The System of the World by Neal Stephenson Page A

soon became annoying to Daniel, who suspected that they were only doing it to be noticed. He told them to instead go and find the driver of the baggage-cart, who had been airborne when Daniel had lost sight of him.
    The smoke was finally beginning to clear; it seemed to be draining, rather than rising, from the court. Mr. Threader approached. “Did anything strike you, Dr. Waterhouse?”
    “Not very hard.” For the first time it occurred to him to brush himself off. Wood-shards and raccoon-tufts showered from the folds of his clothing. His finger caught the edge of a coin, which had been made rough as a saw-blade by the violence of its recent career, and this fluttered to the ground and hit with a tinny slap. Daniel bent to examine it. It was not a coin at all. It was a miniature gear. He picked it up. All round him, Mr. Threader’s assistants were in similar postures, snatching guineas off the ashlars like a crew of gleaners. The driver of the baggage-cart was face down, moaning like a drunk as he was tended to by Henry Arlanc and a woman, possibly Arlanc’s wife. Someone had had the presence of mind to draw the other baggage-cart across the entrance of Crane Court so that the Marching Watch—when and if they arrived—would not simply march in watching for stray coins.
    “At the risk of being one of those bores who will only venture to state facts after they have become perfectly obvious to all,” said Mr. Threader, “I guess that my baggage-cart has just been Blown Up.”
    Daniel flipped the gear over in his palm several times, then put it in his pocket. “Without a doubt, your hypothesis passes the test that we call, Ockham’s Razor.”
    Mr. Threader was strangely merry. For that matter, even Daniel, who had been in a sour mood all day from fasting, was feeling a bit giddy. He saw Henry Arlanc approaching, wiping traces of blood from his hands, his face blackened. “Mr. Arlanc, if you are all right, would you be so good as to fetch a broom, and sweep my things in-doors?”
    This actually produced a guffaw from Mr. Threader. “Dr. Waterhouse!If I may speak frankly, I had been concerned that your coonskins would leave you open to ridicule from London’s à la mode . But in the end, the Garment in Question was not even suffered to pass the city gates.”
    “It must have been done by someone very young,” Daniel guessed.
    “Why do you suppose so, sir?”
    “I have never seen you happier, Mr. Threader! Only a fellow who had lived through very little would imagine that a gentleman of your age and experience would find this sort of thing impressive.”
    This hammered a bung into Mr. Threader’s barrel of chuckles, and straightened him right up for several moments. In time he worked his way back to merry, but only after perilous detours through confused, astonished, and outraged. “I was about to make a similar remark directed at you !” He was less shocked by the explosion than by Daniel’s imputation that it had anything to do with him . Another cycle of bewilderment and stifled anger swirled round his face. Daniel observed with some fascination; Mr. Threader had facial features after all, plenty of them.
    In the end, all Mr. Threader could do was laugh. “I was going to express my outrage, Dr. Waterhouse, that you imagined this had anything to do with me; but I bated. I cannot throw stones, since I have been guilty, mutatis mutandis, of the identical sin.”
    “You thought it was for me !? But no one knew I was coming,” Daniel said. But he said it weakly, for he had just remembered the pirates in Cape Cod Bay, and how Edward Teach, literally smouldering on the poop deck of Queen Anne’s Revenge, had asked for him by name.
    “No one, save the entire crew of the ship that put you ashore at Plymouth—for she must have reached London by now.”
    “But no one knew how I was coming to London.”
    “No one, save the Court of Directors, and most of the Investors, of the Proprietors of the Engine for