The system of the world - By Neal Stephenson Page 0,414

his right. He was headed for a row of small buildings put up against the base of the Prison wall, directly ahead of him, which was to say along the southern verge. Even from a distance Daniel could tell plainly enough that this was a Convenience, a Necessary House, a Shite-Hole. The boy went in to use it, and Daniel said a silent prayer for whomever would have to use it next. Presently the boy emerged, retraced his steps, walked past the turnkey (who studied him shrewdly, but did not move or speak), merged with the incoming and outgoing traffic of visitors, whores, &c., and went out.

Daniel Waterhouse and Peter Hoxton meanwhile had paused about halfway between the gate and the privy, for two reasons.

(1) The Prison building consisted almost entirely of apartments, no better and no worse than any other London slum-apartments, to which prisoners had their own keys. Nevertheless, it did have a few strong-rooms, or, less politely, dungeons in which people could be placed without the privilege of having a door-key! Daniel was especially curious about these. There was a row of them in the Ditch-facing buildings whose back doors and windows were on Daniel’s right hand as he looked south toward the privies. But to inspect these closely would have been indiscreet.

However, haply

(2) Another strange rite was getting underway to the left side of the gate-privy axis. They had approached the Poor Side of the prison: a couple of very large rooms at the extremity of the south wing, where prisoners who could not afford apartments slept and lived all crowded together. Against the exterior wall of one of those teeming halls was a cistern, fed by a pump. This was sunk into the earth less than a hundred feet away from Fleet Ditch itself and so Daniel had to will himself not to imagine what sort of water came out of it. A dozen or so persons were approaching it: a tight cluster of four, surrounded by a ragged entourage. They spread out around the cistern and Daniel perceived that one of them had his elbows pinioned behind his back with a shaggy hank of twine. He was uncovered, and being frogmarched by others who were every bit as down-at-heels as he was but had managed to round up artifacts recognizable as hats and wigs. Heads turned toward the oldest of these, and he went into a peroration that sounded, for all the world, like a legal judgment: certainly it went on that long, and was that hard to follow. It was as pompous as these men were shabby, but when the leprous verbiage was scraped away to expose its grammatical bones, what it said was that these fellows (except for the one who was tied up) were something called the Court of Inspectors and that he, the one who was talking, was the Steward thereof, and that in some proceeding just concluded they had found the bare-headed one guilty of having entered so-and-so’s apartment yesterday and stealing a clay bottle containing gin from out of a hole in the wall where its rightful owner was generally known to park it, when not pressing it against his lips; and that the sentence for said crime was to be carried out forthwith. Whereupon the gin-nicker was spun around so that his back was to the cistern, and its rim behind his knees, and then shoved back so that his feet went out and up, and his head pierced the glaze of scum that covered the reservoir, and went under. Maintaining a fierce grip on the man’s shoulders, his captors maneuvered him so that his face was directly beneath the spout of the pump, and a third officer of the “Court of Inspectors” set to work jacking the pump-handle as vigorously as he could. It was difficult to monitor the results because a crowd of prisoners had gathered round to be edified by it. Daniel glimpsed the prisoner’s feet dancing an air tarantella. Debtors had gathered in all of the Prison’s windows to learn from the booze-hound’s errors. Saturn had a fair view, being tall. Daniel sidled around behind him and stood with his back pressed against Saturn’s and looked the other way, at what he took to be the strong-rooms.

These certainly looked the part, having heavy doors with redundant bars and locks, and little to nothing in the way of windows. He’d heard that some of the strong-rooms were near the Ditch, the Privies, and the