Daniel and Isaac roamed for the better part of an hour, ignoring the shouts and pleadings of the retailers on all sides, until finally Isaac stopped, alert, and sidestepped over to a small folding display-case-on-legs that a tall slender Jew in a black coat had set up. Daniel eyed this Son of Moses curiously-Cromwell had re-admitted these people to England only ten years previously, after they’d been excluded for centuries, and they were as exotic as giraffes. But Isaac was staring at a constellation of gemlike objects laid out on a square of black velvet. Noting his interest, the Kohan folded back the edges of the cloth to reveal many more: concave and convex lenses, flat disks of good glass for grinding your own, bottles of abrasive powder in several degrees of coarseness, and prisms.
Isaac signalled that he would be willing to open negotiations over two of the prisms. The lens-grinder inhaled, drew himself up, and blinked. Daniel moved round to a supporting position behind and to the side of Isaac. “You have pieces of eight,” the circumcised one said-midway between an assertion and a question.
“I know that your folk once lived in a kingdom where that was the coin of the realm, sir,” Isaac said, “but…”
“You know nothing-my people did not come from Spain. They came from Poland. You have French coins-the louis d’or?”
“The louis d’or is a beautiful coin, befitting the glory of the Sun King,” Daniel put in, “and probably much used wherever you came from-Amsterdam?”
“London. You intend to compensate me, then, with what-Joachimsthalers?”
“As you, sir, are English, and so am I, let us use English means.”
“You wish to trade cheese? Tin? Broadcloth?”
“How many shillings will buy these two prisms?”
The Hebraic one adopted a haggard, suffering look and gazed at a point above their heads. “Let me see the color of your money,” he said, in a voice that conveyed gentle regret, as if Isaac might have bought some prisms today, and instead would only get a dreary lesson in the unbelievable shabbiness of English coinage. Isaac reached into a pocket and wiggled his fingers to produce a metallic tromping noise that proved many coins were in there. Then he pulled out a handful and let the lens-grinder have a glimpse of a few coins, tarnished black. Daniel, so far, was startled by how good Isaac was at this kind of thing. On the other hand, he had made a business out of lending money to other students-maybe he had talent.
“You must have made a mistake,” said the Jew. “Which is perfectly all right-we all make mistakes. You reached into the wrong pocket and you pulled out your black money*-the stuff you throw to beggars.”
“Ahem, er, so I did,” Isaac said. “Pardon me-where’s the money for paying merchants?” Patting a few other pockets. “By the way, assuming I’m not going to offer you black money, how many shillings?”
“When you say shillings, I assume you mean the new ones?”
“The James I?”
“No, no, James I died half a century ago and so one would not normally use the adjective new to describe pounds minted during his reign.”
“Did you say pounds?” Daniel asked. “A pound is rather a lot of money, and so it strikes me as not relevant to this transaction, which has all the appearances of a shilling type of affair at most.”
“Let us use the word coins until I know whether you speak of the new or the old.”
“ Newmeaning the coins minted, say, during our lifetimes?”
“I mean the Restoration coinage,” the Israelite said, “or perhaps your professors have neglected to inform you that Cromwell is dead, and Interregnum coins demonetized these last three years.”
“Why, I believe I have heard that the King is beginning to mint new coins,” Isaac said, looking to Daniel for confirmation.
“My half-brother in London knows someone who saw a goldcarolus ii dei gratia coin once, displayed in a crystal case on a silken pillow,” Daniel said. “People have begun to call them Guineas, because they are made of gold that the Duke of York’s company is taking out of Africa.”
“I say, Daniel, is it true what they say, that those coins are perfectly circular?”
“They are, Isaac-not like the good old English hammered coins that you and I carry in such abundance in our pockets and purses.”
“Furthermore,” said the Ashkenazi, “the King brought with him a French savant, Monsieur Blondeau, on loan from King Louis, and that fellow built a machine that mills delicate ridges and inscriptions into the edges of the coins.”
“Typical French extravagance,” Isaac said.
“The King really did spend more time than was good for him in Paris,” Daniel said.
“On the contrary,” the forelocked one said, “if someone clips or files a bit of metal off the edge of a round coin with a milled edge, it is immediately obvious.”
“That must be why everyone is melting those new coins down as fast as they are minted, and shipping the metal to the Orient…?” Daniel began,
“… making it impossible for the likes of me and my friend to obtain them,” Isaac finished.
“Now there is a good idea-if you can show me coins of a bright silver color-not that black stuff-I’ll weigh them and accept them as bullion.”
“ Bullion!Sir!”
“Yes.”
“I have heard that this is the practice in China,” Isaac said sagely. “But here in England, a shilling is a shilling.”
“No matter how little it weighs!?”
“Yes. In principle, yes.”
“So when a lump of metal is coined in the Mint, it takes on a magical power of shillingness, and even after it has been filed and clipped and worn down to a mere featureless nodule, it is still worth a full shilling?”
“You exaggerate,” Daniel said. “I have here a fine Queen Elizabeth shilling, for example-which I carry around, mind you, as a souvenir of Gloriana’s reign, since it is far too fine a specimen to actually spend. But as you can see, it is just as bright and shiny as the day it was minted-”
“Especially where it’s recently been clipped there along the side,” the lens-grinder said.
“Normal, pleasing irregularity of the hand-hammered currency, nothing more.”
Isaac said, “My friend’s shilling, though magnificent, and arguably worth two or even three shillings in the market, is no anomaly. Here I have a shilling from the reign of Edward VI, which I obtained after an inebriated son of a Duke, who happened to have borrowed a shilling from me some time earlier, fell unconscious on a floor-the purse in which he carried his finest coins fell open and this rolled out of it-I construed this as repayment of the debt, and the exquisite condition of the coin as interest.”
“How could it roll when three of its edges are flat? It is nearly triangular,” the lens-grinder said.
“A trick of the light.”
“The problem with that Edward VI coinage is that for all I knew it might’ve been issued during the Great Debasement, when, before Sir Thomas Gresham could get matters in hand, prices doubled.”
“The inflation was not because the coins were debased, as some believe,” Daniel said, “it was because the wealth confiscated from the Papist monasteries, and cheap silver from the mines of New Spain, were flooding the country.”
“If you would allow me to approach within ten feet of these coins, it would help me to appreciate their numismatic excellence,” the lens-grinder said. “I could even use some of my magnifying-lenses to…”
“I’m afraid I would be offended,” Isaac said.