“He’ll not trouble you again, Mister Ellis. I give you my word on it. Mostly he’s close kept in my own house, under my cognizance, and never troubles nobody. But tonight he slipped out when we wasn’t looking and fetched up here. We were out looking for him when we heard the commotion.”
“It’s lucky for me you did,” said I. “Another minute and I wouldn’t be talking to you now. But surely he belongs in Bedlam. Or some other hospital for the distracted and lunatic.”
“Bedlam, Mister Ellis? And have him chained to a wall like a dog? To be laughed at like an animal?” said one of the Yeoman Warders. “Mister Twistleton is our friend, sir. We couldn’t let that happen to him.”
“But he’s dangerous.”
“Most of the time he’s exactly as you see him now. Quite calm in himself. Don’t make us send him there, Mister Ellis.”
“Me? I don’t apprehend how any of you are under my compulsion, Mister Bull. His care is your own affair.”
“It won’t be if you report the matter, sir.”
“Christ Jesus have mercy upon us,” shouted Mister Twistleton.
“You see? Even he asks your indulgence,” said Rohan.
I sighed, exasperated at this turn of events: that I should be attacked in my own bed, near strangled and then asked to forget all about it, as if this had been some foolish schoolboy prank and not a case of attempted murder. It seemed a perfect mockery of the Tower’s reputation for security, how a lunatic should be allowed to wander about the place with no more restraint than some wretched raven.
“Then I must have your word that he will be kept under lock and key, at least at night,” said I. “The next person might not be so lucky as I was.”
“You shall have my word,” said Rohan. “Right willingly.”
I nodded my grudging assent, for I seemed to have little choice in the matter. From what Newton had told me, relations betweenthe Mint and the Ordnance were already quite bad enough without my becoming the author of yet more bad feeling. “What was it that put him out of his wits?” I asked.
“The screams,” said Mister Twistleton. “I hear the screams, you see. Of them as have died in this place. They never stop.”
Sergeant Rohan clapped me on the shoulder. “You’re a good fellow, Mister Ellis,” he said. “For a Minter, that is. He’ll not trouble you again, I promise you that.”
In the days and weeks that followed, I often saw Mister Twistleton about the Tower and always accompanied by a member of the Ordnance; and in truth he always seemed well enough not to be shut up in a madhouse, so that I congratulated myself how I had made a most charitable judgement in the matter; and it was several months afterward before I wondered if I had not made a dreadful mistake.
With public matters in a most sad condition and the country hardly fit to be governed, the Mint worked twenty hours a day, six days a week. As did Newton, for although he had nothing to do with the organising and stimulating of the recoinage, he slept very little, and on the rare occasions when he was not about the business of hunting coiners and clippers, he would occupy himself with the devising of a solution for some mathematic problem or other that would have been set by one of his many mischievous correspondents—for it was their most earnest desire to catch him out in his calculations. But there was always plenty for us to do, and soon we were frequent visitors to the Fleet Prison or to Newgate, to take depositions of evidence from various rogues and scoundrels, many of whom suffered the full penalty of the law.
I mention just one of these cases now, not because it pertains to the telling of this horrible and secret story, which greatly vexed my master for almost a whole year, but to show how many other legal matters at the same time were occupying his virtuoso mind.
The Lords Justices of England ruled the country in the absence of the King, who was fighting the French, with no great success, in Flanders. They had received a letter from a William Chaloner, a most clever and egregious forger, who alleged that money had been coined in the Tower containing less than its proper weight of silver, that false guineas had been made there, and that blanks and guinea stamps had been stolen out of the Mint. My master was ordered by their Lordships to investigate these allegations, which he was obliged to do, although he knew full well that Chaloner was Mercury himself when it came to rhetoric and that he had sold their Lordships a worthless jade. In the meantime, Peter Cooke, a gentleman lately condemned to death for coining, sought to bilk the hangman by telling us that the same Chaloner had been his accomplice, as were others.
How these scoundrels did peach upon each other, for my master had no sooner heard from Cooke, than Thomas White, another villain squeamishly affected by sentence of death, accused John Hunter, who worked at the Mint, of supplying official guinea dies to Chaloner. He also named as coiners Robert Charnock, a notorious Jacobite who had been recently executed for his part in the treasonous plot against King William of Sir John Fenwick; James Pritchard, of Colonel Windsor’s regiment of horse guards; and a man named Jones, about whom little or nothing was known. White had been convicted on the evidence of Scotch Robin, who had been an engraver at the Mint, and was a very leaky fellow, most lachrymose; and although my master suspected his sincerity, he always managed to betray at least one more of his friends under Newton’s close questioning.
It was a source of no small wonder to me, that a man who had kept himself close-closeted in Cambridge for a quarter century should prove such an expert interrogator. Sometimes Newton seemed stern and unforgiving and promised White that he would hang before the week was out if he concealed any other criminals; and then, at other times, my master did counterfeit to White such friendship and mirth that a man might have thought they were cousins. By these advocate’s tricks, which Newton seemed to know by instinct, White named five others, which earned him another reprieve.
Most of these rogues made a good conscience of their deeds and accomplices, but a few tried to keep up the lie, and had the cunning to cry a great while and talk and blubber that they knew nothing at all. Newton was not a man who was easy to trick and with those who tried he was most unforgiving, as if anyone that filled his mind with false information was guilty of something even more heinous than coining. With Peter Cooke, who had sought repeatedly to trick my master most vexatiously, the Doctor proved he could be as vindictive as the Three Furies.
First, we visited the wretched man in his Newgate dungeon, as did several hundred others—for it is the custom in England to view the condemned man, as a visitor to the Tower might look at the lions in the Barbican. Second, we attended the foolish miscreant’s condemned sermon, where Newton fixed his eye upon Cooke, who sat alone in his segregated pew, in front of his own open coffin. And still not full-gorged with his revenge, for so I perceived it, my master insisted that we go to Tyburn and see Cooke make his terrible end.
I remember it well, for it was the first time that I saw a man hanged, drawn and quartered, which is a beastly business. But it was unusual besides because Newton seldomly attended the executions of those he prosecuted.
“I think it is right and proper,” he said by way of justifying himself, “that, as officers of the law, occasionally we should oblige ourselves to witness the fate to which our investigations lead some of these transgressors. So that we may conduct ourselves with a proper gravity, and that we shall not make our accusations lightly. Do you not agree, sir?”
“Yes sir, if you say so,” I said weakly, for I had little appetite for the spectacle.
Cooke, who was a brawny fellow, was drawn on a hurdle in his shift to the place of execution, with the halter wound around his waist and the noose in his hand. To my way of thinking he kept his countenance well, although the hangman rode with him upon the hurdle, and all the time held the axe which Cooke knew would shortly sever his limbs. I shook merely to contemplate the instrument of torture.
We were almost an hour at Tyburn, Cooke delaying the time by long prayers, one after another, until finally, half fainting with fright, he was dragged up the ladder by the hangman, who fixed his halter upon the beam and then threw him off, whereupon the mob set up such a roar of excitement and pressed toward the scaffold that I thought we would be crushed.
The hangman had judged it nicely, for Cooke’s toes touched the scaffold so that he was quite alive when the hangman cut him down and, knife in hand, fell upon his victim like one of Caesar’s bloody assassins. The crowd, much quietened, groaned as one when the hangman, gutting Cooke like an old goat, sliced open his belly, stuffed in his hand and drew it out again holding a handful of steaming tripes, for the day was cold; and these he burned on a brazier in front of the still visibly breathing man who, but for the noose still constricting his neck, would surely have
