Quicksilver (83 page)

Then—like anyone else coming towards a grand party—Jack glanced down at his own person. He had been counting on darkness, but had blundered into light, and was shocked at how clearly his shit-covered rags and neck-iron stood out.

He saw a man inside who’d been in the duc’s entourage the other day. Not wanting to be recognized, Jack turned up the collar of the stolen cape, and drew it round to conceal the bottom half of his face.

A few small clusters of party-goers had formed in the lawn between the front of the house and the fountain, and
all
conversation had been suspended so that all faces could turn to stare at Jack. But they did not raise a hue and cry. They stared for a remarkably
long time, as if Jack were a new and extremely expensive sculpture that had just been unveiled. Then Jack sensed a contagious thrill, a
frisson
like the one that had run through the fish-market at Les Halles when he’d galloped through it. There was a strange pattering noise. He realized they were
applauding
him. A serving-girl flashed away into the ballroom, hitching up her skirts as she ran, to spread some news. The musicians stopped playing, all faces turned to the windows. The people on the lawn had converged toward Jack, while maintaining a certain respectful distance, and were bowing and curtseying, very low. A pair of footmen practically sprawled out onto the grass in their anxiety to hurl the front doors open. Framed in the arch was a porky gentleman armed with a long Trident, which naturally made Jack flinch when he saw it—this fellow, Jack suspected, was the duc d’Arcachon, dressed up as Neptune. But then the duc held the weapon out towards him, resting crossways on his outstretched hands—
offering
it to Jack. Neptune then backed out of the way, still doubled over in a deep bow, and beckoned him into the ballroom. Inside, the party-goers had formed up in what he instinctively recognized as a gauntlet to whip all the skin off his back—but then understood must actually be a pair of lines to
receive
him!

Everything seemed to point to that he was expected to ride into the ballroom on horseback, which was unthinkable. But Jack had become adept (or so he believed) at distinguishing things that were really happening from the waking dreams or phant’sies that came into his head more and more frequently of late, and, reckoning that this was one of the latter, he decided to enjoy it. Accordingly, he now rode Turk (who was extremely reluctant) right past the duc and into the ballroom. Now
everyone
bowed low, giving Jack the opportunity to look down a large number of white-powdered cleavages. A trumpeter played some sort of fanfare. One cleavage in particular Jack was afraid he might fall into and have to be winched out on a rope. The lady in question, noticing Jack’s fixed stare, seemed to think that he was staring at least partly at the string of pearls around her neck. Something of a complicated nature occurred inside her head, and then she blushed and clasped both hands to her black-spotted face and squealed and said something to the effect of “No, no, please, not my jewels…Emmerdeur,” and then she unclasped the pearls from behind her neck; clasped them back together into a loop;
threw
it over the point of Jack’s sword, like a farm girl playing ring-toss at the fair; and then expertly swooned back into the waiting arms of her escort: a satyr with a two-foot-long red leather penis.

Another woman shrieked, and Jack raised his weapon in case he was going to have to kill her—but all he saw was another mademoiselle going into the same act—she ran up and pinned a jeweled brooch to the hem of his cloak, muttering
“pour les Invalides,”
then backed away curtseying before Jack could say what was on his mind, which was:
If you want to give this away to charity, lady, you came to the wrong bloke.

Then they were
all
doing it, the thing was a sensation, the ladies were practically elbowing each other to get near and decorate Jack’s clothes and his sword, and Turk’s bridle, with jewelry. The only person
not
having a good time was a certain handsome young Barbary Pirate who stood at the back of the crowd, red-faced, staring at Jack with eyes that, had they been pliers…

A stillness now spread across the ballroom like a blast of frigid air from a door blown open by a storm. Everyone seemed to be looking toward the entrance. The ladies were backing away from Jack in hopes of getting a better view. Jack sat up straight in the saddle and got Turk turned around, partly to see what everyone else was staring at and partly because he had the sense it would soon be time to leave.

A
second
man had ridden into the ballroom on horseback. Jack identified him, at first, as a Vagabond recently escaped from captivity—no doubt well-deserved captivity. But of course it was really some nobleman
pretending
to be a Vagabond, and his costume was
much better
than Jack’s—the chain around his neck, and the broken fetters on his wrists and ankles, appeared to’ve been forged out of
solid gold,
and he was brandishing a gaudy jeweled scimitar, and wearing a conspicuous, diamond-studded, but comically tiny codpiece. Behind him, out in the courtyard, was a whole entourage: Gypsies, jeweled and attired according to some extremely romantic conception of what it was to be a gypsy; ostrich-plume-wearing Moors; and fine ladies dressed up as bawdy Vagabond-wenches.

Jack allowed the cape to fall clear of his face.

There followed the longest period of silence that he had ever known. It was so long that he could have tied Turk’s reins to a candelabra and curled up under the harpsichord for a little nap. He could have run a message down to Lyons during this silence (and, in retrospect, probably
should
have). But instead he just sat there on his horse and waited for something to happen, and took in the scene.

Silence made him aware that the house was a hive of life and activity, even when all of the Persons of Quality were frozen up like statues. There was the normal dim clattering of the kitchen, for example. But his attention was drawn to the ceiling, which was
(a) a hell of a thing to look at, and (b) making a great deal of noise—he thought perhaps a heavy rain had begun to thrash the roof, partly because of this scrabbling, rushing noise that was coming from it, and partly because it was leaking rather badly in a number of places. It had been decorated both with plaster relief-work and with paint, so that if you could lie on your back and stare at it you would see a vast naval Tableau: the gods of the four winds at the edges of the room, cheeks all puffed as they blew out billowy plaster clouds, and the Enemies of France angling in from various corners, viz. English and Dutch frigates riding the north wind, Spanish and Portuguese galleons the south, as well as pirates of Barbary and Malta and the Turk, and the occasional writhing sea-monster. Needless to say, the center was dominated by the French Navy in massive three-dimensional plasterwork, guns pointing every which way, and on the poop-deck of the mightiest ship, surrounded by spyglass-toting Admirals, stood a laurel-wreath-crowned Leroy, one hand fingering an astrolabe and the other resting on a cannon. And as if to add even greater realism, the entire scene was now running and drizzling, as if there really were an ocean up above it trying to break through and pay homage to the living King who had just rode in. From this alarming leakage, and from the rustling noise, Jack naturally suspected a sudden violent storm coming through a leaky roof. But when he looked out the windows into the courtyard he saw no rain. Besides (he remembered with some embarrassment), the Hôtel d’Arcachon was not some farmhouse, where the ceiling was merely the underside of the roof. Jack well knew, from having broken into a few places like this, that the ceiling was a thin shell of plaster troweled over horizontal lath-work, and that there would be a crawl space above it, sandwiched between ceiling and roof, with room for dull, dirty things like chandelier-hoists and perhaps cisterns.

That
was it—there must be a cistern full of collected rainwater up there, which must have sprung a leak—in fact, had probably been encouraged to do so by St.-George or one of his friends, just to create a distraction that might be useful to Jack. The water must be gushing out across the top of the plaster-work, percolating down between the laths, saturating the plaster, which was darkening in several large irregular patches—gathering storm-clouds besetting the French Navy and darkening the sea from robin’s-egg blue to a more realistic iron-gray. Gray, and heavy, and no longer flat and smooth—the ceiling was swelling and bulging downwards. In several places around the room, dirty water had begun to spatter
down onto the floor. Servants were fetching mops and buckets, but dared not interrupt the Silence.

Turk complained of something, and Jack looked down to discover that the satyr with the very long, barbed, red leather penis had sidled up and grabbed Turk’s bridle.

“That’s an
incredibly
bad idea,” Jack said in English (there was no point in even
trying
his French among
this
crowd). He said it
sotto voce,
not wanting to officially break the Silence, and indeed most people could not hear him over the odd scrabbling noises and muffled squeaks emanating from above. The squeaks might be the sound of lath-nails being wrenched out of old dry joists by the growing weight of the ceiling. Anyway, it was good that Jack glanced down, because he also noticed John Churchill striding round the back of the crowd, examining the flintlock mechanism on a pistol, very much in the manner of an experienced slayer of men who was looking forward to a moment soon when he’d fire the weapon. Jack didn’t have a firearm, only a sword, freighted with jewelry at the moment. He shoved its tip through the satin lining of the riding-cloak, cutting a small gash, and then allowed all of the goods to avalanche into it.

The satyr responded in better English than Jack would ever speak: “It is a
dreadful
thing for me to have done—life is not long enough for me to make sufficient apologies. Please know that I have simply tried to make the best of an awkward—”

But then he was interrupted by King Louis XIV of France, who, in a mild yet room-filling voice, delivered some kind of witticism. It was only a sentence, or phrase, but it said more than any bishop’s three-hour Easter homily. Jack could scarcely hear a word, and wouldn’t’ve understood it anyway, but he caught the word Vagabond, and the word
noblesse,
and inferred that something profoundly philosophical was being said. But not in a dry, fussy way—there was worldly wisdom here, there was irony, a genuine spark of wit, droll but never vulgar. Leroy was amused, but would never be so common as to laugh aloud.
That
was reserved for the courtiers who leaned in, on tiptoe, to hear the witticism. Jack believed, just for a moment, that if John Churchill—who had no sense of humor at all—had not been homing in on him with that loaded pistol, all might have been forgiven, and Jack might have stayed and drunk some wine and danced with some ladies.

He could not move away from Churchill when the satyr was gripping Turk’s bridle. “Are you going to make me cut that off?” he inquired.

“I freely confess that I deserve no better,” said the satyr. “In
fact—I am so humiliated that I must do it myself, to restore my, and my father’s, honor.” Whereupon he pulled a dagger from his belt and began to saw through the red leather glove on the hand that was gripping the bridle—attempting to cut off his left hand with his right. In doing so he probably saved Jack’s life, for this spectacle—the man sawing at his own arm, blood welling out of the glove and dribbling onto the white floor—stopped Churchill in his curly-toed tracks, no more than a fathom away. It was the only time Jack had ever seen Churchill hesitate.

There was a ripping and whooshing noise from one end of the room. The East Wind had been split open by a sagging crevice that unloaded a sheet of dirty, lumpy water onto the floor. A whole strip of ceiling, a couple of yards wide, peeled away now, like a plank being ripped away from the side of a boat. It led straight to the French Navy—half a ton of plaster, bone dry—which came off in a single unified fleet action and seemed to hang in space for a moment before it started accelerating toward the floor. Everyone got out of the way. The plaster exploded and splayed snowballs of damp crud across the floor. But stuff continued to rain down from above, small dark lumps that, when they struck the floor, shook themselves and took off running.

Jack looked at Churchill just in time to see the flint whipping round on the end of its curved arm, a spray of sparks, a preliminary bloom of smoke from the pan. Then a lady blundered in from one side, not paying attention to where she was going because she had realized that there were rats in her wig—but she didn’t know how many (Jack, at a quick glance, numbered them at three, but more were raining down all the time and so he would’ve been loath to commit himself to a specific number). She hit Churchill’s arm. A jet of fire as long as a man’s arm darted from the muzzle of Churchill’s pistol and caught Turk in the side of the face, though the ball apparently missed. The polite satyr was lucky to be alive—it had gone off inches from his head.

Turk was stunned and frozen, if only for a moment. Then a Barbary pirate-galley, driven downwards by a gout of water/rat slurry, exploded on the floor nearby. Some of the water, and some of the rats, poured down on Turk’s neck—and then he detonated. He tried to rear up and was held down by the satyr’s bloody but steadfast clutch, so he bucked—fortunately Jack saw this coming—and then kicked out with both hind-legs. Anyone behind him would’ve been decapitated, but the center of the ballroom had been mostly given over to rats now. A few more of those bucks and Jack would be flung off. He needed to let Turk run. But Churchill was now
trying to get round the satyr to lay a second hand on Turk’s bridle. “This is the worst fucking party I’ve ever been to!” Jack said, whirling his sword-arm around like a windmill.

“Sir, I am sorry, but—”

The polite satyr did not finish the apology, because Jack delivered a cut to the middle of his forearm. The blade passed through sweetly. The dangling hand balled itself into a fist and maintained its grip on the bridle, even as the now one-armed satyr was falling back on top of Churchill. Turk sensed freedom and reared up. Jack looked down at Churchill and said, “Next time you want one of my horses—pay in
advance,
you rogue!”