The System of the World (108 page)

“Actually, those are the bells of Westminster Abbey, carrying down the river on the morning breeze.”

“Why? Someone died?”

“No, it is the tradition to toll the great Bell of the Abbey as the carriage of the new Sovereign draws up before the west door. That Bell is calling all England to the Church, Jack, to celebrate the Coronation of George.”

“Did they reserve a seat for me?”

“Try and concentrate, Jack, or the ringing of that bell will be the last thing you ever hear.”

“I would like to remind you that the
alternative
is for me to plead. No matter how I plead, I’m bound for Tyburn, where I’ll die a much worse death than
this
. Hell, this is practically painless!”

“Are you not forgetting an important part of the plan?”

“What? The plan of Daniel Waterhouse?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, no. I know where you are leading me now, Father Ed, and it’s not a place to which I will be led. You did this once before: forged a letter from
her,
to draw me in to a snare!”

“You are spread-eagled to the floor of Newgate Prison with three hundred pounds of weight on your chest and you have sixty seconds to live. It strikes me as
funny
that you are so wary, at such a moment, of being drawn in to a
trap
!”

“I just don’t wish to be made a fool of again, is all. That’s all I ask for, is a bit of pride.”

“
Pride
is not what you are wanting. You’ve plenty. Has it got you what you desired? No. You don’t want
pride
. You want
Faith.
”

“Oh, Jesus Friggin’ Christ!”

“All right. Barring that, wouldn’t you like to stay on another nine days, just to see how it all comes out in the end?”

“If dying means that I end up on the same plane of existence with you, and must suffer more of your prating, then nine days here begins to sound pretty good.”

“So—?”

“Oh, all right. What the hell. I’ll plead.”

“Say it louder!” de Gex implored him. “They can’t hear you! They are hearkening to the fanfare of distant trumpets!”

“Funny, so am I—I phant’sied I’d died, and that was angels blowing golden horns for me!”

“It is the trumpeter of the Household Royal announcing the entry of George Louis to Westminster Abbey. And those are the drums of his solemn procession!”

“I’ll friggin’ plead!” Jack shouted, “now take this shit off of me, already, and eject yonder Ghost.”

20
OCTOBER
1714

L
ATER, THE
Q
UALITY
who had witnessed it (as well as many who only wanted people to
think
they had) would swear that the villain’s lips had parted, baring his teeth, and that a hungry and feral look had come over his face. For Charles White had been a great man in the land, and it was no small matter to bring him down. He had to be made over, first, in people’s minds, into a kind of beast.

It happened before the west front of Westminster Abbey. All of the great persons of Britain, as well as Ambassadors and other guests from other realms, were standing about, a little bit dumbfounded from several hours of Church. For the Coronation of George was nothing more or less than an uncommonly tedious church-service, spiced up, here and there, with trotting-out of the gaudiest Regalia this side of Shahjahanabad. Through diverse Processionals and Recessionals they had sat, or stood, and every time the King had shooed away a fly it had been answered by a fifteen-minute Fanfare and a solemn Incantation. The Archbishop, the Lord Chancellor, the Chamberlain, and everyone on down to the Bluemantle Pursuivant had all checked in with one another to verify that George Louis of Hanover was the correct chap, and then they had double- and triple-checked, and run it by various phalanxes and bleacher-loads of Bishops, Peers, Nobles,
et cetera,
who could never affirm anything with a
quick nod or thumbs-up but must bellow out pompous circumlocutions in triplicate, bating whenever the trumpet-section, organist, or choir got a whim to break out in half an hour of joyful polyphony. A busy traffic in Bibles, Faldstools, Chalices, Patens, Ampoules, Spoons, Copes, Spurs, Swords, Robes, Orbs, Sceptres, Rings, Coronets, Medals, Crowns, and Rods had cluttered the aisle, as if the world’s poshest pawn-shop were being sacked by a Mobb of under-employed Clerics and Peers, and not a jot or tittle of this swag could ever be moved from Point A to Point B without several prayers and hymns pointing out what a splendid and yet frightfully solemn event it was. Paeans flew thick and fast. Prayers were a penny a pound. The name of Our Lord was just about worn through. Christ’s ears burned. Everything was pretty resounding. Spit-slicks sprawled between trumpeters’ feet. Bellows-pumpers were sent down with busted guts. The boys’ choir grew beards.

When finally the new King had lumbered down the aisle in his purple robe and left the building, the congregants had scarce believed their eyes—as when the world’s most tedious and tenacious dinner-guest finally exits at four in the morning. There had followed a supplemental half-hour of programmed recessionals as the various guests had retreated, and gone outside to stand, blink, mingle, and chat. All the church-bells in London were pealing. The King, and the Prince and Princess of Wales, had long since gone their separate ways.

It was then that the person of Mr. Charles White had been violated by a hand that had clapped him on the shoulder. As Captain of the King’s Messengers, he was dressed for the occasion in a glorious and out-moded get-up. But even through his tasseled epaulet, he felt the hand on his shoulder, and knew its meaning. It was then—some said—that the hungry look came over him, and his lips parted.

He rounded on the fellow who had dared touch him. But then he was dismayed, and stopped. He had been looking for an ear to bite. But the man who stood before him—middle-aged, solid, well-dressed, in a yellow wig—did not have an ear on the right side of his head, just a lumpy orifice. And this so flummoxed Charles White that he quite lost the moment. He looked around to notice that he had been discreetly surrounded by several gentles and nobles, notorious Whigs all, and that they were ready to draw their swords.

“Charles White, I arrest you in the name of the King,” said the man in the yellow wig. And it was then that White knew him: this was Andrew Ellis. White had bitten his ear off twenty years ago, in a coffee-house, as Roger Comstock, Daniel Waterhouse, and a roomful of Whigs had looked on. Ellis was a Viscount or something now, and in and out of Parliament.

“I do not recognize the usurper King,” White announced—a rather impolite thing to say, under the circumstances—“but I
do
recognize the threat of those weapons you are so eager to draw, and so I shall go, under duress, as a man being kidnapped by Black-guards.”

“You may name it kidnapping or any thing else,” said Ellis, “but make no mistake, it is an arrest, upon the authority of the Lord Chancellor.”

“And am I allowed to know the charge?”

“That at the behest of the King of France, you did conspire with one Jack Shaftoe and Édouard de Gex to trespass upon the Liberty of the Tower and adulterate the Pyx.”

“So Jack Shaftoe has broken,” White muttered, as he was being walked, in the midst of this knot of armed Whigs, across the Old Palace Yard, toward the Stairs where a boat waited to take him down to the Tower.

“He has
denounced you,
” Ellis returned. “No one knows whether he is
broken,
or pursuing his own ends.”

“His own,” said White, “or someone else’s.”

But the men who were arresting or abducting him were merely amused by that, and so to any passer-by who had stood on the bank of the Thames to watch them bundling their catch into a waiting river-barge, they’d have seemed a merry band of Englishmen, pleased to have a new King and to have survived his Coronation.

20
OCTOBER
1714

“G
UILTY!” SAID THE MAGISTRATE.

“That’s what I said,” said Jack Shaftoe. He worried that the magistrate had not heard his plea. His voice was enfeebled, as his breathing-musculature was fashed from having worked against three hundred pounds of resistance for days. And the other people sharing this patch of dirt with him were making a lot more noise than he was capable of.

“This court finds you, Jack Shaftoe, Guilty of High Treason!” the magistrate said, in case it had been missed in the uproar.

“This court doesn’t
have
to find me Guilty, as that is how I pleaded!” Jack protested, but it was useless.

He was a bit giddy from the removal of the weights, and from the light and food and water that had been lavished upon him when he had cried uncle, and owned up to invading the Tower of London, and blamed the whole thing on Charles White, and agreed to come down here and plead. So he saw things in an odd way, like a traveler from China to whom everything is impossibly strange. Some sort of judicial proceeding had been underway here, involving him. But he had paid no attention to it at all. He just could not bring himself to attend to the wigged chap up on the balcony. Of much more interest was the scene down here.

Court
was a good English word meaning a yard. A slab of earth. A patch of dirt. Some courts, such as those on the Isle of Dogs when Jack had been a boy, were surrounded by scraps of wood, and full of pigs and of pig-shit. Other courts were surrounded by stone walls with arrow-slits in the top; people on the insides of such courts tended to have a better time of it than those who shared their courts with swine. The Queen had a court. No, scratch that, the Queen was dead. Long live the King! The King had a court. It was infested with courtiers. The theatres of Southwark were a particular type of court. There were countless other specialized types, e.g., tennis courts, forecourts, and the Court of Directors of the East India Company. One entire category of Courts was devoted to inflicting punishment on bad men. This, the Old Bailey, was one such.

Jack had familial ties to the Irish nation and knew that
Baile Atha Cliath
was their name for the city of Dublin. Bailey, it seemed, was just another word for Court. The bailiff brought you to the bailey and put you in the bail-dock, and you dasn’t stray from his bailiwick until you posted bail.

During this mental divagation of Jack’s, on the subject of Courts and Baileys, the magistrate up on the balcony had been washing the place down with a spate of legal mumbo-jumbo, as well as a homily about the error of Jack’s ways, and the error of his mother’s ways, and his father’s, and their mothers’ and fathers’, all the way back to the progenitor of their race, presumed to be one Cain. Little of this reached Jack’s ears, because of the uproar, and none of it penetrated his head, because he was not paying attention. He knew what the magistrate was saying: that Jack was a bad man—beyond bad, if truth be told—so surpassingly and transcendently bad that it was necessary for him to be put to death by the most gruesome and, hence, entertaining means that the English mind could conceive of.

The Old Bailey employed a man called a crier, whose chief qualification
was that he could engrave his own words on a pane of glass, simply by shouting at it. He was deployed, from time to time, to quell the uproar. For the groundlings in this court cared naught for the words of the Justices. But the crier they respected for his loudness. He put it to work now: “Oyez! Oyez! Oyez! My Lords, the King’s Justices, strictly charge and command
all manner
of persons to keep silence while Sentence of Death is passing on the prisoner at the bar, on pain of imprisonment.” By the time he was finished, the crowd had actually heeded his words. No one was talking except for a few daft and/or deaf stragglers tucked away in the corners, who were quickly shushed by the others. Silence was a rare thing around Newgate, and fragile; but this was a different kind of silence altogether, it was contagious as smallpox.

The magistrate was on his feet, treading heavily up to the railing of his balcony. Clearly he was in a foul temper. He’d rather be at the Coronation festivities, drinking the health of the fresh-minted King. Really, the whole country ought to count this a holiday. It was extraordinary that a Judicial Proceeding was underway here on such a day! What could account for it? Certain Powers must have reached into a courtly revel with a long shepherd’s crook and fetched this magistrate out by the neck.

“The law is,” he bellowed, “that thou shalt return from hence, to the Place whence thou camest, and from thence to Tyburn Cross, where thou shalt hang by the neck, but not unto Death; that thou shalt thereafter be drawn and quartered, till the body be Dead! Dead! Dead! And the Lord have Mercy upon thy Soul.”

Those milling shades in the dimness behind the magistrate’s belcony must be those selfsame Powers, practically hopping from foot to foot in their eagerness to run back to Westminster and proclaim the news: Jack Shaftoe was broken by the
peine forte et dure,
he came to the court, he pleaded, and even now lies in chains in the Condemned Hold! That was the preordained Moral of the Morality Play being enacted in this place, which looked more like a theatre the longer Jack stood here. There were even extras, or, in Theatrical cant, spear-carriers. For the Justice’s kind final words,
and the Lord have Mercy upon thy Soul,
were nearly drowned out by the humble-bumble of many boots on the stairs within the building, and before the audience could even consider launching a riot, they found themselves surrounded by a company of Guards brandishing half-pikes.

Some might welcome the new King with toasts, medals, statues, or concubines. But there were men in London who could not think of any better party favor to present to their new Sovereign than Jack Shaftoe’s head on a platter. At an earlier stage of his life he’d have
strained his eyes to resolve the faces lurking back there in the shadows behind the balcony, perhaps shouted something of a defiant nature. But he really could not care less about them now. Truth be told, he hadn’t heard a word the magistrate had uttered (aside, that is, from the terrible Sentence) in the last quarter of an hour. It was all because of the noise of the people who were down here in the dirt—the Court—the Old Bailey—with him. His people.

Something got crushed down atop his head. His knees buckled in alarm for a moment. But he was not being assaulted from behind. Someone had bestowed a hat on him. By the time he turned round, that someone had been chased back into the chanting rabble by a furious corporal of the Guard. But the rabble were very pleased by what they saw. A chant formed of the roar: “God save the King! God save the King! God save the King!”

The magistrate had stood up to make himself heard, his face was red, he was bellowing with such force that his wig was shuddering, but nothing reached the court. A bailiff snatched the thing from Jack’s head and flung it down. Before his boots crushed and treaded it down into the mud of the Bailey, Jack saw what it was: a makeshift crown, sporting a letter V in the middle. Not that Jack knew much about letters; but he recognized that one, because the same symbol was burnt into the brawn of his right thumb, and had been there for most of his life. For Jack had first been branded Vagabond when he’d been a young man.

It was a common designation. King of the Vagabonds, however, was a high title indeed, and one that had not been attached to his name until he had, through inconceivable exertions, earned it.