The Confusion (66 page)

“Are we to understand,” said the London factor, translating for him, “that
La France
is to receive—in addition to the hundred thousand
livres
in silver we have already delivered to you—four hundred thousand
livres
worth of silver as booty in Dunkerque
as well as
four hundred thousand
livres
worth of Baltic timber, in exchange for nothing more than five hundred thousand
livres
in French government obligations in Lyon?”

“I recommend you moderate your tone,” said Eliza. “Voices carry out into the street; and lurking there in ’Change Alley are any number of City men who have heard all the rumors about the insolvency of the Hacklhebers. When I step out that door, I shall be interrogated like a prisoner on the Inquisition’s rack. They will know whether the Hacklhebers have been able to honour their obligations, or not. Through the generous intercession of Monsieur Durand, it will be possible for me to answer in the affirmative.” Eliza half-turned toward the door and rested a gloved hand on the latch. The room grew perceptibly darker as a Mobb of ’Change-men on the street outside noted her gesture, and drew closer to the windows, blocking out the light. Eliza continued: “This talk of yours about four hundred thousand
livres
here or there is quite lost on me; I am a mere housewife with no head for numbers.” She flexed her wrist and the door-latch made a clicking noise, a bit like the cocking of a flintlock. A volcanic up-welling of German sounded from the rear of the shop; Eliza could
not quite follow what was being said, but suddenly the barrister spun to face her and announced: “My client is pleased to accept the proposal, pending resolution of the terms in detail.”

“Then pray resolve them with Monsieur Durand,” said Eliza, “I am going out for a bit of air.”

“And—?”

“And to let the City of London know that the House of Hacklheber is
Ditta di Borsa,
as ever,” Eliza added.

“W
HAT WAS THAT BIT
you hollered into the back, just as you were coming out the door?” asked Bob Shaftoe. “I could not make out your French.”

“’Twas nothing,” said Eliza, “only polite leave-taking. I complimented the old fellow on how adroitly he and his colleagues had managed the transaction, and expressed my hope that in future we might work together again thusly.”

“And what said he to that?”

“Naught, but only stared into my eyes—overcome with fond emotions, I should say.”

“You said before, in St.-Malo, when we—” Bob began, and got lost in his thoughts as his gaze slipped down toward her belly.

“When we were together.”

“Yes, you said you wanted your boot on Lothar’s neck. And it seems to me you had that, just as you phant’sied. But you let him go?”

“Never,” said Eliza, “never. For do not forget that every transaction has two ends, and this is only one of them.”

“Very well. I shall not forget it. But I do not
understand
it.”

“Neither does Lothar.”

“Will you return to France?”

“To Dunkerque,” Eliza said, “to pay my compliments to Captain Bart, and to inform the Marquis d’Ozoir that he has got his timber. What of you, Sergeant Bob?”

“I shall remain here for the present time. I’ve been to visit Mr. Churchill a time or two in the Tower, you know. He shan’t be there very much longer, mark my words.”

“The judicial proceedings against him have become a farce, such as appeals to the English sense of humor, but all grow weary of it.”

“And meanwhile King Louis himself is laying siege to Namur, isn’t he? And folks are asking, why does King William keep our best commander locked up on a ridiculous pretext, when a great campaign is under way on the other side of the Narrow Seas? No, my lady, if I were to go back to Normandy, I’d have some explaining to do, and might even be hanged for desertion. That Irish regiment’ll be sent
God only knows where—for all I know, they’ll wind up in the South, on the Savoy front, a million miles from where I have been trying to go. But soon enough Churchill shall be at the head of an army, and I shall go with that army to Flanders. We shall face the French across some narrow strip of ground. I’ll scan the colors on the opposing side, until I spy those of Count Sheerness—”

“And then?”

“Why, then, I shall devise some means of ending up with
my
boot on
his
throat. And we shall enter into a discussion concerning Abigail.”

“You attempted that with his brother—Abigail’s
previous
owner. He almost killed you, and you did not get Abigail.”

“I do not claim ’tis a likely plan, but ’tis
my
plan, and it gives me something to do.”

“Can I not simply
buy
the girl from Sheerness?”

“It would raise questions. Why should you care about one English slave?”

“That is my business.”

“And Abigail is mine—”

“Would Abigail agree? Or would she prefer that plan that is most likely to lead to her freedom?”

This made Bob a bit stormy-looking. He strove with his temper for a bit. Then he chuckled. “What’s the point of flapping my jaw when you’ll go and do just what you please, no matter what I say? Be off to Dunkerque, then. But if my wishes have any gravity, you’ll tend to yourself and not to me. For I ween you are in a delicate way just now. That is all.”

“I am
ever
in a delicate way,” said Eliza, “but men pick and choose the time to take notice of it, as it suits their purposes.” At this Bob chuckled again, which provoked her. “Let us speak plainly,” she said, “for this is where our ways part—you must to the Tower to attend your master in his prison-cell, I must to dockside to arrange passage to Dunkerque.” They had arrived at the cross where Grace Church Street changed its name to Fish Street, and plunged down to the Bridge. From their right entered Great Eastcheap; under the name of Little Eastcheap it then wended its way off in the direction of the Tower. A stone’s throw down the hill, a lone, stupendous column jutted up from the city, casting a finger of shadow down the length of the street. They’d come nigh to the place where the Fire of London had been kindled a quarter-century before. The column was the Monument that Wren and Hooke had put up to it.

“When you promise to speak plainly, I know to brace myself,” said Bob, and then he did literally, leaning back against a brick wall.

“You have seen me sick, and suppose that I am pregnant. This has
wrought powerfully on your mind, for you know that Abigail was given syphilis by Upnor and may not be able to give you children, even if you do pry her free from the clutches of Count Sheerness. You have stopped thinking of me as ‘Eliza the woman I roger from time to time’ and begun to think of me as ‘Eliza the expectant mother of my only child.’ This has queered your judgment and led you to consider schemes that are not likely to produce Abigail’s freedom. Know then that the fœtus—which might have been yours, or my husband’s, or any of several other men’s—miscarried the night before last. It is with the angels. I would still produce a competent heir for my husband, but must begin a new pregnancy once I have reached France. Perhaps I shall seduce Jean Bart, perhaps the Marquis d’Ozoir, perhaps a Marine who catches my fancy on the street. In any case you must give up hope that any progeny of yours shall come from here—” and Eliza rested her hand on the front of her bodice “—for I am done with being the other woman in the life of Bob Shaftoe and Abigail Frome. Done with being the poppy-elixir that makes you forget your pain, and leads you to dream stratagems that shall never avail you or her a thing. Abigail may be waiting for you, Bob. I am not. Get thee to thy projects, then.”

She was gone from Bob’s sight before the words penetrated all the way to his heart, for she was a small woman, quick, and dissolved into the traffic down Fish Street Hill like a mote of sugar in a stream of boiling water. Bob did not move, but let the brick wall hold him up for some while, until the proprietor—an insurance-man—thrust his head out the window and gave him that look that Gentlemen give to Vagabonds when it is time for them to be moving on. Bob had a soldier’s knack for moving when he did not wish to. He levered himself away from the wall, rounded the corner, and marched down Little Eastcheap toward the Tower, where his Captain would be waiting for him with orders.

SEPTEMBER
1693

E
VERY MORNING A MOB OF
angry Hindoos convened outside the hospital hoping to have a conversation with Jack on his way in, and so every day Jack came a little earlier, stealing in through a back door where manure was carried out and food brought in. Because of that latter function it was the correct entrance for him to use anyway. He walked across an enclosed stable-yard, holding one hand before his face as a sort of visor, to break a trail through the horseflies. At least, he
hoped
that they were horseflies.

His passage was noticed and commented upon by insomniacal horses and camels, standing on splinted and bandaged limbs, or dangling from formidable slings, in stalls all round the yard. A tiger was here, too, being treated for an abscessed tooth, but she was kept in a cage in an out-building. Otherwise her fragrance, and the nearly inaudible sound she made when she yawned, would drive the horses and camels into frenzies. A horse supporting itself on two legs, and kicking with the remaining two, was dangerous enough; a horse in a sling, kicking with all four legs at once, was as dangerous as a cart-load of Afghans.

The insect situation did not improve when he went inside. In part, this was because the distinction between inside and outside was not closely observed in this part of the world; space was divided up by walls and screens, yes. But they all had great bloody holes in them (ornately shaped holes painstakingly carved by master craftsmen,
yes, but none the less holes) to let in air and light and (or so Jack supposed in his more peevish moments) to keep buildings from bursting and falling down when the inmates got to farting—for these people ate beans, or, at any rate, a plethora of mysterious bean-like foodstuffs, as if they were all starving—which, come to think of it, they
were
.

At any rate, the result was that the gallery into which Jack had now entered was thick with flies, zinging through the darkness like spent grapeshot on the fringes of a battle, and crunching into his shaved head and raising welts. They had been drawn here, from all over the Indies, by the smell of diverse sick or injured creatures and their feed and their manure; for this hospital with all its stone screens and lattice-works was like a giant censer dispensing such fragrances into the air of Ahmadabad.

Past the mongoose with the suppurating eye, the jackal with mange, the half-paralyzed king cobra, the stunningly odoriferous civet-cat-with-bone-cancer, the mouse deer with the javelin wound did Jack proceed, and then entered a room filled with bird-cages of bent bamboo, where diverse broken-winged avians were on the mend. A peacock with an arrow stuck sideways all the way through his neck shuffled around, bumping into things and getting hung up on the cages and squawking in outrage. Jack gave him a wide berth, not wanting to get lockjaw off that arrowhead if the peacock should happen to execute a sharp turn in the vicinity of his knees.

Through a rickety door was a room piled floor to ceiling with even smaller cages housing sick or injured mice and rats, some of which sounded distinctly rabid. The less time spent here the better, and so Jack forged on to another room, and down some stone steps.

The smell here transcended mere badness. It was not a smell of mammals or even reptiles, but of an entirely different order of Creation. It was
thrilling
. For quite some time Jack had been breathing through his nose, but now he threw one arm over his face and sucked in air through the crook of his elbow. For the air in this, the deepest and innermost part of the hospital, was (he estimated) fifty percent insects by volume, a sort of writhing meat-cloud that continually hummed, as if he had climbed into an organ pipe. And if even one of those bugs got into a nostril and injured itself trying to struggle free of Jack’s nose-hairs, the caretakers would be sure to notice, and then Jack would be out of a job. For the same reason, he had altered his gait, and now shuffled along on bare feet, plowing carefully through the drifts and flurries of bugs on the floor, hoping there weren’t any scorpions there just now.

“Jack Shaftoe reporting for duty!” he hollered. The chief bug-doctor,
and his diverse hierarchies and sub-hierarchies of assistants, had all been sleeping under gauzy bug-nets suspended from the ceiling. These huddled in the corners of the bug-ward like claques of pointy-headed ghosts. They now began to bobble and twitch as sleepy Hindoos emerged from them. Jack stripped down to the thong that he used to protect what remained of his privities, and handed his clothes to someone (he wasn’t sure
whom
, and didn’t care; this was Hindoostan, there were a lot of people here, and if you held something out and looked expectant, someone would soon enough take it).

A boy brought him the usual concoction, holding the coconut shell to Jack’s lips while others bound Jack’s hands together behind his back with a strip of cloth. Out of habit, Jack put his ankles together so that those could likewise be bound. When he had finished gulping down that draught (which was supposed to nourish and replenish the blood), he allowed himself to fall forward, and was caught by many small warm hands and gently lowered onto the floor—though not before it had been gently swept clear of any insects. His bound ankles were brought up to meet his hands, and all were tied together above his bare buttocks. Meanwhile a swathe of gauze was being tied about his head, screening his mouth, nose, and eyes.

Above, he could hear a boom of timber—what sailors would call a yard—being swung around until one end of it was above him. From a pulley on its tip, a stout rope was now brought down and tied to the web of bonds that joined his wrists and ankles, with a couple of turns around his waist to carry most of his weight.

Deeper voices spoke now—the pulley squeaked, the rope tensed, the yard began to tick and groan, and then Jack was airborne. They swung the yard around, Jack skimming along just a hand’s breadth above the floor, escorted by giggling and shuffling Hindoo boys. But these suddenly peeled away as the stone floor dropped out from under him and he swung out over a pit: a stone-lined silo perhaps four yards across and somewhat less in depth. They let him hang above the middle of it for a few seconds, prodding him artfully with bamboo poles until he stopped swinging; then the rope was let out and Jack descended. Many torches had been lit for this the most critical part of the operation. The gauze over his eyes strained their light from the air and clouded his vision, which was just as well. They took utmost care not to let his full weight down onto the sandy floor of the pit until they were absolutely certain that no living creature was underneath him. But they or their ancestors had done this many times a day since the beginning of Time and were good at their work. Jack came to rest on the pit-floor without crushing a thing.

Then from small holes and arches and burrows, tanks, puddles, sumps, rotten logs, decomposing fruit, hives, and sand-heaps all around, out they came: foot-long centipedes, clouds of fleas, worms of various descriptions, all manner of flying insects—in short, all sorts of creatures whatever that subsisted on blood. He felt a bat land on the back of his neck, and tried to relax.

“That iridescent beetle feasting on your left buttock does not appear to be injured or sick in the slightest degree!” said a curiously familiar voice, speaking English with a musical accent. “I think it should be discharged forthwith, Jack.”

“Wouldn’t surprise me—the whole country is infested with idlers and freebooters—like that rabble out front.”

“That rabble, as you call them, are the men of the Swapak
mahajan
,” said Surendranath—for by this point Jack had recognized him as none other.

“So they keep telling me—what of it?”

“You must understand that the Swapaks are a very ancient subcaste of the Shudra Ahir—the herdsmen of the Vinkhala tribe—which is one of the sixteen branches of the Seventh Division of the Fire Races.”

“And?”

“They are divided into two great classes, the noble and the ignoble, the former being divided into thirty-seven subtribes and the latter into ninety-three. The Shudra Ahir were formerly one of the thirty-seven, until after the Third Incarnation of Lord Kalpa, when they came up from Anhalwara by way of Lower Oond, and intermarried with a tribe of degenerated Mulgrassias.”

“So?”

“Jack, just to put that in context, you must understand that those people are regarded as Dhangs of the lower subcaste (yet considerably above the Dhoms!) by the Virda, whom they nonetheless abhor. To give you an idea of just how degenerate they were, these Dhangs, in an earlier age, had intermarried with the Kalpa Salkh of Kalapur, of whom almost nothing is known save that not even the ape-men of Hari would allow themselves to be overshadowed by them.”

“I am waiting for your point to arrive.”

“The point is that the Shudra Ahir have been herdsmen and feeders of livestock since before the breaking of the Three Jade Eggs, and the Swapak, for almost as long, have been—”

“Feeders of bloodsucking insects in animal hospitals that are operated by some other
mahajan
of some other caste—yes, I know, it’s all been tediously explained to me,” said Jack, flinching as a centipede bit through the flesh of his inner thigh and tapped into an
artery. “But those Swapak have been assured of jobs for so many thousands of years that they have become indolent. They make unreasonable demands of the Brahmins who run this place, and lounge around out front all day and night, pestering passers-by.”

“You sound like a rich Frank complaining about Vagabonds.”

“If I were not having my blood sucked out by thousands of vermin, I might take offense—as it is, your japes and witticisms strike me as more of the same.”

Surendranath laughed. “You must forgive me. When I learned that you were earning your keep in this way, I rashly assumed that you had become a
desperate wretch
. Now I appreciate that you take pride in your work.”

“Compared to those layabouts who are encamped in front, Padraig and I—ouch!—are willing to do this work for a more competitive rate, and comport ourselves as professionals.”

“I very much fear that you will be comporting yourselves as dead men if you do not get out of Ahmadabad,” said Surendranath.

Above, Jack heard commands uttered in Gujarati, then the welcome creak of the pulley. The rope came tight and raised him a few inches off the ground. He writhed and shook himself, trying to shed as many of the creatures as he could. “What are you talking about? They don’t even step on
bugs
. What’re they going to do to a couple of
men?
”

“Oh, it is not difficult for such people to come to an understanding, Jack, with members of castes that specialize in mayhem.”

Jack was now raised up out of the pit and swung round over the floor again. The bug-doctors converged on him with brooms, gently sweeping away the engorged ticks and leeches. Then they let him down and began untying the bonds. As soon as he could, Jack reached up and pulled off the gauze face-mask. Now he was able to get a good look at Surendranath for the first time.

When they’d parted company, outside the customs-house of Surat, more than a year ago, Surendranath, like Jack, had been a shivering wretch, dressed in rags, and still walking slightly bowlegged on account of the thoroughgoing search that was meted out to all who entered the Mogul’s realms there, to make sure that they were not secreting Persian Gulf pearls in their rectal orifices.

Today, of course, Jack looked much the same, save that he was covered with bug bites and lying on his belly. But in front of his nose was a pair of fine leather slippers covered with red velvet brocade, and above them, a pair of orange-and-yellow-striped silk breeches, and hanging over those, a long shirt of excellent linen. This was surmounted by the head of Surendranath. He had grown his moustache
out but otherwise had a professional shave—which must have cost him dearly, so early in the morning—and he had a sizeable gold ring in his nose, and wore a snow-white turban with an overwrap of wine-colored silk edged in gold.

“It’s not
my
fault I’m stuck in this fucking country with no money,” Jack said. “Blame it on those pirates.”

Surendranath snorted. “Jack, when I lose a single rupee I lie awake all night, cursing myself and the man who took it from me. You do not need to urge me to hate the pirates who took our gold!”

“Very well, then.”

“But does this mean that other Hindoostanis, belonging to a different caste, speaking a different language, residing at the other end of the subcontinent, must suffer?”

“I have to eat.”

“There are other ways for a Frank to make a living in Hind.”

“I see those rich Dutchmen in the streets every day. Bully for them. But I can’t make a living from trade when I’ve nothing to my name. Besides—for Christ’s sake, you Banyans make even Jews and Armenians seem like
nuns
in the bazaar.”

“Thank you,” Surendranath said modestly.

“Besides, in Surat and all the other treaty ports, there is an astronomical price on my head.”

“It is true that, as the result of your dealings with the Viceroy, the House of Hacklheber, and the Duc d’Arcachon, all of Spain, Germany, and France now wish to kill you,” Surendranath admitted, helping Jack to his feet.

“You left out the Ottoman Empire.”

“But Hind is another world! You have seen only a narrow strip along the coast. There are many opportunities in the interior—”

“Oh, one bug-pit is the same as the next, I’m sure.”

“—for a Frank who knows how to use the saber and the musket.”

“I’m listening,” Jack said. “Fucking bugs!” and then—distracted, as he was, by the peculiar nature of Surendranath’s discourse, he slapped a mosquito that had landed on the side of his neck. It was only noticed by Surendranath—who made a sound as if he were regurgitating his own gallbladder—and the boy who was standing next to Jack, holding out his neatly folded clothes. Jack met the boy’s eye for a moment; then both looked down at the palm of Jack’s hand, where the mosquito lay crumpled in a spot of Jack’s, or someone’s, blood.