The System of the World: Volume Three of the Baroque Cycle

by Neal Stephenson

  Two days had sufficed for him to learn everything worth knowing concerning the Fleet and how it worked. He had then pissed away nearly a week learning something he ought to have known already: in London, real estate, be it never so smelly and disreputable, was valuable, and jealously looked after. The shambles along Fleet Lane might have seemed unutterably disgusting and mean, but to them who labored in their back rooms and dwelled, or operated brothels, on their upper storeys, they were little kingdoms, and every square foot was looked after as carefully as a statue or flower-patch in Versailles. Daniel knew, as well as he knew that the shortest distance between two points was a straight line, that in the backs of these buildings’ cellars must be drains—the most execrable hair-raising drains conceivable—that communicated with the Fleet Prison’s long-buried ox-bow moat—the same moat whose contents were seeping, through porous walls, into the cellar where the Shaftoes were locked up. But in several days’ hard trying, and phantastickal lying, he was not able even to get past the front rooms of these establishments, much less down into their backs. Those drains were valuable, because they would carry away the objectionable byproducts of certain types of profit-making activities, e.g., butchery and soap-making. Men made livings and supported families on those drains. They found it senseless that an elderly stranger ought to be let in to see these miracles, simply because he voiced curiosity about them. He could have offered money in exchange for a look-see, but this would only have drawn even more attention.

  Points A and B on Hooke’s drawing—the places in the sheer bank of Fleet Ditch where it connected to the moat—were clearly identifiable, but they had been sealed by a pastiche of iron grille-work and masonry with gaps between bricks to let stuff flow through. Saturn with a skiff and a powder-keg could have made short work of these, but it would have been rather noticeable, there in the midst of the city, all of a quarter-mile from St. Paul’s Churchyard.

  In the end the only way to gain access to that sealed-off moat was via Fleet Prison itself, by capitalizing on its very peculiarities, and on the unlooked-for currency of the buried gold story. “Old Partry,” well into his cups during the Beer-Clubb of Thursday, 7 October, had let slip a notion that the soldiers might be circumvented, and the treasure reached, by tunneling in from the moat. The following morning, it was found that the privy adjacent to the kitchen, along the north wall of the Prison, had been vandalized. This was a two-holer: a wooden bench having a pair of orifices that communicated (as was obvious enough, after it had been vandalized) with a common shaft that descended into an inscrutable and noxious blackness. Half the bench was still in good working order, but the other had been gone at with a hatchet, and the hole made a good deal broader and ruder.

  Now this was a grave matter to the general population of the Fleet, because the buildings were famously in decay, and the Warden infamously reluctant to dent his cash flow by effecting repairs. The Court of Inspectors would have to prosecute lawsuits for an hundred years before the Privy got fixed. The Steward came round and had words with “Old Partry.” The aged, daft visitor and his huge manservant were welcome to pass the time of day in the Tap-Room or the Racket Ground, but all buried-treasure talk must cease forthwith. Some of the less acute inmates were getting ideas, and beginning to tear the place up. The privy-basher, if found, would be Pumped.

  Another thing that Daniel had been learning was that even if real estate was expensive, people were cheap. Which ought to have been obvious to him from that, in exchange for tiny bits of silver, people were forever shinnying up chimneys, climbing into bed with syphilitics, or taking musket-balls in Belgium. But like most who did not do such things, he went out of his way not to dwell on it, and had quite put it out of his mind until it was brought to his notice forcefully by Peter Hoxton. In exchange for what he wanted people to do for him, Daniel offered a lot of silver, relatively speaking; and even as Saturn had forewarned him, word got round, and they had to turn people away and deflect their efforts to under-bid those who’d already been hired.

  The work consisted of going into Fleet Prison ostensibly to take a shit; entering the vandalized privy when no one was paying especially keen attention; and jumping down the hole. The first boy who did it got paid extra, because there was no telling what he would find, or what would find him; but he climbed back up the (provided) rope a few minutes later with the sensational intelligence that he had found himself in a long, gently curving tunnel with a firm floor beneath several inches of slimy muck, and, flowing sluggishly over that, sewage that came up to mid-thigh.

  The young men that Daniel hired went down that hole with bags on their backs (nothing bulky enough to draw the notice of the turnkeys) and came up empty-handed. They constructed a wooden ladder down below so that they might re-ascend to the privy without having to use climbing-ropes (as the pioneers had done). They went down with measuring-ropes and came up with numbers in their heads, which were mapped by Saturn: eight feet to the east of the privy-orifice, on the north side of the tunnel, was a drain-opening two hand-spans in breadth, which from time to time vomited cattle-guts. Eleven feet beyond that was the output shaft of a House of Office that must be in the back room of some other edifice. Two fathoms beyond that, on the right, a drain that must belong to the prison’s kitchen. Thirty sloshing paces beyond that, around a bend, a tiny in-flow of fresh water: the overflow drain of a pump and cistern that stood between the Prison kitchen and the dungeon. Up and down the tunnel these explorations spread, a picture filled in, one scrap at a time, by the accounts of the eager, reeking lads who emerged from the privy at all hours. Within a day they had found a stretch of rotten masonry wall, ninety to a hundred feet east of the privy, that could not be anything other than the outside wall of the dungeon itself. By listening with ears pressed against this, they convinced themselves that they heard chains rattling: the massive irons that the Warden of the Fleet had borrowed from Newgate Prison to bind the Shaftoe Gang. Now they went down with iron bars, chisels, and muffled hammers to peck and scrape away the crazed mortar that held that wall together. After two days of this, a chap on the other side—black, and so presumably Tomba—pulled a brick out of the way to make a fist-sized hole, and said that the miners must on no account remove any more material, lest their gaolers notice changes in the wall. So after that they moved on to other sorts of preparations. Several privy-shafts were ascended by boys recruited from London’s surplus of chimney-sweeps, hence, very much at home in filthy and cramped verticals. A particularly accommodating one was identified, and mapped to a house of prostitution in a corner of Bell Savage Inn: one of several culs-de-sac that lay just outside the prison wall, in the smoaky labyrinth of boozing-kens and spunging-houses between it and the Great Old Bailey.

  For a few days in the second week of October, Daniel felt as though Thursday Night Beer-Clubb would never roll around. For the traffic in and out of the damaged privy had begun to attract notice—not so much the comings and goings of the boys themselves (for they employed a system of lookouts, so that their entries to and exits from the shaft would not be be seen by ordinary privy-users), but the trail of nostril-singeing moisture that they tended to leave on their way out. This admittedly was not as obvious in a dark, wet, stinking London prison shit-house as it might have been in some other settings, but some had noted it and begun to talk, which made Daniel very ill at ease. Not that there was any want of other things to feel ill at ease about! The more time he spent in the Tap-Room, the worse he felt; but during the final days, he could not tear himself away from the place for more than a few hours at a time. During the afternoon of the fourteenth, he read Dappa’s auction piece half a dozen times, between re-reading that day’s newspapers, and yesterday’s. But finally the sky got dark and the place began to fill up with Beer-seekers, and Saturn ambled through and gave him a wink, and then, of course, it was all coming too fast! Happening too soon! He wasn’t ready! It was a little bit like a year ago, when Minerva had been stalled off the coast of Massachusetts for week after tedio
us week by contrary winds, and Daniel, irreligious though he was, had prayed for a shift in the wind—only to be assaulted by Blackbeard’s pirate-fleet when that day finally arrived. Another change was in the air now, and another adventure in the offing. He was alarmed. But he reasoned with himself thus: men like Jack Shaftoe had adventures all their lives. Even his maths tutor at Cambridge, Isaac Barrow, had once duelled Corsairs in the Mediterranean. Everything since Enoch had come to his door a year and two days ago, had been an adventure, albeit with lulls. So why not let’s get on with it!

  Daniel summoned one of the Tap-Room’s crack staff, and ordered that a certain keg of beer be tapped, and paid for it in gold. This was received, by the Debtors, with no less awe than a Biblical miracle. They responded with a miracle of their own: they transmogrified a full keg into an empty one. Daniel bought another, for word had gone out into the rules and beyond that Old Partry was buying a round for London, and people were thronging the place—coming in through the gate, Daniel was informed, in such a solid stream that no one could get out. To Daniel it only seemed like a more crowded than usual Beer-Clubb (and a more appreciative!), but when finally he was hoisted up onto the shoulders of several debtors, and huzzahed a good many times, and made the object of divers toasts, he was able from that vantage point to see over the heads of the Clubb and out the open door and windows into the Racket Ground, where he saw: fog. Not the usual London sea-fog, but the condensed breath of hundreds of persons who had backed up outside the doors because the Tap-Room was full. It might have been alarming, had these been Red Indians or Turks. But they were Englishmen. Daniel recognized here only the normal traits of Englishmen, viz. a wont to convene, drink, and be sociable, especially on chilly dark nights. He deemed this an apt moment to trigger another English predilection: joining together in mad projects.

  “I have spent all of my gold,” he announced, when a speech had been called for, and the Clubb had got as quiet as it was ever likely to. “I have spent it all,” he repeated, “and my family, who look a-skance at my researches, would opine that I am now likely to become your fellow-inmate here in the Fleet; which they would be ashamed of, but I would deem a higher honor than to be made a Knight of the Garter.” Now, a pause for toasting and huzzahing. “But this is not to happen. I have only spent my gold thus in the Tap-Room, because I am so sure of finding more anon, out yonder. For lately I have uncovered new documents that shall enable me positively to fix the location of the cache of coins buried in these precincts one hundred and forty years ago by coiners locked up on orders of Sir Thomas Gresham!”

  This utterance had begun promisingly, but then degenerated (in the opinion of most) into a windy and recondite history-lesson, and so the applause was not as vigorous as it might have been, had he simply ordered another keg tapped. But that suited his purposes well enough. The true believers in the buried-gold story had suspected, all evening long, that some new ferment was at work in Old Partry’s mind, and they now surged toward him, waving shovels and pointed sticks. The Court of Inspectors were extremely dismayed, and of a mind to have Daniel Pumped; but they were helpless as long as engulfed in a Mobb of visitors whose bellies were full of beer paid for by Old Partry.

  “Now if you would be so accommodating as to bear me round to the Poor Side,” Daniel said, “I shall find the treasure, and we shall extract it, and divide it up! I make only one demand of you, which is that you remain well clear of the soldiers, and in no way menace or molest them. They are armed, after all; and if we are so rash as to hand them a pretext, why, they might just seize what’s rightfully ours!”

  This, he thought, percolated to the edge of the crowd reasonably well. As well, it gave the Court of Inspectors an excuse to exercise their authority. He saw the Steward and three of his high council making for the dungeon straightaway, presumably to explain to the soldiers what was going on.

  “To the Poor-Side Cistern!” Daniel commanded, and in a few moments was borne there, followed by a thrilled company of shovel-men. This was the place where Daniel had seen a prisoner Pumped on his first visit. He drew out a document. It was written in the Real Character: perfectly impenetrable to even the literate among the debtors, which was a good thing, since it was actually a description of a clock-work mechanism written a long time ago by Hooke. “The inscription says, proceed from here along a line parallel to the Ditch for fifty paces, until a certain Tree is reached,” he announced, and let it be known that he wished to dismount. His bearers let him down, and he backed up to the edge of the cistern, faced north, and began to pace: “One, two, three…”

  By the time he had reached ten, they had begun to count along with him. Fifty found them all goose-stepping and chanting in perfect unison in the Painted Ground.

  “No tree,” Daniel observed in the silence that ensued. “Of course, it was burned in the Fire. We must proceed anyway, keeping in mind that there is likely to be some error.” He scrutinized the document, turning it this way and that, until many had grown restive, and some had even begun to dig holes. “ ‘Turn to the right and go another hundred,’ it says, which foxed me for a bit,” said Daniel, gazing up at the wall of the Prison, which barred all rightward movement. “Until one considers that the prison that stood in those days was smaller. We must measure a distance of one hundred paces that way.” And he thrust his hand at the Prison.

  Now, everyone in the whole party had a different notion of how this was to be achieved, and so for ten minutes the Fleet seemed to have swopped inmates with Bedlam, as all over the place people were clambering through windows, stretching bits of twine across other inmates’ cells, pacing along exterior walls, and dragging sticks through dirt. But after a while, two-thirds of them reconvened on the near edge of the Racket Ground. Smaller clusters of dissident pacers and measurers staked out more or less far-flung positions which they insisted were the correct ones.

  “There is supposed to be another tree here, but it’s gone,” said Daniel. He spent a while reading, and squinting up at the dome of St. Paul’s. “Of course the turret of old St. Paul’s was in a slightly different place,” he reminded them, “but fortunately I am old enough to remember it.” He paced toward that remembered landmark all the way across the Racket Ground, parallelled by the several dissident groups, who counted his paces jealously. He stopped just short of the Prison wall, then sidestepped five paces to the left, until he was standing on the rim of a shallow stone gutter that ran for some distance along the wall’s base. He looked both ways, pretending to check for landmarks; but really he was performing reconaissance on the soldiers. All dozen of them had been rousted from their tents by their sergeant, and now stood in a picket-line across the front of the dungeon-building, facing outwards, with fixed bayonets. The sergeant stood in front of the line. In front of him were several worthies of the Court of Inspectors, who seemed to want to create a buffer between the soldiers and the shovelers. All of these had been watching Daniel alertly, as he had drawn to within half a dozen yards of the nearest soldiers. But that was as close as he came. “Here is where the instructions tell us to dig,” he announced, and stamped the ground. And then he danced out of the way, lest his foot be taken off by the blade of a shovel. He glanced up to see the soldiers looking somewhat relieved. In the dimness behind them, a large man sprinted at the privy as though his bowels were about to give way. Old Partry had been quite forgotten, and was shouldered to the edge of the crowd, and his wig knocked off (actually, he abetted this by shaking his head at the right moment). In the shadow of the Prison wall he shrugged off his cloak, and then stepped out into the clear, uncovered, and dressed in shabby attire that blended well with what most people wore around here. He walked south, all the way around the poor wing, and doubled back along the western side of the prison and walked north past the cistern and the main gate (thronged, now, with Beer-Clubbers wishing to go home, so that all three turnkeys were kept busy inspecting their faces). Up across the Painted Ground he strolled, and then around the north end of the prison buildin
g. The vandalized privy was directly ahead of him. He had made almost a complete circuit of the Fleet to reach it; but in this way he had been able to approach it without parading in front of the soldiers. He entered, sat on the bench, took a deep breath, raised his knees, and spun around on his arse until his feet were poised above the hole. As soon as he dipped them in, strong hands grabbed his ankles and pulled down. Faster than he’d have liked, the rest of him followed. Only his head and shoulders were still showing when he was blinded by sudden lanthorn-glare. Someone was coming in the door of the privy! There was a gasp. Daniel was yanked downwards, barking his chin on the edge of the hole. A scream sounded from the world above, and a crash as the visitor dropped the lanthorn. The ragged oval of light above was snuffed out.

  “Do you s’pose she got a good look at your face?” Saturn grunted in his ear. But Daniel was unable to respond. A kind of paralyzing dismay had come over him, as precursor to horror and, in all likelihood, sickness. He was finally now understanding what it really meant to be in a London sewer—and he wasn’t even really down in it yet, for Saturn was bearing him over one shoulder, sloshing down the tunnel toward a source of illumination hidden round the curve of the ox-bow.

  Daniel would have fled, if not for the shameful knowledge that he’d been paying other people to do this for a week.

  He suffered. Time passed. They were in a different part of the tunnel, with more light and more people. A great hole had been knocked through the wall. Men were working in a low-ceilinged vault. On its far wall was a massive door; wedges had been driven into the crack between it and its jamb, so that even if the soldiers heard something above the din of the Mobb and came down to investigate they would not be able to get it open. Three of the worst-looking wretches Daniel had ever seen were reclining on the floor, as if taking their leisure; but of course they were sick, and weak, and fettered by hundred-pound irons from Newgate. A bloke with a hammer and a punch was striking the irons off of them, one wrist or ankle at a time. By the time Daniel reached them, one was free, and sitting up to rub his wrists. “We been complainin’ for weeks they didn’t give us a latrine,” he observed, “and now we’re going to go down one.”