The System of the World

Blenheim Palace

“FINE! SO BE IT, then! I’ll get along unshod!” bellows a man of similar age and proportions to Jack. He seizes one of his knees with both hands and yanks up. A bare foot emerges from a boot, which is sunk almost to its top in the mud. He plants the foot, grabs the other knee, and repeats. Bob Shaftoe now stands, a free man, in mud almost up to his knees. His boots are stranded nearby, rapidly filling with rain. He salutes them. “Good riddance!”

“Hear, hear!” calls a voice from a tent, pitched nearby on slightly higher and firmer ground. A man rises from a table and turns toward him. The table is lit by several candles even though it is two o’clock in the afternoon.

Bob’s wearing a broad-brimmed felt hat, which supports approximately a gallon of rainwater, distributed among several discrete pools. He cocks his head in a most deliberate and calculating manner, and the pools slide, merge, slalom round the hat’s contours, and spring off its back brim, splatting into the mud behind him. This enables him to get a clear sight-line into the tent.

The man who has just spoken stands in its entrance, gazing down on him; at the table, a peg-legged fellow sits on a folding chair and graciously accepts a cup of chocolate from a woman who has been at work over a little cook-fire in the rear. “Bob,” calls the standing gentleman, “you are now barefoot in the rain, which calls to mind how I first saw you nigh on fifty years ago, and I say it becomes you, and may you leave those boots there to rot, and never again wear such odious contraptions. Now, do come back to us before you catch your death. Abigail has made chocolate.”

Bob wrenches a foot clear of the mud, plants it on a rock, and uses this as a foundation on which to pull the opposite one free. He risks a glance back at the abandoned boots. “Do the bloody plans call for a pair o’boots there?”

“They call for a shrubbery!” announces the peg-leg, peering at Bob through a transit, and consulting a garden-plan spread out on the table. “But never you mind, those boots will be eaten by vermin long before planting-season.”

“What would the Vicar of Blenheim know about planting-season?”

“As much as I know about being a vicar.”

“And that is as much as I know about being a country gentleman,” says the Duke of Marlborough, gazing fretfully across a half-mile of mud and stumps at the still-building pile of Blenheim. “But we must all adapt-we must all learn. Except for Abigail, who is already perfect.” Abigail gives him a skeptical look and a cup of chocolate. Bob squelches another step closer. The gaze of (formerly) Colonel, (and now) the Reverend Barnes strays back to the great map, which looks ever so fanciful when contrasted against the gloomy reality outside. His eye wanders across the orderly geometry of the plan until it fixes upon a wee Chapel and a nearby Vicarage.

Marlborough says, “We shall mount a last Campaign from this tent, and pick off the vermin who are drawn hither by the intoxicating fragrance of Bob’s boots. Bob shall study how to look after plants, Barnes shall learn how to look after souls, I shall learn how to be idle, and Abigail shall look after all of us.”

“It sounds as if it ought to work,” says Bob, “so long as my brother does not show up.”

“He is dead,” Marlborough avers. “But if he shows up, we’ll shoot him. And if he recovers, we’ll pack him off to Carolina, where he may work alongside his offspring. For I am told that you are not the only Shaftoe, Bob, to have turned over a new leaf, and become a tiller of the soil.”

Bob has finally reached the tent’s threshold. “It is a strange fate indeed,” he mutters, “but only fitting.”

“Why fitting?”

“Jack, Jimmy, and Danny ought by rights to become tillers of the soil,” says Bob, “because they have made so much trouble in the past, as soilers of the till.”

“If you are going to make such jests,” says Barnes, “you are welcome to stay out in the rain.”