THE System OF THE WORLD Read online

  The shit that he took off Atalanta’s head was a masterpiece, exactly two well-formed packages plunging into the river like sounding-leads, and vanishing without a splash-evidence that his gut would keep functioning well after other parts of him had given way to age. He was inclined to sit there for a few minutes with his buttocks cupped in the luxuriously polished wooden annulus of the shite-hole, and to savor this triumph, just as the late Samuel Pepys had taught him to do in the case of urination. But the noises coming from belowdecks told him that he had responsibilities down there, not only to his Queen, but to Mr. Baynes.

  For his fears concerning the latter had been realized. The Queen’s Messengers might be very skilled at hounding traitors, but as a theatrical troupe they were rank amateurs, utterly lacking in the all-important Sense of Audience. They had let the show go on too long, and reduced Mr. Baynes to a blubbering imbecile.

  Daniel pulled his breeches back on, went aft, and, at the top of the narrow staircase that led belowdecks, nearly collided with a man coming up for some fresh air. The only thing that prevented it was the other chap’s white hair, which shone in the light of the half-moon, and gave Daniel a moment’s warning.

  He backed up and allowed Isaac to join him on deck.

  “Mr. Hoxton has shown his colours, I should say,” Isaac remarked.

  “What-by running off?”

  “Indeed.”

  “If he had stayed to be keel-hauled, thumbscrewed, drawn, and quartered, we’d know him to be a trustworthy chap, is that it?”

  Isaac was mildly affronted. “No such fate would have befallen him, had he shown a willingness to serve the Queen.”

  “The only way in which Peter Hoxton can be of service to the Queen-or to you-is to bring me intelligence from the flash world. If he had not run away, he would have thereby declared himself an enemy of all things flash, and become perfectly useless. By escaping, along with Angus, he has enhanced his reputation beyond measure!”

  “It is of no account. Your role is now played out. And well played. I thank you.”

  “Why did you send the smoke-signal? Why not wait to see what else Baynes would divulge?”

  “He had already over-stepped, and divulged too much,” Isaac retorted, “and he knew it. He grew reticent, and, to try you, asked you for your story. I knew you had none, or at least, none fit to withstand the scrutiny of this one-armed foreigner, or even of Mr. Baynes. My decision was: Let us advance!”

  “What is it you need from Mr. Baynes now, in order to advance?”

  AT DANIEL’S INSISTENCE, Charles White and his merry men left Mr. Baynes alone for a few minutes in a cabin, though they made sure to put him in irons first, so that he’d not devise some way to evade justice by committing suicide.

  Daniel lurked outside the cabin door until Mr. Baynes stopped sobbing and whimpering, then counted slowly to a hundred (for he himself needed to calm down a bit), then opened the hatch and went through, carrying a lit candle.

  Mr. Baynes was on a bench with his hands fettered behind his back. Before him was a plank table. He had slumped forward so his head lay on it. Daniel was certain he had expired from a stroke, until he perceived the prisoner’s pinioned arms slowly rising and falling, as his lungs filled and emptied like the bellows of an Irish bagpipe.

  Daniel wished he could fall asleep, too. For a few minutes he sat there nodding drowsily in the light of the candle-flame. But he could hear booted and spurred feet pacing round the deck overhead, and he knew perfectly well that he was not anchored in some placid cove, but only a few yards off Black Friars, London.

  “Wake up.”

  “Eh-?” Baynes pulled against his irons, then regretted it and sat up, his spine creaking and popping like an old mast taking a gust. His mouth was a dry hole, pushed in like a wound. He refused to meet Daniel’s eye.

  “Will you talk to me?” Daniel asked.

  Mr. Baynes considered it, but said nothing. Daniel rose to his feet. Mr. Baynes watched him sidelong. Daniel reached into his pocket. Baynes tensed, getting ready to suffer. Daniel drew his fist out, flipped it over, and opened it to display, on the palm of his hand, Mr. Baynes’s set of false teeth.

  Baynes’s eyes got wide and he lunged like a cobra, yawning. Daniel fed the teeth to him and he sucked and gummed them in. Daniel stepped back, wiping his hand on his breeches, and Mr. Baynes sat up straight, having seemingly swapped a new and better skull for the faulty one he’d woken up with.

  “You are a gentleman, sir, a gentleman. I marked you as such the moment I saw you-”

  “In truth I am no gentleman, though I can be a gentle man. Mr. Charles White is a gentleman. He has already explained what he means to do to you. He means what he says; why, I’m surprised you still have both of your ears. Save thine ears, and the rest of thyself, by telling me where and when you are supposed to meet the one-armed foreigner.”

  “You know that I shall be killed, of course.”

  “Not if you serve your Queen as you ought.”

  “Oh, but then I shall be killed by Jack the Coiner.”

  “And if not by Jack, then by old age,” Daniel returned, “unless apoplexy or typhus take you first. If I knew of a way to avoid dying, I’d share it with you, and the whole world.”

  “Sir Isaac knows of a way, or so ’tis rumored.”

  “Spouting Alchemical rubbish is not a way to get in my good graces. Telling me the whereabouts of the one-armed foreigner is.”

  “Your point is well taken, concerning mortality. In truth, ’tis not fear of mine own fate that stopped my tongue.”

  “Whose then?”

  “My daughter’s.”

  “And where is your daughter?”

  “Bridewell.”

  “You fear that some revenge will be taken on her if you assist the Queen’s Messengers?”

  “I do. For she is known to the Black-guard.”

  “Surely Charles White has the power to get one girl sprung from Old Nass,” Daniel reflected. Then he stopped short, astounded to hear himself speaking like a criminal.

  “Aye. Straight from there, to his bedchamber, to be his whore until he has worn her out, at which point he’ll no doubt give her a decent interment in Fleet Ditch!” Mr. Baynes was as upset to imagine this horror, as he would have been to witness it, and had gone all twitchy now; his wooden teeth were chattering together, and clear snot was streaming out of one nostril.

  “And you phant’sy I am a decent sort?”

  “I said it before, sir, you are a gentle man.”

  “If I give you my word that I’ll go to the Spinning-Ken and look after your daughter-”

  “Not so loud, I pray you! For I do not want Mr. White to so much as know that she exists!”

  “I am no less wary of him than are you, Mr. Baynes.”

  “Then-you give your word, Dr. Gatemouth?”

  “I do.”

  “Her name is Hannah Spates, and she pounds hemp in Mr. Wilson’s shop, for she’s a strong girl.”

  “Done.”

  “Prithee, send in the Queen’s Messengers.”

  DANIEL’S REWARD FOR THIS makeshift act of grace was a free moon-light river-cruise to the Tower of London. This was strangely idyllic. The best part of it was that Charles White and his platoon of feral gentlemen were not present; for after a short conversation with Mr. Baynes, they had flocked on the deck like a murder of crows, clambered back into the row-boats, and set off for Black Friars Stairs.

  Even the passage of London Bridge, which, on a smaller boat, was always a Near Death Experience-the sort of event gentlemen would go home and write down, in the expectation that people would want to read about it-was uneventful. They fired a swivel-gun to wake up the drawbridge-keeper in Nonsuch House, and raised a silver-greyhound banner. He stopped traffic on London Bridge, and raised the span for them, and the sloop’s master suffered the current to flush them through into the Pool.

  Half an hour later they clambered by torch-light into the dank kerf of a Tower Wharf sta
ircase. As Daniel ascended the stair, and his head rose through the plane of the Wharf, the whole Tower complex unfolded before and above him like a vast black book, writ on pages of jet in fire and smoke.

  Almost directly ahead on the wharf stood a jumble of small buildings fenced about with a palisade. The wicket had been opened by one of the Wharf Guard standing the night watch. Daniel moved through it in a crowd, and entered one of the small buildings, troubled by the sense that he was invading someone’s dwelling. Indeed he was, as this Wharf-apartment seemed to be home for (at least) a porter, a sutler, a tavern-keeper, and diverse members of their families. But a few steps on, he felt timbers under his feet and sensed that they’d passed through into a different space: they were outdoors again, crossing over a wooden causeway that spanned a straight lead of quiet water. It must be the Tower moat, and this must be a drawbridge.

  The planking led to a small opening in the sheer face of the Tower’s outer wall. On the right hand, a wedge-shaped bastion was thrust out from the same wall, but it offered no doorways: only embrasures and murder-holes from which defenders could shower fatal attentions upon people trying to get across this bridge. But tonight the drawbridge was down, the portcullis was up, no projectiles were spitting out of the orifices of the Tower. The group slowed down to file through a sort of postern gate into the base of Byward Tower.

  To their left was a larger gate leading to the causeway that served as the Tower’s main land entrance, but it had been closed and locked for the night. And indeed, as soon as the last of their group had made it across the drawbridge, the postern gate was closed behind them, and locked by a middle-aged bloke in a night-cap and slippers. Daniel had enough Tower lore stored up in his brain to suspect that this would be the Gentleman Porter, and that he must live in one of the flats that abounded in this corner of the complex. So they were locked in for the night.

  With the gates closed, the ground floor of Byward Tower was a tomb. Isaac and Daniel instinctively moved out from under it and into the open cross where Mint Street came together with Water Lane. There they tarried for a minute to watch Mr. Baynes being frog-marched off to a dungeon somewhere.

  Anyone who entered the Tower of London as they just had, expecting to pass through a portal and find himself in an open bailey, would be disappointed. Byward Tower, through which they’d just passed, was the corner-stone of the outer defenses. All it afforded was entry to a narrow belt of land surrounding the inner defenses, which were much higher and more ancient.

  But even an expert on medieval fortifications would be perplexed by what Daniel and Isaac could see from here, which in no way resembled a defensive system. They appeared, rather, to be standing in the intersection of two crowded streets in pre-Fire London. Somewhere behind the half-timbered fronts of the houses and taverns that lined those streets lay defensive works of stone and mortar that would make the Inner Ward impregnable to a pre-gunpowder army. But in order to see those medieval bastions, embrasures, et cetera, one would have to raze and scrape off everything that had been built atop and in front of them, a project akin to sacking a small English town.

  Byward Tower was a Gordian knot in and of itself, in that it connected the complex’s two most important gates to its most congested corner. But that was only its ground floor. The building consisted of two circular towers bridged together, and was a favorite place to keep important prisoners. It now stood to one side of Daniel and Isaac. To their other side was the enormous, out-thrust bulk of Bell Tower, the southwestern bastion of the inner wall. But Daniel only knew this because he was a scholar who’d looked at old pictures of the place. Much more obvious were the ground-level structures built facing the street: a couple of taverns right at the base of Bell Tower, more sutlers’ shacks, and small houses and apartments heaped and jumbled against and on top of every ledge of stone that afforded purchase.

  Anyone coming into such a crowded place would instinctively scan for a way out. The first one that met the eye, as one came in through Byward Gate, was Water Lane-the strip of pavement between inner and outer defenses, along the river side. This view was half-blocked by Bell Tower and its latter-day excrescences, but none the less seemed like the obvious path to choose, for Water Lane was broad. And because it was open to the public during the daytime, it was generally free of clutter.

  The other choice was to make a hard left, turning one’s back on the river, and wander off into what looked like a medieval slum, thrown up against the exterior of a Crusader castle by a lot of bustling rabble who were not allowed to come in and mingle with the knights and squires. The spine of it was a single narrow lane. On the left side of that lane ran a series of old casemates, which in soldier-parlance meant fortified galleries, specifically meant to be overrun by invaders, so that defenders, purposely stranded inside of them, could shoot through the windows into the attackers’ backs and turn the ditch into a killing-ground. In new forts, the casemates were burrowed into the ramparts, and protected by earth. In obsolete ones like this, they were built against the inner faces of curtain-walls. The ones on the left side of Mint Street were of that sort. They rose nearly to the height of the outer wall, obscuring it, and making it easy to forget that all of this was built intra muros. Gunpowder had long since made them militarily useless, and they had been remodeled into workshops and barracks for the Mint.

  On the right side, packed in tight as they could be, but never rising above a certain level-like mussels along the tide-line-another line of buildings clung to the higher walls of the inner defenses.

  From the corner there at Byward, it all looked like the wreckage of a burnt city that had been raked into a stone sluice where it wanted a good rainstorm to quench the flames, beat down the smoke, and wash it away. The rhythmic crashing noises echoing down the length of this dung-choked ghetto provided the only clue that something of an organized nature was going on in there; but this hardly made Mint Street seem more inviting, even when one knew (as Daniel did) that the incessant bashing was the sound of coins being minted by trip-hammers.

  In a funny way, he thought, this burning gutter was a sort of counterpart to Fleet Ditch.

  Since the Fleet was full of earth and water, and Mint Street full of fire and air, this was not an insight that ever would have come to Daniel’s mind, if not for the fact that, just a few scant minutes before, he had been staring up the one, and now here he was, staring up the other.

  On further reflection, he decided that the two had nothing in common, save that both ran in the same direction to the Thames, and both were cluttered and stagnant and had a lot of shit in them.

  He had known Isaac for fifty years, and so he knew, with perfect certainty, that Isaac would turn away from the clear, cool, pleasant prospect of Water Lane, and march into the metallic seething of Mint Street. This he now did, and Daniel was content to follow in his wake. He’d never penetrated more than a few yards into the Mint; the farthest he’d ever gotten was the office that was just inside the entrance, on the left side of the Lane, and up some stairs. Of course Isaac swept past it and kept on going.

  The Tower of London was essentially square, though, to be pedantic, an elbow in its northern side made it into a pentagon. The strip between inner and outer walls ran the full circuit. The southern side, along the river, was accounted for by Water Lane; but everything else was Mint Street, which was to say that the Mint embraced the Tower of London on three sides (technically four, taking the northern elbow into account).

  Strange as it might seem, in a town with but a single street, it was easy to get lost. The view down the street was obstructed by ten different bastions thrust out from the inner wall, and so one could never see very far. Daniel was of course aware that he was in a horseshoe-shaped continuum, but once he lost count of the towers, this did him little practical good. By walking faithfully in one direction or the other, he would eventually come to an extremity of the horseshoe, and exit onto one end or the other of Water Lane. But the length of the Mint was a quarter of a mile, which
for a Londoner might as well have been the distance between Oslo and Rome. Such an interval sufficed to distinguish between the Fleet Ditch and the Royal Society, or the Houses of Parliament at Westminster and the knackers’ yards of Southwark. So by the time he’d followed Isaac past a couple of those bastions, and gone round a turn or two, Daniel felt as if he’d ventured deep into a city as outlandish as Algiers or Nagasaki.

  Two hundred feet in, the way was bottlenecked by the handsome semicircular curve of Beauchamp Tower. Directly across from it, crammed against the outer wall, were the long casemates where silver and gold were melted down in great furnaces. Continuing north, they immediately passed more casemates containing the coin-bashers. Then they rounded their first corner, another bottleneck between the bastion of Devereux Tower and a low bulky fort in the vertex of the outer wall, called Legge’s Mount. Both were made very strong, and both were still manned by the Black Torrent Guard, to withstand bombardment from that ?ternal Menace, London, which pressed in close on the Tower here.

  Isaac slowed, and looked at Daniel as if he wanted to say something.

  Daniel glanced curiously down the segment of Mint Street that had just come into view. He was strangely let down to see that it was quiet and almost peaceful. He’d been hoping that the Mint would only become more Hellish the deeper he went into it, like the Inferno according to Dante, and that in its deepest penetralia would be a forge of surpassing hotness where Isaac turned lead into gold. But from this corner ’twas plain that the climax had come already-that all the big, hot, and loud bits were close to the entrance (which made sense logistically, he had to admit) and that this northern limb was what passed for a sedate residential neighborhood. It was about as hellish as Bloomsbury Square. Which only went to show that Englishmen could live anywhere. Condemn an Englishman to hell, and he’d plant a bed of petunias and roll out a nice bowling-green on the brimstone.

  Isaac now said something the precise wording of which scarcely mattered. The import was that Daniel was an impediment to his arcane nocturnal researches, and would he please go away. Daniel answered with some pleasantry and Isaac hurried away, leaving Daniel alone to rove up and down a quarter-mile of Mint.