A QUARTER OF A MILE south of the dogleg in the road where Roger Comstock had met Bob Shaftoe, the frontier of London could be discerned by the Wise in the Ways of Real Estate. The most infallible sign of which was that, here, the track leading to Black Mary’s Hole had been improved with a name, Coppice Row, devised to conjure forth, from the fevered brains of would-be buyers, phant’sies of a cozy and bucolic character, be they never so removed from Truth. Along Coppice Row, buildings were going up, or had gone up so recently that they were still redolent of the horse-hair mixed into their damp plaster. On the left side of the road, as one departed from London, the sprawl had been baffled for the time being by the stand of trees, and root-ball of ancient property-rights, surrounding Sir John Oldcastle’s. On the right were a few indifferent buildings, all made of red brick still warm from the kilns. These had shop-arcades facing the street, and flats above. The largest of these buildings commanded a frontage of some hundred feet, sliced into a dozen shop-fronts of various widths. Most were quite narrow, and most still wanted tenants.

One of them had been rented by a clock-maker. Or so it might be guessed from the new-made sign that had been hung out over the street on a clever wrought-iron cantilever. This sign had been constructed around the carcass of an ancient clock that looked to have been salvaged from a bell-tower in some Continental town—perhaps a Belgian hôtel de ville laid low by a mortar-bomb during the late war. At any rate it had been very old even before whatever sequence of fiery disasters, salvagings, soakings in brine, and rough trans-shipments had brought it to Clerkenwell. With its bent, gap-toothed gears and its scabrous corrosions it served better as an Emblem, than as a Keeper, of Time. All by itself it might have served as a conversation-piece, like a Roman ruin. But to it had been added a muscular figure, put together of wood and plaster, and styled after a God, who was with one hand supporting the clock and with the other reaching up to adjust its hour-hand. All this to advertise a shop so small that its proprietor could stand in the middle of it and touch both side-walls with his fingertips.

Clerkenwell Court—as this edifice was styled—was not badly situated, for it was along a way that holiday-makers might traverse en route to the tea-gardens and Spaws of Lambs Conduit Fields. And it was not too distant from Gray’s Inn and diverse Squares round which wealthy persons had built their town-houses. But it was not especially well situated, either, for the place was difficult to reach without passing through one or more infamous Dens of Iniquity, Nests of Vipers, Pits of Degradation, &c., viz. Hockley-in-the-Hole and Smithfield.

None of which had prevented one noble Lady from making the trip out in her carriage early of a Saturday morn. She was well escorted, with a driver, two footmen, and a dog on the outside of the coach, and, on the inside, a young armigerous gentleman and a female attendant. Accompanied by the latter two, she passed through the door below the outlandish clock-sign and pulled on a bell-rope. A distant jingling was audible off beyond the back wall of the shop. She pulled again, and again. Presently a door in the back was opened. Through it the visitors glimpsed, not the expected store-room, but an expansive, crowded, noisy, complicated Yard. Then the whole aperture of the doorway was blocked by the form of a great hulking dark bloke, coming towards them. He entered the shop, stopped, and looked straight over their heads and out the shop’s front window to the carriage waiting there along Coppice Row. A moment sufficed to read the coat of arms on the door. Then he pivoted out of the way and extended an arm toward the back door. “Enter,” he rumbled. Then, in case this had not been a sufficiently florid, courtly greeting, he added, “Welcome.”

Johann von Hacklheber—that being the sole visitor who was male and visibly armed—had stepped in front of the two women when the big dark man had appeared. His left or dagger hand was looking a bit twitchy. This detail did not escape the perception of their host, who flung his great hands up in the air as proof that he was not armed, or as a gesture of exasperation, or both. Then he turned his back on them and vanished the way he had come.

A minute later, his place was taken by Daniel Waterhouse.

“Saturn says that he has all but scared you away,” he began. “He forwards his apologies. He has gone off to brood over his unfitness as a retailer. Please come back. There is nothing here, save a pretense of a horologist’s shop, which does not pay its rent.”

Greetings and salutations of a more formal nature also passed among them, but these were so rote that they made little impression on anyone. Save one detail: Eliza, indicating her young woman attendant, made the following claim: “I present to you Fraülein Hildegard von Klötze.”

“A familiar name—”

“As she would tell you, if she spoke more English, she is a half-sister of Gertrude von Klötze.”

“The nurse who accompanied me on my journey from Hanover. That explains why her eyes are likewise shockingly familiar to me,” said Daniel. “Welcome to London, Fraülein,” he said with a bow—a rather deeper and more formal bow than would normally be directed to a lady-in-waiting. “And welcome, all of you, to the Court of Technologickal Arts. If you would only be so good as to follow me.”

 

“WHEN I WAS A GIRL in Constantinople,” Eliza said, “I one day worked up the nerve to venture out from the harim of the Topkapi Palace and to explore certain reaches of that motley Pile that ought to have been forbidden to me. This I did by climbing up grape-vines, clambering over rooftops, and the like. And after a while I arrived at a place whence I could look down into a court-yard. This place was occupied by men of a mystickal sect called Darwayshes, who wore costumes, and observed rites, setting them apart from the rest of al-Islam. I lurked there for a few minutes, watching them, and then, having had my fill of strange sights, crept back to the harim.”

“The similitude is a good one,” said Daniel Waterhouse. “Yes, now you are in another court full of Dervishes, as queer in their own way, yet as easy around their own kind, as those you spied in Constantinople.” He and Eliza had paused in a relatively stagnant corner of the court. Above them, a beam had been thrown across a gap to make a lifting-point. Suspended from its middle was an elephant’s tusk, an ivory crescent eight feet in diameter if it was an inch. Diverse clever baffles and charms had been fixed to its rope to prevent rodents from abseiling down for midnight picnics; the only creature allowed to gnaw at this treasure was a journeyman ivory-carver who was having at it with a fine-toothed saw. Nor was this the only oddity or wonder in the Court of Technologickal Arts. The yard was an irregular pentagon a hundred feet in breadth. It was closed in by an arcade of work-stalls, each little more than a lean-to sheltering some odd collection of tools. At a glance Eliza saw a glass-blower, a goldsmith, a watch-maker, and a lens-grinder, but there were many others who had their own collections of specialized lathes, mills, hand-tools, and paraphernalia that were every bit as particular, especial, and jealously looked-after. Perhaps that old Jew with the stubby telescopes strapped to his face had once called himself a jeweler, and the obese German overflowing yon tiny stool had been a toy-maker, turning out music-boxes. Now whatever they did had been subsumed in a larger and more obscure purpose. Others simply could not be classified at all. There was a bloke who had a stall to himself, off in the corner—an exile even among Dervishes—where he had mounted a glass sphere on an axle. Spinning this around with the aid of a wan, jittery apprentice, he produced unearthly crackling noises and summoned forth small lightning-bolts.

The open space of the court had mostly been claimed by one faction or another and filled up with works both prodigal and practical. There were too many furnaces and forges to count at a glance, all of them quite small, and devoted to some sub-sub-specialty. These were fashioned of brick and mortar, each to a particular shape, reminding the visitors of so many shells cast up on some outlandish beach. There was a crane, moved by two men each trudging along in a great wooden wheel. This was situated in the back of the court where a gate led in from a warren of country cowpaths, none of which had yet been ennobled with a picturesque name. The court was further enlivened by diverse derricks, rigs, presses, frames, and Overhead Lifting Devices of unknown nature and purpose. There was even a barrow: a stony hummock that might have deserved the appellation of Ruin half a millennium ago, but had by now been mostly resorbed by the earth.

“Your budget for stationery must be generous,” Eliza said. For another curious feature of the place was that scraps of paper were blowing round it like autumn leaves, and each had something scribbled on it. “I am put in mind of the ’Change.” She snatched a scrap that had been dancing in a current of air in front of her, and stretched it out: it had been slashed, scribbled, and cross-hatched with furious pen-strokes. Once it might have been a fair rendition, in perspective, of something three-dimensional. But other hands had added, subtracted, modified, and annotated it so many times that half of the page was covered by ink. Perfected, it had been thrown away.

“We do spend a good bit on ink and paper,” Daniel admitted, “but men such as these cannot think without them.”

“I suppose I am meant to be impressed; but instead I confess myself bewildered,” was the verdict of Johann von Hacklheber, who had never strayed more than arm’s length from “Hildegard,” but had never touched her, as they strolled round the court.

“The difficulty lies in the fact that there is little, so far, in the way of finished work,” Daniel said, “and what has been finished has been shipped to Bridewell Palace.” Then there was a respite as Johann attempted to explain the concept of Bridewell to the German girl, a project that did not seem to go very well.

“Allow me to demonstrate,” Daniel said. He strode off across the court. Johann, “Hildegard,” and Eliza followed, forming a queue that snaked and wended among forges, furnaces, and less namable constructs until it stopped at the foot of the barrow-mound.

This had been endowed with a set of wrought-iron gates, exceptionally massive, and closed with a lock the size of a Folio Bible, as might be seen on an Arsenal-Gate. Daniel had the key: a pound of brass wrought and carved into a lacy labyrinth. He blew on it, then inserted it into a hatch on the lock’s front with the care of a surgeon lancing a King’s boil. Snicking and clicking noises emanated from the penetralia of the device as it issued mechanical challenges, which were rebutted by the key; finally Daniel was given leave to spin a brass wheel that drew back several bolts. The gates came a-jar. Daniel excused himself and stepped through the opening. Peering round him the guests could just make out a sort of vestibule within: a small stone-paved landing at the top of a pit. Some torches were soaking in an oil-pot. Daniel drew one out, shook off lashings of excess oil, and handed it to Johann. “If you would be so kind,” he said. Johann had no difficulty finding an open flame in this court, and handed it back, a-blaze, in a few moments. “I shall be back soon,” Daniel announced. “If not, send down a search party in half an hour.” With that, he stepped over the brink of the pit. “Hildegard” gasped, thinking that he was about to plummet straight down some old well-shaft. But it presently became obvious from the nature of Daniel’s movements that he was in fact descending a stairway, hidden in shadow. Soon he was gone from view, and they were left to watch a quivering rectangle of fiery light, and to hear diverse scraping, squealing, and clanking noises. Then the light again became concentrated into a bobbing fire-brand, followed at a short interval, first by the face of Daniel Waterhouse, and then by a gleaming quadrilateral that he was carrying under one arm like a book.

“This was lent to me by a friend who suffered from an embarrassment of riches,” Daniel explained after the torch had been extinguished and stowed, and the gate locked. They were examining a squarish plate of what appeared to be gold. It had been treated very disrespectfully and was scraped, battered out of plane, salt-caked, and tar-stained. But it was still obviously gold, hand-hammered to a thickness of perhaps an eighth of an inch. “As you have probably guessed, there are more of them stowed below; but we only withdraw as much as can be wrought in a single day.”

For some minutes they followed Daniel around the court as he carried this treasure to several stations. A workman scrubbed it in a barrel of water to get rid of the salt. A goldsmith grasped it with tongs and thrust it into a furnace; for a few moments it was enveloped in fumes and colored flames as impurities were burnt off. Then it resolved to a pure glowing slab. He tugged it out, quenched it in water, and snipped off a corner for assay. Then Daniel took it to a weigher who tediously balanced it on a scale, and noted it in a book. Then it was across the yard to a mill consisting of two great brass rollers, one above the other like a mangle. A man fed the plate into the crevice between these as a boy whirled a crank on an elaborate gear-train. The rollers turned almost as slowly as minute-hands. What emerged from them was no longer a neat square: it had been mashed to an irregular oval blob, like pie-crust under a rolling-pin, thinner than a fingernail. It came out onto a kind of skid that had been fashioned from a whole ox-hide stretched over a frame the size of a dining-table. The plate lay on this like a lake of molten gold, almost smooth enough to bear reflections. Four men—one at each corner—now bore this across the court to a stall where a large shearing-machine had been established. The ox-hide pallet was mated to this, so that the golden sheet could be slid directly into the jaws of the shear. Two men now went to work slicing the lozenge of gold into a large number of strips, each about a hand-span in width. When this was finished they rotated the strips ninety degrees and fed them through a second time, cutting them into squares. Some of the cuttings, from near the edge, came out imperfectly shaped, and were pitched into a discard basket. The rest were piled into a neat stack. When they ran out of gold the shear-men twice counted and re-stacked the cards (for the gold squares resembled nothing so much as a deck of great playing-cards). All of the proceeds—including the basket of scraps—were given back to Daniel. He took them back to the weigher, who accounted for every iota of gold. Daniel then returned the scraps to the locked crypt.

The tour-group reconvened in the shop of the man called Saturn. The golden cards had been stacked and counted one more time, and loaded into a purpose-built, velvet-lined chest that was just the right size for them. They gathered round it instinctively.

“Well, Dr. Waterhouse, we now understand perhaps a tenth of the oddities housed in your court,” said Eliza. “When shall we understand the remainder?”

“When we go to Bridewell!” Daniel returned, and picked up the chest as if he meant to leave.

 

“WE ARE LIKE JEWELS in a pirate’s treasure-chest,” said the Duchess of Arcachon-Qwghlm, trying to get her fellow-passengers to look on the bright side.

Daniel, Eliza, Johann, and “Hildegard” were sharing this booth-on-wheels, not only with a small chest of gold cards, but also with several bales of libels. To judge from their smell and their tendency to rub off on people’s clothing, these had come off the press very recently. Everyone shied away from them save Daniel, who was dressed in clothes that were black to begin with.

According to some unwritten but universal rule of etiquette, people mashed together in a confined space tended not to look one another in the eye, or to converse. The fact that “Hildegard” was, in truth, obviously Princess Caroline of Hanover only exacerbated it. Thus Eliza’s efforts to make cheery conversation.

After they had jolted some distance southwards along Saffron Hill, Daniel, mortified and bored, managed to work one of his arms free of the pile-up, and got a hand on the window-shutter, which he shot open. In London, actual sun-beams were too much to ask for; but he was rewarded with a nebulous in-flow of smoky gray light, which fell on the top-most sheet of a libel-bale.

LIBERTY
by Dappa

“What do you think?” Eliza asked. She’d been watching Daniel read it.

“Oh, as an essay, ’tis well enough wrought. As a political tactic, I question whether ’tis well considered.”

“When he writes ‘reader, this’ and ‘reader, that’ it is no empty figure,” Eliza said. “He does have readers—though few of them would admit to it, in the current climate.”

“There is the rub, my lady,” Daniel said. He slammed the window to, for they were now rattling along the banks of Fleet Ditch, not all that far from the Royal Society’s headquarters in Crane Court, and the ammoniacal stench had choked him and flooded his eyes with tears. “By publishing such things you are gambling that the Whigs shall win and the Tories shall lose.”

Eliza seemed a bit put out by the criticism. But Caroline had been listening to their discourse, and was ready with an answer: “Ve are all gambling on zat, Doctor Vaterhouse. Including you.”

 

IF JOHANN HAD NOT told Caroline that Bridewell was a whilom Royal Palace, she would have alighted from her carriage, swept her gaze over it, and dismissed it as a half-Gothick, half-Tudor ruin-cum-slum. But knowing what she knew, she was bound to stand a-mazed for some minutes, trying to reconstruct it in her mind’s eye.

Visiting Dukes might once have passed an afternoon bowling in that court over yonder, which was now home to an immense Gordian tangle of worn-out cordage, fated to be worried into oakum by the chapped fingers of incarcerated whores. In that high window, where a twelve-year-old pick-
pocket had just thrust his penis out between iron bars to urinate into plain air, a Princess might once have gazed out onto the Fleet, back when it had been a brook instead of a sewer. Knights might have stabled their chargers in that long building that was now a booming, dusty work-shop.

A young woman of a more romantic disposition might have been at hard labor, all day long, trying to make a presentable phant’sy out of this social and architectural midden. Caroline only sustained the effort until cat-calls from diverse barred and grilled windows reminded her that they were out of place, tarrying here in a court normally used to receive new prisoners.

“Pay them no mind,” Daniel recommended, ushering them through a gateway to an inner court. “Persons of Quality come here frequently to gape at the prisoners, though ’tis said that Bedlam provides an infinitely more lurid spectacle. The inmates will all suppose that we are tourists.”

It had become evident that the palace had at least two wings, albeit not very well matched. “We shan’t go that way,” Daniel said, nodding to the left, “it is all men: pick-pockets, procurers, and ’prentices who’ve broken their masters’ noses. Please follow me to the women’s side.” He spoke deliberately, but moved in haste: a tactic intended to make them hurry along and to ignore the countless distractions strewn in their path. “I shall be preceding all of you through many doors—committing an unforgivable breach of etiquette each time—but as you have gathered by now, this palace is no Versailles. Do watch your step.” This as he negotiated a series of pantries, stairs, and corridors that might once have been the province of some lower servants. Then he shouldered his way through a door that flushed them into a space that was startlingly broad and high-roofed: some sort of ancient Hall, where perhaps Earls had dined at long tables. But today it was populated mostly by women. There were two predominant types of furniture: blocks, and stocks. The blocks were nothing more than slices of great tree-trunks, rising to mid-thigh. Before each of these stood a woman. All of the women were young, for their task was too strenuous for girls or dowagers. Each of them wielded a huge mallet: a segment of hardwood tree-trunk a hand-span in diameter and a foot long, impaled on an axe-handle. Snaking along the tops of the blocks were punnies of retted hemp, which is to say, stalks of the hemp plant, a yard taller than a man, and a few inches in diameter, which some months ago had been shorn of their foliage and flung into stagnant ponds in the Lambeth Marshes and weighed down with stones. There, the water had infected and rotted the tissues of those stalks, attacking the interstitial glop that bound the fibers together, but sparing the fibers themselves. Dried in the sun, these had been barged across to Bridewell and piled up in a monstrous faggot at one end of the hall. Fresh punnies were continually being jerked out of this heap by younger girls, dragged down the pavement, and offered up as for sacrifice on vacant blocks. A punny had no sooner come to rest than a prowling man in an apron raised one hand in the air, brandishing a cane, and gazing hungrily at the sight of a woman’s back, protected only by a thin layer of calicoe. If she did not raise her mallet and smash it down on the punny within a heartbeat, the cane would come down with no less violence on her back. Each punny had to be beaten over and over again, all up and down its length and round its circumference, to break loose the snot of rotted and desiccated pulp from the long dark fibers. The hammers boomed on the blocks in a never-ending fusillade, the debris fell to the floor like dirty snow, or shot up into the air in a roiling cloud. Caroline and Eliza immediately reached for their head-scarves and covered their coifs lest their hair be adulterated with coarse hemp-fibers. Soon enough both of the ladies had drawn the tails of those scarves across their mouths and noses too, for the air was saturated with a gas of tiny fiber-scraps that could not be seen but could most certainly be felt when they lodged in the throat or the eyes.

Besides blocks, the other furnishing in the hall was stocks. These had been erected around the walls at regular intervals. Each consisted of two planks mounted in a vertical frame so that they could be slid up and down, and pegged at various discrete altitudes by means of carved shear-pins. Matching half-moon-shaped notches, of diverse sizes and spacings, had been cut into the edges of these planks, so that wrists and necks of varying gauges could be fixed in whatever place and height was most inconvenient to the prisoner, and pleasing to the whims of the responsible official. Most of the stocks were vacant—signifying a well-run shop—but three were occupied by women with their hands stretched up high above their heads. The backs of their dresses were black with oozing and clotting blood.

“Now you know all that is known about the making of hemp and the reformation of morals,” Daniel remarked, after they had darted out through a side exit and gotten into a stairway, where it was possible to hear and to breathe. There was a decent pause so that everyone could brush themselves off and blink debris from their eyes. “It astonishes me,” Daniel reflected, “that men will see what we have just seen—and yet go out the next day to patronize a brothel. Personally I can imagine no scene less likely to stir amorous feelings in general, or an interest in prostitutes in particular—” but Johann harrumphed and Eliza glared. Caroline seemed to find the discourse interesting enough, but she’d been out-voted. “Very well, then, to the apartment of Miss Hannah Spates we go now. Do watch where you step,” Daniel added, unnecessarily, as turds were plainly spread around all over the place.

 

BRIDEWELL PALACE WAS TYPICAL English in that, outside of whatever historical process had caused it to end up the way it was, it made no sense whatever. Like Botany, it could be Memorized but not Understood. The visitors had lost their bearings immediately, and by this point in the tour, none of them would have been surprised if Daniel had flung open a door to reveal a secret tunnel under the Thames, or a back entrance to the Inferno. But instead they found themselves on the uppermost storey of some wing, addition or out-building. Hannah Spates and her colleagues lived and worked here, in a large space under the heavy-burdened rafters of an ancient slate roof. It must have been as cold in the winter as it was stifling today; but it was dry, did not stink, had light from a few windows, and was not decorated with bleeding women. The rafters were steeply sloped, as if trying to shrug off their burden of stone flakes. This gave it the ambience of a Gothick church whose builders had succumbed to Black Death before they could kit it out with pews and pulpit.

It did at least have an organ—or so the visitors thought at first. The largest single object in the room was a box, the size of a Vagabond-shack but much more finely wrought, of oak planks cleverly joined together, and caulked at the corners with tar and oakum. To one side of it was a row of four large bellows, with a wooden rail mounted a few feet above them. Two women were gripping the rail. Each of them divided her weight between a pair of bellows, one under each foot; these had been rigged in such a way that as one foot descended, expelling air into the great wind-chest, the other inhaled and rose up. The women seemed to be scaling an endless stair. They were a matched set of great busty hippy frazzle-haired wenches with apple-red cheeks, getting riper and shinier by the moment, and they seemed to find this great fun. While gazing with open curiosity at the visitors, they kept an eye on a glass U-tube filled with mercury, which started one way whenever one of them took her weight off of a foot, and jerked back as she shifted it to the other. A level had been marked on one side of the tube by tying a red ribbon around it. None of the visitors needed to have it explained that the goal of the exercise was to make the mercury climb until it reached the height of that ribbon.

To the other side of the wind-chest was a console looking somewhat like the keyboard of a pipe-organ. But it had only thirty-two keys, with no sharps or flats, and a few of them were stuck down. The organist was a young woman with long cinnamon hair put up in a loose bun. Like every other woman in Bridewell she wore a dress that appeared to have been plucked by a blind man from a parish poor-box; but it was clean and she had obviously devoted many an hour to patching it and taking it in to respect the general shape of her body. As Daniel approached with his guests in train, she sat up straight, reached out, and pulled on an ivory knob. A sigh came from the works and the stuck keys all came unstuck at once.

“Your grace,” Daniel said, turning to Eliza, “I present Miss Hannah Spates. Miss Spates, this is the lady I told you about.”

Hannah Spates rose, and made a pass at a curtsey.

“I am pleased to make your acquaintance,” said Eliza, having instantly donned a sincere but distant affect commonly seen among high-born philanthropists obliged to visit hospitals, orphanages, poor-houses, &c. “Pray, what is this instrument? Are we to hear a performance?”

Hannah was wrong-footed by the words “instrument” and “performance” but soon enough decrypted the question without any aid from Daniel. “It is the card-punching machine, your grace,” she answered, “it cuts the bits out, as I’m to show you.”

“We shall balance the books first,” Daniel announced, and led his guests onwards to a back corner of the room, where a semblance of a banca had been established. There was a large desk, manned by a clerk. Standing behind him was a gentleman of about fifty, who now stepped forward to be introduced. “Mr. William Ham,” Daniel identified him, “my nephew, and the money-goldsmith who tends to our affairs in the City.”

Pleasantries were exchanged; Eliza allowed as how she had heard of Mr. Ham from friends of hers who were pleased to have done business with him, and William Ham made it known how honored he was by this. He seemed startled and pleased to have been recognized at all, as he was a quiet, well-dressed, but indifferent-looking sort, typical of the newish breed who had taken over the banca trade from the menagerie of chandelier-swinging adventurers, intoxicated poltroons, and pathological liars who’d launched it when Daniel had been a young man.

To business: Daniel handed the little box of gold cards to William Ham, who carried them over to a standing-desk by the window and weighed them on a scale. He called out numbers to the clerk, who repeated them aloud and pricked them down in a book. The cards were then placed in a strong-box that squatted on the floor-boards next to the banca. All, that is, save for one of them, which was handed to a third man: an aproned overseer, struck from the same mould as the ones down in the hemp-pounding shop, save that he was not brandishing a cane. With the care and pomp of a priest bearing the consecrated host across a chancel, he took this to the organ-like device, and set it down, for the nonce, on the music stand above the keyboard. Then he gripped a pair of heavy black wrought-iron handles that projected from the machine’s front panel, just above the keyboard, and gave them a mighty jerk. A slab of iron emerged from the machine like a tongue being thrust out. It was flat and smooth as if it had been extruded from a rolling-mill, and for the most part it was devoid of markings or features of any kind. But at the back of it was a shallow square depression perforated by a dense grid of holes, so that it looked like a grille or screen. The overseer plucked the gold card from the music-stand and laid it into the depression, where it fit perfectly and covered up all of the holes with a margin to spare around the edges. Then he put the heels of his hands against the two iron handles and rammed the slab, along with its golden burden, back into the bowels of the machine. As it boomed into place, the discriminating listener could hear a metallic snap, as though some latches had engaged to hold it all in place.

He stepped back. Miss Spates now took up her perch on the bench before the keyboard, and smoothed out her patched skirt. Her first act was to bend forward and peer into a prism mounted on the top of the console. Evidently she did not like what she saw, and so she reached up with both hands and began to turn a pair of iron cranks this way and that, making some adjustment to the position of the pallet. When she was satisfied, she folded her hands demurely in her lap, and looked at Daniel’s knees.

“Here is where I am suffered to play a small rôle,” Daniel remarked, reaching into his breast-pocket and drawing out a card of stiff paper that had been the object of several hours’ or days’ attention from a fine quill-pen. Its edge was decorated with strings of digits and its interior mostly filled with writing in a cramped hand: blocks of text in LATIN and English, runes in the Real Character, and brief outbursts of digits. This he handed, with a suggestion of a bow, to Hannah, who rotated it and set it in place on the music-stand.

“She can read!?” Johann said incredulously.

“Actually, she can—thanks to her doting father—
but this is unusual, and not strictly necessary,” Daniel answered. “All they need to be able to do, is to distinguish between a one and a zero—as you may see for yourself by inspecting the card.”

Johann, Eliza, and Caroline crowded in behind Miss Spates to peer over her shoulders at the specimen on the music-stand. It bore many styles of numbers and characters; but she had oriented it so that she could read a long string of digits printed along the edge. Every one of those digits was either a 1 or a 0. As the others had been talking, she had been sliding a finger along the keyboard, shoving down some keys but not others. Whenever a key was depressed, snicking and clunking noises would sound from some system of rods and levers back inside the mechanism, and the key would stay where she had put it. It was plain to see that the pattern she was making of those keys was the same as the pattern of ones and zeroes written on the edge of the card: wherever she saw a 1, she depressed the corresponding key, and wherever she saw a 0, she skipped over it.

The minute and exacting toil of Miss Spates was accompanied by loud, sweaty, vigorous labor from the bellows-pumping wenches, who had put on a crescendo, trying to stomp the mercury up to the red ribbon. “By your leave, sir,” one of them gasped, “sometimes we sing a song, as sailors do when they heave on a hawser.”

“Pray carry on!” Daniel returned, to the dismay of the overseer who had just opened his mouth to ban it.

At the final beat, the quicksilver in the tube finally shot up to kiss the ribbon. Hannah Spates hauled back on an ivory knob that she had been gripping in sweaty expectation. The machine hissed, not from one place but from many, like fragments of a burst cannon raining into the sea.

Mounted to the top of the wind-box was a row of what had at first appeared to be organ-pipes. Each was several inches in diameter and a yard long. They were arranged in a segment of an arc whose center was a dense complex of rods and levers atop the console, and whose radius was a couple of yards. The pipes were joined to the console by brass levers that fanned out from the center like rays of the sun. Some of these, but not others, suddenly went into motion.

It now became obvious that pistons were concealed within those cylinders, and some of them were being pressed up by air from the wind-chest. As they moved they elevated the ends of the brass levers. Each lever pivoted around an oiled fulcrum that was far from the piston, and close to the central mechanism, giving it a large mechanical advantage at the latter end. The rapid upward thrust of each piston caused the opposite end of its lever to press downward slowly, but with great force; and each of those lever-ends bore down upon a slim vertical rod. The rods were thirty-two in number, arranged in a regular picket-line; each of them resisted movement for a few heart-beats and then gave way, as if some barrier had been breached. This sudden yielding enabled the piston at the opposite end to fly up until it tripped a lever affixed to a vertical pushrod on the outside of its pipe. The pushrod transmitted force down to some air-gate at the base of the pipe, which sprang open, allowing the piston to fall down to its starting-place. It was all over in a few moments. Miss Spates pulled the knob that caused all the keys to pop up to the zero position.

The coda to the performance was a faint skirling noise that emanated from the works for a few seconds. Then a little golden spume jetted from a cavity on the front of the console, and was caught by a porcelain bowl beneath. Daniel snatched this and showed it to the visitors. It contained several tiny disks of gold, like faery-coins, some of which were still spinning and buzzing round on their rims. “These bits,” Daniel said, “are all of a common weight, which means that to weigh them is to count them; the count is then tallied.”

“Tallied in what way?” Johann asked.

“The clerk examines the card,” Daniel said, indicating the snarled document Miss Spates had been reading from, “and checks the sum of each number, to know how many bits ought to have been punched out; if this agrees not with the number of bits in the bowl, the card is in error, and is sent back to be re-melted. A rare occurrence, for Miss Spates does not make Mis-takes!”

Indeed Miss Spates had already reached up to grip a brass lever, and hauled back on it once; this had ratcheted the iron pallet a short distance deeper into the machine, as she verified by a glance into the prism. The bellows-wenches were singing again, and Miss Spates had found a new number on the card, and was registering it upon the keys. In a few moments came another climax of singing, hissing, and clunking; another convulsion of many levers and another rill of golden bits. After several more repetitions, Hannah Spates rose and got out of the way; the bellows-wenches climbed down and headed off in the direction of a beer-bucket; and the overseer stepped in to haul the iron pallet backwards out of the machine. He retrieved the golden card, which had been Swiss-cheesed by scores of neat round holes. Each of these was situated at an intersection of the Grid of Monsieur Descartes; but not all of the intersections had been punched. The result was a curious admixture of order and randomness, perhaps akin to what one would observe in a neatly printed message that was, however, written in some inscrutable cypher.

“My understanding of Clerkenwell Court has been much advanced,” was Eliza’s verdict, “and yet there remains much that is mysterious. I see, for example, why you have recruited organ-makers. But not the man who makes lightning.”

“We bought a stock of parts from a Dutch organ-maker who was returning to his home country, and so this machine was fabricated using the tricks of that trade,” Daniel allowed. “A toy-maker, a horologist, or electrical enthusiast might have reached the same destination, via a different route.”

“But this is not, as I gather, the machine that does the thinking?”

“The Logic Mill will be a different machine entirely,” Daniel said.

“Will be? And so it does not exist yet?”

“The punching of the cards will take a great deal of time, even if we build many more machines like this one, and put all of Bridewell to work,” Daniel said. “Moreover, the Logic Mill cannot be designed, built, or tested, until we have some samples of cards to give it. And so in our work to date we have borne down very hard on the card-punching problem. As you have seen, that problem is solved. Additional machines like this one are now being made; but most of our efforts may now be devoted to the Logic Mill.” Daniel cleared his throat delicately. “A significant infusion of Capital would be most welcome.”

“I should say so!” Johann exclaimed. “Why are you making the cards out of gold?”

“It is ductile, hence easily made into cards of perfectly uniform thickness. Yet it is durable, for it is the only metal that does not rust or tarnish. But that is not why we need capital. Strange to relate, we already have enough gold locked away in our vault to transcribe all of the paper cards that I brought with me.”

“Please say more on that—?” Eliza requested.

“Oh, when I came here from Boston I brought several boxes of these paper cards—enough to inform the logical kernel of a machine.”

“Why did you?”

“Because, madame, the Massachusetts Bay Colony Institute of Technologickal Arts has been generously supported by men of some importance, and I thought they might like to see tangible evidence that I had actually been doing something. No, I did not anticipate any of this.” He extended a hand toward the machine, and followed up with a judicious hooding of the eyelids, and a nod at Caroline.

“There are more cards still in Boston, then?”

“I left almost all of them behind in Massachusetts. But God willing they are at this very moment being loaded into the hold of a ship, Minerva, which I believe is known to you. She sailed from London in late April, and ought to have reached Boston Harbor last week.”

“When Minerva, God willing, returns to London, then you shall have need of more gold for making into cards,” Johann observed.

“By a happy coincidence,” Daniel said with a dry smile, “more gold is expected to reach us, by sea, at the same time. And so when I speak of our need for capital, I am not referring to gold for card-making.”

“As a sort of technologickal adventurer, Doctor, you are suffered, nay encouraged, to imbibe of a sort of optimism that in other disciplines—such as finance—would be reckoned incompetence,” Eliza said. “I am being asked to act as a financier, and can afford myself no such luxury. I say that you are gambling too much on the likelihood that two ships—one freighted with cards, the other with gold—shall arrive in London safely and at the same time.”

“The point is well taken,” Daniel said, “and so let me simplify matters by letting you know that the cards and the gold are on the same ship.”

“Minerva carries both?”

“And I think you know what a fine ship she is. I would sooner trust gold to the bilge of Minerva than the vaults of many a banca. It is safe to predict that, round the beginning of August, she will drop anchor in the Pool, and we shall have all of the requisites to punch a large number of these cards. What is wanted, in the meantime, is financing to sustain the operations of Clerkenwell Court, so that we may build the Logic Mill.”

“May I presume that you have already tried and failed to get additional support from your benefactor?”

“Roger Comstock is the one who proposed that I consult you, madame.”

“I never thought one such as he could run out of money.”

“Properly speaking, it is a question of liquidity. Much now hangs in the political balance, as you know. The perils that have forced Princess Caroline to seek refuge far from the gardens of Hanover, have not failed to press in, almost as hotly, on the Marquis of Ravenscar. He has extended his resources to the utmost, readying and arming himself for the coming struggle against Bolingbroke.”

“And not without effect, if yesterday’s news from Parliament be true,” Johann put in.

“Yesterday was a victory for Comstock—but it was little more than a skirmish. Ahead lie battles.”

“It is a wonder he has time or money for Logic Mills at all,” Johann remarked.

“In truth, he does not, and has quite forgotten about us for now,” Daniel said.

“So you require a sort of bridge loan,” Eliza said.

“Indeed, madame.”

“A bridge-builder cannot practice his trade, unless he knows the length of the span to be made—”

“The length is from now until a Hanover is crowned King or Queen of Great Britain.”

“That could be never.”

“And yet, as a wise woman once remarked, we are all gambling on it.”

“It could be years, then.”

“Queen Anne is as likely to live to the end of 1714 as I am to go to Naples and sell myself in the town square as a gigolo,” Daniel averred.

“What is the amount you seek?”

“A stipend, delivered at regular intervals. Mr. Ham has drawn up some figures.”

“That sounds boring,” Eliza said, “and so I propose a parting of the ways. Johann, who has a head for numbers, can look at Mr. Ham’s. Hildegard may wish to stay with him.”

“And you, madame?”

“I have a head for relationships,” Eliza said, “and so I shall join you in my carriage as you are delivered back to Clerkenwell Court, and I shall discourse to you of the relationship—or to be blunt, what precisely is to be my security for the proposed loan.”

 

“IT IS A CURIOUS sort of Mint that you have created,” Eliza remarked.

Daniel was startled out of a drowsy reverie. The Duchess of Arcachon-Qwghlm had been silent, staring out the window, as her carriage had taken them up the bank of Fleet Ditch and round the western approach of Holbourn Bridge. Now they were stuck in the absurdly mis-named Field Lane, a clogged chute of brick and horse-shit.

London had come awake reluctantly. The Mobility had devoted all of their energies, yesterday, to the Hanging-March; even those who had not actually pushed their way through the crowd to glimpse the awful Derrick raised above Tyburn Cross, had busied themselves picking the pockets, filling the bellies, or satisfying the urges of those who had. As for the Nobility, they had been as preoccupied with a violent and ghastly spectacle of a different character: down in Westminster, the Whigs had suddenly begun to ask pointed questions as to what had become of certain Asiento revenues. Persons of Quality had devoted yester evening and much of the night to liquidating their holdings in the South Sea Company, and gathering in Clubbs and coffee-houses to misinform one another.

But it was now mid-afternoon, and everyone, hanging-watchers and Parliamentarians alike, was finally awake. Except for Daniel Waterhouse, who had almost drifted off when pricked awake by this curious remark from Eliza. “I beg your pardon?” he mumbled, buying time to wake himself up.

“I am trying to hatch a similitude for what you are doing at Bridewell,” Eliza returned. Then, sensing that this answer had been none too informative, she straightened her spine, like a cat, and turned her face toward Daniel. She was so beautiful that he flinched. “Gold is meant to be fungible—an ounce of it here is no different from an ounce in Amsterdam or Shahjahanabad.”

I wish someone would explain that to Isaac, Daniel mused, then felt bad, as Isaac was a sick man just now—he’d collapsed in Westminster Palace a couple of weeks ago, and was still lying on a sick-bed at Roger Comstock’s house.

“A financier, asked for a loan, carries out a diligent summing-up of the debtor’s assets, to ensure that the loan shall be secured by something of worth,” Eliza continued. “You have gold. This gold could be weighed, to find its worth. There could be no better security for a loan. But there is a complication. You are not using the gold as gold. You are using it as a medium for storage of information. Or I might say it thus: you are informing it. Once informed by the card-punching organ, it possesses value—to you, at least—that it did not have before. If it were to be melted down, it would lose that value. The only like procedure that I can call to mind, is that whereby blank disks of gold are informed by the blow of a die at the Mint, making ’em into guineas, and thereby imbuing ’em with additional worth—seigneurage, they name it. And so I say that your organ at Bridewell is like a little Mint, and your punched cards are the Coin of a new Realm.”

“You have convinced me,” Daniel said. “I only hope that Sir Isaac does not hear of it, and denominate me a rival.”

“If the rumors as to Sir Isaac’s condition are true,” Eliza said, “you or some rival may soon be running the Mint at the Tower. But that is beside the point. Supposing you build the Logic Mill, and it works. Then the value—and I mean value not moral, aesthetic, or spiritual, but oeconomic—of your Institute inheres in the ability to carry out logical and arithmetical work using the cards.”

“Indeed, madame, that is all we can offer.”

“If the cards were foreclosed upon by a creditor, and melted, the information would all be con-fused, the Logic Mill would not do work, and the value we just spoke of would be annihilated.”

“True.”

“It follows that the gold, once wrought into punched cards, becomes a poor form of security indeed, as it cannot be spent, in a monetary sense, without destroying your enterprise.”

“I agree without reservation that the gold cannot secure the loan.”

“Moreover, if I understand the nature of the project, the cards and the machine are to be shipped to the Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg when they are finished.”

“That is true of the first set.”

“But subsequent ones, supposing you build more, shall become the property of the Marquis of Ravenscar.”

“As currently envisioned, yes.”

“All that I would be left with would be some news that I might use to my advantage in certain markets. This is a sort of game I played to great advantage when I was young, and had nothing to lose, and no one who depended on me. But now I require tangible equity in exchange for my investments. I invest with my head, not my heart.”

“And yet it is plain that you support Dappa, and I have heard that you contribute generously to hospitals for Veterans and Vagabonds.”

“As charities, yes. But it is too late for you to remake your Institute as a charity.”

“Then let me tell you something of the Logic Mill that not even Roger knows,” Daniel sighed.

“You have my attention, Doctor.”

“It will not work.”

“The Logic Mill will not do logic?”

“Oh, yes, of course it will do that. Doing logic with a machine is not so very difficult. Leibniz took it up where Pascal dropped it, and I built upon Leibniz’s work for fifteen years in Boston. Now I have turned it over to a cabal of ingenious fellows who in fifteen weeks have advanced further than I did.”

“Then what do you mean, when you say it will not work?”

“When I returned from Hanover two days ago I devoted some time to reviewing the schemes that the ingénieurs have devised. I am most pleased with the results. But then I discovered a grave difficulty: we want power.”

“Ah, you spoke to me of this in Hanover.”

“Indeed, for then I had begun to suspect what I now know: that the Logic Mill shall require a source of Power, in the newfangled Mechanickal sense of that word, that is both mighty and steady. A very large water-wheel in a great river might serve; but much better would be—”

“The Engine for Raising Water by Fire!”

“If you were to invest in that, madame—and rest assured that it does want investors—you could obtain a controlling interest with little difficulty, thereby satisfying your requirement for Equity. With a new financial wind at his back, Mr. Newcomen could clear certain shoals on which the work has recently run aground, and drive on into open and beckoning seas. Meanwhile, here in London, the Logic Mill project shall arrive at an impasse, because of the dearth of Power. It shall happen soon—less than a year from now. You may then take the matter up with the Tsar, or with the Marquis of Ravenscar, or both; they will bargain with you then, madame, having no other choices.”

Eliza gazed out the windows for some minutes. By now they had run the length of Saffron Hill, and the driver had made a detour to the edge of Clerkenwell Green and up Rag Street so as to spare himself, his horses, and his passengers a disagreeable and perilous transit of Hockley-in-the-Hole, where at this very moment outrages were being committed that would be punished six weeks hence at the next Hanging Day.

They had entered into the extension of Rag Street called Coppice Row, bringing them full circle. Daniel, gazing forward out his window, spied a carriage stopped before Clerkenwell Court. His heart forgot to beat when he recognized it. Matters were about to become more complicated than he’d have liked them to be. He thumped on the roof, and the driver reined in his team at the corner, a stone’s throw short of the other carriage. “I will alight here,” Daniel said, “as this is an easier place to get your lovely carriage turned round.” Before Eliza could protest he opened the door, and one of her footmen jumped down to help him out.

“You have cast a new light on the matter,” Eliza announced, giving him a prim smile that was the beginning of good-bye. “I am now willing to consider the proposal. But I cannot come to any conclusions until I have become well acquainted with the gentleman who founded the company.”

“The Earl of Lostwithiel,” said Daniel, raising his voice, as he was now out in the street, addressing Eliza through the open carriage-door. “For some weeks he has excused himself from the House of Lords. The illness of his third son forced him to withdraw to the west country. The poor child’s demise extended his absence. I suspect that complications relating to the Engine have drawn it out even further. But even now, news is speeding westwards of yesterday’s doings in Parliament. Lostwithiel must return now. He will be back in London anon. I shall see to it that he pays a call on your grace at Leicester House.”

 

“THIRTY-SEVEN MINUTES AGO,” said the big horologist named Saturn, “a strange old Tory appeared at our gates and begain baying for Doctor Waterhouse.” He nodded at the carriage parked in front of his shop.

Daniel had already recognized it. “Where is Mr. Threader now?” he inquired.

“I have plied him with tea, and given him a brief look round the place—not letting him see any of the good bits—and then advanced from tea to brandy. He is drinking it three doors down, in that shop where the plasterers were finishing up yesterday.”

“Thank you, Mr. Hoxton,” Daniel said, putting a hand on the door to go out.

“You are welcome,” Peter Hoxton said, in a guarded way, “but I must say, if I had known, when Fate brought us together, what sort of persons you associate with, I should never have pursued the acquaintance.”

Daniel exited smiling. His expression changed over to one of surprise as a second carriage—a battered hackney, its wheel rims thumping from dents and clotted horse-turds—came up Coppice Row at reckless speed, and halted, in serial and ramshackle style, just ahead of Mr. Threader’s. The door flew open. Out stepped a red-faced, white-haired, black-suited Nonconformist. Immediately behind him came a small man in breeches, waistcoat, &c., of a more conventional cut, though made of materials so florid as to be almost tribal. And behind him came a common-looking bloke who was even bigger than Saturn. He stayed behind to flick coins into the outstretched palm of the coachman.

“Brother Norman. Mr. Kikin. What a pleasure,” Daniel said, moving to intercept them before they could reach the door of the clock-shop, and further damage Saturn’s esteem for him. “I had not been notified that our Clubb was to meet to-day; but I welcome you to Clerkenwell Court, and I shall welcome our Treasurer too, when I have run him to ground.”

“Mr. Threader is here?” said the astonished Mr. Kikin, and cast a comical look up and down Coppice Row. This was then mimicked by his bodyguard, who had taken up his usual station behind Mr. Kikin’s shoulder.

“Why?” demanded Mr. Orney; but just then the door of a vacant storefront burst open, and out came Mr. Threader, already red in the ears from brandy.

“I haven’t the vaguest notion of why you two are here,” he proclaimed, “but since you are, I hereby call to order an emergency meeting of the Clubb for the Taking and Prosecution of the Party or Parties responsible for the Manufacture and Placement of the Infernal Engines lately Exploded at Crane Court, Orney’s Ship-yard, et cetera!”

“First order of business: selecting a shorter name,” Mr. Orney suggested.

“The first order of business, as ever, shall be the Collection of Dues—presuming as always that you are still solvent, Mr. Orney.”

“If news from Westminster is true, it is not my solvency that bears examination—Mr. Threader.”

“It is of Parliament that I would discourse—which is why that is to be the second order of business—those Members who arrived late must wait their turn.”

“How can we be late for a meeting that was called after we arrived!?”

“Gentlemen,” Daniel said, “I fear we are disturbing our neighbors in Hockley-in-the-Hole. May we—please—take this inside?”

 

IT MIGHT ONE DAY serve as a pub or coffee-house, but for the nonce it was an empty room, freshly plastered, strewn with straw. The walls were white, darkling to overcast gray in the corners where still-damp plaster emitted palpable warmth and a nostril-stinging fragrance. The Clubb set up an impromptu Parliament there, using overturned buckets as chairs, and an upright barrel as lectern. These were improvised by Saturn and Mr. Kikin’s bodyguard during the time that Mr. Threader raked in the Dues with all the weighing, biting, and microscopic examination of coins, and injurious commentary, that had become a Clubb custom. Then it was time for Mr. Threader to take command of the barrel. As he all too soon discovered, this was empty, and when struck with the fist emitted a tremendous boom, useful for rhetorical effect.

“When a Ship of Force appears before the breakwater, and lobs a mortar-shell (boom) into the town (boom), you may be certain of two things: first (boom) that the enemy has been laying its plans for many months in advance; second (boom) that more (boom) mortar (boom) shells (boom) are shortly to follow (boom boom boom).”

“More brandy, Mr. Threader?” suggested Mr. Orney; but Threader ignored him.

“Yesterday,” continued Mr. Threader, “the notorious leader of the Faction dropped (boom) a bomb (boom) in the House of Lords, discomposing the awful dignity, and shattering the traditional somnolence, of that August Body!”

“I have heard it said that if there were a way to invest in Apoplexy, one could have gotten rich in Westminster yesterday,” said the Russian.

“As you are a Foreigner, sir, your amusement, like your person, are tolerated even if not welcomed. Those of us who live here must consider it soberly.” He shot Orney a warning look to nip in the bud any plays on the word. “To revisit my similitude of the Ship and the Mortar-Shell, we must ask, how long has Ravenscar been planning this? And where will the next (boom) shell (boom) fall (boom)?”

“It’ll fall on your head if you keep striking that barrel-head,” Mr. Orney muttered.

“I have heard that yesterday was a lively one indeed for the South Sea Company, and doubtless for your enterprise, Mr. Threader,” Daniel said. “In fact, such must be the demands upon your professional services, that I am astonished to find you here. Yes, Comstock has put Viscount Bolingbroke on the spot regarding that Asiento money. But what has that got to do with our Clubb?”

“It has been a strange fortnight for men whose business is to handle money,” Mr. Threader said.

“Thank you for sharing that reflection with us, sir,” returned Mr. Orney. “How does it bear on the very reasonable question just asked by Brother Daniel?”

“Men have been gathering up guineas, removing them from circulation, paying for them with French coins or other specie. It is all part of a subtile and covert investigation of the coinage, set afoot, ’tis said, by Bolingbroke.”

“I move,” said Daniel, “that we suspend Mr. Threader’s remarks, and move him away from the Barrel, until such time as he professes a willingness to divulge, plainly and tersely, why the hell he is here; and in the meantime that either Brother Norman or Mr. Kikin take the Barrel and explain why they are here.”

This motion passed by acclamation. Threader turned his back on all of them, a sullen gesture that elicited some hooting. Orney rose to speak; and in his Nonconformist get-up, standing before a barrel on a straw-covered floor, he looked for all the world like an itinerant preacher-man convening a barn-load of rustic believers.

“Though hangings might yesterday have been the talk of the Newgate-Tyburn axis, and the vanished Asiento money the sensation of Westminster and the City, the great happening of the day in Rotherhithe was the arrival—I shall employ dry understatement, and call it startling—of a Russian war-galley. She rowed here direct from St. Petersburg. To judge from the number of available places on her benches, she was driven with a speed fatal to several oarsmen; and the diverse large-caliber holes in her hull attest to at least one encounter with the Swedish Navy. At any rate, she got here, and now graces one of my docks, for she wants repairs. No sooner had she been made fast to my pier than several furry emissaries came down the gangplanks and fanned out into the city—”

“Rats?” guessed Mr. Threader.

“Russians,” said Orney, “though of course there were some rats, too. One of the Russians brought a message to Mr. Kikin. Another brought one to me.”

“No doubt the Tsar is running low on warships, and wants to know when you will be finished with those you are supposed to be building for him,” said Mr. Threader.

“Oh I am building them, sir,” Orney returned, “notwithstanding the best efforts of Infernal Engine-makers.”

“I applaud you, Brother Norman,” Daniel said, “for being the first man to say anything that is actually relevant to this Clubb’s purpose.”

“What shall your answer be, to the impatient Tsar?” Threader asked cruelly.

“Progress is being made,” Orney said, “though I do confess it would be made faster if my fire-office would deign to make good on the losses for which they were supposedly insuring me.”

“A-ha!” exclaimed Mr. Threader, satisfied.

“Why should your fire insurer not compensate you for what was plainly a fire?” Daniel asked.

“The policy that I bought from them contains an exemption for fires consequent to Acts of War. They have taken the position that the ship was set fire by Swedish incendiaries.”

This was too much for Mr. Threader, who put both hands over his face to stifle a guffaw. Mr. Orney’s deadly adversary he might be in nearly every regard; but in their hostility towards the insurance industry, the two men were as blood brothers. “Oh yes,” he burst out, “a Londoner can scarce set foot out of his house nowadays without being set on fire by a roving Mobb of Swedish Incendiaries!”

“I think you have made your predicament clear, Brother Norman,” said Daniel. “You require that the Clubb achieve its stated goal, so that you may claim the money you are due from your insurer; complete the ships; and escape the wrath of the Tsar.” He turned now to the Muscovite. “Mr Kikin, are you at liberty to disclose the import of the message brought to you yesterday?”

“His Imperial Majesty made some references to Mr. Orney. To relate these now were redundant,” said Kikin. “He takes the side of the insurance company in suspecting Swedish Incendiaries.” A pause to clear his throat and inspect his nails as another juicy spate of laughter escaped from behind the hands of Mr. Threader. “His Imperial Majesty then wrote, or I should say, dictated to his scribe, a surpassingly bizarre discourse concerning some gold plates, which he desires ardently, notwithstanding the fact that they have been, in some sense, damaged; and he puts it all down to a fellow named Doctor Daniel Waterhouse—a name I never dreamed I should stumble across in an official communication from the Tsar of All the Russias.”

“It’s a long story,” Daniel said, to end the long and profound silence that ensued—for Mr. Kikin’s revelation had left even Mr. Threader dumbstruck.

“The Tsar has a long memory—and a long reach,” Kikin reminded him.

“Very well, it’s like this,” Daniel said, and flipped open the latch on the little card-case he had been carrying around. At Bridewell he had dropped off the blank cards made this morning, and swopped them for ones that had been punched by Hannah Spates, and audited by the clerk. He displayed one to the Clubb, holding it up to a window so that light would shine through the holes. “As you can see, to describe it as damaged reflects an error in translation or transcription—what the Tsar meant was that it would have a lot of holes punched in it.”

“It is hardly the first strange request that His Imperial Majesty has made,” said Kikin. Indeed, the Russian was taking this much more matter-of-factly than Orney or Threader, who were so befuddled that they almost looked frightened.

Daniel said, “By the time that Brother Norman has this galley ship-shape, which will be—?”

“A week,” said Orney. “God willing.”

“By then I shall have damaged quite a few more, and they shall be ready to ship to St. Petersburg. If the Tsar is pleased by the results, the project in question may then move forward. But as this has nothing to do with the Clubb, let us set it aside for now.” And he literally did, putting the card back in the chest and setting it aside.

“Well, if we’re to speak no further of Brother Daniel’s entanglements in Muscovy,” said Mr. Orney, “perhaps Mr. Threader would now care to explain his presence.”

“I would speak to the Clubb of an Opportunity,” said Mr. Threader—who had finally composed himself and re-established his customary dry and dignified mien. He was gazing pensively out the window, and so did not witness the other members rolling their eyes and glancing at their watches. After a pause for effect, he made a half-turn and began looking them in the eye, each in turn. “Dr. Waterhouse has raised the possibility that the Infernal Device that nearly killed him and me in Crane Court, might not have been intended for either one of us—but rather for Sir Isaac Newton, who was known to frequent Crane Court late of a Sunday evening. This hypothesis was roundly hooted down at our previous meeting, and I shall be the first to confess that I was extremely skeptickal of it. But everything has changed. In the Clubbs and coffee-houses of the City, one name is now on every tongue: Jack the Coiner. At Westminster, in Lords, and in Star Chamber, who is the man they speak of? The Duke of Marlborough? No. Prince Eugene? No. It is Jack the Coiner. At the Tower of London, rumors abound that Jack the Coiner goes in and out of the Mint at will. Why is my lord Bolingbroke investigating the fineness of Her Majesty’s coinage? Why, because he fears it has been adulterated by Jack the Coiner. Why has Sir Isaac Newton suffered a nervous collapse? Because of the mischief committed against him by Jack the Coiner. Now, I ask you men of the Clubb: supposing, for the sake of argument, that we credit the extraordinary hypothesis of Dr. Waterhouse as to the intended victim of the first Infernal Device: what man would have a motive to assassinate him whose charge it is to prosecute all coiners, and send them to Tyburn to be torn apart? Why, a coiner! And among coiners, which would command the resources, which would have the cunning, to build and to place an Infernal Device?”

Kikin and Orney were silent, sullenly declining to participate in Threader’s call-and-response.

“Jack the Coiner,” said Daniel dutifully—since it was, after all, his hypothesis.

“Jack the Coiner. And therein lies the Opportunity I spoke of.”

“An opportunity to have our throats slit from ear to ear?” Mr. Orney inquired.

“No! An opportunity to be of service to great men—men such as Her Britannic Majesty’s Secretary of State Viscount Bolingbroke, Mr. Charles White, and Sir Isaac Newton!”

“Ah, yes, that would seem like an Opportunity for some,” said Mr. Kikin, “but not for me, as I am already quite busy being of service to the Greatest Man in the World. Thank you anyway.”

“As for myself,” said Mr. Orney, “I am put in mind of Our Saviour, who made Himself of service to the poor by washing their feet with His own hands. Following His example as best a sinner may, I can have no larger ambition than to be of service to my common ordinary brethren, the salt of the earth. The Viscount Bolingbroke can look after himself.”

Mr. Threader sighed. “I had phant’sied I might fire this Clubb with renewed lust for the pursuit.”

Daniel said, “Mr. Kikin and Mr. Orney each has his own reason to join in that pursuit, as they have just explained to us—so why don’t let’s each pursue Jack for his own motives. If you wish to construe it as an Opportunity, it is of no account to me one way or the other.”

“I have been making inquiries about this knave Jack,” Mr. Threader said. “It is rumored that he is from time to time seen around the warehouses of Mr. Knockmealdown.”

Orney scoffed. “That is like saying he has been spotted in England,” he pointed out, “since the hideaways and bolt-holes of the East London Company spread across half of the Borough.”

“Who is this person? What is this company?” Mr. Kikin wanted to know.

“Mr. Knockmealdown is the most notorious receiver of stolen goods in the metropolis,” Daniel said.

“That is no mean distinction,” Mr. Kikin said, “as this place has as many fences as constables.”

“To be sure, there are thousands of those,” Daniel assured him, “but only a few dozen receivers of note.”

Orney put in, “There is only one who has amassed capital sufficient to receive goods on a large scale—say, the whole contents of a pirated ship, as well as the ship itself. That is Mr. Knockmealdown.”

“And this man has a company?!”

“Of course not,” Orney said. “But he has an organization, which has ramified and spread from Rotherhithe—where I am sorry to say he got his start—up the bank to encompass a considerable part of the Bermondsey and Southwark waterfronts. Some wag once, drawing a facetious comparison to the British East India Company, dubbed it the Irish East London Company, and the name has stuck.”

“So Mr. Threader has tracked our quarry as far as the south bank of the River Thames,” Daniel said. “Meanwhile our missing member, Henry Arlanc, has, he assures me, been pursuing his investigations among the Vault-men of Fleet Ditch, so far to no practical effect. Has there been any progress in retaining a thief-taker?”

“I spent, or rather wasted, some time on it,” said Mr. Kikin. “I posted a reward, and heard from several who feigned interest. But when I explained the nature of the work to them, they quickly lost interest.”

“If the hypothesis of Brother Daniel and Mr. Threader is correct, this explains itself,” said Mr. Orney. “Thief-takers, as I understand them, are petty scoundrels—poachers of small game. Such a varlet would not dare challenge Jack the Coiner.”

“Perhaps, rather than posting a reward, it were better to find one thief-taker who is resolute, and treat with him directly,” Mr. Threader suggested.

“It is most generous of the two of you to share these notions with me,” said Mr. Kikin, “but I have anticipated you, and made efforts to reach Mr. Sean Partry.”

“And that is—?” Orney asked.

“The most famous of all living thief-takers,” Kikin announced.

“I have never heard of him,” said Threader.

“Because you are a City man—why should you? Rest assured he enjoys a high reputation in the demimonde—several of the petty thief-takers who came to me after I posted the reward, mentioned his name with great respect.”

“Supposing that he is all that he’s reputed to be—even so, can he challenge the likes of Jack the Coiner?” Daniel asked.

“More to the point, will he?” Threader added.

“He will,” Kikin returned, “for ’tis said that his younger brother was slain by a member of Jack’s gang. As to whether he can, this shall be discovered before we have to pay him very much money.”

“Very well, provided we can settle on a clear definition of this troubling phrase very much money, I would be amenable to further contacts with Mr. Sean Partry,” said Mr. Threader; and the others seemed to say, with little nods of their heads, that they did not disagree.

“We’ve not heard from you, Brother Daniel,” said Orney. “Have you continued in your own investigation? How goes it?”

“It goes splendidly,” Daniel returned, “but it is a slow strategy that I am pursuing, one that shall reward our patience. Notwithstanding which, results are beginning to develop: both the Marquis of Ravenscar and the Royal College of Physicians have been victims of burglary in the last month. I could not be more satisfied.”

The other three exchanged looks, but none would be first to admit that he could not understand what Daniel was talking about. He was developing a reputation, it seemed, as a strange bloke who wandered about London in possession of perforated gold plates badly wanted by the Tsar; and the instincts of Mr. Orney, Mr. Threader, and Mr. Kikin were not to pry into the Pandora’s Box that, it seemed, was the life of Dr. Waterhouse.