The Tower of London appears as a place of imprisonment and clandestine transmission in a fragmentary narrative about the Plan’s shifting identities. It holds a narrator known to the jailers as Seven Seas Jim and a fellow prisoner called Soapes; years later, the narrator’s account is recast as the testimony of someone who says he learned the secret of becoming another person from Soapes in the Tower.

Confinement and the Prisoners

The narrator describes being sent to the Tower after Verulam’s laughter and an accusation that has left him a “poor madman.” He says he has studied philosophy, jurisprudence, medicine, and theology with ardent zeal, yet knows no more than before. The prison does not bring him closer to certainty: learning and confinement coexist with an admission of bewilderment.

The jailers know the narrator only as Seven Seas Jim. In the same cell-bound account, he is accompanied by a “human wraith” who calls himself Soapes. The narrator’s account of his surroundings is therefore also an account of names that conceal or distort identity: the prisoner’s label, his companion’s adopted name, and the identities each seems to carry beyond the dungeon.

Messages Through the Wall

Soapes communicates by striking a spoon against the wall. The narrator says the marks form a mysterious alphabet that Soapes claimed to have received from John Trithemius. Through this improvised channel, Soapes sends messages to the prisoner in the next cell, identified as the count of Monsalvat. The Tower’s walls both isolate its prisoners and become the surface through which their secret network operates.

The account withholds what the messages say and what the count’s role entails. Its emphasis instead falls on the method and the chain of transmission: a spoon, a wall, an alphabet attributed to a learned authority, and a recipient behind another barrier. The prison thus becomes a setting in which secrecy is not simply preserved by silence; it is actively made and passed on under conditions of enforced separation.

The Tower as a School of Disguise

A later passage returns to the Tower from another point in the narrative’s layered history. The speaker says that Soapes told him everything there when he was Kelley, and identifies the secret as becoming someone else. He then describes using that knowledge to imprison Giuseppe Balsamo in the Fortress of San Leo and steal his secrets, after which Saint-Germain vanished and people believed the speaker to be the Conte di Cagliostro.

This retrospective connection gives the Tower a significance beyond its function as a prison. It is presented as the setting where a secret of identity and impersonation was transmitted, though the passage offers this claim through a voice already invested in aliases and transformations. The movement from Kelley to a speaker who claims other identities makes the Tower’s coded messages and concealed prisoners part of a broader pattern: confinement does not stop the circulation of secrets, and a name may be less a stable identity than a role assumed or imposed.