The Confusion

Cabin of Meteore, off Cherbourg, France
2 JUNE 1692

FOR THREE DAYS Meteore had been swinging about her anchor in a languid circle like the shadow on a sundial, driven by the comings and goings of the tides. Eliza lived in a great cabin at the stern. Had this been a warship or a merchantman, this would have been the private domain of the captain. One of its walls consisted of an arc of windows, as broad as the whole ship, staring abaft. When Eliza’s view through those windows consisted of the town of Cherbourg, it meant that the tide was flooding in from the Channel, pushing Meteore east-southeast at the end of her cable. When the tide ebbed, then, and Meteore swung round the other way, she ought to have enjoyed a view out to sea. Instead, for three days she had seen nothing but fog: a murk into which all her carefully laid plans had been slowly dissolving. Very occasionally, loud booming noises would come out of it as gunners on the lost ships would take aim and fire at dark patches that were making suspicious noises. But for the most part it was a source of cacophonous music: sailors blowing trumpets and whistles, beating drums, and calling out in English, Dutch, or French and rattling chains as they raised or lowered anchors, depending on whether they judged it less hazardous to drift with the tide or stay in one place.

The two fleets-to the west, forty-five French ships under Admiral de Tourville, and to the east, ninety-nine Dutch and English ships under Admiral Russell-had collided in plain view of Cherbourg on the 29th, and joined battle. Tourville had driven hard into the center of Russell’s line, so careless of the risk of being flanked that he had flanked himself. Standing on Meteore’s maintop watching the battle through a perspective-glass, Eliza had almost phant’sied she could read Tourville’s mind: He believed that the great ships in Russell’s center were under command of Jacobites who would strike their colors and run up Stuart flags when he bore in close. Instead of which they had opened fire, and it had developed into a full engagement.

On behalf of Jean Bart, Eliza had of late campaigned in the salons of Versailles to persuade young courtiers that the navy was as gallant as the army. Few had taken the bait. For one glorious hour in the Channel off Cherbourg, a battle had played out that, if only Versailles could have seen it, would have left the army denuded of talent for years to come. Never again would Eliza have had to use words to convey the glamour of naval combat, for it was all there plainly to be seen. The flagship of Admiral Tourville was Soleil Royal, new, with a hundred guns; as fine a ship as any afloat, for French shipwrights had caught up with and even surpassed the Dutch in recent years. Admiral Russell’s flagship was Britannia, also with a hundred guns. These two vessels went after each other like fighting cocks. There was no standing off to watch the battle from a remove, no tedious maneuver and counter-maneuver of the line of battle. The worst of the fighting was not delegated to lesser ships and lower ranks. Like two medieval kings jousting in the lists, Soleil Royal and Britannia went at each other full-bore, each giving as good as it got. Before long they had crippled each other. Only then did Admiral Tourville seem to comprehend that none of the English ships would be coming over to his side-which meant he was outnumbered by more than two to one. New signals went up on the half-ruined Soleil Royal. The French fleet suspended the attack and drew off in good order. They had engaged a force double their size, rendered the opposing flagship useless, and stood down, all without losing a single vessel. More importantly to Eliza, the twenty thousand French and Irish soldiers camped outside of Cherbourg-mostly around La Hougue, ten or fifteen miles away-were still safe on terra firma. James Stuart, who had been King of England, and phant’sied he still was, had come out from his pretend Court at St.-Germain to head up the invasion; presumably he had watched this battle from some high place nearby. He had just suffered one more rude shock in a life that had been full of them: Not a single one of the British ships-his ships-had shown the slightest inclination to take his part in the dispute. It had to be obvious, even to him, that there would be no invasion.

Eliza would never have been so fatuous as to have said that the day had gone perfectly. For aboard those ships scuttling about on the water were men, and every bloom of powder-smoke meant balls of metal flying through the air and sometimes carrying away legs, or lives. But not a single ship had gone down; it was no longer possible to take seriously the possibility of an invasion; and Eliza’s plan was ticking along like a watch.

Then the wind had died, and the brassy haze that had lain on the water for most of that day had congealed into fog. It had come down like a grey velvet curtain terminating the first act of an opera, which was well enough; except that then it had got stuck, and there had been no second, third, fourth, or fifth Acts; only endless, sporadic noises off as the fleets had drifted to and fro, firing at phantoms. The rest of the 29th, fog; the 30th, fog; the 31st, fog; the 1st of June, fog! From time to time some intrepid sailors would reach shore in a longboat and grope their way along the coast until they found Cherbourg, and they would bring news. In this way they learned, for example, that some French ships (anchored) and some English ones (drifting) had become tangled together in the murk on the second day, and had at each other with cutlasses until the tide had drawn them apart. But really very little happened. On the first day Eliza had wished that all of Versailles could have witnessed the duel of the flagships; every hour since then, she had thanked Providence that no courtiers were anywhere nearby to see this travesty; or (what would was worse) to not see it. She did not envy Pontchartrain and Etienne, who would have to approach the King soon and request more money for the navy. She could not guess what the King might say, for he was unfailingly civil; but she knew what he would be thinking: Why should I scrape my Treasury floor to build wooden tubs so that men may bump into one another in fog?

She had all but given up hope for her plan when the sun had gone down behind the fog last night. “If I see the sun rise tomorrow morning,” she had said, “then perhaps there is a way; if not, the work of the last two months is wasted, and I shall begin all over again.”

At first light today she had gazed into the eastern sky half hoping to see nothing but a cliff of fog, for then her plan would have been unequivocally dead, which would have been altogether simpler and easier. Instead she had seen the disk of the sun, as crisp, and about as bright, as a copper coin resting on a bed of ashes.

She closed her eyes; invoked the Devil and the Heavenly Father in the same sentence, in case either of them was listening; and closed the shutters on three of the cabin windows, while leaving the others open. As Meteore swung round on the morning tide, and exposed her gilded backside to the town, this signal would become visible to those who had been watching for it.

She began to pack some goods into a bag: first, five Bills of Exchange, which she wrapped up in a wallet of skins, oiled to baffle moisture. Then a rolled blanket. Scarves. A comb and some pins, clips, and ribbons for suppressing her hair. Some silver coins, mostly Pieces of Eight chopped into wedge-shaped bits, certain to astonish the English.

The rooves of Cherbourg were glowing, seemingly not with the reflected light of the sun, but rather from within, like hot irons pulled from the forge. A boom sounded from far off, then another, then a ripple of them.

Then someone knocked on her door and her skeleton practically jumped free of her skin; for she phant’sied somehow it was a handful of wayward grapeshot striking Meteore. She dropped her bag on the floor and kicked it under her bed, then went to the door and unlatched it. It was Brigitte, her lady-in-waiting.

“It is Monsieur d’Ascot to call on you, my lady.”

“Bit early.”

“Nevertheless, he is here.”

“A few minutes while I make myself presentable.”

“Shall I help you?”

“No, for I am not really going to make myself presentable. I make him wait because I can, and because it is expected, and because he deserves to be punished for coming so early.”

“PARDON ME, MADAME, for having disturbed your morning,” said William, Viscount Ascot, in French that sounded as if he’d practiced it while he’d been waiting. Eliza thought of asking him to speak English; but he’d probably take it as an insult. “I was asked to keep you apprised of any news concerning the invasion.”

This meant several things. First of all, in spite of the fact that James Stuart had showed up, there must be someone competent still in charge and making information wash up and down the chain of command. Second, this man, Ascot, must be one of the agents who were supposed to carry the Bills of Exchange to London. Third, nothing was going to happen; for if Ascot and the other four agents were going to do it today, all five would have showed up at dawn, and they’d already be fanning out across the Channel in separate boats, each with a Bill of Exchange in his breast pocket.

“Time is drawing very short,” Eliza remarked. “The Bills must be presented in London three days from now. They must be sent on their way this morning, or else I might as well tear them up.”

“Yes, madame,” said Ascot. “The King and Council are aware of it.” He meant James Stuart and his claque. As if to emphasize this, he gazed out the window into Cherbourg. Somewhere in the town, on some church-steeple, there must be signalmen poised to raise flags as messages came in from the headquarters at La Hougue. “The fog is lifting!” he exclaimed. “When I was strolling on the upperdeck just now, madame, I was able to see one or two miles out into the Channel.”

“And what did you observe, monsieur?”

“Boats coming in, madame.”

“Under sail or-”

“No, for the wind is only just coming up. They are longboats, with sailors pulling lustily at the oars. Some of them are towing a damaged ship-a big one.”

“Do you think it might be the Soleil Royal?”

“Quite possibly, madame. Or”-Ascot smiled-“perhaps what is left of Britannia.”

This made Eliza dislike Ascot somehow; for he was after all an Englishman. He was straining visibly to say things he guessed she would like to hear; and his guesses were not very interesting. She was silent for a moment, out of sheer hopelessness. Into that silence Ascot put the words “On those longboats will be information, madame; the information that the King of England shall require to make his decision.”

Eliza nodded as if she accepted this; but what she was thinking was, first, How could even a syphilitic be so insane as to phant’sy that the invasion might still happen and, second, If he doesn’t cancel it soon I shall have a grave problem on my hands. She glanced involuntarily at the cabin windows, and the three closed shutters. They’d been visible from Cherbourg for at least half an hour now. Things were in motion that she could no longer control.

For a minute or two it had been possible to hear shouting abovedecks, which aboard ship was a wholly usual thing; more so when longboats were coming in from the Channel bearing news. Eliza had paid no attention to it. Now, though, they heard a thunking splash. A man, or something as big as a man, going overboard.

“Madame, I beg your leave to investigate-” began Ascot.

“Go, go!” said Eliza in English; which startled Ascot so much that he reverted to it as he opened the cabin door.

“I can’t imagine what this is all about-what on earth-”

Eliza followed him out the hatch into a dark and somewhat cluttered space sheltered beneath the poop deck. But in a few strides they had emerged onto the open upperdeck of Meteore. From here they enjoyed a clear view forward, which meant, out of the harbor and into the waters of the Channel. As Ascot had mentioned, many longboats were coming in. Too many, to Eliza’s suspicious eye; for how many were really needed, to carry a few bits of news? Bright patches shone out here and there in the fog on the Channel: sunlight illuminating squares of canvas that had been strung up to catch the freshening breeze.

As Ascot had mentioned, one ship-a big one-was a good deal closer. It was not so much being towed by longboats as being washed into the harbor by the tide. It had somehow caught a sunbeam that had pierced a loop-hole in the fog. Or so Eliza thought when she first caught sight of it out the corner of her eye. When she looked at it full on, though, she realized it was making its own light. It was burning. It was, or had been, Soleil Royal.

Her attention was diverted by another thunk-splash, then another. It could no longer be denied that men were jumping off the ship.

Several of the sailors on the upperdeck were men she had never laid eyes on before. And to judge from the curious way they were gazing about, they were new to Meteore.

Just ahead of them a man vaulted over the upperdeck railing on to the ship. This was not supposed to happen. There was nothing out there-it was like a stranger jumping into a second-storey window.

“I say!” exclaimed Ascot, still stuck in English. “I do say!”

The newcomer turned to face Ascot. His answer was as follows: “Fucking whoreson Jacobite traitor!” He was raising one arm as he delivered this remark, and punctuated the sentence by turning Ascot’s head into a pink spout. The thing in his hand was a blunderbuss.

Eliza went back into the dark space beneath the poop deck and began pulling doors open. The doors led to cabins where Brigitte, Nicole, and a maidservant were lodged. “Into my cabin now, no questions!”

She got them all into the big cabin: four women in all. Brigitte was of a mind to heave furniture against the door. But that did not work as well here as it would have ashore, since the significant furniture was bolted down. Some trunks, a chair, and a mattress were all that they could shift for in the way of a barricade. Eliza urged them all to bend their efforts to this task, even though she knew it was absurd. A glance out the windows told her that Meteore was moving. The English had cut her anchor cable, made her fast to a longboat or two, and were towing her out into the Channel. Better for them to attend to barricade-making than to think too hard about what this portended.

A most unsettling noise radiated through the air all round, and made their breakfasts quiver in their stomachs. Eliza went to a window and saw one of Cherbourg’s shore-batteries obnubilated by powder-smoke. The artillerymen had opened fire; she guessed they were hoping to sink Soleil Royal before she drifted into the anchorage and set fire to other ships, or exploded. She explained as much to her companions. Fortunately none of them was swift enough to ask how long it might be before the same batteries opened up on Meteore.

They had been ignored, for a time, by those who had taken the ship-which made perfect sense once Eliza understood that their intention was to take the entire vessel. But now that Meteore was under way, albeit slowly, English marines had begun to pound desultorily on the door of the cabin. Hammers and prybars were mined from tool-lockers. Splinters began to fly out of the wall-rather than waste effort on the barricaded door, they were simply smashing their way through a bulkhead.

Such was the noise that Eliza might almost have overlooked the sudden arrival of the immense one-armed man in her cabin. Almost; for he entered through a window, swinging in on the end of a rope, and a chunk of glass hit her in the ear. And the maidservant must have seen him hurtling toward the glass, for she began screaming an instant before the implosion, and kept it up for a few moments after; long enough for the intruder to catch her about the waist by his one proper arm, pick her up, and throw her out of the ship. In the end, the scream was terminated only by her impact with the water. A few seconds later it resumed, sounding a bit gurgly. The large man had big pale blue eyes and seemed distracted; so much to take in, so many things to do. He looked around the cabin, making a quick count of the number of women who had not yet been thrown out (three). He turned and looked back at the ruined window. It was partly blocked by a skein of crazed glass, shredded wood, and caulking, which had complicated the defenestration of the maidservant. The man shrugged and one of his arms tripled in length. For it had been severed below the elbow and replaced with a three-part flail, segments made of some sort of dark, heavy-looking wood, bound and capped with iron, and joined one to the next by short segments of chain. He turned toward the window, judged the distance, and went into a curious shrugging and shivering movement that propagated down the length of the flail and sent its distal segment ripping through what was left of the window-frame like chainshot launched from a cannon. That and a few kicks sufficed to make a clean rectangular aperture through which he presently hurled a screaming Nicole.

Before he could pursue this wench-flinging project any further, he was distracted by the rude irruption into the cabin of a man’s arm. The English boarders had made a hole, and one of them was reaching in to see what he might grab. At the top of his list was the brass bolt holding the cabin door closed.

The ramshackle and skeletal arm of the flail rattled across the cabin, a strangely unfolding train of dire consequences, and struck the new intruder round about the elbow with a splintery sort of noise. The arm was withdrawn, leaving a dark cavity through which the one-armed man flung a dagger that had appeared in his hand from nowhere. “Shoot him!” someone screamed, from the other side of the bulkhead; but Brigitte had the presence of mind to topple Eliza’s mattress-which had been propped against the cabin door-so that it obscured the rift in the bulkhead. The men on the other side could reach through the hole and thrust it away, but it only flopped back again; which, if Eliza had had more time for reflection, she might have taken as some sort of lesson in how soft defenses could be more effective than hard ones.

Eliza had gone to the missing window. Below was a two-oared skiff. A line ran from it straight up to a grapple snared in the rigging of Meteore’s mizzen-mast, above; this was how the one-armed man had gotten aboard, though, being one-armed, it seemed he had had to make use of some ingenious block-and-tackle arrangement, much too complicated for Eliza to work out under these circumstances.

The two women who had been flung out earlier were bobbing like lilies on the water, for their skirts had inflated as they had dropped. Eventually they would become waterlogged and sink, but they had both got hold of the little boat’s gunwale and seemed fine for now. Which was the very least that Eliza looked for, from her personal staff. Indeed she made a mental note to ask this question of all prospective employees she interviewed in future: You are on your mistress’s jacht preparing for her petit levee when the vessel is taken by English marines and towed out to sea under fire from shore batteries. Barricaded in a cabin, waiting for a fate worse than death, you are picked up and hurled into the sea by a mysterious one-armed giant who has swung into a window on a rope. Do you (a) struggle bootlessly until you sink and drown, (b) scream until someone rescues you, or (c) dog-paddle to the nearest floating object and wait calmly for your mistress to resolve the difficulty?

Eliza had suspected very early that the one-armed man might be some sort of a godsend, and was now convinced of it. She hitched up her skirt, snaked a leg under her bed, caught her bag-handle on the point of her slipper, and jerked it out. Turning to the open window, she paused for a few moments to time her breathing, and the rolling of the seas; then she tossed out the bag, and it landed square in the middle of the rowboat. Then she turned around. Flail-arm, it seemed, had fastened his gaze upon Brigitte with a look that seemed to say, “I mean to throw you out next, mademoiselle,” and she had declined the honor. Now he was trying to get one arm about her waist (a factitious narrowing of Brigitte’s midsection, owed to laces and whalebones). Few men were big, strong, and reckless enough to pick up Brigitte and toss her, when she was not of a mind to be. This fellow had been, prior to the loss of his arm. As matters stood, they were evenly matched, unless he elected to beat her senseless with the terrible flail first. And this he was not of a mind to do; though he was plainly enough tempted, Eliza thought she could see a tenderness about his eyes. And so a dire, ungainly, loud struggle, destructive of property and of the dignity of the participants, ranged all across the cabin.

“Brigitte!” Eliza called, at a moment when the one-armed man had tripped over his flail and was slow getting up. Brigitte raised her hot gaze from the intruder and looked up to see Eliza framed in the window. “You may stay and flirt with him all you want, or take him to bed for all I care! But I am departing and shall await you below.” And then she vanished from Brigitte’s sight.

In spite of herself she let out a yell just before she hit the water. Then she was speechless for a moment, it was so cold; but before more than a few moments had passed, she began paddling toward the wee boat, as best she could. She did this partly out of a thought to the Interview Question, and partly out of fear that Brigitte and Monsieur Flail-arm might hurtle down atop her at any moment. Heavy splashes behind her confirmed that she’d made the correct choice.

To get four sopping femmes aboard so small a boat was no simple thing. Flail-arm, as soon as he’d gone into the water, had prestidigitated another sharp object and severed the line linking the rowboat to Meteore, and the gap between them had begun to widen. Eliza glanced up at her stolen jacht only once. She saw English marines at the poop-deck rail, and English marines in the windows of her cabin (for they had finally got past Brigitte’s improvisations). One of them had the bad manners to aim a pistol down at Flail-arm. But just then a boom sounded from not far away, and something whined over their heads and ripped two pounds of oak out of the railing. The marines jumped back, and some flung themselves to the deck. Eliza followed Flail-arm’s startled gaze across the water and spied a boat coming on rapidly, under full sail.

Eliza was no great aficionado of ship-types, and made a practice of quitting any conversation in which the men drifted off into, and got stuck on, ship-prattle. But at a glance she guessed this one was eighty feet long. It had no transom and no superstructure, had two masts, was lug-rigged. In Holland it might have gone under the name of galjoot. In any case, it was a coastal trading-ship, adequate to cross the Channel, and it was obviously armed with at least one swivel-gun. The shot they had fired at the English marines had been mostly for effect. Never could this little smuggler’s craft have challenged Meteore, had Meteore been under sail, and properly manned; but as matters stood, the galjoot had enough sting in her swivel-guns to give the English second thoughts about standing in plain view and taking pot-shots at Men Overboard. Eliza had spied the boat a few minutes ago, and hoped it might be the one she had hired; this confirmed as much. It made no effort to pursue Meteore, but wore around so as to make itself a barrier between Meteore and the rowboat, and then released the air from its sails. Arbalete (for that was the name painted on her bows) approached with a curious mixture of charity and hostility, on the one hand flinging out lines for the ladies to snatch from the air, or rake up out of the water, on the other hand keeping loaded muskets at the ready. The only part of this morning’s proceedings that they had been led to expect was that they might be collecting an anonymous passenger from the vicinity of Meteore. All else-the assault of the English longboats, the apparition of the flaming Soleil Royal, and Flail-arm with his rowboat-had been unexpected. Eliza was already dreading the re-negotiation of the deal that probably lay ahead with the captain of Arbalete. That it had even ventured this far into the melee could probably be attributed solely to a bloke standing amidships holding a musket: Bob Shaftoe.

“All is well, Sergeant Bob. No, I don’t know who he is. He is a mute, or something. But he seems well-intentioned. The worst I can say of him is that he is more forthright in his methods than would be considered proper at Versailles.”

“I have noted him about the waterfront, spying on Meteore,” was Bob’s answer.

“Come to mention it, so have I,” said Eliza, “but lacking your penetration, sir, I could not make out whether he was spying, or merely satisfying his curiosity.”

“Perhaps lovely Duchesses are more accustomed to being stared at for hours at a time than mangled Sergeants,” Bob said. “To me it looked like spying.”

“As perhaps it was, Sergeant Bob; but this morning he has been of service to a boat-load of women.”

“Is it to be you alone, or the entire boat-load?” demanded the incredulous Monsieur Rigaud, Captain of Arbalete. Until this point, he had been preoccupied by the spectre-even more terrifying to a ship-captain than to any other sort of person-of the Soleil Royal drifting past them with gouts of flame spurting from her hundred gun-ports. Rigaud seemed at last to have convinced himself that the English, before setting fire to her, had extracted her stores of gunpowder-i.e., that they wanted her to burn for a long time, make a memorable spectacle for the citizenry of Cherbourg, and perhaps set fire to a few other ships-not simply blow up. If he was right, then the danger to Arbalete was past, for the flagship had unequivocally drifted beyond them. He had, accordingly, turned his mind to a threat almost as dire: an onslaught of female passengers.

“Only I,” said Eliza, and slung her bag at Rigaud’s head.

This was news to the other women, and caused a little flurry of gasps and outcries. Eliza considered trying to explain matters. Mommy must run off to England and steal three tons of silver. Instead she reached up-for the rowboat was grinding against Arbalete’s side-and let Bob seize one of her hands, and a French sailor the other. The weight came off of her feet. She was hoisted aboard Arbalete like a bale of silk. “Lovely Brigitte,” she called, “I hope that one day you will forgive me for now pressing you in to service as galerienne. But you must get in to shore before matters get any worse; and this man, I am afraid-”

“Rows in circles. The same had occurred to me, my lady.” Brigitte seized the oars.

“We shall keep our swivel-guns charged, and watch you in to the shore,” volunteered Monsieur Rigaud, who had become considerably more pliant now that the rowboat full of women was working away from Arbalete.

“Send a despatch to Captain Bart in Dunkerque,” Eliza called.

“Saying what, Madame?”

“That it is going to happen after all.”

“AMPUTATIONS ARE DICEY THINGS,” remarked Bob Shaftoe some hours later. For a while, he had had that look on his face that warned Eliza he was pondering something, and likely to blurt out just such a ghoulish observation as soon as he took a whim to speak. “One strives to preserve the elbow, or the knee, at all costs, for that additional degree of articulation in the stump makes all the difference. In a below-the-elbow amputation, the hand is gone, and with it the ability to sense, to grasp, to caress. But yet there is the elbow, and the sinews to make it act. To turn the arm into a flail-a whole train of articulations, unfeeling, ungrasping, yet capable of action-yes, to put a flail on a stump is wholly fitting in a way.”

“Remind me to ask you later for your thoughts on disembowelment,” said Eliza, then regretted it, for she was already queasy. They were out on the Channel now, the wind had come up, and she was robed, hooded, and swaddled in blankets like a woman out of a desert land-a very cold desert land.

Bob squinted at her. “I’ve had any number of such thoughts this morning, and have held them back from you.” He was alluding to the scenes that they had all beheld from the deck of Arbalete as they had sailed east-northeast along the tip of the Cotentin-that stump of an arm that France thrust out toward England. For the first hour or so, their view had been of Cherbourg, and of the waters north of it, which had gradually been unveiled as the last traces of the four-day fog had dissolved into plain air. A goodly part of the Anglo-Dutch fleet was there. The burning of Soleil Royal and the invasion of Cherbourg Harbor by longboats were only aspects of a larger action, which they came better to understand as they drew back from it. The English and Dutch had cut a few ships from the French fleet and were going about the tedious and ungallant work of mopping them up: trying to get enough cannonballs into their hulls to sink or ruin them before they could scurry in under the protection of the shore batteries. By the time that Cherbourg had receded from Arbalete’s view, that issue was no longer in much doubt: This remnant of the French fleet, if it reached Cherbourg at all, would never sail again. Not long after, Arbalete had rounded the Point of Barfleur, which had brought them in view of a vast bay, fifteen miles broad and five deep, pressed like a thumbprint into the eastern side of the Cotentin. It was there, in the shelter of the peninsula, that the bulk of the invasion-transports had gathered to receive soldiers and materiel from the great camps around La Hougue. And it was there, they now discovered, that Admiral Tourville had sought refuge with perhaps two dozen of his ships. Now that the fog had lifted, the bulk of the Anglo-Dutch fleet had formed up off La Hougue and were boring in to finish Tourville off; and since the anchorage proper was protected by shore batteries, this meant longboat-work again. What had happened to Meteore this morning was, in other words, to be the pattern for what would be done to Tourville’s fleet today. Eliza, though she knew little of Naval tactics, could see the logic of it as plainly as if it had been writ out on a page by Leibniz: The English could bring their ships no nearer shore than a certain point because of the shore-batteries. Tourville could not sail what was left of the French fleet-now outnumbered three or four to one-out of the anchorage. And so there was a no-man’s-land between the English and French, which soon developed a dark infestation of longboats issuing from all the Anglo-Dutch ships. Unable to maneuver or even to weigh anchor in the jammed anchorage, the crews of the French ships could only stand on the decks and wait to repel boarders.

Arbalete, which under these circumstances could be overlooked as an insignificant smuggler’s boat, now made her course due north, threaded her way between a pair of laggardly English men-of-war, and began a sprint for Portsmouth. Before the anchorage of La Hougue was lost to view astern, they noted a spark of light drifting out of it, trying to catch up with its own column of smoke. The burning of the French fleet had begun. Those aboard Arbalete could at least turn their backs on the scene, and run away from it. Not so fortunate, as Eliza knew, was James Stuart, who was camped in a royal tent on a hill above La Hougue. He’d have to watch the whole thing. For all that she despised the man and his reign, Eliza couldn’t but feel sorry for him: chased out of England once in girl’s clothes, during the Commonwealth, and a second time with a bloody nose during the Glorious Revolution; loser of the Battle of the Boyne; chased out of Ireland; and now this. It was while she was mulling over these cheerful matters that Bob Shaftoe unexpectedly piped up with his ruminations on the topic of stumps; which gives a fair portrait of the mood aboard Arbalete during her passage to England.

“I HAVE SEEN altogether too many men in my day, living as I have in Vagabond-camps and Regimental quarters. And so it could be that my memory has been overfilled and is now playing tricks on me. But I think that I have seen that man before,” Bob said.

“Flail-arm? You mentioned you’d noticed him in Cherbourg, spying or gawking.”

“Aye, but even the first time I saw him there, I phant’sied I’d seen his face elsewhere.”

“If he was spying on me there, perhaps he had been doing the same in St.-Malo, and you’d noticed him on one of your visits,” said Eliza, and was immediately sorry that she had raised this topic; for her bowels were in an uproar, she’d spent more time at the head than all others on the boat summed, and Bob had conspicuously refrained from saying anything about it, but only squinted at her knowingly. It was late afternoon. The sun was slicing down across the northwestern sky, making England into a rubble of black lumps in the foreground, and casting golden light on Bob’s face.

“I phant’sied I’d make the return voyage, you know.”

“You mean, back to Normandy tomorrow? But are you not absent without leave from your Irish regiment? Would you not be flogged for it, or something?”

“I got leave, on a pretext. It is still not too late.”

“But it sounds as though you are having second thoughts.”

“The closer we draw to England, the better she suits me. I went to France for diverse reasons, none of which have turned out to be any good.”

“You hoped it would bring you within reach of Abigail.”

“Aye. But instead I was marooned in Brest nigh on half a year, then Cherbourg for three months. And so serving France has brought me no nearer to Paris than if I’d been posted in London. Who knows where they’ll have us go next?”

“If what I have heard means anything,” Eliza said, “the fighting will be very hot in the Spanish Netherlands this summer. They are probably laying siege to Namur as we speak. That is most likely where Count Sheerness is-”

“And so probably Abigail as well,” said Bob, “for if he means to spend the whole summer in those parts, he has brought his household with him. Very well. My most expedient way of reaching that part of the world shall be to re-join the Black Torrent Guards and be shipped thither at King William’s expense.”

“Don’t you suppose your nine months’ absence will have been noted? What kind of flogging will they award you for that!?”

“I was conducting military espionage in the enemy camp for the Earl of Marlborough,” Bob retorted; though the look on his face, and the lilt in his voice, suggested that this had only just come into his head.

“The Earl of Marlborough has been dismissed from all offices, stripped of command. His colonelcy of the Black Torrent Guards will have been sold off to some Tory hack.”

“But nine months ago when my mission of espionage began, none of that was true.”

“Your idea still seems risky to me,” said Eliza, eager to draw the exchange to a curt finish because the rioting had started up in her belly once more.

“Then I shall test the waters first, with Marlborough, before presenting myself to the Regiment,” Bob said. “You’re going to London! I don’t suppose you’d be willing to bring him a private note from me-?”

“Since you cannot read or write, I suppose you’d like me to pen the note as well?” said Eliza, and turned her back on Bob, the better to search for a convenient scupper. She did not feel as though she would have time to trudge all the way to the head; besides which, a French sailor was already sitting up there, taking a lengthy shit into the English Channel and singing.

“Your offer is well received,” Bob returned. “And as I am unfit to frame a proper letter to an Earl, perhaps I could interest you in composing it as well-?”

“I’ll just talk to him,” said Eliza, dropping to her hands and knees. The next thing that emerged from her mouth, however, was altogether unfit for presentation to an Earl; a fact Bob was discreet enough not to point out.