The System of the World (119 page)

T
WELVE GRAINS IS A FORTIETH
of an ounce; and gold being the densest thing in the world, a fortieth of an ounce is smaller than a pea. Yet such is the precision of the Goldsmiths’ techniques that they can conduct a reliable assay with so tiny a sample. To take the twelve grains
from a single coin would defeat the purpose of the whole undertaking, for such a test might be queered by a freak of chance: a meaningless surplus or deficit of gold in one particular coin. Hence the mixing and sampling that has led to Mr. Threader’s having a dozen guineas set out on the cloth before him. He has come armed with a pair of mighty long-handled snips. He stands up for better leverage, and in short order has cut each of the dozen guineas into halves. He then works his way down the row of twenty-four half-guineas, snipping off their sharp corners. There ought to be forty-eight of these. They are so tiny that they appear to Daniel as points of fire on Threader’s black velvet cloth, echoing the stars painted on the ceiling of this chamber. Like a mad demiurge, Mr. Threader creates a little cosmos crowded with half-moons and strewn stars. He then begins to impose Order on his own Chaos, picking up the halved guineas and setting them to one side, while herding the stars into a globular cluster in the middle. It seems that his old fingers have difficulty picking up the wee bits, for he raises his hand to his mouth once or twice and licks his fingertips, like a scholar who is having difficulty getting traction on a page. Everyone is watching this closely, though Daniel’s mind is a bit distracted still because of that business with Isaac. He turns his head thataway, and notes that the Lord Privy Seal has ventured out of the side chamber where he and all of the great big-wigs are supposed to be awaiting the verdict of the Jury. His lordship has got it into his head that he is going to say hello to Sir Isaac, and turns that way purposefully. But Catherine has read his mind, has tracked his doddering progress, giving him the evil eye the whole way. He’s too blind or careless to notice. She steps into his path. Daniel averts his gaze, not wishing to see the Catastrophe of Manners that’s in the offing.

“Pray, my lord, do
not
, I beg you,” cries Catherine Barton from the corner of the room. All heads turn that way except for that of Daniel, who is just turning round the other way.

Mr. Threader glances up over his half-glasses, reaches down, and puts the tip of his long finger on a star. When he withdraws his hand, it’s gone—the star has been snuffed out. But another one tumbles to the cloth in its place. This he seizes between thumb and index finger, picks up, and drops upon the little mound that he’s making in the middle. He brings his fingertips to his mouth again to lick them, and Daniel sees a fleck of gold come away on the tip of his tongue and disappear, he supposes, right down Mr. Threader’s epiglottis. Then Mr. Threader rubs his hands together as if they’re chilly—which they probably are. He favors Daniel with a wink.

The crisis in the corner has been sorted out somehow; heads are turning back toward the Pesour. He stands there motionless, hands
at his sides, as if he has not moved a muscle during this little
contretemps
. “Sir Isaac is grown so reclusive of late, one can’t but wonder what it is he’s trying to hide from us!” Mr. Threader remarks, in a clearly audible aside to one of the Goldsmiths. “I daresay all his secrets shall be discovered in a few minutes’ time; he can hide from Lord Privy Seal but not from
this
.” Nodding at the furnace.

Daniel is by and large a great stifler of urges and hider of feelings; but he knows that this is a cue. “You
dog
!” he exclaims, and takes half a step forward, reaching around himself, groping for the ridiculous sword he’s hung on himself for the occasion, and half yanking it from its scabbard. In that moment every face in the room turns toward him. Mr. Threader snuffs out another star, lets another one fall from between his fingers, and reloads.

“Dr. Waterhouse,” he says, mumbling a bit, probably because he is in the act of swallowing a bit of a guinea, “my old friend! Are you feeling quite all right?”

“I am no friend of
yours,
sir!” Daniel cries, and makes to draw the sword all the way out; but then younger and stronger hands are on his arm, and someone has moved to block his path to Mr. Threader. “I am a true friend of Sir Isaac Newton—a man so dedicated, so loyal to his King and to his craft that he has come here to-day in spite of being laid low with illness!” Daniel shoves the sword back in to its sheath, spins, and takes a few paces back into the open space between the Jurors and Miss Barton. All eyes track him except for those of Mr. Threader, who is up to more conjuring. “You would do well to remember, sir, that it is your solemn duty to conduct this assay justly and truly, and in spite of the enmity that your profession bears toward Sir Isaac. The Lords of the Council—” and here Daniel turns to gesture with one hand toward the door of the side chamber. The unfamiliar scabbard swings around and whacks him on the ankle, which gives him an idea—he hooks a toe over it, flails his arms, and tumbles to the floor.

It’s all the Jurors can do not to laugh out loud. But soon enough they are struck dumb by two very different, yet equally mesmerizing sights: first of all Catherine Barton rushing forward and bending down to assist Daniel, so that everyone’s able to stare down her bodice. Second, the Duke of Marlborough striding in from the next room in high dudgeon.

“What in the name of—” he begins, then stops, lost in contemplation of Miss Barton’s cleavage.

“ ’Tis nothing, my lord, if you please, a momentary flaring of warm feelings, as when a log bursts on a hearth, and sparks fly,” says Mr. Threader. “The only sparks that matter to us are these.” He gestures with both hands at the pile of golden bits he has made on the
cloth. “If, as I hope, Dr. Waterhouse’s exertions have left him quite uninjured, then I shall weigh out twelve grains of these.”

“I am…fine,” Daniel announces. “Thank you, Miss Barton,” he says, for she’s just hauled him to his feet, and is spanking the dust from him. “I am sorry,” he concludes. “Pray continue, Mr. Threader.”

Working now with a pair of tweezers, Mr. Threader moves granules of gold one by one from the pile of snips to one of the pans of his great Scale. On the opposite pan he places a twelve-grain weight from the set that was stored in the Abbey. After a minute the scale-pans begin to move. The Pesour goes into a protracted and tedious work of swapping larger bits for smaller ones, or sometimes snipping a bit in half to make change, as it were.

Finally Mr. Threader steps back from the table, hands upraised like a priest’s. “I say,” he intones, “that on the pan of yonder scale is a sample of metal fairly chosen from the coins in the Pyx, weighing twelve grains exactly; and I invite the Fusour to assay it.”

William Ham steps up.

William has not worked as a goldsmith since he was a boy. But like his father before him he’s a member in good standing of the Company. Daniel reckons that they tapped him as Fusour for a reason: he defied Sir Isaac and the King’s Messengers in the Bank of England a few days ago, asserting that they had no right to enter the vault and seize a deposit. They honor him for it now. This steadfast Goldsmith protected the sanctity of England’s commerce by his actions in the bank, and now he’ll perform a like service by challenging the produce of the Mint.

He has been at work preparing some necessaries over by the furnace. He approaches the Scale now carrying a wooden tray between his hands. On the tray are a sheet of lead, hammered out to a thin irregular disk, like a miniature pie-crust; a bullet-mold; pliers; and a cube of gray-white material rather less than an inch on a side, with a round depression in its upper surface. William Ham sets this down before the scale and tilts the scale-pan so that the twelve grains of gold-bits slide off and shower down into the center of the leaden sheet. He then folds the sheet together to imprison the gold, and wraps it up into a lumpy wad about the size of a hazelnut. He places this into one half of the bullet-mold, settles the other half over it, and squeezes the mold together with the pliers. When the packet comes out it has been rendered almost perfectly spherical: a wee globe, less like the Earth than the pitted gray Moon. He sets this into the depression in the top of the cupel—for that is the name of the cube of burnt bone ash. The sample fits into this neatly, recalling diagrams Daniel once studied in Geometry of spheres inscribed within cubes. William carries the tray
over and sets it beside the furnace. A pair of tongs awaits. He uses these to pick up the cupel and thrust it into the heart of the furnace. It is dark and gray at first, but in a few moments it begins to absorb and then to give back some of the radiance in which it’s immersed. The lead softens and sags. William Ham consults his watch. A dome of surface tension forms in the cupel as its contents become liquid. The gray ash darkens as the molten metals saturate it.

Written right on the gold trial plate is the following:
This standard composed of 22 carracts of fine gold, 2 carracts of alloy in the pound troy of Great Britain made the 13th day of April 1709.
The late Sir Isaac Newton begged to differ—he suspected that the true numbers were more like 23 and 1, and that the goldsmiths had fixed the plate to make it more likely he’d fail the Trial—but in any case, the point is that Sir Isaac’s guineas are supposed to be made almost entirely of gold, with small amounts of base metals permitted. That is to say that out of the twelve grains of guinea-shards that made up the sample, eleven grains (if the inscription on the trial plate is taken at face value) or more (if the Goldsmiths fudged it) must be pure gold. The way to verify this is chymically to separate the gold from the not-gold, then weigh the former. The Company of Goldsmiths learned, ages ago, that when an assay is made in a cupel according to this receipt, the base metals in the sample will dissolve into the lead and be drawn, along with it, into the bone ash, like water into a sponge. But the pure gold will remain aloof, and form an ingot in the depression in the cupel’s top. And that is what happens now, before the eyes of Daniel and all the Jurors. Though it is an everyday procedure, it seems nearly as magical, to Daniel, as what occurred a few moments ago in the sedan chair. The release of the body of pure radiant gold from the dissolving globe of lead reminds him of the dream-vision of which Princess Caroline spoke.

If the assay is left in the furnace for too long, the gold will evaporate and lose weight, which is not fair to the Master of the Mint. If it is not left in long enough, some base metal will remain allayed with the ingot of gold, which is not fair to the King. Knowing how long to leave it in there is a black art of the Goldsmiths, and Daniel gets the sense that William is silently polling the other eleven members of his Jury for their opinions. When a consensus seems to have been reached, he picks up the tongs again and withdraws the cupel and sets it on a brick to cool down. The lead jacket has vanished and the cupel has turned charcoal-gray. Remaining in the top of the cupel is the ingot: a tiny round lake of gold. The stars and moons that decorated Mr. Threader’s black firmament have been changed by alchemy into this little sun. They need only wait for its heat to subside before they take the weight of it.

H
OLBOURN 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 færy-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.