The System of the World

London
LATE FEBRUARY 1714

DANIEL WAS LURKING LIKE A bat in the attic, supervising Henry Arlanc, who was packing Science Crapp into crates and casks. Sir Isaac Newton emerged from a room on the floor just below, talking to a pair of younger men as they strode down the corridor. Daniel craned his neck and peered down the stairway just in time to catch a glimpse of Isaac’s feet and ankles as they flicked out of view. One of the men was Scottish, and sanguine, and fully agreeable to whatever it was that Isaac thought he should do. “I shall remark on the Baron’s remarks, sir!”

Leibniz had published his latest salvo in Journal Literaire under the title “Remarks.”

“I’ll use him smartly, I will!”

“I shall supply you with my notes on his Tentamen. I found in it a clearly erroneous use of second-order differentials,” Isaac said, preceding the others down the stairs.

“I perceive your strategy sir!” boomed the Scotsman. “Before the Baron presumes to pick the lint from oot o’ yoor eye he ought to extricate the log from oot o’ his oon!” It was John Keill: Queen Anne’s cryptographer.

The three men stormed down the stairs and out into the streets, or so it sounded to Daniel, in whose failing ears their footsteps and their conversation melted together into a fusillade of hoots and booms.

Daniel waited until their carriages had cleared the end of Crane Court, then went to the Kit-Cat Clubb.

ONE OF THE REGULARS THERE was John Vanbrugh, an architect who made a specialty of country houses. For example, he was building Blenheim Palace for the Duke of Marlborough. He couldn’t help but be busy on that front just now, since Harley had just flung ten thousand pounds at the Duke. Most of his tasks, just now, had nothing to do with the drawing up of plans or the supervision of workers. He was rather shunting money from place to place and attempting to hire people. Daniel knew this because Vanbrugh was using the Kit-Cat Clubb as his office, and Daniel couldn’t go there and read the paper and drink chocolate without hearing half of Vanbrugh’s business. Occasionally Daniel would glance up to discover Vanbrugh staring at him. Perhaps the architect knew he had corresponded with Marlborough. Perhaps it was something else.

At any rate, Vanbrugh was there when Daniel walked down from Crane Court, and within a few moments he had a great deal more reason to stare. For Daniel had scarcely sat down before a really excellent carriage pulled up in front of the club, and the head of Sir Christopher Wren appeared in its window, asking for Dr. Daniel Waterhouse. Daniel obliged by coming out and climbing right in. The magnificence of this vehicle, and the beauty of the four matched horses that drew it, were sufficient to stop traffic on the Strand, which greatly simplified the task of getting it turned around and aimed back the way Daniel had come, eastwards into the city.

“I sent a carter round to Crane Court, as you requested, to collect whatever it was you wanted collected. He shall meet us at St. Stephen Walbrook and then he is yours for the day.”

“I am in your debt.”

“Not at all. May I ask what it is?”

“Rubbish from the attic. A gift to our scientific brethren in St. Petersburg.”

“Then I am in your debt. Given the nature of my work, what a scandal it would raise, if Crane Court collapsed under the weight of beetles.”

“Let us consider all accounts settled between us, then.”

“Did you really go through all of it!?”

“What I am really after is the residue of Hooke.”

“Oh-er! You shan’t find it there. Sir Isaac.”

“Hooke and Newton are the two most difficult persons I have ever known-”

“Flamsteed belongs too in that Pantheon.”

“Hooke thought Newton stole his ideas.”

“Yes. He made me aware of it.”

“Newton considered himself aggrieved by any such accusations. Hooke’s legacy could only support Hooke, and never exonerate Newton-so away with all such rubbish! But Hooke, being no less obstreperous than Newton, must have anticipated this-he would therefore have placed his most valuable stuff out of Newton’s reach.”

Wren bore his eighty-one years as an arch supports tons of stone. He had been a sort of mathematical and mechanical prodigy. The quicksilver that had seemingly welled up out of the ground, round the time of Cromwell, had been especially concentrated in him. Later that tide had seemed to ebb, as many of the early Royal Society men had succumbed to a heaviness of the limbs, or of the spirit. Not so with Wren, who seemed to be changing from an elfin youth into an angel, with only a brief sojourn in Manhood. He wore a tall fluffy silver wig, and clothing of light color, with airy lace at the throat and wrists, and his face was in excellent condition. His age showed mostly in the dimples of his cheeks, which had lengthened to crevices, and in the fragile skin of his eyelids, which had become quite loose, pink, and swollen. But even this only seemed to lend him a placid and mildly amused look. Daniel saw now that Wisdom had been among the gifts that God had bestowed on the young Wren, and that it had led him into architecture: a field where the results spoke for themselves, and in which it was necessary to remain on speaking terms with large numbers of one’s fellow humans for years at a time. The other early Royal Society men had not recognized Wren’s wisdom, and so there had been whispers, fifty years ago, that the wonder boy was squandering his gifts by going into the building trade. Daniel had been as guilty of saying so as anyone else. But Wren’s decision had long since been vindicated, and Daniel-who’d made his own decisions, some wiser than others-felt no trace of envy, and no regret. Only a sort of awed bemusement, as their carriage emerged from Ludgate and circumnavigated St. Paul’s church-yard, and Wren parted a curtain with one finger to cast an eye over St. Paul’s, like a shepherd scanning his flock.

What would it be like, to have built that? Daniel could only guess at it, by considering what he had built, and trying to appraise it in a similar spirit. But Daniel’s work was not finished yet. He was not that old-or so he felt, in present company. When Wren’s son had laid the last stone into its place in the lantern atop the dome of St. Paul’s, Sir Christopher had been ten years older than Daniel was today.

St. Paul’s had passed from view; they had turned onto Watling Street and come to a dead stop in the congestion; the tables had turned, and now Wren was looking at Daniel bemusedly. “I do not intend to make your business mine,” he said, “but it would help me to help you, if you would allow me to know what sort of Hooke-stuff you are looking for. Some of his artwork, to adorn your walls? Navigational instruments, for finding your way back to Boston? Architectural drawings? Astronomical observations? Schemes for flying machines? Samples of exotic plants and animals? Clock-work? Optical devices? Chymical Receipts? Cartographical innovations?”

“Forgive me, Sir Christopher, my affairs divide and multiply from one day to the next, I am compelled to pursue several errands at once, and so my answer is not as plain as it might be. Almost anything will serve the end I have already mentioned, viz. giving the Russian savants-in-training food for thought. As for my own purposes, I require anything to do with machines.”

“I have heard it mentioned that you are a member of the Court of Directors of the Proprietors-”

“No. It is not that. Mr. Newcomen’s Engine is a huge and beastly piece of ironmongery, and he needs no assistance from me to make it. I am thinking of small, precise, clever machines.”

“I suppose you mean, small, precise machines, made cleverly.”

“I meant what I said, Sir Christopher.”

“So it’s the Logic Mill again? I thought Leibniz gave up on it, what, forty years ago.”

“Leibniz only set it aside forty years ago, so that he could-” Here Daniel was struck dumb for a few moments out of sheer awe at the faux pas he had been about to commit; he was going to say, invent the calculus.

Sir Christopher’s face, as he regarded this narrowly averted conversational disaster, looked like the death-mask of a man who had died in his sleep while having a pleasant dream.

Finally Wren said, brightly, “I recall Oldenburg was furious. Never forgave him for not finishing it.”

A short pause. Daniel was thinking something unforgivable: perhaps Oldenburg had been right, Leibniz should have built the damned machine and never trespassed upon the holy ground that Isaac had discovered and walled round. He sighed.

Sir Christopher was regarding him with infinite patience. ’Twas like sharing a coach with a Corinthian column.

“I am serving two masters and one mistress,” Daniel began. “Just now, I don’t know what the mistress expects of me, and so let us leave her out of the discussion, and consider my masters. Both men of power. One, a prince of a faraway land, of an old style, but with new ideas. The other, a new sort of prince: a Parliamentary potentate. I can satisfy both, by achieving the same object: construction of a Logic Mill. I know how to build it, for I have been thinking about it, and making test-pieces, for twenty years. I shall soon have a place to build it in. There is even money. I want tools, and clever men who can work miracles with them.”

“Hooke devised machines for cutting tiny gears, and the like.”

“And he knew all of the watch-makers. Among his papers there might be names.”

Wren was amused. “Oh, you’ll have no difficulty getting watch-makers to talk to you, after my lord Ravenscar passes the Longitude Act.”

“That depends on whether they perceive me as a competitor.”

“Are you?”

“I believe that the way to find longitude is not to make better clocks, but to make certain astronomical observations-”

“The Method of Lunar Distances.”

“Indeed.”

“But there is so much arithmetick to be done, with that method.”

“And so let us equip every ship with an Arithmetickal Engine.”

Sir Christopher Wren pinkened-not because he was angry, or embarrassed, but because he was interested. His mind worked for a while. Daniel let it. Finally Wren said, “The most ingenious mechanics I have ever seen, have not been those who make clocks-though they are admittedly very clever-but the ones who make organs.”

“Pipe-organs, you mean?”

“Yes. For churches.”

Daniel felt something very strange happening to his face: he was smiling. “Sir Christopher, you must have employed more organ-makers than any man in history.”

Wren held up a steadying hand. “The furnishings are put in by the parish vestries-it is they who employ the organ-makers. But this much is true: I see them all the time.”

“London must be infested with them!”

“That was more true ten and twenty years ago than now. London’s churches are finished. Many of the organ-makers have gone back to the Continent, to rebuild instruments destroyed in the wars. But many are still here. I shall make inquiries, Daniel.”

They arrived at the church of St. Stephen on Walbrook. Walbrook had been a stream in Roman times, and was now assumed to be a sewer flowing somewhere beneath the street of the same name, though no one was volunteering to go down and verify this. It was a good omen for the day, because this was Daniel’s favorite church. (1) Wren had put it up early in his career-come to think of it, during the same years Leibniz had been toiling on the calculus. It was all domes and arches, as white and pure as an egg; and whatever uplifting thoughts its parishioners might think as they filed into it, Daniel knew it was Wren’s secret anthem to Mathematicks. (2) Thomas Ham, his goldsmith uncle, had lived and worked close enough to hear the hymns being sung in this church. His widow Mayflower-who late in life had converted to Anglicanism-had attended services there with her surviving son William. (3) When King Charles II had ennobled Thomas Ham by way of apology for absconding with all of his customers’ deposits, he had named him Viscount Walbrook, and so to Daniel the Church of St. Stephen Walbrook felt almost like a family chapel.

Wren had put up so many churches so quickly that he’d not had time to plant steeples on them. They all looked splendid on the inside. But steeples were essential to his vision of how London ought to look from the outside, and so now, in semi-retirement, he was going round to his old projects and banging out majestic yet tasteful steeples one after the other. From here Daniel could see another being finished at St. James Garlickhythe, a quarter-mile away, and yet another freshly completed one across the street from there at St. Michael Paternoster Royal. Apparently Sir Christopher’s steeple project was rolling through London a neighborhood at a time. Eminently practical, that. This one, at St. Stephen Walbrook, was just getting underway, using men and materiel being moved over from the other two.

They were taking over the near end of an anomalous open ground north of the church, which spanned a distance of a hundred yards or so between it and the riotous Poultry/Threadneedle/Cornhill/Lombard intersection. Formerly this had been the Stocks Market. It was impossible for so much uncovered dirt to exist in a city like London without becoming a breeding-ground for Crime or Commerce, and Daniel spied instances of both as soon as he got out of Wren’s carriage. At the nearer end, Wren’s workmen had set up, and were guarding, supply-dumps for the masons and carpenters who would spend the next year or two working here, and were erecting a tiny encampment of shacks and tents. Their dogs were parading around, solemn as doctors, urinating on anything that did not move fast enough. Amid this mess, Daniel spied one cart laden with parcels he’d packed with his own hands in the attic of the Royal Society.

A lot of fellows were doffing their hats-not to Daniel, of course, but to his traveling-companion. Wren was clearly getting ready to part ways with him. “I have in my possession drawings of many of Hooke’s buildings.”

“That is just the sort of thing I need.”

“I shall send them to you. As well as the names of some men, now retired, who built them, and who may have recollections of peculiarities in their construction.”

“That is really splendid of you.”

“It is the least I can do on behalf of the estate of the fellow who taught me how to design arches. Lastly, I shall nominate you as Overseer of Demonstrations to the Royal Society.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“It will become clear to you with a little reflection. I bid you good day, Dr. Waterhouse.”

“You are a perfect gentle knight, Sir Christopher.”

HE HAD PHANT’SIED that London would be less congested in its eastern reaches, beyond Bishopsgate, but if anything that part of the city was worse yet. For on that front it lay open to the inroads of, on the left hand, Industry, and on the right, Shipping. Neither Daniel nor his carter cared to spend the balance of the day disputing the right-of-way against heavy wagons laden with bricks, coal, and lime, and being drawn down the street by cavalry-charges of draught

–horses. They might cross the Bridge, but Southwark would be the same scene with narrower, fewer, and worse roads. So Daniel decreed a change in plans, and had the carter drive him and his parcels down Fish Street Hill to the approaches of London Bridge, and then east along Thames Street as if going to the Tower. To their right, diverse narrow ancient lanes ran down to the wharves, about a bow-shot away, each street giving him a moment’s glimpse of a different controversy, mob action, or commercial transaction; but the river Thames was not present in any of these tableaux, because all he could see at the open street-ends was masts and rigging.

They passed the Billingsgate market, which was arrayed around the three sides of a large rectangular dock, or cut-out in the riverbank, where small vessels could come in from the Pool. The dock reached most of the way to Thames Street, which broadened into a plaza there, so as to shake hands with the market. Black rocks skittered out, or lodged and shattered, under the iron rims of the cart’s wheels. The horses faltered. They were pushing through a crowd of children in grimy clothes who were buzzing around gleaning those black rocks out of crevices between paving-stones.

“Crimps!” said the carter, “Crimps and Meters come to meet the Hags.” He was referring, not to the boys scavenging coal, but to classes of people doing business on the northern shore of Billingsgate Dock. Crimps were coal-merchants, and to judge from snatches of accent drifting on the breeze, they were Yorkshiremen. Meters were the City of London officials who weighed the chalders of sea-coal on immense blackened steel-yards, and Hags were the stout tubby boats that ferried it in from the big hulks out in the Pool. All of which was new to Daniel, who thought of Billingsgate as a fish-market; but he was reassured to see that the fishwives had not been driven out of the place, indeed still controlled most of the dock, and drove back encroaching Crimps with well-aimed barrages of fish-guts and vivid, faithful descriptions of their persons and their families.

Past Billingsgate the going was easier, but only slightly, as the Customs House was shortly ahead of them on the right. This was so crowded with men doing transactions that it was said by some to rival Change Alley. Their discourse commingled into a surfing roar, and even from here Daniel could hear the occasional crash and foam of some mighty wave of Intercourse.

“This will do,” he said, and the carter took the next right turn and drove down a lane, lined with small and dingy, but very active, business concerns, to the Thames wharf. Several wee docks had been chopped out of this stretch of the riverbank and it did not take them long to find one where watermen were gathered, smoking pipes and exchanging learned commentary. Simply by standing still and dispensing coins to the right people at the right times, Daniel was able to cause his parcels to be loaded on a boat; passage to be booked across and down the river; and the carter to be sent home.

Seen from Thames Street the river had seemed less Conduit than Barrier-a palisade of honed wood thrown up to prevent an invasion, or an escape. But with a few strokes of the waterman’s oar they penetrated the screen along the wharves and surged out into the main channel. This was as crowded as any water in the world, but miraculously open and accommodating compared to the streets of London. Daniel felt as though burdens had been lifted, though nothing could be further from the truth. London very quickly became a smouldering membrane, a reeking tarpaulin flung over the hill and not smoothed out. The only features of consequence were the Fire Monument, the Bridge, the Tower, and St. Paul’s. The Bridge, as always, seemed like a Bad Idea, a city on stilts, and a very old, slumping, inflammable Tudor city at that. Not far from its northern end was the Fire Monument, of which Daniel was now getting his first clear view. It was an immense solitary column put up by Hooke but universally attributed to Wren. During Daniel’s recent movements about London he had been startled, from time to time, to spy the lantern at its top peering down at him from over the top of a building-just as he had often felt, when he was a younger man, that the living Hooke was watching him through a microscope.

The tide was flowing, and it wafted them downstream at a fair clip. They were abreast of the Tower before he knew it. With some effort of will, Daniel swerved his gaze from Traitor’s Gate, and wrenched his thoughts from recollection of old events, and paid heed to present concerns. Though he could not see through the Tower’s walls and bastions, he could see smoke rising from the general vicinity of the Mint buildings; and beneath the general clamor radiating from the city he phant’sied he could detect the slow heavy pulse of the trip-hammers beating out guineas. On the battlements were soldiers, wearing black trim on their red coats: therefore, the Queen’s Own Black Torrent Guards, who had been garrisoned at the Tower, yanked away from it, re-garrisoned there, yanked back again so many times that Daniel had given up trying to keep track. The whereabouts of the Black Torrent Guard were an infallible weather-cock that told which way the wind was blowing, where Marlborough-who had founded the regiment-was concerned. If the United Kingdom was at war, the Black Torrent Guards were at the front. If at peace, and Marlborough in favor with the Sovereign, they would be at Whitehall. If Marlborough lay under suspicion of being another Cromwell-in-the-making, then his favored Regiment would be exiled to the Tower, and numbed with the toils of minding Mint and Arsenal.

As they drifted down the river, the buildings gradually became meaner, and the ships more magnificent. Not that the buildings were so very mean at first. Carriageways had always coursed along both banks, but now one could not see them because warehouses, mostly of burnt brick, had been cast up between them and the river, their walls plunging sheer into the water so that boats could bump against them to be loaded or unloaded with the help of cranes that projected out above the water like the feelers of microscopic animalcules. The only relief in these warehouse-walls was at small flat wharves specializing in this or that type of cargo, and connected to the world by rays of pounded dirt. On the left or Wapping bank, those streets led into a city that had, dumbfoundingly, been summoned into being during Daniel’s absence. On the right or Southwark bank, the buildings soon dwindled to a mere screen along the water-front, with open country beyond. But Daniel was only allowed to see into it when the boat swam into transitory alignment with a south-going road. Such roads were lined with new buildings for a quarter-mile or so inland, making them look like sword-cuts hacked into the city. And the country beyond was not your English farmsteads (though there were pastures and dairies) but your quasi-industrial landscape of tenter-grounds and tanner yards, the inherently land-hungry manufactures of large flat goods.

Coming round the elbow before Wapping put them in view of a mile of river, running straight up to the great horseshoe-bend between Limehouse and Rotherhithe, Daniel was surprised, and yet not, to see that the new city on the left bank extended almost that entire distance, so that the formerly free-standing towns of Shadwell and Limehouse were all but swallowed by London now. The very idea made his skin crawl just a bit, for the downriver slum-towns had always been the breeding-grounds of mudlarks, river-pirates, rabid dogs, wharf-rats, highwaymen, and Vagabonds, and the intervening belt of countryside-pocked though it might have been with clay-pits, brick-yards, and gin-houses-had been a sort of cordon sanitaire between them and London. He wondered if London might get more than it bargained for, by replacing that barrier with through streets.

The Southwark side was much more open, and parts of it were un-obstructed, so that Daniel, and grazing dairy-cows, could inspect each other across a few yards of water, mud, and turf. But just as the sloops and schooners were giving way to proper three-masted ships as they progressed down this stretch of the Pool, so the small wharves and warehouses of city merchants were being supplanted by vast flat yards that owned long swaths of the bank, big as battle-fields, and almost as noisy: the ship-yards. Some bloke at the Kit-Cat Clubb had tried to convince Daniel that there were now no fewer than two dozen ship-yards active along the edges of the Pool, and almost as many dry-docks. Daniel had only pretended to credit this, out of politeness. Now he believed. For what seemed like miles, the banks of the Thames were lined with enterprises that ate trees by the thousands and shit boats by the score. They spat out enough saw-dust and wood-shavings to safely pack St. Paul’s in a shipping-crate, supposing a crate that large could be built. Which it probably could, here. Certain things Daniel had been noticing suddenly became connected in his mind. The rafts of hardwood logs floating down the Charles, day after day, in Boston, and the fact that coal, its smoke, and its soot were everywhere in London now, both spoke of a desperate hunger for wood. The forests of Old and New England alike were being turned into fleets, and only a fool would burn the stuff.

At the last minute the waterman showed uncertainty as to which ship-yard was Mr. Orney’s-there being so many to choose from, here-but Daniel knew. It was the one with three men-of-war, all being built to the same plan, resting side-by-side on the ways. The workers sitting on the ribs of those ships, eating their midday meals, were English- and Irishmen, wearing wool caps if they bothered to protect their heads from the raw breeze at all. But as they rowed closer Daniel saw two men in giant fur hats, inspecting the work.

The waterman made them drift beneath the jutting sterncastles of the three hulls. The one in the middle was nearly complete, except for the all-important carving, painting, and gilding of gaudy decorations. The other two were still receiving their hull planks.

They came in view of a pier that thrust out into the river at the downstream end of the yard, well clear of the ships. A man in plain black clothing was sitting on a keg near the end, nibbling on a pasty and reading a Bible. When he saw them coming, he put both down carefully, stood up, and held out his hands to catch the painter thrown his way by the waterman. His hands blurred and conjured up a perfect knot, making them fast to a heavy iron bitt on the pier. The knot, and the style in which it had been performed, demonstrated to all who witnessed them that this fellow was one of God’s elect. His clothing was severe, and it was none of your fine Sunday stuff, but heavy woolen work-clothes, flecked all over with stray fibers and saw-dust. From the man’s callused hands, and his way with cordage, Daniel took him for a rigger.

On the shore above them, wheel-ruts and plank-roads formed a miniature London of avenues and squares, except that the place of buildings was taken by stacks and heaps of logs, timbers, rope-coils, oakum-bales, and pitch-kegs. Running along one side of this supply-dump, and defining the eastern boundary of Orney’s yard, was a public right-of-way that traversed the flats for a short distance and then bounded up a stairway to Lavender Lane, which was the bankside street in this part of Rotherhithe.

“God save you, brother,” Daniel said to the rigger.

“And thee-sir,” returned the rigger, giving him the once-over.

“I am Dr. Waterhouse of the Royal Society,” Daniel confessed, “a high and mighty title for a sinner, which brings me never so much respect and honor among those who have been seduced by the pleasures and illusions of Vanity Fair.” He threw a glance over his shoulder at London. “You may so address me, if you wish; but to be called ‘Brother Daniel’ would be a higher honor.”

“Then Brother Daniel it is, if thou wouldst return the favor, by knowing me as Brother Norman.”

“Brother Norman, I perceive that thou dost set a continual example of Industry to the men around you who are tempted by the false promises of Slothfulness. All of this I understand-”

“Oh, there are hard workers among us, Brother Daniel, otherwise how could we perform such works as these?”

“Thy point is well taken, Brother Norman, and yet my confusion only worsens; for I have never seen a ship-yard so prodigious, with workers so few; where is everyone?”

“Why, Brother Daniel, I am grieved to inform thee that they are in Hell. Or as close a thing to Hell as there is on this earth.”

Daniel’s first guesses at this riddle were prison or a battlefield but these did not seem likely. He had almost settled on whorehouse when he heard the sound of men erupting into cheers on the far side of Lavender Lane.

“A theatre? No! Bear-baiting,” he guessed.

Brother Norman closed his eyes prayerfully, and nodded.

This outburst of cheering was the signal for several of the men who had been eating to rise up and quit the ship-yard. They ascended the stairs in a bunch, followed at a cautious distance by the two Russians Daniel had noticed earlier. Other than Brother Norman, perhaps half a dozen workers now remained in the entire yard.

“I say,” Daniel exclaimed, “is it Mr. Orney’s custom to suspend all work, in the middle of the day, so that his workers can run off to attend a bloody and disgraceful spectacle? It is a miracle anything gets done in this place.”

“I am Mr. Orney,” Brother Norman said pleasantly.

Forty years ago, Daniel might now have flung himself into the river from sheer mortification. In light of recent months’ events, he knew he would survive this, like it or not. The best he could do was to soldier on. He was more concerned about the waterman who’d brought him here. That man had been listening shrewdly to the exchange, and now looked as if he might topple backward off the pier.

“I do beg your pardon, Brother Norman,” said Daniel.

“Oh, not at all, Brother Daniel, for how are we to come closer to God, if our ears be not open to the criticism of godly brethren?”

“Very true, Brother Norman.”

“Thou mightst never wot, O Son of Drake, what a ridiculous figure thou makest, in thy foppish periwig and whorish clothing, unless I were to lovingly put thee in mind of it.”

Another cheer from beyond Lavender Lane reminded Daniel that, as usual, the unrepentant sinners were having more fun.

“I have acquainted the workers with my views on such entertainments,” Brother Norman continued. “Several of our Brethren are there now, handing out tracts. Only God can save them.”

“I thought you were a rigger,” Daniel said idiotically.

“To be an examplar, in a ship-yard, is to show excellence in all of its tributary trades.”

“I see.”

“The baiting-ring is yonder. Tuppence a head. Enjoy!”

“Oh, no, Brother Norman, I have not come for that.”

“Why hast thou come then, Brother Daniel? Solely to offer me thy opinions as to how I might better look after my affairs? Wouldst thou care to audit my books? The day is young.”

“Splendid of you to offer, but-”

“I am afraid my fingernails are dirty, and might not meet with thine approval, but if thou wouldst come back tomorrow-”

“That is really quite all right, Brother Norman. My father, the smuggler, who employed diverse pirates and Vagabonds, was frequently observed to have a bit of dirt under his nails after we had been up all night loading contraband.”

“Very well, then, how may I be of help to thee, Brother Daniel?”

“By loading these parcels aboard the first of yonder ships that, if God wills it, does set sail for St. Petersburg.”

“This is not a warehouse. I cannot accept responsibility for aught that happens to them while they are stored in my yard.”

“Agreed. The thief who makes off with them is in for bitter disappointment.”

“You must secure the permission of Mr. Kikin.”

“And he is-”

“The short one. Approach Mr. Kikin from directly in front, with thine hands in plain view, or the tall one shall kill thee.”

“Thank you for that advice, Brother Norman.”

“Not at all. Mr. Kikin is quite certain that London is alive with Raskolniks.”

“What’s a Raskolnik?”

“From the nature of Mr. Kikin’s precautions, I infer that it is a sort of Russian Huguenot, bearded, ten feet tall, and good at throwing things.”

“Well, I don’t think I quite match that description-”

“One can never be too careful. Thou couldst be a Raskolnik disguised as a superannuated dandy.”

“Brother Norman, ’tis such a pleasure to be free of the stuffy courtesies of London.”

“The pleasure is entirely mine, Brother Daniel.”

“Tell me, please, have you heard any news of an East Indiaman called Minerva?”

“The ship Minerva of Rumor and Legend? Or the real one?”

“I have heard no rumors, know no legends…I assure you my interest is practical.”

“I saw a Minerva in dry-dock, round the bend, a fortnight ago, and so I can promise thee she was not the one of legend.”

“How does that follow, Brother Norman? I am wanting some knowledge, concerning Minerva, that would transform your riddle into a story.”

“Forgive me, Brother Daniel, I assumed you were as knowledgeable about maritime legends, as you are in ship-yard management. Some of the French sailors impose on the credulous, by insisting that there was once a ship, of that name, whose hull, below the waterline, was clad in gold.”

“Gold!?”

“Which could only be seen when she was heeled over, as when a stiff breeze was coming in abeam.”

“What a preposterous notion!”

“Not entirely, Brother Daniel. For the enemy of speed is the barnacle, which makes the hull rub the water. The notion of covering a hull with smooth metal is excellent. That is why I, and half the other shipwrights along the Pool, went to the trouble of having a look at this Minerva when she was in dry-dock.”

“But you did not see gold.”

“Copper is what I saw, Brother Daniel. Which might have been shiny and red when it was new. And if the light were to glance off it in just the right way, why, a Frenchman-a Papist, susceptible to gaudy and false visions-might phant’sy it were gold.”

“So that’s how the legend got started, you suppose.”

“I am certain of it. Oh, but the ship is quite real, Brother Daniel, I spied her riding at anchor a day or two ago, not half a mile out-I believe that is her, there, in front of Lime-Kiln Dock.” Brother Norman helpfully extended a hand across and downriver, indicating a short stretch that contained a hundred vessels, of which a third were full-sized, ocean-going three-masters. Daniel did not even bother to look. “She is a rakish teak-built sort of Dutch East Indiaman of the later Jan Vroom school, marvelous well-armed, generous tumble-home, a temptation and a terror to pirates.”

“I lived aboard her for two months and yet would never be able to pick her out from that crowd, at this range. Brother Norman, when do you expect that these ships shall set sail for St. Petersburg?”

“July, if God wills it and the cannons are delivered on time.”

“Sir,” Daniel said to his waterman, “I am going to go have a word with Mr. Kikin. While I do, I should be obliged if you would deliver a message to Captain van Hoek of Minerva.”

Daniel got out a pencil and a scrap of paper and wrote out the following on a barrel-head:

Captain van Hoek,

If your intention is to make a return voyage to Boston, then mine is to hire you to collect certain goods there, and bring them back to me here in London, preferably no later than July. I may be reached at the Royal Society, Crane Court, Fleet Street, London.

–Daniel Waterhouse