Here, timing was everything. Hangings occurred only eight times a year. Prisoners were sentenced to hang a week or two in advance. And so most of the time there were no condemned people at all in the Condemned Hold. Rather, it was used as a temporary holding cell for new prisoners of all stripes who had been frog-marched to the Porter’s Lodge across the street and traded the temporary ropes that bound their arms behind their backs, for iron fetters that they would wear until they were released. After being ironed (as this procedure was called) with so much metal that they could not even walk, they would be dragged across the vault and thrown into the Condemned Hold to lie in the dark for a few days or weeks. The purpose of this was to find out how much money they really had. If they had money, they’d soon offer it to the gaolers in exchange for lighter chains, or even a nice apartment in the Press-Yard. If they had none, they’d be taken to some place like the Stone Hold.

If one paid a visit to the Condemned Hold on a day chosen at random, it would likely be filled with heavily ironed newcomers. These were of no interest to Jack and Bob, at least not yet. Instead, the Shaftoe boys came to Newgate during the days immediately prior to Tyburn processions, when the Condemned Hold was full of men who actually had been condemned to hang. There they performed.

Around the time of their birth, the King had come back to England and allowed the theatres, which had been closed by Cromwell, to open again. The Shaftoe boys had been putting their climbing skills to good use sneaking into them, and had picked up an ear for the way actors talked, and an eye for the way they did things.

So their Newgate performances began with a little mum-show: Jack would try to pick Bob’s pocket. Bob would spin round and cuff him. Jack would stab him with a wooden poniard, and Bob would die. Then (Act II) Bob would jump up and ‘morphosize into the Long Arm of the Law, put Jack in a hammerlock, (Act III) don a wig (which they had stolen, at appalling risk, from a side-table in a brothel near the Temple), and sentence him to hang. Then (Act IV) Bob would exchange the white wig for a black hood and throw a noose round Jack’s neck and stand behind him while Jack would motion for silence (for by this point all of the Condemned Hold would be in a state of near-riot) and clap his hands together like an Irish child going to First Communion, and (Act V) utter the following soliloquy:

John Ketch’s rope doth decorate my neck.

Though rude, and cruel, this garland chafes me not.

For, like the Necklace of Harmonia,

It brings the one who wears it life eternal.

The hangman draweth nigh-he’ll turn me off

And separate my soul from weak’ning flesh.

And, as I’ve made my peace with God Almighty,

My spirit will ascend to Heaven’s Door,

Where, after brief interrogation, Christ will-

Bob steps forward and shoves Jack, then yanks the rope up above Jack’s head.

HAWKKH! God’s Wounds! The noose quite strangleth me!

What knave conceived this means of execution?

I should have bribed John Ketch to make it quick.

But, with so many lordly regicides

Who’ve lately come to Tyburn to be penalized,

The price of instant, painless death is quite

Inflated-far beyond the humble means

Of common condemnees, who hence must die

As painf’lly as they’ve lived. God damn it all!

And damn Jack Ketch; the late John Turner; and

The judges who hath sent so many rich men to

The gallows, thereby spurring said inflation.

And damn my frugal self. For, at a cost

That scarce exceeds an evening at the pub,

Might I have hired those exc’llent Shaftoe boys,

Young Jack, and Bob, the elder of the pair,

To dangle from my legs, which lacking ballast,

Do flail most ineffectu’lly in the air,

And make a sort of entertainment for

The mobile.

Bob removes the noose from Jack’s neck.

But soft! The end approaches-

Earth fades-new worlds unfold before my eyes-

Can this be heaven? It seemeth warm, as if

A brazier had been fir’d ‘neath the ground.

Perhaps it is the warmth of God’s sweet love

That so envelops me.

Bob, dressed as a Devil, approaches with a long pointed Stick.

How now! What sort

Of angel doth sprout Horns upon his pate?

Where is thy Harp, O dark Seraph?

Instead of which a Pike, or Spit, doth seem

To occupy thy gnarled claws?

DEVIL:I am

The Devil’s Turnspit. Sinner, welcome home!

JACK:I thought that I had made my peace with God.

Indeed I had, when I did mount the scaffold.

If I had but died then, at Heaven’s Gate

I’d stand. But in my final agony,

I took God’s name in vain, and sundry mortal

Sins committed, and thus did damn myself

To this!

DEVIL:Hold still!

Devil shoves the point of his Spit up Jack’s arse-hole.

JACK:The pain! The pain, and yet,

It’s just a taste of what’s to come.

If only I had hired Jack and Bob!

Jack, by means of a conjuror’s trick, causes the point of the spit, smeared with blood, to emerge from his mouth, and is led away by the Devil, to violent applause and foot-stomping from the Crowd.

After the applause had died down, Jack, then, would circulate among the condemned to negotiate terms, and Bob, who was bigger, would watch his back, and mind the coin-purse.

When a woman is thus left desolate and void of counsel, she is just like a bag of money or a jewel dropt on the highway, which is a prey to the next comer.

-DANIELDEFOE,Moll Flanders

JACK HAD KEPT A SHREWDeye on the weather all spring and summer. It had been perfect. He was living in unaccustomed comfort in Strasbourg. This was a city on the Rhine, formerly German and, as of quite recently, French. It lay just to the south of a country called the Palatinate, which, as far as Jack could make out, was a moth-eaten rag of land straddling the Rhine. King Looie’s soldiers would overrun the Palatinate from the West, or the Emperor’s armies would rape and pillage it from the East, whenever they couldn’t think of anything else to do. The person in charge of the Palatinate was called an Elector, which in this part of the world meant a very noble fellow, more than a Duke but less than a King. Until quite recently the Electors Palatinate had been of a very fine and noble family, consisting of too many siblings to keep track of, most quite magnificent; but since only one (the oldest) could be Elector, all of the rest of them had gone out of that country, and found better things to do, or gotten themselves killed in more or less fascinating ways. Eventually the Elector had died and turned matters over to his son: an impotent madman named Charles, who liked to stage mock battles around an old Rhine-castle that wasn’t good for much else. The fighting was imaginary, but the trenches, siege-works, dysentery, and gangrene were real.

Now Jack had been making a sort of living, for several years, from being a fake soldier in France-a line of work that had been brought to ruin by many tiresome reforms that had recently been introduced to the French Army by one Martinet. When he’d heard about this crazy Elector he’d wasted no time in going to the Palatinate and finding gainful employment as a pretend musketeer.

Not long afterwards, King Louis XIV of France had attacked the nearby city of Strasbourg and made it his, and as frequently happened in sacked cities in those days, there had been a bit of the old Black Death. At the first appearance of buboes in the groins and armpits of the poor, the rich of Strasbourg had boarded up their houses and fled to the country. Many had simply climbed aboard boats and headed downstream on the Rhine, which had naturally taken them past that old wrack of a castle where Jack and others were playing at war for the amusement of the crazy Elector Palatine. One rich Strasbourgeois, there, had disembarked from his river-boat and struck up a conversation with none other than Jack Shaftoe. It was not customary for rich men to speak to the likes of Jack, and so the whole business seemed a mystery until Jack noticed that, no matter how he moved about, the rich man always found some pretext to stay well upwind of him.