“As how could they not,” Solomon returned, “for Mithras was the god of contracts.”
“The god of contracts!?” exclaimed William Ham.
“Indeed,” said Solomon, “and so it is a good thing for you that you have founded your Bank on his Temple.”
“This Mithras does not appear in any Pantheon I have ever heard of.”
“He was not a god of Olympus but one that the Greeks borrowed from the Persians, who had in their turn borrowed him from Hindoostan. From the Greeks his cult spread to the Romans, and became popular around the hundredth year of what you call Anno Domini. Or, as I would put it, some years after the destruction of the Temple of Solomon. Especially among soldiers, such as garrisoned Londinium, along the banks of the Walbrook.”
Solomon had been clambering onto the ladder as he spoke.
“You aren’t going down there?”
“Mr. Ham, I was sent here by the Tsar to investigate the Bank’s security,” said Solomon, “and inspect it I shall!”
Daniel followed Solomon down the ladder. Three of them now squatted together in a vaulted tunnel that ran off into the earth, sloping gently down toward the well so that it, too, acted as a drain. William Ham was left to sit sentry in the Temple of Mithras, and to run for help if they never emerged. But after a very brief shuffle down the tunnel they sensed space above their heads, and found stone steps, which turned to the right and led them down to the level of the groundwater. A creek, perhaps eight feet in breadth, ran sluggishly off into the dark, wending round pilings, moles, and foundations one could only assume supported buildings up on the street. In rainy weather they might have had to stop and turn back. But it was the first day of August and the level did not rise above their ankles as long as they stayed along the side of the channel. So they ventured downstream, shining their lights on walls and foundations as they went, and speculating as to which belonged to which building.
“During the Plague,” Daniel said, “my uncle Thomas Ham-William’s father-enlarged the cellar of his goldsmith’s shop, which cannot be more than a stone’s throw from us. He discovered a Roman mosaic, and diverse pagan coins and artifacts. My wife in Boston is wearing one of them in her hair.”
“What did the mosaic depict?” Solomon asked.
“Some figures that called to mind Mercury. Mr. Ham styled it a Temple of Mercury and made of it a good omen. But it contained other images that would call his opinion into question-”
“Ravens?”
“Yes! How did you know?”
“Carox, the raven, was, to Persians, a messenger of the Gods-”
“As Mercury was to the Romans.”
“Indeed. The worshippers of Mithras believed that as the soul descended from the sphere of the fixed stars to be incarnated on Earth, it passed through all of the planetary spheres along the way, and was influenced by each in turn. In passing through the sphere of Venus the soul became amorous, and so on. The innermost sphere, and the last to wreak its influence on the soul, was that of Mercury or Corax. The practitioners of this cult believed that as the soul prepared for death, and a return to the sphere of the fixed stars, it must reverse that transmigration, shedding first the trappings of Mercury-Corax, then those of Venus, et cetera, and finally-”
“Saturn?” guessed Saturn.
“Indeed.”
“I am honored to be closest to the fixed stars, and least worldly of vices.”
“Accordingly, there were seven ranks. For each rank was a chamber-always subterranean. Your uncle’s cellar was that of Mercury-Corax, where new initiates were taken in. Later they would move through a gate or passage to the next chamber, which would have been decorated with images of Venus, and so on.”
“What was the big chamber under the Bank?”
“You shall be pleased to know it was the chamber of Saturn, for the highest-ranking members,” Solomon said.
“I did feel wondrously at home in the place!”
“If it is true that we are passing the foundations of the Ham goldsmith shop,” said Solomon, “then we are traversing the hierarchy in reverse order, following the same course as souls coming down from the C?lestial Sphere to be incarnated in the World.”
“Funny that,” Daniel said, “for I have just recognized the name of an old friend of mine, who’d be pleased to know where his work stood in the hierarchy.”
They had stopped before a pile of relatively new stone-work, where heavy blocks had been laid to repair some ancient foundation, and to make it ready to support a new building. For the most part it was an uninterrupted bulwark of massive stones; but in one place a long slab had been laid like a lintel across a gap between two others, creating a low squarish opening through which the cellar on the other side could drain if need be. Carved on that lintel in spidery Roman letters was:
CHRISTOPHER WREN A.D. 1672
“This is the Church of St. Stephen Walbrook,” said Daniel.
“No better place for souls to enter the world,” Saturn mused.
They crawled up the drain-a tight fit-and emerged in the church’s tombs. The bell was tolling above. “A grim birth,” Daniel said. It took him a few moments to get his bearings, but then he led Saturn and Solomon up a stair to a room at the back of the church. They were surprised to see daylight coming in through windows-but not half so surprised as the vicar’s wife was to see them. Her eyes were swollen half-shut from weeping, her cries of terror were relatively subdued, and her efforts to chase the muddy interlopers out of the building were desultory. No service was in progress, yet, strangely, many of the pews were occupied by persons who had come to do nothing but sit and pray in silence. Daniel, Saturn and Solomon stumbled out into the half light of early morning. A man was shuffling down Walbrook Street, headed for the Thames, bonging a hand-bell and shouting: “The Queen is dead, long live the King!”
It remains that, from the same principles, I now demonstrate the frame of the System of the World.
–NEWTON, Principia Mathematica
Marlborough House
MORNING OF WEDNESDAY, 4 AUGUST 1714
’Tis a notion in the pamphlet shops that Whiggish libels sell best, so industrious are they to propagate scandal and falsehood.
-FROM A LETTER TO ROBERT HARLEY, 1ST EARL OF OXFORD, QUOTED IN SIR WINSTON CHURCHILL, Marlborough: His Life and Times, VOL. VI
THE LEVEE, OR RITUALIZED, semi-public getting-
out-of-bed-in-the-morning, was an invention of Louis XIV, and like many of the Sun King’s works was frowned upon by all right-minded Englishmen, who knew of it only from lurid yarns told of Versailles court-fops’ prostituting their daughters to wangle an invitation to hold a candlestick or carry a shirt at a levee of the Sun King. This was all Daniel knew of the subject as of nine of the clock on the morning of August 4th, when a messenger knocked him up at Crane Court to inform him that he, Daniel, was one of half a dozen who had been summoned to take part in the Duke of Marlborough’s first levee in London, which was going to commence in an hour’s time.
“But my own levee is not yet finished,” Daniel might have answered, wiping porridge from an unshaven chin. Instead he told the messenger to wait downstairs and that he would be along presently.
Marlborough House was invested by a crowd of several hundred Englishmen, the giddy-tired residue of an ecstatic Mobb that had sung the Duke through the streets of London yesterday: a Roman triumph thrown together on the spur of the moment by disorderly plebeians.