“My glass is only half empty, Dr. Waterhouse, and you have not even touched yours; so it seems there is ample time, if you will abandon this guarded cryptic way of speaking and only come out and say what you mean.”

“You may-supposing some escape were to be possible-board ship and go to America. But she will not.”

Jack almost shot back some waggish riposte, but then a serious look spread over his phizz, and he settled back, and waited. “You cannot possibly be talking about what I think you’re talking about!” he said finally.

“I know it is difficult to believe,” said Daniel.

“Even supposing-well-supposing any number of things I’m unwilling to suppose-why would she employ you as a go-between?”

“It is an eminently reasonable question,” said Daniel. “The answer is that she is not. I am doing this at the bidding of another-a friend of the lady in question.”

“Then I do not think much of this person’s friendship,” said Jack, “for a true friend would not dream of trying to mend what was broken so long ago. Some friend! Ha!”

“None the less,” Daniel said, “I have been asked, by the friend in question, to make inquiries. The friend is young, and she has fanciful notions concerning the power of true love, et cetera, et cetera.”

“Yes, as depicted in plays,” Jack said. “And by that I do not mean the vile, merry plays of the Restoration but older ones such as I attended as a lad.”

“Of a simpler ?ra.”

“Indeed. Yes. Though I am by no means fatuous enough to believe in such mawkish phant’sies, sir, I know how it is that young ladies, perhaps over-fond of the Theatre and the Italian Opera, can fall under its influence for a time, until Age and Experience slap them back to their senses. And so I’ll allow that this young lady who sent you may be merely daft, and not the least bit malicious.”

“She will be ever so gratified,” said Daniel, “to know that the King of the Vagabonds thinks so.”

“No need to jab at me, there, Doctor. ’Tis a sufficiently trying conversation, even without your biting asides. I am getting round to telling you something of great moment, which you must relay to this meddlesome lass, and that is as follows: the woman in question said to me, a long time ago, that I’d never again see her nor hear her voice until the day I died. And she’s not the sort to renege.”

“Well, then, it follows that if you escape death, and board ship for America, you won’t get to see her or speak to her,” Daniel pointed out.

“That were a very sad fate indeed,” said Jack, “but it is the fate to which I have been doomed for twelve years; and another few years of it wouldn’t kill me; whereas hanging around London would.”

’TWAS NATURAL TO ASSUME of a prison that, like the Inferno of Dante, it would only get worse as one worked one’s way in through the gate and pierced its concentric wards. Daniel had been circumventing the Fleet-a largely autonomous city of about a thousand souls-since he’d been tiny. The prison building proper (burned down in 1666, rebuilt in 1670) was a bit shy of two hundred fifty feet in length from the Poor Side common-room on the south end, to the Chapel on the north; forty feet deep; and forty high (sufficient for five storeys of low-ceilinged apartments, if one counted its half-buried cellar). But this structure, big as it was, could no more be confused with the Prison as a whole, than, say, the White Tower could be mistaken for the Tower of London complex. The Fleet Prison, as Daniel had always known it, was a squarish town about five hundred feet on a side-so, on paper, six acres or so. But seen up close it was like one of those writhing horrors that Hooke used to view under his microscope, which was to say it felt a thousand times larger than it was, because so complex and seething. Its outer boundary was understood to run, on the western side, right up the bank of the Fleet Ditch. On the north, all of Fleet Lane lay within it, but the buildings on the north side of the street lay without; so a prisoner could walk down the lane, trailing a hand along the fronts of the buildings, but if he or she stepped thro’ a doorway it would be deemed an Escape, and set in motion a train of financial consequences for the Warden. Similarly on the street called the Great Old Bailey (which coincided with the eastern boundary) and Ludgate Hill (southern), though along the latter it was more complicated because the prison had thrust out three narrow tendrils along as many small Courts that depended from the south side of Ludgate. Thus the squarish, six-acre rules (as it was, for some reason, called) within which certain prisoners could roam about un-chained and unguarded, provided that they had taken out a Warrant of Attorney to confess a judgment to the amount of the debt with which the prisoner stands charged, with a defeazance on the back declaring it is to be void in case no escape should take place. This and other such securities, by very long-standing tradition, made it at least theoretically possible for those who’d been put in prison for debt-which meant most of the Fleet’s population-to move, and in some cases set up domiciles, outside of the Prison proper but within the rules, which was nearly indistinguishable from other seedy neighborhoods of London. The only way you’d really know you were in a prison was that certain chaps had odd habits of locomotion-in the interior of the six acres they’d move about like anyone else, but as they approached the boundary streets they’d become tentative, as if they could sense an invisible barrier, and would sidle along cautiously, lest a misstep or traffic accident push them over the border and make them guilty of Escape.

All of this was an accommodation that like other institutions in this country had grown up insensibly during the half-dozen centuries since the Norman Conquest. When those actual Normans had burst in on the place, they’d found a patch nearer to one acre in extent, shaped like the hoof-print of a horse, its flat side defined by the bank of the Fleet River (in those days, one phant’sied, a babbling rural freshet) and the rest of it bulging out to the east. In any case it had somehow picked up a privileged legal status: the Bishop of London had authority over all the land around it, but not this one-acre hoofprint. Which anomaly could presumably be traced back to some more or less interesting yarn involving mailed Angles whaling on each other with gory battle-axes, but none of that mattered now-what mattered was that this oddity had somehow been leveraged, over the better part of a millennium, into the hoofprint’s current status as the Prison for the Courts of Common Pleas, Chancery, Exchequer, and Curia Regis. It had served in like capacity for the Court of Star Chamber until that had been abolished, and so Drake had once been chained up here, before Daniel had been born. In those days, for that reason, it had been a more interesting place, and more profitable to the Warden. But now it was thought of almost entirely as a debtors’ prison. There were a few exceptions to that rule, which had lately become very important to Daniel. But in order for him to come to grips with the exceptions he had first to know and understand the norms.

This had entailed a negligible amount of preliminary research. Negligible because small, but also because he simply could not believe what he’d been reading about how the place was run. Like a general planning a campaign, he’d sought to draw up an Order of Battle: a list of the opposing forces, an inventory of their battalions. Yet no matter how many documents he perused, or debtors he bought gin for in the sad taverns that competed against cut-rate slaughterhouses and brothels for real estate in the rules, he could only turn up references to the following officials: