The System of the World: Volume Three of the Baroque Cycle

by Neal Stephenson

  “Sir, you may consider your proposal On the Table,” said Jack, “and after I have waited a decent interval for competing proposals to join it, I shall weigh them all, and arrive at some judicious decision, provided that my old mate, the Imp of the Perverse, does not get the better of me.”

  The Black Dogg of Newgate

  4 OCTOBER 1714

  NEWGATE WAS THE MOST versatile building in town. It was the Middlesex county gaol, not only for malefactors, but for debtors of both the honest and the dishonest type, and for fines as well. But this was also the City of London’s prison for criminals. It was in that capacity that it now played host to Jack Shaftoe, and hundreds of others who only wished they were Jack Shaftoe. But grades and distinctions could be found even within that class. Not all London criminals were footpads, horsepads, shoplifters, file-clys, night-gamesters, running-smoblers, or till-divers. There were also the Unfortunate Gentlemen, guilty of Treason, Murder, Highway Robbery, Rape, Scandal, Debt, Duelling, Bankruptcy, or Coining. Of all of these except for Rape and Debt, Jack Shaftoe was guilty as charged.

  To create a distinct Ward or Hold for each of these classes were a task to which only Noah were equal. But to mix them all in one room were unnatural, or, at least, un-English. Accordingly, Newgate possessed three great divisions. Below the aristocratic confines of the Press-Yard and Castle, where Toffs in Trouble paid their debts to society playing cards in ventilated apartments, but above the loathsome flesh-pits of the Common-Side, was the Master-Side of Newgate. One part of this was for Felons, the other for mere Debtors, but in practice they were all commingled, especially in that part of the prison called the Black Dogg.

  Inhabitants of the Press-Yard and Castle looked indistinguishable from any other Persons of Quality, save that they were fettered. Common-Side prisoners tended to be flagrantly, almost gloriously wretched, and even without the heavy chains that they were obliged to wear, could never have been mistaken for anything other than prisoners. Occupants of the Master-Side, however, bore to free Londoners the same relationship as a dried and salted cod, hanging on a rack, did to a live one swimming in the sea: which was to say that most of the same bits were there, and with some squinting, head-cocking, and generous dollops of imagination, you could make in your mind’s eye a picture of what they’d once been. Family and friends would show up from time to time bearing clothing, food, candles, and toiletries, and so most of these were able to keep up some vestiges of whatever looks they’d had before they’d been clapped into irons.

  The Visitor looked like one of those. The patches that held his clothing together might have been taken as stigmata of poverty up on Newgate Street, but down here in the Black Dogg, people were apt to look on them as badges or decorations proving that someone out there still knew his name. His black periwig, so ratty and bedraggled, would have earned him mockery had he worn it in Charing Cross, but in the Black Dogg it proved—well, it proved he still had a periwig. More remarks in the same vein could be made concerning his shoes, his stockings, and the three-cornered hat pulled down low over his face. Even his insistent, raspy cough was very typical of Newgate prisoners, as was his low murmuring way of speaking. All in all, anyone familiar with Newgate would have marked him, without a moment’s thought, as a long-term Master-Side Debtor. But then, upon a second look, they would have noted two oddities about the man: one, that there were no irons round his ankles. He was free to leave. Two, that the ankle-chained bloke he was conversing with was a clean and well-dressed Press-Yard and Castle prisoner, only slumming for a short interval here in the Black Dogg. Divers cudgel-wielding Gaolers and Bailiffs had crowded into the place to keep an eye on this inmate while he passed the time of day with his visitor. But soon enough it had become evident that this old, coughing, out-of-breath, patched, raggedy, down-at-heels gager could not possibly be here as part of any scheme to break Jack Shaftoe out of prison. Or if he were, he could be stopped simply by throwing him an elbow. So the guards had relaxed, and shooed prisoners off benches and away from tables, and taken seats, bought drink from the prisoner-barman, and bided their time, each keeping an eye on Jack from across the room.

  “Thank you for coming round,” Jack said to his visitor. “I’d have nipped round to see you, but I’m chained to a great bloody window-grille most days.”

  The Visitor twitched and coughed.

  “Thought you might like to know,” Jack continued, “that I have been receiving offers from other quarters that are right tempting. More attractive, by a long chalk, than aught that I’ve heard from you.”

  The Visitor murmured some hot words, and, when words failed him, made flat slicing gestures.

  “Oh, I’ve no illusions as to that,” Jack assured him. “All has changed since we met here on the 28th of July. There is abundant evidence—as people never tire of telling me—to send me and the boys to Tyburn. So, I am not about to ask you for what we spoke of before: the farm in Carolina. That is a pipe-dream. But for Christ’s sake! A man of your intelligence must know that this is no kind of tempting offer! A merciful hanging, that is to say, a long drop, a short stop, and a decent burial for me and the boys. You cannot seriously expect me to assist you in exchange for such floor-sweepings. Bloody hell, if I want to die fast, I can make it so in the privacy of my own apartment!”

  The Visitor spoke for some little while now, but was cut off, at the end, by a coughing fit; which seemed to bring him such discomfort that he shifted about and writhed on his chair.

  “Sore ribs,” was the diagnosis of Doctor Jack Shaftoe. “Oh, I’ve had what you’ve got, sir, a time or two. Bloody torture, ain’t it? An arm or a leg heals in a trice, but ribs take forever.” This seemed to be a sort of patter while he waited for the Visitor’s fit to subside. When the other had finally stifled himself with a handkerchief to the lips, Jack went on: “It is easy enough for me to stand up before anyone you like, put my hand on a Bible, and testify that the coins I took out of the Pyx—your coins—were sound, and the ones I put into it—my fakes—were debased. But you quite correctly ask, who the hell is going to take my word for it? No one in his right mind. So. Yes. Indeed. You, sir, require hard evidence, in the form of the hard currency that I stole. Where is it, you’d like to know? Well, I already told you before that I gave all of that swag to the late Marquis of Ravenscar. I hoped that’d satisfy you. But as you have been so tiresome on this topic, I have, since the Marquis’s death, made certain inquiries among those of my friends you’ve not yet murdered, thrown into prison, or chased out of the country. And they tell me, sir, that those Sinthias from the Pyx were taken out of Ravenscar’s house after he died by that friend of his, that Daniel Waterhouse, and that this Waterhouse cove placed ’em for safekeeping in a vault or something below the ground out in Clerkenwell—I see by your face that you know the place I mean!” For the greasy wig had begun to bob up and down as the Visitor nodded.

  The Visitor pointed something out, and then it was Jack’s turn to nod. “You’ll never come out and say what you mean, but I can translate it well enough into plain talk: without the King’s Messengers to act as your bully boys, you must go through channels now. You can no longer just raid a place like Clerkenwell Court on your personal say-so. You must secure the Authority first. If you would like me to testify before a magistrate that the Pyx coins are secured in that vault, why, I’ll do that, sir, I will. But in exchange I must have freedom for Jimmy and Danny and Tomba. And for myself I want life, is all. Keep me locked up forever, if that is your will; but I’ll not be subjected to all of that rudeness out at Tyburn, and my parts pickled in Jack Ketch his Kitchen.”

  The Visitor mumbled something, and clawed at the tabletop until he’d dragged himself to his feet. “See you in a week, then!” Jack said. The Visitor said nothing in return, but turned round, keeping his face to the wall, and tottered out of the Black Dogg.

  NOW SOME OF THE GAOLERS were of a mind to jump up and fetch Jack straightaway back to his parlor up in the Castle. But others had not yet finished
their pints. Jack himself had ordered a round for the house only a minute earlier, and had not even begun to quaff from the fresh mug that had just been set before him. It seemed indecent to drag him out just now. So Jack sat, and shook hands and exchanged pleasantries with several prisoners who had the temerity to approach his table, and even kissed a Common-Side wench—almost certainly a Felon, by the looks of her—on the cheek. But after a few minutes there was movement from an adjacent table. Two free men had been sitting there all through Jack’s interview with his visitor: one, younger and quite bulky, the other, of indeterminate age (because of a wig and a turned-up collar) but with the bony physique of one of those fortunate chaps who has found the knack of spiting age. The big one stayed in his chair, only shifting position so as to bring Jack’s table into the corner of his eye. The slight one got up, went into the corner, and helped himself to a seat. He was gripping a mug—courtesy of Jack! He had not, however, brought it to his lips. Rather, he kept it clenched between his hands so that they would not shake so much. They wanted to shake with rage. No, they wanted to close round the throat of Jack Shaftoe.

  Jack enjoyed watching his new visitor for a few minutes. For it took that long for the old man to contain his fury enough to speak.

  “How long,” he finally said, “how long have you been whispering those—those abominable lies into the ear of Sir Isaac Newton?”

  “For as long as I have been privy to his eager ears,” said Jack, “going on two months now. It is something I never looked for. Great men in this town will do backflips to get Ike’s attention for even a moment. Who’d have thought he would listen so avidly to a Vagabond? And yet since he clapped me in irons, I’ve had better entrée to him than the bloody King of England himself. I snap my fingers—there he is, ready to listen for hours.”

  “Since the Marquis of Ravenscar went to his long home,” said Daniel, “Isaac Newton is my oldest friend. Or was; for your lies have made him into a bitter and dangerous enemy.”

  Jack snorted. “I could see what excellent friends you were when you came here to parley with me on the evening of July the 28th. The suspicion on old Ike’s face was quite obvious. Oh, not suspicion of you only but of everyone. I knew then that a few words from me would set him off. And so now you are enemies. Which is of as much significance to me, as that flies are, at this moment, swarming on camels’ arses in Cairo. Your old friend, enemy, or whatever he is, wishes to tear me limb from limb. Now. This bloke, who would do this terrible thing to me, is, it seems, a sorcerer or alchemist of some stripe, straight out of a bleeding færy-tale! Just like elves and trolls, his sort are fading away, and soon to vanish from this world. A state of affairs that is as plain to them, as it is to you and me! But where you and I look on this as a dying-off—and good riddance!—Ike and his chums mistake it for an Apocalypse that will be their great and final triumph. Ones such as he used to come and pester us in Vagabond-camps, and we would sport with them, lacking other diversions. Just as the proprietor of a gin-house uses his customers’ lust for booze to get money to feed his family, why, I am using Ike’s lust for the Solomonic Gold to get what I require for myself and the boys. Which I’ll go on doing until I have achieved satisfaction. If the result is a raid upon the Whig Mint hidden at Clerkenwell Court, and if in consequence you and your learned associates are brought hither in chains, it is nothing to me.”

  “Fine. It is all clear. What is it then that you want?”

  “Jimmy, Danny, Tomba, and I, free men, on a ship bound for America.”

  “It is so noted,” said the other. “However, there is a complication of which I am obliged to make you aware.”

  “My glass is only half empty, Dr. Waterhouse, and you have not even touched yours; so it seems there is ample time, if you will abandon this guarded cryptic way of speaking and only come out and say what you mean.”

  “You may—supposing some escape were to be possible—board ship and go to America. But she will not.”

  Jack almost shot back some waggish riposte, but then a serious look spread over his phizz, and he settled back, and waited. “You cannot possibly be talking about what I think you’re talking about!” he said finally.

  “I know it is difficult to believe,” said Daniel.

  “Even supposing—well—supposing any number of things I’m unwilling to suppose—why would she employ you as a go-between?”

  “It is an eminently reasonable question,” said Daniel. “The answer is that she is not. I am doing this at the bidding of another—a friend of the lady in question.”

  “Then I do not think much of this person’s friendship,” said Jack, “for a true friend would not dream of trying to mend what was broken so long ago. Some friend! Ha!”

  “None the less,” Daniel said, “I have been asked, by the friend in question, to make inquiries. The friend is young, and she has fanciful notions concerning the power of true love, et cetera, et cetera.”

  “Yes, as depicted in plays,” Jack said. “And by that I do not mean the vile, merry plays of the Restoration but older ones such as I attended as a lad.”

  “Of a simpler æra.”

  “Indeed. Yes. Though I am by no means fatuous enough to believe in such mawkish phant’sies, sir, I know how it is that young ladies, perhaps over-fond of the Theatre and the Italian Opera, can fall under its influence for a time, until Age and Experience slap them back to their senses. And so I’ll allow that this young lady who sent you may be merely daft, and not the least bit malicious.”

  “She will be ever so gratified,” said Daniel, “to know that the King of the Vagabonds thinks so.”

  “No need to jab at me, there, Doctor. ’Tis a sufficiently trying conversation, even without your biting asides. I am getting round to telling you something of great moment, which you must relay to this meddlesome lass, and that is as follows: the woman in question said to me, a long time ago, that I’d never again see her nor hear her voice until the day I died. And she’s not the sort to renege.”

  “Well, then, it follows that if you escape death, and board ship for America, you won’t get to see her or speak to her,” Daniel pointed out.

  “That were a very sad fate indeed,” said Jack, “but it is the fate to which I have been doomed for twelve years; and another few years of it wouldn’t kill me; whereas hanging around London would.”

  Fleet Prison

  AFTERNOON OF 5 OCTOBER 1714

  ’TWAS NATURAL TO ASSUME of a prison that, like the Inferno of Dante, it would only get worse as one worked one’s way in through the gate and pierced its concentric wards. Daniel had been circumventing the Fleet—a largely autonomous city of about a thousand souls—since he’d been tiny. The prison building proper (burned down in 1666, rebuilt in 1670) was a bit shy of two hundred fifty feet in length from the Poor Side common-room on the south end, to the Chapel on the north; forty feet deep; and forty high (sufficient for five storeys of low-ceilinged apartments, if one counted its half-buried cellar). But this structure, big as it was, could no more be confused with the Prison as a whole, than, say, the White Tower could be mistaken for the Tower of London complex. The Fleet Prison, as Daniel had always known it, was a squarish town about five hundred feet on a side—so, on paper, six acres or so. But seen up close it was like one of those writhing horrors that Hooke used to view under his microscope, which was to say it felt a thousand times larger than it was, because so complex and seething. Its outer boundary was understood to run, on the western side, right up the bank of the Fleet Ditch. On the north, all of Fleet Lane lay within it, but the buildings on the north side of the street lay without; so a prisoner could walk down the lane, trailing a hand along the fronts of the buildings, but if he or she stepped thro’ a doorway it would be deemed an Escape, and set in motion a train of financial consequences for the Warden. Similarly on the street called the Great Old Bailey (which coincided with the eastern boundary) and Ludgate Hill (southern), though along the latter it was more complicated because the prison had thrust
out three narrow tendrils along as many small Courts that depended from the south side of Ludgate. Thus the squarish, six-acre rules (as it was, for some reason, called) within which certain prisoners could roam about un-chained and unguarded, provided that they had taken out a Warrant of Attorney to confess a judgment to the amount of the debt with which the prisoner stands charged, with a defeazance on the back declaring it is to be void in case no escape should take place. This and other such securities, by very long-standing tradition, made it at least theoretically possible for those who’d been put in prison for debt—which meant most of the Fleet’s population—to move, and in some cases set up domiciles, outside of the Prison proper but within the rules, which was nearly indistinguishable from other seedy neighborhoods of London. The only way you’d really know you were in a prison was that certain chaps had odd habits of locomotion—in the interior of the six acres they’d move about like anyone else, but as they approached the boundary streets they’d become tentative, as if they could sense an invisible barrier, and would sidle along cautiously, lest a misstep or traffic accident push them over the border and make them guilty of Escape.

  All of this was an accommodation that like other institutions in this country had grown up insensibly during the half-dozen centuries since the Norman Conquest. When those actual Normans had burst in on the place, they’d found a patch nearer to one acre in extent, shaped like the hoof-print of a horse, its flat side defined by the bank of the Fleet River (in those days, one phant’sied, a babbling rural freshet) and the rest of it bulging out to the east. In any case it had somehow picked up a privileged legal status: the Bishop of London had authority over all the land around it, but not this one-acre hoofprint. Which anomaly could presumably be traced back to some more or less interesting yarn involving mailed Angles whaling on each other with gory battle-axes, but none of that mattered now—what mattered was that this oddity had somehow been leveraged, over the better part of a millennium, into the hoofprint’s current status as the Prison for the Courts of Common Pleas, Chancery, Exchequer, and Curia Regis. It had served in like capacity for the Court of Star Chamber until that had been abolished, and so Drake had once been chained up here, before Daniel had been born. In those days, for that reason, it had been a more interesting place, and more profitable to the Warden. But now it was thought of almost entirely as a debtors’ prison. There were a few exceptions to that rule, which had lately become very important to Daniel. But in order for him to come to grips with the exceptions he had first to know and understand the norms.