The Confusion

Qwghlm
AUGUST 1702

The Seamen returned enriched with the Plunder, not of Ships, but of Fleets, Loaden with Silver; they went out Beggars, and came home Gentlemen; nay, the Wealth they brought Home, not only enrich’d themselves, but the whole Nation.

–DANIEL DEFOE,

A Plan of the English Commerce

TWO MONTHS LATER, while Minerva was lost in fog off of Outer Qwghlm, a loud noise came up from her hold, and she stopped moving.

Van Hoek drew his cutlass and went after the pilot, James Hh, and at length tracked him down at the head. He was perched on the bowsprit. “Welcome to Qwghlm,” he announced, “you are hard aground on the rock that we call the Dutch-hammer.” Then he jumped.

By this point van Hoek had been joined by several other men with pistols, and all of them rushed forward in the hope of getting a shot off at Hh. But they did not see him in that icy water (which soon would have killed him anyway); all they saw was a faint impression in the fog, like a woodcut pressed with diluted ink, of a longboat rowing away. That longboat fired a signal from its swivel-gun, and when the boom had finished echoing among the Three Sghrs, the men on Minerva could hear the distant shouting of men on other ships-a whole squadron, arrayed all around them, riding safely at anchor, well clear of the stony reef. All of these voices were speaking in French except for one or two, shouting through speaking-trumpets: “Welcome home, Jaaack!”

The men on Minerva remained perfectly still. It was not that they were trying to be stealthy-there was little point in hiding now. This was a ceremonial silence, as at a funeral. Too, there was a process of mental rearrangement taking place in the minds of the ship’s officers, as they sorted through the memories of everything that had occurred in the last few months, and began to understand it all as an elaborate deception, a trap laid by the French.

As the fog began to lift, and the outlines of French frigates started to resolve and solidify all around them. Van Hoek ambled back to the poop deck, laid his right arm out carefully on the rail, and brought his cutlass down on it, a few inches above the wrist. The blade caught in his bones and he had to worry it out and chop several more times. Finally the hand-already mangled and truncated from diverse mishaps-made a splash in the water below. Van Hoek lay down on the deck and turned white. He probably would have died if he had not been aboard a ship where treating amputations was a routine affair. This at least gave the sailors something to do while the French longboats converged on them.

At some point Dappa got a distracted look on his face, excused himself from van Hoek’s side, and began to walk briskly in the direction of Vrej Esphahnian.

Vrej drew one of several pistols from his waist-band and aimed it at Dappa. A whirring blade flew into his arm, like a steel hummingbird, and spoiled his aim. It was a hunting yo-yo and it had been flung by a Filipino crewman standing off to Vrej’s side.

Vrej dropped the weapon and flung himself overboard. He was wearing a scarlet cape that billowed up as he fell, like a sail, and formed a bubble on the water below, an island of satin that kept him afloat until a Frenchman on a longboat flung a rope to him.

“Say the word, Dad,” said Jimmy, who was manning a loaded swivel-gun, and holding a lighted torch above its touch-hole.

“It’s me they want,” Jack said, matter-of-factly, as if he were captured by the French Navy every day.

“It’s us they have,” Danny answered, pointedly, bringing another swivel-gun to bear on another longboat, “and we’ll soon make ’em wish they didn’t.”

Jack shook his head. “This is not to be another Cairo.”

QWGHLM CASTLE WAS a Dark Ages citadel that had all too obviously failed its essential purpose. Indeed, most of it was not even competent to keep out sleet and rats. Its lee corner, where it gripped the living rock of the Sghr, had, however, at least put up a struggle against gravity. It supported a row of stark crenels that finger-combed the tangled winds above the crunchy wilderness of smithereens and guano that accounted for the rest of the Castle.

To re-roof such a thing was to waste money; but to embed a whole brand-new Barock chateau in it, as the duc d’Arcachon had recently finished doing, was to make some sort of ringing proclamation. In the visual language of architects and decorators, the proclamation said something about whatever glorious principles were personified by all its swooping, robed, wreathed, winged demigods. Translated into English it said, “I am rich and powerful, and you are not.”

Jack got the message. They put him under house-arrest in a grand bedchamber with a high Barock window through which the Duke and Duchess, presumably, could watch the comings and goings of ships in the harbor. The room’s back wall, facing these windows, consisted mostly of mirrors-which as even Jack knew was an homage to the Galerie des Glaces at Versailles.

Jack lay in bed for several days, unable to bring himself to look into any mirrors, or to go near that window and see Minerva stuck on the Dutch-hammer. Sometimes he would get out of bed and hug the cannonball that was attached to his neck-collar by a four-foot length of chain and carry it into the en suite garderobe: a closet with a wooden bench decorated with a hole. Being ever so careful not to let the cannonball fall into that hole-for he’d not quite decided to kill himself yet-he’d sit down and void himself into a chute that spilled out onto the stone cliff-side far below.

Years ago-the last time a collar of iron had been locked around his neck by an Arcachon-John Churchill had warned him that angry Frenchmen were bound to come after him with pliers sooner or later. Jack could only assume that this was still true, and that in the meantime he was being kept in luxurious surroundings as part of some highly refined campaign of sarcasm.

After a week they moved him to a stone chamber. The windows were crossbow-embrasures that had recently been chocked up with pigs of glass. But they did afford him a view of the Dutch-hammer and its latest victim. Minerva had languished there, an object of ridicule, as gold and silver were extracted from her hold, and replaced with rocks to keep her ballasted.

“Did Vrej survive the fall, and the water?” was Jack’s first question when Edmund de Ath-who had revealed himself to be, in fact, one Edouard de Gex, a Jesuit, and a hater of the Jansenists and of the Enlightenment both-came around to taunt him.

Edouard de Gex looked surprised. “Why do you ask? Surely you’re not naive enough to think you’ll have an opportunity to kill him.”

“Oh no, I was just wondering how it came out in the end.”

“How what came out?”

“The story. You see, all along I’ve been supposing that this was my story, but now I see it has really been Vrej’s.”

Edouard de Gex shrugged. “He lives. He has a bit of a catarrh. When he’s feeling better he’ll probably come around and explain matters to you.”

“That should be a lively conversation…but pray tell, why the hell are you here?”

“I am here to look after your immortal soul.”

De Gex had traded his former garb for a Jesuit’s black robes, and even his language had changed. Formerly he had spoken Sabir, but now it was English. “It is my intention to convert all of Britain to the true faith,” he remarked, “and so I have made a study of your language.”

“And you’re going to begin with me? Weren’t you paying attention in Mexico City?”

“The Inquisition there has grown lax. You said you were a Catholic and they took you at your word… I prefer a more rigorous approach.” De Gex produced a letter from his sleeve. “Does this look familiar?”

“It looks like the one Eliza sent me in New Spain…” Jack blinked and shook his head. “The one we opened and read on the ship…which was obviously a fake…but that one hasn’t even been opened.”

“Poor Jack. This is the true letter that was delivered to you in New Spain, and that you sealed up inside van Hoek’s book-chest. But it was not sent by Eliza. It was sent by Elizabeth de Obregon. That fickle bitch smuggled it out of the convent where she was being held in Mexico City. Then later, when we were in Vera Cruz-”

“You took it out of the crate where I’d stored it, and substituted a fake one you’d written. Van Hoek complained that the caulking was badly done… I should’ve suspected tampering.”

“I am a better forger than a caulker, it would seem,” de Gex said.

“The forgery worked,” Jack allowed.

“Monsieur Esphahnian listened to your talk of Eliza for years, and knew every detail of the story by heart…without his information, I could never have composed that letter.”

De Gex broke the seal on the letter of Elizabeth de Obregon. “It would weigh on my conscience, Jack, if I did not read you your mail. This is written in florid Spanish… I will translate it into English. She begins with the usual complicated salutation and apology…then complains of persistent nightmares that have plagued her ever since she arrived in New Spain, and prevented her from getting a single good night’s sleep. In these nightmares, she is on the Manila Galleon, in the middle of the Pacific, when it falls into the hands of the Inquisition. There is no mutiny and no violence…one day the Captain is simply gone, as if he had fallen overboard when no one was looking, and the officers are in irons, confined to their cabins, but none of them knows it yet because they are all in a drugged sleep. A man in a black robe has seized control of the ship…like any other Inquisitor, he has a staff of familiars, who until now have been disguised as merchants’ servants. They have been gathering information about their employers’ blasphemies and heresies. And, too, he has bailiffs, alguaciles, who’ve been disguised as ordinary seamen but who are now armed with pistols, whips, and blunderbusses, and are not slow to use them against anyone who challenges the authority of the man in the black robe… She goes on, Jack, to narrate this nightmare (she calls it a nightmare) in considerable detail, but much of it is well-known to you, who have such an intimate knowledge of the workings of the Inquisition. Suffice it to say that the Holy Office carried out its duties exactingly on that ship, and many of the merchants aboard were discovered to be Jews. Really, the entire Galleon was a nest of vipers, a ship of infamous degradation…”

“Is that what she wrote, or are you ‘translating’ a bit freely?”

“But even as he was decorating the yard-arms with dangling merchants, giving them the strappado so that they would unburden themselves of their sins, this black-robe was keeping lookouts posted for any sign of Minerva.”

“Does she explain the firing of the signal-cannon?”

“The hereticks mutinied. They fired the cannon in an attempt to summon help. There was general warfare-the black-robe was driven belowdecks…”

“Where he kindled a fire, to make an auto da fe of the entire ship.”

“When Elizabeth de Obregon woke aboard Minerva, the first thing she saw was that same black-robe staring her in the face. With opium and with clever arguments he induced her to believe that the burning of the Galleon had been an accident, and that now, on Minerva, they were prisoners of the hereticks, who would kill the black-robe if they knew him to be a Jesuit. After that they would make her their whore. So she played the role that the black-robe devised for her…but after recuperating in Mexico City, and suffering diverse tortures from want of opium, and coming out from the influence of the black-robe, these nightmares had begun. She decided that they were not nightmares but true memories, and that all the black-robe’s doings must have been part of a plan having something to do with Minerva, and something to do with the gold of Solomon, which Minerva’s owners had stolen from the ex-Viceroy.”

“And she wrote to warn us of this? That was a noble act on the lady’s part,” Jack mused, “but I cannot imagine why she cared whether we lived or died.”

“She was of a converso family,” de Gex said. “She was a Jewess.”

“I cannot help but notice you are using the past tense.”

“She lies in a pauper’s grave outside Mexico City. The Inquisition there, so corrupt and pusillanimous, gave her nothing more than routine treatment. She died of some pestilence that was sweeping through the prison. But one day I will see her burned in effigy in a great auto da fe in St. James’s Park, Jack. You’ll be there, too-you’ll put the torch to her pyre and pray the rosary while her effigy burns.”

“If you can arrange an auto da fe in Westminster, I’ll do that,” Jack promised.

JACK HAD ASSUMED during the first days in Qwghlm that everyone aboard Minerva would be put to the sword, or at least sent to the galleys in Marseille. But as days had gone by it had become clear that only Jack and Vrej would be getting off at this stop-the ship and her crew, and van Hoek, Dappa, Jimmy, and Danny, were free to go, albeit without their gold. Jack liked to believe that this was because he had given himself up willingly. Later he came to suspect that it was because Electress Sophie was a part-owner of the ship. She was being shown a Professional Courtesy by whatever noble Frenchman was behind all of this-the duc d’Arcachon, or Leroy himself.

After Minerva’s holds and lockers had been stripped to the bare wood, they waited for a high tide and began throwing ballast-rocks overboard, trying to float her off the reef. Jack watched this operation from a battlement of the Castle, where he was allowed to carry his cannonball to and fro sometimes, under guard. After a while de Gex joined him, greeting him with: “I remind you, Jack, that suicide is a mortal sin.”

Jack was baffled by this non sequitur until he followed de Gex’s gaze over the mossy crenellations and down a hundred feet of sheer stone to icy surf flailing away at rocks. Then he laughed. “I’ve been expecting some Arcachon to come up here and put me to a slow death-d’you really think I’d do the deed for him, and spare him such a pleasant journey?”

“Perhaps you would wish to avoid being tortured.”

“Oh no, Edouard, I’m inspired by your example.”

“You are referring to the Inquisition in Mexico?”

“I was wondering: Did the Inquisitor know you were a fellow-Jesuit? Did he go easy on you?”

“If he had given me light treatment, you and Moseh would have detected it-and you would not have decided to trust me. No, I fooled the Inquisitor as thoroughly as I fooled you.”

“That is the most bizarre thing I have heard in my entire circuit of the world.”

“It is not so strange,” said de Gex, “if only you knew more. For, contrary to what you suppose, I do not consider myself some kind of saint. Nay, I have secrets so dark that I myself do not know them! I phant’sied the Inquisitor might somehow wrest out of me through torture what I could not discover by prayer and meditation.”

“That is more bizarre yet. I preferred the first version.”

“Really, it was not so bad as the Jews are always claiming. There are any number of ways it could be made far more painful. When the Holy Office is reestablished in London, I’ll institute some improvements-we’ll have a lot of hereticks to prosecute in a short time, and this desultory Mexican style simply will not do.”

“I had not considered suicide when I came up here,” Jack muttered, “but you are bringing me around smartly.” He stuck his head out through a gap between crenels and leaned over the edge of the wall to see what the final few seconds of his life might look like. “Pity the tide is so unusually high-I’d hit water instead of rocks.”

“Pity we are abjured to deliver you in one piece,” de Gex said, gazing at Jack almost lovingly. “I would love to put what I learned in Mexico City to use, here and now, against your person, and get a full accounting of what you did with King Solomon’s gold.”

“Oh, is that all you wanted to know? We took it to Surat, excepting some trivial expenditures in Mocha and Bandar, and there Queen Kottakkal took it from us. If it’s that particular gold you want, get thee to Malabar!”

Edouard de Gex shook his finger at Jack. “I know from Monsieur Esphahnian that the true story is far more complicated. He spent years in the north of Hindoostan, fighting in some infidel army-”

“Only because he failed the Intelligence Test.”

“-and by the time he finally got to Malabar, the Jew had had plenty of time to insinuate himself into the confidence of that pagan Queen. A substantial part of the gold had already been diverted into the ship-building project. What became of it?”

“You said yourself it had gone to the ship-building project!”

Jack naturally turned to look towards the ship in question now. She had foundered perhaps two miles away, but seen from this tower through clear Arctic air, she seemed much closer. She was riding unusually high by this point, which was no wonder since for the last half-hour her hull had been veiled in splashes made by the ballast-stones that the crew were rolling out through the gun-ports. The waves began to nudge her back and forth as her keel lifted off the reef. Finally a cheer sounded, and several cannons were fired as signals and celebrations. Triangles and trapezoids of canvas began to cloud her spars. “Note how upright she carries herself, even when underloaded,” Jack had pointed out.

“I will not be taken in by this ruse of changing the subject,” de Gex said.

“Oh, but I’m not,” Jack answered, but de Gex plodded onwards with his interrogation.

“Vrej claims that timber and labor are practically free in Hindoostan. According to his review of the accounts, too much gold was missing and whatever I may think of his theology, I would not dream of calling into question his accounting.”

“Vrej has been tiresome on this particular subject for nigh on eight years now,” Jack answered. “When he vaulted over the rail the other day, right out there, the first thing that came to my mind-even before I really grasped that he’d betrayed us-was joy. Joy that I’d never again have to listen to him on this subject. Now, you have picked up the torch.”

“Vrej has related his suspicions to me. He says that whenever he raised this subject, the others would shrug it off with all sorts of vague similitudes, about ‘greasing the path’ or some such…”

“We are all old salts now, and prefer nautickal terms,” Jack answered. “Instead of talking about some path needing to be greased, we’d more likely think of hulls that become barnacle-covered, which slows them down, and we’d speak of the desirability of keeping ’em smooth, for easy movement through the water.”

“In any event-I assume this is a Delphic way of saying that bribes were paid to some Mogul or Maratha chieftain?”

“Assume what you like-that would still place the gold far away from you,” Jack pointed out. He was gazing out to sea, watching Minerva trim her sails as she came out of the lee of the Sghr and picked up a leading wind across her larboard beam. One by one the yards traversed round, and their sails stopped shivering as the crew braced the yards and made her close-hauled. Immediately Minerva began to heel over and pick up speed. But de Gex now blocked Jack’s view, squaring his shoulders and getting his face directly in front of his. “Your ship may be free now, Jack, but you seem to have forgotten that you are not on her. You are in my power now.”

“I thought I was in Leroy’s power,” Jack said, which was nothing more than an audacious guess; but the look on de Gex’s face told him he’d guessed right.

“My Order is not without influence in his majesty’s court,” de Gex said. “In his efforts to find the gold that the Jew stole, Vrej Esphahnian could do nothing more than bore you. I can do much more.”

Jack rolled his eyes. “Oh come now! If our aim had been to steal from Vrej, we’d have made a proper job of it. We were only chaffing him-we’re not thieves.”

“Where, then, is King Solomon’s gold?”

“Turn around,” Jack said.

De Gex finally turned around. The harbor below the Castle was crowded with French ships, most of them riding at anchor; the few that were in a position to get under way were now, however, frantically trying to raise more sail. Their decks were a-swarm with sailors coming up from below, like ants from a damaged hill. De Gex could not fathom why, until he noticed that every spyglass and pointing finger in the harbor was aimed at Minerva, now several miles ahead of the French ships that were trying to organize a pursuit. Van Hoek-commanding from a sick-bed lashed into place on the poop deck-had heeled her perilously far over for one so lightly ballasted, but she did not capsize, and seemed to be skimming over the water rather than plowing it up. A ship that hadn’t been careened since before Vera Cruz would normally have been too encrusted with barnacles to make much headway, but Minerva moved as if her hull had been freshly scraped and painted. Not until she altered course slightly, and the sun glanced off her exposed hull, did de Gex understand why: the underside of the ship, below the waterline, had been sheathed, from stem to stern, in plates of hammered gold.

Only a sliver of that plating was now visible, but it shone out across the harbor like a gleam of light through a cracked door. Everyone had seen it, and a few French ships were now setting out on a forlorn pursuit, but most of the mariners were content to stand at the railings of their anchored vessels and only gaze in adoration. Jack knew what those sailors were thinking. They did not care about the value of the gold, and they certainly believed no nonsense about King Solomon’s hoard. They were thinking, instead: If I were a sailor on that ship, I’d never have to scrape another barnacle.

JACK SAW IT AS ODD that de Gex had set Minerva free so hastily, considering that he had been pursuing this matter for above ten years, and traveled all the way around the world, survived the wrack of the Manila Galleon, given himself up to torture, amp;c. The next day Jack understood why de Gex had wanted to get Minerva, and most of the French fleet, clear of the harbor. Sails breached the southern horizon, a ship came into view, maneuvered adroitly round the Dutch-hammer, and dropped anchor directly below the Castle. Jack recognized her from miles out. He’d last seen her in Alexandria, holed and dismasted. Since then Meteore had been refitted and cleaned up by ship-wrights who, to judge from the looks of what they’d done, charged a lot of money.

He was taken back to his cell long before the jacht came close enough that anyone on its decks might have picked him out through a spyglass. This gave him another hint as to who might be aboard. His suspicions were confirmed later by faint sounds of women’s and children’s laughter, audible when he lay with his ear to the crack under his door. This was not a Naval Expedition but a pleasure-cruise, timed to call at Qwghlm during the magic fortnight around late August and early September when blizzards were least oft observed. The chilly cannonball that Jack had been carrying around for the last fortnight now seemed to have been implanted in his chest, and his heart ripped out to make room for it. De Gex had been oddly disinclined to torture him thus far, which had caused Jack to wonder what new, excruciating horrors might be in store for him. But he’d never phant’sied it’d be this bad! He could see how this would end: He would be dragged out naked and chained, and displayed before Eliza, and de Gex would relate the hilarious tale of how Jack had twice had all the money in the world, and twice lost it.

A few hours after Meteore’s arrival, when aromas of French cooking had suffused the entire castle, large Bretons came to Jack’s cell and dragged him to a part of the chateau that, as best as Jack could make out, was near the bedchambers. It was a windowless, hence torch-lit corridor joining an irregular series of chambers, closets, and wide spots. It had received little attention during the remodel, and still looked much as the last band of Vikings, Saracens, or Scots had left it. Here and there Jack glimpsed the backside of a wall: strips of lath, or wattle, with curls of plaster, or daub, squirting through. Casks and crates were piled in some places. They took him to a wide place in the passage where an iron grid had been leaned against the wall: a portcullis hammered out by some blacksmith a thousand years ago, torn down and thrown aside in some upheaval, and left to gather rust and cobwebs ever since. The Bretons pinned Jack against this, spreadeagled, and lashed him to it with cords. Here it became obvious that they were sea-faring men. When Jack opened his mouth to issue some remark to that effect, one of them opportunely shoved a rag-wad into his mouth, and lashed that in place, and lashed his head to the grate. They lashed his fingers down even, which struck Jack as gratuitous, unless they were afraid of his rapping out some message. When they were satisfied, they dragged the gridiron, Jack and all, down the passageway a short distance and through a curtain of mildewy sailcloth. Jack was then blinded for a few moments by sudden light. But as his eyes adjusted, he began to think he was back in the bedchamber where they had kept him for the first week. As he saw clearer, though, he came to understand he was gazing into that bedchamber from without. He was looking through the back sides of the mirrors that glazed the wall. His view of the room, from here, was total; he was positioned at the head of the canopied bed, arm’s length from where a sleeper would lay his, or her, head.

“It is a style of architecture that has served me well,” said a voice in French.

Jack would have jumped out of his skin, had he not been restrained, for the Bretons had taken their leave, and he hadn’t suspected anyone else was in here. All he could move was his eyeballs. By swiveling these as far as they’d go, he was able to perceive movement in a dim corner of this hidden chamber.

A man came into view. He wore a periwig-powdered white, as was the new vogue-and what Jack could only assume were the most excellent fashions from France, so ridiculous were they. Something was funny about one of his hands, but, beyond that, he was splendid to look upon, and (as Jack could now detect, even with dirty rags jammed into his gob) he smelled good.

“You shan’t recognize me, I’m afraid,” said the only man in the room who could talk. “I scarcely recognize you. We last met in the Grand Ballroom of my residence in Paris: the Hotel Arcachon. You took your leave of most of me hastily, and impolitely; though you did carry my hand for several miles, tangled in the bridle of that magnificent horse. Later it was found in the middle of the post-road to Compiegne with my signet-ring still on it; which is how it was traced back to me. Still you were not done re-arranging the body-parts of Lavardacs, for some years later you kindly shipped me the head of my father.”

Etienne de Lavardac, duc d’Arcachon, raised now the stump of his arm so that Jack could view it. A cup had been strapped thereto, and extending from this was a black leather riding-crop. If Jack hadn’t been gagged, he’d now have volunteered some observations as to how Etienne had a paltry and disappointing view of how to inflict pain, compared to the Spanish Inquisition; but Etienne anticipated him. “Oh, this is not for you. My revenge on you I have contemplated, and prepared for, these seventeen years, and it shall involve more than a riding-crop. It takes time to build a place like this, you know! I have had several of them made: there is another at St.-Malo and yet another at La Dunette. I have stood in them and watched my wife whore herself to sergeants and cryptologists. That, however, is not why I caused them to be made. Only today are these chambers being put to their true purpose. Vrej Esphahnian is in the one at La Dunette even at this moment. He is trussed up like you, staring through such a mirror, and listening as his brothers, dressed in the finest clothing, serve expensive coffee to dinner-guests.

“You see, we fooled Monsieur Esphahnian into believing that his brothers had been betrayed by you, Jack, and were perishing of typhus in debtors’ prisons all around Paris. His joy at learning that this is not true will be balanced by some embarrassment that he turned you in to us for no good reason, and lost his share of the silver and gold in Minerva’s hold. I do wonder which of these three causes him the greatest anguish: that he betrayed his friends, that he threw away a fortune, or that he was duped. Father Edouard should reach Versailles in a few more days-he’ll inform Monsieur Esphahnian that the missing gold was attached to the ship’s hull the entire time-this ought to perfect his agony. It is a better torture, I believe, than anything the Spanish Inquisition could devise. But better yet is in store for you, Jack!”

He walked out.

A door opened and a woman entered the bedchamber. Jack did not know her instantly, only because he did not wish to. She’d changed, but not that much. He simply could not bear to open his eyes to her.

Nasr al-Ghurab had told them that in the sack of Constantinople the Ottomans had discovered, in a dungeon, a device that the Byzantines had once used to put out the eyes of noble prisoners. There was none of poking or gouging. Rather, it was a great hemispherical bowl, wrought of copper, with a sort of vise in its center. The bowl would be heated first until it was glowing, and then the prisoner’s head-masked, except for the eyes-would be clamped into the vise. The apparatus was so laid out that the pupils of the victims’ eyes were positioned at the center of the hemisphere. When the lids were pulled up, the eyes could see nothing but a featureless heaven of red wrath that ruined even as it dazzled. The sensitive parts of the eyes were incinerated in a few moments, and the victim rendered perfectly blind without the eyes themselves ever having been touched by anything save that awful last glimpse.

In idle moments since having heard this story, Jack had sometimes wondered what thoughts went through the mind of the one who was being clamped into it. Did he resist? Could he? Were unwilling eyelids peeled back with tongs, or was the victim compelled somehow to open them himself?

It was in much the same frame of mind that he followed Eliza’s entry into the bedchamber without looking at her directly. But in the end he couldn’t not open his eyes, of his own free will, and gaze upon what was there, burn him and blind him though it might.

She had been at dinner with rich people, and was some time taking her gown off, washing her face, peeling off the black patches, and letting her hair down. Ladies-in-waiting came and went. A girl of perhaps nine, with eyes and face marred by smallpox, came into the room and crawled into Eliza’s lap for a few minutes’ rocking and snuggling; Eliza read to her from a book, then sent her off to bed with kisses all over her wrecked face. A nurse led in a boy of about seven, who had escaped the pox so far-but in a way he was worse for Jack to look upon, for his jaw had the same deformity as both of the two last ducs d’Arcachon. But Eliza smiled when he came in, and cuddled him and read to him just as she had done to the pock-marked girl. The nurse took the boy away and Eliza sat alone for some time, tending to correspondence; she read a scattering of notes and wrote two letters.

Etienne came in to the bedchamber now and twirled off his coat, and tossed his small-sword onto a window-bench. Eliza gave him a perfunctory over-the-shoulder greeting. Etienne strolled up along the side of the bed, walking towards Jack, loosening his cravat, idly swishing the riding-crop. He stopped before the mirror, pretending to study his own reflection, but in fact staring Jack directly in the eye. “I believe I shall ride bare-back to-night,” he announced, loudly enough to penetrate the silvered glass.

Eliza was a bit surprised. But she mastered that quickly, and then had to hide a flush of annoyance. She finished a sentence, parked her quill in an inkwell, stood up, and peeled her gown back over her head. What greeted Jack, then, viewed through forty-odd-year-old eyes and a mottled, half-silvered mirror by candlelight, was not a bit less lovely than what he had last seen of her seventeen years ago. He could tell there had been a hard-fought dispute with the Pox and that Eliza had won it. Of course she had won it!

Her husband came up and struck her across the face with his hand, twisting her around so that she fell face-down on the bed. Then he whipped her across the arse and the backs of her thighs with the crop, occasionally looking up to smirk at Jack through the mirror. He commanded her to rise to all fours, and she obeyed. Fucking, interspersed with more whipping, ensued. Etienne did it from a position bolt upright on his knees on the bed behind Eliza, so that he could stare Jack down until the last moments when his eyes closed.

Now in the dungeons of the Inquisition, Jack had himself noted a ph?nomenon oft discoursed of by prisoners, namely that after a bit of torture the body went numb and it simply did not hurt that much any more. Perhaps the same thing was at work here. It had hurt just to see Eliza-to be so close to her. Seeing her little Lavardac boy had perhaps been the worst. This scene of “riding bare-back,” however grisly it was in a certain way, simply did not trouble him as much as Etienne clearly supposed it did. If Eliza had jumped up from her writing-desk to smother her husband with kisses and then dragged him to bed and made rapturous love to him, that would have hurt. But instead she had shrugged, and parked her quill. Before the ink was dry on the sentence she’d been writing when Etienne had entered the room, he had exhausted himself, she had her clothes back on, and was approaching the desk with a look on her face that said, Now where was I when what’s-his-name interrupted me?

LATER JACK WAS TAKEN AWAY and returned to his cell. The next night, the whole thing was repeated-almost as if Etienne knew in his heart that it had failed the first time. The chief difference was that when Etienne came into the bedchamber and announced his intentions, Eliza was, this time, truly astonished.

On the third night, she was out-and-out flabbergasted, and asked Etienne a number of probing questions clearly meant to establish whether he might be developing a brain tumor.

Jack, a theatre-goer of long standing, now saw how it was going to be. For Etienne had explained to him that his doom was to be locked up in a cell here for the rest of his life, and that once a year, when the weather cleared, Etienne was going to sail up here with Eliza and repeat this procedure a few times before turning round and sailing home. As Etienne told him this, Jack was, of course, gagged, and could not answer; but what he was thinking was that this was indeed an excruciating torture, but for wholly different reasons than Etienne imagined. The premise was excellent, granted; but the road to dramaturgickal perdition was thick strewn with excellent premises. The difficulty lay in that this show was wretchedly staged and, in a word, botched. This made it almost more painful to view than if it had been carried off brilliantly. Jack’s fate, it seemed, was to languish in a chilly dungeon three hundred and sixty-odd days out of each year and, on the other few days, to be a captive audience to a bad play. He had to grant that it would be a humiliating fate if he had been a member of the French nobility. But as a Vagabond who’d already lived thrice as long as he ought to’ve, it wasn’t bad at all; it was pleasing, in fact, to see how not under Etienne’s thumb was Eliza. Jack’s chief source of discomfort, then, was a feeling well known to soldiers of low rank, to doctors’ patients, and to people getting their hair cut; namely, that he was utterly in the power of an incompetent.

After the third night, the set was struck, as it were. Jack was locked in his cell to begin the first year of his ordeal, and Meteore sailed away south.

Jack settled in, and began to make friends with his gaolers. They were under strict orders not to talk to him, but they couldn’t help hearing him when he talked, and he could tell that they fancied his stories.

He was there for all of a month. Then a French frigate came and took him away. They gave him clothes, soap, and a razor. Jack had a most enjoyable journey to Le Havre, for he knew that there was only one man in the world who could have countermanded the orders of Etienne de Lavardac, duc d’Arcachon.