The procession bumps to a stop for some reason Jack can’t see. Getting into the Christian spirit, he takes this opportunity to whip off his purple cape and toss it to the priest. He then indicates that the priest is to give it to a poor old woman, over yonder, who has somehow fought her way to the front of the crowd.
The rich people are having their say now. The procession has passed Chancery Lane and travels now among the homes of the high and the mighty: Red Lyon Square, Waterhouse Square, Bloomsbury. All to the north side. To the south, Drury Lane plugs in, running up from Covent Garden and Long Acre. Which is to say that Dukes and Merchant Princes control one side of the parade route, whores and actresses the other. Captains of Commerce, worth millions of pounds sterling, practically topple from balconies and rooftops in their eagerness to shake their fists at him. The ladies on the other side are much more forgiving. Jack, on an impulse, stands up, shrugs off his coat, and throws it into a phalanx of prostitutes. It’s shredded in a heartbeat. He’s down to his cloth-of-gold vest now, already missing a few buttons. He turns around to make sure that Jack Ketch is getting a load of this. And indeed he is. The executioner was dismayed by Jack’s alms-giving at St. Sepulchre, but after a while he seemed to put it out of his mind, reckoning it was an aberration, a moment of weakness, on Shaftoe’s part. Which must have made it all the more painful for him when Shaftoe began to disrobe and hurl his priceless raiments into the Mobb.
At St. Giles’s, there’s another ritual: the procession stops so that bowls of ale may be brought out and given to the prisoners. Jack drinks several, paying for each with a golden button. By the time they start moving again, and round the Tottenham Court bend into Oxford Road, his vest is hanging loose on his shoulders, not a single button remaining.
A carriage is stopped in the intersection, like a boat run aground in the middle of a torrent. Standing atop it is a fat Duke who has positioned himself so that Jack will get a good long look at him as he is dragged away to the west. He screams something that must be very unpleasant, and, realizing that Jack cannot quite make out what he’s saying over the general noise, turns red in the face and begins to bellow and gesticulate with such fury that his wig shudders askew. But the meaner sort of people, leaving aside the occasional angry fishwife, are much more forgiving. At the crossing of Marybone Lane, where the countryside finally opens up to the north side of the road, a common-looking fellow comes trotting alongside with a pint of wine for Jack, and Jack pays him by handing him the golden vest.
They have reached Tyburn Cross. It is a desert the size of the Pacific Ocean, paved with human faces. A few tall objects protrude above the flood, here and there: a stranded carriage, a tree that’s about to collapse from the weight of the people who’ve climbed it, occasional men on horseback, and the Triple Tree itself. Which Jack does not see until he’s underneath it. It is an alienated frame-work of six mighty timbers-three vertical pilings and three cross-bars forming a triangle high above-beautiful in a strange way. The feeling is of entering a house without a roof, a home whose ceiling is Heaven.
A space about a stone’s throw in width has been cleared round the base of the Deadly Nevergreen. The crowd’s held at bay by pikemen, now reinforced by the King’s Own Black Torrent Guards. Some bestride their war-horses facing outwards with sabers drawn and pistols cocked; others have dismounted and fixed bayonets.
The preliminary hangings seem to take forever. Jack enlivens the proceedings by stripping off his breeches, whipping them around his head a few times, showering coins in all directions, and flinging them off into the crowd. Somewhere along the line he’s lost his periwig, too. So now he’s stripped down to white undergarments, shoes, and a noose. Going to his destiny a pauper, like that Lazarus the Ordinary read about in chapel this morning.
The others are all dead, decorating two of the Three-Legged Mare’s cross-bars. The third is reserved exclusively for Jack. He climbs up onto the cart, and the driver maneuvers it beneath the clear space. Jack’s eyes are tired from seeing so much, and so he tilts his head back for a moment so that all he can see is the sky, divided in half by the rope-worn timber above.
Gunfire sounds from nearby. He swings his chin down again. This is the first time he’s seen the crowd from a high vantage-point. Yet still he cannot find the edge of it. Gunpowder-smoke is drifting up from a black phalanx of Quakers or Barkers or some such. No one knows why.
Below, preparations are being made.
Flies explode from Jack Ketch’s man-rated butcher block as Ketch heaves a rolled bundle onto it. He loosens a couple of ties and shakes out the contents: a complete suite of disembowelling-tools. The table is a scab the size of a bed. Ketch distributes his tools around it, occasionally testing an edge with a thumb. He takes particular care with some rusty shackles. This is a way of letting Shaftoe know that he can expect to be alive and conscious during the later phases of the operation.
When they pulled out of the Press-Yard some hours ago, Ketch had every expectation of being a rich man at the end of the day. All of those golden buttons, all of those rich clothes, the coins in the pockets, all were for him. He was going to get out of debt and buy shoes for his children.
Now Ketch is going to get nothing. Shaftoe has avoided meeting Ketch’s eye until now, not knowing, and not caring, whether Ketch was responding to the relentless destruction of his fortune with curses, tears, or shocked disbelief. But they do look at each other now, Shaftoe up on his cart, and Ketch down at his abattoir, and Shaftoe sees that Ketch is perfectly calm. There’s no trace of the warm emotion he showed earlier, in the Press-Yard. It’s as if that never occurred. Even if Ketch removed his hood, the face beneath would be no more expressive than is the black leather mask. He has gone into a cool professional mode. In a way, revenge is easy for Ketch, because he need only carry out the Court’s sentence to the letter, and put him to death in terrorem.
Jack now wonders whether this strategy was a good idea. A younger man would be scared. But it’s normal to have second thoughts at this stage. It’s the sign of a good plan.
He is expected to say a few words now.
“I, Jack Shaftoe, also known as L’Emmerdeur, the King of the Vagabonds, Ali Zaybak, Quicksilver, Lord of Divine Fire, Jack the Coiner, do hereby repent of all my sins and commend my soul to God,” he says, “and ask only that I receive a decent Christian burial, with all of my quarters, if they can be rounded up, to be put together in the same box. And my head, too. For it is well known that the College of Physicians is gathered, as I speak, round their dissection-table on Warwick Lane, sharpening their scalpels, and getting ready to cut my head open so that they may rummage through my brains looking for the house where the Imp of the Perverse has dwelt lo these many years. I would prefer that this not happen. Having said that, Mr. Ketch, I turn myself over to your care. And I ask only that you check your knotwork twice over, for last night when Betty came to service me and these other fellows in the Condemned Hold, she was saying that you had quite lost your enthusiasm for the job, and were looking for a position as a maid-of-all-work. Step to it, man, the Physicians are waiting-”
And that is all he can get out, for during this last bit, Ketch has slung the loose end of the rope over the timber above, and pulled it taut. Very taut. Earlier, he’d promised to put a lot of slack in it and give Shaftoe a nice long drop, so that it would be over quickly; but that was before Shaftoe breached a certain implied contract. Ketch pulls the rope so taut that Jack is only appearing to stand on the cart; in truth, the tips of his toes are barely grazing the floor-boards now. “I shall tend to you in a few minutes’ time, Jack,” he mumbles into Shaftoe’s ear.