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

by Neal Stephenson

  This had entailed a negligible amount of preliminary research. Negligible because small, but also because he simply could not believe what he’d been reading about how the place was run. Like a general planning a campaign, he’d sought to draw up an Order of Battle: a list of the opposing forces, an inventory of their battalions. Yet no matter how many documents he perused, or debtors he bought gin for in the sad taverns that competed against cut-rate slaughterhouses and brothels for real estate in the rules, he could only turn up references to the following officials:

  A Warden, who had bought the title as a sort of Investment—possibly the most complicated financial security in the history of the world—and who was never there.

  A Deputy Warden, who had entered into some manner of indenture with the Warden, so as to shield the Warden from the liability he ought to have incurred whenever a prisoner was found to have escaped—the details made Daniel’s head spin, and were not important—suffice it to say that the arrangement only made sense if the Deputy Warden were essentially no better than an imprisoned debtor himself, so that when any liability fell on him as a result of an escape, he could simply shrug off the now inconvenient title, plead insolvency, and dissolve back into the Fleet’s general population.

  A few Tipstaffs, who were officials charged with escorting prisoners to and from the several Courts; these were not resident in the Prison and had no weapons [other than painted staves] and no power to help or hinder Daniel.

  A Scavenger, who as far as could be made out was a parasitical species of janitor.

  A Crier.

  A Chaplain.

  Three Turnkeys.

  No matter how many times he went over the list, Daniel could not fathom how order could be maintained over a one-acre prison housing, every night, upwards of a thousand men, women, and children, by a staff whose executive arm, as it were, numbered three turnkeys. He would have to go and see it. Anyone could do so; they did not charge a fee for admission, as at Bedlam. Daniel blended in as long as he wore old clothes and did not go around announcing that he was a Lord Regent.

  The Fleet presented itself along the bank of the Ditch as a sheer wall, ventilated by a few stoutly gridironed windows where the poor debtors would sit all day long rattling tin cups that they thrust out between the bars. Passers-by could chuck coins into these; but since to be a passer-by meant to stroll along the brink of the Sceptered Isle’s Cloaca Maxima, these were not superabundant. Hooke had wanted to bridge the whole Ditch over, i.e., to bury it. This would have perked up the cup-rattling business no end; but it had not been done.

  Next to the poor debtors’ begging-grate was a massive archway tunneling, for an intimidating distance of some forty feet, through this wall of Prison buildings that rose above the Ditch-brink. The tunnel was lined on both sides by stone benches occupied, most of the time, by Disagreeable Persons. In entering this tunnel one crossed over the ancient boundary and so departed, albeit temporarily, from the see of the Bishop of London. Wretched ministers sat here all day long, hoping to earn a shilling or two by performing quick no-questions-asked weddings. The same rite, celebrated a few yards away, would be illegal and illegitimate, but here the Bishop had no power to ban it. There were too many such men of the cloth to fit on the finite bench space under the arch; the more enterprising were all parading up and down the bank of the Fleet hoping to draw in business.

  The other people on the bench tended to be male and female prostitutes, or their customers, hoping to conduct business, which was to be negotiated here, and consummated within the Prison.

  At a certain point the arched passage was severed by a stone wall no more than about eight feet high, with a row of iron spikes protruding cheerfully from its top. Set into the middle of this was a grated doorway. Anyone could pass in, but only some could pass out. Daniel slowed as he approached this. Peter Hoxton had been acting as a sort of rear-guard, and almost piled into him. “You are permitted to go on,” Saturn pointed out, looking this way and that at the Bench-people. For these had noted Daniel and begun to tender diverse proposals. Daniel ignored him, and them. He was staring at his feet. He flipped his walking-stick around and rapped its massive head against the paving-stones, moved to the side a couple of feet, and did it again. Finally he resolved to go in. But he got into a nasty collision, just before the door, with a young man. It was not nasty in the sense of being violent, nor in the sense of being acrimonious, for the young man tried to avoid it, and proffered a sort of apology after. He had been walking along behind Daniel and Saturn in traffic, and when they’d bated before the door, he had sought to go around them. The nastiness came from that he was a butcher’s boy, employed probably by one of the many shambles out in the rules along Fleet Lane, and so his clothes were soggy with blood and other body fluids of dead animals, and clotted with fæces and brains and feathers and hair. Some of it ended up on Daniel. The boy was aghast, particularly when he got it in his head that Saturn might retaliate; but Daniel smiled benignly and said, “After you, young man,” and held out a hand. The boy pushed through the door, smearing it anew—for it looked as if many of his colleagues had preceded him—and civilly held it open for Daniel. Daniel and Saturn went in, passing by a whore (tertiary syphilis) and client (primary) waiting to go out, walked through the scrutiny of a turnkey, and emerged from the tunnel into one side of a stripe of open ground that lay athwart their path. The Prison building was directly ahead of them, an immense barrier stretching more than a hundred feet to the left as well as to the right, and looming high above. In half a dozen strides they could have ascended a few steps and gone right into it. But Daniel drew up short, and stopped again. His attention had been seized by a peculiar triptych of figures who were standing just within the gate, and who had no thought of getting out of Daniel’s, or anyone’s, way. One was a scruffy and beaten-down-looking chap, who kept turning to the left and right, as if mounted on a vertical spit. Next to him, looking on, was a fellow, slightly better dressed, leaning on a staff daubed all over with paint. A few paces distant stood a grim, heavy man who was staring at the first fellow in a way that normally would have provoked a row. The staring went on for an uncannily long time, and Daniel began to collect that it was some sort of rite. He noticed that the turnkey who was stationed by the gate was also staring, when he was not busy scrutinizing the faces of departing visitors; and this detail solved the puzzle for him, just as Saturn—who had been amusing himself watching Daniel try to make sense of it—gave the explanation: “New prisoner. These turnkeys have a faculty in common with thief-takers: they never forget a face, once they’ve given it a keen study.”

  Daniel now felt a strong disinclination to be studied, or even glimpsed, by men with such gifts, and so he moved forward, and stopped in a place a bit nearer the Prison and away from the eldritch scrutiny of the turnkeys. He rapped on the pavement again, and looked both ways. They were in a sort of choke-point; the prison grounds were narrowest here, broader to the right (south) and more so to the north. That was because the bit to the north was separated from the Ditch outside, not by a thick row of buildings, as here, but only by a stone curtain-wall, twenty-five feet high, with rotating spikes at the top. To spruce things up it had been painted, down low, with scenery. But Daniel only glimpsed a few vertical splints of this because the place was crowded with smokers, strollers, and conversationalists. The day was a bit nippy, but the walls and the Prison’s bulk kept out all wind, and so the prisoners and the guests were making the most of it. Which gave him an insight. Seeing self-described poor debtors begging outside, he’d always assumed they were committing a tautology. But now that he was on the inside, he could see debtors who were affluent, and so he understood that the cup-rattlers without called themselves poor to distinguish themselves from these.

  Daniel turned his back on the Painted Ground, as the yard to the north was called, and, at a prudent distance, followed the butcher’s boy who had collided with him a moment earlier. The gruesome lad moved purposefully but was obliged to
meander somewhat over the course of a sixty-pace journey, channeled between the Prison on his left and the backs of the Fleet Ditch–facing buildings on his right. He was headed for a row of small buildings put up against the base of the Prison wall, directly ahead of him, which was to say along the southern verge. Even from a distance Daniel could tell plainly enough that this was a Convenience, a Necessary House, a Shite-Hole. The boy went in to use it, and Daniel said a silent prayer for whomever would have to use it next. Presently the boy emerged, retraced his steps, walked past the turnkey (who studied him shrewdly, but did not move or speak), merged with the incoming and outgoing traffic of visitors, whores, &c., and went out.

  Daniel Waterhouse and Peter Hoxton meanwhile had paused about halfway between the gate and the privy, for two reasons.

  (1) The Prison building consisted almost entirely of apartments, no better and no worse than any other London slum-apartments, to which prisoners had their own keys. Nevertheless, it did have a few strong-rooms, or, less politely, dungeons in which people could be placed without the privilege of having a door-key! Daniel was especially curious about these. There was a row of them in the Ditch-facing buildings whose back doors and windows were on Daniel’s right hand as he looked south toward the privies. But to inspect these closely would have been indiscreet.

  However, haply

  (2) Another strange rite was getting underway to the left side of the gate-privy axis. They had approached the Poor Side of the prison: a couple of very large rooms at the extremity of the south wing, where prisoners who could not afford apartments slept and lived all crowded together. Against the exterior wall of one of those teeming halls was a cistern, fed by a pump. This was sunk into the earth less than a hundred feet away from Fleet Ditch itself and so Daniel had to will himself not to imagine what sort of water came out of it. A dozen or so persons were approaching it: a tight cluster of four, surrounded by a ragged entourage. They spread out around the cistern and Daniel perceived that one of them had his elbows pinioned behind his back with a shaggy hank of twine. He was uncovered, and being frogmarched by others who were every bit as down-at-heels as he was but had managed to round up artifacts recognizable as hats and wigs. Heads turned toward the oldest of these, and he went into a peroration that sounded, for all the world, like a legal judgment: certainly it went on that long, and was that hard to follow. It was as pompous as these men were shabby, but when the leprous verbiage was scraped away to expose its grammatical bones, what it said was that these fellows (except for the one who was tied up) were something called the Court of Inspectors and that he, the one who was talking, was the Steward thereof, and that in some proceeding just concluded they had found the bare-headed one guilty of having entered so-and-so’s apartment yesterday and stealing a clay bottle containing gin from out of a hole in the wall where its rightful owner was generally known to park it, when not pressing it against his lips; and that the sentence for said crime was to be carried out forthwith. Whereupon the gin-nicker was spun around so that his back was to the cistern, and its rim behind his knees, and then shoved back so that his feet went out and up, and his head pierced the glaze of scum that covered the reservoir, and went under. Maintaining a fierce grip on the man’s shoulders, his captors maneuvered him so that his face was directly beneath the spout of the pump, and a third officer of the “Court of Inspectors” set to work jacking the pump-handle as vigorously as he could. It was difficult to monitor the results because a crowd of prisoners had gathered round to be edified by it. Daniel glimpsed the prisoner’s feet dancing an air tarantella. Debtors had gathered in all of the Prison’s windows to learn from the booze-hound’s errors. Saturn had a fair view, being tall. Daniel sidled around behind him and stood with his back pressed against Saturn’s and looked the other way, at what he took to be the strong-rooms.

  These certainly looked the part, having heavy doors with redundant bars and locks, and little to nothing in the way of windows. He’d heard that some of the strong-rooms were near the Ditch, the Privies, and the prison’s dung-midden, and that was true of these, though the stench was not so bad as all this implied because it was a crisp day. But Daniel did not see any of the precautions he’d have expected if members of the Shaftoe gang had been locked up here. Moreover, at their other side, these rooms faced the Ditch-brink, and might have windows or grates communicating with the outside, which made them a less fitting place for locking up really infamous criminals.

  The gin-thief having been fully reformed, the pumping ended, and its beneficiary was dragged out half-dead and left on the ground next to the cistern. The crowd dispersed. Some of them went south round the nearer end of the great building, squeezing through a narrow and loathsome pass between it and the privies and the midden; here the surrounding wall was forty feet high, because it came so close to the upper-storey windows of the building that it put anyone who looked at it in mind of rope-based strategies. But once Daniel and Saturn had rounded the corner and turned north again, now on the east side of the building, the space between it and the wall broadened decisively into a close a hundred feet or more across, which Daniel identified from his preliminary readings as the Racket Ground. This adjoined the north or Master’s Side of the prison, where more affluent debtors dwelled in apartments that were more or less crowded depending on how much money they had—this being one of the Warden’s primary Engines of Revenue. Despite the chill in the air there were too many games of rackets, bowls, skittles, &c. underway here for Daniel to sort out. Around the edges were a few scabrous tables where it looked like card-games might be prosecuted during summer. Daniel took a seat at one of these to rest his legs. His back was to the prison wall and he could survey the entire Racket Ground and the Master’s Side opposite. Some distance off to his right, the prison’s northeastern lobe was described by the curve of the wall. Nestled in its lee were a few separate buildings: a kitchen, which had its own pump and cistern. To one side of it, another midden, threatening to engulf another privy—all of this disconcertingly close to the prison chapel. To the other side, a building in the crook of the wall that Daniel would have been hard pressed to identify—that is, if not for the fact that two armed soldiers were standing in front of it. Two tents, standard military issue, and a cook-fire encroached on the Racket Ground nearby.

  Daniel had been carrying a map-case slung over one shoulder. He unlimbered it now and unbuckled its lid. When he overturned it, the first thing that emerged was a wee avalanche of dust and of plaster-crumbs still bound together in clusters by horse-hair. But with a bit of shaking he was able to produce a roll of documents.

  Saturn had last seen these when he’d rooted them out of a shattered wall in the cupola of Bedlam. “When you were abusing the pavement with your stick, some of the prisoners espied you, and speculated you were mad,” he said. “Now I do begin to wonder—”

  “It suits me very well for them to suppose I am mad!” Daniel exclaimed, pleased to hear about it. “You may explain to them that I am not only daft but senile, and convinced that treasure was buried here long ago by a counterfeiter—”

  “Counterfeiter! Here?”

  “Yes, from time to time coiners and smugglers have been committed to this place by the Court of Exchequer or Curia Regis. So the story makes sense to that point, as all madman-stories must, in their beginnings. I’ve got it into my head that I can find this treasure. You are a manservant, charged, by my exasperated family, with following me around, keeping me out of trouble, and tending to my needs.”

  “In that capacity,” said Peter Hoxton, “I’ll just nip down to the Tap-Room, if it’s all the same to you, and get chocolate for myself and—?”

  “Coffee for me, thank you,” said Daniel, and began to wrestle the drawings out on the pitted tabletop, weighing them down at the edges with shattered bowling-pins. Saturn ambled across the Racket Ground, dodging airborne or rolling balls as need be, and giving the cold shoulder to an acquaintance who’d recognized him. He worked his way north round the aperture
between kitchen and chapel so that he could go in at the northern extremity of the building—the Tap-Room and coffeehouse were there, hard by the chapel.

  As he had been doing on and off for fifty years, Daniel communed with the mind of Robert Hooke through Hooke’s curious notes and jottings, and his exquisite pictures.

  Anno Domini 1335 ye Warden of ye Fleet hired laborers to dig a Moat around ye Prop’ty (ye Court & ye Building withal). Width of ye Excav’n was 10 Feet. Of Necessity (or else how could it have been Filled with Water) we say that this communicated with ye Fleet at two places, forming an ox-bow lying to ye East side of that River, & that its Pos’n agrees approx. with ye present Wall…a later Record complains that Sewers & Tannery-drains & as many as 1 doz. Latrines have been made to discharge into said Moat from adjoining Prop’ties, making of it an open Sewer that must needs have been no less Offensive then, than is the Fleet Ditch to-day…ye Moat no longer exists, & yet ye Rec’ds want any sugg’n of its having been Filled. Whence I venture to Conclude, ’twas never Filled, but rather Roofed, to shield ye Environs from its noisome damps, & yet discharges into ye Fleet, most probably at A and B, & doth account for much of what is loathsome about that Ditch… and here Hooke went on to develop his argument that the same treatment ought to be given to the Ditch itself.