The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and the System of the World (249 page)

“We could go north round Britain, conceivably,” Vrej muttered, “and approach through the North Sea, which ought to be a Dutch-English lake.”

“But if we are going that route
anyway,
we may as well go to Qwghlm.”

“I am coming about to your view,” Vrej said, after a moment.

“I don’t like it,” van Hoek said.

AUGUST
1702

T
WO 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.”

Q
WGHLM
C
ASTLE 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 château 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 Édouard de Gex, a Jesuit, and a hater of the Jansenists and of the Enlightenment both—came around to taunt him.

Édouard de Gex looked surprised. “Why do you ask? Surely you’re not naïve 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
.”

Édouard 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 fé
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 fé
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 fé
in Westminster, I’ll do that,” Jack promised.

J
ACK 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?”