The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and the System of the World (212 page)

Monsieur,

A man of your erudition, a scholar as well as a nobleman, must know that the office of
contrôleur-général
comes with certain perquisites. If you have been slow to avail yourself of the same, it is not out of ignorance, but because your only thought is to be of service to the Most Christian King. I have long noted, but never mentioned this, for it was obvious that you were satisfied. But the latest letters from my friends in France are of a very grim cast, which has caused me to wonder whether you have, as you lay in bed in the dark hours of the night, regretted that you had not been more forward in looking after your own interests during those early years when France’s prosperity was the envy of the world, and her credit as good as gold.

I would be remiss if I did not let you know of a certain opportunity. As you know, France has since ancient times owed money to any number of different creditors at any given time. Part of the job of the
contrôleur-général
is to see that these obligations are discharged by assigning them to sources of revenue;
for example, if France owes such-and-such number of
livres
to Signore Fiorentino, the
contrôleur-général
might go to some French count and say, “This year, when you collect the taxes on your lands, send the proceeds to Signore Fiorentino, as we owe him a debt.” A consequence of this is that not all French government debts are of equal value; for if the count, in the example above, was
honnête,
his lands bountiful, and the weather good, why, Signore Fiorentino would be repaid promptly and in full, while some other creditor, whose loan had been assigned to a less reliable source of revenue, might come up short-handed. It is this variability that makes the work of the
contrôleur-général
so endlessly absorbing. Not to mention
profitable;
for nothing in law or custom prevents the
contrôleur-général
himself from purchasing some loans that have gone bad, and then re-assigning them to more reliable sources of revenue, so that they are suddenly worth more. It is a perquisite of the office, and no one would give it a second thought if you were to avail yourself of it.

As it happens, for several years I have been purchasing underperforming loans from diverse petty nobles who did their parts to be of service to the King when the present war broke out. The total number of such transactions now numbers in the hundreds. The principals of all of these loans, summed, come to rather more than half a million
livres,
though I acquired them for less than a quarter of that amount. I will now sell them to you, Monsieur, for just what I paid for them, plus a soupçon of five percent. If, as I suspect, you lack the liquid assets necessary to close such a transaction, I will accept your word as a nobleman, and not think of being repaid until after you have had the leisure to plumb all of these obligations into adequate sources of revenue. Once you have accomplished that, you should be able to see that each of these loans is repaid in full, which means that you could in
theory get back quadruple what you shall owe me.

No gratitude is expected, or desired; my only wish, as ever, is to be of service.

Eliza, duchesse d’Arcachon My lady,

My lady,

I hope this finds you on a tidy and well-skippered
Zille
halfway up the Elbe. Please forgive me for the intemperate remarks contained in my previous letter. The situation in all places has become so bizarre, so suddenly, that I know not what to make of it. Half of London—the better half—is said to have been abandoned. Because there is no silver, Persons of Quality have no means of conveying rents from their lands in the country, to town; so they have no choice but to board up their town-houses and move to the country, where they can live on barter. It seems the worst possible moment for the Whigs to have taken power, and to have put in the Marquis of Ravenscar at the Exchequer; but perhaps it is the case that he, like you, perceives some opportunity where others see only confusion, and has chosen this moment to strike.

To business. You asked for the latest on the Esphahnians. I will tell you what I know.

You’ll recall that after the severed head of your father-in-law turned up at his own birthday party on the evening of 14 October 1690, we heard little that was of any use on this channel for several years. Vrej Esphahnian had contrived to get a letter out from Egypt a few days before the duc d’Arcachon’s demise, and several months later he posted a brief note from Mocha in which he directed his family not to make any effort
to reply, as he could not predict where the currents of trade would next take him.

In the meantime I had not been idle. It was clear to me that the Esphahnians used some form of steganography in their letters, but I could not make out how they did it. The family was scattered among several hovels, entresols, and prisons around Paris. I hired thieves to rifle through their possessions, and at length found some letters that Vrej had sent to them from Spain and Barbary beginning in 1685. In the margins and interlinear spaces of these, I saw an inscription writ in letters of vermilion. It was plain enough that this was some sort of invisible ink, which had been made visible by some secret art known to the Esphahnians. By reading these, I was able to learn more of Vrej’s story.

He had been sent to Spain early in 1685 to establish a family trading circuit there. But he had been taken by the Barbary Corsairs and enslaved. Yet his owner soon recognized that he had talents beyond pulling oars, and put him to work in a port city near Morocco, whence he was able to correspond with his family. From them, he learned of the disaster that had befallen the Paris Esphahnians after they had made the mistake of sub-letting their entresol to Jack Shaftoe. By this time they had been released from the Bastille, but one of them had died in prison, and their business was of course destroyed, so that in coming years many would drift in and out of debtors’ prisons.

In 1688 Vrej’s owner traded him to Algiers. There he became acquainted with another literate slave, a Jew of great intelligence, and over the course of several conversations with this Jew learned that Jack Shaftoe was still alive, as a galley-slave in the same city. During the winter of 1688–89, Vrej wrote to his family in Paris apprising them of this and proposing to find Jack and cut his throat, or arrange for it to be done, as revenge. Of course I do not have a copy of what was sent back in response; but it is easy enough to infer, from what Vrej wrote in his next letter, that older and wiser heads in Paris had prevailed. Jack Shaftoe was looked on as a sort of madman, a victim of possession, not responsible for his actions (though Vrej questions this, and suspects it is all an act), and no advantage to the family, temporal or spiritual, is seen in killing the poor man. Rather, it is suggested that Vrej seek some advantage in his dealings with the Jew.

As you will have anticipated, my lady, this Jew, this Armenian, and Jack, as well as several other galley-slaves, developed
into the corps of pirates who have caused so much trouble since then.

All of these things were known to me, and to Father Édouard de Gex, by the end of the Year of Our Lord 1690. As you know, de Gex took the keenest imaginable interest in this. He began to ransack books of Alchemy for information about the vermilion ink: how it was concocted, and what vapor or infusion was required to make the hidden letters manifest on the page. With the connivance of his
cousine
the duchesse d’Oyonnax, he made the Esphahnians a great success among all the coffee-fanciers at Court, with the result that they have been able to move to Versailles and build that coffee-house on the Rue de l’Orangerie where you and I have spent so many stimulating hours. This had the effect that de Gex desired: All of the Esphahnians were gathered together in one house where they could be spied on with ease. When a letter came to them from some place such as Mocha, de Gex and I knew it first; and when a member of this family went out to buy something from a chymist, he was of necessity dealing with one of the Esoteric Brotherhood, well known to de Gex. And so by the middle of 1692 we had learned everything there was to know about the vermilion ink: how to compound it, and how to render it visible. Too, we knew of Vrej’s movements about the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. The one person who was wholly in the dark was Vrej himself. Because of his erratic movements, his family had not been able to send a letter to him since 1689, when they had been clinging to a wretched existence in Paris.

Finally in September of 1692 the pirates sailed to Surat, in Hindoostan, to get away from the Hell-hounds sent after them by Lothar von Hacklheber and various others they had injured. They were assaulted from an unexpected quarter by pirates of Malabar and their treasure was taken from them. Several, including Vrej, waded up on to the shores of Hindoostan where they dispersed. Vrej was press-ganged into the army of a regional king, a vassal of the Great Mogul whose
nom de guerre
is Dispenser of Mayhem. One might imagine that a man in such a position would be little better than a slave; however, it seems that, in the armies of the Mogul, Christian mercenaries enjoy a kind of elevated status—even when they are serving against their will! Or so I infer from the fact that Vrej was at last able to assemble the materials needed to concoct the invisible ink. And for the first time since his wanderings had begun, he was able to specify a return address. His letter
reached France in November of 1692. De Gex and I steeped it in the chymical vapour that caused the scarlet letters to appear, and extracted the information I have just given you. Then I put my forgers to work making an exact duplicate of the letter, including the part written in invisible ink. This was delivered to the Café Esphahan and duly read by Vrej’s kin. They immediately produced a letter in reply. Its outward contents were just the sort of mawkish drivel you would expect, but when de Gex and I exposed it to the vapour and read the hidden inscription, we found it to be rather more businesslike. In neat vermilion letters they told Vrej about the good fortune that the family had lately achieved.

I had been planning to have my forgers produce an exact copy of this, as we had done with the incoming letter; but de Gex had come under the spell of an idea, and formed a resolve to play a deeper game. He was extremely vexed that he had patiently bided his time for so many years only to learn that the Solomonic Gold had been lost to Malabar pirates, and had decided to grasp the nettle, as it were, and go to Hindoostan himself. To that end, he wished to cultivate Vrej as a source of intelligence, and, if possible, as an accomplice. But it was necessary to keep the matter a secret from other members of this pirate-band. The hidden channel of the vermilion ink was ideally suited to that purpose. And so the letter crafted by my forgers ended up being rather different from the original. It was written out on the cheapest paper we could gather up, with ink of miserable quality. The plaintext was much the same as in the original. But the invisible message was altogether different. In the letter that was actually posted back to Vrej, he is given the bad news that life has only gotten worse for the Esphahnians; two more of his brothers have perished in debtors’ prisons, &c. However (according to this account, which de Gex concocted himself), the star of Jack Shaftoe has only soared higher; he is accounted a sort of picaresque hero now, and the story goes that he has pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes, especially those of the pirates he travels with; for hidden in the treasure that was stolen is something of unimaginable value, known to Jack and to the Jew, but that they are concealing from their brethren.

The forged letter concludes by urging Vrej not to worry too much over the fate of his family in Paris, for, praise be to God, they have at last found an ally and a protector in one Father Édouard de Gex, a saintly man who knows of all the injustices
perpetrated against the family, and who has taken a solemn vow to see to it that justice is done.

That forgery was sent off to Vrej in Hindoostan in December of 1692. The following April—about one year ago—Vrej’s reply came in, and the scarlet letters might have been written in some unholy concoction of blood and fire, so infused were they with fury and lust for revenge. “The Lord has delivered him into my hands!” was what de Gex said upon reading it. I think he meant Jack Shaftoe, rather than Vrej. At any rate we produced a forged version whose invisible text was, of course, wholly different. In this version Vrej congratulates his family on their good fortune and asks to learn more of the glorious Café Esphahan, &c.

In this manner the correspondence has gone back and forth a few more times between Vrej and his brothers. Every word of it, of course, has passed through the mind and hand of de Gex, and been twisted one way or the other, so that Vrej and his brothers have developed utterly divergent pictures of what is going on.

Had you taken the trouble to ask me, you might have learned of all of these things prior to your departure for Germany. Since then, however, one more letter has come in from Vrej.

This letter was written in the court of the Great Mogul at Shahjahanabad where (one imagines) Vrej was reclining on silken pillows and being fed peeled grapes by bejewelled virgins, as he and what remained of his pirate-band had won a great battle against the Maratha rebels and thereby re-opened the high road from Surat to Delhi. Vrej relates the story in some detail. Word of it has already reached the courts of Europe via more than one channel and so I shall not say much about it here, on the assumption that you have heard or read other accounts. The general drift of Vrej’s letter is that although he is being showered with rewards in Shahjahanabad, he cannot take any pleasure in them as long as he knows that his family are suffering in Paris; indeed, he would come home in the blink of an eye were it not for this saintly benefactor, Father Édouard de Gex, who was now looking after the family. Instead, Vrej proposes to tarry in Hindoostan so that he can get to the bottom of this story that I mentioned before—namely that there was something of extraordinary value secreted in the treasure of Bonanza. One would think that this had been irretrievably lost; but Vrej reports that some members of the pirate-band were taken as prisoners by the Malabar
pirates. There exists the possibility that not all of them were slain instantly, tortured to death presently, or driven insane; i.e., that they are still alive in Malabar and know something about the lost treasure’s whereabouts.

For his services to the Great Mogul, Jack Shaftoe has been made King of a region in southern Hindoostan for a term of three years, which, as bizarre as it sounds, is a customary way for that potentate to reward his generals. Soon Jack and the remnants of his band shall journey to his new kingdom for him to be enthroned. Vrej shall go with them, and promises to send his family news as soon as he has any to write down, and the means to post it.

That is all. Father Édouard, who was hoping for news more definite, is beside himself, and divides his time between the following three activities: one, uttering oaths that should never be heard from a priest. Two, seething, and trying to prevent himself from uttering any further oaths. Three, doing penance in various churches and chapels, to seek forgiveness for having let slip oaths. And so it is not an especially productive time for him; but between famine and lack of money it is no productive time for France either and so he does not stand out from the crowd.

Bonaventure Rossignol