The System of the World

Sloop Atalanta, off the Isle of Grain
LATE AFTERNOON

WHEN NEXT THEY SAW COLONEL Barnes, they were well down the last reach of the Hope. The tide was rushing away from them so ardently that it threatened to ground Atalanta on the floor of an empty Thames. The river drew narrower every minute as its contents fled to the sea, exposing vast gray-brown slatherings to the air. Southend could be seen a few miles off the port bow, stranded in a mud desert. But what dominated the prospect was the sweep of the open ocean, which now subtended a full quarter of the horizon.

To starboard a fat sinuous river could be seen meandering out through the Kent marshes and nearly exhausting itself as it struggled across the ever-widening flat, trying to connect with the Thames.

“It is Yantlet Creek,” announced Colonel Barnes. “All that lies beyond it is not the mainland, but the Isle of Grain.”

“How can a creek form an island?” Daniel inquired.

“Questions such as that are the penalty we suffer for inviting Natural Philosophers,” Barnes sighed.

“Sir Isaac asked, too?”

“Yes, and I’ll give you the same answer.” Barnes unrolled his map, and traced the S of Yantlet Creek inland to a place where it joined up with a ganglion of other creeks, some of which flowed the other direction, into the Medway on the opposite side of the isle.

“Gravity seems to be mocking us here-who can explain the flow of these streams?” Daniel mused.

“Perhaps Leibniz can,” Barnes returned, sotto voce.

“So it is truly an island,” Daniel admitted, “which raises the question: how will your mounted companies be able to cross over to it? I assume that is what they are doing.”

Barnes used one dirty fingernail to trace the line of a road from the ferry wharf at Gravesend eastwards along the foot of the chalk hills. Where the Thames had jogged north to swing round the hammerhead, the road angled south to cut across its narrow handle, and then to follow the higher and drier ground a few miles inland of the Thames. “Here’s where they should have got ahead of us,” Barnes said. “And here is the bridge-the only bridge-over Yantlet Creek to the Isle of Grain.”

“Military man that you are, you lay great stress upon the onliness of that bridge,” Daniel remarked.

“Military man that I am, I have made it mine, for today,” Barnes stated. “My men have crossed over it, and hold the Isle end.” Then he checked his watch, to reassure himself. “Jack and his men are pent up now on that Isle, they cannot escape by land. And if they should attempt it by sea-why, we shall be waiting for them, shan’t we?”

He could learn nothing further from the map, so Daniel looked up. He could now see a rectangular keep sticking up out the top of a cairn-like foundation, perhaps a mile ahead of them.

At high tide, Shive Tor might make, if not a pretty picture, then at least a striking Gothick spectacle, jutting out of sparkling water off the shore of the Isle of Grain, brooding over the traffic of ships through England’s front gate. But at this moment it stood alone in the middle of an expanse of drained muck the size of London.

“If Jack lives up to his reputation, he’ll have a vessel at his disposal-perhaps a bigger and better one than this,” Daniel said-less to raise a serious objection than to egg Barnes on.

“But look beyond-behold what lies in the distance!” Barnes exclaimed.

Daniel now gazed past Shive Tor and perceived that there was water again, a mile or two beyond it. It required a moment or two to persuade himself that this must be the channel of the Medway. On the far bank of that lay a system of fortifications with a fishing-village cowering behind it: Sheerness.

“If Jack breaks for France, we need only signal Sheerness Fort. The Admiralty shall see to the rest,” Barnes said. He said it distractedly, as he’d telescoped a brass perspective-glass to full length and was using it to squint at Shive Tor. “Not to worry, though-as we expected, he’s high and dry. There’s a ship-channel, you see, so that the Tor can be serviced by water, and Jack’s been dredging it deeper and deeper, so he can sail right up to the Tor with larger and larger vessels-but it’s no use during a spring tide. A longboat would scrape the bottom of that ditch this evening.”

Round the time Shive Tor had emerged from behind the Isle of Grain, a new wind had flooded over the starboard bow. For the last few minutes the sailors had been attending to it, trimming the canvas. Their business masked the more subtle operations of signalmen, who were at work with flags trying to communicate (or so Daniel assumed) with the dragoons who had disembarked at Gravesend. There was, in other words, a bit of a lull. Quite obviously, it would not last, and then there was no telling when Daniel would have another opportunity to speak to Barnes.

“Don’t mind Roger,” he said.

“Beg your pardon, sir?”

“The Marquis of Ravenscar. Don’t be troubled. I shall send him a note.”

“What sort of note, precisely?”

“Oh, I don’t know. ‘Dear Roger, fascinated to hear you are raising an army, oddly enough, so am I, and have already invited Colonel Barnes to be my Commander-in-Chief. Do let’s be allies. Your comrade-in-

arms, Daniel.’ ”

Barnes wanted to laugh but could not quite trust his ears, and so held it in, and went apoplectic red. “I should be indebted,” he said.

“Not at all.”

“If my men were to suffer, because of some political-”

“It is quite out of the question. Bolingbroke shall live out his declining years in France. The Hanovers shall come, and when they do, I shall extol you and your men to Princess Caroline.”

Barnes bowed to him. Then he said, “Or perhaps not, depending upon what happens in the next hour.”

“It shall go splendidly, Colonel Barnes. One more thing, before we are embroiled-?”

“Yes, Doctor?”

“Your superior wanted to convey some message to me?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“The Black-guard who accosted you on Tower Wharf this morning.”

“Ah yes,” Barnes said, and grinned. “Great big chap, dark and a bit gloomy, would’ve made a fine dragoon. Spoke in words I did not fully understand. Which was probably his intent. Wanted me to tell you that it was a lay.”

Daniel was frozen for a count of ten.

“You all right, Doctor?”

“This breeze off the sea is quite bracing.”

“I’ll get you a blanket.”

“No, stay… Those…those were his words? ‘It’s a lay’?”

“That was the entire message. What’s it signify? If you don’t mind my asking.”

“It means we should all turn around and go back to London.”

Barnes laughed. “Why’d we want to do such a thing, Doctor?”

“Because this is a trap. No, don’t you see? They somehow-Jack somehow-knew.”

“Knew what, Doctor?”

“Everything. He led us on.”

Barnes took a moment to think it through. “What, you’re saying the Russian was planted?”

“Just so! Why else would he have divulged so much, so soon?”

“Because Charles White had his testicles in a vise?”

“No, no, no. I’m telling you, Colonel-”

“Too fanciful,” was the verdict of Barnes. “More likely, the Black-guard’s in the pay of Jack, and, in a last-ditch gambit to stop us from coming out here, tried to scare us off with words.”

There was no changing Barnes’s mind. Daniel had committed a grave error by instilling Barnes with Hope first, then trying to make him afraid. If a want of hope made men desperate, a surfeit of it made them stupid in a wholly other way. Hope was tricky business, it seemed, and ought to be managed by someone with more experience of it than Daniel.

They were accosted by a lone musket-shot from shore. The captain ordered his seamen to slacken the canvas until they were only just making head-way. A skiff had pushed off from the indistinct shore of the Isle of Grain. News of it rapidly penetrated the quarterdeck and brought Charles White and Sir Isaac Newton up to the poop.

In a few minutes the skiff came alongside them, carrying a lieutenant of the King’s Own Black Torrent Guards. It had been commandeered from a local fisherman and his boy, who did all the work. They were not so much put out by this turn of events, as incredulous.

The lieutenant brought a cargo of words, and unloaded it with no small pride on the poop deck. These words were accepted as valuable military intelligence by all present save Daniel, who construed them only as additional tricks put in their way by Jack the Coiner.

The gist of it was that a brilliant success had been achieved. The dragoons had galloped over the Yantlet Creek bridge half an hour ahead of schedule, and posted a platoon there to hold it. The rest of the company had made for that stretch of shore-line nearest Shive Tor, and posted a lookout on St. James’s Church. This was built on the nearest thing the Isle of Grain had to a hill, and looked straight out across the tide flats. There the command post had been established. Most of the company was now deployed below it, at the high tide line, ready either to intercept any counterfeiters fleeing from the Tor on foot, or to mount a charge across the flats and storm the building. All of which had been noted by the inmates of the Tor, who had burned a few documents (or so it could be guessed from interpreting smoke) and then tried to escape by water.

Moored on the seaward side of the Tor, in the dredged channel, had been a boat of perhaps sixty feet in length, built on the lines of a Dutch ocean-going fishing vessel called a hooker. As Daniel, son of a smuggler, knew, this would be an ideal sort of craft for illicit traffic across the North Sea. Drake had used boats with flatter bottoms, because he tended to unload in shallow coastal creeks, but since Jack had his own ship-channel, he could carry out a thriving trade with a deeper-draught vessel such as this hooker. The occupants of Shive Tor had hastily loaded some items onto the hooker, raised sail, and tried to take her down the channel to open water. But she had run aground almost immediately, no more than a bowshot from the Tor. They had flung out enough stuff to refloat her, then let the wind-which was abeam-push her to the side of the wee channel, where she had run aground for good. This had opened the channel again and enabled at least some of them to make their escape in a sort of whaling boat: not much bigger than a longboat, but equipped with a mast and a sail, which had been raised once it had been rowed free of the channel. The whaler’s flight was being watched from St. James’s Church. But not much longer; in another hour, darkness would fall.

Having concluded this narration, the lieutenant awaited orders. Now, Mr. Charles White, who was quite obviously the master of this expedition, had the good form to look expectantly at Barnes, giving him leave to utter the command.

Barnes considered it for a long time-to the shock, then irritation, of Charles White and Isaac Newton both. Finally he shrugged and gave orders. This lieutenant was to be rowed back to shore, where he was to order an advance across the tidal flats to Shive Tor. Atalanta was to raise sail and pursue the fleeing whaler, pausing only to drop its longboat at the mouth of the Tor’s dredged channel so that an advance party could reach the Tor, arrest anyone who hadn’t made it onto the whaler’s passenger list, and salvage the grounded hooker before the resurgent tide floated it off.

These orders produced intense activity from all except Charles White, who responded with a sigh of mock relief and a roll of the eyes: what had taken Colonel Barnes so long? Precious seconds had been wasted as he pondered what was obvious!

Barnes had turned his back on White immediately after giving the command. He thumped over to Daniel.

“You’re correct,” Barnes said. “It’s-what did your friend call it? A lay.”

“What brings this change of mind, Colonel Barnes?”

“The fact that I had no decision to make. An imbecile could have given those orders.” He glanced over at White. “And one almost did.”

“Is it your intention to remain aboard, or to go to the Tor in the longboat?”

“A peg-leg’s no use in muck,” Barnes said.

“Daniel, I should benefit from your assistance at the Tor,” announced Sir Isaac Newton, breaking in on their conversation from behind Barnes. He was shrugging on a coat, and had brought up a wooden case that, from the way that he glared at anyone who came near it, Daniel assumed must contain Natural-Philosophick or Alchemical instruments.

Barnes pondered for a moment.

“On the other hand,” he said, “I could always hop about on one foot.”