The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and the System of the World (52 page)

“Let him pray while he’s kicking!”

“He’s not going to be doing any kicking, ’cause you and I are going to be hanging on his legs.”

“But he’s lying about the treasure.”

“I can see that, you think I’m stupid? But as long as we’re here, let’s do a right job of it.”

While they argued, Cole was turned off. He sprawled against the sky just above their heads. They dodged instinctively, but of course he didn’t fall far. They jumped into the air, gained hand-holds on his feet, and ascended, hand-over-hand.

After a few moments of dangling from the rope, Cole began to kick vigorously. Jack was tempted to let go, but the tremors coming down Cole’s legs reminded him of what he’d felt in the rope when poor Dick had been dragged down beneath the river, and he held on by imagining that this was some kind of vengeance. Bob must’ve had the same phant’sy, for both boys gripped their respective legs like stranglers until Cole finally went limp. When they realized he was pissing himself, they both let go at once and tumbled into the fœtid dust below the gibbet. There was applause from the crowd. Before they’d had time to dust themselves off, they were approached by the sister of the one remaining condemned man—also a slow-hanging wretch, by his looks—who offered them cash money to perform the same service. The coins were clipped, worn, and blackened, but they were coins.

John Cole’s loose board turned out not to be loose, and when pried up, to cover shit instead of treasure. They were hardly surprised. It didn’t matter. They were prosperous tradesmen now. On the eve of each hanging-day, Jack and Bob could be found in their new place of business: Newgate Prison.

It took them several visits just to understand the place.
Gate
in their usage meant a sort of wicket by which humans could pass through a fence around a hog-yard without having to vault over—not that vaulting was such a difficult procedure, but it was dangerous when drunk, and might lead to falling, and being eaten by the hogs. So gates they knew.

They had furthermore absorbed the knowledge that in several parts of London town were large fabricks called Gates, viz. Ludgate, Moorgate, and Bishopsgate. They had even passed through Aldgate a few times, that being their usual way of invading the city. But the connexion between gates of that type, and hog-yard-wickets, was most obscure. A gate in the hog-yard sense of the word made no sense unless built in a wall, fence, or other such formal barrier, as its purpose was to provide a means of passage through same. But none of the large London buildings called Gates appeared to have been constructed in any such context. They bestrode important roads leading into the city, but if you didn’t want to pass through the actual gate, you could usually find a way round.

This went for Newgate as well. It was a pair of mighty fortress-turrets built on either side of a road that, as it wandered in from the countryside and crossed over Fleet Ditch, was named Holborn. But as it passed between those turrets, the high road was bottle-necked down to a vaulted passageway just wide enough for a four-horse team to squeeze through. Above, a castle-like building joined the turrets, and bridged the road. An iron portcullis made of bars as thick as Jack’s leg was suspended within that castle so that it could be dropped down to seal the vault, and bar the road. But it was all show. For thirty seconds of scampering along side streets and alleys would take Jack, or anyone else, to the other side. Newgate was not surrounded by walls or fortifications, but rather by buildings of the conventional sort, which was to say, the half-timbered two- and three-story dwellings that in England grew up as quick and as thick as mushrooms. This Gothick fortress of Newgate, planted in the midst of such a neighborhood, was like a pelvis in a breadbasket.

If you actually did come into the city along Holborn, then when you ducked beneath that portcullis and entered the vaulted passageway beneath Newgate you’d see to the right a door leading into a porter’s lodge, which was where new prisoners had their chains riveted on. A few yards farther along, you’d emerge from beneath the castle into the uncovered space of what was now called Newgate Street. To your right you would see a gloomy old building that rose to a height of three or four stories. It had only a few windows, and those were gridded over with bars. This was a separate piece of work from the turret-castle-vault building; rumor had it that it had once done service as an inn for travelers coming into the city along Holborn. But the prison had, in recent centuries, spread up Newgate Street like gangrene up a thigh, consuming several such houses. Most of the doorways that had once welcomed weary travelers were bricked up. Only one remained, at the seam between the castle and the adjoining inn-buildings. Going in there, a visitor could make a quick right turn into the Gigger, or, if he had a candle (for it grew dark immediately), he could risk a trip up or down a stairway into this or that ward, hold, or dungeon. It all depended on what sort of wretch he was coming to visit.

On Jack and Bob’s first visit they’d neglected to bring a light, or money with which to buy one, and had blundered down-stairs into a room with a stone floor that made crackling noises beneath their feet as they walked. It was impossible to breathe the air there, and so after a few moments of blind panic they had found their way out and fled back into Newgate Street. There, Jack had noticed that his
feet were bloody, and supposed that he must have stepped on broken glass. Bob had the same affliction. But Bob, unlike Jack, was wearing shoes, and so the blood could not have come from him. On careful inspection of the soles of those shoes, the mystery was solved: the blood was not smeared about, but spotted his soles, an array of little bursts. At the center of each burst was a small fleshy gray tube: the vacant corpse of an engorged louse that Bob had stepped on. This accounted for the mysterious crackling noise that they had heard while walking around in that room. As they soon learned, it was called the Stone Hold, and was accounted one of the lowest and worst wards of the prison, occupied only by common felons—such as the late John Cole—who had absolutely no money. Jack and Bob never returned to it.

Over the course of several later sallies into the prison they learned its several other rooms: the fascinating Jack Ketch his Kitchen; the so-called Buggering Hold (which they avoided); the Chapel (likewise); the Press-Yard, where the richest prisoners sat drinking port and claret with their periwigged visitors; and the Black Dogge Tavern, where the cellarmen—elite prisoners who did a brisk trade in candles and liquor—showed a kind of hospitality to any prisoners who had a few coins in their pockets. This looked like any other public house in England save that everyone in the place was wearing chains.

There were, in other words, plenty of lovely things to discover at the time and to reminisce about later. But they were not making these arduous trips from the Isle of Dogs to Newgate simply for purposes of sightseeing. It was a business proposition. They were looking for their market. And eventually, they found it. For in the castle proper, on the north side of the street, in the basement of the turret, was a spacious dungeon that was called the Condemned Hold.

Here, timing was everything. Hangings occurred only eight times a year. Prisoners were sentenced to hang a week or two in advance. And so most of the time there were no condemned people at all in the Condemned Hold. Rather, it was used as a temporary holding cell for new prisoners of all stripes who had been frog-marched to the Porter’s Lodge across the street and traded the temporary ropes that bound their arms behind their backs, for iron fetters that they would wear until they were released. After being ironed (as this procedure was called) with so much metal that they could not even walk, they would be dragged across the vault and thrown into the Condemned Hold to lie in the dark for a few days or weeks. The purpose of this was to find out how much money they really had. If they had money, they’d soon offer it to
the gaolers in exchange for lighter chains, or even a nice apartment in the Press-Yard. If they had none, they’d be taken to some place like the Stone Hold.

If one paid a visit to the Condemned Hold on a day chosen at random, it would likely be filled with heavily ironed newcomers. These were of no interest to Jack and Bob, at least not yet. Instead, the Shaftoe boys came to Newgate during the days immediately prior to Tyburn processions, when the Condemned Hold was full of men who actually had been condemned to hang. There they performed.

Around the time of their birth, the King had come back to England and allowed the theatres, which had been closed by Cromwell, to open again. The Shaftoe boys had been putting their climbing skills to good use sneaking into them, and had picked up an ear for the way actors talked, and an eye for the way they did things.

So their Newgate performances began with a little mum-show: Jack would try to pick Bob’s pocket. Bob would spin round and cuff him. Jack would stab him with a wooden poniard, and Bob would die. Then (Act II) Bob would jump up and ’morphosize into the Long Arm of the Law, put Jack in a hammerlock, (Act III) don a wig (which they had stolen, at appalling risk, from a side-table in a brothel near the Temple), and sentence him to hang. Then (Act IV) Bob would exchange the white wig for a black hood and throw a noose round Jack’s neck and stand behind him while Jack would motion for silence (for by this point all of the Condemned Hold would be in a state of near-riot) and clap his hands together like an Irish child going to First Communion, and (Act V) utter the following soliloquy:

John Ketch’s rope doth decorate my neck.

Bob steps forward and shoves Jack, then yanks the rope up above Jack’s head.

HAWKKH! God’s Wounds! The noose quite strangleth me!

Bob removes the noose from Jack’s neck.

But soft! The end approaches—

Earth fades—new worlds unfold before my eyes—

How now! What sort

Of angel doth sprout Horns upon his pate?

D
EVIL
:I am

J
ACK
: I thought that I had made my peace with God.

D
EVIL
: Hold still!

Devil shoves the point of his Spit up Jack’s arsehole.

J
ACK
: The pain! The pain, and yet,

Jack, by means of a conjuror’s trick, causes the point of the spit, smeared
with blood, to emerge from his mouth, and is led away by the Devil, to violent
applause and foot-stomping from the Crowd.

After the applause had died down, Jack, then, would circulate among the condemned to negotiate terms, and Bob, who was bigger, would watch his back, and mind the coin-purse.

The Continent

LATE SUMMER
1683

J
ACK HAD KEPT A SHREWD
eye on the weather all spring and summer. It had been perfect. He was living in unaccustomed comfort in Strasbourg. This was a city on the Rhine, formerly German and, as of quite recently, French. It lay just to the south of a country called the Palatinate, which, as far as Jack could make out, was a moth-eaten rag of land straddling the Rhine. King Looie’s soldiers would overrun the Palatinate from the West, or the Emperor’s armies would rape and pillage it from the East, whenever they couldn’t think of anything else to do. The person in charge of the Palatinate was called an Elector, which in this part of the world meant a very noble fellow, more than a Duke but less than a King. Until quite recently the Electors Palatinate had been of a very fine and noble family, consisting of too many siblings to keep track of, most quite magnificent; but since only one (the oldest) could be Elector, all of the rest of them had gone out of that country, and found better things to do, or gotten themselves killed in more or less fascinating ways. Eventually the Elector had died and turned matters over to
his son: an impotent madman named Charles, who liked to stage mock battles around an old Rhine-castle that wasn’t good for much else. The fighting was imaginary, but the trenches, siege-works, dysentery, and gangrene were real.

Now Jack had been making a sort of living, for several years, from being a fake soldier in France—a line of work that had been brought to ruin by many tiresome reforms that had recently been introduced to the French Army by one Martinet. When he’d heard about this crazy Elector he’d wasted no time in going to the Palatinate and finding gainful employment as a pretend musketeer.

Not long afterwards, King Louis XIV of France had attacked the nearby city of Strasbourg and made it his, and as frequently happened in sacked cities in those days, there had been a bit of the old Black Death. At the first appearance of buboes in the groins and armpits of the poor, the rich of Strasbourg had boarded up their houses and fled to the country. Many had simply climbed aboard boats and headed downstream on the Rhine, which had naturally taken them past that old wrack of a castle where Jack and others were playing at war for the amusement of the crazy Elector Palatine. One rich
Strasbourgeois,
there, had disembarked from his river-boat and struck up a conversation with none other than Jack Shaftoe. It was not customary for rich men to speak to the likes of Jack, and so the whole business seemed a mystery until Jack noticed that, no matter how he moved about, the rich man always found some pretext to stay well upwind of him.

This rich man had hired Jack and arranged for him to get something called a Plague Pass: a large document in that Gothickal German script with occasional excursions into something that looked like either Latin (when it was desirable to invoke the mercy and grace of God) or French (for sucking up to King Looie, only one rung below God at this point).
^*
By flourishing this at the right times, Jack was able to carry out his mission, which was to go into Strasbourg; proceed to the rich man’s dwelling; wash off the red chalk crosses that marked it as a plague-house; pry off the deals he’d nailed over the doors and windows; chase out any squatters; fend off any looters; and live in it for a while. If, after a few weeks, Jack hadn’t died of the plague, he was to send word to this rich man in the country that it was safe to move back in.

Jack had accomplished the first parts of this errand in about May, but by the beginning of June had somehow forgotten about
the last. In about mid-June, another Vagabond-looking fellow arrived. The rich man had hired him to go to the house and remove Jack’s body so that it wouldn’t draw vermin and then live in it for a while and, after a few weeks, if he hadn’t died of the plague, send word. Jack, who was occupying the master bedchamber, had accommodated this new fellow in one of the children’s rooms, showed him around the kitchen and wine-cellar, and invited him to make himself at home. Late in July, another Vagabond had showed up, and explained he’d been hired to cart away the bodies of the first two,
et cetera, et cetera.

All spring and summer, the weather was ideal: rain and sun in proportions suitable for the growing of grain. Vagabonds roamed freely in and out of Strasbourg, giving wide berths to those mounds of decomposing plague-victims. Jack sought out the ones who’d come from the east, treated them to the rich man’s brandy, conducted broken conversations with them in the zargon, and established two important facts: one, that the weather had been just as fine, if not finer, in Austria and Poland. Two, that Grand Vizier Khan Mustapha was still besieging the city of Vienna at the head of an army of two hundred thousand Turks.

Round September, he and his fellow-squatters found it necessary to depart from that fine house. It did not make him unhappy. Pretending to be dead was not a thing that came naturally to Vagabonds. The population of the house had swollen to a dozen and a half, most of them were tedious people, and the wine-cellar was nearly empty. One night Jack caused the window-shutters to be thrown open and the candles to be lit, and played host and lord over a grand squatters’ ball. Vagabond-musicians played raucous airs on shawms and pennywhistles, Vagabond-actors performed a comedy in zargon, stray dogs copulated in the family chapel, and Jack, presiding over all at the head of the table, dressed in the rich man’s satin, almost fell asleep. But even through the commotion of the ball, his ears detected the sound of hoofbeats approaching, swords being whisked from scabbards, firelocks being cocked. He was vanishing up the stairs even as the owner and his men were smashing down the door. Sliding down an escape-rope he’d long ago fixed to a balcony’s rail, he dropped neatly into the rich man’s saddle, still warm from thrashing the master’s chubby ass. He galloped to a potter’s field on the edge of town where he had stored some provisions against this very sort of event, and took to the road well supplied with salt-cod and biscuit. He rode southwards through the night until the horse was spent, then stripped off its fine saddle
and threw it into a ditch, and traded the horse itself to a delighted ferryman for passage east across the Rhine. Finding the Munich road, he struck out for the East.

The barley harvest was underway, and most of it was destined for the same place as Jack. He was able to ride along on barley-carts, and to talk his way across the Neckar and the Danube, by telling people he was off to join the legions of Christendom and beat back the Turkish menace.

This was not precisely a lie. Jack and brother Bob had come to the Netherlands more than once to soldier under John Churchill, who was in the household of the Duke of York. York spent a lot of time abroad because he was Catholic and most everyone in England hated him. But in time he had returned home anyway. John Churchill had gone with him and Bob, dutiful soldier that he was, had gone home with Churchill. Jack had stayed on the Continent, where there were more countries, more Kings, and more wars.

Great big dark mounds were visible off to his right, far away. After they continued to be there for several days in a row, he realized that they must be mountains. He’d heard of them. He had fallen in with a cart-train belonging to a barley-merchant of Augsburg, who was contemptuous of the low grain prices in Munich’s great market and had decided to take his goods closer to the place where they were needed. They rode for days through rolling green country, dotted with bent peasants bringing in the barley-harvest. The churches were all Papist, of course, and in these parts they had a queer look, with domes shaped like ripe onions perched atop slender shafts.

Over days those mountains rose up to meet them, and then they came to a river named Salz that pierced the mountain-wall. Churches and castles monitored the valley from stone cliffs. Endless wagon-trains of barley came together, and clashed and merged with the Legions of the Pope of Rome who were coming up from Italy, and Bavarians and Saxons, too: mile-long parades of gentleman volunteers, decorated like knights of old with the Crusaders’ red cross, bishops and archbishops with their jeweled shepherd’s-hooks, cavalry-regiments that beat the earth as if it were a hollow log—each horseman accompanied by his
cheval de bataille,
a fresh
cheval de marche
or two, a
cheval de poursuite
for hunting stags or Turks, and a
cheval de parade
for ceremonial occasions, and the grooms to care for them. There were armies of musketeers, and finally a vast foaming, surging rabble of barefoot pikemen, marching
with their twenty-foot-long weapons angled back over their shoulders, giving those formations the look of porcupines when they are in a mellow and complacent mood and have flattened their quills.

Here the barley-merchant of Augsburg had at last found a market, and might have sold his goods at a handsome profit. But the sight of Christendom at war had inflamed both his avarice and his piety, and he was seized with a passion to ride farther and see what more wonders lay to the east. Likewise Jack, sizing up those pike-men, and comparing their rags and bare feet to his stolen traveling-togs and excellent leather boots, suspected he could strike a better deal closer to Vienna. So they joined together with the general flood and proceeded, in short confused marches, to the city of Linz, where (according to the merchant) there was a very great
Messe.
Jack knew that
Messe
was the German word for a Mass, and reckoned that Herr Augsburg meant to attend church in some great cathedral there.

At Linz they grazed the south bank of the River Danube. In the plain along the river was a fine market that had been swallowed and nearly digested by a vast military camp—but no cathedral.
“Die Messe!”
Herr Augsburg exclaimed, and this was when Jack understood something about the German language: having a rather small number of words, they frequently used one word to mean several different things.
Messe
meant not only a Mass but a trade-fair.

Another army had marched down from the north and was laboriously crossing the Danube here, trickling across Linz’s bridges and keeping Linz’s watermen busy all day and all night, poling their floats across the stream laden with artillery-pieces, powder-kegs, fodder, rations, luggage, horses, and men. Jack Shaftoe spoke a few words of German. He had picked up quite a bit of French, and of course he knew English and the zargon. These men who had ridden down out of the north did not speak any of those tongues, and he could not guess whether they might be Swedes or Russians or of some other nation. But one day cheering came up from the bridges and the ferries, mingled with the thunder of thousands of war-horses, and from the woods on the north bank emerged the mightiest cavalry that Jack, in all his travels in England, Holland, and France, had ever seen. At its head rode a man who could only be a King. Now this wasn’t Jack’s first King, as he’d seen King Looie more than once during French military parades. But King Looie was only play-acting, he was like a whoreson actor in a Southwark theatre, got up in a gaudy costume, acting the way
he imagined that a warrior King might act. This fellow from the north was no play-actor, and he rode across the bridge with a solemn look on his face that spoke of bitter days ahead for Grand Vizier Khan Mustapha. Jack wanted to know who it was, and finally locating someone who spoke a bit of French he learned that what he was looking at, here, was the army of Poland-Lithuania, and their terrible King was John Sobieski, who had made an alliance with the Holy Roman Emperor to drive the Turks all the way back to Asia, and his mighty, gleaming cavalry were called the Winged Hussars.

Once King John Sobieski and the Winged Hussars had crossed the Danube and made camp, and a
Messe
in the religious sense had been said, and the thrill had died down a little, both Herr Augsburg the barley-merchant and Jack Shaftoe the vagabond-soldier made their own private calculations as to what it all meant for them. Two or (according to rumor) three great cavalry forces were now encamped around Linz. They were the spearheads of much larger formations of musketeers and pikemen, all of whom had to eat. Their rations were carried on wagons and the wagons were drawn by teams of horses. All of it was useless without the artillery, which was, as well, drawn by teams of horses. What it all amounted to, therefore, was the world’s richest and most competitive
Messe
for barley. Prices were thrice what they’d been at the crossing of the Salz and ten times what they’d been in Munich. Herr Augsburg, having chosen the moment carefully, now struck, playing John Sobieski’s barley-buyers off against those of the Bavarian, Saxon, and Austrian lords.

For his part, Jack understood that no force of cavalry as lordly, as magnificent, as the Winged Hussars could possibly exist, even for a single day, without a vast multitude of especially miserable peasants to make it all possible, and that peasants in such large numbers could never be kept so miserable for so long unless the lords of Poland-Lithuania were unusually cruel men. Indeed, after John Sobieski’s vivid crossing of the Danube a gray fog of wretches filtered out of the woods and congealed on the river’s northern bank. Jack didn’t want to be one of ’em. So he went and found Herr Augsburg, sitting on an empty barley-cart surrounded by his profits: bills of exchange drawn on trading-houses in Genoa, Venice, Lyons, Amsterdam, Seville, London, piled up high on the cart’s plankage and weighed down with stones. Mounting up onto the wagon, Jack the Soldier became, for a quarter of an hour, Jack the Actor. In the bad French that Herr Augsburg more or less understood, he spoke of the impending Apocalypse before the
gates of Vienna, and of his willingness, nay, eagerness, to die in the midst of same, and his prayerful hope that he might at least take a single Turk down with him, or barring that, perhaps inflict some kind of small wound on a Turk, viz. by jabbing at him with a pointed stick or whatever he might have handy, so that said Turk might be distracted or slowed down long enough for some other soldier of Christendom, armed with a real weapon, such as a musket, to actually take aim at, and slay, that selfsame Turk. This was commingled with a great deal of generally Popish-sounding God-talk and Biblical-sounding quotations that Jack claimed he’d memorized from the Book of Revelation.