The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and the System of the World (296 page)

Leaving this on the bench he flung open the door on the carriage’s left side. A small open space welcomed him, since no spectators would stand where the view to the south was blocked by the coach. Johann did not mark him; he was as fascinated as anyone else by the spectacle at the Monument. Dappa strode, but never ran, north through the crowd onto Bishopsgate. He phant’sied he might hear reward-seekers pursuing him through the crowd; never mind, if those did not, others would soon enough.

In a few moments’ time he was seated in a coffee-house literally in the shadow of South Sea House, sipping chocolate and pretending to read the
Examiner
. As if he’d a right to be there.

Busy men were all around him, unrolling documents on tables: charts of the Bights of Benin and Biafra, loading-diagrams of slave-ships, ledgers heavy with human assets. Familiar names flew around the place: Accra, Elmina, Ijebu, and Bonny. He felt, strangely, at home. Even more strangely, he felt at peace. Flipping the newspaper over, he licked his pencil again, and began to write.

DUSK

I
N A FEW MINUTES
S
IR
Isaac was on the deck of the hooker, his hair gleaming like a comet’s tail in the fierce light of the burning Tor. Daniel stood near him, flat-footed under the weight of his Blanket, peering from beneath his rumpled Cap. A team of four dragoons were bent over the hooker’s rail, straining to heave-ho Colonel Barnes aboard without snapping off his other leg.

Very quickly the longboat rowed away from them, for the water was now deep enough that it could move free of the dredged channel.
The hooker drew a bit more water than that, and was confined to the channel for the time being. Pulling his cap off so that he could feel the flow of air over his scalp, Daniel verified his suspicion that the burning Tor was drawing in a powerful flood of air, some of which was catching on the hull and the bare spars of the hooker. She was being sucked directly into the pillar of fire, like a moth into Vulcan’s forge.

Barnes was aware of it. The dragoons had begun exploring the ship, looking for an anchor, or anything that would serve the same end. There were none, as the anchor-cables had been chopped through in the coiners’ haste to escape.

“Is there anything that seems heavy down there?” Barnes demanded of a dragoon who had been groping around belowdecks.

Isaac pricked up his ears, as he too was very keen on finding something heavy.

“Only a great bloody chest,” the dragoon answered, “too heavy to move.”

“Did you look inside of it?” Isaac inquired, tense as a starving cat.

“No, sir. ’Tis locked. But I know what’s in it.”

“How do you know what is in it, if you did not look inside?”

“Why, I can hear it, sir. Ticking away just as steady as you please. It is a great big clock.”

As if the tips of their noses were joined by a hawser that had just snapped taut, Daniel and Isaac swiveled their heads toward each other.

Daniel spoke to the dragoon, though he was looking Isaac in the eye. “Is it
so
heavy that it could not be carried abovedecks and hurled over the side?” he asked.

“I heaved with all my might and could not budge it a hair’s breadth, sir.”

Daniel was asking himself whether he ought to let the dragoons know what was obvious to him and Isaac: that they were trapped on a derelict vessel with a ticking Infernal Device. But Isaac made up his mind quicker, and said: “Pray forgive Dr. Waterhouse’s curiosity on so trivial a matter. He and I are
amateurs
of clock-work. As we have little else to do just now, perhaps he and I shall retire belowdecks and amuse ourselves with Horologickal chit-chat.”

“And I’ll join you,” said Barnes, who had caught on, “if you’ll have me, that is.”

“Please be our guest, Colonel,” said Daniel. He then led Isaac and Barnes toward an open hatch, which, against the fire-lit deck planks, stood out as a crisp black rectangle.

DUSK

F
ATHER
É
DOUARD DE
G
EX
of the Society of Jesus stood up on one leg, for he’d damaged an ankle, and turned around to survey the debris trail he had left across the roof of the White Tower. Chiefly he desired to know where the contents of his satchel were. It seemed a good deal lighter now than when he’d jumped off the Monument a few moments earlier.

Under the groaning rope, and interspersed with flattened Scotsmen and their far-flung dirks, sporrans, and tam-o-shanters, was a Milky Way of coins and the small leather bags they’d just sprayed out of. De Gex hobbled back along his track snatching them up and stuffing them into his bag. Ashamed to see a man of the cloth performing stoop-and-pick labor in their midst, the stunned and bruised Highlanders drew themselves up, shook the dust from their kilts, and went to work gleaning coins and wee bags from the roof.

But de Gex did not leave off collecting and counting them until he had worked his way back to the west parapet. There he encountered the first man he had knocked down: a bulky fellow with a patch over one eye, who spoke to him in tolerable French. “In the name of the Auld Alliance,” said he (referring to an extremely spotty but æon-spanning series of diplomatic trysts between Scotland and France) “I bid you welcome to the Tower of London. Please consider it the property of France—”

“
Pourquoi non?
Since it was built by us.”

“—and yours to command!”

“Very well, my first command is that you take down the banner of MacIan of MacDonald!” answered de Gex.

Lord Gy was not pleased to hear this. That much was on his face, as plain as a laceration. But he bore it with the insolent calm of one who has heard worse and would like you to notice that he is still alive. “I apologize,” he said, “the lads were a trifle high-spirited. The sobriety and discretion of Paris are foreign to young blades who have just
galloped down from the heather.” And making a small bow, he turned in the direction of the banner. So did de Gex.

But both of them were astonished to find no banner at all: only a flag-pole that had been severed at waist level by one stroke of a very good blade. Next to it, the banner-carrier—a being made entirely of freckles, perhaps fourteen years old—was sitting in a gun-slit pinching a bloody nose.

Rufus MacIan hurried over to make inquiries. Édouard de Gex, after the obligatory rolling of the eyes, looked about and noted, for the first time, that Jack was nowhere to be seen. In the commotion of de Gex’s descent upon the White Tower, Jack must have taken the matter of the banner into his own hands. He must then have gone down stairs; and the nearest way down would have been through a door, now standing open, in the round turret that held together the northeastern vertex of the building. That turret loomed above the place where MacIan was interrogating the bloody-nosed freckle-boy, and it was obvious that MacIan would be headed that way in a moment.

De Gex commanded the Highlanders around him to remain at their posts, and strode toward the round turret. Several of the Scotsmen affected not to have grasped his order, and followed him; but MacIan, who was now aimed for the same door, turned round, his face very choleric, and bit off a few words in Scots that sent them all glancing away. He entered the round turret only two strides ahead of de Gex.

“Pity,” said the latter, looking around the perfectly barren room, “all the astronomical devices are gone.”

Lord Gy was already in the stair, on his way down. “Eh?”

“Didn’t you know? This was where Flamsteed worked, in the days before the Royal Observatory was moved to Greenwich. The Prime Meridian of the English once passed through this room—”

Which was perfectly trivial and beside the point, as de Gex well knew. But he did not like the look on the face of Lord Gy, and wanted to break his concentration. The gambit might have worked on a French nobleman whose social reflexes had been trained to quivering perfection in the salons of Versailles. It failed on Lord Gy, who had ascended to the nobility by cutting such a Frenchman in twain, and who at this moment looked as if he were ready to do it again.

The purpose of the round tower was to support a spiral stair. Finding Jack was a matter of winding down and gazing into each doorway that presented itself. They shortly tracked him down on the middle of the building’s three floors. This space, formerly the royal court of a King, had been given over in recent centuries to the storage of official
documents. Jack was squatting with his back to them in the middle of a cavernous fireplace shaking powder from a horn onto the Scottish banner, which he had folded a couple of times and stuffed beneath an andiron. On his career through the former throne-room he had swiped an armload of rolled-up papers from a dusty shelf and piled them under and around the banner to serve as kindling.

“Jacques—” de Gex began.

“Pardon me while I destroy the evidence, your virginity.”

“Ye baistart!” exclaimed Lord Gy.

“Did I say, destroy the evidence?” Jack said, looking over his shoulder to see MacIan. “I meant that this sacred banner became torn and dirtied in the fray, and the only respectful way to dispose of it now is by a cleansing flame.” And he held a pistol—an unloaded one, as it turned out—next to the banner and pulled the trigger. Sparks from the flint sprayed across powder-smeared fabric and became something more than sparks. A fizzy conflagration spread across the banner, like flames across a field of harvested stalks, only faster. Jack recoiled, staggering out of the fireplace to get clear of the smoke. Since a draught had not yet been established in the chimney, a good deal of the smoke followed him—indeed, was sucked into his wake so that he seemed to be trailing it behind him like a rocket. “Right, let’s go somewhere we can breathe,” Jack suggested, and strode past de Gex and MacIan, headed for the stair.

Now de Gex had seen a few duels in his day. These were at least as formal, and as premeditated, as weddings. But he’d also seen a sufficient number of sudden murderous stabbing-brawls to have understood that even they were not as spontaneous as they looked.

If you were strolling in the gardens of Versailles, you might one day hear sudden noises, and turn around to see, some distance away, one fellow—let’s call him Arnauld—going after another—call him Blaise—with a drawn blade. From which, if you were a careless observer, you might think that Arnauld had just snapped without warning, like an ice-covered bough falling from a tree. But in truth the Arnaulds of the world were rarely so reckless. A careful observer, watching Arnauld for two or three minutes prior to the onset of violence, would see some sort of exchange between him and Blaise—a calculated insult from Blaise, let us say, such as a refusal to let Arnauld through a door ahead of him, or a witticism about Arnauld’s wig, which had been so very fashionable three months ago. If Blaise were a polished wit, he would then move on, blithe, humming an air, and giving every appearance of having forgotten the event.

But Arnauld would become a living Exhibit. Symptoms would set in that were so obvious and dramatic as to furnish a topic of study for
the Royal Society. Why, a whole jury of English savants could stand around poor Arnauld with their magnifying lenses and their notebooks, observing the changes in his physiognomy, noting them down in Latin and rendering them in labored woodcuts. Most of these symptoms had to do with the Humour of Passion. For a few moments, Arnauld would stand fast as the insult sank in. His face would turn red as the vessels in his skin went flaccid, and consequently ballooned with blood from a heart that had begun to pound like a Turkish kettle-drum signalling the onset of battle. But this was not when the attack came, because Arnauld, during this stage, was physically unable to move. All of his activity was mental. Once he got over the first shock, Arnauld’s first thought would be to convince himself that he had reined in his emotions now, got himself under control, was ready to consider matters judiciously. The next few minutes, then, would be devoted to a rehearsal of the recent encounter with Blaise. Affecting a rational, methodical approach, Arnauld would marshal whatever evidence he might need to convict Blaise of being a scoundrel, and sentence him to death. After that, the attack would not be long in following. But to one who had not been there with those Fellows of the Royal Society to observe all that had led up to it, it would seem like the spontaneous explosion of an Infernal Device.

De Gex was standing behind MacIan and had watched the banner-burning over the other’s epaulets. The backs of MacIan’s ears had gone cherry red. He’d not so much as twitched an eyelid when Jack had strode past him to the stair. De Gex knew what would be coming soon. There was nothing he could say now to interrupt the proceedings going on in MacIan’s brain: the marshalling of the arguments, the sure and inevitable judgment. But there was something he could
do
. He let his satchel down to the floor, and reached silently into the pocket of his cassock. It was not a lined pocket, but a slit that went all the way through the garment, and gave him access to what was beneath.

Father Edouard was a
member
of the Society of Jesus, but he was a
participant
in the society of
men
—to be specific, the men of London, the most beastly city he had ever seen, though he’d circumnavigated the globe. In his waistband, his fingers found the hilt of a splendid watered-steel dagger he’d picked up from a Banyan in Batavia. He drew it silently from its leather sheath. MacIan still hadn’t moved. The room was silent except for the crackle of the flames spreading to the pile of ancient documents Jack had strewn around the flag. De Gex broke the silence, a little, by stepping forward.

But this triggered a greater sound from behind him. Before de Gex could turn to see what it was, his dagger-hand had been seized
from behind and twisted up behind his back. The fingers opened and the weapon dropped, but did not fall to the floor; it was intercepted by another hand. An instant later that hand appeared in front of him and brought the dagger to his throat. He had been embraced from behind by a man who smelled of sweat-sodden wool, of horses, and of gunpowder. One of the Highlanders had tailed him silently down stairs.

“Ye ir a man of kirk, so a sal gie ye benefit of clergy,” said the Highlander into his ear, “binna ye speik sae much as a word, an then it’ll be atwein ye and St. Peter as ti whaur ye sal be expoondin yeir next sermon.”

Rufus MacIan turned around. His ears were no longer red. With barely a glance towards de Gex he strode to the spiral stair and followed Jack down to the first storey.

I
T WAS PACKED TO
the ceiling with gunpowder. Not wanting to blow what remained of his clan to kingdom come, MacIan removed a pistol from his waistband, made sure it wasn’t cocked, and laid it on a sill before turning his attention into the great room that accounted for most of the first floor.

“What were you thinking?” asked Jack.

Jack the Coiner was standing at the head of an aisle between stacked powder-kegs. He had not drawn his blade, but he had pulled it a few inches out of its scabbard to loosen it, and he was standing in a sideways attitude that, in a society where men routinely ran each other through with swords, was implicitly menacing.

MacIan kept his distance. “I dinna expect to live this lang,” he said, “I hae nae thoughts concerning what we should dae after.”

“Let me supply you with some thoughts, then,” said Jack. “We are finished here.”

“Finished!?”

“We have done all that we needed to do,” said Jack, “excepting some trifles in the Mint which Father Édouard and I shall attend to after you and the others are…gone.”

“
Gone!?
An how dae ye expect to hold the Tower of London agin a Regiment, with nae one to man the defenses?”

“It was never my intention to
hold
it,” Jack returned. “So fly. Now. Escape to the heather. Savor your revenge. Unless…”

“Unless
what
?”

“Unless you prefer to go out as a hero of the United Kingdom, defending this house of your Stuart queen.”

“Now that is insufferable,” said Rufus MacIan. “That isna to be endured.” Both hands came up in front as if he were going to clasp
them in prayer. But they did not bate before his face, but kept rising and reaching back until they had found the handle of the Claymore projecting up above one shoulder. With one jerk it was out and in front of him. Suddenly Jack’s weapon was likewise exposed, a handsome watered-steel blade, curved like a saber, and, in the Turkish way, slightly broader at the tip than at the guard. He held it in one hand. It would be an odd, ragged, improvised sort of duel: a medieval longsword against something that was not a cutlass and not a rapier.

“Very well,” Jack said, “hero of Britain it is, then.”

Jack had the lighter and swifter blade. It would be suicide for MacIan to stand and await an attack, because it was unlikely he could move the Claymore fast enough to parry it. So he came on like a bull from a chute, feinting this way and that to make Jack commit himself, then winding up and swinging the weapon down at Jack’s head with all his might. It was a blow that could not be fended off with any lighter weapon, and so Jack was obliged to spin back and away. MacIan pursued him into an aisle between stacked powder-kegs. In these narrower confines he would have less room to swing his long blade. But Jack had done nothing to break the momentum of the great sword and so MacIan was able to swing it around and ring down another terrible blow at Jack’s head. Jack barely had time to get his sword-hand up. If he had held his lighter weapon horizontally, trying to bar altogether the descent of the Claymore, it wouldn’t have gone well for him. But he had the luck, or the presence of mind, to make the pommel the highest part of the weapon, and leave the point angled downwards toward the floor. The Claymore came down with little loss of speed, but it was deflected laterally, missing Jack and crashing into the stone floor, where it sent a shower of sparks against the base of a keg of gunpowder.

There was, in Rufus MacIan, a responsible and level-headed military officer. For the last few moments this person had been muscled out of the way by another that shared the same skull: the raving Celtic berserker. The sight of those sparks striking that keg caused the latter to vanish like a will o’ the wisp and the former to be reinstated. There was a momentary pause as Rufus MacIan waited to see if they and the White Tower were to remain in existence. But the sparks winked out, and nothing happened.