like a swain getting ready to serenade his lady love. Which maneuvers would normally be both dark (as the sun had set quite some time ago) and dangerous (as men who stood in the middle of a highway leading into a gate of the City of London normally did not long survive). But the Bell-Man’s progress was well-lighted by a crowd of Londoners with torches, who had thronged the highway from one side to the other, throwing up a barrier of flame that would dazzle and terrify any horses whose drivers were foolish enough to bring them this way. Newgate was closed for the evening. The Bell-Man stood in a fiery semicircle, blinking in surprise, as normally he must carry out his duties alone and unheralded.
Jack had been playing the recluse since he had been condemned. In the first days, crowds had gathered in Holborn from time to time, apparently drawn by rumors that Jack Shaftoe was going to get out of bed and stand in his window to be viewed, like a King taking the air in St. James’s. All of them had been driven away, disappointed, by constables. But tonight was a special occasion, for how many times in his life would Jack be half-hanged, drawn, and quartered? Jack busied himself for a minute or two, lighting tapers. For sources of illumination were another luxury that was famously in short supply at Newgate, and those sycophants who lacked the Yellow Boys (that is to say, Guineas) to buy Jack bottles of Oporto might at least scratch together thrums (that is to say, three pence) to buy him a taper, so that he might take good aim at his chamber-pot later. He had not been burning many of these, but at this point there was little reason to hoard them, and so he went round and set every one of them alight. The room immediately filled with lambent smoke, and the fragrance of rancid tallow, which took him right back to his boyhood on the Isle of Dogs. There was a small ironbound hatch in one of his windows, which might be opened to admit air. He did so now, to spill out the smoke, and was spotted by the crowd down in Holborn, who phant’sied that Jack Shaftoe had nothing better to do on this, his last night, than to banter with them. That damned bell started up, quieting a surge of excitement from the crowd, and the Bell-Man roared out his stanza.
Jack was ready for him. He put his face to the open grate and shouted back,
O tedious Man, who with thy Bell
Dost ring me down the road to Hell,
Tomorrow eve, at half past seven,
I’ll hock a spit on you from Heaven.
For if, as preachers say, the afterlife
Smells sweet, sounds pleasant, is free of strife,
And is, in sum, a Kingdom of Felicity,
It must be any place that does not harbor Thee.
The performance was extremely well-received by all hearers save the Bell-Man himself, who slinked away in the direction of St. Sepulchre, stepping a bit lively as turds and expired vegetables began to pelt him in the back.
Now that he’d been sent away in disgrace, the only people remaining were members in good standing of the Mobility, a.k.a. the Mobb, a class of people divided by their tendency to rape, murder, and steal from one another, but united in their admiration for Jack. They were expecting something from him, without a doubt. A few groups were trying to sing songs to him, in different keys and meters, but no one tune had taken hold yet. Jack—who must be nothing more, to them, than a silhouette against a smoky candle-lit chamber, half-obscured by the reticule of massive iron bars—waved his arms a bit to quiet them down, then put his face to the grate again, and shouted:
“The curfew-bell has sounded, and the gentleman from St. Sepulchre has given me his stanzas, and I am retiring! As should you all! For we have a long and busy day ahead of us tomorrow! I have an appointment at Tyburn in the morning, to which you are all invited! And then another at the College of Physicians in the afternoon. For even though my body is to be quartered, my head is expected to come through the ceremony more or less intact, and those Natural Philosophers around the corner there—straight up Newgate Street, take a right on Warwick Lane just across from Grey Fryars, there, then down to the first entry on