“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.
“You could inspect this one as closely as you wanted,” Daniel said, “and find no evidence of criminal tampering-I got it from a blind innkeeper who had suffered frostbite in the fingertips-had no idea what he was giving me.”
“Didn’t he think to bite down on it? Like so?” said the Judaic individual, taking the shilling and crushing it between his rear molars.
“What would he have learned by doing that, sir?”
“That whatever counterfeit-artist stamped it out, had used reasonably good metal-not above fifty percent lead.”
“We’ll choose to interpret that as a wry jest,” Daniel said, “the likes of which you could never direct against this shilling, which my half-brother found lying on the ground at the Battle of Naseby, not far from fragments of a Royalist captain who’d been blown to pieces by a bursting cannon-the dead man was, you see, a captain who’d once stood guard at the Tower of London where new coins are minted.”
The Jew repeated the biting ceremony, then scratched at the coin in case it was a brass clinker japanned with silver paint. “Worthless. But I owe a shilling to a certain vile man in London, a hater of Jews, and I would drive a shilling’s worth of satisfaction from slipping this slug of pig-iron into his hand.”
“Very well, then-” said Isaac, reaching for the prisms.
“Avid collectors such as you two must also have pennies-?”
“My father hands out shiny new ones as Christmas presents,” Daniel began. “Three years ago-” but he suspended the anecdote when he noticed that the lens-grinder was paying attention, not to him, but to a commotion behind them.
Daniel turned around and saw that it was a man, reasonably well-heeled, having trouble walking even though a friend and a servant were supporting him. He had a powerful desire to lie down, it seemed, which was most awkward, as he happened to be wading through ankle-deep mud. The servant slipped a hand between the man’s upper arm and his ribs to bear him up, but the man shrieked like a cat who’s been mangled under a cart-wheel and convulsed backwards and landed full-length on his back, hurling up a coffin-shaped wave of mud that spattered things yards away.
“Take your prisms,” said the merchant, practically stuffing them into Isaac’s pocket. He began folding up his display-case. If he felt the way Daniel did, then it wasn’t the sight of a man feeling ill, or falling down, that made him pack up and leave, so much as the sound of that scream.
Isaac was walking toward the sick man with the cautious but direct gait of a tightrope-walker.
“Shall we back to Cambridge, then?” Daniel suggested.
“I have some knowledge of the arts of the apothecary.” Isaac said, “Perhaps I could help him.”
A circle of people had gathered to observe the sick man, but it was a very broad circle, empty except for Isaac and Daniel. The victim appeared, now, to be trying to get his breeches off. But his arms were rigid, so he was trying to do it by writhing free of his clothes. His servant and his friend were tugging at the cuffs, but the breeches seemed to’ve shrunk onto his legs. Finally the friend drew his dagger, slashed through the cuffs left and right, and then ripped the pant-legs open from bottom to top-or perhaps the force of the swelling thighs burst them. They came off, anyway. Friend and servant backed away, affording Isaac and Daniel a clear vantage point that would have enabled them to see all the way up to the man’s groin, if the view hadn’t been blocked by black globes of taut flesh stacked like cannonballs up his inner thighs.
The man had stopped writhing and screaming now because he was dead. Daniel had taken Isaac’s arm and was rather firmly pulling him back, but Isaac continued to approach the specimen. Daniel looked round and saw that suddenly there was no one within musket range-horses and tents had been abandoned, back-loads of goods spilled on the ground by porters now halfway to Ely.
“I can see the buboes expanding even though the body is dead,” Isaac said. “The generative spirit lives on-transmuting dead flesh into something else-just as maggots are generated out of meat, and silver grows beneath mountains-why does it bring death sometimes and life others?”
That they lived was evidence that Daniel eventually pulled Isaac away and got him pointed back up the river toward Cambridge. But Isaac’s mind was still on those Satanic miracles that had appeared in the dead man’s groin. “I admire Monsieur Descartes’ analysis, but there is something missing in his supposition that the world is just bits of matter jostling one another like coins shaken in a bag. How could that account for the ability of matter to organize itself into eyes and leaves and salamanders, to transmute itself into alternate forms? And yet it’s not simply that matter comes together in good ways-not some ongoing miraculous Creation-for the same process by which our bodies turn meat and milk into flesh and blood can also cause a man’s body to convert itself into a mass of buboes in a few hours’ time. It might seem aimless, but it cannot be. That one man sickens and dies, while another flourishes, are characters in the cryptic message that philosophers seek to decode.”