“If you want to know whose hand wielded the knife that severed the rope, I cannot give you his name,” Barnes says. “Just then, I was preoccupied with the larger task of leading my troops.”
“How did you lead them? What orders did you give?”
“To form a cordon with fixed bayonets around Jack Ketch and those other participants who were still alive.”
“Did you give an order to fire?”
“No,” says Barnes, “as I judged it would be suicidal; and though I am ever ready to die in the line of duty, I was of the view that for us to commit suicide would have impeded us in the conduct of our mission.”
“I have often thought that the Vicar and the Warrior in you were struggling to achieve dominance, Colonel Barnes. Now I see that the Warrior has at last prevailed. For the Vicar would have opened fire and trusted to God. It is only the Warrior who would have chosen the difficult path of an orderly retreat.”
Barnes-who has been expecting anything but praise-salutes, and goes red in the face.
“They wish to know why the soldiers did not fire on the Mobb to restore order!” says Johann von Hacklheber, speaking on behalf of a formation of very disgruntled-looking Hanoverians.
“Because this is England and we don’t massacre people in England!” Marlborough announces. “Or rather, we do but we are striving to turn over a new leaf. Pray translate that into more diplomatic language, Freiherr von Hacklheber, and see to it that the new King quite gets the message, so that we don’t have to send the Barkers after him.” Marlborough winks at Daniel.
Isaac has paid little heed to these last few exchanges. “In truth it is just as well for my purposes that Jack Shaftoe’s corpse was left intact, for I have been looking forward to conducting an autopsy on the wretch at the College of Physicians, to find out what on earth made him the way he was.”
“I know,” says Barnes. “All London knows, for Jack announced as much-somewhat more colorfully-from the gallows. It was this very thing that so infuriated the Mobb.”
“So be it,” says Isaac, with a shrug. “Have your men take the corpse to the College of Physicians.”
“We don’t know where it is,” says Colonel Barnes.
“On Warwick Lane, off Newgate.”
“No. I meant, we don’t know where the corpse is.”
“I beg your pardon?” says Isaac, and looks to Marlborough. But the Duke is in a frank Cultural Exchange with his Hanoverian counterparts and has no time for Isaac. It has taken the Germans some time to fully comprehend the impertinence of Marlborough’s quip about the Barkers, and to believe that the Duke actually said something that rude; now they are waxing wroth, getting a bit foamy even. Johann von Hacklheber, seeing he’s caught in a perilous crossfire, is edging away, trying to make himself party to the safer and more interesting conversation re: Jack Shaftoe’s carcass.
“After the dead body was cut down,” Barnes continues, “some of the Mobb raised it up. I sent soldiers to wrest it from them. The Mobb scampered away and gave it a right good heave.”
“On to the ground?”
“No, it was caught and raised up on high again by others of the Mobb; and when they spied my soldiers coming for them, they gave it another heave, so that others, farther from the gallows, took up the burthen. And from there it developed into a sort of, well, orderly procedure, and I had to climb up on to the scaffold to see where it went. He sort of glided. Like a leaf, floating on a turbulent and swirling stream, dodging and spinning in unseen Mobb-currents, but ever moving in the same general direction: away from me.”
Isaac sighs, and begins to look his age again. “Spare me any further poetick description and just say forthrightly, please, where did you last see the body of Jack Shaftoe?”
“Sort of dissolving into the western horizon.”
Isaac stares at him.
“The Mobb was of tremendous size,” Barnes explains.
“You are quite certain he was dead at the time he was cut down?”
“If I may, sir, that’s easily answered!” says Johann von Hacklheber. “Anyone who was at Newgate this morning can tell you he was wearing a king’s ransom in cloth-of-gold, and that his pockets bulged with coins. All of which, of course, was payment for Jack Ketch-”
“To hang him fast-break his neck in an instant,” Isaac says. “Very well! Let the Mobb have him then. Let him end up in a potter’s field somewhere.”
“Yes,” says Daniel Waterhouse, “it is a most fitting end for such a villainous man. And this-the new King, the strong Bank, the sound coinage, and all the works of Natural Philosophers and ingenieurs-are a fine beginning for a new System of the World.”
At this, Johann von Hacklheber looks askance at Marlborough, who is close to getting into a sword-fight with some Duke of Germany.
“Never you mind that,” Daniel reassures him, “for it is all part of the System.”
For Time, though in Eternitie, appli’d
To motion, measures all things durable
By present, past, and future
–MILTON, Paradise Lost
Leibniz-Haus, Hanover
NOVEMBER 1714
MOST MEN, standing knee-deep in gold, would talk about that. But not these two eccentric Barons.
“Then he stepped out of his sedan chair and looked perfectly all right,” says Johann von Hacklheber.
He sits down upon an empty barrel. Leibniz, cringing and mincing from the gout, has been seated for some while. They are beneath Leibniz’s great house, in a cellar made to store victuals. But the bottles of wine, the kegs of beer, the turnips, potatoes, and belching buckets of sauerkraut have been hauled out and given to the poor. The place has been filled up with barrels of a different sort. Leibniz, unwilling now to trust anyone in Hanover, left them sealed until Johann arrived. Johann’s been dismantling them, removing the gold plates, and placing them in orderly stacks.
“It sounds as though he was re-animated by the Elixir Vitae,” Leibniz admits.
“I thought you didn’t believe in such things,” says Johann, and gestures at the gold plates all around.
“I don’t think about such matters the way he does,” says Leibniz, “but I can’t rule out the possibility that monads, ordered in the right way, might do things that would seem like miracles to us.”
“Well, you have got all the magic gold you could ever desire, if you want to cure that gout, or-”
“Live forever?”
Johann looks abashed, and instead of answering, picks up his pry-bar, and goes to work on another barrel.
“I suspect that there are some of us who have been living forever,” Leibniz says, “such as your supposed great-uncle, and my benefactor, Egon von Hacklheber. Or Enoch Root, as others know him. Let us suppose that Enoch knows how to manipulate the Subtile Spirit in such a way as to heal diseases and extend life. What of it, then? What has he accomplished? How has it changed anything?”
“Hardly at all,” says Johann.
“Hardly at all,” agrees Leibniz, “save that from time to time he may grant a few years’ undeserved life to someone who would otherwise have perished. Enoch must have been asking himself, these last couple of millennia, what is the point of it all. It is obvious that he took a lively interest in Natural Philosophy, and did what he could to foster it. Why?”
“Because Alchemy was not bringing him satisfaction.”
“Evidently not. Now, Johann, it would seem that Sir Isaac has been granted a few more years by Alchemy, and yet clearly it has not brought him any happiness or enlightenment that he did not possess before. Which gives us another hint as to why it does not satisfy Enoch. You point out that I, likewise, could use the Solomonic Gold in this cellar to extend my life. Let us suppose that it’s true. But obviously this is not the goal toward which I have been directed by Enoch, or by Solomon Kohan. On the contrary! Those two have sought to sequester the gold and keep it out of the hands of the one man who knows how to wield it: Isaac Newton. For me to take up Alchemy at my age, and melt those plates down to make an elixir-why, it’d be Doctor Faustus all over again! And with the same dismal result in the last act.”