Neal Stephenson: THE System OF THE WORLD

The cord snaps! Jack drops a couple of inches, the noose clubs him in the back of the head, the rope draws tighter.

Jack keeps watching his brother. Now, as in the early years of his life, there is no one else in the world.

Bob until now has kept his hands together in front of him, tucked into the capacious sleeves of his garment. Now, seeing Jack’s distress, he draws them apart, and holds them up in the air like a saint. The sleeves churn. Two larks fly out of the right one, and a blackbird from the left. They flutter aimlessly about the gallows for a few moments, then identify it as Not a Real Tree, and ascend into the light.

Jack feels the pressure of the world being relieved.

He has no trouble taking the birds’ meaning: they have escaped. All three of them. They are headed for America.

There is a roaring. He cannot know if it is the blood in his ears, or the Mobb, or, perhaps, a legion of demons and a choir of angels fighting for possession of his soul. Jack rolls his eyes high up in their sockets, trying to keep those birds in view. The sky, which was blue a moment ago, has turned uniformly gray, and its compass is narrowing. It shrinks to a lead coin with two white birds and a black one minted on its face.

IN DUE TIME MR. THREADER seizes the cupel with tongs and upends it over the freshly polished scale-pan of the balance. The ingot-an oblate bead-falls out, and spins and buzzes on the pan. Some flecks of burnt bone fall around it; Mr. Threader blows these away and then gives the ingot an exploratory nudge or two with his tweezers, to satisfy himself that no other impurities have stuck to it. When he is certain that there’s nothing on that pan except for pure gold, he places a ten-grain standard weight on the opposite pan. This is not nearly enough to balance the ingot-which is good, as far as it goes-and so, now wielding the ivory-handled tweezers, he adds a one-grain weight. Then a half-grain. The scale has gone into motion but still inclines toward the ingot of gold. Mr. Threader is working now with standard weights so small that Daniel can hardly see them: they are evanescent squares of gold foil stamped with fractions. He makes a messy pile of them and then stops, stumped. He removes a lot of small ones and replaces them with a larger one, and hems and haws. Finally he removes every single one of the standard weights, sets them back in their niches in the case, and puts on the single twelve-grain weight that he used earlier to weigh the sample of guinea fragments.

The pans oscillate for a long time, the needle making equal excursions to either side of dead center. After a while, friction prevails, and it stops. It is so close to being perfectly centered that in order to read it Mr. Threader must place his hand over his nose and mouth, so that his breathing won’t startle it, and practically polish the thing with his eyelashes.

Then he draws back: the only man in the room who is moving so much as a muscle. For everyone has marked the delay, and noticed the twelve-grain weight on the other pan: very odd.

“The ingot weighs twelve grains,” Mr. Threader proclaims.

“There must be some error,” says a flummoxed senior Goldsmith. “Such a thing is impossible unless all the guineas contain no base metals whatsoever!”

“Or,” says Mr. Threader under his breath to Daniel, “the base metals were converted to gold in the cupel!”

“There must have been some error in the assay,” the senior Goldsmith continues, beginning now to look to his Guild-fellows, to erect a consensus.

But William Ham is having none of it. “That is a difficult accusation to sustain, without evidence,” he points out.

“The evidence is right there before our eyes!” complains the elder, gesturing at the balance.

“That is evidence only that Sir Isaac makes good guineas, and that the British coin is the soundest currency of the whole world,” William says doggedly. “Every member of this Jury watched-nay, participated in-the Assay. Did we not? None of us saw anything amiss. By our silence we have already consented to it, and vouchsafed its result. To reverse ourselves now, and say ’twas all done wrong, is to go before that man and say, ‘My lord, we do not know how to do an assay!’ ” William gestures toward the end of Star Chamber, where the Duke of Marlborough’s absorbed in conversation with some other dignitary.

William’s a banker, not a practicing Goldsmith. In the councils of that Company he is of low rank and little account. But outside their Clubb-house, in the City of London, he has earned a gravitas that makes heads turn his way when he speaks. This is why they nominated him as Fusour. Perhaps it is why the senior Goldsmith is calling the Assay into question; he’s spooked by William’s influence. Such political currents are too subtle for Daniel to follow; all he needs to know is that the Goldsmiths and the City men alike are swayed by William’s words. If they trouble to look at the senior Goldsmith at all, it is in glances over their shoulders, as if looking back curiously at one who has fallen behind.

To his credit, the elder sees clearly enough the way it’s going. He cringes once at what he’s being forced to do, then his face slackens. “Very well,” he says, “let us give Sir Isaac his due, then. He has exasperated us more than any other Master of the Mint; but no one has ever claimed he did not know his way around a furnace.” He turns toward Marlborough, as do the other Goldsmiths, and they all bow. Marlborough notes it and nods to the chap he’s been talking to, who turns around to see it. Daniel recognizes the fellow as Isaac Newton, and feels a kind of pride that his friend is being honored in this way, and that he seems at last to have earned the trust of Marlborough. A moment passes before Daniel remembers that Isaac is dead.

This courtly scene is disturbed by trouble in the gallery leading in from New Palace Yard: some uncivil person is trying to crash the party, and the Serjeant is dutifully trying to stop him. Their dispute and their footsteps draw nearer.

“What business-”

“The King’s business, sir!”

“Whom would you-”

“My captain, sir! The Duke of Marlborough! Perhaps you will have heard of him!” The speaker stomps right into Star Chamber, moving in an uneven gait: a uniformed Colonel with a peg-leg of carven ebony. Then he stops, realizing he’s just burst in upon a solemn moment, and doesn’t know what to say. It promptly gets worse: recent evolutions have given the Lords waiting in the side chamber the idea that they have been missing out on something. Most of them choose this moment to debouche into the Star Chamber wearing expressions that say, “Explain, or be hanged!”

Daniel by now has recognized the peg-legged colonel: this is Barnes of the Black Torrent Guard. Barnes was already of a mind to dig his own grave and jump into it even before the King’s Remembrancer, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, First Lord of the Treasury, Lord Privy Seal, and Lord Chancellor filed into the room, followed by enough Hanoverian Dukes and Princes to conquer Saxony. Barnes is now not only peg-legged but peg-tongued and peg-brained. The only man who dares make a sound is Marlborough.

“My lords,” he says, when the side-chamber has emptied out, “we have news from the Jurors. And unless I have mistaken the signs, we have got news from Tyburn Cross as well.”

Daniel glances at Barnes, who is going through a chrestomathy of head-shaking, throat-slitting, eye-bulging, and hand-waving. But Marlborough is oblivious; he’s got eyes only for the Lords of the Council, and the Hanoverians. He goes on, “Would the Juries care to make a preliminary report?”

The Pesour and the Fusour make after-you gestures at each other. Finally William Ham steps forward, and bows. “We shall of course draw up the document presently, and give it to the King’s Remembrancer,” he says, “but it is my great pleasure to inform my lords that the assay has been performed, and it has proved beyond doubt that His Majesty’s currency is sounder than it has ever been in all the history of this Realm, and that the highest accolades are owed to the Master of his majesty’s Mint, Sir Isaac Newton!”