Dorset

JUNE 1685

        I never justify’d cutting off the King’s Head, yet the Disasters that befel Kings when they begun to be Arbitrary, are not without their use, and are so many Beacons to their Successors to mark out the Sands which they are to avoid.

—The Mischiefs That Ought Justly

to Be Apprehended from a

Whig-Government, ANONYMOUS,

ATTRIBUTED TO BERNARD MANDEVILLE, 1714

IF POOR JACK’S RAVINGS have any color of truth in them, then you have been among Persons of Quality. So you have learnt how important Family is to such people: that it gives them not only name but rank, a house, a piece of land to call home, income and food, and that it is the windowpane through which they look out and perceive the world. It brings them troubles, too: for they are born heirs to superiors who must be obeyed, roofs that want fixing, and diverse local troubles that belong to them as surely as their own names.

Now, in place of “Persons of Quality” substitute “common men of soldier type” and in place of “Family” say “Regiment,” and you will own a fair portrait of my life.

You seem to’ve spent a lot of time with Jack and so I’ll spare you the explanation of how two mudlark boys found themselves in a regiment in Dorset. But my career has been like his in a mirror, which is to say, all reversed.

The regiment he told you of was like most old English ones, which is to say, ’twas militia. The soldiers were common men of the shire and the officers were local gentlemen, and the big boss was a Peer, the Lord Lieutenant—in our case, Winston Churchill—who got the job by living in London, wearing the right clothes, and saying the right things.

Those militia regiments once came together to form Cromwell’s New Model Army, which defeated the Cavaliers, slew the King, abolished Monarchy, and even crossed the Channel to rout the Spaniards in Flanders. None of this was lost on Charles II. After he came back, he made a practice of keeping professional soldiers on his payroll. They were there to keep the militias in check.

You may know that the Cavaliers who brought Charles II back made their landfall in the north and came down from Tweed, crossing the Cold Stream with a regiment under General Lewis. That regiment is called the Coldstream Guards, and General Lewis was made the Duke of Tweed for his troubles. Likewise King Charles created the Grenadier Guards. He probably would have abolished the militia altogether if he could have—but the 1660s were troublous times, what with Plague and Fire and bitter Puritans roaming the country. The King needed his Lords Lieutenant to keep the people down—he granted ’em the power to search homes for arms and to throw troublesome sorts in prison. But a Lord Lieutenant could not make use of such powers save through a local militia and so the militias endured. And ’twas during those times that Jack and I were plucked out of a Vagabond-camp and made into regimental boys.

A few years later John Churchill reached an age—eighteen years—when he was deemed ready to accept his first commission, and was given a regiment of Grenadier Guards. It was a new regiment. Some men and armaments and other necessaries were made available to him, but he had to raise the rest himself, and so he did the natural thing and recruited many soldiers and noncommissioned officers from his father’s militia regiment in Dorset—including me and Jack. For there is a difference ’twixt Families and Regiments, which is that the latter have no female members and cannot increase in the natural way—new members must be raised up out of the soil like crops, or if you will, taxes.

Now I’ll spare you a recitation of my career under John Churchill, as you’ve no doubt heard a slanderous version of it from brother Jack. Much of it consisted of long marches and sieges on the Continent—very repetitive—and the rest has been parading around Whitehall and St. James, for our nominal purpose is to guard the King.

Lately, following the death of Charles II, John Churchill spent some time on the Continent, going down to Versailles to meet with King Louis and biding in Dunkirk for a time to keep a weather eye on the Duke of Monmouth. I was there with him and so when Jack came through aboard his merchant-ship full of cowrie-shells I went out to have a brotherly chat with him.

Here the tale could turn ghastly. I’ll not describe Jack. Suffice it to say I have seen better and worse on battle-fields. He was far gone with the French Pox and not of sound mind. I learnt from him about you. In particular I learnt that you have the strongest possible aversion to Slavery—whereof I’ll say more anon. But first I must speak of Monmouth.

There was a Mr. Foot aboard God’s Wounds, one of those pleasant and harmless-seeming fellows to whom anyone will say anything, and who consequently knows everyone and everything. While I was waiting for Jack to recover his senses I passed a few hours with him and collected the latest gossip—or, as we say in the military, intelligence—from Amsterdam. Mr. Foot told me that Monmouth’s invasion-force was massing at Texel and that it was certainly bound for the port of Lyme Regis.

When I was finished saying my good-byes to poor Jack I went ashore and tried to seek out my master, John Churchill, to give him this news. But he had just sailed for Dover, London-bound, and left orders for me to follow on a slower boat with certain elements of the regiment.

Now I’ve probably given you the impression that the Grenadier Guards were in Dunkirk, which is wrong. They were in London guarding the King. Why was I not with my regiment? To answer I would have to explain what I am to John Churchill and what he is to me, which would take more time than it would be worth. Owing to my advanced age—almost thirty—and long time in service, I am a very senior non-commissioned officer. And if you knew the military this would tell you much about the peculiar and irregular nature of my duties. I do the things that are too difficult to explain.

Not very clear, is it? Here is a fair sample: I ignored my orders, cast off my uniform, borrowed money on my master’s good name, and took passage on a west-bound ship that brought me eventually to Lyme Regis. Before I embarked I sent word to my master that I was making myself useful in the West, where I had heard that some Vagabonds wanted hanging. As I’m certain you have perceived, this was both a prophecy of what was soon to come, and a reminder of events long past. Monmouth had set sail for Dorset because it was a notorious hotbed of Protestant rebellion. Ashe House, which was the seat of the Churchill family, looked down into the harbor of Lyme Regis, which had been the site of a dreary siege during the Civil War. Some of the Churchills had been Roundheads, others Cavaliers. Winston had taken the Cavalier side, had brought this riotous place to heel, and he and his son had been made important men for their troubles. Now Monmouth—John’s old comrade-in-arms from Siege of Maestricht days—was coming to make a bloody mess of the place. It would make Winston look either foolish or disloyal in the eyes of the rest of Parliament, and it would cast doubts on John’s loyalty.

For some years, John has been in the household of the Duke of York—now King James II—but his wife Sarah is now Lady of the Bedchamber to the Duke’s daughter, the Princess Anne: a Protestant who might be Queen someday. And among those Londoners who whisper into each other’s ears for a living, this has been taken to mean that John’s merely putting on a show of loyalty to the King, biding his time until the right moment to betray that Papist and bring a Protestant to the throne. Nothing more than Court gossip—but if Monmouth used John’s very home ground as the beach-head of a Protestant rebellion, how would it look?

Monmouth’s little fleet dropped anchor in the harbor of Lyme Regis two days after I had arrived. The town was giddy—they thought Cromwell had been re-incarnated. Within a day, fifteen hundred men had rallied to his standard. Almost the only one who did not embrace him was the Mayor. But I had already warned him to keep his bags packed and horses saddled. I helped him and his family slip out of town, following covert trails of Vagabonds, and he despatched messengers to the Churchills in London. This way Winston could go to the King and say, “My constituents are in rebellion and here is what my son and I are doing about it” rather than having the news sprung on him out of the blue.

It would be a week at the earliest before my regiment could come out from London—which amounts to saying that Monmouth had a week to raise his army, and that I had a week in which to make myself useful. I waited in a queue in the market-square of Lyme Regis until the clerk could prick my name down in his great book; I told him I was Jack Shaftoe and under that name I joined Monmouth’s army. The next day we mustered in a field above the town and I was issued my weapon: a sickle lashed to the end of a stick.

The next week’s doings were of some moment to John Churchill, when I told him the tale later, but would be tedious to you. There is only one part you might take an interest in, and that is what happened at Taunton. Taunton is an inland town. Our little army reached it after several days’ straggling through the countryside. By that time we were three thousand strong. The town welcomed us even more warmly than Lyme Regis; the school girls presented Monmouth with a banner they had embroidered for him, and served us meals in a mess they had set up in the town square. One of these girls—a sixteen-year-old named Abigail Frome…

Shall I devote a thousand words, or ten thousand, to how I fell in love with Abigail Frome? “I fell in love with her” does not do it justice, but ten thousand words would be no better, and so let us leave it at that. Perhaps I loved her because she was a rebel girl, and my heart was with the rebellion. My mind could see it was doomed, but my heart was listening to the Imp of the Perverse. I had chosen the name of Jack Shaftoe because I reckoned my brother was dead by now and would not be needing it. But being “Jack Shaftoe” had awakened a lust I had long forgotten: I wanted to go a-vagabonding. And I wanted to take Abigail Frome with me.

That was true the first and possibly the second day of my infatuation. But in between those long sunny June days were short nights of broken and unrestful sleep, when fretful thoughts would dissolve into strange dreams that would end with me shocked upright in my bed, like a sailor who has felt his ship hit a reef, and who knows he ought to be doing somewhat other than just lying there. I’d not bedded the girl or even kissed her. But I believed we were joined together now, and that I needed to make preparations for a life altogether different. Vagabonding and rebellion could not be part of that life—they are fit for men, but men who try to bring their women and children along on that life are bastards plain and simple. If you spent any time on the road with Jack, you will take my meaning.

So my Vagabond-passion for this rebel girl made me turn against the rebellion finally. I could flirt with one or the other but not with both; and flirting with Abigail was more rewarding.

Now came word that the militia—my old regiment of local commoners—was being called up to perform its stated function, namely, to put down the rebellion. I deserted my rebel regiment, crept out of Taunton, and went to the mustering-place. Some of the men were ready to throw in their lot with Monmouth, some were loyal to the King, and most were too scared and amazed to do anything. I rallied a company of loyal men, little better than stragglers, and marched them to Chard, where John Churchill had at last arrived and set up an encampment.

This is as good a time as any to mention that while sneaking through the rebel lines at Taunton I had been noticed—not by the sentry, a dozing farmhand, but by his dog. The dog had come after me and seized me by the leg of my breeches and held me long enough for the farmer to come after me with a pitchfork. As you can see, I had let things get out of hand. It was because I have a fatuous liking for dogs, and always have, ever since I was a mudlark boy and Persons of Quality would call me a dog. I had removed the sickle from the end of my stick and left it in Taunton, but the stick I still had, so I raised it up and brought the butt down smartly between the dog’s brown eyes, which I remember clearly glaring up at me. But it was a dog of terrier-kind and would on no account loosen its bite. The farmer thrust at me with his pitchfork. I spun away. One tine of the fork got under the skin of my back and tunneled underneath for about a hand’s breadth and then erupted somewhere else. I made a backhand swing of my stick and caught him across the bridge of the nose. He let go the pitchfork and put his hands to his face. I pulled the iron out of my flesh, raised it up above the dog, and told the farmer that if he would only call the damned creature off I would not have to spill any blood here, other than my own.

He saw the wisdom of this. But now he had recognized me. “Shaftoe!” he said, “have you lost your nerve so soon?” I recognized him now as a fellow I had passed time with while we waited in the queue in Lyme Regis to enlist in Monmouth’s army.

I am accustomed to the regular and predictable evolutions of the march, the drill, and the siege. Yet now within a few days of my conceiving a boyish infatuation with Abigail Frome, I had worked my way round to one of those farcical muddles you see in the fourth act of a comedy. I was forsaking the rebellion in order to forge a new life with a rebel lass, who had fallen in love, not with me, but with my brother, who was dead. I who have slain quite a few men had been caught and recognized because I would not hurt a mongrel. And I who was—if I may say so—doing something that demanded a whiff of courage or so, and that demonstrated my loyalty, would now be denounced as a coward and traitor, and Abigail would consider me in those terms forever.

A civilian—by your leave—would have been baffled, amazed. My soldier’s mind recognized this immediately as a screw-up, a cluster-fuck, a Situation Normal. This sort of thing happens to us all the time, and generally has worse consequences than a pretty girl deciding that she despises you. Fermented beverages and black humor are how we cope. I extricated myself without further violence. But by the time I made my way into the camp of John Churchill, the pitchfork-wound on my back had suppurated, and had to be opened up and aired out by a barber. I could not see it myself, but all who gazed upon it were taken a-back. Really ‘twas a shallow wound, and it healed quickly once I became strong enough to fend off the barber. But that I had staggered into the camp bleeding and feverish at the head of a column of loyal militia troops was made into something bigger than it really was. John Churchill heaped praise and honor upon me, and gave me a purse of money. When I related the entire tale to him, he laughed and mused, “I am doubly indebted to your brother now—he has furnished me with an excellent horse and a vital piece of intelligence.”

Jack tells me you are literate and so I will let you read about the details of the fighting in a history-book. There are a few particulars I will mention because I doubt that historians will consider them meet to be set down in print.

The King declined to trust John Churchill, for the reasons I stated earlier. Supreme command was given to Feversham, who despite his name is a Frenchman. Years ago Feversham undertook to blow up some houses with gunpowder, supposedly to stop a fire from spreading, but really, I suspect, because he was possessed of that urge, common to all men, to blow things up for its own sake. Moments after he satisfied that urge, he was brained by a piece of flying debris, and left senseless. His brain swelled up. To make room for it, the chirurgeons cut a hole in his skull. You can imagine the details for yourself—suffice it to say that the man is a living and breathing advertisement for the Guild of Wigmakers. King James II favors him, which, if you knew nothing else about His Majesty, would give you knowledge sufficient to form an opinion about his reign.

It was this Feversham who had been placed in command of the expedition to put down the Duke of Monmouth’s rebellion, and he who received credit for its success, but it was John Churchill who won the battles, and my regiment, as always, that did the fighting. The Duke of Grafton came out at the head of some cavalry and did battle with Monmouth at one point. The engagement was not all that important, but I mention it to add some color to the story, for Grafton is one of Charles II’s bastards, just like Monmouth himself!

The campaign was made exciting only by Feversham’s narcolepsy. That, combined with his inability to come to grips with matters even when he was awake, made it seem for a day or two as if Monmouth had a chance. I spent most of the time lying on my stomach recovering from the pitchfork-wound. And I count myself fortunate in that, because I had, and have, no love for the King, and I liked those rustic Nonconformists with their sickles and blunderbusses.

In the end Monmouth deserted those men even as they were fighting and dying for him. We found him cowering in a ditch. He was shipped off to the Tower of London and died groveling.

The farmers and tradesmen of Lyme Regis and Taunton who had made up Monmouth’s army were Englishmen through and through, which is to say not only were they level-headed decent sensible moderate folk, but they could not conceive of, and did not know about, any other way of being. It simply did not occur to them that Monmouth would abandon them and try to flee the island. But it had occurred to me, because I had spent years fighting on the Continent.

Likewise they never imagined the repression that followed. Living in that open green countryside or settled in their sleepy market-towns, they had no understanding of the feverish minds of the Londoners. If you go to a lot of plays, as Jack and I used to do, you notice, soon enough, that the playwrights only have so many stories to go around. So they use them over and over. Oftimes when you sneak into a play that has just opened, the characters and situations will seem oddly familiar, and by the time the first scene has played out, you will recall that you’ve already seen this one several times before—except that it was in Tuscany instead of Flanders, and the schoolmaster was a parson, and the senile colonel was a daft admiral. In like manner, the high and mighty of England have the story of Cromwell stuck in their heads, and whenever anything the least bit upsetting happens—especially if it’s in the country, and involves Nonconformists—they decide, in an instant, that it’s the Civil War all over again. All they want is to figure out which one is playing the role of Cromwell, and put his head on a stick. The rest must be put down. And so it will continue until the men who run England come up with a new story.

Worse, Feversham was a French nobleman to whom peasants (as he construed these people) were faggots to be stuffed into the fireplace. By the time he was finished, every tree in Dorset had dead yeomen, wheelwrights, coopers, and miners hanging from its branches.

Churchill wanted no part of this. He got himself back to London as directly as possible, along with his regiments—myself included. Feversham had not been slow to spread tales of the glorious fight. He had already made himself into a hero, and every other part of the tale was likewise made into something much grander than it really was. The ditch in which we captured Monmouth was swollen, by the tale-tellers, into a raging freshet called the Black Torrent. The King was so taken with this part of the story that he has given my regiment a new name: we are now, and forever, the King’s Own Black Torrent Guards.

Now at last I can speak to you of slavery, which according to Jack is a practice on which you harbor strong opinions.

The Lord Chief Justice is a fellow name of Jeffreys, who was reputed for cruelty and bloody-mindedness even in the best of times. He has spent his life currying favor with the Cavaliers, the Catholics, and the Frenchified court, and when King James II came to the throne Jeffreys got his reward and became the highest judge of England. Monmouth’s rebellion brought a whiff of blood on the west wind, and Jeffreys followed it like a slavering hound and established a Court of Assizes in that part of the country. He has executed no fewer than four hundred persons—that is, four hundred in addition to those slain in battle or strung up by Feversham. In some parts of the Continent, four hundred executions would go nearly unnoticed, but in Dorset it is reckoned a high figure.

As you can see, Jeffreys has been ingenious in finding grounds for putting men to death. But there are many cases where not even he could justify capital punishment, and so instead the defendants were sentenced to slavery. It says something about his mind that he considers slavery a lighter punishment than death! Jeffreys has sold twelve hundred ordinary West Country Protestants into chattel slavery in the Caribbean. They are on their way to Barbados even now, where they and their descendants will chop sugar cane forever among neegers and Irishmen, with no hope of ever knowing freedom.

The girl I love, Abigail Frome, has been made a slave. All the schoolgirls of Taunton have been. For the most part these girls have not been sold to sugar plantations; they would never survive the voyage. Instead they have been parceled out to various courtiers in London. Lord Jeffreys gives ‘em away like oysters in a pub. Their families in Taunton then have no choice but to buy them back, at whatever price their owners demand.

Abigail is now the property of an old college chum of Lord Jeffreys: Louis Anglesey, the Earl of Upnor. Her father has been hanged and her mother died years ago; of her cousins, aunts, and uncles, many have been sent to Barbados, and the ones who remain do not have the money to buy Abigail back. Upnor has amassed heavy gambling debts, which drove his own father to bankruptcy and forced him to sell his house years ago; now Upnor hopes to repay some of those debts by selling Abigail.

It goes without saying that I want to kill Upnor. One day, God willing, I shall. But this would not help Abigail—she’d only be inherited by Upnor’s heirs. Only money will buy her freedom. I think that you are skilled where money is concerned. I ask you now to buy Abigail. In return, I give you myself. I know you hate slavery and do not want a slave, but if you do this for me I will be your slave in all but name.

AS BOB SHAFTOE HAD TOLD his story, he had led Eliza through a maze of paths through the lee woods, which he appeared to know quite well. Before long they had reached the edge of a canal that ran from the city out to the shore at Scheveningen. This canal was not lined with sharp edges of stone, as in the city, but was soft and sloping at the edges, and in some places lined with rushes. Cows stood chewing on these, and watched Bob and Eliza walk by, interrupting him from time to time with their weird, pointless lamentations. As they had drawn closer to the Hague, Bob had begun to show uncertainty at certain canal-intersections, and Eliza had stepped into the lead. The scenery did not change very much, except that houses and small feeder canals become more frequent. Woods appeared to their left side, and continued for some distance. The Hague sneaked up on them. For it was not a fortified city, and at no point did they pass through anything like a wall or gate. But suddenly Eliza turned to the right on the bank of another canal—a proper stone-edged one—and Bob realized that they had penetrated into something that could be called a neighborhood. And not just any neighborhood, but the Hofgebied. Another few minutes’ walk would take them to the very foundations of the Binnenhof.

In the woods by the sea, it might have been foolhardy for Eliza to speak frankly; but here she could summon the St. George Guild from their clubhouse with a shout. “Your willingness to repay me is of no account,” she told Bob.

This was a cold answer, but it was a cold day, and William of Orange had treated her coldly, and Bob Shaftoe had knocked her off her horse. Now Bob looked dismayed. He was not accustomed to being beholden to anyone save his master, John Churchill, and now he was in the power of two girls not yet twenty: Abigail, who owned his heart, and Eliza, who (or so he imagined) had it in her power to own Abigail. A man more accustomed to helplessness would have put up more of a struggle. But Bob Shaftoe had gone limp, like the Janissaries before Vienna when it had come clear to them that their Turkish masters were all dead. All he could do was look with watery eyes at Eliza and shake his head amazed. She kept walking. He had no choice but to follow.

“I was taken a slave just like your Abigail,” Eliza said. “ ‘Twas as if Mummy and I’d been plucked off the beach by a rogue wave and swallowed by the Deep. No man came forward to ransom me. Does that mean it was just that I was so taken?”

“Now you’re talking nonsense. I don’t—”

“If ‘tis evil for Abigail to be a slave—as I believe—then your offer of service to me is neither here nor there. If she should be free, all the others should be as well. That you’re willing to do me a favor or two should not advance her to the head of the queue.”

“I see, now you’re making it into a grand moral question. I am a soldier and we have good reasons to be suspicious of those.”

They had entered into a broad square on the east side of the Binnenhof, called the Plein. Bob was looking about alertly. A stone’s throw from here was a guard-house that served as a gaol; he might have been wondering whether Eliza was trying to lead him straight into it.

But instead she stopped in front of a house: a large place, grand after the Barock style, but a little odd in its decorations. For atop the chimneys, where one would normally expect to see crosses or statues of Greek gods, there were armillary spheres, weathercocks, and swivel-mounted telescopes. Eliza fished in the folds of her waistband, nudged the stiletto out of the way, found the key.

“What’s this, a convent?”

“Don’t be absurd, do I look like some French mademoiselle who stays at such places?”

“A rooming-house?”

“It is the house of a friend. A friend of a friend, really.”

Eliza swung the key round on the end of the red ribbon to which she had tied it. “Come in,” she finally said.

“Beg pardon?”

“Come inside this house with me that we may continue our conversation.”

“The neighbors—”

“Nothing that could happen here could possibly faze this gentleman’s neighbors.”

“What of the gentleman himself?”

“He is asleep,” Eliza said, unlocking the front door. “Be quiet.”

“Asleep, at noon?”

“He stirs at night—to make observations of the stars,” Eliza said, glancing upwards. Mounted to the roof of the house, four stories above their heads, was a wooden platform with a tubular device projecting over the edge—too frail to shoot cannonballs.

The first floor’s main room might have been grand, for its generous windows looked out over the Plein and the Binnenhof. But it was cluttered with the debris of lens- and mirror-grinding—always messy, sometimes dangerous—and with thousands of books. Though Bob would not know this, these were not only about Natural Philosophy but history and literature as well, and nearly all of them were in French or Latin.

To Bob these artifacts were only moderately strange, and he learned to overlook them after a few moments’ nervous glancing around the room. What really paralyzed him was the omnipresent noise—not because it was loud, but because it wasn’t. The room contained at least two dozen clocks, or sub-assemblies of clocks, driven by weights or springs whose altitude or tension stored enough energy, summed, to raise a barn. That power was restrained and disciplined by toothy mechanisms of various designs: brass insects creeping implacably around the rims of barbed wheels, constellations of metal stars hung on dark stolid axle-trees, all marching or dancing to the beat of swinging plumb-bobs.

Now a man in Bob Shaftoe’s trade owed his longevity, in part, to his alertness—his sensitivity to (among other things) significant noises. Even the dimmest recruits could be relied on to notice the loud noises. A senior man like Bob was supposed to scrutinize the faint ones. Eliza got the impression that Bob was the sort of bloke who was forever shushing every man in the room, demanding absolute stillness so that he could hold his breath and make out whether that faint sporadic itching was a mouse in the cupboard, or enemy miners tunnelling under the fortifications. Whether that distant rhythm was a cobbler next door or an infantry regiment marching into position outside of town.

Every gear and bearing in this room was making the sort of sound that normally made Bob Shaftoe freeze like a startled animal. Even after he’d gotten it through his head that they were all clocks, or studies for clocks, he was hushed and intimidated by a sense of being surrounded by patient mechanical life. He stood at attention in the middle of the big room, hands in his pockets, blowing steam from his mouth and darting his eyes to and fro. These clocks were made to tell time precisely and nothing else. There were no bells, no chimes, and certainly no cuckoos. If Bob was waiting for such entertainments, he’d wait until he was a dusty skeleton surrounded by cobweb-clogged gears.

Eliza noted that he had shaved before going out on this morning’s strange errand, something that would never have entered Jack’s mind, and she wondered how it all worked—what train of thoughts made a man say, “I had better scrape my face with a blade before undertaking this one.” Perhaps it was some sort of a symbolic love-offering to his Abigail.

“It is all a question of pride, isn’t it?” Eliza said, stuffing a cube of peat into the iron stove. “Or honor, as you’d probably style it.”

Bob looked at her instead of answering; or maybe his look was his answer.

“Come on, you don’t have to be that quiet,” she said, setting a kettle on the stove to heat.

“What Jack and I have in common is an aversion to begging,” he said finally.

“Just as I thought. So, rather than beg Abigail’s ransom from me, you are proposing a sort of financial transaction—a loan, to be paid back in service.”

“I don’t know the words, the terms. Something like that is what I had in mind.”

“Then why me? You’re in the Dutch Republic. This is the financial capital of the world. You don’t need to seek out one particular lender. You could propose this deal to anyone.”

Bob had clutched a double handful of his cloak and was wringing it slowly. “The confusions of the financial markets are bewildering to me—I prefer not to treat with strangers…”

“What am I to you if not a stranger?” Eliza asked, laughing. “I am worse than a stranger, I threw a spear at your brother.”

“Yes, and that is what makes you not a stranger to me, it is how I know you.”

“It is proof that I hate slavery, you mean?”

“Proof of that and of other personal qualities—qualities that enter into this matter.”

“I am no Person of Quality, or of qualities—do not speak to me of that. It is proof only that my hatred of slavery makes me do irrational things—which is what you are asking me to do now.”

Bob lost his grip on his cloak-wad and sat down unsteadily on a stack of books.

Eliza continued, “She threw a harpoon at my brother—she’ll throw some money at me—is that how it goes?”

Bob Shaftoe put his hands over his face and began to cry, so quietly that any sounds he made were drowned out by the whirring and ticking of the clocks.

Eliza retreated into the kitchen, and went back to a cool corner where some sausage-casings had been rolled up on a stick. She unrolled six inches—on second thought, twelve—and cut it off. Then she tied a knot in one end. She fit the little sock of sheep-gut over the handle of a meat-axe that was projecting firmly into the air above a chopping-block, then, with her fingertips, coaxed the open end of it to begin rolling up the handle. Once it was started, with a quick movement of her hand she rolled the whole length up to make a translucent torus with the knotted end stretched across the middle like a drum-head. Gathering her skirts up one leg, she tucked the object into the hem of her stocking, which came up to about mid-thigh, and finally went back into the great room where Bob Shaftoe was weeping.

There was not much point in subtlety, and so she forced her way in between his thighs and stuffed her bosom into his face.

After a few moment’s hesitation he took his hands away from between his wet cheeks and her breasts. His face felt cold for a moment, but only a moment. Then she felt his hands locking together behind the small of her back, where her bodice was joined to her skirt.

He held her for a moment, not weeping anymore, but thinking. Eliza found that a bit tedious and so she left off stroking his hair and began going to work on his ears in a way he would not tolerate for long. Then, finally, Bob knew what to do. She could see that for Bob, knowing what to do was always the hard part, and the doing was easy. All those years Vagabonding with Jack, Bob had been the older and wiser brother preaching sternly into Jack’s one ear while the Imp of the Perverse whispered into the other, and it had made him a stolid and deliberate sort. But having made up his mind, he was a launched cannonball. Eliza wondered what the two of them had been like, partnered together, and pitied the world for not allowing it.

Bob cinched an arm around the narrowest part of her waist and hoisted her into the air with a thrust of rather good thigh-muscles. Her head grazed a dusty ceiling-beam and she ducked and hugged his head. He yanked a blanket from a couch; the books that had been scattered all over the blanket ended up differently scattered on the couch. Carrying Eliza and dragging the blanket, he trudged in a mighty floorboard-popping cadence to an elliptical dining-table scattered with the remains of a scholarly dinner: apple-peels and gouda-rinds. Making a slow orbit of this he flipped the corners of the tablecloth into the center. Gathering them together turned the tablecloth into a bag of scraps, which he let down gently onto the floor. Then he broadcast the blanket onto the table, slapped it once with his palm to stop it from skimming right off, and rolled Eliza’s body out into the middle of the woolly oval.

Standing above her, he’d already begun fumbling with his breeches, which she deemed premature—so bringing a knee up smartly between his thighs and pulling down on a grabbed handful of his hair, she obliged him to get on top of her. They lay there for a while with thighs interlocked, like fingers of two hands clutching each other, and Eliza felt him get ready as she was getting ready. But long after that they ground away at each other, as if Bob could somehow force his way through all those layers of masculine and feminine clothing. They did this because it felt good, and they were together in a cold echoing house in the Hague and had no other demands on their time. Eliza learned that Bob was not a man who felt good very often and that it took him a long time to relax. His whole body was stiff at first, and it took a long time for that stiffness to drain out of his limbs and his neck, and concentrate in one particular Member, and for him to agree that this did not all have to happen in an instant. At the beginning his face was planted between her breasts, and his feet were square on the floor, but inch by inch she coaxed him upwards. At first he showed a fighting man’s reluctance to sever his connection with the ground, but in time she made it understood that additional delights were to be found toward the head of the table, and so he kicked his boots off and got his knees, and eventually his toes, up on the tabletop.

For a long time then they were face-to-face, which Eliza thought was as pleasant as this was likely to get. But after a while she got Bob to raise his chin and entrust her with his throat. While she was exploring that terrain she was undoing the top few buttons of his shirt, pulling it down off his shoulders as she did so, pinning his arms to his sides and exposing his nipples.

She locked her right knee behind his left, then shoved her tongue through a protective nest of hair, found his right nipple, and carefully nipped it. He twisted up and away from her. Pulling down hard on his trapped knee she drew her left leg up, planted her foot on the raised blade of his pelvis, and shoved. Bob rolled over onto his back. She came up from under him and wound up sitting on his thighs. A hard yank down on his breeches freed his erect penis while binding his thighs together. She pulled the knotted sheepgut from her stocking, stripped it down over him, straddled him, and sat down hard. He was distracted with pretending to be angry, and the sudden pleasure ambushed him. The sudden pain astonished her, for this was the first time a man had ever been inside Eliza. She let out an angry yell and tears spurted from her eyes; she shoved clenched fists into her eye-sockets and tried to control her leg-muscles, which were convulsively trying to climb up and off of him. She felt that he was rocking her up and down, which made her angry, but her knees were grinding steadily into the hard wood of the table, and so the sensation of movement must arise from light-headedness: a swoon that needed to be fought off.

She did not want him looking up at her like this and so she fell forward and struck the table to either side of his head with the flats of both palms, then bowed her head so that her hair fell down in a curtain, hiding her face, and everything below his chest, from Bob’s view. Not that he was doing a lot of sightseeing; he had apparently decided that there were worse situations he could be in.

She moved up and down on him for a while, very slowly, partly because she was in pain and partly because she did not know how close he might be to reaching his climax—all men were different, a particular man would be different according to the time of day, and the only way to judge it was by the rhythm of his breathing (which she could hear) and the slackness of his face (which she could monitor through a narrow embrasure between dangling locks of hair). By those measures, she was nowhere near finished, and a lengthy and painful grind awaited her. But finally he came complete, in a long ordeal of back-arching and head-thumping.

He took the first breath, the one that meant he was finished, and opened his eyes. She was staring directly back at him.

“I hurt like hell,” she announced. “I have inflicted this on myself as a demonstration.”

“Of what?” he asked, bewildered, stuporous, but pleased with himself.

“To show you what I think of honor, as you style it. Where was Abigail just now?”

Bob Shaftoe now tried to become angry, without much success. An Englishman of higher class would have huffed “Now see here!” but Bob set his jaw and tried to sit up. He had more success in that—at first—because Eliza was not a large girl. But then from behind the dazzling hair curtain came a hand, and the hand was holding a small Turkish dagger—very nice, a wriggling blade of watered steel—which closed on his left eyeball and obliged him to lie flat again.

“The demonstration is very important,” Eliza said—or growled, rather, for she really was very uncomfortable. “You come with high talk of honor and expect me to swoon and buy Abigail back for you. I have heard many men speak of honor while ladies are in the room, and then seen them abandon all thought of it when the lusts and terrors of the body overcame their noble pretensions. Like cavaliers throwing down their polished armor and bright battle-flags to flee a charging Vagabond-host. You are no worse—but no better. I will not help you because I am touched by your love for Abigail or stirred by your prating about honor. I will help you because I wish to be somewhat more than another wave spreading and spending itself on a godforsaken beach. Monsieur Mansart may build kingly châteaux to prove that he once existed, and you may marry your Abigail and raise up a clan of Shaftoes. But if I am to make a mark on this world, it will have something to do with slavery. I will help you only insofar as it serves that end. And buying the freedom of one maiden does not serve it. But Abigail may be of use to me in other ways…I shall have to think on it. While I think, she’ll be a slave to this Upnor. If she remembers you at all, it will be as a turncoat and a coward. You will be a miserable wretch. In the fullness of melancholy time, perhaps you’ll come to see the wisdom of my position.”

Now the conversation—if it could be called that—was interrupted by a mighty throat-clearing from the opposite end of the room, gallons of air shifting dollops of phlegm out of the main channel. “Speaking of Positions,” said a husky Dutch voice, “would you and your gentleman friend please find a different one? For since you’ve made sleep quite impossible I should like to eat.”

“With pleasure, meinheer, I would, but your lodger has a poniard at my eye,” said Bob.

“You are much cooler in dealing with men than with women,” Eliza observed, sotto voce.

“A woman such as you has never seen a man in a cool condition, unless you were spying on him through a knot-hole,” Bob returned.

More throat-clearing from the owner: a hearty, grizzled man in his middle fifties, with all that that implied in the way of eyebrows. He had hoisted one of them like a furry banner and was peering out from under it at Eliza; typically for an astronomer who did his best seeing through a single eye. “The Doctor warned me to expect odd callers…but not business transactions.”

“Some would call me a whore, and some shall,” Eliza admitted, giving Bob a sharp look, “but in this case you are assuming too much, Monsieur Huygens. The transaction we are discussing is not related to the act we have performed…”

“Then why do both at the same time? Are you in such a hurry? Is this how it is done in Amsterdam?”

“I am trying to clear this fellow’s mind so that he can think straighter,” said Eliza, straightening up herself as she said it, for her back was getting tired and her bodice was griping her stomach.

Bob knocked her dagger-hand aside and sat up violently, throwing her into a backward somersault. She’d have landed on her head except that he caught her upper arms in his hands and spun her over—or something rather complicated and dangerous—all she knew was that, when it was over, she was dizzy, and her heart had skipped a few beats, her hair was in her face and her dagger-hand was empty. Bob was behind her, using her as a screen while he pulled his breeches up with one hand. His other hand had a grip on her laces, which he was exploiting as a sort of bridle. “You should never have straightened your arm,” he explained quietly, “It tells the opponent that you are unable to make a thrust.”

Eliza thanked him for the fencing-lesson by pirouetting in a direction calculated to bend his fingers backwards. He cursed, let go of her laces, and yanked his breeches up finally.

“Mr. Huygens, Bob Shaftoe of the King’s Own Black Torrent Guards. Bob, meet Christiaan Huygens, the world’s foremost Natural Philosopher.”

“Hooke would bite you for saying so…Leibniz is brighter than I…Newton, though confused, is said to be talented. So let us say only that I am the foremost Natural Philosopher in thisroom,” Huygens said, taking a quick census of the occupants: himself, Bob, Eliza, and a skeleton hanging in the corner.

Bob had not noticed the skeleton before, and its sudden inclusion in the conversation made him uneasy. “I beg your pardon, sir, ‘twas disgraceful—”

“Oh, stop!” Eliza hissed, “he is a Philosopher, he cares not.”

“Descartes used to come up here when I was a young man, and sit at that very table, and drink too much and discourse of the Mind-Body Problem,” Huygens mused.

“Problem? What’s the problem? I don’t see any problem,” Bob muttered parenthetically, until Eliza crowded back against him and planted a heel on his instep.

“So Eliza’s attempt to clarify your mental processes by purging you of imbalancing humours could not have been carried out in a more appropriate location,” Huygens continued.

“Speaking of humours, what am I to do with this?” Bob muttered, dangling a narrow bulging sac from one finger.

“Put it in a box and post it to Upnor as a down payment,” Eliza said.

The sun had broken through as they spoke, and golden light suddenly shone into the room from off the Plein. It was a sight to gladden most any Dutch heart; but Huygens reacted to it strangely, as if he had been put in mind of some tiresome obligation. He conducted a poll of his clocks and watches. “I have a quarter of an hour in which to break my fast,” he remarked, “and then Eliza and I have work to do on the roof. You are welcome to stay, Sergeant Shaftoe, though—”

“You have already been more than hospitable enough,” Bob said.

HUYGENS’S WORK CONSISTED OF STANDING very still on his roof as the clock-towers of the Hague bonged noon all around him, and squinting into an Instrument. Eliza was told to stay out of his way, and jot down notes in a waste-book, and hand him small necessaries from time to time.

“You wish to know where the sun is at noon—?” “You have it precisely backwards. Noon is when the sun is in a particular place. Noon has no meaning otherwise.” “So, you wish to know when noon is.”

“It is now!” Huygens said, and glanced quickly at his watch. “Then all of the clocks in the Hague are wrong.” “Yes, including all of mine. Even a well-made clock drifts, and must be re-set from time to time. I do it here whenever the sun shines. Flamsteed will be doing it in a few minutes on top of a hill in Greenwich.”

“It is unfortunate that a person may not be calibrated so easily,” Eliza said.

Huygens looked at her, no less intensely than he had been peering at his instrument a moment earlier. “Obviously you have some specific person in mind,” he said. “Of persons I will say this: it is difficult to tell when they are running aright but easy to see when something has gone awry.”

“Obviously you have someone in mind, Monsieur Huygens,” Eliza said, “and I fear it is I.”

“You were referred to me by Leibniz,” Huygens said. “A shrewd judge of intellects. Perhaps a bit less shrewd about character, for he always wants to think the best of everyone. I made some inquiries around the Hague. I was assured by persons of the very best quality that you would not be a political liability. From this I presumed that you would know how to behave.”

Suddenly feeling very high and exposed, she took a step back, and reached out with a hand to steady herself against a heavy telescope-tripod. “I am sorry,” she said. “It was stupid, what I did down there. I know it was, for I do know how to behave. Yet I was not always a courtier. I came to this place in my life by a roundabout path, which shaped me in ways that are not always comely. Perhaps I should be ashamed. But I am more inclined to be defiant.”

“I understand you better than you suppose,” Huygens said. “I was raised and groomed to be a diplomat. But when I was thirteen years old, I built myself a lathe.”

“Pardon me, a what?”

“A lathe. Down below, in this very house. Imagine my parents’ consternation. They had taught me Latin, Greek, French, and other languages. They had taught me the lute, the viol, and the harpsichord. Of literature and history I had learned everything that was in their power to teach me. Mathematics and philosophy I learned from Descartes himself. But I built myself a lathe. Later I taught myself how to grind lenses. My parents feared that they had spawned a tradesman.”

“No one is more pleased than I that matters turned out so well for you,” Eliza said, “but I am too thick to understand how your story is applicable to my case.”

“It is all right for a clock to run fast or slow at times, so long as it is calibrated against the sun, and set right. The sun may come out only once in a fortnight. It is enough. A few minutes’ light around noon is all that you need to discover the error, and re-set the clock—provided that you bother to go up and make the observation. My parents somehow knew this, and did not become overly concerned at my strange enthusiasms. For they had confidence that they had taught me how to know when I was running awry, and to calibrate my behavior.”

“Now I think I understand,” Eliza said. “It remains only to apply this principle to me, I suppose.”

“If I come down in the morning to find you copulating on my table with a foreign deserter, as if you were some sort of Vagabond,” Huygens said, “I am annoyed. I admit it. But that is not as important as what you do next. If you posture defiantly, it tells me that you have not learned the skill of recognizing when you are running awry, and correcting yourself. And you must leave my house in that case, for such people only go further and further astray until they find destruction. But if you take this opportunity to consider where you have gone wrong, and to adjust your course, it tells me that you shall do well enough in the end.”

“It is good counsel and I thank you for it,” Eliza said. “In principle. But in practice I do not know what to make of this Bob.”

“There is something that you must settle with him, or so it would appear to me,” Huygens said.

“There is something that I must settle with the world.”

“Then by all means apply yourself to it. Then you are welcome to stay. But from now on please go to your bedchamber if you want to roger someone.”