The System Of The World (The Baroque Cycle, #3)

by Neal Stephenson

“You may have hidden virtues, Brother Daniel. Pray overlook my stubborn unwillingness to see them.”

As I am half as old, and twice as big, as you, why, many an idle cove, who does not wot the true nature of our relationship, may ignorantly assume that I am your bodyguard, and, on account of that foolish misapprehension, refrain from stabbing you or bludgeoning you to death.”

Daniel had written eight drafts of his letter back to her, for he knew perfectly well that one day Isaac would find it among her effects, and read it. He would read it every bit as shrewdly as a challenge from Leibniz.

“Before you ask,” Daniel said, “that was a ten.”

Daniel briefly considered hiring one of the printers in St. Paul’s Churchyard to make up a broadsheet in which he, Daniel Waterhouse, declared to the whole world that he was scared shitless nearly all the time.

But he could sense a Newtonian glare boring into the other side of his head,

“Before you embark on a new life overseas, assuming that is your fate,” Jack said, “find Eliza and tell her she is my true love.”

A sense of relief now washed over him as he came to a realization: they were altogether doomed.

General amusement in the Chapel now, occasioned by the facial expressions of Messrs. Ditton and Whiston, who were no longer even putting forth the effort to be angry or agitated. They now looked as if they were resting on slabs at the College of Physicians, about halfway through their own autopsies.

All were mortified on Sir Isaac’s behalf, except for Sir Isaac, who clearly just wanted to be asked questions so that he could answer them and get away from these people.

There is an old master sergeant of that Regiment, a Robert Shaftoe. This Chamber will no doubt be astonished to learn that Sergeant Shaftoe is none other than the brother or half-brother of one Jack Shaftoe, thought to be the same person as Jack the Coiner.

The number of her male admirers had not diminished over the years, but their nature had changed. When she’d been an eligible mademoiselle at Versailles she had caught the eye of the King and been pursued round the place by a horde of lust-blind fops. Now, having passed through marriage, maternity, smallpox, and widowhood, she was the kind of woman that important forty-, fifty-, and sixty-year-old men were always talking about in hushed corners of Clubbs and Salons. From time to time one of these would screw up his courage, sally forth from his redoubt, and buy her a château or something, always to retreat, defeated but not humiliated, honorably scarred, and ennobled in reputation, clustered around by other gentlemen who desperately wanted to know what had happened. To be spurned by a lady who was rumored to have bedded the Duke of Monmouth, William of Orange, and Louis XIV was to enter into a sort of communion with those figures of legend.

“Unaccountably, irrationally, inadvisably, I do. I am his father confessor. He is my disciple and bodyguard. It is another conversation for another day—

Any opponent who does not know this about me, stands at a grave disadvantage; a disadvantage I am not above profiting from.”

“That, and a perverse desire to better himself—to prove he was worthy of me, by becoming more like me. What he did not understand—and what I could not tell him—was that I loved him precisely because he was unlike me.”

If I should be struck by a meteorite during this combat, and killed, they will convey my apologies and my love to my mother.”

“So much for awkward,” he said.

“Gertrude” and Johann had locked their eyes together across the room. Eliza could have detonated a barrel of gunpowder and they would not have heard it.

Sergeant Shaftoe was not the sort who would admit to being startled or impressed by anything; but at least he did not look bored or contemptuous—a signal achievement for Roger Comstock.

“A war?” “Much nastier: a Parliamentary inquiry.

“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.

“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.”

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.