, but where it touched the walls of the crucible it was sagging and ponding.

“The only ones who can testify against me are Jack and his boys,” Mr. Threader reminded him. “Jack has not implicated me, and will be dead in a few hours. The boys have escaped-”

“I know,” Daniel said, “I broke them out of prison. I know where they are. Got affidavits from them, before they left the country. Witnessed and sealed affidavits stating that you took part in coining. Speaking of which, I do believe we are just about ready for that mold.”

Mr. Threader reached into his coat-pocket. “To own this thing is a death-warrant,” he said, “but you already have mine in your hip pocket, it seems, and so this is redundant.” And he took out a cylinder of clay, a bit larger in diameter than a guinea coin, and as long as a finger. In the middle it had been broken or chopped into two halves that had been rejoined with slip and fired to make the thing whole. He lay this on its side on the workbench and then rolled it until a tapered hole, like a tiny funnel, came round to the top. Then he chocked it between a pair of fire-bricks. “Be my guest,” he offered, “but this is hardly the way to forge a proper guinea!”

“It need not be all that convincing,” Daniel said, “as we are going to chop it up anyway.”

Mr. Threader was startled, then baffled by this remark; then he understood, and nodded. Meanwhile Daniel had taken up the tongs again, and reached in to the furnace. The crucible came out a-glow. Daniel swung it round over the bench-top and let the tongs rest on one of the fire-bricks, to steady himself. Then he twisted his wrists. Liquid fire spilled out of the crucible. A bead or two went astray, but most of it went down the hole in the clay cylinder.

“There,” said Mr. Threader, “we are in the same boat now-you have just committed High Treason!”

“It is an old failing of my family,” Daniel admitted. He tapped the last drips of gold from the crucible; they beaded on the table and instantly congealed. He set the tongs and crucible aside, and closed the furnace door. With a pair of tweezers he picked up every bead of gold that had gone astray and dropped them into a little cup. Then he took up the clay mold, which was warm, and snapped it in half. A guinea fell out of it and spun on the table. As Mr. Threader had warned him, it was not a very good guinea: the gold had not evenly filled the mold, so parts of it were indistinct. The edging was no good at all, and it had a bubble trapped in it. A prong stuck out of its rim where the filling-hole had been. Daniel flicked it into a bowl of water to cool it down, then plucked it out with his bare fingers and attacked it with a pair of heavy shears. His hands almost were not equal to this task, and he thought for a moment that he might have to send for Saturn. But Mr. Threader, warming to the task, wrapped his hands around Daniel’s and they squeezed together, grunting like swine, and finally there was a snap and two halves of the guinea went flying opposite directions. Daniel had so arranged things that one of these halves included the prong and most of the other gross imperfections. This he placed in the bowl with the other surplus. But the other half was more presentable. Daniel fetched this off the floor and brought it back, and they halved it again, and again-a little bit like cutting a Piece of Eight into reales, except they made the bits smaller and quite irregular-reducing the false half-guinea into a rubble of mangled shards. When Mr. Threader deemed that they had a suitable range of shapes and sizes, they raked it all into a scale-pan and weighed it-both men jotting down the number.

And then both agreed, without having to say it, that they were finished. Daniel saw the visitor out; Mr. Threader had taken a sedan chair so that no one might see the Pesour paying a call on the Master of the Mint, something that would have seemed very fishy indeed.

“Did you-somehow-influence the Jury to choose me?” Mr. Threader wanted to know.

“I used what influence I could muster.”

“Because of my guilty conscience.”

“No, in truth, any member of the Jury probably could have been swayed, one way or another,” Daniel said. “I thought of you because of your skill at prestidigitation. And I hope you can do tricks with coin-snips as well as with whole guineas.”

“Most of it is a matter of misdirecting the audience’s attention-less dexterity is involved than is commonly supposed. But I shall practice with these tonight.”

“Then I shall practice making a distracting spectacle of myself,” Daniel promised him.

“Then you shall be up all night long, for it does not come naturally to you.”

“I’ll be up all night anyway,” Daniel said, “doing all kinds of unnatural things.”