“This was lent to me by a friend who suffered from an embarrassment of riches,” Daniel explained after the torch had been extinguished and stowed, and the gate locked. They were examining a squarish plate of what appeared to be gold. It had been treated very disrespectfully and was scraped, battered out of plane, salt-caked, and tar-stained. But it was still obviously gold, hand-hammered to a thickness of perhaps an eighth of an inch. “As you have probably guessed, there are more of them stowed below; but we only withdraw as much as can be wrought in a single day.”

For some minutes they followed Daniel around the court as he carried this treasure to several stations. A workman scrubbed it in a barrel of water to get rid of the salt. A goldsmith grasped it with tongs and thrust it into a furnace; for a few moments it was enveloped in fumes and colored flames as impurities were burnt off. Then it resolved to a pure glowing slab. He tugged it out, quenched it in water, and snipped off a corner for assay. Then Daniel took it to a weigher who tediously balanced it on a scale, and noted it in a book. Then it was across the yard to a mill consisting of two great brass rollers, one above the other like a mangle. A man fed the plate into the crevice between these as a boy whirled a crank on an elaborate gear-train. The rollers turned almost as slowly as minute-hands. What emerged from them was no longer a neat square: it had been mashed to an irregular oval blob, like pie-crust under a rolling-pin, thinner than a fingernail. It came out onto a kind of skid that had been fashioned from a whole ox-hide stretched over a frame the size of a dining-table. The plate lay on this like a lake of molten gold, almost smooth enough to bear reflections. Four men-one at each corner-now bore this across the court to a stall where a large shearing-machine had been established. The ox-hide pallet was mated to this, so that the golden sheet could be slid directly into the jaws of the shear. Two men now went to work slicing the lozenge of gold into a large number of strips, each about a hand-span in width. When this was finished they rotated the strips ninety degrees and fed them through a second time, cutting them into squares. Some of the cuttings, from near the edge, came out imperfectly shaped, and were pitched into a discard basket. The rest were piled into a neat stack. When they ran out of gold the shear-men twice counted and re-stacked the cards (for the gold squares resembled nothing so much as a deck of great playing-cards). All of the proceeds-including the basket of scraps-were given back to Daniel. He took them back to the weigher, who accounted for every iota of gold. Daniel then returned the scraps to the locked crypt.

The tour-group reconvened in the shop of the man called Saturn. The golden cards had been stacked and counted one more time, and loaded into a purpose-built, velvet-lined chest that was just the right size for them. They gathered round it instinctively.

“Well, Dr. Waterhouse, we now understand perhaps a tenth of the oddities housed in your court,” said Eliza. “When shall we understand the remainder?”

“When we go to Bridewell!” Daniel returned, and picked up the chest as if he meant to leave.

“WE ARE LIKE JEWELS in a pirate’s treasure-chest,” said the Duchess of Arcachon-Qwghlm, trying to get her fellow-passengers to look on the bright side.

Daniel, Eliza, Johann, and “Hildegard” were sharing this booth-on-wheels, not only with a small chest of gold cards, but also with several bales of libels. To judge from their smell and their tendency to rub off on people’s clothing, these had come off the press very recently. Everyone shied away from them save Daniel, who was dressed in clothes that were black to begin with.

According to some unwritten but universal rule of etiquette, people mashed together in a confined space tended not to look one another in the eye, or to converse. The fact that “Hildegard” was, in truth, obviously Princess Caroline of Hanover only exacerbated it. Thus Eliza’s efforts to make cheery conversation.

After they had jolted some distance southwards along Saffron Hill, Daniel, mortified and bored, managed to work one of his arms free of the pile-up, and got a hand on the window-shutter, which he shot open. In London, actual sun-beams were too much to ask for; but he was rewarded with a nebulous in-flow of smoky gray light, which fell on the top-most sheet of a libel-bale.

by Dappa

My Persecutor has been heard to say that my libels are used only to stop up chinks, and plug diverse other windy orifices, in the garderobes of Bankside gin-houses. Which if true raises the question of how he would know anything of such places; but let us pass over this mystery. For if Mr. Charles White’s assertion is true, then you, reader, are enjoying but a few minutes’ peaceful interlude in a House of Office somewhere in Southwark, and I had best get to the point before you have done with your business.

If you put your eye up to the chink that was vacated, when you pulled this document from its rightful place, you may be able to see a street-an eastward continuation of Bankside, tho’ a bit further from the shore, running in front of Winchester Yard; that is called Clink Street, and forms a part of the boundary of the Liberty of the Clink. This parcel, ’tis said, long ago belonged to some abbots; but they granted it to the Bishop of Winchester, with the stipulation that that noble prelate would put it to work saving mens’ souls, and gathering alms. Accordingly, a long line of Bishops ran brothels there for many hundreds of years. These were none of your latter-day whore-houses, infamous for disease and the degradation of women; nay, this was in the Halcyon days before the French Pox, and a certain great Patron and Regulator of Brothels, who dwelt not far off in St. James, issued a decree that no woman be forced to work in such a place against her will. So keenly were these Institutions inspected and ruled by the King and the Bishop that Labor, Management, and Customers all got along famously, and few disputes arose. But as in any human intercourse, trouble was foredoomed, and so a Prison was constructed here. It is from the Clink prison that I pen these words. Do not be concerned for my welfare. I am in a commodious flat, with a river-view; for this I have my patroness, and several of my readers, to thank. Below are several windowless chambers where some hundreds of my fellow-prisoners dwell, heavily ironed and lightly fed.

Why, you may ask, should the Clink be so crowded with wretches, when those Kings and Bishops had such care to make of this place an earthly Paradise? Why, because of certain degradations that have come with time. The Pox shut down the old Stews; the brothels moved from their proud stations on Bankside to a Diaspora of back-rooms, salted all over the Metropolis, where the Lords Spiritual and Temporal can scarcely find, much less rule, them. The Temples of Aphrodite were replaced by bull- and bear-baiting rings, which I should describe as Fields of Mars, if there were anything martial about them; but this is giving them more than they deserve. The Muses flourished here too, until Cromwell shut down the theatres. The merry god Dionysus once gamboled in the Liberty of the Clink, but alas, the good old drinks of ale and wine have been quite driven out by that infamous new-fangled poison, Genebre. Pox, poison, and pit-bulls rule this Clink now. It is a sad prospect, and enough to make a sapient prisoner reflect upon the nature of Liberties in general. For we all love to phant’sy that we live in some sort of Liberty-if not of the Clink, then of the City of London or some other Jurisdiction where men are proud to style themselves Free. But under close inspection, how often do we find those Freedoms to be Chimaeras, and our cherished Liberties to be little better than my private flat in the upper storey of the Clink? We may put it down, I suppose, to the nostalgia for Merry Olde England, whereby all things, be they never so modern or outlandish, are viewed through a perspective-glass of ancient design, which promises to deliver a true image, but in truth colors and distorts all that is seen through it. Merry Olde England did not have the modern Pox; and so brothels are no longer what they used to be. Bloody and vile baiting-pits it did not have either, at least, not in the numbers seen to-day, and not frequented nor managed by respectable men. And Merry Olde England did not have slavery: that queer institution whereby a man may own another, simply by saying that he does. But the true England of to-day has all of these things. So I do not much bemoan the fact that I am in the Clink while you, reader, are at Liberty; for the Liberties in which we dwell are but delusions. I would fainer dwell in a meaner Liberty with fewer delusions than roam about a great one while being used by the lies and deceptions of the Party in power.