The System of the World (34 page)

THE SAME AFTERNOON

T
HE
T
OWER MIGHT HAVE ENDURED
forever with very little upkeep, had it not been for a nasty infestation of humans. From a janitorial standpoint, the problem with this particular race was not that they were
de-
, but avidly
con
-structive, and would on no account leave off bringing new building-stuff in through the all-too-numerous gates,
and fashioning them into shelters. Left to the elements, such improvisations would break down naturally in decades or centuries, leaving the Tower as God and the Normans had intended it to be. But the difficulty with a human was that where he found a shelter he would occupy it, and when it broke, fix it, and if not prevented, build annexes onto it. To the management of the Tower, it was less an infestation of termites than a plague of mud-daubing wasps.

Every time the Constable brought in a surveyor, and compared his work to the plan his predecessor had drawn up some decades before, he would discover new nests that had insensibly grown in the corners, as dust-balls under a bed. If he went to eject the people who lived in them, so that he could tear them down, he would be confronted with documents and precedents, showing that those people were not squatters but tenants, and that they’d been paying rent for decades to some
other
squatter-cum-
tenant, who in turn paid rent or performed necessary services for some Corporation or Office or other
sui generis
queer ancient Entity that claimed long standing or warrant Royal.

Short of a concerted arson campaign, the only brake on this infestation was a lack of space within the walls that circumscribed the hive. It came down, then, to a question of how much crowding human beings could endure. The answer: not as much as wasps, but still rather a lot. In fact, there was a certain type of human who thrived on it, and those types gravitated naturally to London.

Dart the Barber lived in a garret above a storehouse in Cold Harbour. Most of the year, Cold Harbour was cold without a doubt. To Dart and his roommates—Pete the Sutler and Tom the Boot-black—it was also a sort of metaphorical harbour. But beyond that the name made no sense at all. It was nowhere near the water, and performed no harbour-like functions. Cold Harbour was a patch of turf and a few storehouses in the middle of Tower Green, just off the southwest corner of the ancient Conqueror’s keep called the White Tower.

A wee hole had been worried through the wattle near the vertex of the gable, just large enough to admit a pigeon, vent smoke from a rush-light, or frame a man’s face. At the moment it was giving Dart a sort of dove’s-eye-view of the Parade. Accounting for about half of the Inner Ward, the Parade was the largest open space in the Tower. A well-tended patch of English turf it was. But it was scarred, below Dart, with ridges of rain-worn stone: the exposed foundations of walls that had been thrown down, æons ago, by long-dead Constables. For perhaps the only thing that could stir a Constable to use force against the gnawing accretion of sheds, annexes, pop-outs, &c., was the combined awareness of (a) his own mortality and (b) the fact
that there was no place left in the Tower complex to dig his grave. At any rate, there was evidence here that Cold Harbour had once been a bigger thing than it was now. From ground level, these ruins were a meaningless maze of tripping-hazards. From Dart’s privileged viewpoint they could be made out as a page of rectilinear glyphs stroked in gray and yellow paint on green baize.

If Dart had been as keenly interested in the several centuries just past as he was in the several hours just beginning, he could have decyphered that grassy palimpsest to tell a tale about the fortifications of the Inmost Ward, and how they had changed over time, from a picket to keep out die-hard Angles, to the innermost of half a dozen lines of circumvallation, to a security checkpoint for a royal palace, to an outmoded slum, to a tripping-hazard. The part where Dart dwelt had only been suffered to remain standing because it was easily made over into storehouses.

And if Dart were one for profound introspection he might ponder the queerness of his circumstance: he (an illiterate barber), a sutler, and a Black-guard (as boys who polished boots were called) sharing an apartment twenty paces distant from William the Conqueror’s chief Fort.

However none of these thoughts came to him, or even came
near
him, as he peered out through the gable-vent on the afternoon in question, heaving ruby-colored blood up from his lungs onto a crusty brown rag. Dart was living for the moment.

The Parade stretched an hundred paces from east (the line of barracks huddled along the footing of the White Tower) to west (a wee street of warders’ houses backed against the west wall). A hundred and fifty paces separated its north (the Chapel) from its south (the Lieutenant’s Lodging). The Cold Harbour dwelling of Dart the Barber, Tom the Black-guard, and Pete the Sutler was about half-way ’long the eastern edge of it. So to his left Dart had a good view over the northern half of the Parade, but to his right all was obliterated by the high White Tower, which squatted in the heart of the complex like a solid cube of stone. Its formidable lines had been cluttered, on its western and southern sides, by low skirts of identical barrack-houses, jammed in wall-to-wall so that their peaked roofs merged to form a sawtooth fringe. Two companies of the Guard regiment lived in these and similar ones near by. The other dozen companies were packed into various spaces around the periphery of the Inner Ward, along Mint Street, or wherever space could be found for them. All told, they numbered near a thousand.

A thousand men could not live without victuals, which was why sutlers’ houses had been allowed, nay, encouraged to occupy various
crannies around the Tower and the Wharf. Pete’s was one such; he was the tenant of this garret, and he sublet hammock-space to Dart and, more recently, to Tom.

The Queen’s Own Black Torrent Guards often drew duty of a ceremonial nature, such as greeting foreign ambassadors on Tower Wharf, and so they were more than normally concerned with the upkeep of their kit. This meant no lack of work for Tom and the other boot-blacks. And any congregation of humans required barbers to dress wounds and see to the removal of redundant hairs, whiskers, bodily humours, and necrotizing limbs. So Dart had been permitted to wind some bloody gauze round a pike and plant it outside a certain door in Cold Harbour as the customary hall-mark of his trade.

He was not plying that trade now but nervously honing a razor, again and again, on a leather strop, and peering down the line of barracks doors, watching Tom the Black-guard make his rounds. Most of the garrison was
extra muros
on Tower Hill; in their absence Tom was going to each door in turn to polish the boots that had been left out by the soldiers. To look at him, Tom was a boy of about twelve. But he spoke with the voice, and answered to the urges, of a grown man, which made Dart suspect he was really a bloke who’d not grown properly.

Tom had been doing this for the best part of two hours and had settled into a fixed routine, which was that he would squat down to polish a pair of boots, then stand up when he was finished, as though feeling a need to stretch, and look idly around the Parade, then glance up into the sky to see if any change in the weather was coming. Then he would turn his attention to the next pair of boots.

The only thing more tedious than to perform this duty was to watch it. Even though Dart had been told that he must on no account take his eyes off Tom, he found it hard going to keep his eyes open. The sun was beating against a white haze that steeped the garret in drowsy warmth. Cool gusts found their way to Dart’s face from time to time and reminded him to open his eyes. True to form, he, being the barber, had the worst shave in the whole Tower. His stubbly chin pricked him awake when he nodded off and let it rest on the dove-shit-covered sill of the tiny window. The only thing he could do while he bided his time was to whet the tools of his trade. But if he did so any more, they would become transparent.

Tom the Black-guard had a yellow cloth slung over his shoulder.

It had not been there a minute before. Dart was seized by guilt and fear, and already justifying himself: I did not take my eyes off him for more than a heart-beat!

He looked again. Tom bent down to start in on another pair of
boots. The yellow cloth stood out like a lightning-bolt against the usual black-stained rags.

He closed his eyes, counted to five, opened them, and looked a third time to be sure. It was still there.

Dart the Barber stepped away from the window for the first time in two hours, raked his strops, shears, and razors together into a bag, and made for the stairs.

The garret had been turned into a maze by stacked sacks of flour and kegs of salted meat, as well as by hams and gutted rabbits dangling from the rafters, and the hammocks where Dart and Tom and Pete slept. But Dart moved through adroitly, and minced down a fatally precipitous stair to the ground floor, where after a brief scamper down a stunningly foul-smelling passage no wider than his shoulders he was discharged into a somewhat wider L-shaped alley that ran from the Bloody Tower gate to the Inner Ward. Scuttling round the bend of that L, he emerged onto grass before the southwestern angle of the White Tower. Then, reversing his direction round to the left, he entered the Parade.

He’d been warned not to look about, but could not help glancing at Tom, hard at work over a boot. Tom was turned his way. Though his head was bent down over his work, his eyes were rolled up in their sockets so far that they had turned white, enabling him to mark Dart’s progress over the grass.

Dart made bold to glance this way and that, trying to guess what Tom had seen. For it had seemed, during those two hours, as if Tom had been scanning the sky for something. Over the western wall of the Tower, nothing was visible except for the columnar Monument, some half a mile distant, and beyond that, the dome of St. Paul’s. He turned his head to the right and looked north over the storehouses and barracks that lined that edge of the Inner Ward. Here was something: shreds of smoke were climbing up to vanish against the white sky. The source seemed near to hand. But not as near as the Mint, which lay just on the far side of those barracks. He guessed it was coming from Tower Hill. It was probably not from gunpowder, for Dart had not heard the Guard discharging any weapons. Possibly someone had lit a rubbish-fire in one of the courts tucked away in the maze of the Tower hamlets. Or possibly ’twas something more than a rubbish-blaze.

He faltered. He had made it most of the way across the Parade. But suddenly the door of No. 6, one of the warders’ houses, had opened. Three Sentinels were there, in place of the usual one. It seemed that the Scotsman was due to be aired out. A Yeoman Warder emerged. It was Downs. He lived in No. 6 with the Scotsman, and he had been very particular about getting a good shave this morning.
Now he’d gone it one better by donning his best coat. He was followed by Lord Gy, a bulky man in a kilt. Then out came his maidservant, the big red-head, with a basket over her arm. Lord Gy and Yeoman Downs began to walk due south towards the Lieutenant’s Lodging, beneath the parapet of Bell Tower. The three Sentinels formed a triangle around them and the red-head brought up the rear. Dart stopped to let them pass in front of him, and doffed his hat. The Laird ignored him; Yeoman Downs made an answering wink. All of this passed from Dart’s mind as soon as it moved out of view. Few events were more routine than a social call by a noble prisoner on the Lieutenant of the Tower.

A lone Sentinel—a private soldier of the Black Torrent Guard—was stationed before the door of No. 4. Like No. 6, No. 4 was a Tudor sort of house that wouldn’t rate a second glance if it were dropped along a village green in Essex and its peculiar occupants replaced with a petty tradesman and his family.

When Dart drew close enough to make it obvious he was headed for No. 4, the Sentinel reached round behind himself and rapped on the front door. A moment later Yeoman Clooney thrust his head out an open window nearby and inquired, “Visitor for my lord?”

“Barber,” answered the Sentinel.

“Is he expected?”

Clooney always asked this. It was the most feeble of challenges. Even so, Dart had to stifle a momentary impulse to run away—or, worse, to break down and confess. But he could sense the Black-guard’s eyes prodding him in the back like a pistol-barrel. “Sir,” he gargled. He had to cough up some bloody phlegm and swallow it before he could continue: “I told my lord I would come this week, he is due.”

Clooney’s head drew back into the house. A brief exchange of murmurs could be heard through the open window. Then floor-boards cracked and door-locks snapped. Yeoman Clooney opened his front door and nodded in a confidence-inspiring way to the Sentinel. “His lordship will see you,” he proclaimed, in a trumpety heraldic tone that reminded Dart what an honor it was to mow an Earl’s scalp, and how unworthy Dart was of it. Dart hunched over, picked up his bag, and hustled into the house, tipping his hat at the Sentinel, then making a nod at Yeoman Clooney.

The house had a front parlour looking out on the Parade through the very window Clooney had been using to exchange words with the Sentinel. The light was good there, and so that was where Dart spread out his drop-cloth. He set a chair in the middle of it.

The Earl of Hollesley was spending the twilight of his life in this house because he had been entrusted with some of H. M. Government’s
money during the War of the Spanish Succession, and had used it to put a new roof on his country house, instead of buying saltpeter in Amsterdam. He was near sixty, and as far as Dart knew, his entire life consisted of sitting in a chair and having his hair cut. Other prisoners strolled round the Liberty, killed themselves, or staged spectacular, improbable escapes; the Earl of Hollesley spent all his time in No. 4. Except for Dart, once a fortnight, he rarely entertained visitors. When he did they tended to be Catholic priests, for the Earl had gone Popish in his dotage. When he entered the room on Yeoman Clooney’s arm, Dart said to him, “M’lord,” which was all he was encouraged to say.