The System of the World

Leicester Fields
THE SAME TIME

ELIZA HAD RUN diverse errands fair and foul, and embraced many sacrifices, on behalf of these Hanover women, but this was in some ways the most disagreeable of all: going for a carriage-ride, here and now. For a carriage, be it never so finely decorated, and perforated with doors and windows, was unavoidably a box, and to shut herself up in a box at such a pass went against everything in her nature.

She had never quite got out of her mind a day when she and several other harem-girls, all in their burqas, had been herded into a tunnel beneath Vienna to be put to the sword. To hear the screams of the women, and smell their blood, and know what was going on while only being able to see a tiny patch of light, and being unable to use her hands, save by gripping things through the slippery fabric: this was for her the worst moment of her life, the thing she’d spent all her time since trying to put behind her.

Her view out the window of this carriage was no better than that from a burqa, and her ability to reach out and grab things even less. True, it was mounted on wheels, and pulled by a team of horses. But her usual retinue of dogs and armed footmen were absent, as they would have destroyed the illusion that this carriage contained Princess Caroline in disguise. The driver was trustworthy, but all someone had to do was aim a pistol at him, or knock him out of his perch and seize the reins; then she’d be even more helpless than she had been on that horrible day in Vienna.

Still and all, she rated the chances as good that the carriage would speed her to Marlborough House without let. The distance was less than half a mile as the crow flew, and once they worked clear of a few narrow streets south of Leicester Fields they would be speeding down such broad open avenues as Hay Market and Pall Mall. Whether it came to a good or a bad end, the ride would be over quickly, the revulsion she felt at being shut up in a wooden burqa she’d only have to tolerate for a few minutes.

It began well enough: an uneventful half-circuit of Leicester Fields, traversing the east side of the square, then swinging round to head west along its southern edge. This ought to have been a straight shot to Hay Market; but the driver called for a turn too soon, and she felt the box revolving leftwards onto St. Martin’s. Out one window she could see a narrow burqa-view of Sir Isaac Newton’s house; out the opposite, a flare of light where none ought to be. Someone had lit a bonfire in the southwestern corner of Leicester Fields, blocking the outlet to Hay Market. And they’d done it in the last minute or so, for Eliza had scanned the square carefully before suffering herself to be boxed, and seen nothing.

No matter; St. Martin’s Street offered two different outlets that would lead them west. They reached the first of these in only a few moments, and slowed so that the driver could gaze down the side-street to see if it was clear. Eliza did the same. No more than fifty yards away, what looked like a squadron of cavalry was cantering into position to block them. They did not have banners, drums, or bugles, and did not wear uniforms, unless you considered Mode to be a kind of uniform. But they moved with a shared purpose, and Eliza sensed that they were looking to one man, in particular, for orders: a chap in a long cloak, on a black horse.

Before Eliza could take in much more, or say anything, the driver had made up his mind to try the second and last side-street. His whip skirled and cracked, touching off a barrage of noise: sixteen iron-shod hooves and four iron-rimmed wheels accelerating over cobblestones as the box creaked, bobbled, and thudded in its suspension. To communicate with the driver was now next to impossible; she could pound and kick on the roof all she pleased, and scream through the grate until she was hoarse, and he likely would not hear a thing.

It was not clear what she should say to him. To maintain the illusion was all. To reach Marlborough House would be good, insofar as it enhanced the illusion. But it was not essential, and certainly not worth anyone’s getting killed. To rattle around aimlessly for a while would serve as well, and perhaps better.

At the end of the street, where it turned to the right, there was enough room for the team and carriage to make a rapid sweeping turn. This the driver did-so swiftly that the carriage lost traction and slewed sideways for a yard or two, until its wheel-rims caught hard on a scarp in the road. Then its skid was arrested so sharply that the whole box lifted up and slanted as two wheels left the pavement for an instant. Presently the slack went out of the rig and jerked it forward again on its new, west-going course. The carriage crashed back down on four wheels again and Eliza was hurled to the right, then back as the team accelerated. She was left with the troubling memory of a momentary sound that, because it had been so sharp, had reached her ears even through all of the noise of this maneuver: the crack of the whip perhaps, or even a pistol-shot. But it had seemed to come from just outside the left window. She phant’sied it had had a splintering quality. Perhaps a wheel-spoke giving way as the lateral skid of the carriage had been arrested. Perhaps the driver should be directed to avoid violent right turns. Or had he heard the sound, too, and wanted no advice?

Her hatred of the box and passion to know what was going on urged her to shove her head out the window and look forward. Simple prudence said otherwise. The horses were galloping now. In a few yards they’d reach a tee, and be obliged to turn left or right on Hedge Lane; she braced her feet against the opposite bench, and her hands against the sides, and prayed they would go left. For she was convinced now that the heartbeat-like thumpa-thumpa-thumpa she heard on the left, and felt through the bones of the carriage, was a bad spoke or two.

This tactic-ramming-speed in the streets of London-seemed insane from within the box. But it was not really so, for (as she was recollecting) the carriage had a long pole-not unlike a ram on a galley-that extended all the way forward, between each pair of horses in the team, and to which all the harnesses were connected. People got killed by these things all the time: some by impalement and others by having their brains dashed out. Even supposing there were a squadron of Jacobite cavalry trying to bar their escape onto Hedge Lane-and that had to have been a phantasm, hadn’t it?-all of them would get well clear of that deadly pole, once they perceived that it had built up too much speed to stop. What they might do then, when they’d regrouped and got their blood up, was another matter-but no point in fretting about that now.

It seemed to have worked, anyway, for the carriage’s speed slackened even as she was tensed for a crash, and it began to manage a turn-a left turn, thank God, and not so fast-onto Hedge Lane. And really not so much a full turn as a quick leftward jog into the next west-going street, Little Suffolk, which would run straight to Hay Market, and dump them out directly across from the triple-arched facade of the Italian Opera House that Vanbrugh and the Whigs had built there.

She heard horses all round during this maneuver, and voices shouting; but could not make out words until they had got well established on Little Suffolk, and built up to a steady canter that would bring them to the Opera House in considerably less than one minute. There seemed no point in letting those seconds go to waste. Eliza could hear the riders all around shouting absurd things such as “Halt!” and “I demand that you stop this carriage.” She wanted no such thing to occur; but neither did she want the driver to press forward if someone was about to shoot him. The important thing was the illusion.

She shot open the window on the carriage’s left side and got a burqa-impression of several riders, all of whom abruptly went silent; which was so gratifying that she slid over to the right and shot that window open as well. She risked a peek out and forward, and saw a row of building-fronts ahead. This might have been any of London’s newer streets. But her eye was arrested by one building-front twice or thrice as broad as its neighbors.

Like them it was made of brick, but so much of its facade was spoken for by arched windows and doorways, and by the massive grooved voussoirs that framed them, and the stacks of deeply rusticated blocks that ascended from its corner-stones, and the broad friezes and cornices that spanned its width between storeys, that it really seemed to have been fabricated out of massive clods of pale stone, with brick and mortar spackled into the narrow traces between. It was meant to look as dramatic as what went on inside of it: for this was the Italian Opera, and it stood in the Hay Market. Though Eliza loved and, like a good Whig, subscribed to it, it was of no utility whatever tonight, save as a landmark. Narrow streets such as Little Suffolk might be barricaded by a few men and a bonfire, but the Hay Market was nearly a hundred feet in breadth. It would take a company to stop them there.

“Ignore these men!” she said, “straight on, and stop for no one!” Which was only an indifferent snatch of libretto, as it went; but what made all the difference was that she uttered it in German. Eliza had been in many a salon, in Versailles and Amsterdam and elsewhere, and spoken many a clever or shocking mot, and created many a frisson-but all were as nothing compared to the effect that these words had on the riders around her. “It is she! It is the Princess!” one of them shouted, and spurred his horse to a gallop, riding forward to the intersection with Hay Market, now perhaps fifty yards away. Eliza was so pleased by this that she feared she might be recognized as an impostor, and spoil the effect; so before any of the riders on the right side could get too long a look at her, she withdrew and skidded back to the left side to have a look out that window.

But there enjoyment ended. Ahead, she saw meteors of flame bobbing and swirling on the end of torch-handles. One of these stooped to the pavement and vanished in an orb of dull fire-glow, which broke open into a rush of brilliant yellow flame. Someone had put a torch to the base of a well-laid bonfire. The carriage faltered as the horses saw it. The driver cracked his whip over and over, and permitted the team to divert to the right as much as they could in the confines of Little Suffolk. Hope that they could skirt the fire, and fear of the whip and of the shouting riders, drove the horses into an undisciplined rush forward. Just as they burst through into Hay Market, someone tossed a handful of firecrackers into the flames. They went off in a barrage so close and hot that Eliza felt bursts of heat reaching in through the window to slap at her face. She tried to move to the right. But the team had gotten a worse scare than she, and moved away from it with all the power of several tons of muscle. The carriage veered right, and went up on its left wheels. Eliza would have dropped straight into the left door had she not lashed out to grip the sill of the window on the right. For a moment she was suspended, gazing up through the burqa-slot to see nothing but chimney-tops, storks’ nests, and stars in the sky.

Then the left wheel collapsed. The entire carriage dropped an arm’s length or so, and landed with its full weight on the end of the left axle. Or so she collected from the sounds and the movements. Her right hand was jarred loose from the windowsill, so she dropped like a sack of barley into the left door. Its latch gave way and it fell open; but it could only open so far, as it was nearly skidding along the pavement. The only thing holding it above the cobbles of Hay Market was that axle, which projected beyond the side of the vehicle for a short distance. And so Eliza, lying on her back on the broken door with the wind knocked out of her, was able to turn her head and see pavement rushing away only a few inches from her nose, taking her chestnut-colored wig with it.

But presently the pavement slowed and stopped. The horses-who must be driverless now-had decided that the place they had reached-the front court of the Opera, by the looks of it-was safer than any other place in view, and resolved to stop here. Eliza began trying to squirm out of the half-open door; she phant’sied there was enough space between the ground and the flank of the carriage to admit her body. This very soon turned out to have been overly optimistic, for the door was not open quite wide enough to let her out. She got her head, a shoulder, and an arm free, but the remainder of Eliza would not come unless the door were removed. It was held in place by hinges of ox-hide. Eliza’s left arm was still imprisoned, but she could move it around, and find one of the hinges by groping. She had a little Turkish watered-steel dagger in the waistband of her dress: a nasty old habit. She found it with her left hand, and drew it out. A few moments later she was sawing away at one of the leather hinges.

And she was thus busily engaged when a pair of polished black riding-boots presented themselves before her face. The hem of a long dark cloak roiled about them like a cloud. A chestnut wig fell to the pavement. “You are not the woman I was looking for,” said a voice in French.

Eliza looked far, far up to see the face of Father Edouard de Gex staring down at her. He was perspiring freely. “But you will do, madame, you will do.” In his gloved hands he was twirling a dagger that gave off an oily sheen in the light of the bonfires that were springing up all around.