Free The System of the World by Neal Stephenson

by, I say! For your own sake! And keep right on going.”
    “To the Royal Exchange, you mean…one or two doors down, on the opposite side…”
    “No, no, no.”
    “Ah, you are speaking of Change Alley, where the stock-jobbers swarm.”
    “That is off Cornhill. Therefore, in a strictly cartographic sense, you are getting colder. But in another, you are getting warmer.”
    “You are trying to interest me in some security that is traded in Change Alley. But it issues from an Eighth Wonder of the World that is on Threadneedle, near Gresham’s College. It is a most imposing riddle, Mr. Threader, and I am ill-equipped to answer it, as I’ve not frequented that busy, busy neighborhood for twenty years.”
    Daniel now leaned to one side, planting his elbow on an arm-rest and supporting his chin on his hand. He did so, not because he was tired and weak from hunger (though he was), but so that he could see round Mr. Threader’s head out the rear window of the carriage. For he had glimpsed a peculiar apparition overtaking them. A rustic person would have guessed it to be a coffin levitating through the air. And considering the number of corpses that had been disposed of in Fleet Ditch over the centuries, there was no better place in London for a haunting. But Daniel knew it was a sedan chair, probably the same one that had emerged, a few moments ago, from the alley across the way. Looking across the Ditch Daniel could see directly into that alley, or one like it, and it seemed to him like the vertical equivalent of the Fleet Ditch itself, a black slot filled with who knew what sort of vileness. What had a sedan chair been doing in such a place? Perhaps taking a gentleman to an unspeakably perverse tryst. At any rate it was now gaining ground on them, coming up along one side. It got close enough that Daniel could sit up straight and view it directly out the carriage’s side window. The windows of the sedan chair—assuming it had windows—were screened with black stuff, like a confession-booth in a Papist church, and so Daniel could not see into it. He could not even be certain that anyone was inside, though the ponderous jouncing of the box on its poles, and the obvious strain on the two massive blokes who were carrying it, suggested that something was in there.
    But after several moments these porters seemed to hear some command from inside the box, and then they gratefully slackened their pace and allowed Mr. Threader’s carriage to pull away from them.
    Mr. Threader, meanwhile, had resorted to complicated hand-gestures, and was staring at a distant point above Daniel’s head.
    “Proceed to the fork in the road, there, where Pig Street leads away from Threadneedle. Whether you go right, toward Bishopsgate, or left up Pig toward Gresham’s College, you will in a few moments come to the offices of the South Sea Company, which, though it is only three years old, already spans the interval between those two ways.”
    “And what do you propose I should do there?”
    “Invest! Open an account! Align your interests!”
    “Is it just another Tory land bank?”
    “Oh, on the contrary! You are not the only one to perceive the wisdom of investing in the future increase of foreign trade!”
    “The South Sea Company, then, has such interests…where? South America?”
    “In its original conception, yes. But, as of a few months ago, its true wealth lies in Africa.”
    “Africa! That is very strange. It puts me in mind of the Duke of York’s Africa Company, fifty years ago, before London burned.”
    “Think of it as the Royal Africa Company, risen from the ashes. Just as the capital stock of the Bank of England is the East India Company, that of the South Sea Company is the Asiento.”
    “Even I know that this word Asiento is linked somehow to the Peace, but I’ve been terribly distracted—”
    “We could not win the war—could not dislodge the grandson of Louis XIV from the Throne of Spain—but we did extract certain