Jack guesses that every constable, beadle, bailiff, watchman, and gaoler in London is included in the entourage. Even for a normal Hanging-Day this does not suffice to hold back the crowd, and so there are always soldiers with half-pikes. But today there are these mounted squadrons as well. Jack had supposed at first that they were cavalry, but quickly knew from their colors that they were actually the King’s Own Black Torrent Guards-no less than the terrible Dragoons who keep the Tower. Awfully nice of them to come out for his execution considering all of the trouble he has put them to in recent months. ’Tis a splendid gesture, and probably a calculated one. Of all His Majesty’s regiments, none would be more avid to witness his death, none less likely to allow him to slip away. And so all that Jack sees of the Mobb, he sees by peering, through his low, sledge-back vantage-point, between the scissoring legs of the Dragoons’ mounts. But he sees plenty.
The King’s Own Black Torrent Guards have blundered into a sort of pincer now, and allowed themselves to be enveloped. For to the north of St. Sepulchre’s is Smithfield, a largish open space, site of the cattle market, and used for occasional burnings at the stake.* The two great streets that curve down from Smithfield are Gilt-Spur, which they’ve already passed, and Cow-Lane, which is ahead. Smithfield, it is now obvious, has served as an immense gathering-place and holding-pen for hanging-watchers; for at least the past day, and probably longer, revelers have congregated there to hurl spent gin-bottles into howling bonfires. The ringing of the church-bells has served as their signal, and now they are flooding down Gilt-Spur Street and Cow-Lane. This puts a million of them in front of the procession and a million behind.
Cow-Lane joins Holborn near the eastern end of the bridge that Hooke threw over Fleet Ditch some years ago. This is therefore a strategic intersection. If the procession were somehow blocked there by the Mobb, it would have no way of getting across the streaming shit-flume of the Fleet, it would be bottled up, unable to reach the killing-ground. Jack can’t see it, but he knows they’re headed that way, because the earth is tilting beneath the sledge, causing him to recline ever so gently. They are descending Snow Hill. The whole parade should grind to a halt at any moment. But to his surprise they make the turn at the base of the hill without delay, and cross onto the pavers of the bridge. They are halfway across the Fleet Ditch before Jack perceives why: a company of artillery has established a bridgehead there, and set up several cannons, presumably loaded with grapeshot and chains, pointed up Cow-Lane towards Smithfield. A few yards farther along is another battery aimed south along the stony brink of the Ditch, holding back a hundred thousand or so who have formed up there. The Mobb is thus obliged to watch his passage from a remove. Jack stands up in his sledge and waves an arm. Ten thousand people surge to glimpse the great event. It is difficult to guess how many are crushed; but at least a hundred of them are projected over the kerb into the Ditch. Jack sits down, not wishing to be responsible for any more such mayhem. Another score of spectators tumble into the Fleet.
Star Chamber
TWELVE GRAINS IS A FORTIETH of an ounce; and gold being the densest thing in the world, a fortieth of an ounce is smaller than a pea. Yet such is the precision of the Goldsmiths’ techniques that they can conduct a reliable assay with so tiny a sample. To take the twelve grains from a single coin would defeat the purpose of the whole undertaking, for such a test might be queered by a freak of chance: a meaningless surplus or deficit of gold in one particular coin. Hence the mixing and sampling that has led to Mr. Threader’s having a dozen guineas set out on the cloth before him. He has come armed with a pair of mighty long-handled snips. He stands up for better leverage, and in short order has cut each of the dozen guineas into halves. He then works his way down the row of twenty-four half-guineas, snipping off their sharp corners. There ought to be forty-eight of these. They are so tiny that they appear to Daniel as points of fire on Threader’s black velvet cloth, echoing the stars painted on the ceiling of this chamber. Like a mad demiurge, Mr. Threader creates a little cosmos crowded with half-moons and strewn stars. He then begins to impose Order on his own Chaos, picking up the halved guineas and setting them to one side, while herding the stars into a globular cluster in the middle. It seems that his old fingers have difficulty picking up the wee bits, for he raises his hand to his mouth once or twice and licks his fingertips, like a scholar who is having difficulty getting traction on a page. Everyone is watching this closely, though Daniel’s mind is a bit distracted still because of that business with Isaac. He turns his head thataway, and notes that the Lord Privy Seal has ventured out of the side chamber where he and all of the great big-wigs are supposed to be awaiting the verdict of the Jury. His lordship has got it into his head that he is going to say hello to Sir Isaac, and turns that way purposefully. But Catherine has read his mind, has tracked his doddering progress, giving him the evil eye the whole way. He’s too blind or careless to notice. She steps into his path. Daniel averts his gaze, not wishing to see the Catastrophe of Manners that’s in the offing.
“Pray, my lord, do not, I beg you,” cries Catherine Barton from the corner of the room. All heads turn that way except for that of Daniel, who is just turning round the other way.
Mr. Threader glances up over his half-glasses, reaches down, and puts the tip of his long finger on a star. When he withdraws his hand, it’s gone-the star has been snuffed out. But another one tumbles to the cloth in its place. This he seizes between thumb and index finger, picks up, and drops upon the little mound that he’s making in the middle. He brings his fingertips to his mouth again to lick them, and Daniel sees a fleck of gold come away on the tip of his tongue and disappear, he supposes, right down Mr. Threader’s epiglottis. Then Mr. Threader rubs his hands together as if they’re chilly-which they probably are. He favors Daniel with a wink.
The crisis in the corner has been sorted out somehow; heads are turning back toward the Pesour. He stands there motionless, hands at his sides, as if he has not moved a muscle during this little contretemps. “Sir Isaac is grown so reclusive of late, one can’t but wonder what it is he’s trying to hide from us!” Mr. Threader remarks, in a clearly audible aside to one of the Goldsmiths. “I daresay all his secrets shall be discovered in a few minutes’ time; he can hide from Lord Privy Seal but not from this.” Nodding at the furnace.
Daniel is by and large a great stifler of urges and hider of feelings; but he knows that this is a cue. “You dog!” he exclaims, and takes half a step forward, reaching around himself, groping for the ridiculous sword he’s hung on himself for the occasion, and half yanking it from its scabbard. In that moment every face in the room turns toward him. Mr. Threader snuffs out another star, lets another one fall from between his fingers, and reloads.
“Dr. Waterhouse,” he says, mumbling a bit, probably because he is in the act of swallowing a bit of a guinea, “my old friend! Are you feeling quite all right?”
“I am no friend of yours, sir!” Daniel cries, and makes to draw the sword all the way out; but then younger and stronger hands are on his arm, and someone has moved to block his path to Mr. Threader. “I am a true friend of Sir Isaac Newton-a man so dedicated, so loyal to his King and to his craft that he has come here to-day in spite of being laid low with illness!” Daniel shoves the sword back in to its sheath, spins, and takes a few paces back into the open space between the Jurors and Miss Barton. All eyes track him except for those of Mr. Threader, who is up to more conjuring. “You would do well to remember, sir, that it is your solemn duty to conduct this assay justly and truly, and in spite of the enmity that your profession bears toward Sir Isaac. The Lords of the Council-” and here Daniel turns to gesture with one hand toward the door of the side chamber. The unfamiliar scabbard swings around and whacks him on the ankle, which gives him an idea-he hooks a toe over it, flails his arms, and tumbles to the floor.
It’s all the Jurors can do not to laugh out loud. But soon enough they are struck dumb by two very different, yet equally mesmerizing sights: fi
rst of all Catherine Barton rushing forward and bending down to assist Daniel, so that everyone’s able to stare down her bodice. Second, the Duke of Marlborough striding in from the next room in high dudgeon.
“What in the name of-” he begins, then stops, lost in contemplation of Miss Barton’s cleavage.
“ ’Tis nothing, my lord, if you please, a momentary flaring of warm feelings, as when a log bursts on a hearth, and sparks fly,” says Mr. Threader. “The only sparks that matter to us are these.” He gestures with both hands at the pile of golden bits he has made on the cloth. “If, as I hope, Dr. Waterhouse’s exertions have left him quite uninjured, then I shall weigh out twelve grains of these.”
“I am…fine,” Daniel announces. “Thank you, Miss Barton,” he says, for she’s just hauled him to his feet, and is spanking the dust from him. “I am sorry,” he concludes. “Pray continue, Mr. Threader.”
Working now with a pair of tweezers, Mr. Threader moves granules of gold one by one from the pile of snips to one of the pans of his great Scale. On the opposite pan he places a twelve-grain weight from the set that was stored in the Abbey. After a minute the scale-pans begin to move. The Pesour goes into a protracted and tedious work of swapping larger bits for smaller ones, or sometimes snipping a bit in half to make change, as it were.
Finally Mr. Threader steps back from the table, hands upraised like a priest’s. “I say,” he intones, “that on the pan of yonder scale is a sample of metal fairly chosen from the coins in the Pyx, weighing twelve grains exactly; and I invite the Fusour to assay it.”
William Ham steps up.
William has not worked as a goldsmith since he was a boy. But like his father before him he’s a member in good standing of the Company. Daniel reckons that they tapped him as Fusour for a reason: he defied Sir Isaac and the King’s Messengers in the Bank of England a few days ago, asserting that they had no right to enter the vault and seize a deposit. They honor him for it now. This steadfast Goldsmith protected the sanctity of England’s commerce by his actions in the bank, and now he’ll perform a like service by challenging the produce of the Mint.
He has been at work preparing some necessaries over by the furnace. He approaches the Scale now carrying a wooden tray between his hands. On the tray are a sheet of lead, hammered out to a thin irregular disk, like a miniature pie-crust; a bullet-mold; pliers; and a cube of gray-white material rather less than an inch on a side, with a round depression in its upper surface. William Ham sets this down before the scale and tilts the scale-pan so that the twelve grains of gold-bits slide off and shower down into the center of the leaden sheet. He then folds the sheet together to imprison the gold, and wraps it up into a lumpy wad about the size of a hazelnut. He places this into one half of the bullet-mold, settles the other half over it, and squeezes the mold together with the pliers. When the packet comes out it has been rendered almost perfectly spherical: a wee globe, less like the Earth than the pitted gray Moon. He sets this into the depression in the top of the cupel-for that is the name of the cube of burnt bone ash. The sample fits into this neatly, recalling diagrams Daniel once studied in Geometry of spheres inscribed within cubes. William carries the tray over and sets it beside the furnace. A pair of tongs awaits. He uses these to pick up the cupel and thrust it into the heart of the furnace. It is dark and gray at first, but in a few moments it begins to absorb and then to give back some of the radiance in which it’s immersed. The lead softens and sags. William Ham consults his watch. A dome of surface tension forms in the cupel as its contents become liquid. The gray ash darkens as the molten metals saturate it.
Written right on the gold trial plate is the following: This standard composed of 22 carracts of fine gold, 2 carracts of alloy in the pound troy of Great Britain made the 13th day of April 1709. The late Sir Isaac Newton begged to differ-he suspected that the true numbers were more like 23 and 1, and that the goldsmiths had fixed the plate to make it more likely he’d fail the Trial-but in any case, the point is that Sir Isaac’s guineas are supposed to be made almost entirely of gold, with small amounts of base metals permitted. That is to say that out of the twelve grains of guinea-shards that made up the sample, eleven grains (if the inscription on the trial plate is taken at face value) or more (if the Goldsmiths fudged it) must be pure gold. The way to verify this is chymically to separate the gold from the not-gold, then weigh the former. The Company of Goldsmiths learned, ages ago, that when an assay is made in a cupel according to this receipt, the base metals in the sample will dissolve into the lead and be drawn, along with it, into the bone ash, like water into a sponge. But the pure gold will remain aloof, and form an ingot in the depression in the cupel’s top. And that is what happens now, before the eyes of Daniel and all the Jurors. Though it is an everyday procedure, it seems nearly as magical, to Daniel, as what occurred a few moments ago in the sedan chair. The release of the body of pure radiant gold from the dissolving globe of lead reminds him of the dream-vision of which Princess Caroline spoke.
If the assay is left in the furnace for too long, the gold will evaporate and lose weight, which is not fair to the Master of the Mint. If it is not left in long enough, some base metal will remain allayed with the ingot of gold, which is not fair to the King. Knowing how long to leave it in there is a black art of the Goldsmiths, and Daniel gets the sense that William is silently polling the other eleven members of his Jury for their opinions. When a consensus seems to have been reached, he picks up the tongs again and withdraws the cupel and sets it on a brick to cool down. The lead jacket has vanished and the cupel has turned charcoal-gray. Remaining in the top of the cupel is the ingot: a tiny round lake of gold. The stars and moons that decorated Mr. Threader’s black firmament have been changed by alchemy into this little sun. They need only wait for its heat to subside before they take the weight of it.
Holbourn
HOLBOURN OUGHT TO BE the Valley of the Shadow of Death for Jack. Perhaps he’d see it that way if he were facing forwards, watching Tyburn creep toward him. But they’ve faced him the other way, towards the London he’s leaving. There is intended to be a message in this: he is supposed to be looking back ruefully on his traitorous doings. But it is not working out thus. Jack is a spark dragged through a trench full of gunpowder. Far from being the Valley of the Shadow of Death, it is a roaring flume of vibrant riotous life, perfectly arrayed for viewing by Jack, and as such, a great distraction for one who really ought to be attending to his sins.
He does not recognize any one person in particular, but London, as an entire thing, is as familiar to him as the faces in a parish church, on Sunday morn, would be to an aged vicar. Groups are recognizable too. There’s a battalion of fishwives, of approximately regimental size, who have outflanked the artillery batteries at the Bridge and, by a covert march along Chick Lane, worked their way round to the west bank of the Fleet. There they seem to have divided into companies and squads, and mustered themselves within striking-distance in such places as Saffron Hill, the Dyers’ Court, the Plough-Yard, and Bleeding Heart Court. These are tributaries that empty into Holbourn along the hill that climbs up from the Fleet crossing, where the Hanging-March is doomed to move slowly. Triggered by the westward-propagating Mobb-roar, the fishwives mount vicious sallies from their nests and burst into the road, shouldering between the pikemen and the dragoons, pulling fistfuls of black coins from their aprons and flinging them at Jack’s head. They pock the sledge like grapeshot, they ricochet and ring in the air like f?ry-bells. Jack rips a button from his coat and underhands it to a fishwife who has actually penetrated to within a few yards of the sledge. She’s too astonished to do anything but clap it out of the air. A knot of fish-guts strikes him square on the bridge of the nose. He returns fire with another golden button.
Having beaten back the assault of the Fishwives’ Regiment with only light casualties, they crest the hill and enter into the widest part of Holbourn, which runs for a mile to St. Giles’s, passing between diverse expensive squares, all conv
erted from cow-pastures during Jack’s lifetime. A Puritan in a black frock stands up on the street-island at Holbourn Bar, holding a Bible over his head, open to some passage he guesses Jack should know about. Another breaks through the cordon and climbs into the sledge with Jack and gets ready to baptize him with a bucket of water he’s brought along; but the Ordinary of Newgate, who’s been riding in the cart, isn’t having any of that. He’s down on the pavement in a trice, hustling along beside the sledge, and makes a grab for the handle of the Baptismal pail. This leads to a tug-of-war, and creates enough of a diversion that a short procession of Catholics-or so he assumes, from the monks’ robes they’re all wearing-is able to slip in, and make itself part of the parade. One is a priest, the others are burly monks, which makes perfect sense as a lone Papist wouldn’t survive for ten seconds in this crowd. The priest strides along behind the sledge, looks Jack in the eye, and begins to declaim rapidly in what Jack assumes is Latin. Jack is being given last rites! A very considerate gesture on someone’s part. This tiny and intrepid Popish strike force was probably despatched by Louis XIV from a secret chapel-headquarters in a vault beneath Versailles.
The procession bumps to a stop for some reason Jack can’t see. Getting into the Christian spirit, he takes this opportunity to whip off his purple cape and toss it to the priest. He then indicates that the priest is to give it to a poor old woman, over yonder, who has somehow fought her way to the front of the crowd.
THE System OF THE WORLD Page 113