The system of the world - By Neal Stephenson Page 0,476

young woman. They cross the floor of Star Chamber; her head turns to gaze curiously at the assayer’s furnace, whose red light shines on her, so that Daniel recognizes her as Catherine Barton.

She comes in to the chamber and is heralded by the Serjeant. Great is her fame, of course, and so the amount of ogling that now takes place is beyond all boundaries of dignity. It almost would have been better if she had showed up stark naked. “My lords,” she says, for with so many dignitaries in the room she daren’t speculate as to who is in charge, “Sir Isaac Newton is ill. I have sat by his bed this last week and I beseeched him not to answer your summons. He would not heed me, but gave orders that he was to be brought here this morning no matter what. He is very weak, and so, if it please my lords, I have arranged to bring him here in his sedan chair. With your permission, I’ll have him brought in thusly.”

“As his nurse, Miss Barton, is it your opinion that he is fit to understand what is going on around him, and to be tried?” asks the King’s Remembrancer.

“Oh, yes. He knows,” Miss Barton insists, “however, because he is so very weak, he requests that Dr. Daniel Waterhouse act as his spokesman.” And, having now fixed on the King’s Remembrancer as the boss, she steps forward and hands him a letter, presumably written in Isaac’s hand, saying as much.

Generally not one to seize the moment, Daniel acts all out of character now by striding in to the middle of the room while most eyes are still trying to pick him out in the crowd. “If Sir Isaac’s proposal is acceptable to my lords, then I shall be honoured to serve as his hand and voice.”

There is a certain amount of looking back and forth now, but this does not alter what is inside the Pyx, or what is written on the indenture, and so in the end it does not really matter. Suddenly, important heads are nodding all around the room. “It is so ordered,” says the King’s Remembrancer, not before reading the letter through twice. “You have the gratitude of the Council, Dr. Waterhouse. Er, shall we have Sir Isaac’s chair brought in, then?”

“There is no precedent for this, and so pray allow me to suggest one,” Daniel says. “We are soon to move in to the Star Chamber for the Assay, are we not? Then rather than move Sir Isaac twice, I suggest we make him comfortable straightaway in Star Chamber. He can hear the indenture being read from there.”

“So ordered!”

Miss Barton curtseys her way out and flits across Star Chamber, calling to Daniel with her eyes. Daniel excuses himself and backs out. Heads lean in and faces turn to line the doorway. Daniel is confronted by the black obelisk of Isaac’s sedan chair, suspended between two astonished-looking porters. Miss Barton is hissing directions: “In the corner! The corner! No, that one!” There is some almost comical turning about, but finally they understand what she wants: for the sedan’s door to face toward a corner of Star Chamber so that when the door is open Isaac, in his pitiful state, won’t be visible to the entire Chamber. Finally they get it set down the way she wants it. Daniel side-steps through a narrow gap between pole and wall, and backs in to the corner. He glances up one time to see all of those faces in the next room peering through the doorway at him. Then he undoes the latch on the sedan chair’s door and opens it. The first thing he sees is a hand, pale and still, gripping an ornate key. He opens the door farther, letting light shine in so that he can see Isaac sprawled against the wall of his black box, eyes open and mouth a-gape, perfectly still. Daniel need not check his pulse to be certain that what he is looking at, here, is the recently deceased corpse of Sir Isaac Newton, dead at age seventy-one of Newgate gaol-fever.

The Press-Yard, Newgate Prison

TEN MINUTES LATER they are down in the Press-Yard, just off Phoenix Court. It is called a Yard but is really nothing more than a fortified alley. A short caravan is drawn up there, waiting to convey them all to Tyburn: a wagon containing various tools of Mr. Ketch’s trade; a spacious open cart, already loaded with empty