THE System OF THE WORLD Read online

  “I have shown this house to visitors an hundred times,” she was saying, “and so all sorts of prattle is on the tip of my tongue-all of it perfectly boring to you, Dr. Waterhouse, to whom this house needs no introduction! You know we are crossing the central hall, and that the important rooms are to the left…” She meant the dining hall and the library. “And the odds and ends to the right…” (servant’s quarters, kitchen, back stairs, House of Office) “and the Withdrawing Room straight ahead. What is your pleasure? Do you need to retire that way?” she asked, glancing to the right. She was asking him if he needed to urinate or defecate. “Or is there anything you would like there?” glancing left-meaning, did he need to take any refreshment. She kept her hands clasped together in front of her bodice and pointed to the left or right with tiny movements of her eyes, obliging Daniel to gaze into them attentively. “To be proper, I should conduct you into the Withdrawing Room where we might have a great argument as to who should sit in which chair. But after the war, French manners are quite out of favor with us-especially us Whigs-and I cannot bring myself to be so formal with you, who are like another uncle to me.”

  “I should only make an ass of myself-I who have spent twenty years in a wooden house!” Daniel returned. “Only tell me this, I pray you: if we go into the Withdrawing Room, can I see-”

  “The volcano has been moved,” she said, quite solemn, as if afraid Daniel would be furious.

  “Out of the house, or-”

  “Oh, heaven forbid! No, ’tis the centerpiece of the house as ever, Doctor! It is only that this part of the house, which is to say, the part you designed, began to seem, in some of its rooms, rather more small than suited Roger’s tastes.”

  “That is when Mr. Hooke was brought in to add the wings.”

  “You know the story, Dr. Waterhouse, and so I shall not bore you, other than to say that the addition contains a ballroom that is at last large enough to exhibit the volcano in the style it deserves.” And with that she wheeled around and pushed open a pair of doors across the hall from the vestibule, allowing light to flood in from the windows of the Withdrawing Room. Daniel stepped in, and then stopped, a-mazed.

  When this room had been laid out, those windows had commanded a view to the north across a pasture, soon to become a formal garden: a view near to Daniel’s heart, as it was practically the same as the one from the back of Drake’s old house. But now the garden had been truncated to a court-yard with a fountain in the center, and directly on the other side, a stone’s throw away, rose a Barock palace. This room, which Daniel had conceived as a quiet retreat from which to enjoy a vast prospect of flowers and greenery, had been reduced to a sort of viewing-gallery for contemplating the magnificence of the real house.

  “Vanbrugh,” Catherine explained. The same one who was doing Blenheim Palace for the Duke of Marlborough.

  “Hooke-”

  “Mr. Hooke did the wings, which as you can see, embrace the courtyard, and connect your Temple to Mr. Vanbrugh’s, er…”

  Fuck-house of the Gods was on the tip of Daniel’s tongue, but he could hardly throw stones at Vanbrugh since he had started it. All he could summon up was, “What an undeserved honour ’tis for me, that Vanbrugh should finish so grandly, what I started so plainly.”

  The chairs in the Withdrawing Room were arranged in an arc facing toward the window. Catherine passed between two of them and opened a pair of French doors that in the original scheme had led out onto the long central promenade of the garden. Instead of which he followed her onto marble paving-slabs and pursued her around the kerb of an octagonal pool. It had a bronze fountain in the center of it, a great Classical action-scene: muscular Vulcan thrusting himself forth on massive but bent legs, having a go at Minerva, the cool helmet-head, who was pushing him back with one arm. Swords, daggers, helmets, and cuirasses were strewn all round, interspersed with the odd half-forged thunderbolt. Vulcan’s knobby fingers were ripping Minerva’s breastplate away to expose a body obviously modeled after Catherine Barton’s. Daniel recognized the tale: Minerva went to Vulcan’s forge to acquire weapons and armor; Vulcan became inflamed with lust and assaulted her; she, being one tough deity, held him at bay, and he had to settle for ejaculating on her leg. She wiped it off with a rag and flung it on the ground, fertilizing Mother Earth, who later bore Erichthonius, an early king of Athens, who introduced the use of silver money.

  The sculpture was heavy-laden with clews and portents: with her free hand Minerva was already reaching for a rag, and Vulcan was ominously close to making contact with her creamy thigh. Smaller sculpture groups decorated the ends of the fountain-pool; at the end nearer to Daniel’s building, a babe on the lap of a fertility sort of goddess (lots of cornucopiae) being fed grapes from a bunch. Opposite, near Vanbrugh’s building, a crowned King seated on a pile of bullion. As they skirted the pool, Daniel felt a perverse urge to swivel his head and find out just how the sculptor had handled certain particulars. He was especially keen to know from where the water was spurting. At the same time, he couldn’t bear to see it. Catherine was ignoring the fountain altogether; she did not want to talk about it, had turned her face away, her posture rhyming with Minerva’s. Daniel contented himself with pursuing her across the court-yard, albeit with even less success than Vulcan.

  What with so many distractions, they were inside the new house before Daniel had really had the time to examine its interior. Probably just as well; he’d gotten a vague impression of lots and lots of statues, prancing along rooftops and balustrades.

  “Rokoko, it is called,” Catherine explained, leading him into what must have been the grand ballroom. “ ’Tis all the rage.”

  Daniel could only recollect Drake’s house, with its bare walls and floors, and one or two plain boxy pieces of furniture to a room. “It makes me feel old,” he said, baldly.

  Catherine favored him with a brilliant smile. “Some say, ’tis the result of a surplus of decorators, combined with a deficit of houses.”

  And a want of taste, Daniel wished he could say. “As you are the mistress of the household, mademoiselle, I shall make no comment on what some say.” She rewarded him with dimples. Without meaning to, he had made a sly comment on her Arrangement with Roger.

  Daniel found these moments slightly unnerving. For the most part she did not look like Isaac-not even the young, frail, girlish Isaac Daniel had met at Trinity half a century ago. He would never have guessed she had a drop of Newton-blood in her veins if he hadn’t known as much already. But during the moments when she forgot to hide her cleverness, a family resemblance flashed forth, and he saw Isaac’s face for an instant, as if the author of Principia Mathematica were stalking him through a darkened room when lightning struck outside.

  “Here is a curious invention you may find worthy of your attention, Doctor. This way, please!”

  The volcano stood at one end of the ballroom. It was a great improvement on the volcanoes made by Nature, which were so rude, irregular, and unadorned. This one was perfectly conical, with forty-five-degree-angle slopes converging on a polished brass nozzle or teat at the summit. A semi-ruined Classical temple, complete with half-collapsed golden dome, had been erected there, enclosing the vent, which could be viewed between Doric columns of red marble. The mountain itself was black marble, veined with red, and adorned with the usual tiresome menagerie of nymphs, satyrs, centaurs, amp;c., all sculpted in gold. It probably stood no more than four feet from base to summit, but was made to seem much larger by the base that supported it: a hollow plinth rising from the floor to waist level, supported all round with caryatids in the shape of Typhon and other gross earthy monsters.

  “If you come round back with me, Doctor, I shall a-maze you with the most marvelous Screw.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  She had opened a hatch concealed in the back, and was beckoning. He came round, squatted carefully, and peered inside. Now he could see a fat cylinder that began in a copper basin on the floor, and ran up at an angle to t
he summit of the volcano.

  “Roger wanted so badly to have a volcano that would spew rivers of molten silver. It would have been spectacular! But Mr. MacDougall was afraid it would set fire to the guests.”

  “Which would have been spectacular too, in a different way,” Daniel mused.

  “Mr. MacDougall persuaded Roger to settle for oil of phosphorus. It is prepared elsewhere, and brought here in casks, and poured into the tub. The Screw of Archimedes conducts it upwards, it gushes from the summit, and runs down the slopes as the centaurs and whatnot flee in terror.”

  “They-flee?”

  “Oh, yes, for it is meant to represent glowing streams of liquid fire.”

  “That I understand. But how do they flee-?”

  “They are clock-work creatures.”

  “Also the work of Mr. MacDougall?”

  “Indeed.”

  “I remember hiring a silversmith named Millhouse but not an ingenieur named MacDougall.”

  “Mr. Millhouse hired Mr. MacDougall to do the clever bits. When Mr. Millhouse died of smallpox-”

  “Mr. MacDougall took over,” Daniel guessed, “and could not stop adding one clever bit after another.”

  “Until Roger cut him off-somewhat emphatically, I’m afraid,” said Catherine, and winced in a manner that made Daniel want to stroke her hair.

  “Is he still alive?”

  “Oh, yes, he works in theatres, making apparitions, explosions, and storms.”

  “Of course he does.”

  “He staged the naval battle that burned down the Curtain.”

  “I believe you. How frequently does the volcano erupt?”

  “Once or twice a year, for important parties.”

  “And Mr. MacDougall is called back from exile on those occasions?”

  “Roger has him on retainer.”

  “Where does he get his phosphorus?”

  “He has it delivered,” she said, as if this were an answer.

  “Where may Mr. MacDougall be found, I wonder?”

  “The Theater Royal, in Covent Garden, is getting ready to stage a new production entitled The Sack of Persepolis,” Catherine said, tentatively.

  “Say no more, Miss Barton.”

  Sir Isaac Newton’s House,

  St. Martin’s Street, London

  LATER THAT DAY

  “I’VE A SORT OF RIDDLE for you, to do with guineas,” was how Daniel ended the twenty-year silence between himself and Sir Isaac Newton.

  He had been fretting, ever since Enoch Root had turned up in his doorway in Massachusetts, over how to begin this conversation: what ponderous greeting would best suit the gravity of the occasion, how much time to spend reminiscing about student days in Cambridge, and whether to say anything about their last encounter, which had gone as badly as any social encounter, short of homicide, could go. Like a play-wright penning and burning draughts of a troublesome scene, he had scripted this reunion in his head an hundred times, and each time the script had careered off into a bloody debacle like the last act of Hamlet. As it seemed perfectly hopeless, and as he’d been assured by Saturn that he had only hours or days to live in any case, he reckoned, why waste time on formalities?

  When the door was opened, and he first looked Isaac in the face from across the room, he did not see any trace of fury or (what would have been more dangerous) fear. Isaac looked resigned. He was feigning patience. He looked like a Duke receiving a long-lost idiot half-brother. And on the spur of the moment, Daniel said this thing about guineas as he was stepping over the threshold. The servant who’d opened the door for him gave him the same sort of look he might bestow on a gibbeted corpse suspended above a crossroads on a warm day, and closed the door behind him.

  Daniel and Isaac were alone together in the study. Or Daniel assumed it was called a study. He could not imagine Isaac having a bedchamber or a dining-room. Any room he was in, was a study by default. The walls were paneled in dark wood, surprisingly uneven, almost rustic, compared to Roger’s house. The door was made of the same stuff, so that it vanished when it was closed, making it seem as if Daniel and Isaac were a pair of old desiccated specimens closed up in a shipping crate. The room had windows looking out onto the street. Their massive, elaborate wooden shutters were open to admit some of the light off Leicester Fields, but much of this was blocked by half-drawn scarlet curtains. Isaac was seated behind a great table, the sort of table Drake would’ve owned, and he was dressed in a long scarlet dressing-gown over a good linen shirt. His face had not changed all that much, though it had got heavier, and he still had the long white hair. But his hairline had jumped back, making it seem as if his brain were trying to force its way up out the top of his head. His skin had been white when Daniel had walked in, but by the time he had made it to the end of the room to proffer his hand, Isaac had gone red in the face, as if stealing the color from his robe.

  “There is nothing in my life quite so irritating as to be riddled and teased with inane conundrums, meant to prove my wit, and to try my senility,” he answered. “Bernoulli-Leibniz’s pawn-sent me-”

  “The brachistochrone problem, I recall it,” Daniel said, “and you solved it in hours. It took me rather longer.”

  “But you did solve it,” Isaac commanded. “Because it was a problem of the calculus, meant to try whether I understood the calculus or not! Can you fathom the impertinence of it!? I was the first man who could ever have solved it, Daniel, and you the second, because you had the calculus from me first-hand. To be hectored thus, by the Baron’s lackeys, three decades after I had invented it-”

  “In truth my riddle is another sort of thing altogether,” Daniel said. “I really am quite sorry to have wrong-footed you.”

  Isaac blinked and heaved a sigh. He seemed inordinately relieved. Perhaps he had feared that Daniel would dispute what he had just said: You had the calculus from me first-hand. That was the key. In Daniel, Isaac saw a witness who could testify to Isaac’s priority in the discovery of the calculus. Whatever other annoying and inconvenient qualities Daniel might have, vanished when placed beside that. Daniel felt the muscles of his scalp and neck easing, felt his lungs filling with air. He was going to be all right. He’d make it out of the room whole, even if he said things that made Isaac a little angry. To Isaac, Daniel was more than a pawn; he was a rook, kept sequestered in the corner of the board until the end-game, then brought out at last to sweep inexorably down the board, driving the foe back to the last rank and forcing surrender. Isaac would put up with a lot, from a rook.

  He wondered whether Isaac had, through some machinations, caused Daniel to be brought back to London. Perhaps he had exerted some action at a distance upon Princess Caroline in Hanover.

  “What is your riddle, Daniel?”

  “Earlier today, I was with a man who knows a good deal more than I do about money. This fellow was trying to judge the value of a guinea.”

  “Of a coin that purported to be a guinea,” Isaac corrected him.

  “Indeed-I say ‘guinea’ because that is what, in the end, it turned out to be.”

  “He should have weighed it.”

  “That is just what he did. And he could say nothing against the weight of the coin. Which would seem to settle the matter. But then he did something that to me was very odd. He put the coin in his mouth and he bit down on it.”

  Isaac made no answer, but Daniel thought he pinkened again, slightly. Certainly he was interested in the story. He clasped his hands together on the table in front of him, composing himself, rather like a cat.

  “Now,” Daniel said. “Even I know that coiners frequently make their counterfeits by joining two faces stamped from gold foil, and filling the void between them with solder. The solder is both lighter and softer than gold. This provides two means of detection: one may weigh the coin, or bite it. Either should suffice. In particular, if a coin has passed the test of weighing, its value should be confirmed beyond doubt! For nothing is heavier than gold. Any adulteration should be bet
rayed by a want of gravity. The weighing test ought to be infallible. And yet this chap-who really is extremely knowledgeable concerning coins-felt it necessary to make the additional test of biting. Is there any reason for it? Or was he being foolish?”

  “He was not being foolish,” Isaac said, and stared at Daniel expectantly. His eyes were great luminous ice-balls hanging in space, like comets.

  “Do you mean to say that I was, Isaac?”

  “To associate with such a man? Foolish, or naive,” Isaac returned. “As you have wandered in the wilderness for two decades, I shall grant you the benefit of the doubt.”

  “Then cure me of naivete, and tell me, what sort of man is he?”

  “A weigher.”

  “Well, he is obviously that, inasmuch as he weighs things, but you seem to invest the word with connotations that are lost on a back-woodsman such as I.”

  “In spite of all my efforts to reform the practices of the Mint, and to make each newly coined guinea identical to the last, some variation in weights persists. Some guineas are slightly heavier than others. Such errors are reducible but not eradicable. I have reduced them to the degree that, where honest persons are concerned, no variation exists. That is, most men in London-and I include sophisticated men of commerce-would trade one guinea for another without hesitation, and certainly without bothering to take out a scale and weigh them.”

  “I well remember when that was not the case,” Daniel remarked.