There is a certain amount of looking back and forth now, but this does not alter what is inside the Pyx, or what is written on the indenture, and so in the end it does not really matter. Suddenly, important heads are nodding all around the room. “It is so ordered,” says the King’s Remembrancer, not before reading the letter through twice. “You have the gratitude of the Council, Dr. Waterhouse. Er, shall we have Sir Isaac’s chair brought in, then?”
“There is no precedent for this, and so pray allow me to suggest one,” Daniel says. “We are soon to move in to the Star Chamber for the Assay, are we not? Then rather than move Sir Isaac twice, I suggest we make him comfortable straightaway in Star Chamber. He can hear the indenture being read from there.”
“So ordered!”
Miss Barton curtseys her way out and flits across Star Chamber, calling to Daniel with her eyes. Daniel excuses himself and backs out. Heads lean in and faces turn to line the doorway. Daniel is confronted by the black obelisk of Isaac’s sedan chair, suspended between two astonished-looking porters. Miss Barton is hissing directions: “In the corner! The corner! No, that one!” There is some almost comical turning about, but finally they understand what she wants: for the sedan’s door to face toward a corner of Star Chamber so that when the door is open Isaac, in his pitiful state, won’t be visible to the entire Chamber. Finally they get it set down the way she wants it. Daniel side-steps through a narrow gap between pole and wall, and backs in to the corner. He glances up one time to see all of those faces in the next room peering through the doorway at him. Then he undoes the latch on the sedan chair’s door and opens it. The first thing he sees is a hand, pale and still, gripping an ornate key. He opens the door farther, letting light shine in so that he can see Isaac sprawled against the wall of his black box, eyes open and mouth a-gape, perfectly still. Daniel need not check his pulse to be certain that what he is looking at, here, is the recently deceased corpse of Sir Isaac Newton, dead at age seventy-one of Newgate gaol-fever.
The Press-Yard, Newgate Prison
TEN MINUTES LATER they are down in the Press-Yard, just off Phoenix Court. It is called a Yard but is really nothing more than a fortified alley. A short caravan is drawn up there, waiting to convey them all to Tyburn: a wagon containing various tools of Mr. Ketch’s trade; a spacious open cart, already loaded with empty coffins; and, drawing up the rear, a sledge. The cart is for most of the condemnees, for Ketch, and for the Ordinary. The sledge is reserved for Shaftoe, it being the tradition that a traitor be dragged to his death facing backwards. Mere hanging is too good for such a vile person, wheels are too nice.
As the condemnees progress from each stage to the next, their entourage grows. Here in the Press-Yard there must be two score men, mostly gaolers with cudgels, but a few constables as well. Jack’s beginning to see blunderbusses. A sort of corridor is formed, tending to funnel them straight to the big cart. The other prisoners clamber up and sit down, using coffin-lids as benches. Jack is directed to his wheelless land-barge, which has a plank to sit on, but no coffin; by the end of the day, a coffin, or indeed any other container, will be quite wasted on him.
Mr. Ketch, who is nothing if not organized, opens one of the several lockers on his supply-wagon, and pulls out several lengths of rope. Each of them has a hangman’s noose in one end. He tosses all but one of them into the big cart, then circles around to the rear where he addresses Jack.
“It’s a fine one, eh?” he exclaims, holding up the noose.
“If you were not wearing a black hood you’d be glowing with pride, Mr. Ketch. But I do not know why.”
“This rope I got from a pirate-captain I hanged last year.”
“He supplied his own rope?”
“Indeed. A hawser, he called it. Look at the thickness of it.”
“He wanted to be sure the rope would not break? That seems very odd to me.”
“No, no, I’ll show you!” And Ketch steps round to Shaftoe’s left side and fits the noose over the latter’s head. The rope is so thick and stiff, the noose so tight, that it can barely close around Shaftoe’s throat. But the knot lodges under his left ear like a great bony fist. “Feel that leverage-now you’ll take my meaning, sir!” Ketch says, pulling up once or twice on the loose end of the rope. Each time he does, the knot, bearing on the heel of Shaftoe’s skull, crowbars his entire head forward and to one side. “And look at the length of it!” Shaftoe turns to see that Ketch has retreated to a distance of some two fathoms, but still has not run out of rope. “With this I can give you a drop such as few men are afforded, Mr. Shaftoe, very few. By the time you get to the end of this rope you’ll be moving as fast as a cannonball. You’ll be smoking a pipe in Heaven long before I chop off your testicles and shovel your guts out; and the quartering will mean as little to you, as coffin-worms to a dead bishop.”
“You are a princely fellow, Mr. Ketch, and Betty is fortunate to have you.”
“Mr. Shaftoe,” says Jack Ketch in a lower voice, stepping up very close to him now, and absent-mindedly wrapping the loose rope into a neat coil, “I shan’t have leisure to exchange words with you again, until we are standing beneath the Tree. For I’ve other prisoners to tend to, as you can see, and the journey to Tyburn promises to be, er…”
“Festive?”
“I was going to say ‘eventful,’ not wanting to show disrespect. I’ll be in the cart. We shall not be able to hear each other. Since you’re facing backwards, we shall not be able to see each other. Even when we are face to face beneath the Tree, the noise will be such that we’ll not be able to exchange a word, though we scream in each other’s ears. So I say to you now, sir, thank you! Thank you! And know that you shall feel less pain today than a man who bangs his head on a door-frame in a dark room.”
“In the way of pain, I ask for nothing more nor less than what I deserve,” says Shaftoe, “and I shall entrust you, Mr. Ketch, with that determination.”
“And I shall prove worthy of that trust sir! Farewell!” says Jack Ketch. He turns his back on Shaftoe as if he’s afraid he might cry again. He straightens his back, works on his composure, smooths down his hood, and steps up into the cart, where he has other clients waiting.
Star Chamber
THE NEXT TIME Daniel has his wits about him, the King’s Remembrancer is reading some document aloud, declaiming in the hoarse lope of one who has been reading for quite a long while. Daniel looks through the doorway to see the King’s Remembrancer peering through half-glasses at a generously sized parchment with a zigzag edge: one of the counterpanes of an indenture. This would be the contract that Isaac signed when he became Master of the Mint. It is one of the treasures that Daniel fetched out of the Abbey vault. What it says is that Isaac accepts sole personal responsibility for whatever is about to be found in the Pyx. It probably seemed like a lot of dry legal gibberish when Isaac signed it, but as the words resound through Star Chamber in the hearing of all the most important men in the Realm, it strikes him as so very grave and formidable as to make Isaac almost lucky to be dead. Daniel notes that he is the object of curious scrutiny by several of those men, and so he fixes his gaze on Isaac’s dead face, smiles, nods, and makes a sotto voce remark as if chatting with the sick man.
The Indenture draws to a thunderous end with invocations of God and of the Sovereign, and then the King’s Remembrancer looks up and demands the three keys of the Pyx.
In taking Isaac’s key out of his hand, Daniel notes that rigor mortis has not set in yet. He can’t have been dead for long.
The other Key-holders of the Pyx have already undone their respective locks by the time Daniel gets in there. Only one lock remains: a beauty, made to look like the front of the Temple of Solomon. Daniel gets it open and flips the hasp out of the way. Two members of the City jury step up and raise the lid of the Pyx. The cervical vertebrae of the Great and the Good pop and creak all round as they vie to see what’s in it: a pile of wee leather packets, called Sinthias, each labeled with a month and a year.