The System of the World

The Press-Yard and Castle, Newgate Prison
23 OCTOBER 1714

STRANGE WHAT A DIFFERENCE was made by moving twenty feet. For that was the distance separating Jack’s four-posted feather-bed in the Castle from the middle of the Press-Room, which happened to be situated just on the other side of the apartment’s back wall. A few days earlier, he’d lain naked on a stone floor with a box of weights on his chest; now, clad in a clean linen nightshirt, he reclined on goose-down.

A month or two ago, Jack could have bought his way into this apartment without difficulty. But since then most of his assets had been spent. And what hadn’t been spent had been seized, or otherwise put out of his reach, by his febrile Persecutor, Sir Isaac Newton.

There was no fixed rent for the apartments of the Press-Yard and Castle. Rather, the Keeper applied a sliding scale, depending upon the Degree of the personage imprisoned. A Duke-let us say, a rebel Scottish lord-would be expected to pay a premium of five hundred guineas upon admission to the gaol, simply to escape from the Common-Side and Master-Side. Having got over that hurdle he would, each week, then have to pay the gaoler about a mark, or thirteen shillings and change, for the privilege of staying in a room such as this one.

Now Jack was going to be dead in a week, and so the rent would not add up to much-not even a pound. But the premium was a different matter. A commoner with means, having no other distinctions to his name, would be charged at a much lower rate than a Duke-say twenty pounds. What, then, would be the rate for a Jack Shaftoe? Some would say he was less than a commoner, and ought to pay fewer than twenty pounds sterling. But others-probably to include the Gaoler of Newgate-would insist he was greater, in his way, than a Duke, and ought to pay a king’s ransom.

In sum, he could not possibly have been sprung from the Condemned Hold for less than several hundred pounds. He did not have such money, not any more. Neither did any of his surviving friends. Where had it come from?

This was not part of the deal he’d struck the other night with Sir Ike in the Condemned Hold. Newton had asked for Jack to dictate an affidavit, stating that evidence of a Whig coining-ring was to be found in a subterranean vault in one of the late Roger Comstock’s real estate developments in Clerkenwell. Newton had tediously rehearsed the statement with him all night long, it seemed, and Jack had prattled it back to a Stenographer and a line-up of dumbfounded worthies the next morning. But Newton had not offered to put Jack back into his Castle apartment, and Jack hadn’t asked, because he sensed that Newton was running low on money. The quid pro quo, rather, was that Jack’s punishment might be reduced: at the very least, to a conventional (and speedy) hanging, perhaps even to a fine he’d never be able to pay, so that he’d spend the rest of his life on the Master Debtor’s side of Newgate.

No, someone else-someone with lots of money-had caused Jack to be moved here. It was a further step on the road to Faith that de Gex had prated about: Jack had nothing, but he was somehow being cared for and looked after. It hurt his pride, yes, but not as much as some things he could mention.

It seemed unlikely that his benefactress (for Jack liked to indulge himself in the phant’sy that it was a female) had done so only to make Jack more comfortable during this, his final week on Earth. Jack preferred to suppose that this had been meant as some way of sending him a message. To decypher that message was now the only thought in his mind; but he soon stopped making any progress on the riddle, and postponed further work on it, pending arrival of fresh clews.

Instead he divided his time between thinking about Eliza and cursing himself for being so fatuous as to think of her. On the other hand, he had to admit, there was no great harm in it. It could no longer lead him astray, as it had done in years past. He was now as astray as it was possible for anyone to be in this world. He was at a pole. Van Hoek had explained to him once that if you went to the South Pole, then east and west and south would cease to exist, and any direction you went would be north. Thus Jack’s current status in the world.