The System of the World (105 page)

Daniel liked this so much that he paid her more than it was probably worth. “Now, you say that there is a Wine-Clubb?”

“Yes, sir, Monday nights. And Beer-Clubb Thursdays. Leastwise, men gather and drink, and call it a Clubb.”

“Prisoners or visitors or—”

“Both.”

“So it is finished at ten of the clock?”

The woman had no idea what Daniel was on about, so he had to explain: “At that hour, the turnkeys call ‘strangers all out,’ do they not?”

“What matters it, if they do? The Clubbs roar until one or two in the morning, sir, and then they disperse to apartments, and carry on through sunrise.”

Daniel slid her another coin, feeling stupid in retrospect. For everyone said this was the greatest brothel in London, and how could such a thing be, if everyone really was shooed away at ten?

“Of the Wine-Clubb and the Beer-Clubb, which is the loudest?”

“Loudest? Wine-Clubb, loud early, quiet late. Beer-Clubb, other way round, know-what-I-mean.”

“Do the soldiers ever partake?” asked Daniel, nodding at the tents.

“Ooh, every so often a pair of ’em’ll nip round for a pint,” she said, “but it’s been dicey, ’tween us ’n’ them, know-what-I-mean—”

“Because of the Steward’s legal proceedings.”

“Yeah. Yeah. That’s it.”

“How can they sleep, in those tents, with all of the noise from the tap-room nearby?”

“They can’t. But sleep’s always a problem in the Fleet,” she said, “for them as have ambitions of sleepin’, know-what-I-mean.”

“I know precisely what you mean, madame,” said Daniel, sliding a final coin. “Do take this and buy some cotton to stuff in your ears.”

“Thank you ever so kindly, sir,” she said, backing away. “Hope to see you on Monday or Thursday evening, as you prefer.”

“I
F THIS GETS ANY EASIER,”
said Daniel to Saturn, “I shall feel a bit let down.”

“It doesn’t look easy to me! Have you seen the locks on that dungeon?”

“It shall be as easy as throwing a party,” Daniel returned. “Now, come—let’s go out—supposing that the turnkeys will let us!—and look for real estate on Fleet Lane.”

Saturn looked gloomier than usual.

“What, the idea doesn’t please you?”

“It is no more displeasing than any of your other recent notions,” said Peter Hoxton, Esq.

“Is that your idea of diplomacy?”

“It is the best I can muster just now. You should not have looked in Hockley-in-the-Hole, if you sought a diplomat.”

“Then as long as we are being blunt,” said Daniel, “this is as good a time as any for me to inform you that I know you made the Infernal Devices for Jack.”

“Was wondering,” said Peter Hoxton, motionless and red.

“I had suspected, but it became more than obvious in July, when you crafted that excellent snare that caught de Gex.”

Peter Hoxton commenced inhaling now, and, over the next quarter-minute or so, drew into his lungs a few hogsheads of air, and grew and grew until it seemed his ribcage was going to press up against the building to one side and the wall to the other, and begin cracking the masonry. But finally he reached his limit, and let all of the air out in a whistling hurricanoe.

“Was wondering,” he repeated, as if he’d only been trying the phrase on for size, the first time he’d said it. “Have been on tenterhooks, a bit.”

“I know you have.”

“I am gratified” said Saturn, cherishing this word, “gratified that you did not simply
prosecute
me.”

“No one was killed,” Daniel pointed out. “The explosions did not continue.”

“One of the reasons I sought you out in the first place, you know, was that…”

“You wanted to keep an eye on me, and my investigation.”

“Oh, to be sure, but also because…”

“You felt bad that you’d had a hand in Blowing me Up.”

“Yes—exactly! It’s as if you read my mind.”

“I read your face, your manner, which is what a Father Confessor is
supposed
to do. What do you know concerning the Pyx?”

“I opened it. Jack took some things out, placed others in.”

“What did Jack put in? Was it fine gold? Or allayed with base metal?”

Saturn shrugged. “I sometimes purchase gold to make watches,” he said, “but that is all I know of gold.”

After this Daniel was silent for such a long time that Saturn progressed through diverse stages of irritability, nervousness, and melancholy. He looked up and regarded the Fleet Prison. “Would you like me to go yonder and pick out a cell, then, or—”

“Wrong place for Infernal Device makers. You would find the company of debtors tedious. You would fall to drinking.” Daniel pushed himself to his feet and drained his coffee, which had been tepid when served and was cold now. “Now, about that real estate,” said Daniel. “My life began getting really complicated round the time the King of England blew up my house, and killed my dad; now I may have to blow up another house to make things simple again; if so, I’ll need a man of your skills.”

Saturn finally stood up. “That, at least, is more interesting than what we have been doing, and so I shall join you.”

NOTICE
of a
P
UBLICK
A
UCTION
to be conducted in the
L
IBERTY
of the
C
LINK
ONE WEEK FROM TODAY
[
that is, on the
20th
October A.D.
1714]
Item for sale: MR. CHARLES WHITE, ESQ.

DAPPA
of the
L
IBERTY OF THE
C
LINK
13 October
A.D.
1714

BEER-CLUBB NIGHT (THURSDAY,
14
OCTOBER
1714)

D
APPA HAD ONLY WRITTEN THE
bloody thing yesterday and the Tap-Room was already plastered with them—as was every other coffee-house and Clubb in the metropolis. Or so Daniel assumed, as he sat in the corner, pretending to have a beer, and reading it. He had not actually set foot in the Kit-Cat or any other such place since his memorable encounter with Jack Shaftoe in the Black Dogg ten days earlier. Rather, this Tap-Room had become his new College, and the debtors—especially the elders of the Court of Inspectors—his new fellows. They were no more tedious than most of the Kit-Cat’s membership, and Daniel often found them easier to get along with, as they had no purpose in life other than to go on existing as merrily as possible. Daniel could make them a good deal merrier by purchasing the occasional round for the house.

And also by discoursing of buried treasure. For that yarn, which Daniel had made up on the spur of the moment, had spread through the Fleet’s population as quick as pink-eye. Not one in ten believed a word of it, of course; but that still left a few dozen who were ready to assault with spades and prybars any snatch of ground, floor, or wall whereon Daniel fixed his gaze for more than a few moments. Daniel had never meant to draw so much attention to himself, and was now worried that, if he did break the Shaftoes out of prison somehow, he’d be identified and prosecuted. But it was too late. All he could do now was fling out red herrings that might slow the investigations of future prosecutors. He wore a large brown wig, and gave out that
his family name was Partry, and encouraged the prisoners of the Fleet to call him “Old Partry.”

This, he now understood, was how men like Bolingbroke got into big trouble—not by doing anything identifiably stupid, but through an insensible narrowing of choices that compelled them, in the end, to take some risk or other.

Of those credulous souls who believed in the buried-gold story, not a single one belonged to the Court of Inspectors. This led to some tension between the two factions whenever Daniel took up his seat in the Tap. For the Steward and his Court desired proximity to “Old Partry” so that they might get free drinks, and the gold-diggers wanted to hear about his latest researches. Daniel played them off against each other shamelessly—not a prudent long- (or even medium-) term strategy, but just barely sustainable for ten days. He began to drop hints that he had narrowed the gold’s location down to the prison’s northeast corner—that being the one where Jimmy and Danny Shaftoe and Tomba were locked in the strong-room. It did not take more than an hour for the gold-digging faction to arrive at the furious conclusion that the soldiers lately garrisoned in that corner were really there to provide cover for a treasure extraction project being conducted, illicitly of course, by High Officialdom, probably Tories under the control of the sinister Charles White! The Court of Inspectors did not credit a word of it, but saw merit in the legend anyway, in that it gave them yet another pretext to file writs against the Warden, and so they began disingenuously to spread and to foster the story, and even to improve upon it. This was all so absurd that Daniel’s orderly mind could never have predicted it; never would he have advanced any such thing as a strategy. But once underway, it could not be stopped.

Two days had sufficed for him to learn everything worth knowing concerning the Fleet and how it worked. He had then pissed away nearly a week learning something he ought to have known already: in London, real estate, be it never so smelly and disreputable, was valuable, and jealously looked after. The shambles along Fleet Lane might have seemed unutterably disgusting and mean, but to them who labored in their back rooms and dwelled, or operated brothels, on their upper storeys, they were little kingdoms, and every square foot was looked after as carefully as a statue or flower-patch in Versailles. Daniel
knew,
as well as he knew that the shortest distance between two points was a straight line, that in the backs of these buildings’ cellars must be drains—the most execrable hair-raising drains conceivable—that communicated with the Fleet Prison’s long-buried ox-bow moat—the same moat whose contents were seeping,
through porous walls, into the cellar where the Shaftoes were locked up. But in several days’ hard trying, and phantastickal lying, he was not able even to get past the front rooms of these establishments, much less down into their backs. Those drains were
valuable,
because they would carry away the objectionable byproducts of certain types of profit-making activities, e.g., butchery and soap-making. Men made livings and supported families on those drains. They found it senseless that an elderly stranger ought to be let in to see these miracles, simply because he voiced curiosity about them. He could have offered money in exchange for a look-see, but this would only have drawn even more attention.

Points A and B on Hooke’s drawing—the places in the sheer bank of Fleet Ditch where it connected to the moat—were clearly identifiable, but they had been sealed by a pastiche of iron grille-work and masonry with gaps between bricks to let stuff flow through. Saturn with a skiff and a powder-keg could have made short work of these, but it would have been rather noticeable, there in the midst of the city, all of a quarter-mile from St. Paul’s Churchyard.

In the end the only way to gain access to that sealed-off moat was via Fleet Prison itself, by capitalizing on its very peculiarities, and on the unlooked-for currency of the buried gold story. “Old Partry,” well into his cups during the Beer-Clubb of Thursday, 7 October, had let slip a notion that the soldiers might be circumvented, and the treasure reached, by tunneling in from the moat. The following morning, it was found that the privy adjacent to the kitchen, along the north wall of the Prison, had been vandalized. This was a two-holer: a wooden bench having a pair of orifices that communicated (as was obvious enough, after it had been vandalized) with a common shaft that descended into an inscrutable and noxious blackness. Half the bench was still in good working order, but the other had been gone at with a hatchet, and the hole made a good deal broader and ruder.

Now this was a grave matter to the general population of the Fleet, because the buildings were famously in decay, and the Warden infamously reluctant to dent his cash flow by effecting repairs. The Court of Inspectors would have to prosecute lawsuits for an hundred years before the Privy got fixed. The Steward came round and had words with “Old Partry.” The aged, daft visitor and his huge manservant were welcome to pass the time of day in the Tap-Room or the Racket Ground, but all buried-treasure talk must cease forthwith. Some of the less acute inmates were getting ideas, and beginning to tear the place up. The privy-basher, if found, would be Pumped.

Another thing that Daniel had been learning was that even if real estate was expensive, people were cheap. Which ought to have been
obvious to him from that, in exchange for tiny bits of silver, people were forever shinnying up chimneys, climbing into bed with syphilitics, or taking musket-balls in Belgium. But like most who did not do such things, he went out of his way not to dwell on it, and had quite put it out of his mind until it was brought to his notice forcefully by Peter Hoxton. In exchange for what he wanted people to do for him, Daniel offered a lot of silver, relatively speaking; and even as Saturn had forewarned him, word got round, and they had to turn people away and deflect their efforts to under-bid those who’d already been hired.

The work consisted of going into Fleet Prison ostensibly to take a shit; entering the vandalized privy when no one was paying especially keen attention; and jumping down the hole. The first boy who did it got paid extra, because there was no telling what he would find, or what would find him; but he climbed back up the (provided) rope a few minutes later with the sensational intelligence that he had found himself in a long, gently curving tunnel with a firm floor beneath several inches of slimy muck, and, flowing sluggishly over that, sewage that came up to mid-thigh.

The young men that Daniel hired went down that hole with bags on their backs (nothing bulky enough to draw the notice of the turnkeys) and came up empty-handed. They constructed a wooden ladder down below so that they might re-ascend to the privy without having to use climbing-ropes (as the pioneers had done). They went down with measuring-ropes and came up with numbers in their heads, which were mapped by Saturn: eight feet to the east of the privy-orifice, on the north side of the tunnel, was a drain-opening two hand-spans in breadth, which from time to time vomited cattle-guts. Eleven feet beyond that was the output shaft of a House of Office that must be in the back room of some other edifice. Two fathoms beyond that, on the right, a drain that must belong to the prison’s kitchen. Thirty sloshing paces beyond that, around a bend, a tiny in-flow of fresh water: the overflow drain of a pump and cistern that stood between the Prison kitchen and the dungeon. Up and down the tunnel these explorations spread, a picture filled in, one scrap at a time, by the accounts of the eager, reeking lads who emerged from the privy at all hours. Within a day they had found a stretch of rotten masonry wall, ninety to a hundred feet east of the privy, that could not be anything other than the outside wall of the dungeon itself. By listening with ears pressed against this, they convinced themselves that they heard chains rattling: the massive irons that the Warden of the Fleet had borrowed from Newgate Prison to bind the Shaftoe Gang. Now they went down with iron bars, chisels,
and muffled hammers to peck and scrape away the crazed mortar that held that wall together. After two days of this, a chap on the other side—black, and so presumably Tomba—pulled a brick out of the way to make a fist-sized hole, and said that the miners must on no account remove any more material, lest their gaolers notice changes in the wall. So after that they moved on to other sorts of preparations. Several privy-shafts were ascended by boys recruited from London’s surplus of chimney-sweeps, hence, very much at home in filthy and cramped verticals. A particularly accommodating one was identified, and mapped to a house of prostitution in a corner of Bell Savage Inn: one of several culs-de-sac that lay just outside the prison wall, in the smoaky labyrinth of boozing-kens and spunging-houses between it and the Great Old Bailey.

For a few days in the second week of October, Daniel felt as though Thursday Night Beer-Clubb would never roll around. For the traffic in and out of the damaged privy had begun to attract notice—not so much the comings and goings of the boys themselves (for they employed a system of lookouts, so that their entries to and exits from the shaft would not be be seen by ordinary privy-users), but the trail of nostril-singeing moisture that they tended to leave on their way out. This admittedly was not as obvious in a dark, wet, stinking London prison shit-house as it might have been in some other settings, but some had noted it and begun to talk, which made Daniel very ill at ease. Not that there was any want of other things to feel ill at ease about! The more time he spent in the Tap-Room, the worse he felt; but during the final days, he could not tear himself away from the place for more than a few hours at a time. During the afternoon of the fourteenth, he read Dappa’s auction piece half a dozen times, between re-reading that day’s newspapers, and yesterday’s. But finally the sky got dark and the place began to fill up with Beer-seekers, and Saturn ambled through and gave him a wink, and then, of course, it was all coming too fast! Happening too soon! He wasn’t ready! It was a little bit like a year ago, when
Minerva
had been stalled off the coast of Massachusetts for week after tedious week by contrary winds, and Daniel, irreligious though he was, had prayed for a shift in the wind—only to be assaulted by Blackbeard’s pirate-fleet when that day finally arrived. Another change was in the air now, and another adventure in the offing. He was alarmed. But he reasoned with himself thus: men like Jack Shaftoe had adventures all their lives. Even his maths tutor at Cambridge, Isaac Barrow, had once duelled Corsairs in the Mediterranean. Everything since Enoch had come to his door a year and two days ago, had been an adventure, albeit with lulls. So why not let’s get on with it!

Daniel summoned one of the Tap-Room’s crack staff, and ordered that a certain keg of beer be tapped, and paid for it in gold. This was received, by the Debtors, with no less awe than a Biblical miracle. They responded with a miracle of their own: they transmogrified a full keg into an empty one. Daniel bought another, for word had gone out into the
rules
and beyond that Old Partry was buying a round for London, and people were thronging the place—coming in through the gate, Daniel was informed, in such a solid stream that no one could get out. To Daniel it only seemed like a more crowded than usual Beer-Clubb (and a more appreciative!), but when finally he was hoisted up onto the shoulders of several debtors, and huzzahed a good many times, and made the object of divers toasts, he was able from that vantage point to see over the heads of the Clubb and out the open door and windows into the Racket Ground, where he saw: fog. Not the usual London sea-fog, but the condensed breath of hundreds of persons who had backed up outside the doors because the Tap-Room was full. It might have been alarming, had these been Red Indians or Turks. But they were Englishmen. Daniel recognized here only the normal traits of Englishmen, viz. a wont to convene, drink, and be sociable, especially on chilly dark nights. He deemed this an apt moment to trigger another English predilection: joining together in mad projects.

“I have spent all of my gold,” he announced, when a speech had been called for, and the Clubb had got as quiet as it was ever likely to. “I have spent it all,” he repeated, “and my family, who look a-skance at my researches, would opine that I am now likely to become your fellow-inmate here in the Fleet; which they would be ashamed of, but I would deem a higher honor than to be made a Knight of the Garter.” Now, a pause for toasting and huzzahing. “But this is not to happen. I have only spent my gold thus in the Tap-Room, because I am so sure of finding more anon, out yonder. For lately I have uncovered new documents that shall enable me positively to fix the location of the cache of coins buried in these precincts one hundred and forty years ago by coiners locked up on orders of Sir Thomas Gresham!”