Read The System of the World Online
Authors: Neal Stephenson
The tour-group reconvened in the shop of the man called Saturn. The golden cards had been stacked and counted one more time, and loaded into a purpose-built, velvet-lined chest that was just the right size for them. They gathered round it instinctively.
“Well, Dr. Waterhouse, we now understand perhaps a tenth of the oddities housed in your court,” said Eliza. “When shall we understand the remainder?”
“When we go to Bridewell!” Daniel returned, and picked up the chest as if he meant to leave.
“W
E ARE LIKE JEWELS
in a pirate’s treasure-chest,” said the Duchess of Arcachon-Qwghlm, trying to get her fellow-passengers to look on the bright side.
Daniel, Eliza, Johann, and “Hildegard” were sharing this booth-on-wheels, not only with a small chest of gold cards, but also with several bales of libels. To judge from their smell and their tendency to rub off on people’s clothing, these had come off the press very recently. Everyone shied away from them save Daniel, who was dressed in clothes that were black to begin with.
According to some unwritten but universal rule of etiquette, people mashed together in a confined space tended not to look one another in the eye, or to converse. The fact that “Hildegard” was, in truth, obviously Princess Caroline of Hanover only exacerbated it. Thus Eliza’s efforts to make cheery conversation.
After they had jolted some distance southwards along Saffron Hill, Daniel, mortified and bored, managed to work one of his arms free of the pile-up, and got a hand on the window-shutter, which he shot open. In London, actual sun-beams were too much to ask for; but he was rewarded with a nebulous in-flow of smoky gray light, which fell on the top-most sheet of a libel-bale.
LIBERTY
by Dappa
My Persecutor has been heard to say that my libels are used only to stop up chinks, and plug diverse other windy orifices, in the
garderobes
of Bankside gin-houses. Which if true raises the question of how
he
would know anything of such places; but let us pass over this mystery. For if Mr. Charles White’s assertion
is
true, then you, reader, are enjoying but a few minutes’ peaceful interlude in a House of Office somewhere in Southwark, and I had best get to the point before you have done with your business.
If you put your eye up to the chink that was vacated, when you pulled this document from its rightful place, you may be able to see a street—an eastward continuation of Bankside, tho’ a bit further from the shore, running in front of Winchester Yard; that is called Clink Street, and forms a part of the boundary of the
Liberty of the Clink
. This parcel, ’tis said, long ago belonged to some abbots; but they granted it to the Bishop of Winchester, with the stipulation that that noble prelate would put it to work saving mens’ souls, and gathering alms. Accordingly, a long line of Bishops ran brothels there for many hundreds of years. These were none of your latter-day whore-houses, infamous for disease and the degradation of women; nay, this was in the
Halcyon
days before the
French
Pox, and a certain great Patron and Regulator of Brothels, who dwelt not far off in St. James, issued a decree that no woman be forced to work in such a place against her will. So keenly were these Institutions inspected and ruled by the King and the Bishop that Labor, Management, and Customers all got along famously, and few disputes arose. But as in any human intercourse, trouble was foredoomed, and so a Prison was constructed here. It is from the Clink prison that I pen these words. Do not be concerned for my welfare. I am in a commodious flat, with a river-view; for this I have my patroness, and several of my readers, to thank. Below are several windowless chambers where some hundreds of my fellow-prisoners dwell, heavily ironed and lightly fed.
Why, you may ask, should the Clink be so crowded with wretches, when those Kings and Bishops had such care to make of this place an earthly Paradise? Why, because of certain degradations that have come with time. The Pox shut down the old Stews; the brothels moved from their proud stations on Bankside to a
Diaspora
of back-rooms, salted all over the Metropolis, where the Lords Spiritual and Temporal can scarcely find, much less rule,
them. The Temples of Aphrodite were replaced by bull- and bear-baiting rings, which I should describe as Fields of Mars, if there were anything martial about them; but this is giving them more than they deserve. The Muses flourished here too, until Cromwell shut down the theatres. The merry god Dionysus once gamboled in the Liberty of the Clink, but alas, the good old drinks of ale and wine have been quite driven out by that infamous new-fangled poison,
Genebre
. Pox, poison, and pit-bulls rule this Clink now. It is a sad prospect, and enough to make a sapient prisoner reflect upon the nature of Liberties in general. For we all love to phant’sy that we live in some sort of Liberty—if not of the Clink, then of the City of London or some other Jurisdiction where men are proud to style themselves Free. But under close inspection, how often do we find those Freedoms to be Chimaeras, and our cherished Liberties to be little better than my private flat in the upper storey of the Clink? We may put it down, I suppose, to the nostalgia for Merry Olde England, whereby all things, be they never so
modern
or
outlandish,
are viewed through a perspective-glass of ancient design, which promises to deliver a true image, but in truth colors and distorts all that is seen through it. Merry Olde England did not have the modern Pox; and so brothels are no longer what they used to be. Bloody and vile baiting-pits it did not have either, at least, not in the numbers seen to-day, and not frequented nor managed by
respectable
men. And Merry Olde England did not have slavery: that queer institution whereby a man may own another, simply by saying that he does. But the true England of to-day has all of these things. So I do not much bemoan the fact that I am in the Clink while you, reader, are at Liberty; for the Liberties in which we dwell are but delusions. I would fainer dwell in a meaner Liberty with fewer delusions than roam about a great one while being used by the lies and deceptions of the Party in power.
“What do you think?” Eliza asked. She’d been watching Daniel read it.
“Oh, as an essay, ’tis well enough wrought. As a political tactic, I question whether ’tis well considered.”
“When he writes ‘reader, this’ and ‘reader, that’ it is no empty figure,” Eliza said. “He
does
have readers—though few of them would admit to it, in the current climate.”
“There is the rub, my lady,” Daniel said. He slammed the window to, for they were now rattling along the banks of Fleet Ditch, not all that far from the Royal Society’s headquarters in Crane Court, and
the ammoniacal stench had choked him and flooded his eyes with tears. “By publishing such things you are gambling that the Whigs shall win and the Tories shall lose.”
Eliza seemed a bit put out by the criticism. But Caroline had been listening to their discourse, and was ready with an answer: “Ve are all gambling on zat, Doctor Vaterhouse. Including you.”
I
F
J
OHANN HAD NOT
told Caroline that Bridewell was a whilom Royal Palace, she would have alighted from her carriage, swept her gaze over it, and dismissed it as a half-Gothick, half-Tudor ruin-cum-slum. But knowing what she knew, she was bound to stand a-mazed for some minutes, trying to reconstruct it in her mind’s eye.
Visiting Dukes might once have passed an afternoon bowling in that court over yonder, which was now home to an immense Gordian tangle of worn-out cordage, fated to be worried into oakum by the chapped fingers of incarcerated whores. In that high window, where a twelve-year-old pick-
pocket had just thrust his penis out between iron bars to urinate into plain air, a Princess might once have gazed out onto the Fleet, back when it had been a brook instead of a sewer. Knights might have stabled their chargers in that long building that was now a booming, dusty work-shop.
A young woman of a more romantic disposition might have been at hard labor, all day long, trying to make a presentable phant’sy out of this social and architectural midden. Caroline only sustained the effort until cat-calls from diverse barred and grilled windows reminded her that they were out of place, tarrying here in a court normally used to receive new prisoners.
“Pay them no mind,” Daniel recommended, ushering them through a gateway to an inner court. “Persons of Quality come here frequently to gape at the prisoners, though ’tis said that Bedlam provides an infinitely more lurid spectacle. The inmates will all suppose that we are tourists.”
It had become evident that the palace had at least two wings, albeit not very well matched. “We shan’t go that way,” Daniel said, nodding to the left, “it is all men: pick-pockets, procurers, and ’prentices who’ve broken their masters’ noses. Please follow me to the women’s side.” He spoke deliberately, but moved in haste: a tactic intended to make them hurry along and to ignore the countless distractions strewn in their path. “I shall be preceding all of you through many doors—committing an unforgivable breach of etiquette each time—but as you have gathered by now, this palace is no Versailles. Do watch your step.” This as he negotiated a series of pantries, stairs, and corridors that might once have been the
province of some lower servants. Then he shouldered his way through a door that flushed them into a space that was startlingly broad and high-roofed: some sort of ancient Hall, where perhaps Earls had dined at long tables. But today it was populated mostly by women. There were two predominant types of furniture: blocks, and stocks. The blocks were nothing more than slices of great tree-trunks, rising to mid-thigh. Before each of these stood a woman. All of the women were young, for their task was too strenuous for girls or dowagers. Each of them wielded a huge mallet: a segment of hardwood tree-trunk a hand-span in diameter and a foot long, impaled on an axe-handle. Snaking along the tops of the blocks were punnies of retted hemp, which is to say, stalks of the hemp plant, a yard taller than a man, and a few inches in diameter, which some months ago had been shorn of their foliage and flung into stagnant ponds in the Lambeth Marshes and weighed down with stones. There, the water had infected and rotted the tissues of those stalks, attacking the interstitial glop that bound the fibers together, but sparing the fibers themselves. Dried in the sun, these had been barged across to Bridewell and piled up in a monstrous faggot at one end of the hall. Fresh punnies were continually being jerked out of this heap by younger girls, dragged down the pavement, and offered up as for sacrifice on vacant blocks. A punny had no sooner come to rest than a prowling man in an apron raised one hand in the air, brandishing a cane, and gazing hungrily at the sight of a woman’s back, protected only by a thin layer of calicoe. If she did not raise her mallet and smash it down on the punny within a heartbeat, the cane would come down with no less violence on her back. Each punny had to be beaten over and over again, all up and down its length and round its circumference, to break loose the snot of rotted and desiccated pulp from the long dark fibers. The hammers boomed on the blocks in a never-ending fusillade, the debris fell to the floor like dirty snow, or shot up into the air in a roiling cloud. Caroline and Eliza immediately reached for their head-scarves and covered their coifs lest their hair be adulterated with coarse hemp-fibers. Soon enough both of the ladies had drawn the tails of those scarves across their mouths and noses too, for the air was saturated with a gas of tiny fiber-scraps that could not be seen but could most certainly be felt when they lodged in the throat or the eyes.
Besides blocks, the other furnishing in the hall was stocks. These had been erected around the walls at regular intervals. Each consisted of two planks mounted in a vertical frame so that they could be slid up and down, and pegged at various discrete altitudes by means of carved shear-pins. Matching half-moon-shaped notches, of diverse
sizes and spacings, had been cut into the edges of these planks, so that wrists and necks of varying gauges could be fixed in whatever place and height was most inconvenient to the prisoner, and pleasing to the whims of the responsible official. Most of the stocks were vacant—signifying a well-run shop—but three were occupied by women with their hands stretched up high above their heads. The backs of their dresses were black with oozing and clotting blood.
“Now you know all that is known about the making of hemp and the reformation of morals,” Daniel remarked, after they had darted out through a side exit and gotten into a stairway, where it was possible to hear and to breathe. There was a decent pause so that everyone could brush themselves off and blink debris from their eyes. “It astonishes me,” Daniel reflected, “that men will see what we have just seen—and yet go out the next day to patronize a brothel. Personally I can imagine no scene less likely to stir amorous feelings in general, or an interest in prostitutes in particular—” but Johann harrumphed and Eliza glared. Caroline seemed to find the discourse interesting enough, but she’d been out-voted. “Very well, then, to the apartment of Miss Hannah Spates we go now. Do watch where you step,” Daniel added, unnecessarily, as turds were plainly spread around all over the place.
B
RIDEWELL
P
ALACE WAS TYPICAL
English in that, outside of whatever historical process had caused it to end up the way it was, it made no sense whatever. Like Botany, it could be Memorized but not Understood. The visitors had lost their bearings immediately, and by this point in the tour, none of them would have been surprised if Daniel had flung open a door to reveal a secret tunnel under the Thames, or a back entrance to the Inferno. But instead they found themselves on the uppermost storey of some wing, addition or out-building. Hannah Spates and her colleagues lived and worked here, in a large space under the heavy-burdened rafters of an ancient slate roof. It must have been as cold in the winter as it was stifling today; but it was dry, did not stink, had light from a few windows, and was not decorated with bleeding women. The rafters were steeply sloped, as if trying to shrug off their burden of stone flakes. This gave it the ambience of a Gothick church whose builders had succumbed to Black Death before they could kit it out with pews and pulpit.