Daniel had developed two alternative hypotheses: Mr. Threader was a betting agent who roamed about taking and settling wagers. Or, Mr. Threader was a Jesuit in disguise, visiting the homes of crypto-Catholic Jacobite Tories to hear confessions and to collect tithes. The polished wooden chests, according to this hypothesis, contained communion wafers, chalices, and other Popish gear.
All of these speculations collapsed in a few minutes when Daniel saw Blenheim Palace a-building; realized whose estate they were on; and, in his astonishment, forgot himself, and blurted, “Is he here?”
“Is who here, precisely? Dr. Waterhouse?” Mr. Threader asked delicately.
“Churchill.”
“Which Churchill?” Mr. Threader asked shrewdly. For new ones were being produced all the time.
“The Duke of Marlborough.” Then Daniel came to his senses. “No. I’m sorry. Stupid question. He’s in Antwerp.”
“Frankfort.”
“He has just moved to Antwerp,” Daniel insisted.
This occurred moments before Mr. Threader went into one of Marlborough’s out-houses to do whatever it was that he did. Meanwhile Daniel meditated on the foolishness of his little outburst. Obviously the Lord of the Manor was not in residence now. Men who owned such estates did not live upon them, at least, not in January. At this time of the year they were all in London. The most important occupants of the country estates were not men, but sheep, and the most important activity was conversion of grass into wool; for wool, exported, brought revenue, and revenue, farmed, enabled gentlefolk to pay rent, buy wine, and gamble in London, all winter long.
All clear enough in its general outlines. But as Daniel had got older he had developed a greater respect for details. Mr. Threader, he suspected, was a detail.
To a merchant, England was a necklace of sea-ports surrounding a howling impoverished waste. As with a burning log on a hearth, all the warmth, color and heat lay in the outer encrustation of ruby-red coals. The interior was cold, damp, dark, and dead. The sea served the same purpose for the commerce of England as the atmosphere did for combustion of a log. Any place that the sea could not reach was of no account, save in the vastly inferior sense that it sort of held everything together structurally.
And yet England did have an interior. Daniel had quite forgotten this until he had been awakened by the sheep-teeth right in front of his face. Unlike, say, the interior of New Spain, which produced its wealth in a few highly concentrated mines, England’s countryside made its treasure in the most diffuse way imaginable. There were no wool-mines. A given swath of grass produced infinitesimal revenue. In order to arrange it so that a Lord could wager a hundred guineas on a horse-race, some kind of frightfully tedious and complicated money-gathering process would have to take place, and it would have to take place all over England, all the time, without letup. Daniel’s eyes watered, to think of the number of separate transactions that must go on, all over a given hundred-mile-square patch of English turf, in order to yield a single pound sterling of free-and-
clear income, deliverable to a Fop in London.
But at any rate it happened somehow. The recipients of those pounds sterling gathered in London, all winter long, and engaged in Intercourse. That is, money changed hands among them. In the end, a great deal of that money must make its way back out into the countryside to pay for the building and upkeep of stately houses, amp;c., amp;c.
The stupidest imaginable way of handling it would have been to gather together all of the pennies in the countryside, from millions of tributary farmsteads, and physically transport them into London; let the wagon-trains feed and water while the gentlefolk carried out their Intercourse; and then load the coins back onto the wagons and haul them back out to the country again. And perhaps that was how they did it in some countries. But England had obstinately refused to mint coins of large denominations-which was to say, gold coins-in large enough quantities to be actually useful. Anyway, such coins were too enormous for small transactions on farms. Those that were minted, tended to be snapped up by London merchants, and used for overseas trade. The true coin of England, the one ordinary folk used, had always been the silver penny. But its low value-which was precisely what made it useful in market-town and countryside-made it miserably inconvenient for gentry who wanted to live in the city. The annual systole and diastole of wealth in and out of London would require movement of vast wagon-trains laden with coins.
One never saw such traffic on English roads, though. The very idea had a Robin Hood-esque, days-of-yore ring to it. And because what was out of sight was out of mind, Daniel had never thought about what was implied by the disappearance of money-chests from the highways of modern England.
Suppose one had gained the trust of many gentlefolk in London. One could then act as an intermediary, settling their transactions in the city with a word and a handshake, without the need for bags of silver to be lugged around and heaved into the doorways of posh town-houses.
Suppose one also had many contacts in the countryside-a network, as it were, of trusted associates on all of the estates and in all of the market-towns. Then one could almost dispense with the need for hauling stamped disks of silver to and from London on the highways-but only by replacing it with a torrential, two-way flow of information.
Winged-footed Mercury, messenger of the Gods, must have very little to do nowadays, as everyone in Europe seemed to be worshipping Jesus. If he could somehow be tracked down and put on retainer and put to work flitting back and forth from city to country and back, carrying information about who owed what to whom, and if one, furthermore, had rooms full of toiling Computers, or (engaging in a bit of Speculative Fiction here) a giant Arithmetickal Engine for balancing the accounts, then most transactions could be settled by moving a quill across a page, and movement of silver across England could be cut back to the minimum needed to settle the balance between city and country.
And forget silver. Convert it to gold, and the number of wagons required would be divided by thirteen.
And if one possessed a reservoir, a money-cistern somewhere, even those movements could be reduced-one could then do calculus on the curves, and integrate them over time-
“You were right,” Mr. Threader exclaimed, climbing back into the carriage. “His Grace has indeed moved to Antwerp.”
“When Queen Anne suffered her latest Onset of Symptoms,” Daniel said absent-mindedly, “George Louis in Hanover finally got it clear in his mind that he and his mum would be responsible for the United Kingdom any day now, and that they would need an apparatus-a Council of State, and a Commander in Chief.”
“Of course he would want Marlborough for that,” said Mr. Threader, sounding just a bit scandalized. As if there was something clearly improper about the next King of England choosing the most glorious and brilliant general of English history to take the reins of the Army.
“Therefore the Duke has gone to Antwerp to renew ties with our regiments in the Low Countries, and to be ready-”
“To pounce,” Mr. Threader said.
“Some would say, to be of service, when the new reign begins, and his exile comes to an end.”
“Self-imposed exile, let us not forget.”
“He is not a fool, nor a coward-he must have felt some strong compulsion to leave his country.”
“Oh, yes, he was to be prosecuted for duelling!”
“For issuing a challenge, I was informed, to Swallow Poulett, after Mr. Poulett said, to the Duke’s face, in Parliament, that the Duke had sent his officers off to be slaughtered in hopeless Engagements, so that the Duke could then profit from re-selling their commissions.”