“Er-well I din’t have it on me, did I?” returned John Cole, who was a bit surly in his disposition on the happiest of days. But Jack thought he looked a bit dodgy.

“You could’ve sent someone to fetch it!”

“How’s I to know they wouldn’t nick it?”

“Leave off, Jack,” Bob had said. Since Dick’s demise, he had been, technically, the man of the family; at first he’d made little of it, but lately he was more arrogant every day. “He’s s’posed to be saying his prayers.”

“Let him pray while he’s kicking!”

“He’s not going to be doing any kicking, ’cause you and I are going to be hanging on his legs.”

“But he’s lying about the treasure.”

“I can see that, you think I’m stupid? But as long as we’re here, let’s do a right job of it.”

While they argued, Cole was turned off. He sprawled against the sky just above their heads. They dodged instinctively, but of course he didn’t fall far. They jumped into the air, gained hand-holds on his feet, and ascended, hand-over-hand.

After a few moments of dangling from the rope, Cole began to kick vigorously. Jack was tempted to let go, but the tremors coming down Cole’s legs reminded him of what he’d felt in the rope when poor Dick had been dragged down beneath the river, and he held on by imagining that this was some kind of vengeance. Bob must’ve had the same phant’sy, for both boys gripped their respective legs like stranglers until Cole finally went limp. When they realized he was pissing himself, they both let go at once and tumbled into the f?tid dust below the gibbet. There was applause from the crowd. Before they’d had time to dust themselves off, they were approached by the sister of the one remaining condemned man-also a slow-hanging wretch, by his looks-who offered them cash money to perform the same service. The coins were clipped, worn, and blackened, but they were coins.

John Cole’s loose board turned out not to be loose, and when pried up, to cover shit instead of treasure. They were hardly surprised. It didn’t matter. They were prosperous tradesmen now. On the eve of each hanging-day, Jack and Bob could be found in their new place of business: Newgate Prison.

It took them several visits just to understand the place. Gate in their usage meant a sort of wicket by which humans could pass through a fence around a hog-yard without having to vault over-not that vaulting was such a difficult procedure, but it was dangerous when drunk, and might lead to falling, and being eaten by the hogs. So gates they knew.

They had furthermore absorbed the knowledge that in several parts of London town were large fabricks called Gates, viz. Ludgate, Moorgate, and Bishopsgate. They had even passed through Aldgate a few times, that being their usual way of invading the city. But the connexion between gates of that type, and hog-yard-wickets, was most obscure. A gate in the hog-yard sense of the word made no sense unless built in a wall, fence, or other such formal barrier, as its purpose was to provide a means of passage through same. But none of the large London buildings called Gates appeared to have been constructed in any such context. They bestrode important roads leading into the city, but if you didn’t want to pass through the actual gate, you could usually find a way round.

This went for Newgate as well. It was a pair of mighty fortress-turrets built on either side of a road that, as it wandered in from the countryside and crossed over Fleet Ditch, was named Holborn. But as it passed between those turrets, the high road was bottlenecked down to a vaulted passageway just wide enough for a four-horse team to squeeze through. Above, a castle-like building joined the turrets, and bridged the road. An iron portcullis made of bars as thick as Jack’s leg was suspended within that castle so that it could be dropped down to seal the vault, and bar the road. But it was all show. For thirty seconds of scampering along side streets and alleys would take Jack, or anyone else, to the other side. Newgate was not surrounded by walls or fortifications, but rather by buildings of the conventional sort, which was to say, the half-timbered two- and three-story dwellings that in England grew up as quick and as thick as mushrooms. This Gothick fortress of Newgate, planted in the midst of such a neighborhood, was like a pelvis in a breadbasket.

If you actually did come into the city along Holborn, then when you ducked beneath that portcullis and entered the vaulted passageway beneath Newgate you’d see to the right a door leading into a porter’s lodge, which was where new prisoners had their chains riveted on. A few yards farther along, you’d emerge from beneath the castle into the uncovered space of what was now called Newgate Street. To your right you would see a gloomy old building that rose to a height of three or four stories. It had only a few windows, and those were gridded over with bars. This was a separate piece of work from the turret-castle-vault building; rumor had it that it had once done service as an inn for travelers coming into the city along Holborn. But the prison had, in recent centuries, spread up Newgate Street like gangrene up a thigh, consuming several such houses. Most of the doorways that had once welcomed weary travelers were bricked up. Only one remained, at the seam between the castle and the adjoining inn-buildings. Going in there, a visitor could make a quick right turn into the Gigger, or, if he had a candle (for it grew dark immediately), he could risk a trip up or down a stairway into this or that ward, hold, or dungeon. It all depended on what sort of wretch he was coming to visit.

On Jack and Bob’s first visit they’d neglected to bring a light, or money with which to buy one, and had blundered down-stairs into a room with a stone floor that made crackling noises beneath their feet as they walked. It was impossible to breathe the air there, and so after a few moments of blind panic they had found their way out and fled back into Newgate Street. There, Jack had noticed that his feet were bloody, and supposed that he must have stepped on broken glass. Bob had the same affliction. But Bob, unlike Jack, was wearing shoes, and so the blood could not have come from him. On careful inspection of the soles of those shoes, the mystery was solved: the blood was not smeared about, but spotted his soles, an array of little bursts. At the center of each burst was a small fleshy gray tube: the vacant corpse of an engorged louse that Bob had stepped on. This accounted for the mysterious crackling noise that they had heard while walking around in that room. As they soon learned, it was called the Stone Hold, and was accounted one of the lowest and worst wards of the prison, occupied only by common felons-such as the late John Cole-who had absolutely no money. Jack and Bob never returned to it.

Over the course of several later sallies into the prison they learned its several other rooms: the fascinating Jack Ketch his Kitchen; the so-called Buggering Hold (which they avoided); the Chapel (likewise); the Press-Yard, where the richest prisoners sat drinking port and claret with their periwigged visitors; and the Black Dogge Tavern, where the cellarmen-elite prisoners who did a brisk trade in candles and liquor-showed a kind of hospitality to any prisoners who had a few coins in their pockets. This looked like any other public house in England save that everyone in the place was wearing chains.

There were, in other words, plenty of lovely things to discover at the time and to reminisce about later. But they were not making these arduous trips from the Isle of Dogs to Newgate simply for purposes of sightseeing. It was a business proposition. They were looking for their market. And eventually, they found it. For in the castle proper, on the north side of the street, in the basement of the turret, was a spacious dungeon that was called the Condemned Hold.