The system of the world - By Neal Stephenson Page 0,3

dogs—I fear I paid double or treble for everything at first.”

“What embarrassed you in Plymouth inns, may enrich you here, a few miles north,” said the Earl.

“It does not seem a propitious location,” Daniel said. “The poor folk who lived here could not even keep their roof off the floor.”

“No one lived here—this was what the Old Men call a jews-house. It means that there was a lode nearby,” said the Earl.

Newcomen added, “Over yonder by that little brook I saw the ruins of a trip-hammer, for crushing the shode.” Having got his pipe lit, he thrust his free hand into a pocket and pulled out a black stone about the size of a bun. He let it roll into Daniel’s hand. It was heavy, and felt colder than the air. “Feel its weight, Dr. Waterhouse. That is black tin. Such was brought here, where we are standing, and melted in a peat-fire. White tin ran out the bottom into a box hewn from granite, and when it cooled, what came out was a block of the pure metal.”

The Earl had his pipe blazing now too, which gave him a jovial, donnish affect, in spite of the fact that (1) he was all of twenty-three years old, and (2) he was wearing clothes that had gone out of fashion three hundred years ago, and furthermore was bedizened with diverse strange ancient artifacts, viz. some heraldic badges, a tin peat-saw, and a tiny bavin of scrub-oak twigs. “This is where I enter into it, or rather my predecessors do,” he remarked. “The block tin would be packed down the same sort of appalling road we just came up, to one of the four Stannary towns.” The Earl paused to grope among the clanking array of fetishes dangling from chains round his neck, and finally came up with a crusty old chisel-pointed hammer which he waved menacingly in the air—and unlike most Earls, he looked as if he might have actually used a hammer for some genuine purpose during his life. “The assayer would remove a corner from each block, and test its purity. An archaic word for ‘corner’ is ‘coign,’ whence we get, for example, ‘quoin’—”

Daniel nodded. “The wedge that gunners use, aboard ship, to elevate a cannon, is so called.”

“This came to be known as quoinage. And thence, our queer English word ‘coin,’ which bears no relation to any French or Latin words, or German. Our Continental friends say, loosely translated, ‘a piece of money,’ but we English—”

“Stop.”

“Is my discourse annoying to you, Dr. Waterhouse?”

“Only insofar as I like you, Will, and have liked you since I met you as a lad. You have always seemed of a level head. But I fear you are going the way of Alchemists and Autodidacts now. You were about to declare that English money is different, and that its difference inheres in the purity of the metal, and is signified in the very word ‘coin.’ But I assure you that Frenchmen and Germans know what money is. And to think otherwise is to let Toryism overcome sound judgment.”

“When you put it that way, it does sound a bit silly,” the Earl said, cheerfully enough. Then he mused, “Perhaps that is why I have felt it necessary to make this journey with a blacksmith on one hand, and a sixty-seven-year-old Doctor on the other—to lend some gravity to the proposal.”

By gestures so subtle and tasteful that they were almost subliminal, the Earl led them to understand that it was time they were underway. They returned to the coach, though the Earl lingered for a few moments on the running board to exchange civil words with a small posse of gentleman riders who had just come up out of the Gorge and recognized the arms painted on the carriage door.

For a quarter of an hour they trundled along in silence, the Earl gazing out an open window. The horizon was far away, smooth and gently varying except where it was shattered by peculiar hard shapes: protruding rocks, called Tors, shaped variously like schooners or Alchemists’ furnaces or fortress-ramparts or mandibles of dead beasts.

“You put a stop to my discourse and quite rightly, Dr. Waterhouse. I was being glib,” said the young Earl. “But there is nothing glib about this Dartmoor landscape, or would you disagree?”

“Plainly not.”

“Then let the landscape say eloquently what I could not.”

“What is it saying?”

By way of an answer, Will reached into a breast-pocket and pulled out a leaf of paper covered