The Baroque Cycle - The System Of The World Part 18

"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 own fate that stopped my tongue." 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 a.s.sist 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 Na.s.s," Daniel reflected. Then he stopped short, astounded to hear himself speaking like a criminal.

"Aye. Straight from there, to his bedchamber, to be his wh.o.r.e 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 imagine this horror, as he would have been to this horror, as he would have been to witness witness it, and had gone all twitchy now; his wooden teeth were chattering together, and clear snot was streaming out of one nostril. 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. 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 pa.s.sage 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 staircase. 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 pa.s.sed through into a different s.p.a.ce: 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 pa.s.s through a portal and find himself in an open bailey, would be disappointed. Byward Tower, through which they'd just pa.s.sed, was the corner-stone of the outer outer defenses. All it afforded was entry to a narrow belt of land surrounding the defenses. All it afforded was entry to a narrow belt of land surrounding the inner inner defenses, which were much higher and more ancient. 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, et cetera, one would have to raze and sc.r.a.pe off everything that had been built atop and in front of them, a project akin to sacking a small English town. one would have to raze and sc.r.a.pe 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 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 s.h.i.t 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 pa.s.sed 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 aeternal 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 h.e.l.lish the deeper he went into it, like the Inferno according to Dante, and that in its deepest penetralia would be a forge of surpa.s.sing 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 pa.s.sed for a sedate residential neighborhood. It was about as h.e.l.lish as Bloomsbury Square. Which only went to show that Englishmen could live anywhere. Condemn an Englishman to h.e.l.l, 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.

He gave it a once-over, just to stop feeling lost. The northern limb sported a couple of houses at first, obviously for high Mint officials. Then it was workmen's barracks on the left side, and, on the right, milling machines of some sort, perhaps the ones that stamped inscriptions on the edges of coins to foil clippers.

As he approached the northern elbow he found himself among soldiers, and thought he'd somehow wandered astray; but after getting round the turn he began to see, again, Mint dwellings on the left and milling shops on the right. So 'twould seem the conversion of military casemates to monetary workhouses was a work still in progress.

There was another sharp right turn, pinched between the bastion where they kept the Crown Jewels and another defensive mount, like Legge's, in the outer wall. This brought him round to the eastern limb of the Mint, which ran straight south to Water Lane. A few strangely pleasant houses with gardens soon gave way to more of a smoky, glowing, banging character: probably the Irish Mint, which appeared to run all the way to the end.

By all rights he ought to've been tired. But the noise and vigor of the Mint infected his blood, and he ended up walking the entire length of it several times before he began to feel the effects of his long day.

The chapel bell tolled midnight from the Inner Ward as Daniel was rounding the northwest corner, near Legge's Mount, for the third time. Daniel took it as a signal to duck into a little court along the outer wall, a gap between casemates, which had been beckoning to him. It appeared to belong to one of the Mint officials, who kept a wee casemate-house just next to it, as cozy as a dwelling made from a last-ditch fortress defense could ever be. At any rate, the court had a bench in it. Daniel sat down on that bench and fell asleep suddenly.

His watch claimed it was two o'clock in the morning when he, and all the workers who dwelt along Mint Street, were awakened by a sort of Roman Triumph making its way up from Byward Tower. Or at least it sounded as loud and proud as that. But when Daniel finally got up from his bench, dry and stiff as a cadaver, and tottered out to look, he thought it bore the aspect of a funeral-procession.

Charles White was riding atop the black wagon, which was surrounded by cloaked out-riders-mounted Messengers-and followed by a troop of soldiers on foot: two platoons of the Queen's Own Black Torrent Guards, who garrisoned the Tower, and who (or so Daniel gathered) were in the unenviable position of being at the beck and call of Charles White, whenever he wanted reinforcements. The black wagon itself was now padlocked from the outside from the outside.

A strange parade it was. Yet much better suited to this horseshoe-town than any of your sunlit, gay, flower-strewing, music-playing parades. Daniel could not help but fall in step with it as the wagon came abreast of him.

"So!" Daniel exclaimed, " 'twould appear that the information provided by our guest was correct."

He could feel White's glare on his face like sunburn. "All I'll allow is that our hen squawked, and laid an egg, whose savour is not yet proved. More eggs had better follow, and they had best be full of excellent meat, or else that hen shall furnish Jack Ketch with a dish of wings and drumsticks."

White's hen/egg gambit drew light applause. "How'll you try this egg we have just gathered, sir?" asked one of the foot-soldiers.

"Why, crack its sh.e.l.l first," he returned, "and then 'tis a choice, whether to fry it on the griddle, boil it 'til hard, scramble it-or eat it raw!"

Another round of laughter for this witticism. Daniel regretted having exposed himself in Mint Street. But they were now making the turn at the elbow, bringing new buildings and bastions in view, and White had lost interest.

"We have him!" White proclaimed, seemingly talking to the moon. But following White's gaze, Daniel was able to make out Isaac's silhouette against a narrow archway on the right side, backlit by several torches; or was that the false dawn of furnace-light?

They'd worked their way round to the best district of the whole Mint: the northeast, where the Master and Warden had their private houses and courts on the left. But Isaac was on the right. The arch in which he stood was some kind of sally-port of the Inner Keep.

"He fought like Hercules," White continued, "despite being one-armed. And we could not clap him in manacles for the same reason!" Everyone laughed. "This holds him very well, though!" He rapped on the roof of the wagon.

The procession drew to a halt there, under the embrasures of the bastion called Brick Tower. Daniel now perceived that Brick Tower had been conceived as a mustering-place where the very bravest, drunkest, or stupidest knights in the Tower of London would gather in preparation for a sally. When they were ready, they would charge down a stone stair that ran along the front of the inner wall, make a sharp left, and continue down a second flight, erupting from the door where Isaac was standing, into the ditch, where G.o.d knows what would transpire between them and any foe-men who'd penetrated that far, and survived the fire from the casemates.

All of which was of primarily historical interest tonight. Save that this sally-stair held, in the crook of its arm as it were, a large storehouse, and next to it a stable, belonging to the Mint. These buildings obscured the lower half of Brick Tower, and for all Daniel knew, might be connected with it through pa.s.sageways-squinting at old sooty out-buildings in the dark at two in the morning left plenty of lee-way for the imagination.

At any rate, the horses drawing the black wagon were obviously of the view that they were home, and the night's work finished. It was into those dark buildings that the wagon was now conducted. The Messengers remained within, the Guards emerged and dispersed to their barracks, some of which were all of fifty paces away.

This left Daniel alone in the street. Or so he phant'sied, for a few moments, until he noticed a red coal bobbing up and down in a moon-shadow across the way, and realized that someone was lurking there, smoking a pipe, and observing him.

"Did you partic.i.p.ate, Sergeant Shaftoe?"

He was only making an educated guess. But the pipe-coal emerged from the shadows, and the form of Bob coalesced in moon-light.

"I dodged that detail, I do confess, Guv."

"Such errands are not to your liking?"

"Let some youngster take the glory. Opportunities for action are scarce of late, now that the war is in recess."

"At the other end of town," said Daniel, "they do not say 'tis in recess, recess, but but finished finished."

"What other end of town would that be, then?" demanded Bob, feigning elderly daftness. "Would you be speaking of Westminster?" He said that in a very good accent. But then he reverted to mudlark c.o.c.kney. "You can't mean the Kit-Cat Clubb."

"Nay, e'en at the Kit-Cat Clubb they say the same."

"To Doctors they say it, I think. To soldiers they say different things. The discourse of the Whigs is cloven like a devil's hoof."

An ugly commotion now arose within the stable at the foot of Brick Tower, which, while Doctor Waterhouse and Sergeant Shaftoe had been conversing, had been lit up with torches. The doors of the wagon had been unlocked, and men were shouting in a way Daniel hadn't heard since he'd gone to the bear-baiting in Rotherhithe. From where they were standing, it was not loud. But something in the tenor of it made it out of the question for Daniel and Bob to continue their talk. Suddenly it rose to such a pitch that Daniel shrank away, thinking that the prisoner might be about to escape altogether. There was a tattoo of thumps, and a scream or two; then momentary silence, broken by a man calling out in a language of bent vowels and outlandish syllables.

"I have heard curses in many tongues, but this one is new to me," Bob remarked. "Where's the prisoner from?"

"He is from Muscovy," Daniel decided, after listening for a few more moments, "and he is not cursing, but praying."

"If that is how Muscovites sound when they talk to G.o.d, I'd hate to hear their blaspheming."

After that, all movements inside the stable were accompanied by the clanking of irons. "They put a collar on him," Bob said learnedly. The sounds receded, then vanished all of a sudden. "He's in the Tower now," Bob announced. "G.o.d have mercy on him." He sighed, and gazed down the length of the street in the direction of the full moon, which was swinging low over London. "I had better rest," he said, "and so had you-if you intend to come."

"Come where?" Daniel asked.

"Wherever we are directed by the Russian."

It took a moment for Daniel to work through all that was implied by this. "You think that they will torture him-and he will break-and lead us to-?"

"It is only a matter of time, once Charles White has him in the Tower. Come, I'll get you a proper billet, away from the noise."

"What noise?" Daniel asked, because the Mint had been extraordinarily quiet these last few minutes. But as he followed Bob Shaftoe back up the street, he began to hear, through one of the open embrasures in Brick Tower, the sound of a man screaming.

River Thames THE NEXT MORNING (23 APRIL 1714).

"IN THE END THE M MUSCOVITE spoke willingly," Isaac announced. spoke willingly," Isaac announced.

He and Daniel were on the p.o.o.p deck of Charles White's sloop Atalanta Atalanta. Twelve hours had pa.s.sed since the Muscovite had been brought into the Tower.

Daniel had spent one of those hours attempting to sleep in the officers' quarters of the Queen's Own Black Torrent Guards. Then the whole Tower had been roused by a call to arms. Or so it had seemed, from the perspective of one savagely irritable old man who desperately wanted to sleep. In truth, only the First Company of the Guards was rousted. To the other denizens of the Tower it was the most delicious sort of nocturnal alarm: one that gave occasion only to roll over and go back to sleep.