by David Liss
“If trading blows is your plan,” I offered, “then I shall take your offer willingly. But somehow I think you haven’t a fair exchange in mind.” With the gifts given by my pretty stranger clutched tightly in my palm, I held out my wrists and allowed this blackguard to shackle them together. Next, I was made to sit in a wooden chair in the center of the room. Here my legs were bound together in a manner similar to my wrists, but these shackles were attached by a chain to a staple rising from the floor. I had only a few feet of slack with which I might hobble about as best I could.
Once the turnkeys left me there, I had an opportunity to examine my surroundings. The room was not overly small, some five feet wide and ten feet long. It offered no more than the chair on which I sat, a rough mattress, barely in reach of the chain, a very large pot for my necessary business (its size suggesting that it would be emptied none too often), a table, and a small fireplace, now unlit despite the cold. At the very top of one wall was a small and exceedingly narrow window that just peeked above the ground layer. It permitted only a few rays of daylight to penetrate, but this was hardly an escape route, as a cat could not squeeze its way through those slits. There were two windows of a much larger kind that overlooked the hallway, though still not large enough to permit a man to pass.
I breathed in deeply to sigh, an act I regretted at once, for the air was exceedingly unwholesome and stank of condemned bodies nearby as well as those who had long since passed through. It smelled of chamber pots in need of emptying and those in need of being mopped. It smelled of vomit and blood and sweat.
The sounds were of no more comfort. I could hear the nearby clicking of rat claws on the stone floor and the scrape in my ear of the lice that had not given me a moment to adjust to my new surroundings before latching onto my person. Somewhere in the distance a woman sobbed, and perhaps a bit closer: drawn-out laughter, treacly with madness. My closet was, in short, a dark and desolate place, and the turnkeys had not left me alone for more than a minute or two before I began plotting my departure from it.
I am no master of escapes, but I had broken into a goodly number of houses in my younger days, after my career as a pugilist had been forced to a period by a leg injury. I therefore knew a thing or two about the use of a lockpick. I took the device that the pretty stranger had pressed into my hand and held it in my palm, as though its weight could tell me something of its utility. It did not, but I was determined that the lady’s efforts should not be in vain. True, I had no ideas of who she might be or why she should have gone to such lengths to aid me, but I thought it better to address those matters after I was free.
I therefore set myself to the task of digging into the lock of my shackles. My wrists being manacled together, I had none of the dexterity a housebreaker enjoys, but I had not the fear of being happened upon either, so with careful application I was able to insert the pick into the lock and feel out the mechanisms. It took some time to be able to find the spring, and more time to activate it, but I managed to trigger the release, and in less than a quarter hour too. What a glorious sound, the muted snap of metal upon metal, and the musical slackening of the chains! My hands were now free, and after rubbing my wrists for the few moments that I indulged in this new liberty, I began work on my feet.
This was slightly more difficult because of the angle, because in just fifteen minutes what little light graced the room had begun to fade, and because my fingers had begun to grow tired from such precise labors. But soon enough I was entirely free of my chains.
There was little enough reason to rejoice, however. Though I could now move around my cell at liberty, I could go nowhere, and if my state of release was discovered I should find myself in a worse position than that in which I began. Now I would have to work quickly. I looked around my cell in the growing darkness. The onset of evening would be an advantage, of course, providing cover for my actions. It nevertheless increased my feeling of melancholy.
Why had such a thing happened to me? How could it be that I was now condemned to hang for a crime I never committed? I sat down and put my face in my hands. I was on the verge of weeping, but then I at once chastised myself for giving in to despair. I was free of my chains, I had tools, and I had strength. This prison, I declared to myself with spurious determination, would not detain me long.
“Who’s that over there, clanking around so?” I heard a voice, thick and distorted, through the walls of the prison.
“I’m new,” I said.
“I know you’re new. I heard you come in, didn’t I? I asked who you were, not about your freshness. Are you a fish or a man? When your mama set a steaming cake before you, you wanted to know if it was seed or plum, not when she first started to bake it.”
“My name’s Weaver,” I said.
“And what do they have you for?”
“For a killing in which I took no part.”
“Oh, that is always the way, isn’t it? Only the innocent end up here. Never been a man condemned who done what they said. Except me. I done it, and I’ll say so like the honest man I am.”
“And what do they have you for?”
“For refusing to live by the law of a foreign usurper, is what. That false king on the throne took away me livelihood, he did, and when a man tries to take it back, he finds himself thrown in prison and sentenced to hang.”
“How did the king take away your livelihood?” I asked, without much real interest.
“I was in the army, don’t you know, serving Queen Anne, but when the German stole the throne, he thought our company too Tory in its tone and had us disbanded. I never knew nothing but soldiering, so I couldn’t think of how to make my living but by that, and when I couldn’t do that no more, I had to find another way.”
“That way being?”
“Riding out on the highway and stealing from those what support the Hanoverian.”
“And were you always quite certain to rob only those who support King George?”
He laughed. “Perhaps not so careful as I might have been, but I know a Whiggish coach when I see one. And’s not as though I never did try to make my living in honest ways. But there’s no work to be found, and people are starving upon the street. I was not about to be one of those. Anyhow, they nabbed me with a stolen watch in me pocket, and now I’m to hang for certain.”
“It is a small crime,” I told him. “They may prove lenient.”
“Not for me, they won’t. I made the mistake of being taken in a little gin house, and the constable what took me heard me raise a toast to the true king just before he dragged me away.”
“Perhaps that was unwise,” I observed.
“And the gin house was called the White Rose.”
The entire world knew that the white rose was a symbol of the Jacobites. It was a foolish place to be arrested, but men who broke the law were often foolish.
I knew that support for the Chevalier was common among thieves and the poor—I had many times been in the company of men of the lower sort who would gladly raise a bumper in the name of the deposed king’s son—but such toasts were generally not taken very seriously. Men such as this, who had lost their army positions after the Tories had been purged, often took to robbing the highways and smuggling, joining gangs of other Jacobite thieves who told themselves that their crimes were but revolutionary justice.
As I write this memoir, so many years after the events I describe, I know I may find some readers too young to remember the rebellion of ’45, when the grandson of the ousted monarch came close to marching upon London. Now the threat of Jacobites seems no more serious than the threat of bugbears or hobgoblins, but my young readers must recollect that, in the days of which I write, the Pretender was more than a tale to frighten children. He had launched a daring invasion in 1715, and there had been numerous plots since to return him to the throne or stir up rebellion against the king. As I sat in prison, a general election loomed upon us, the first to take place since George I acceded to the throne—so this election was wide
ly seen as one that would determine how much the English had come to love or hate their German monarch. It therefore seemed to us likely that at any time we might be subject to an invasion in which the Pretender would take up arms in order to reclaim his father’s throne.
The Jacobites, those followers of the son of the deposed James II, saw this moment as their finest opportunity in seven years to retake the throne for their master. Outrage toward the ministry and, less openly, toward the king had been running hot ever since the collapse of the South Sea Company stock in the fall of 1720. As the Company sank, so too did the countless other projects that had taken root in the seemingly fertile soil of soaring stock prices. Not just a single company but an entire army of companies had been destroyed in an instant.
As wave after wave of financial ruin crashed upon our shores, as riot from food shortages and low wages kindled like dry straw in a drought, as men of great wealth lost their fortunes in a flash, discontent with our foreign king’s government rose and overflowed. It was later said that in the months following the bursting of the Bubble, the Pretender might have ridden into London without an army and found himself crowned without the loss of a drop of blood. That may or may not be the case, but I can assure my readers that I have never before or since seen hatred toward the government as volatile as it was in those days. Greedy Parliamentarians scrambled to screen the South Sea Company directors—that they might better screen their own profits from the Company’s stock fraud—and the crowds grew angrier and more vicious. In the summer of 1721 a mob descended upon the Parliament itself to demand justice, an unruly throng that dispersed only after three readings of the Riot Act. With an election imminent, the Whigs, who controlled the ministry, realized that their grasp on the government might be loosening, and it was widely believed that if the Tories could return a majority, King George would not remain our monarch long.
I write now with a political understanding I did not possess at the time, but I knew enough of the public resentment toward the king and his Whig ministers to understand why this thief’s political inclinations should have reflected so ill on him. Thieves and smugglers and the impoverished tended to lean toward the cause of the Jacobites, whom they saw as dashing outcasts like themselves. After the Bubble burst, and more men than ever before were struggling for bread, thieves and brigands began to appear in unprecedented numbers.
“It is very hard,” I told him, “that a man should be hanged for saying what men have always said.”
“I think so too. It is not as though I’ve killed anyone. Not like you.”
“I haven’t killed anyone either,” I said. “Not anyone for whose murder I’ve been charged, at any rate.”
At this he laughed. “The name is Nate Lowth,” he said. “What did you say your name was again?”
I stood up now. This Lowth, with all his chatter, seemed to help me find the fire I needed to act. I walked over to the windows that looked out on the hallway. There were bars, of course. I examined each one to see if it might be loose.
“Weaver,” I called over. “Benjamin Weaver.”
“Sod me!” he shouted. “Benjamin Weaver the fighter in the cell next to me. Isn’t that the most rotten luck in the world?”
“How so?”
“Why, on hanging day, when a man can shine his brightest, no one will give a fig for poor Nate Lowth. They’ll all be there to see Weaver swing. I’ll just be a mere tidbit to whet their appetites.”
“I intend not to make myself conspicuous,” I told him.
“I appreciate your neighborly gesture, but it may not be in your hands. They’ve heard of you, and it’s your end they’ll want to gaze on.”
None of the bars were so loose as I would like, so I picked up the file that the woman had given me and reexamined the metal that blocked my path. The bars were too thick to saw through. It would take me all night and more, and I had no intention of being in my cell when the sun came up. Instead, I began to chip at the stone around the bars. The metal of the file was strong enough that it did not bend or snap. I used a blanket to muffle the sound as best I could, but the icy crack of metal on stone still echoed through the hallway.
“What’s that noise?” Nate Lowth asked.
“I don’t know,” I told him between blows. “I hear it too.”
“You lying heathen,” he said. “You’re making a break for it, ain’t you?”
“Of course not. I honor the law above all else. It is my duty to hang if told to do so.” I had now removed an inch or two around one of the bars, and it was considerably loosened, though I could not yet tell how far it descended or how long I would have to continue my labors.
“You needn’t worry about me,” he said. “I won’t raise the alarm. I told you—I’m of a frame of mind to prefer your not being in attendance for our hanging day.”
“Well, I hope I am absent, but I don’t see it as very likely.”
“Now I know what all the clanking was for.”
“You may believe what you like,” I told him. “It does me no harm.”
“Don’t get sour with a fellow. I’m only making conversation.”
I gave the bar a good pull, and the stone around the base began to crack. I pulled again, and rotated the bar in a circular motion, widening the area of its encasement. Dust rained from the upper portion, sticking to my hands, which were slick with sweat. I wiped my hands against my breeches and began to apply them once more.
“You still there, Weaver, or are you gone yet?”
“I’m still here,” I said, grunting as I spoke. “Where would I go?” I gave the bar a good pull, and the stone at its base cracked fiercely. One or two more yanks, and it would be free.
“Can you send me something nice once you’re outside? Some wine and oysters.”
“I’m in here, just like you.”
“Well, let us say that if you do happen to get out, I’d like you to send me something. After all, I’m not calling the guards, now, am I, as many a man would do for spite. Neither am I threatening you, mind you. I’m just pointing out that I’m a good friend to ye.”
“Should I find myself outside these walls, I will send wine and oysters.”
“And a whore,” he said.
“And a whore.” Another pull. More crumbling.
“A very eager whore, if you don’t mind.”
“I will be certain to review the candidates with great care,” I said. “None but the most enthusiastic will meet my approval.” I sucked in my breath and pulled with the sum of my strength. The stone cracked entirely at the base, and I was able to pull the bar free. It was a little more than two feet in length, and I knew what I would do with it.
“I’ll make like I didn’t hear that noise,” Nate Lowth said.
I walked over to the fireplace and examined the chimney. It was narrow but, I thought, manageable. “I am going to sleep now,” I shouted to Lowth. “Please, no more conversation.”
“Sleep soundly, friend,” he said. “And don’t forget my whore.”
I stooped over and crawled into the fireplace. It was cold and airless inside, and I immediately felt as though my lungs were coated with soot. I ducked out once more and, using the file, tore a piece of blanket from the bed, wrapped it around my nose and mouth, and then, once more, to the chimney.
Reaching skyward, I found enough of a ledge to grab on to, and I pulled myself up. No more than a foot or two, but still it was progress. The interior was tighter than I had first realized, and moving that little space took an interminable amount of time. My arms were now above me, one of them clutching the bar, and there was no room to lower them. I felt the pressure of stone against my chest, and the sharpness of a jagged edge as it cut through both skin and linen. The bit of blanket I had tied in place to protect my breathing now felt as though it were suffocating me.
What if I cannot get out? I thought. They will come in the morning and think me gone, while my body, lodged in the chimney, begins to rot.
I shook my head, i
n part against this notion, in part to loosen the mask I had made. Better to breathe in dust, I thought, than breathe in nothing. The little knot in the blanket soon wore thin, and the mask fell away. I immediately regretted it, for the dust filled my mouth and throat, and I felt I could breathe less well than before. I coughed something fierce so I thought I must vomit my lungs, and the sound echoed throughout the chimney and no doubt the prison.
Nevertheless, I knew I had no choice but to move forward. I reached up and found another ledge and pulled myself up a foot or two more. My sweat mixed with soot to make a nasty mud that caked my hands and face and lodged in my nose. A glob of it settled near my nostril, and I made the mistake of trying to set it loose by rubbing my nose against the wall. That only brought more dirt into my nose, and now I truly could not breathe.
I cannot do it, I thought, as a piece of rock pushed its way into an open wound on my chest. At least not now. Let me go back, clean myself as best I can, and rethink this route. But when I tried to move downward, I found the hope of retreat was now closed to me. I had no leverage to push myself down. Sharp pieces of brick, like spikes, seemed to materialize beneath me to jab at my arms and legs. I could not see why, or turn my head enough to examine the passage. I had no choice, I realized, but to move forward, but when I reached up, I found I could not do that either. My hand found a ledge, but I could not budge my body.
I was truly stuck.
The dizzying madness of panic began to descend on me. Swirls of terror flashed before my eyes like fireworks. This was my hideous fate, more hideous than even the one His Majesty’s justice intended for me next hanging day. I squirmed and pushed and pulled and twisted, but I could still move only an inch or two.
There was nothing to do but apply the metal bar. It would make far more noise than I would desire, but I was now willing to accept rescue from my jailor as a pleasing outcome. With the little room afforded me, I began to strike at the wall of the chimney. Because my hand was above my head, dust and rock rained down into my face. I turned away as best I could and struck again. And again.