The System of the World

Holbourn

HOLBOURN OUGHT TO BE the Valley of the Shadow of Death for Jack. Perhaps he’d see it that way if he were facing forwards, watching Tyburn creep toward him. But they’ve faced him the other way, towards the London he’s leaving. There is intended to be a message in this: he is supposed to be looking back ruefully on his traitorous doings. But it is not working out thus. Jack is a spark dragged through a trench full of gunpowder. Far from being the Valley of the Shadow of Death, it is a roaring flume of vibrant riotous life, perfectly arrayed for viewing by Jack, and as such, a great distraction for one who really ought to be attending to his sins.

He does not recognize any one person in particular, but London, as an entire thing, is as familiar to him as the faces in a parish church, on Sunday morn, would be to an aged vicar. Groups are recognizable too. There’s a battalion of fishwives, of approximately regimental size, who have outflanked the artillery batteries at the Bridge and, by a covert march along Chick Lane, worked their way round to the west bank of the Fleet. There they seem to have divided into companies and squads, and mustered themselves within striking-distance in such places as Saffron Hill, the Dyers’ Court, the Plough-Yard, and Bleeding Heart Court. These are tributaries that empty into Holbourn along the hill that climbs up from the Fleet crossing, where the Hanging-March is doomed to move slowly. Triggered by the westward-propagating Mobb-roar, the fishwives mount vicious sallies from their nests and burst into the road, shouldering between the pikemen and the dragoons, pulling fistfuls of black coins from their aprons and flinging them at Jack’s head. They pock the sledge like grapeshot, they ricochet and ring in the air like f?ry-bells. Jack rips a button from his coat and underhands it to a fishwife who has actually penetrated to within a few yards of the sledge. She’s too astonished to do anything but clap it out of the air. A knot of fish-guts strikes him square on the bridge of the nose. He returns fire with another golden button.

Having beaten back the assault of the Fishwives’ Regiment with only light casualties, they crest the hill and enter into the widest part of Holbourn, which runs for a mile to St. Giles’s, passing between diverse expensive squares, all converted from cow-pastures during Jack’s lifetime. A Puritan in a black frock stands up on the street-island at Holbourn Bar, holding a Bible over his head, open to some passage he guesses Jack should know about. Another breaks through the cordon and climbs into the sledge with Jack and gets ready to baptize him with a bucket of water he’s brought along; but the Ordinary of Newgate, who’s been riding in the cart, isn’t having any of that. He’s down on the pavement in a trice, hustling along beside the sledge, and makes a grab for the handle of the Baptismal pail. This leads to a tug-of-war, and creates enough of a diversion that a short procession of Catholics-or so he assumes, from the monks’ robes they’re all wearing-is able to slip in, and make itself part of the parade. One is a priest, the others are burly monks, which makes perfect sense as a lone Papist wouldn’t survive for ten seconds in this crowd. The priest strides along behind the sledge, looks Jack in the eye, and begins to declaim rapidly in what Jack assumes is Latin. Jack is being given last rites! A very considerate gesture on someone’s part. This tiny and intrepid Popish strike force was probably despatched by Louis XIV from a secret chapel-headquarters in a vault beneath Versailles.

The procession bumps to a stop for some reason Jack can’t see. Getting into the Christian spirit, he takes this opportunity to whip off his purple cape and toss it to the priest. He then indicates that the priest is to give it to a poor old woman, over yonder, who has somehow fought her way to the front of the crowd.

The rich people are having their say now. The procession has passed Chancery Lane and travels now among the homes of the high and the mighty: Red Lyon Square, Waterhouse Square, Bloomsbury. All to the north side. To the south, Drury Lane plugs in, running up from Covent Garden and Long Acre. Which is to say that Dukes and Merchant Princes control one side of the parade route, whores and actresses the other. Captains of Commerce, worth millions of pounds sterling, practically topple from balconies and rooftops in their eagerness to shake their fists at him. The ladies on the other side are much more forgiving. Jack, on an impulse, stands up, shrugs off his coat, and throws it into a phalanx of prostitutes. It’s shredded in a heartbeat. He’s down to his cloth-of-gold vest now, already missing a few buttons. He turns around to make sure that Jack Ketch is getting a load of this. And indeed he is. The executioner was dismayed by Jack’s alms-giving at St. Sepulchre, but after a while he seemed to put it out of his mind, reckoning it was an aberration, a moment of weakness, on Shaftoe’s part. Which must have made it all the more painful for him when Shaftoe began to disrobe and hurl his priceless raiments into the Mobb.

At St. Giles’s, there’s another ritual: the procession stops so that bowls of ale may be brought out and given to the prisoners. Jack drinks several, paying for each with a golden button. By the time they start moving again, and round the Tottenham Court bend into Oxford Road, his vest is hanging loose on his shoulders, not a single button remaining.

A carriage is stopped in the intersection, like a boat run aground in the middle of a torrent. Standing atop it is a fat Duke who has positioned himself so that Jack will get a good long look at him as he is dragged away to the west. He screams something that must be very unpleasant, and, realizing that Jack cannot quite make out what he’s saying over the general noise, turns red in the face and begins to bellow and gesticulate with such fury that his wig shudders askew. But the meaner sort of people, leaving aside the occasional angry fishwife, are much more forgiving. At the crossing of Marybone Lane, where the countryside finally opens up to the north side of the road, a common-looking fellow comes trotting alongside with a pint of wine for Jack, and Jack pays him by handing him the golden vest.

They have reached Tyburn Cross. It is a desert the size of the Pacific Ocean, paved with human faces. A few tall objects protrude above the flood, here and there: a stranded carriage, a tree that’s about to collapse from the weight of the people who’ve climbed it, occasional men on horseback, and the Triple Tree itself. Which Jack does not see until he’s underneath it. It is an alienated frame-work of six mighty timbers-three vertical pilings and three cross-bars forming a triangle high above-beautiful in a strange way. The feeling is of entering a house without a roof, a home whose ceiling is Heaven.

A space about a stone’s throw in width has been cleared round the base of the Deadly Nevergreen. The crowd’s held at bay by pikemen, now reinforced by the King’s Own Black Torrent Guards. Some bestride their war-horses facing outwards with sabers drawn and pistols cocked; others have dismounted and fixed bayonets.

The preliminary hangings seem to take forever. Jack enlivens the proceedings by stripping off his breeches, whipping them around his head a few times, showering coins in all directions, and flinging them off into the crowd. Somewhere along the line he’s lost his periwig, too. So now he’s stripped down to white undergarments, shoes, and a noose. Going to his destiny a pauper, like that Lazarus the Ordinary read about in chapel this morning.

The others are all dead, decorating two of the Three-Legged Mare’s cross-bars. The third is reserved exclusively for Jack. He climbs up onto the cart, and the driver maneuvers it beneath the clear space. Jack’s eyes are tired from seeing so much, and so he tilts his head back for a moment so that all he can see is the sky, divided in half by the rope-worn timber above.

Gunfire sounds from nearby. He swings his chin down again. This is the first time he’s seen the crowd from a high vantage-point. Yet still he cannot find the edge of it. Gunpowder-smoke is drifting up from a black phalanx of Quakers or Barkers or some such. No one knows why.

Below, preparations are being made.

Flies explode from Jack Ketch’s man-rated butcher block as Ketch heaves a rolled bundle onto it. He loosens a couple of ties and shakes out the contents: a complete suite of disembowelling-tools. The table is a scab the size of a bed. Ketch distributes his tools around it, occasionally testing an edge with a thumb. He takes particular care with some rusty shackles. This is a way of letting Shaftoe know that he can expect to be alive and conscious during the later phases of the operation.

When they pulled out of the Press-Yard some hours ago, Ketch had every expectation of being a rich man at the end of the day. All of those golden buttons, all of those rich clothes, the coins in the pockets, all were for him. He was going to get out of debt and buy shoes for his children.

Now Ketch is going to get nothing. Shaftoe has avoided meeting Ketch’s eye until now, not knowing, and not caring, whether Ketch was responding to the relentless destruction of his fortune with curses, tears, or shocked disbelief. But they do look at each other now, Shaftoe up on his cart, and Ketch down at his abattoir, and Shaftoe sees that Ketch is perfectly calm. There’s no trace of the warm emotion he showed earlier, in the Press-Yard. It’s as if that never occurred. Even if Ketch removed his hood, the face beneath would be no more expressive than is the black leather mask. He has gone into a cool professional mode. In a way, revenge is easy for Ketch, because he need only carry out the Court’s sentence to the letter, and put him to death in terrorem.

Jack now wonders whether this strategy was a good idea. A younger man would be scared. But it’s normal to have second thoughts at this stage. It’s the sign of a good plan.

He is expected to say a few words now.

“I, Jack Shaftoe, also known as L’Emmerdeur, the King of the Vagabonds, Ali Zaybak, Quicksilver, Lord of Divine Fire, Jack the Coiner, do hereby repent of all my sins and commend my soul to God,” he says, “and ask only that I receive a decent Christian burial, with all of my quarters, if they can be rounded up, to be put together in the same box. And my head, too. For it is well known that the College of Physicians is gathered, as I speak, round their dissection-table on Warwick Lane, sharpening their scalpels, and getting ready to cut my head open so that they may rummage through my brains looking for the house where the Imp of the Perverse has dwelt lo these many years. I would prefer that this not happen. Having said that, Mr. Ketch, I turn myself over to your care. And I ask only that you check your knotwork twice over, for last night when Betty came to service me and these other fellows in the Condemned Hold, she was saying that you had quite lost your enthusiasm for the job, and were looking for a position as a maid-of-all-work. Step to it, man, the Physicians are waiting-”

And that is all he can get out, for during this last bit, Ketch has slung the loose end of the rope over the timber above, and pulled it taut. Very taut. Earlier, he’d promised to put a lot of slack in it and give Shaftoe a nice long drop, so that it would be over quickly; but that was before Shaftoe breached a certain implied contract. Ketch pulls the rope so taut that Jack is only appearing to stand on the cart; in truth, the tips of his toes are barely grazing the floor-boards now. “I shall tend to you in a few minutes’ time, Jack,” he mumbles into Shaftoe’s ear.

Jack’s head is forced down by the knot behind his ear; he can’t help but notice that the cart is no longer beneath him. He remembers the cord that he earlier strung from his shoe to the noose beneath his drawers, and pushes off against it with one leg. This relieves some of the pressure. Behind him on the cart, the Ordinary and the Catholic priest are striving to out-pray each other.

Four teams of horses stand at the ready in the clear space below, facing different ways like the cardinal points on a compass-card, ready for the final and most spectacular part of the operation. A few people, presumably connected in one way or another with aspects of the drawing-and-quartering, are standing around down there, watching him.

One of these is a solitary man, dressed in a monk’s robe. Come to think of it, he’s one of the monks who was escorting the Catholic priest up Holbourn. He takes up a position in the open, next to the giant butcher block. The man’s hood is drawn nearly closed, so that he looks out at the world down a tunnel of black homespun. He turns to face Jack, cleverly arranging it so that a tube of sunlight will shine onto his face. Jack’s expecting Enoch Root or, barring that, some wild holy man.

Instead he recognizes the face of his brother Bob.

And that explains how a lone monk is able to be here at all, because Bob, of course, knows his way around the King’s Own Black Torrent Guard.

For one glorious moment of stupidity, Jack supposes that some kind of rescue is about to happen.

Then there’s a moment of terror as he wonders if Bob is going to run up and hang from his legs to kill him fast. Or barring that, perhaps he’ll pull a pistol and put Jack out of his misery directly.

The cord snaps! Jack drops a couple of inches, the noose clubs him in the back of the head, the rope draws tighter.

Jack keeps watching his brother. Now, as in the early years of his life, there is no one else in the world.

Bob until now has kept his hands together in front of him, tucked into the capacious sleeves of his garment. Now, seeing Jack’s distress, he draws them apart, and holds them up in the air like a saint. The sleeves churn. Two larks fly out of the right one, and a blackbird from the left. They flutter aimlessly about the gallows for a few moments, then identify it as Not a Real Tree, and ascend into the light.

Jack feels the pressure of the world being relieved.

He has no trouble taking the birds’ meaning: they have escaped. All three of them. They are headed for America.

There is a roaring. He cannot know if it is the blood in his ears, or the Mobb, or, perhaps, a legion of demons and a choir of angels fighting for possession of his soul. Jack rolls his eyes high up in their sockets, trying to keep those birds in view. The sky, which was blue a moment ago, has turned uniformly gray, and its compass is narrowing. It shrinks to a lead coin with two white birds and a black one minted on its face.