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This, he thought, percolated to the edge of the crowd reasonably well. As well, it gave the Court of Inspectors an excuse to exercise their authority. He saw the Steward and three of his high council making for the dungeon straightaway, presumably to explain to the soldiers what was going on.
“To the Poor-Side Cistern!” Daniel commanded, and in a few moments was borne there, followed by a thrilled company of shovel-men. This was the place where Daniel had seen a prisoner Pumped on his first visit. He drew out a document. It was written in the Real Character: perfectly impenetrable to even the literate among the debtors, which was a good thing, since it was actually a description of a clock-work mechanism written a long time ago by Hooke. “The inscription says, proceed from here along a line parallel to the Ditch for fifty paces, until a certain Tree is reached,” he a
By the time he had reached ten, they had begun to count along with him. Fifty found them all goose-stepping and chanting in perfect unison in the Painted Ground.
“No tree,” Daniel observed in the silence that ensued. “Of course, it was burned in the Fire. We must proceed anyway, keeping in mind that there is likely to be some error.” He scrutinized the document, turning it this way and that, until many had grown restive, and some had even begun to dig holes. “ ‘Turn to the right and go another hundred,’ it says, which foxed me for a bit,” said Daniel, gazing up at the wall of the Prison, which barred all rightward movement. “Until one considers that the prison that stood in those days was smaller. We must measure a distance of one hundred paces that way.” And he thrust his hand at the Prison.
Now, everyone in the whole party had a different notion of how this was to be achieved, and so for ten minutes the Fleet seemed to have swopped inmates with Bedlam, as all over the place people were clambering through windows, stretching bits of twine across other inmates’ cells, pacing along exterior walls, and dragging sticks through dirt. But after a while, two-thirds of them reconvened on the near edge of the Racket Ground. Smaller clusters of dissident pacers and measurers staked out more or less far-flung positions which they insisted were the correct ones.
“There is supposed to be another tree here, but it’s gone,” said Daniel. He spent a while reading, and squinting up at the dome of St. Paul’s. “Of course the turret of old St. Paul’s was in a slightly different place,” he reminded them, “but fortunately I am old enough to remember it.” He paced toward that remembered landmark all the way across the Racket Ground, parallelled by the several dissident groups, who counted his paces jealously. He stopped just short of the Prison wall, then sidestepped five paces to the left, until he was standing on the rim of a shallow stone gutter that ran for some distance along the wall’s base. He looked both ways, pretending to check for landmarks; but really he was performing reconaissance on the soldiers. All dozen of them had been rousted from their tents by their sergeant, and now stood in a picket-line across the front of the dungeon-building, facing outwards, with fixed bayonets. The sergeant stood in front of the line. In front of him were several worthies of the Court of Inspectors, who seemed to want to create a buffer between the soldiers and the shovelers. All of these had been watching Daniel alertly, as he had drawn to within half a dozen yards of the nearest soldiers. But that was as close as he came. “Here is where the instructions tell us to dig,” he a
“Do you s’pose she got a good look at your face?” Saturn grunted in his ear. But Daniel was unable to respond. A kind of paralyzing dismay had come over him, as precursor to horror and, in all likelihood, sickness. He was finally now understanding what it really meant to be in a London sewer-and he wasn’t even really down in it yet, for Saturn was bearing him over one shoulder, sloshing down the tu
Daniel would have fled, if not for the shameful knowledge that he’d been paying other people to do this for a week.
He suffered. Time passed. They were in a different part of the tu
“Up one is more like,” said Saturn. “I hope you are in condition to climb a ladder, Da
“I hope that gager slung over your shoulder is,” Da
“He has hidden reserves,” Saturn said.
“He’d better stop hiding them,” said the black man-though it was not easy to discern skin tones under these circumstances.
Moved, finally, by this and more such mockery, Daniel wriggled, and insisted that he be set upright in the tu
“We’ll stay together, thank’ee kindly,” said Da