“His Majesty’s Privy Council have demanded a Trial of the Pyx,” Daniel reminds them, “and so provided there are no objections I say that we should give them satisfaction by fetching the necessary bits and conveying them to Star Chamber with no further ado.”

There are no objections and so Daniel turns significantly toward the locked door. The First Lord of the Treasury his Clarke, Writer of the Tallies, and Auditor of the Receipt of the King’s Exchequer moves into position on one side of him, and another Key-holder on the other. They make a second echelon behind another group of three Key-holders who form up directly in front of the door: the Dean of Westminster, the Chamberlain’s Deputy of the Receipt of the King’s Exchequer, and a representative of the Company of Goldsmiths. The Dean steps up, pulling off a key that has been dangling on his breast-bone on a golden rope, and sets to work on one of the three padlocks visible on this, the outer door. When he is finished, the other two Key-holders play their parts. The padlocks are carried away in pomp and laid out on the stone bench where important men make it their business to keep an eye on them. The great hasp is dismantled by a brawny Acolyte and the door is pulled open.

Two steps lead down into a small anteroom. The way is barred by a second door, no less formidable than the first. Daniel steps forward and down in to this space, takes out his key, and after a few moments’ trial and error, works out which lock it is meant to open. That achieved, he ascends back to cloister level, for there is only room there for one Key-holder and one lanthorn-man. Presently all three inner-door locks have been removed, and brought out into the light, and the hasp is undone. Eyes turn to Daniel again. He goes down in there and puts his shoulder to the door and shoves. It swings halfway open and stops resolutely, as he knew it would. The vault beyond is twice as ancient as the Chapter House. It was rifled during some 13th-Century disturbance-for this is where the Abbey stores its plate and other treasures-and so they installed a stone kerb on the floor so that the door could not be swung fully a-gape, and any future looters would have to ferry the goods out one bauble at a time, as opposed to by the chest-load.

It is Daniel’s privilege now to go in, so he takes possession of a lanthorn and side-steps into the Pyx chamber-then quells a misanthropic urge to slam it behind him and bar it, and live here for a thousand years on the Philosopher’s Stone. The place is bigger than he’d expected: thirty feet square, with a single squat pillar in the center holding up the four low-slung vaults that converge there and give the place such a hunched, dwarvish feel. After all of this fuss, Daniel’s bemused to find that it is just a dusty old storage-cellar with black lock-boxes strewn about according to no especial plan.

Others follow him in. Some seem to know their way around the place. They converge on certain of the treasure-chests, and there is much more finagling with keys. The last group to sack the place were Cromwell’s men, who shot the locks off the chests and helped themselves to the Coronation regalia. But Cromwell had needed a sound coinage as badly as any King of old, and so he’d had to mend the chests and replace the locks. Daniel is tempted to point this out as he watches hereditary nobles fumbling with the Puritan hard-ware, but he stifles himself.

Three important objects come out from their respective lock-boxes:

(item) A leather case containing Terrible Documents: the counterpanes of the indentures signed by Isaac and other Mint officials. The First Lord of the Treasury his Clarke takes possession of these.

(item) A boxy wooden chest containing standard weights.

(item) A broader and flatter chest containing standard plates: sheets of precious metal of known fineness, produced in the furnaces of the Company of Goldsmiths. It is against these that Isaac’s coins are to be compared.

These three treasures are borne up into the Cloister as if they were royal triplets being trotted out for some fresh air. Long and loud is the clicking of keys and clanging of hasps in their wake. This rite must have been a lot more efficient, Daniel reflects, back in the days when Parliament and the Council both held their deliberations a few paces away in the Chapter House. When the monks booted them out, there must have been some discussion along the lines of “Oh yes, and one of these days we must fetch the Pyx stuff out of the Abbey and store it where it is actually used.” But that was one of those errands that, if not achieved in the first twelve hours, would remain undone centuries later. And, as all of this was shewing, the fetching-out of these three items had long since ossified into a ceremony.

A procession forms up and marches back along the Cloister, into the Transept of the Abbey, and across the Quire. The demolition-crews taking down the galleries in the North Transept seem to sense that something very grave is underway, and shush one another, and clear a path for them; some take their hats off, others stand at attention, holding their crowbars at parade rest. As soon as the last of the parade has gone out the north door, they descend back into joyous mayhem.

The procession right-faces as it clears the door, entering in to a pass between the Abbey and St. Margaret’s Church. Their path toward the River is squarely barred by the gloomy, encrusted hulk of Westminster Hall. To the left or north end of it lie those encrustations belonging to the Exchequer, including the Star Chamber. This is where Sir Isaac Newton’s travail began, back in June. It is where the final settling of accounts is going to take place now, or as soon as Daniel and the others cross the street.

IT IS A WHOLE new look for the chapel: the black window treatments have been pulled down, and sentenced to a period of confinement, not to exceed one-eighth of a year, in a wooden box where moths will feed upon them. Light is cautiously admitted through the window-grates. The tourists in the back pews are absent. On the altar before the Condemned pew, the coffin has been replaced with a platter of bread and wine. The wine looks as if it’s to be metered out in thimbles, which is an offense to Jack. For if the Church believes, as it plainly does, that a little bit of communion wine is a good thing, then why should not a bucket of it be excellent?

But there’ll be plenty of opportunities to get drunk on the way to Tyburn, and so this is a mere passing flicker of annoyance. He is here to be Churchified. It is the next in the steadily building rite of mortifications and tortures that began with the Bell-Man last night and will culminate, in a few hours, with quartering.

Jack Shaftoe is brought in separately, after the wretches who spent the night in the Condemned Hold have already been frogmarched up the aisle and chained to the awful Pew. He feels like a bride, the last one into the church, the one all heads turn to look at. As well they might! For Jack got up two hours ago, not wanting to waste a single minute of this most special of all days, and has spent the intervening time getting dressed up in his Hanging-Suit.

He does not know whence the Hanging-Suit came. It arrived at dawn, delivered, the turnkey insisted, by a blond man who roared up in an immense black carriage, and did not speak a word.

Several boxes were needed to contain the entire Hanging-Suit. By the time Jack first saw it, they’d all been gone through by the gaolers, to make sure that no shivs, pistols, saws, or Infernal Devices were wrapped up in the finery. So all was in disarray, all blotched with grimy hand-prints. And yet the inherent majesty of the Hanging-Suit was in no way diminished.

The innermost of the Hanging-Suit’s three layers-the part that touches Jack-comprises white drawers of Egyptian cotton, white hose of Turkish silk, and a shirt made from enough fine white Irish linen to keep a company of Foot in tourniquets and bandages through a brief foreign war. And it must be understood that the adjective “white” here means a true, blinding salt-white, and not the dirty beige that passes for white in poorly illuminated textile markets.