The System of the World

Under a Pile of Lead Weights, the Press-Room,
Newgate Prison
20 OCTOBER 1714

Then said Apollyon, “I am sure of thee now,” and with that he had almost pressed him to death, so that Christian began to despair of life.

-JOHN BUNYAN, The Pilgrim’s Progress

MERCURY DID NOT KNOW the way to Newgate. Strange that the Messenger of the Gods should absent himself from a great Gate astride a high Road leading into what Jack Shaftoe was pleased to denominate the greatest metropolis in the world. Yet Mercury had never been spied here. Nor (for that matter, and to be perfectly honest) was he wont to visit most of the other locales where Jack had spent his life. For that swift prancing God, accustomed to the swept marble floors of Olympus, would never wish to get shit on his dove-white ankle-wings. Indeed, considering the places he had frequented, Jack might have lived his life in a perfect informational void-and been a happier man for it-were it not for the fact that fastidious Mercury had three cupbearers or, in plain language, butt-boys, viz. Light, Sound, and Stink. These swarmed and ranged round him somewhat as Panic and Terror were said to do around Mars, and conveyed news into and out of places where the Boss feared to tread.

Light was rarely seen around Newgate. For that matter ’twas not oft spied in London generally. There was a yard at one end of the prison, so narrow that a young man could stand with his back against the building and piss against the enclosing wall. On days when the sun appeared above London, it shone into that yard for some minutes about noon. But for that very reason, the apartments (as they were styled, despite a lot of stout ironmongery about the windows) that looked out on that yard were reserved for prisoners who had a lot of money.

Jack had a lot of money-much of which he had, indeed, manufactured himself-but he was not in one of those apartments on this day, for reasons having to do with certain auncient hallowed canons of the English judiciary. He was, rather, in the Common Felons’ side, where Light was a stranger, unless a shred of it be arrested, and sentenced to a brief term of imprisonment in a lanthorn.

By and large, Sound, that lusty runagate, had a much easier time of it here than his ethereal brother Light. The inmates of Newgate loved Sound, and never let off making as much of it as they could. Partly it was the want of Light, which made Sound their only medium for the exchange of intelligence, or, as the case might be, stupidity. And partly it was that everyone in the place-rich, poor, felon, debtor, male, female, adult, child-had the means of making noise with every movement, in that they all wore iron fetters from the moment they were admitted to when they were discharged. Rich could afford light chains, poor must make do with heavy, but chains they all had, and they loved to make them clink and rattle. As if sheer volume of noise might shake the stench from the air, and scare away the lice.

Jack lay in the Press-Room in the center of the prison, on the second floor. Next door was the Women Felons’ hold, which contained about a hundred females packed head to foot like chocolate soldiers in a box. Their sole source of diversion was to scream the most foul things they could think of out a grate set into the stone wall at one end of the room, communicating with the street. And as it turned out there were plenty of free Londoners who had nothing better to do than to stand out there and listen to them. As this practice had been continuously practiced and maintained on this spot for something like one thousand years, with only occasional lapses attributable to plague, fire, gaol-fever, or wholesale tear-downs and re-builds of the prison fabrique itself, it had been developed to a high art. To blaspheming, these women were what the Duke of Marlborough was to generalship. Fortunately for Jack, who liked a bit of quiet so that he might lapse into unconsciousness from time to time, the Press-Room walls were thick, and muffled those execrations into a vague clamor.

But if Jack heard more than he saw, he smelt a thousand times as much as he heard. For, of all of Mercury’s aides-de-camp, that base, insinuating wretch, Stink, was most at home in Newgate. Mostly what Jack smelt was himself, and what had lately been squeezed out of him. But from time to time he got a whiff of fire being kindled, and then he nosed hot oil, pitch, and tar. For the Press-Room lay near Jack Ketch his Kitchen, where that high official took the heads and limbs of his clients to boil them in the substances mentioned, so that they should endure longer when put up on spikes round city gates.

He had been put into this place on the eighteenth of October. After he had been here for a long time, the door had opened, and a gaoler had come in and stuffed a heel of black bread into his mouth. Then another long time had elapsed. Then the door had opened again, and another gaoler had come in with a ladle that he had dragged through a puddle on the floor a few moments earlier. He had poured the proceeds into Jack’s mouth to spit out or swallow as he saw fit. Jack, impetuous fellow, had swallowed. Now, he knew that a prisoner on bread and water (e.g., himself) was served once a day, the bread alternating with the water. He’d had two servings; ergo, it must be nigh on the twentieth of October. On that date the new King was to be crowned at Westminster Abbey, a mile and a half from here.

What a shame that he could not attend the Coronation! Oh, he had not been invited. But then, he had made a long career of venturing into places where he’d not been welcome, and so this need not have stopped him.

The diverse parades, processions, and rites of the Coronation were attended by respectable men and women: bishops, doctors, yeomen, and earls. Every single one of them hoped and trusted that major portions of Jack Shaftoe would end up in Jack Ketch his Kitchen soon. For that to happen, though, he should have to be convicted. Specifically, he’d have to be convicted of High Treason. Mere robbers, murderers, amp;c. were only hanged. And a hanged body, entire, was a grocery too gross to maneuver up the stairs to yonder Kitchen. The penalty for High Treason, on the other hand, was to be hanged until half dead (whatever that meant), then cut down, drawn, and separated-with the aid of four teams of horses galloping in opposite directions-into at least four pieces, of a convenient size for the oil, pitch, and tar spa operated just a few steps away from here by Jack Ketch. Shaftoe had been booked for a lengthy and painful round trip via Tyburn, and only one formality prevented it: in order for Jack to be convicted, there’d have to be a proper trial; and according to the rules of such things, the trial could not progress beyond a certain point until Jack pleaded one way or the other.

Accordingly the bailiff, two days ago, had rousted him from his clean, well-lighted apartment in the Castle, and chivvied him down a long narrow alley, a sort of sheep-chute that ran direct to the holding-pen of the Old Bailey. Thence into a Yard where a magistrate (or so it could be presumed from his mien and his Wig) had peered down at him from a balcony (for it had been learnt long ago that magistrates who swapped air with Newgate prisoners soon died of gaol fever). Jack had declined to plead, and so the usual procedure had been effected: back up that alley to Newgate. But to the Press-Room instead of his lovely apartment. There Jack had been stripped to his drawers and very very strongly encouraged to lie down flat on his back on the stone floor. The four corners of the Press-Room were adorned with iron staples set into the floor. These had been connected to his wrists and ankles by chains. Then, in an uncanny prefigurement of the penalty for High Treason, the chains had been drawn tight, so that he was spread-eagled.

A stout wooden box, open on the top-therefore reminiscent of a manger-was suspended from the ceiling in the middle of the room by some tackle. This had been let down until it had dangled a few inches above Jack’s breast-bone. The gaolers had gone to work ferrying lead cylinders from a strangely tidy display against the wall, and piling them into the manger with unnerving hollow booms. They had kept at it for rather a long time, and like lawyers they had cited precedents the whole way-now we are above the hundredweight mark, which is for elderly ladies and tubercular children-now we are at two hundred pounds, which was enough to induce Lord so-and-so to plead after a mere three hours-but we have more respect for you than him, Jack-so now we are up nearing three hundred pounds, which killed Bob the Stabber but which Jephthah Big withstood for three days.

And now, Jack, we are ready for you. As you’re plainly ready for us.

They’d let the box of weights down onto him then, the pulley overhead supplying all of the squeals and screams that Jack would’ve, if he could’ve. The weight had not hit him all at once, but had grown and grown, like the tide. He’d understood right away why so many of the people alluded to by the gaolers had broken, or simply died: it was not the weight, and not the pain, though both were extraordinary, but rather the sheer gloom of it. This Jack was able to master, though just barely, by reminding himself that this was not the worst spot he’d ever been in. Not by a long chalk. And this kept him settled until that thread was broken that connected him to the here and now, and his mind, unleashed, began to dream of the old days.

Through many old stories his mind rambled then, and like a translucent ghost he haunted vivid scenes of Port-Royal in Jamaica, the Siege of Vienna, Barbary, Bonanza, Cairo, Malabar, Mexico, and other places, seeing faces he well remembered, loving most of them, hating a few. To some of those persons he called out. He called out so loud that the gaolers of Newgate heard him, and came in to the Press-Room to see whether he had given up, and was ready to plead. But they found only that he was a-mazed in his own memories, and not conscious of his true surroundings. And he was in a kind of anguish, not because of the weights-for he’d ceased to be aware of them-but because those memories were fixed, and would in no way respond to his outcries. He might as well have been in a Chapel calling out to the frescoes on the ceiling: gorgeous, but dead, and deaf. One time he saw Mr. Foote, in a flowered tunic, hoisting a colorful drink on a Queenah-Kootah beach, as if drinking Jack’s health; but this was the nearest anyone came to taking notice of him.

Strangely, the only one who would speak to him was the one he hated the most: Father Edouard de Gex.

“Of all the people! I can’t imagine anything more offensive!” Jack raged.

“Yes, but you have to admit I am just the sort who would turn up in a time and place such as this.” De Gex had dropped that annoying French accent.

“Well, yes…you have me there,” Jack said weakly.

Jesuit that he was, de Gex was ready with a glib explanation: “The others who haunt your memories, Jack, are still alive, or else gone on to their destinies, and are too far removed from this world to hear you. It is only I who haunts this world thus.”

“You didn’t go to Hell? I had you prick’d down as a straight-to-Hell man.”

“As I once told you in a moment of weakness, my status was, and is, ambiguous.”

“Ah, yes-your devious cousine muddied those waters, did she not-I had forgotten.”

“Not even St. Peter can sort the matter out,” said the ghost of de Gex, “so I must wander the earth until Judgment Day.”

“What do you do to pass the time, then, Father Ed?”

Father Ed shrugged. “I seek to redeem myself, by giving good advice, and steering others, who still have some prospect of reaching Heaven, into the path of righteousness.”

“Haw! You of all people?”

De Gex shrugged. “Since you’re chained to the floor, you have no choice but to listen to, but it is your choice whether you shall heed, my advice.”

“And what is your advice? Speak up, you are fading.”

“I do not fade,” de Gex explained. “The gaolers have heard you shouting at me, and opened the door of your cell; voila, it’s morning, the windows of Newgate Prison have been opened to admit fresh air, light floods in to the place. I remain here with you. Ignore the gaolers; they are confused, they see me not, they suppose you to be not in your right mind.”

“Ha! Fancy that! Me, not in my right mind!”

“You have accepted the proposal that was tendered by Daniel Waterhouse…why?”

“Oh, I adjudged him the most capable of bringing it off. Charles White is a powerful man, but in a precarious spot, liable to be chased out of the country at any moment. I dared not gamble all on him. Newton I simply could not fathom. Waterhouse, though…he’s dependable, he is, and was in touch with Saturn, and had every incentive to see the matter through. He has already sprung the boys out of the Fleet-that explains why Sir Isaac was so furious yester evening…”

“That was three evenings ago, Jack,” said de Gex, “and they put you under these weights two days ago, on the eighteenth.”

“Stab me, that’s a hell of a long time, I had quite lost track.”

“You have held out longer than anyone; word has leaked out, through the windows of Newgate, into the streets, and the Mobb have begun to sing songs about you:

“Put another Weight on the Stack

Said the Vagabond Half-cocked Jack

For the night is still young

I’ve got air in me lungs

And I don’t think I’m ready to crack.”

“Is that what they were caterwauling? I had wondered. It is not so bad, I suppose, for a snatch of Mobb doggerel. And very touching. But I trust that the Mobb can improve on it. Perhaps take up a collection and hire a proper Poet, with some taste. I’d fancy something in heroic couplets, iambic hexameter perhaps, and capable of being set to music…”

“Jack! Has it occurred to you to wonder why you can hear me, a departed spirit, while none of the gaolers knows I am in here?”

“No, but it has occurred to me to wonder why you leave me alone here for two whole bloody days-then show up to trouble my repose with ghastly Advice.”

“The answer is the same in both cases. You are standing before the threshold of the portal that joins your world to the next.”

“Is that a poetickal way of saying I’m about to croak?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I shall see you in a minute or two, then, I can feel myself going…I can hear the bells of Heaven ringing…”

“Actually, those are the bells of Westminster Abbey, carrying down the river on the morning breeze.”

“Why? Someone died?”

“No, it is the tradition to toll the great Bell of the Abbey as the carriage of the new Sovereign draws up before the west door. That Bell is calling all England to the Church, Jack, to celebrate the Coronation of George.”

“Did they reserve a seat for me?”

“Try and concentrate, Jack, or the ringing of that bell will be the last thing you ever hear.”

“I would like to remind you that the alternative is for me to plead. No matter how I plead, I’m bound for Tyburn, where I’ll die a much worse death than this. Hell, this is practically painless!”

“Are you not forgetting an important part of the plan?”

“What? The plan of Daniel Waterhouse?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, no. I know where you are leading me now, Father Ed, and it’s not a place to which I will be led. You did this once before: forged a letter from her, to draw me in to a snare!”

“You are spread-eagled to the floor of Newgate Prison with three hundred pounds of weight on your chest and you have sixty seconds to live. It strikes me as funny that you are so wary, at such a moment, of being drawn in to a trap!”

“I just don’t wish to be made a fool of again, is all. That’s all I ask for, is a bit of pride.”

“Pride is not what you are wanting. You’ve plenty. Has it got you what you desired? No. You don’t want pride. You want Faith.”

“Oh, Jesus Friggin’ Christ!”

“All right. Barring that, wouldn’t you like to stay on another nine days, just to see how it all comes out in the end?”

“If dying means that I end up on the same plane of existence with you, and must suffer more of your prating, then nine days here begins to sound pretty good.”

“So-?”

“Oh, all right. What the hell. I’ll plead.”

“Say it louder!” de Gex implored him. “They can’t hear you! They are hearkening to the fanfare of distant trumpets!”

“Funny, so am I-I phant’sied I’d died, and that was angels blowing golden horns for me!”

“It is the trumpeter of the Household Royal announcing the entry of George Louis to Westminster Abbey. And those are the drums of his solemn procession!”

“I’ll friggin’ plead!” Jack shouted, “now take this shit off of me, already, and eject yonder Ghost.”