It was on a chilly November evening in 1762 that a man named John Montagu changed history. And, in a way that would make any of us jealous, he changed history with his unprecedented laziness. Lord Montagu was an avid gambler, but also a talkative one. He would often regale his fellow card players with lavish and detailed stories as they sat around their piles of chips and pushed hand after hand across the felt. Because of this, their games would go on for hours -- the players could often feel their rational faculties slipping away as hunger took root in their bellies and grew into their brains. They learned eventually to have their servants bring food around as they played. And it was exactly this problem, the problem of how to play cards while eating at the same time, that caused John Montagu, the Fourth Earl of Sandwich, to have this revelation:
"Maybe we should get a bigger table, eh?"
Then he burped.
Another card player sighed. He slid his plate away, having seemingly lost his appetite, and nearly knocked over Montagu's pile of chips. "Have some manners, will you? You're an Earl," he said.
This man was Timothy Reuben, the Seventh Earl of Glastonbury. He was was a fastidious man, known among his peers as being a stickler for rules. This served him well in his position as Earl, as well as treasurer for the Glastonbury chapter of the British Dressage Club, but it caused his social relations to grind a bit.
"I mean, we're in my ancestral home, for God's sake," Reuben continued. "This isn't some cheap tavern. It's a place of decorum."
"Could have fooled me," Montagu said. He allowed himself to be a bit of a ham, and cast a meaningful look at the room's large, stained-glass window.
Reuben was downright imperiously proud of the house, which seemed to gain another set of locks and another stained-glass window every time Montagu visited. It couldn't hold a candle to Sandwich Manor, though, with its luxurious top and bottom floors and all of the kitchens, toilet rooms, and "functional" areas on the floor between. It was a design of his own devising, and was serving to be enormously practical.
"Anyway," Reuben said with a huff, "whose bid is it?"
"I believe it's mine," the man across from Reuben said. He waved his hand frantically from behind a whole, roasted, suckling pig. "But I seem to be unable to find my last card..."
Neither Montagu nor Reuben was surprised by this admission from their friend. Joseph Dagwood, the First Earl of Derby, was new nobility. Everyone knew not to expect much of new nobility, and Dagwood fit the stereotype perfectly. Also, he insisted on wearing such a silly hat.
"You're too sloppy, Joe," Montagu said.
"Don't you roll your eyes at me!" Dagwood shouted back.
"You can't even see me from behind --"
"I could tell from your tone." Dagwood smacked the rump of the pig. "I'm new, but I'm not stupid. Thanks to your book, your voice is an open face!"
He paused for a moment, recalling what he had just said.
"I mean --"
"I'll put the... bid th'five on... on those hearts're there," the last player said. He tossed his chips into the center of the table with as much slur in the toss as there was in his voice. Three of the chips landed in a pickle jar.
Montagu attempted to fish them out with his free hand. Drink was a new habit of Tomas von Gerber, the Eighth Graf of Lower Saxony. His territory included the Free City of Hamburg, and the stress from interacting with Hamburgers had taken its toll on his will. It was disheartening to see such a thing happen to a man of only sixteen.
"You poor boy!" Reuben rose to help his friend. "Let me pour you some more, just one more, just to steady the nerves. Steady on, right, chap?"
"S'more, yeah. You're a good'n, Grinder," von Gerber said.
Reuben bristled at the use of his hated nickname, but slid von Gerber's glass back around a baguette and into his hands.
Meanwhile, Montagu had fished the third of von Gerber's chips out of the pickle jar -- after being misled by pickle chips twice and the chip slipping out of his grip three times. Success had eventually come by squeezing his target chip between two pickle chips. He discreetly wiped his hand on the table's felt, hoping that Reuben wouldn't notice.
"It was my turn, you know," Dagwood said from behind the pig.
Reuben shook his head at the small man. "But you couldn't find your last card. So you forfeit. Also, you owe me a new deck."
His matter-of-fact tone either intimidated or frustrated Dagwood, and the Earl threw his remaining cards down with a snarl.
"I'd rather eat anyway," he said. "It's downright impossible to eat and play cards."
"That's why I said we should get a bigger table," Montagu said. But he hadn't been following the conversation very closely. Something about his sub-marine pickle misadventure had struck a nerve in his brain, and it was ringing out like the highest string on a violin.
"Wouldn't fit in the room," Dagwood said through a mouthful of pork. "And this is the biggest room in this pitifully overdecorated and undersized house."
"Excuse me?" Reuben said. His volume was controlled, but his voice seemed to gain an octive with every syllable. "Are you disparaging The Most Noble and Ancient House of Reuben?"
"You've got it backwards. It's The Noble and Most Ancient House."
Reuben sputtered, unable to find words.
All of this went over both von Gerber and Montagu's heads. Von Gerber, because he was in a numb bliss. Montagu, because he was thinking more clearly than he had ever before. His head was spinning like a gyro, spinning on the axis of a single bright, crystalline thought. The complexity was squaring, cubing with each iteration. Every card in his hand was... was between two others. You could pick up a card without touching it, as long as you touched the cards on either side.
Everything...
Everything in the world was made of layers.
Layers on layers, and those themselves layers of larger structures.
Dagwood continued undeterred. "Forget the Roman script above the threshold -- I think I saw cave paintings in the powder room!"
"I'll, I'll..." Reuben had no words for a transgression of decorum this blatant. "I'll ban you!"
"Ban me?"
"Yes! And..." Reuben thought quickly, his eyes darting from side to side. "And I'll ban your family! Your father, your brother, your mother-in-law, all of them."
And what Reuben said to Dagwood next shook Montagu out of his reverie:
"I'll ban your sons."
This was where nobility got serious. A Ban for Life and Title was not unprecedented, but it was sufficiently severe that it was not threatened lightly. One would as soon drive a stake into the heart of Noble relations as issue such a ban. Only two BLTs had ever been declared, but the older of the two had stood for nearly two hundred years. It was why Montagu felt uneasy whenever he visited Ireland, and why his cousin stayed out altogether.
"Steady on!" Montagu said. "Let's not be hasty, here. There's no need to issue, uh... to be so speedy in our judgment."
The two men only glared at each other. His words weren't getting through to them.
"Look, look," he said, reaching for the baguette. He ripped it in half and held up the two pieces. "It's all about layers, see? These... these are the two of you. And these pickle chips are your hearts. There's enmity between you. We'll say, um... We'll say that this pork is the enmity. When we try to layer the two of you together, in friendship, the enmity gets in the way. So we need to remove the enmity --"
"No, don't!" Reuben said.
He looked fascinated, and Dagwood's head was tipped to the side in deep, astonished thought.
Montagu shook his head. "If I don't remove it, then the metaphor breaks down. Layers, you see."
"You don't understand," Dagwood said.
"No, you don't understand," Montagu said, pointing.
"Pick up your cards!"
"Why? What layer do they represent?"
Montagu began to worry that "layers" were too complex for his friends to pick up on. He'd have expected this from von Gerber, who was singing softly to himself, but Reuben was usually quick on the uptake.
Shrugging mentally, he reached down and pulled his cards off the felt. He felt uncomfortable holding them in his left hand, though, and swapped them for the... the thing in his right.
As he grasped the cards, he realized --
-- his fingers weren't greasy.
"Montagu, you've invented a more efficient way to gamble!" Reuben cried.
"Grampa always said I was meant for something big," Montagu said. "But I wouldn't have guessed it would be from this... from this, um..."
Self-serving, eponymous suggestions rolled in.
"How about a Reuben?"
"It could be called a Dagwood..."
"Gerber! Gerber!"
These were all ridiculous. Especially Gerber.
"No," John Montagu, the fourth Earl of Sandwich, declared. "Its chosen name is clear."
He held the food high above his head.
"It shall be called a Montagu!"
The name did not stick.