by Philip Kerr
“But what was his name?” I asked. “Were not enquiries of him made? It is a sad thing to see how uncertain a thing my predecessor’s reputation was and how little is to be presumed of his honesty. I trust if I disappeared, you might give me a rather better opinion.”
“Your concern does you credit,” admitted Newton. “His name was George Macey. And I do believe some enquiries of him were made.”
“But pray sir, is it not possible that Mister Macey should be lamented as a victim, as condemned for a villain? By your own reckoning these are desperate men you have been dealing with. Might he not have been murdered?”
“Might, sir? Might? This was six months ago, when I was still finding my way around this strange place. And I can frame no hypothesis after such an interval of time. For to me the best and safest method of philosophising seems to be, first, to inquire diligently into the evidence of things and to proceed later to hypothesis for the explanations as to how they are. What might or might not have happened is of little concern to me. The investigation of mysteries and difficult things by the method of analysis ought ever to precede the method of composition.
“That is my method, Mister Ellis. To know it is to hit my constitution exactly, sir. But your questions do you justice. I will continue to appreciate your honesty, sir, for I would not make you my creature. But always speak to the point. And make your earliest study my scientific method, for it will stand you in good stead, and then you and I shall get on very well.”
“I will study you and your method most diligently, sir,” said I.
“Well then, what think you of the house and garden?”
“I like them very well, Doctor Newton. I think I was never so lucky at cards as I have been in entering your employment.”
This was true. I had never lived on my own. At the Bar I had shared rooms with another man; and before that, I had been at the University of Oxford where I had lived in college. And it was a great pleasure to close the door of a whole house behind me and be by myself. For all my life I had been obliged to find a space away from brothers and sisters, students and pupil barristers in order that I might read, or dream. But the first night I spent in my new house at the Tower was very nearly my last.
I had gone to bed early with a number of essays on the amendment of English coins that had been written by the leading minds of the day, including Doctor Newton, Sir Christopher Wren, Doctor Wallis, and Mister John Locke. These had been commissioned by the Regency Council in 1695 and Newton had suggested they would give me a good grounding in the various issues surrounding the recoinage. These did not encourage me to stay awake, however; my evening’s reading was as tedious as anything I had seen since abandoning my legal studies; and after an hour or two, I put the candle in the fireplace and pulled the quilt over my head with scarcely a thought for the superstitious fancies that had beset me earlier.
I do not know how long I was asleep. Perhaps it was as little as half an hour, perhaps much longer, but I awoke with a start, as if I had pulled myself out of the grave and back into life. Immediately I was possessed of the certainty that I was not alone; and holding my breath I became convinced that the dark shadows of my bedchamber were animated with the respiration of another. I sat up and, my whole body swayed by the beating of my own heart, I listened as closely to the tenebrous atmosphere as if I had been the prophet Samuel himself. And by and by I was able to distinguish the sound in my own bedchamber as of someone sucking air through a quill, which made my hair stand on end.
“For God’s sake, who is there?” I cried and, swinging my legs out of bed, I went to fetch the stub of candle from the fireplace to light another and illuminate the gloom. In the same instant out of the shadows spoke a voice that chilled me to the bone.
“Thy Nemesis,” said the voice.
I had a brief glimpse of a man’s face and was about to answer when, in a most inhuman manner, he attacked me, forcing me back onto the bed where, with all his weight upon my chest, he set about trying to gouge at my eyes with his thumbs, so that I cried out murder. But the strength of my assailant was formidable and although I caught him a couple of good blows about the head, the power of his attack never faltered and I thought for certain that I should be murdered and if not killed then blinded. Desperately, I forced his hands away from my eyes only to have him fasten them about my throat. Sensible of the fact that I was surely being strangled, I kicked out, in vain. A moment or two later I felt a great weight lifted from my chest and assumed that my soul had begun its upward motion to heaven before, finally, I realised that my attacker had been pulled off me and was now under the restraint of two members of the Ordnance, although he tolerated their hold upon him with such calm that I wondered if these two sentinels detained the right man.
A third member of the Ordnance, one Sergeant Rohan, helped me to come to myself with a little brandy so that I was at last able to stand and confront my assailant in the light of the lantern the Yeoman Warders had brought with them.
“Who are you?” I demanded to know in a voice hardly my own, it sounded so hoarse. “And why did you attack me?”
“His name is Mister Twistleton,” reported the strangely spoken Sergeant Rohan. “And he is the Tower Armourer.”
“I did not attack you, sir,” said Mister Twistleton with such a show of innocence that I almost believed him. “I don’t know who you are. It was the other gentleman I attacked.”
“Are you mad?” I said, swallowing uncomfortably. “There is no other gentlemen here. Come sir, what harm have I done to you that you should attack me?”
“He’s mad all right,” said Rohan. “But as you can see for yourself, there’s no harm in him now.”
“No harm in him?” I repeated with no small incredulity. “Why, he very nearly murdered me in my bed.”
“Mister Ellis, is it?” asked Sergeant Rohan.
“Yes.”
“He’ll not trouble you again, Mister Ellis. I give you my word on it. Mostly he’s close kept in my own house, under my cognizance, and never troubles nobody. But tonight he slipped out when we wasn’t looking and fetched up here. We were out looking for him when we heard the commotion.”
“It’s lucky for me you did,” said I. “Another minute and I wouldn’t be talking to you now. But surely he belongs in Bedlam. Or some other hospital for the distracted and lunatic.”
“Bedlam, Mister Ellis? And have him chained to a wall like a dog? To be laughed at like an animal?” said one of the Yeoman Warders. “Mister Twistleton is our friend, sir. We couldn’t let that happen to him.”
“But he’s dangerous.”
“Most of the time he’s exactly as you see him now. Quite calm in himself. Don’t make us send him there, Mister Ellis.”
“Me? I don’t apprehend how any of you are under my compulsion, Mister Bull. His care is your own affair.”
“It won’t be if you report the matter, sir.”
“Christ Jesus have mercy upon us,” shouted Mister Twistleton.
“You see? Even he asks your indulgence,” said Rohan.
I sighed, exasperated at this turn of events: that I should be attacked in my own bed, near strangled and then asked to forget all about it, as if this had been some foolish schoolboy prank and not a case of attempted murder. It seemed a perfect mockery of the Tower’s reputation for security, how a lunatic should be allowed to wander about the place with no more restraint than some wretched raven.
“Then I must have your word that he will be kept under lock and key, at least at night,” said I. “The next person might not be so lucky as I was.”
“You shall have my word,” said Rohan. “Right willingly.”
I nodded my grudging assent, for I seemed to have little choice in the matter. From what Newton had told me, relations betweenthe Mint and the Ordnance were already quite bad enough without my becoming the author of yet more bad feeling. “What was it that put him out of his wits?” I asked.
“The screams,” said Mister Twistleton. “I hear
the screams, you see. Of them as have died in this place. They never stop.”
Sergeant Rohan clapped me on the shoulder. “You’re a good fellow, Mister Ellis,” he said. “For a Minter, that is. He’ll not trouble you again, I promise you that.”
In the days and weeks that followed, I often saw Mister Twistleton about the Tower and always accompanied by a member of the Ordnance; and in truth he always seemed well enough not to be shut up in a madhouse, so that I congratulated myself how I had made a most charitable judgement in the matter; and it was several months afterward before I wondered if I had not made a dreadful mistake.
With public matters in a most sad condition and the country hardly fit to be governed, the Mint worked twenty hours a day, six days a week. As did Newton, for although he had nothing to do with the organising and stimulating of the recoinage, he slept very little, and on the rare occasions when he was not about the business of hunting coiners and clippers, he would occupy himself with the devising of a solution for some mathematic problem or other that would have been set by one of his many mischievous correspondents—for it was their most earnest desire to catch him out in his calculations. But there was always plenty for us to do, and soon we were frequent visitors to the Fleet Prison or to Newgate, to take depositions of evidence from various rogues and scoundrels, many of whom suffered the full penalty of the law.
I mention just one of these cases now, not because it pertains to the telling of this horrible and secret story, which greatly vexed my master for almost a whole year, but to show how many other legal matters at the same time were occupying his virtuoso mind.
The Lords Justices of England ruled the country in the absence of the King, who was fighting the French, with no great success, in Flanders. They had received a letter from a William Chaloner, a most clever and egregious forger, who alleged that money had been coined in the Tower containing less than its proper weight of silver, that false guineas had been made there, and that blanks and guinea stamps had been stolen out of the Mint. My master was ordered by their Lordships to investigate these allegations, which he was obliged to do, although he knew full well that Chaloner was Mercury himself when it came to rhetoric and that he had sold their Lordships a worthless jade. In the meantime, Peter Cooke, a gentleman lately condemned to death for coining, sought to bilk the hangman by telling us that the same Chaloner had been his accomplice, as were others.
How these scoundrels did peach upon each other, for my master had no sooner heard from Cooke, than Thomas White, another villain squeamishly affected by sentence of death, accused John Hunter, who worked at the Mint, of supplying official guinea dies to Chaloner. He also named as coiners Robert Charnock, a notorious Jacobite who had been recently executed for his part in the treasonous plot against King William of Sir John Fenwick; James Pritchard, of Colonel Windsor’s regiment of horse guards; and a man named Jones, about whom little or nothing was known. White had been convicted on the evidence of Scotch Robin, who had been an engraver at the Mint, and was a very leaky fellow, most lachrymose; and although my master suspected his sincerity, he always managed to betray at least one more of his friends under Newton’s close questioning.
It was a source of no small wonder to me, that a man who had kept himself close-closeted in Cambridge for a quarter century should prove such an expert interrogator. Sometimes Newton seemed stern and unforgiving and promised White that he would hang before the week was out if he concealed any other criminals; and then, at other times, my master did counterfeit to White such friendship and mirth that a man might have thought they were cousins. By these advocate’s tricks, which Newton seemed to know by instinct, White named five others, which earned him another reprieve.
Most of these rogues made a good conscience of their deeds and accomplices, but a few tried to keep up the lie, and had the cunning to cry a great while and talk and blubber that they knew nothing at all. Newton was not a man who was easy to trick and with those who tried he was most unforgiving, as if anyone that filled his mind with false information was guilty of something even more heinous than coining. With Peter Cooke, who had sought repeatedly to trick my master most vexatiously, the Doctor proved he could be as vindictive as the Three Furies.
First, we visited the wretched man in his Newgate dungeon, as did several hundred others—for it is the custom in England to view the condemned man, as a visitor to the Tower might look at the lions in the Barbican. Second, we attended the foolish miscreant’s condemned sermon, where Newton fixed his eye upon Cooke, who sat alone in his segregated pew, in front of his own open coffin. And still not full-gorged with his revenge, for so I perceived it, my master insisted that we go to Tyburn and see Cooke make his terrible end.
I remember it well, for it was the first time that I saw a man hanged, drawn and quartered, which is a beastly business. But it was unusual besides because Newton seldomly attended the executions of those he prosecuted.
“I think it is right and proper,” he said by way of justifying himself, “that, as officers of the law, occasionally we should oblige ourselves to witness the fate to which our investigations lead some of these transgressors. So that we may conduct ourselves with a proper gravity, and that we shall not make our accusations lightly. Do you not agree, sir?”
“Yes sir, if you say so,” I said weakly, for I had little appetite for the spectacle.
Cooke, who was a brawny fellow, was drawn on a hurdle in his shift to the place of execution, with the halter wound around his waist and the noose in his hand. To my way of thinking he kept his countenance well, although the hangman rode with him upon the hurdle, and all the time held the axe which Cooke knew would shortly sever his limbs. I shook merely to contemplate the instrument of torture.
We were almost an hour at Tyburn, Cooke delaying the time by long prayers, one after another, until finally, half fainting with fright, he was dragged up the ladder by the hangman, who fixed his halter upon the beam and then threw him off, whereupon the mob set up such a roar of excitement and pressed toward the scaffold that I thought we would be crushed.
The hangman had judged it nicely, for Cooke’s toes touched the scaffold so that he was quite alive when the hangman cut him down and, knife in hand, fell upon his victim like one of Caesar’s bloody assassins. The crowd, much quietened, groaned as one when the hangman, gutting Cooke like an old goat, sliced open his belly, stuffed in his hand and drew it out again holding a handful of steaming tripes, for the day was cold; and these he burned on a brazier in front of the still visibly breathing man who, but for the noose still constricting his neck, would surely have screamed out his agonies.
Newton did not flinch at the sight and, studying his countenance for a few seconds, I saw that although he took no pleasure in this sad spectacle, nor did he show any signs of lenity either; and I almost thought my master regarded the whole spectacle as he would have observed the dissection of a human cadaver in the Royal Society, which is to say as some kind of experimental procedure.
Finally, the hangman struck off Cooke’s head and, prompted by the Sheriff, held it up for the encouragement of the crowd, declaring it to be the head of Peter Cooke, a villain and a traitor. So ended this terrible morning of blood.
From Tyburn we took a hackney to Newton’s house for dinner where Mrs. Rogers, the housekeeper, had cooked us a chicken. Newton’s appetite was undiminished by the cruelty of the punishment we had witnessed which I was moved to discuss, finding I had little stomach for eating, the sight of another man’s stomach ripped open being still so vivid in my mind.
“I cannot think the law is best served by such severity,” I declared. “Should a man who coins be punished in the same way as one who plans to kill the King?”
“One is just as disruptive to the smooth governing of the realm as the other,” declared Newton. “Indeed it might even be argued that a king might be killed with little disruption to the country at large, as in ancient Rome where the Praetorians killed their emperors like boys kill flies. But if the m
oney is bad, then so the country lacks a true measure of prosperity and by that same sickness shall it quickly perish. But it is not for us to discourse upon the justice of the punishment. It is a matter for the courts. Or the Parliament.”
“I should as soon be murdered in my bed as treated thus.”
“Surely ’tis always better to be executed than murdered, for any condemned man has an opportunity to make his peace with Almighty God.”
“Tell that to Peter Cooke,” said I. “I should think he would have preferred to make a quicker end of it, and trusted God’s proper judgement afterwards.”
The exceedingly stormy weather of November gave way to a fierce frost in early December, in the midst of rumours about French naval preparations for a landing in Ireland. My master and myself had spent all morning in the office, this being close by the Byward Tower and over the entrance to the Mint. Like everywhere else in the Tower it was a damp little place, which a large fire did little to dispel so that I frequently suffered from a most pernicious cough. Frequently our documents were mildewed so that I was often obliged to dry them in front of the fire.
The office itself was furnished with several comfortable chairs, two or three desks, some shelves and a close stool. There were two windows: one that overlooked Mint Street and the other the moat, wherein we would empty our chamber pot. This moat was ten feet deep and some thirty feet in width, and, in ancient times, had once been filled with snakes, crocodiles, and alligators from the Royal Menagerie.
On this particular morning two dredgers operating under the licence of the Lord Lieutenant—it being one of the Tower liberties that anything which fell into the moat was the property of the Tower and, by extension, of the Lord Lieutenant—were dragging the filthy water. We paid little attention to them at the time, being much concerned with rumours of a new forging process having been perfected in relation to the golden guinea coin, this information being laid before my master by Humphrey Hall, who was one of Newton’s extensive web of informers, and a most reliable and diligent fellow. But presently news reached us that one of the dredgers had fetched out of the moat a man’s body, the condition of which was such that it was strongly suspected he had been murdered, for the feet were bound together and very likely he had been weighed down.