Eliza had turned away from the window and made Daniel Waterhouse the object of her scrutiny. She had, in fact, quite backed him into a corner. Something had occurred to her just now: a wild idea she did not like very much. “You phant’sy that’s all there is, don’t you? When you, Daniel, speak of your life’s work, the only thing you include in that is what you have done on the Logic Mill.”
Daniel showed empty hands to her. “What else is there?”
“At the very least, there is your son Godfrey, whom you ought to go home and look in on! One child in Boston today is a million descendants at some time in the future.”
“Yes, but in what estate, in what sort of country?”
“That is for you to determine. And setting aside Godfrey-consider all you have done in the year since you received the letter from Princess Caroline!”
“I feel it’s all been a muddle.”
“You have done much for this country. For the Engine for Raising Water by Fire. For the abolition of Slavery. For Newton and Leibniz both, though neither of them might appreciate it.”
“As I said before, ’tis all a muddle to me. But I am a great brooder, and you have given me something to brood on for the rest of my days.”
“Don’t only brood on it, if you please. Work it out. See what you have done.”
“In your rendering of the accompt,” said Daniel, “do you find anything at all in the way of assets?”
“Oh, yes,” Eliza said. “The Engine for Raising Water by Fire shall more than pay for all of the losses that I have complained of.”
“I didn’t feel that you were complaining so much as facing facts,” Daniel said.
“I lose money all the time,” she assured him. “I have spent rather a lot on this Slavery project, and it is only beginning-it’ll take at least as long to do away with Slavery as it will to construct a proper Logic Mill, of that I’m sure.”
“Ah, so I’m no worse than you-very kind of you to say so. What is to be your next project, if I may inquire?”
“As far as this investment is concerned? To cut the losses, liquidate what is to no purpose, and redouble investment in what is actually working: the Engine.”
“It seems very reasonable when you put it that way,” said Daniel, for some reason feeling quite relieved. “If the Engine succeeds, by the way, it will help your Cause, by reducing the demand for slave labor-”
“And yours,” she said, “by supplying motive Power for a Logic Mill. Now you are beginning to understand.”
“As Roger liked to say, ’tis a good thing to be educable.”
“Very well!” she said, and clapped her hands. “But there are details for us to attend to, aren’t there, before we become distracted by these grand schemes?”
“We have a way to keep the cards safe from men of that type,” said Daniel, gesturing with his head in the direction of the authorities sacking the Court.
“I had guessed as much. I was thinking of Friday.”
“Two things are happening on Friday: the Trial of the Pyx, and the Hanging-March,” Daniel reminded her. “Which of them do you mean?”
Eliza got that rueful half-smile again. “Both,” she said simply, “for they are one thing now.”
“Then you and I have arrived at the same conclusion,” Daniel said. “It is between Isaac and Jack. For Jack almost certainly placed base metal in the Pyx. If he testifies to that effect, Newton is absolved, and the currency is upheld.”
“Would there be any way to save Newton, and the Currency, without such testimony from Jack?”
“Wouldn’t it be easier to persuade Jack to testify? That would have the added benefit of saving Jack from execution, supposing a deal could be struck-”
“A very questionable supposition, that,” she pointed out, “and at any rate, I don’t want him to make any such deal. I want him to be executed on Friday.”
Daniel was so dumbfounded by this bald utterance that he kept on talking, like a man who has been shot through the head but keeps walking a stride or two before he crumples. “Er-well-even if that is what you want-why not strike a deal that would give him a quick merciful hanging, at least?”
“The original sentence,” she insisted, “is what I want to be carried out against Jack Shaftoe on Friday.”
“So-” Daniel blinked and shook his head, unable to fathom her placid cruelty. “So you are asking me, is there a way for Newton to triumph, in a Trial of the Pyx, even without testimony from Jack?”
“That is what I am asking you, as a Natural Philosopher.”
“You are asking me, then, if the Trial of the Pyx can be rigged!”
“Good day, Dr. Waterhouse; both of us have many things to tend to before Friday,” said Eliza, and walked out of the room.
The Chapel, Newgate Prison
24 OCTOBER 1714
I beseech you, Brethren, by the Mercies of God, that you present your Bodies a Living Sacrifice, Holy, Acceptable unto God; which is your Reasonable Service.
-ROMANS 12:1
ENGLAND’S POWERS TEMPORAL WERE NOT precisely finished with Jack Shaftoe. But they’d done everything to him that was within their scope, found him guilty of the worst of all crimes, thrown him in the worst of all places, sentenced him to the worst of all punishments. They were spent. Their Avenging Sword needed a good working-over with a whetstone, and their terrible quiver was empty. And so they had turned him over to the Powers Spiritual of the Realm, viz. the Church of England. This was the first time-and quite obviously the last-in Jack’s life that he had attracted the notice of that organization. He did not know how to behave under its strange gaze.
The Vagabond-camps of his youth had been more than amply supplied with lunaticks. Indeed Newgate was the only place he had ever been since that contained a higher proportion of madmen.
He and Bob had learnt very early that the Nation of the Insane comprised diverse classes, sects, and parties, each of which must be treated with in a different way. A matched pair of starving ragamuffins, roving around a camp in the middle of some ducal game-park, exerted a powerful draw on maniacs of many types. But for those boys to survive, they had to learn to distinguish between, say, the religious Phanatiques and the p?dophiles. For the consequences of being caught by them were wholly different. A Phanatique might even take it upon himself to defend a couple of boys from the sort of mad Vagabond who was bent on buggery. For this service he might exact a price, namely, to make them hear a sermon. It was in his nature to give sermons, just as it was to lambaste sodomites. As these two behaviors expressed the same nature, they could not be teased apart. The boys had to accept one with the other. From such sermons had the Shaftoe boys learned everything there was to know about the Anglican Church.
Later in his life, Jack was to recollect those open-air sermons with the skepticism of a world-weary adult. The sermonizers were religious maniacs who’d liefer rove the countryside in the company of pestilential Vagabonds than submit to the authority of Anglicans; and so how could such be expected to give a fair and impartial account of what went on in the Church of England? Of the slanders and calumnies that they flung against that Church’s shiny red door, most were probably hallucinations; the remainder might have a germ of truth, but must still consist mostly of perfervid phant’sies. It was not that Jack had any affinity for the Church, any need to hold up their end of the argument. It was rather that he got sick of preachers early on. If he were to give credit to their ravings about the Anglican Church, he must give equal credit to their assertions, so tediously repeated, that he was bound for Hell. He preferred to take a dim view of everything they said, rather than picking and choosing.
This chapel he was sitting in now made him think that everything those Phanatiques told him might have been literally true.
The Phanatiques said that Anglican churches-unlike the open-air conventicles and simple barnlike meeting-houses of the Nonconformists-were divided up into boxes called pews. And lest this sound too attractive to a lot of bored Vagabonds who were standing in the mud or, at best, sitting on logs, they likened those pews to livestock pens, in which the churchgoers were pent up like so many sheep waiting to be fleeced, or slaughtered.