THE System OF THE WORLD Read online

  “You refer to our visits to Stourbridge Fair, before the Plague,” Isaac said immediately.

  “Yes,” Daniel answered, after a moment of awkwardness.

  He and Isaac had walked from Trinity to the Fair once, to buy prisms, and along the way, Isaac had made some remarks about fluxions-the beginnings of the calculus. During his recent sea-voyage from Massachusetts, Daniel had summoned that ancient memory to mind, and brought it back to life in his head, remembering certain queer details, like the shapes of the aquatic plants in the river Cam, bent downstream by the sluggish fluxion of the water. It was now obvious that Isaac had been thinking hard, and recently, about the same memory.

  To go on prating of coins, when the true topic of the conversation was so close to breaking the surface, were faintly ridiculous. But Englishmen, given a choice, would always prefer the faintly ridiculous over the painfully direct. So, on with numismatics.

  “It got even worse-the coinage did-later,” Isaac said.

  “I remind you that I did not depart until the middle of the 1690s, when there were hardly any coins left in the country, and our ?conomy was a confetti of I.O.U.s.”

  “Now England is awash in gold. The currency is as hard as adamant. Our commerce is the wonder of all the earth, and even Amsterdam is in our shade. It were vanity for me to take too much credit for this. But it is simple honesty to say, that it could not happen in the absence of this plain understanding, shared by all Englishmen, that a guinea may be exchanged for a guinea without a second thought. That all guineas are the same.”

  Suddenly all that Daniel had observed of Mr. Threader rearranged, in his mind, into a novel, strange, but perfectly coherent picture; it was like watching a pile of rubble spontaneously assemble itself into a marble statue. “Allow me to hazard,” Daniel said, “that a weigher” (he almost said, “Mr. Threader”) “is a chap who to outward appearances believes what every honest, plain-dealing Englishman believes about the value of a guinea. But in secret, he takes every guinea that comes his way, and weighs it ’pon scales of the most exacting precision. Such as are light, or of the mean weight, he returns into circulation. But such as are heavy, he hoards. And when he has hoarded an hundred such-I am only making up numbers for the sake of argument-perhaps he has enough gold, in sum, to mint an hundred and one guineas. He has created a new guinea out of thin air.”

  Isaac said yes by slowly blinking his pink eyelids. “Of course, what you have described is only the most elementary of their practices. Those who master it, move on quickly to more nefarious schemes.”

  But Daniel was still new to all of this, and stuck on the elementary. “It would only be feasible,” he guessed, “if one were already in a line of work that involved handling large numbers of coins.”

  “Naturally! And that is why the practice is so rife among the money-scriveners. I make guineas, and send them out into the country; they scurry about unraveling the tapestry I’ve so laboriously woven, and return the heaviest coins to London, where they invariably make their way to the coffers of the most vile and execrable traitors in the realm!”

  Daniel recalled driving past shredded corpses at Tyburn. “You mean that weighers are connected with coiners.”

  “As spinners are with weavers, Daniel.”

  Daniel was silent for a moment, rehearsing every memory he had of Mr. Threader.

  “That is why I was so shocked-shocked half to death, if you must know-to see you traveling in the company of one such!” Isaac said, actually shaking a bit with emotion.

  Daniel was so used to Isaac mysteriously knowing things, that he was not as surprised by this very odd revelation as he ought to have been, and did not pay any particular mind to it. “For that,” he remarked, “there is an explanation that you would find miserably boring if you knew it.”

  “I have made it my business to know it, and I accept that there was nothing untoward in your temporary association with that man,” Isaac returned. “If I were inclined to be suspicious, like Flamsteed, I should interpret your continued association with him in the worst possible light! As it is, I see plainly enough that you were ignorant of his true nature, and beguiled by his charm, and I trust you to heed my warning.”

  Daniel was now very close to laughing out loud. He could not choose which was funnier: the phant’sy that Isaac Newton was not suspicious-minded, or that Mr. Threader possessed charm. Better change the subject! “But my question is not answered yet. Why did he bite the coin, if he had already weighed it?”

  “There is a way to fool the weighing-test,” Isaac said.

  “Impossible! Nothing is heavier than gold!”

  “I have discovered the existence of gold of greater than twenty-four-carat weight.”

  “That is an absurdity,” Daniel said, after a moment’s pause to consider it.

  “Your mind, being a logical organ, rejects it,” Isaac said, “because, by definition, pure gold weighs twenty-four carats. Pure gold cannot become purer, hence, cannot be heavier. Of course, I am aware of this. But I say to you that I have with my own hands weighed gold that was heavier than gold that I knew to be pure.”

  From any other man on earth-Natural Philosophers included-this would amount to saying, “I was sloppy in the laboratory and got it wrong.” From Sir Isaac Newton, it was truth of Euclidean certainty.

  “I am put in mind of the discovery of phosphorus,” Daniel remarked, after considering it for a few moments. “A new element of nature, with properties never before seen. Perhaps there exist other elements of which we are unaware, having properties hitherto unknown. Perhaps there is such an element, similar in many respects to gold, but having a higher specific gravity, and perhaps the gold you spoke of was alloyed with it to make a metal, indistinguishable from gold in its gross properties, but slightly more dense.”

  “I give you credit for ingenuity,” Isaac said, slightly amused, “but there is a simpler explanation. Yes, the gold I speak of is alloyed with something: a fluidic essence that fills the interstices among its atoms and gives the metal greater weight. But I believe that this essence is nothing less than-”

  “The Philosophick Mercury!” Daniel exclaimed. The words came out of his mouth in a spirit of genuine excitement; bounced off the hard walls of dark wood; and, when they entered his ears, made him cringe at his own idiocy. “You think it is the Philosophick Mercury,” he corrected himself.

  “The Subtile Spirit,” Isaac said, not excited, but solemn as Rhadamanthus. “And the goal of Alchemists for thousands of years, ever since the Art was taken into the Orient, and removed from human ken, by its past master, King Solomon.”

  “You have been searching for traces of the Philosophick Mercury since we were boys,” Daniel reminded him. “As recently as twenty years ago, your efforts to find even the smallest trace of it had met with abject failure. What has changed?”

  “I took your advice, Daniel. I accepted the charge of the Mint from my lord Ravenscar. I initiated the Great Recoinage, which brought vast tonnage of gold plate and bullion out from where it had been hoarded.”

  “And you adjusted the ratio in valuation of silver to gold, so that the latter was over-valued,” Daniel said, “which as everyone knows, has practically driven all silver off the island, and attracted gold from every corner of the globe where commerce has spread its tendrils.”

  Isaac declined comment.

  “Prior to your-” here Daniel was about to say something like terrifying spasm of dementia but corrected himself: “change of career, twenty years ago, you were only able to work with such modest samples of gold as you could buy from local sources. Your appointment to the Mint-combined with the policies you have adopted there-have made the Tower of London the bottle-neck through which all the world’s gold flows, and put you in a position to dip your finger into that flow at will, sampling and testing the gold of many different lands-am I getting it right?”

  Isaac nodded, and it seemed he looked almost mischievous, in a naughty-old-man sort of way. “The pract
ice of all Alchemists since the time of Hermes Trismegistus has been to presume that the Gold of Solomon had been forever lost, and to attempt to re-discover his lost Art through patient trials and arcane study. This was the course that defeated me, before what you coyly describe as my change of career. But during my recuperation, as I went to inspect the Mint, and conversed with my predecessors there, I came to realize that the ancient presumption of the Esoteric Brotherhood was no longer true. If Solomon went away into the remotest isles of the Orient, why, Commerce has now gone that far, or farther, and in particular the Spaniards and the Portuguese have left no stone unturned, the world over, in their assiduous search for gold and silver. No matter how far Solomon may have journeyed, he would have left behind traces of his passage, in the form of Solomonic Gold, which is to say, gold made through an Alchemical process, bearing traces of the Philosophick Mercury. In the millennia since his kingdom vanished from the earth, this gold might have passed from one ignorant set of hands to another a thousand times. It might have been taken across wastes by caravans, forged into pagan funeral-masks, plundered from fallen citadels, buried in secret hoards, dug up by thieves, seized by pirates, made into jewels, and coined into specie of diverse realms. But through all of these evolutions it would preserve the traces of the Philosophick Mercury that would provide an infallible proof of its origins. To find it, I need not pore over ancient manuscripts for fragments of Alchemical lore, and I need not venture into far reaches to search for ancient gold with my own hands. I need only position myself like a spider at the center of the global web of commerce, and then so arrange matters that all the world’s gold would flow inwards toward me, as every point of matter in the solar system naturally falls inwards toward the Sun. If I then remained vigilant, and sampled all the gold that came into the Mint to be made into guineas, in time I should be nearly certain of finding some traces of the Solomonic Gold.”

  “And now you would appear to have found it,” said Daniel, unwilling to weigh in, yet, on Isaac’s side. “How recently has this occurred?”

  “For the first several years there was nothing. Not a trace. I despaired of finding it ever,” Isaac admitted. “Then, during the respite in the War, round 1701, I found a bit of gold heavier than twenty-four carat. I cannot summon words, here and now, to convey my emotions then! It was just a flake of gold leaf, found in a coiner’s shop after it was raided, on my orders, by the King’s Messengers. The coiner himself had been slain during the raid-most frustrating! Several years later, I found a counterfeit guinea that was heavier than it ought to be. In time, I hunted down the coiner who had made it, and interrogated him as to where he had obtained his bullion. He had gotten most of it from conventional sources. But he said that he had recently purchased, through a middleman, a quantity of gold in the form of sheet metal, hand-hammered, about an eighth of an inch thick. Six months later I talked to another coiner who recollected having seen a larger piece of such gold. He said it had been marked on one side with a linear pattern of scrapes, and stained on the other face with tar.”

  “Tar!”

  “Yes. But I have never seen such a sample with my own eyes. I only find evidence of its existence in coins-counterfeit guineas of a level of quality such that I myself am sometimes deceived by them!”

  “So, ’twould appear that whoever has this gold, has hoarded it, and used to spend it, in the form of plates stained with tar. But from time to time he will deliver some of it up to a coiner-”

  “Not a coiner but the coiner. Jack. Jack the Coiner. My Nemesis, and my prey, these last twelve years.”

  “Jack sounds like an interesting chap,” Daniel allowed, “and I ween I shall learn more of him from you anon-but is it your hypothesis that he has a hoard of these gold sheets somewhere, and coins them from time to time?”

  “No. They’re of no use to him hoarded. If he had a hoard, he would coin every last ounce of it, as fast as his coiners could do the work. No, it is my hypothesis that Jack knows the owner of the hoard, and that from time to time that person, wanting some money to spend, takes some plates out, and brings them to Jack.”

  “Do you have any notion as to who the hoarder might be?”

  “The answer is suggested by the tar, and the scrapes. It is coming from a ship.”

  “There is a vague association between tar and ships, but beyond that, I don’t follow you,” Daniel said.

  “The information you are wanting is that, among sailors and officers of the French Navy, there is a legend-”

  “Ah, in truth I have heard it!” Daniel exclaimed. “But I failed to draw the connexion. You refer to a legendary ship whose hull was plated with gold.”

  “Indeed.”

  “But ’twould seem that in your view this is no legend.”

  “I have studied it,” Isaac announced. “I can now trace the descent of King Solomon’s Gold from the pages of the Bible, down through the ages, to the hull of that ship, and thence to the samples that I have assayed in my laboratory in the Tower of London.”

  “Pray tell me the tale then!”

  “Most of it is no tale at all. The Islands of King Solomon lie in the Pacific. There his gold rested, undisturbed by men, until round the time that you and I were young, and Huygens’s clock began to tick. A Spanish fleet, driven by a typhoon far off the charted sea-lanes that join Acapulco to Manila, dropped anchor in the Solomons, and took on board certain provisions, including earth to pack round the galley-stoves to protect the planks of the ship from fire. During the voyage home to New Spain, the heat of the fire melted gold-or something that looked like it-out of the sand, and it pooled to form nuggets of astonishing fineness, which were discovered when the ships broke bulk in Acapulco. The Viceroy of New Spain, then just beginning a twenty-five-

  year reign, was not slow to send out ships to the Solomons to extract more of this gold, and bring it back to Mexico to be piled up in his personal hoard. At the end of his reign, he caused the Solomonic Gold to be loaded aboard his private brig, which sailed back to Spain in convoy with the Spanish treasure-fleet. They made it safe as far as Cadiz. But then the little brig foolishly sailed alone up to Bonanza, where the Viceroy had caused a villa to be built, in which he phant’sied he would enjoy a wealthy retirement. Before she could be unloaded, she was set upon in the night by pirates, dressed as Turks, and led by the infamous criminal known to us as Half-Cocked Jack, the King of the Vagabonds, and to the French as L’Emmerdeur. The gold was stolen and spirited away in long stages to Hindoostan, where most of it fell into the possession of a heathen potentate, an Amazon pirate-queen, black as char-coal, who had not the faintest understanding of what she had netted. But on those shores, Jack and his confederates used their ill-gotten gains to build a pirate-ship. And from some Dutch shipwrights they had the notion-which was in no way a faulty one, as e’en a stopped Clock is correct twice daily-that if the hull of this ship were cladded, below the waterline, with sheets of smooth metal, she would afford no purchase for barnacles, and repel the attacks of the teredo.”

  “ ’Tis a wholly reasonable idea,” Daniel said.

  “ ’Twas a good idea, most strangely executed! For, vain and extravagant man that he was, this Jack decreed that the metal be wrought out of solid gold!”

  “So the tale told by those French mariners was in no way fanciful,” Daniel concluded.

  “I should rather say, ’twas none the less true, for being fanciful!” Isaac returned.

  “Do you know where that ship is now?” Daniel asked, trying not to sound nervous; for he knew.

  “It is thought that she was christened Minerva. But this is not known with certainty, and is of little use, even if true, as hundreds of ships answer to that name. But I suspect that she still roams the seas, and calls at London from time to time, and that some commerce plays out between Jack the Coiner, and those who sail her. Plates of gold are taken out of her bilge-for make no mistake, they were stripped from her hull and replaced with copper, probably in some unfrequented Caribbean cove,
many years ago-and delivered to Jack, who coins them into excellent guineas, with which he poisons Her Majesty’s stock of money. That is the tale of Solomon’s Gold, Daniel. I hoped you would find it a diverting yarn. Why do you look so distracted?”

  “I find it very odd that the prize you have sought your entire life, should happen to rest in the hands of the man you describe as your Nemesis.”

  “My Nemesis, where Mint work is concerned. In other fields, I have other foes,” Isaac reminded him shortly.

  “That is beside my point. Why shouldn’t the hoard of Solomonic Gold lie in a vault in Seville, or at the Vatican, or the Forbidden City of Peking? Of all the places in the world where this gold might have ended up, why should it be in the possession of Jack the Coiner-the one man you’d most like to see being dragged on a sledge to Tyburn?”

  “Because its density exceeds that of gold, it is valuable to a counterfeiter.”

  “It is more valuable to an Alchemist. Do you suppose Jack knows as much, and do you suppose he is aware that you, Isaac, are an Alchemist?”

  “He is a mere criminal.”

  “Yes, and a very cosmopolitan one, from the sounds of it.”

  “I assure you he has not the faintest comprehension of matters Alchemical.”

  “Neither do I. And yet I understand that you desire this gold!”

  “What does it matter? He knows that I wish to hunt him down and bring him to justice-that is enough.”

  “Isaac, you have a habit of under-estimating the intelligence of anyone who is not you. Perhaps this Jack is using the Solomonic Gold to bait you.”

  “What matters it if a mouse baits a lion?”

  “Depends on whether the lion is being baited into single combat with that mouse, or into a pit-fall with sharpened stakes at the bottom.”

  “I do not think your analogy is applicable. But I am grateful for your expression of concern. Now let us end all tedious disputes about Jack, by ending Jack!”

  “Did you say ‘us’?”