SPRING 1685
Thou hast met with something (as I perceive) already; for I see the dirt of the Slough of Despond is upon thee; but that Slough is the beginning of the sorrows that do attend those that go on in that way; hear me, I am older than thou!
—JOHN BUNYAN, The Pilgrim’s Progress
JACK WAS BURIED up to his neck in the steaming manure of the white, pink-eyed horses of the duc d’Arcachon, trying not to squirm as a contingent of perhaps half a dozen maggots cleaned away the dead skin and flesh surrounding the wound in his thigh. This itched, but did not hurt, beyond the normal wholesome throbbing. Jack had no idea how many days he’d been in here, but from listening to the bells of Paris, and watching small disks of sunlight prowl around the stable, he guessed it might be five in the afternoon. He heard boots approaching, and a padlock negotiating with its key. If that lock were the only thing holding him in this stable, he would’ve escaped long ago; but as it was, Jack was chained by the neck to a pillar of white stone, with a few yards of slack so that he could, for example, bury himself in manure.
The bolt shot and John Churchill stepped in on a tongue of light. In contrast to Jack, he was not covered in shit—far from it! He was wearing a jeweled turban of shimmering gold cloth, and robes, with lots of costume jewelry; old scuffed boots, and a large number of weapons, viz. scimitar, pistols, and several granadoes. His first words were: “Shut up, Jack, I’m going to a fancy-dress ball.”
“Where’s Turk?”
“I stabled him,” Churchill said, pointing with his eyes toward an adjacent stable. The duc had several stables, of which this was the smallest and meanest, and used only for shoeing horses.
“So the ball you mean to attend is here.”
“At the Hotel d’Arcachon, yes.”
“What’re you supposed to be—a Turk? Or a Barbary Corsair?”
“Do I look like a Turk?” Churchill asked hopefully. “I understand you have personal knowledge of them—”
“No. Better say you’re a Pirate.”
“A breed of which I have personal knowledge.”
“Well, if you hadn’t fucked the King’s mistress, he wouldn’t have sent you to Africa.”
“Well, I did, and he did—send me there, I mean—and I came back.”
“And now he’s dead. And you and the duc d’Arcachon have something to talk about.”
“What is that supposed to mean?” Churchill asked darkly.
“Both of you have been in contact with the Barbary Pirates—that’s all I meant.”
Churchill was taken aback—a small pleasure and an insignificant victory for Jack. “You are well-informed,” he said. “I should like to know whether everyone in the world knows of the duc d’Arcachon’s intercourse with Barbary, or is it just that you are special?”
“Am I, then?”
“They say l’Emmerdeur is King of the Vagabonds.”
“Then why didn’t the duc put me up in his finest apartment?”
“Because I have gone to such extravagant lengths to prevent him from knowing who you are.”
“So that’s why I’m still alive. I was wondering.”
“If they knew, they would tear you apart with iron tongs, over the course of several days, at the Place Dauphine.”
“No better place for it—lovely view from there.”
“Is that all you have for me, in the way of thanks?”
Silence. Gates were creaking open all round the Hotel d’Arcachon as it mobilized for the ball. Jack heard the hollow grumbling of barrels being rolled across stone courtyards, and (since his nose had stopped being able to smell shit) he could smell birds roasting, and buttery pastries baking in ovens. There were less agreeable odors, too, but Jack’s nose sought out the good ones.
“You could at least answer my question,” Churchill said. “Does everyone know that the duc has frequent dealings with Barbary?”
“Some small favor would be appropriate at this point,” Jack said.
“I can’t let you go.”
“I was thinking of a pipe.”
“Funny, so was I.” Churchill went to the stable door and flagged down a boy and demanded des pipes en terre and du tabac blond and du feu.
“Is King Looie coming to the duc’s fancy-dress ball, too?”
“So it is rumored—he has been preparing a costume in great secrecy, out at Versailles. Said to be of a radically shocking nature. Impossibly daring. All the French ladies are aflutter.”
“Aren’t they always?”
“I wouldn’t know—I’ve taken a sound, some would say stern, English bride: Sarah.”
“What’s she coming as? A nun?”
“Oh, she’s back in London. This is a diplomatic mission. Secret.”
“You stand before me, dressed as you are, and say that?”
Churchill laughed.
“You take me for an imbecile?” Jack continued. The pain in his leg was most annoying, and shaking away flies had given his neck a cramp, as well as raw sores from the abrasion of his iron collar.
“You are only alive because of your recent imbecility, Jack. L’Emmerdeur is known to be clever as a fox. What you did was so stupid that it has not occurred to anyone, yet, that you could be he.”
“So, then…in France, what’s considered suitable punishment for an imbecile who does something stupid?”
“Well, naturally they were going to kill you. But I seem to have convinced them that, as you are not only a rural half-wit, but an English rural half-wit, the whole matter is actually funny.”
“Funny? Not likely.”
“The duc de Bourbon hosted a dinner party. Invited a certain eminent writer. Became annoyed with him. Emptied his snuff-box into the poor scribbler’s wine when he wasn’t looking, as a joke. The writer drank the wine and died of it—hilarious!”
“What fool would drink wine mixed with snuff?”
“That’s not the point of the story—it’s about what French nobility do, and don’t, consider to be funny—and how I saved your life. Pay attention!”
“Let’s set aside how, and ask: why did you save my life, guv’nor?”
“When a man is being torn apart with pliers, there’s no telling what he’ll blurt out.”
“Aha.”
“The last time I saw you, you were ordinary Vagabond scum. If there happened to be an old connexion between the two of us, it scarcely mattered. Now you are legendary Vagabond scum, a picaroon, much talked of in salons. Now if the old link between us came to be widely known, it would be inconvenient for me.”
“But you could have let that other fellow run me through with his rapier.”
“And probably should have,” Churchill said ruefully, “but I wasn’t thinking. It is very odd. I saw him lunging for you. If I had only stood clear and allowed matters to take their natural course, you’d be dead. But some impulse took me—”
“The Imp of the Perverse, like?”
“Your old companion? Yes, perhaps he leapt from your shoulder to mine. Like a perfect imbecile, I saved your life.”
“Well, you make a most splendid and gallant perfect imbecile. Are you going to kill me now?”
“Not directly. You are now a galérien. Your group departs for Marseille tomorrow morning. It’s a bit of a walk.”
“I know it.”
Churchill sat on a bench and worried off one boot, then the other, then reached into them and pulled out the fancy Turkish slippers that had become lodged inside, and drew the slippers on. Then he threw the boots at Jack and they lodged in the manure, temporarily scaring away the flies. At about the same time, a stable-boy came in carrying two pipes stuffed with tobacco, and a taper, and soon both men were puffing away contentedly.
“I learned of the duc’s Barbary connexions through an escaped slave, who seems to consider the information part of a closely guarded personal secret,” Jack said finally.
“Thank you,” said Churchill. “How’s the leg, then?”
“Someone seems to’ve poked it with a sword…otherwise fine.”
“Might need something to lean on.” Churchill stepped outside the door for a moment, then returned carrying Jack’s crutch. He held it crosswise between his two hands for a moment, weighing it. “Seems a bit heavy on this end—a foreign sort of crutch, is it?”
“Exceedingly foreign.”
“Turkish?”
“Don’t toy with me, Churchill.”
Churchill spun the crutch around and chucked it like a spear so that it stuck in the manure-pile. “Whatever you’re going to do, do it soon and then get the hell out of France. The road to Marseille will take you, in a day or two, through the pays of the Count of Joigny.”
“Who’s that?”
“That’s the fellow you knocked off his horse. Notwithstanding my earlier reassuring statements, he does not find you amusing—if you enter his territory…”
“Pliers.”
“Just so. Now, as insurance, I have a good friend lodging at an inn just to the north of Joigny. He is to keep an eye on the road to Marseille, and if he sees you marching down it, he is to make sure that you never get past that inn alive.”
“How’s he going to recognize me?”
“By that point, you’ll be starkers—exposing your most distinctive feature.”
“You really are worried I’ll make trouble for you.”
“I told you I’m here on a diplomatic mission. It is important.”
“Trying to work out how England is to be divvied up between Leroy and the Pope of Rome?”
Churchill puffed on his pipe a few times in a fine, but not altogether convincing, display of calmness, and then said, “I knew we’d reach this point in the conversation, Jack—the point where you accused me of being a traitor to my country and my religion—and so I’m ready for it, and I’m actually not going to cut your head off.”
Jack laughed. His leg hurt a great deal, and it itched, too.
“Through no volition of my own, I have for many years been a member of His Majesty’s household,” Churchill began. Jack was confused by this until he recollected that “His Majesty” no longer meant Charles II, but James II, the whilom Duke of York. Churchill continued: “I suppose I could reveal to you my innermost thoughts about what it’s like to be a Protestant patriot in thrall to a Catholic King who loves France, but life is short, and I intend to spend as little of it as possible standing in dark stables apologizing to shit-covered Vagabonds. Suffice it to say that it’s better for England if I do this mission.”
“Suppose I do get away, before Joigny…what’s to prevent me from telling everyone about the longstanding connexions between the Shaftoes and the Churchills?”
“No one of Quality will ever believe a word you say, Jack, unless you say it while you are being expertly tortured…it’s only when you are stretched out on some important person’s rack that you are dangerous. Besides, there is the Shaftoe legacy to think of.” Churchill pulled out a little purse and jiggled it to make the coins ring.
“I did notice that you’d taken possession of my charger, without paying for it. Very bad form.”
“The price in here is a fair one—a handsome sum, even,” Churchill said. Then he pocketed the purse.
“Oh, come on—!”
“A naked galérien can’t carry a purse, and these French coins are too big to stuff up even your asshole, Jack. I’ll make sure your spawn get the benefit of this, when I’m back in England.”
“Get it, or get the benefit of it? Because there is a slipperiness in those words that troubles me.”
Churchill laughed again, this time with a cheerfulness that really made Jack want to kill him. He got up and plucked the empty pipe from Jack’s mouth, and—as stables were notoriously inflammable, and he did not wish to be guilty of having set fire to the duc’s—went over to the little horseshoe-forge, now cold and dark, and whacked the ashes out of the pipes. “Try to concentrate. You’re a galley slave chained to a post in a stable in Paris. Be troubled by that. Bon voyage, Jack.”
Exit Churchill. Jack had been meaning to advise him not to sleep with any of those French ladies, and to tell him about the Turkish innovation involving sheep-intestines, but there hadn’t been time—and besides, who was he to give John Churchill advice on fucking?
Equipped now with boots, a sword, and (if he could just reach it, and slay a few stable-boys) a horse, Jack began considering how to get the damned chain off his neck. It was a conventional slave-collar: two iron semicircles hinged together on one side and with a sort of hasp on the other, consisting of two loops that would align with each other when the collar was closed. If a chain was then threaded through the loops, it would prevent the collar from opening. This made it possible for a single length of chain to secure as many collars, and hence slaves, as could be threaded onto it, without the need for expensive and unreliable padlocks. It kept the ironmongery budget to a minimum and worked so handily that no French Château or German Schloss was without a few, hanging on a wall-peg just in case some persons needed enslaving.
The particular chain that went through Jack’s collar-hasp had a circular loop—a single oversized link—welded to one end. The chain had been passed around the stone pillar and its narrow end threaded through this loop, then through Jack’s collar, and finally one of the duc’s smiths had heated up the chain-end in the stable’s built-in forge, and hammered an old worn-out horseshoe onto it, so it could not be withdrawn. Typical French extravagance! But the duc had an infinite fund of slaves and servants, so it cost him nothing, and there was no way for Jack to get it off.
The tobacco-embers from the pipes had formed a little mound on the blackened hearth of the forge and were still glowing, just barely. Jack squirmed free of the manure-pile and limped over to the forge and blew on them to keep them alive.
Normally this whole place was swarming with stable-boys, but now, and for the next hour or two, they’d be busy with ball duty: taking the horses of the arriving guests and leading them to stalls in the duc’s better stables. So a fire in this hearth would be detectable only as a bit of smoke coming out of a chimney, which was not an unusual sight on a cool March evening in seventeenth-century Paris.
But he was getting ahead of himself. This was a long way from being a fire. Jack began looking about for some tinder. Straw would be perfect. But the stable-boys had been careful not to leave anything so tinderlike anywhere near the forge. It was all piled at the opposite end of the stable, and Jack’s chain wouldn’t let him go that far. He tried lying flat on the floor, with the chain stretched out taut behind him, and reaching out with the crutch to rake some straw towards him. But the end of the crutch came a full yard short of the goal. He scurried back and blew on the tobacco some more. It would not last much longer.
His attention had been drawn to the crutch, which was bound together with a lot of the cheapest sort of dry, fuzzy twine. Perfect tinder. But he’d have to burn most of it, and then he’d have no way to hold the crutch together, and therefore to conceal the existence of the sword—so, if the attempt failed tonight, he was doomed. In that sense ’twere safer to wait until tomorrow, when they’d take the chain off of him. But only to chain him up, he supposed, to a whole file of other galériens—doddering Huguenots, most likely. And he wasn’t about to wait for that. He must do it now.
So he unwound the crutch and frizzed the ends of the twine and put it to the last mote of red fire in the pipe-ashes, and blew. The flame almost died, but then one fiber of twine warped back, withered, flung off a little shroud of steam or smoke, then became a pulse of orange light: a tiny thing, but as big in Jack’s vision as whole trees bursting into flames in the Harz.
After some more blowing and fidgeting he had a morsel of yellow flame on the hearth. While supplying it more twine with one hand, he rummaged blindly for kindling, which ought to be piled up somewhere. Finding only a few twigs, he was forced to draw the sword and shave splints off the crutch-pole. This didn’t last long, and soon he was planing splinters off pillars and beams, and chopping up benches and stools. But finally it was big and hot enough to ignite coal, of which there was plenty. Jack began tossing handfuls of it into his little fire while pumping the bellows with the other hand. At first it just lay in the fire like black stones, but then the sharp, brimstony smell of it came into the stable, and the fire became white, and the heat of the coal annihilated the remaining wood-scraps, and the fire became a meteor imprisoned in a chain—for Jack had looped the middle part of his chain around it. The cold iron poisoned the fire, sucked life from it, but Jack heaped on more coal and worked the bellows, and soon the metal had taken on a chestnut color which gave way to various shades of red. The heat of the blaze first dried the moist shit that was all over Jack’s skin and then made him sweat, so that crusts of dung were flaking off of him.
The door opened. “Où est le maréchal-ferrant?” someone asked.
The door opened wider—wide enough to admit a horse—then did just that. The horse was led by a Scot in a tall wig—or maybe not. He was wearing a kiltlike number, but it was made of red satin and he had some sort of ridiculous contrivance slung over one shoulder: a whole pigskin, sewn up and packed with straw to make it look as if it had been inflated, with trumpet-horns, flutes, and pennywhistles dangling from it: a caricature of a bagpipe. His face was painted with blue woad. Pinned to the top of his wig was a tam-o’-shanter with an approximate diameter of three feet, and thrust into his belt, where a gentleman would sheathe his sword, was a sledgehammer. Next to that, several whiskey-jugs holstered.
The horse was a prancing beauty, but it seemed to be favoring one leg—it had thrown a shoe on the ride over.
“Maréchal-ferrant?” the man repeated, squinting in his direction. Jack reckoned that he, Jack, was visible only as a silhouette against the bright fire, and so the collar might not be obvious. He cupped a hand to his ear—smiths were notorious for deafness. That seemed to answer the question—the “Scot” led his horse toward the forge, nattering on about a fer à cheval and going so far as to check his pocket-watch. Jack was irritated. Fer meant “iron,” fer à cheval as he knew perfectly well meant “horseshoe.” But he had just understood that the English word “farrier” must be derived somehow from this—even though “horseshoe” was completely different. He was aware, vaguely—from watching certain historical dramas, and then from roaming round la France listening to people talk—that French people had conquered England at least one time, and thereby confused the English language with all sorts of words such as “farrier,” and “mutton,” which common folk now used all the time without knowing that they were speaking the tongue of the conquerors. Meanwhile, the damned French had a tidy and proper tongue in which, for example, the name of the fellow who put shoes on horses was clearly related to the word for horseshoe. Made his blood boil—and now that James was King, Katie bar the door!
“Quelle heure est-il?” Jack finally inquired. The “Scot” without pausing to wonder why a maréchal-ferrant would need to know the time went once again into the ceremony of withdrawing his pocket-watch, getting the lid open, and reading it. In order to do this he had to turn its face towards the fire, and then he had to twist himself around so that he could see it. Jack waited patiently for this to occur, and then just as the “Scot” was lisping out something involving sept Jack whipped the chain out of the fire and got it round his neck.
It was stranglin’ time in gay Paree. Most awkwardly, the red-hot part of the chain ended up around the throat of the “Scot,” so Jack could not get a grip on it without first rummaging in the tool-box for some tongs. But it had already done enough damage, evidently, that the “Scot” could not make any noise.
His horse was another matter: it whinnied, and backed away, and showed signs of wanting to buck. That was a problem, but Jack had to take things one at a time here. He solved the tong problem and murdered the “Scot” in a great sizzling cloud of grilled neck-flesh—which, he felt sure, must be a delicacy in some part of France. Then he peeled the hot chain off, taking some neck parts with it, and tossed it back into the fire. Having settled these matters, he turned his attention—somewhat reluctantly—to the horse. He was dreading that it might have run out through the open stable doors and drawn attention to itself in the stable-yard beyond. But—oddly—the stable-doors were now closed, and were being bolted shut, by a slender young man in an assortment of not very good clothes. He had evidently seized the horse’s reins and tied them to a post, and had the presence of mind to toss a grain-sack over its head so that it could not see any more of the disturbing sights that were now so abundant in this place.
Having seen to these matters, the gypsy boy—it was certainly a gypsy—turned to face Jack, and made a somber, formal little bow. He was barefoot—had probably gotten here by clambering over rooftops.
“You must be Half-Cocked Jack,” he said, as if this weren’t funny. Speaking in the zargon.
“Who are you?”
“It does not matter. St.-George sent me.” The boy came over, stepping carefully around the glowing coals that had been scattered on the floor when Jack had whipped out the chain, and began to work the bellows.
“What did St.-George tell you to do?” asked Jack, throwing on more coal.
“To see what kind of help you would need, during the entertainment.”
“What entertainment would that be?”
“He did not tell me everything.”
“Why should St.-George care so much?”
“St.-George is angry with you. He says you have shown poor form.”
“What are you going to tell him?”
“I will tell him,” the gypsy boy said, and here he smiled for the first time, “that l’Emmerdeur does not need his help.”
“That’s just it,” Jack said, and grabbed the bellows-handle. The boy turned and ran across the stable and vanished through an opening up in the eaves that Jack hadn’t known was there.
While the chain heated, Jack amused himself by going through his victim’s clothing and trying to guess how many gold coins were in his purse. After a couple of minutes (by the pocket-watch, which lay open on the floor) Jack reached into the fire with the tongs and drew out a length of yellow-hot chain. Before it could cool he draped it across an anvil, then smashed it with a heavy chisel-pointed hammer, and then he was free. Except that a yard of hot chain still dangled from his neck, and he could not pull it through his neck-loop without burning himself. So he quenched it in a trough of water. But then he found that in breaking it he’d smashed the last link, and broadened it, so it would no longer pass through the neck-loop. He did not want to spend the time to heat the chain back up, so he was stuck with the collar, and an arm’s length of chain, for now. No matter, really. It was dark outside, he would be seen only as a silhouette, and he needed only that it be a respectable type of silhouette—a shape that people would not discharge weapons at without thinking twice. So he yanked the wig (now wrecked and burnt, but still a wig) off the dead “Scot” and put it on—discarding, however, the unwieldy tam-o’-shanter. He pulled on the boots that John Churchill had donated, and took the long cape that the “Scot” had been wearing. Also his gloves—an old habit to cover the V branded on his thumb. Finally he pilfered the saddle from the horse—it was a magnificent saddle—and carried it out into the stable-yard.
The sight of a supposed Person of Quality toting his own saddle was anomalous, and even if it weren’t, Jack’s dragging one leg, brandishing a scimitar, and muttering out loud in vulgar English also cast uncertainty on his status as a French nobleman. But, as he’d hoped, most of the stable-boys were busy in the main courtyard. The guests were now arriving in force. He barged into the next stable, which was dimly lit by a couple of lanterns, and came face-to-face with a stable-boy who, in an instant, became the most profoundly confused person Jack had ever seen.
“Turk!” Jack called, and was answered by a whinny from several stalls down the line. Jack sidled closer to the stable-boy and allowed the saddle to slide off his shoulders. The boy caught it out of habit, and seemed relieved to have been given a specific job. Then Jack, using his sword as a pointing-device, got him moving in the direction of Turk.
The boy now understood that he was being asked to help steal a horse, and stiffened up in a way that was almost penile. It took no end of prodding to get him to heave the saddle onto Turk’s back. Then Jack socked him in the chin with the guard of the sword, but failed to knock him out. In the end, he had to drag the fool over to a convenient place by the entrance and push him down and practically draw him a picture of how to go about pretending he’d been surprised and knocked unconscious by the English villain.
Then back to Turk, who seemed pleased to see him. As Jack tightened the girth, and made other adjustments, the war-horse’s sinews became taut and vibrant, like the strings of a lute being tuned up. Jack checked his hooves and noted that Churchill had gotten some expert maréchal-ferrant to shoe him. “You and me both,” Jack said, slapping his new boots so that the horse could admire them.
Then he put one of those boots into a stirrup, threw his leg over the saddle, and was hurtling across the duc’s stable-yard before he could even get himself situated properly. Turk wanted out of here as badly as he did. Jack had intended to look for a back exit, but Turk was having none of that, and took him out the way Churchill had ridden him in: straight through a gate into what Jack reckoned must be the main courtyard of the Hôtel d’Arcachon.
Jack sensed quite a few people, but couldn’t really see them because he was dazzled by all of the light: giant torchières like bonfires on pikes, and lanterns strung on colored ropes, and the light of thousands of lanterns and tapers blasting out through the twenty-foot-high windows that constituted most of the front wall of a large noble House directly in front of him. A hundred sperm whales must have given up their bodily fluids to light the lanterns. And as for the tapers in those chandeliers, why, even over the smells of cuisine, fashionable perfume, wood-smoke, and horse-manure, Jack’s nose could detect the fragrance of honey-scented Mauritanian beeswax. All of this sweet-smelling radiance glanced wetly off a large fountain planted in the middle of the court: various Neptunes and Naiads and sea monsters and dolphins cleverly enwrithed to form a support for a naval frigate all speckled with fleurs-de-lis. Wreckage of Dutch and English ships washed up on shores all around, forming benches for French people to put their buttocks on.
The force of the light, and Jack’s hauling back on the reins, had taken the edge off of Turk’s impetuous charge for the exit, but not quite soon enough: the fact remained that Turk, and thus Jack, had effectively burst into the couryard at a near-gallop and then stood agape for several seconds, almost as if demanding to be noticed. And they had been: little knots of Puritans, Færy-Queens, Persians, and Red Indians were looking at them. Jack gave the warhorse an encouraging nudge, while holding fast to the reins so he wouldn’t bolt.
Turk began following a groomed gravel path among flower-beds, which Jack hoped would take them round the fountain eventually and to a place where they could at least see the way out. But they were moving directly toward the light rushing from those banks of windows. Through them Jack saw an immense ballroom, with white walls garlanded with gold, and white polished marble floors where the nobility, in their fancy-dress, were dancing to music from a consort stuffed into a corner.
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!”
Turk tried to bolt for the front door, but his hard fers de cheval slipped and scrabbled on the marble, and he could not build up speed. A sea-monster came down across his path, shedding a hundred rats from its crushed entrails. Turk wheeled and scrambled off toward a crowd of ladies who were doing a sort of tarantella, inspired by the belief that rats were scaling their petticoats. Then, just as Jack was convinced that the charger was going to crush the women under his hooves, Turk seemed to catch sight of a way out, and veered sideways, his hooves nearly sliding out from under him, and made for a doorway set into the back corner of the ballroom. It was a low doorway. Jack had little time to react—seeing the lintel headed for his face, decorated in the middle with a plaster d’Arcachon coat of arms,* and not wanting to have it stamped on his face forever, he flung himself backwards and fell off the horse.
He managed to get his right foot, but not his left, out of the stirrup, and so Turk simply dragged him down the ensuing corridor (which had a smooth floor, but not smooth enough for Jack). Nearly upside-down, Jack pawed desperately against that floor with the hand that wasn’t gripping the sword, trying to pull himself sideways so that Turk’s hooves wouldn’t come down on him. Time and again his hand slammed down onto the backs of rats, who all seemed to be fleeing down this particular corridor—drawn by some scent, perhaps, that struck them as promising. Turk outpaced the rats, of course, and was making his own decisions. Jack knew that they were passing into diverse rooms because the thresholds barked his hips and ribs and he got fleeting views of servants’ breeches and skirts.
But then, suddenly, they were in a dimly lit room, alone, and Turk wasn’t running anymore. Nervous and irritable to be sure, though. Jack cautiously wiggled his left foot. Turk startled, then looked at him.
“Surprised to see me? I’ve been with you the whole way—loyal friend that I am,” Jack announced. He got his boot out of that stirrup and stood. But there was no time for additional banter. They were in a pantry. Squealing noises heralded the approach of the rats. Pounding of boots was not far behind, and where there were boots, there’d be swords. There was a locked door set into the wall, opposite to where they had come in, and Turk had gone over to sniff at it curiously.
If this was not a way out, Jack was dead—so he went over and pounded on it with the pommel of his sword, while looking significantly at Turk. It was a stout door. Curiously, the crevices between planks had been sealed with oakum, just like a ship’s planking, and rags had been stuffed into the gaps round the edges.
Turk wheeled around to face away from it. Jack hopped out of the way. The war-horse’s hindquarters heaved up as he put all weight on his forelegs, and then both of his rear hooves smashed into the door with the force of cannonballs. The door was half caved in, and torn most of the way loose from its upper hinge. Turk gave it a few more, and it disappeared.
Jack had sunk to his knees by that point, though, and wrapped a manure-plastered sleeve up against his nose and mouth, and was trying not to throw up. The stench that had begun to leak from the room beyond, after the first blow, had nearly felled him. It nearly drove Turk away, too. Jack just had the presence of mind to slam the other door and prevent the horse’s fleeing into the hallway.
Jack grabbed the candle that was the pantry’s only illumination, and stepped through, expecting to find a sepulchre filled with ripe corpses. But instead it was just another small kitchen, as tidy a place as Jack had ever seen.
There was a butcher’s block in the center of the room with a fish stretched out on it. The fish was so rotten it was bubbling.
At the other end of this room was a small door. Jack opened it and discovered a typical Parisian back-alley. But what he saw in his mind’s eye was the moment, just a few minutes ago, when he had ridden right past the duc d’Arcachon while carrying an unsheathed sword. One twitch of the wrist, and the man who (as he now knew) had taken Eliza and her mother off into slavery would be dead. He could run back into the house now, and have a go at it. But he knew he’d lost the moment.
Turk planted his head in Jack’s back and shoved him out the door, desperate to reach the comparative freshness of a Paris alley choked with rotting kitchen-waste and human excrement. Back inside, Jack could hear men battering at the pantry door.
Turk was eyeing him as if to say, Shall we? Jack mounted him and Turk began to gallop down the alley without being told to. The alarm had gone up. So as Jack thundered out into the Place Royale, sparks flying from his mount’s new shoes, the wind blowing his cape out behind him—in other words, cutting just the silhouette he’d intended—he turned round and pointed back into the alley with his sword and shouted: “Les Vagabonds! Les Vagabonds anglaises!” And then, catching sight of the bulwark of the Bastille rising above some rooftops, under a half-moon, and reckoning that this would be a good place to pretend to summon reinforcements—not to mention a way out of town—he got Turk pointed in that direction, and gave him free rein.