Read The System of the World Online
Authors: Neal Stephenson
“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
.”
AFTERNOON OF
5
OCTOBER
1714
’T
WAS 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
.
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:
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.