The Confusion

A Hay-rick, St.-Malo, France
9 APRIL 1692

The mind is its own place, and in it self

Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.

–MILTON,

Paradise Lost

“THIS MUST BE how syphilis spreads: blokes like me, hopping from place to place.”

“Why, Bob! I don’t believe anyone’s ever said anything quite so romantick to me.”

“I can’t guess what you were expecting when you roger an old sergeant in hay.”

“Come, lace me back up.”

“Would you hold your hair up out of the way? There, that’s better…”

“…”

“…tedious work, ain’t it?”

“Oh, stop complaining.”

“I’ve no complaints. But we could have left this bit on, you know.”

“Yes, and the stockings as well, and we could have done it standing up, and you with your boots and breeches on. But for me to enjoy it, Bob, I require a sense of abandon, of freedom, that only comes with removal of clothes.”

“This tight enough?”

“It is fine…for the same reason, Bob, I could do without your idle ruminations on syphilis, and how it spreads.”

“I don’t have it, mind you. Haven’t rogered anyone in years.”

“Nor do I. And neither have I.”

“What d’you mean, you told me you’ve a baby boy, six months old-”

“Last time we met. Now, seven months.”

“Be that as it may, how can you say you haven’t rogered anyone in years?”

“Sex with my husband I leave out of the reckoning altogether.”

“Strikes me as a large omission.”

“It would not, if you had ever had sex with Etienne de Lavardac, duc d’Arcachon.”

“Can’t say as I have, Madame.”

“Unless you did, and forgot about it. At any rate-he has been doing it to me again lately.”

“Lately…ah. You are saying that there was a cessation, round about the time of the birth of number two, and now he is trying for three.”

“In his mind they are One and Two respectively. For the first, being a bastard, is a zero; which means a nullity, something that does not exist.”

“That-the bastard I mean-is the one you had round about the time I shipped out to Dundalk, and you got marooned in Dunkerque?”

“Yes. Why?”

“Just refreshing my memory, my lady, no need to be getting all stiff in the spine-cor! It’s gone loose, I shall have to re-lace from the beginning.”

“It is not necessary. Just get to work buttoning up the bodice.”

“Got ripped a bit, I’m afraid.”

“I’ll have it mended. Come, I am apprehensive that someone will happen along and discover us.”

“Ah, but not to worry-I’m naked!”

“How is it better to be naked?”

“As long as I keep my mouth shut, I’ll be indistinguishable from one of your French nobility. They’ll run away in terror.”

“Especially when they see your scars. Very impressive.”

“You would never think so, if you had any notion of the pain that comes with these scars, the weakness, the helplessness-draining pus for months-not knowing from one moment to the next whether you shall live or die-”

“You forget that I have given birth twice.”

“Touche. Ah, but now you’ve brought me back round to my topic.”

“What is your topic?”

“You never talk about the bastard.”

“Perhaps, from that, you should collect that I do not wish to speak of him.”

“I was merely asking as a routine courtesy, as is common among parents.”

“How are Jack’s boys?”

“Jimmy and Danny are Regimental boys like their father and nuncle. If they’re doing as they ought to-which is unlikely-they are, at this moment, peeling potatoes at our camp outside of Cherbourg.”

“Do they have any inkling that you are acting as a spy for Marlborough?”

“Why, what an impolite question, Madame la duchesse! I am in no way certain that I am a spy. Haven’t made up my mind yet. Haven’t sent any information his way.”

“Well, when you decide to do so, you may send it through me.”

“If I decide to do so.”

“You will. An invasion of England is planned, is it not?”

“When French and Irish regiments march up to the tip of the Cotentin Peninsula and form great camps in the spring-time, it does make one tend to think ’long those lines, don’t it?”

“In the end you’ll not suffer England to be invaded. You’ll inform Marlborough.”

“Marlborough’s in disgrace. He and his meddlesome wife got on the wrong side of William and Mary. He had to sell his offices, his commissions. He is nothing now.”

“Yes, it is the talk of every salon in Versailles. But if England is invaded, he will be un-disgraced very rapidly, and put at the head of some regiments. And you will rally to him.”

“As you seem so certain of these things, I deem all your questions answered, madame-so I turn them round. Does the Duke of Arcachon have any inkling that you are a spy?”

“Your supposition is mistaken. I spied for England once. Now I do it for myself.”

“Ah. So, if we are to cross the Channel, you should like to know of it for your own purposes.”

“You say this-‘for your own purposes’-as if I am the only one in the world who had purposes.”

“Very well, very well…damned lot of buttons, ain’t it?”

“You did not seem to mind so much when you were undoing them ten minutes ago.”

“Twenty minutes, by your leave, madame, do allow me some pride. Ten minutes! Am I really so perfunctory?”

“Perhaps I am.”

“Hmm, now, that is an unusual turning of the tables…it is supposed to be he who is perfunctory and selfish, and she who wants to stretch it out.”

“Ah, but I did stretch it out, Sergeant, when I was inspecting it for signs of the French Pox. And a long stretch it was.”

“You try to change the subject, and to distract me with flattery-but this methodical inspection of my yard is further proof of the businesslike nature of the transaction just concluded, is it not?”

“Very well…I hope that Number Three, as you count them, or Two, as Etienne does, will be half-Shaftoe rather than half-Lavardac, and, in consequence, altogether fitter, handsomer, and cleverer than Number Two/One, bless his poor little heart.”

“I…I…I am shocked!”

“Why so shocked, you who’ve been in battles and seen, and done, the worst that men can do?”

“P’raps that is not so terrible, set against the worst that women can do.”

“You protest too much. You are not serious. Though ’tis true there are terrible women in the world, I am not one of them.”

“Why, to use a man in such a way…am I to have no knowledge of my own offspring!?”

“Why did you not ask such penetrating questions prior to fucking me in a haystack, Sergeant Shaftoe? Were you not aware, until now, that fucking leads to babies?”

“Very well, very well…that is not why I am shocked.”

“Why then, Bob?”

“Of course, I know you don’t really fancy me. So, ’tis not that I have been let down on that score.”

“Just as I know you do not really fancy me.”

“Of course not. Though you are fetching, a bit.”

“Just as are you in your own mottled way, Bob.”

“But I always assumed that you had me simply because you couldn’t have Jack.”

“Just as you have me because you can’t have Abigail?”

“Just so, madame. But it did never enter my head that it was, at root, a baby-making proposition…what is wrong with Number Two/One?”

“Lucien is, to use an English expression, a funny-looking kid. ’Tis common among Lavardacs. Moreover, he is listless and slow to thrive.”

“What of Number One/Null?”

“The most beautiful child who ever lived. Bright, happy, vigorous, altogether radiant.”

“What’s his name?”

“He was baptized Jean-Jacques.”

“I can guess where the Jacques is from.”

“Yes, and the Jean is from Jean Bart.”

“You named your firstborn after a pirate and a Vagabond?”

“Don’t be so haughty. One of them is your brother, after all.”

“But why this careful phrasing: ‘He was baptized Jean-Jacques’?”

“He answers to Johann.”

“How’s that again?”

“Johann. Johann von Hacklheber.”

“Peculiar name that, for the bastard of a French duchess.”

“He has been…visiting in Leipzig for a few days short of eighteen months. When he went there, he was not quite a year and a half old. I have got reports of him from friends who dwell in that part of the world, and they inform me that he is called by the name Johann von Hacklheber there.”

“Now, anything with a ‘von’ in it is a noble name-like ‘de’ here, am I right?”

“Oh yes. He dwells in the household of a German baron.”

“I know nothing of the ways of Continental nobility, but it strikes me as an unusual sort of arrangement.”

“You have no idea.”

“You may not know it, Madame, but you have got a sort of burning glow about the face and eyes now, a bit like during sex, but different.”

“It is another form of desire, that’s all.”

“You want the boy back. You are not happy with the arrangement…oh, Jesus!”

“Go ahead and say it.”

“He was taken from you!?”

“Yes.”

“Jesus. Why!?”

“Never mind. My purpose is to get to him who took my boy, and…”

“Get your boy back, I assume?”

“…”

“Or, to judge from the look on your face, perhaps I should not make assumptions.”

“Let me tell you what is truly evil about what was done to me eighteen months ago.”

“I am listening.”

“You are probably phant’sying parallels, similitudes, between what was done to your Abigail and what was done to my Jean-Jacques. But put such thoughts out of your mind. Abigail is a slave, held against her will, misused. A prisoner. This is no longer true of my Jean-Jacques. He is better off as Johann in Leipzig than he was as Jean-Jacques in Versailles. The captors of Abigail are imbeciles-guilty of a failure of imagination. By keeping her in a miserable estate, they make you miserable, ’tis true-but your path is clear: It is the path so familiar from myths and legends, the path of righteous fury, revenge, retribution, rescue. Lothar von Hacklheber has done something infinitely more cruel. He has made my boy happy. If I were able, somehow, to go to Leipzig and steal him back, the child would be terrified and miserable. And perhaps justly so, for when I got back I should have no choice but to deposit him in some Church orphanage outside of Versailles to be raised by nuns and made over into a Jesuit priest.”

“Hoosh. I am glad for my own sake, madame, that I was not anywhere near you at the moment when you first came to understand this…”

“…”

“Why are you staring at me thus? It makes me think I had better put my clothes back on-perhaps arm myself as well.”

“…”

“Are you only just understanding it now!?”

“If an idea is terrible enough, the mind is unwilling to swallow it in one go, but regurgitates and chews it like cud many times before it goes down for good. This is one that I have been chewing on for more than a year. It took me several weeks, after Jean-Jacques was abducted, for me to establish his whereabouts. By the time I could formulate even a hasty and ill-conceived plan to go fetch him back, I was pregnant with Lucien. It is only now that Lucien has been born, and I have recovered from it, that I can consider taking any steps in the matter of Jean-Jacques. And now it is too late. There. Done. I have swallowed it.”

“All right. I could see this coming. Put your head there on my breastbone, madame, I’ll hold you in my arms, so you don’t collapse, or come undone. Sob all you want, I have you, no one’s looking, we have time.”

“…”

“…”

“…”

“Now that you mention it, my lady, to have the love of my life enslaved and raped by a syphilitic lord does seem quite mild by comparison.”

“I cannot tell if you are being sarcastic.”

“Neither can I, madame, I honestly cannot. But tell me this: If you cannot get your boy back without destroying his welfare, then what do you intend?”

“In pondering this very question I have hesitated, and in hesitating I have only made matters worse. Soon I shall act.”

“And what is the end you have fixed on?”

“I mean to end up, in some sense, with my boot on the neck of Lothar von Hacklheber, and him looking up helpless into my eyes.”

“Well. Well! Let me just say that the last bloke who had me in such a fix was the Earl of Upnor, and-”

“My powers of organization exceed those of the late Upnor by a significant margin, and so I intend to arrange matters so that I will not end up being beaten to death with a stick by an Irishman.”

“Ah. That is good news.”

“Tell me everything about what is being prepared around Cherbourg, Sergeant Shaftoe, whether you intend for it to be relayed to Marlborough, or not.”

“Very well. But how will this intelligence be of any help to you in your machinations against-oh, never mind. You’re glowering at me.”

“You speak so knowingly of my machinations, as if I were some ridiculous figure in an Italian opera, who does naught but machinate; yet if you could follow me about, you would observe a tired mother who follows her husband from Versailles to St.-Malo, and suckles her infant, and occasionally throws a dinner party, and perhaps once or twice a year fucks a cryptologist in a carriage, or a sergeant in a haystack.”

“How will this lead to your boot on Lothar’s throat again? Never mind, never mind. I’m certain I’d never understand it anyway.”

“You are in good company. If I do it right, not even Lothar will understand it.”