The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and the System of the World (78 page)

Bolstrood relaxed a bit.

“So at first the market will drop,” Monmouth said distractedly.

“Until the
true
situation becomes generally known,” Eliza said, patted his arm firmly, and drew back. Gomer Bolstrood seemed to relax further. “During that interval,” Eliza continued, “our investor will have the opportunity to reap a colossal profit, by selling the market short. And in exchange for that opportunity he’ll gladly buy you all the lead and powder you need to mount the invasion.”

“But that investor is
not
Mr. Sluys—?”

“In any short-selling transaction there is a
loser
as well as a
winner,
” Eliza said. “Mr. Sluys is to be the loser.”

“Why him specifically?” Bolstrood asked. “It could be
any
liefhebber.”

“Selling short has been illegal for three-quarters of a century! Numerous edicts have been issued to prevent it—one of them written in the time of the Stadholder Frederick Henry. Now, if a trader is caught short—that is, if he has signed a contract that will cause him to lose money—he can ‘appeal to Frederick.’”

“But Frederick Henry died
ages
ago,” Monmouth protested.

“It is an expression—a term of art. It simply means to repudiate the contract, and refuse to pay. According to Frederick Henry’s edict, that repudiation will be upheld in a court of law.”

“But if it’s true that there must always be a loser when selling short, then Frederick Henry’s decree must’ve stamped out the practice altogether!”

“Oh, no, your grace—short selling thrives in Amsterdam! Many traders make their living from it!”

“But why don’t all of the losers simply ‘appeal to Frederick’?”

“It all has to do with how the contracts are structured. If you’re clever enough you can put the loser in a position where he dare not appeal to Frederick.”

“So it
is
a sort of blackmail after all,” Bolstrood said, gazing out the window across a snowy field—but hot on Eliza’s trail. “We set Sluys up to be the loser—then if he appeals to Frederick, the entire story comes out in a court of law—including the warehouse full of lead—and he’s exposed as a traitor. So he’ll eat the loss without complaint.”

“But—if I’m following all of this—it relies on Sluys
not knowing
that there is a plan to invade England,” Monmouth said. “Otherwise he’d be a fool to enter into the short contract.”

“That is certainly true,” Eliza said. “We want him to believe that V.O.C. stock will rise.”

“But if he’s selling us the lead, he’ll know we’re planning
something.
”

“Yes—but he needn’t know
what
is being planned, or
when.
We need only manipulate his mental state, so that he has reason to believe that V.O.C. shares are soon to rise.”

“And—as I’m now beginning to understand—you are something of a virtuoso when it comes to manipulating men’s mental states,” Monmouth said.

“You make it sound ever so much more difficult than it really is,” Eliza answered. “Mostly I just sit quietly and let the men manipulate themselves.”

“Well, if that’s all for now,” Monmouth said, “I feel a powerful urge to go and practice some self-manipulation in private—unless—?”

“Not today, your grace,” Eliza said, “I must pack my things. Perhaps I’ll see you in Amsterdam?”

“Nothing could give me greater pleasure.”

France

EARLY
1685

J
ACK RODE BETWEEN PARIS
and Lyons several times in the early part of 1685, ferrying news. Paris: the King of England is dead! Lyons: some Spanish governorships in America are up for sale. Paris: King Looie has secretly married Mademoiselle de Maintenon, and the Jesuits have his ear now. Lyons: yellow fever is slaying mine-slaves by the thousands in Brazil—the price of gold ought to rise.

It was disconcertingly like working for someone—just the sort of arrangement he’d given up, long ago, as being beneath his dignity. It was, to put it more simply, too much like what Bob did. So Jack had to keep reminding himself that he was not
actually
doing it, but
pretending
to do it, so that he could get his horse ready to sell—then he would tell these bankers to fuck themselves.

He was riding back toward Paris from Lyons one day—an unseasonably cold day in March—when he encountered a column of three score men shuffling toward him. Their heads were shaved and they were dressed in dirty rags—though most had elected to tear up whatever clothes they had, and wrap them around their bleeding feet. Their arms were bound behind their backs and so it was easy to see their protruding ribs, mottled with sores and whip-marks. They were accompanied by some half-dozen mounted archers who could easily pick off stragglers or runaways.

In other words, just another group of galley slaves on their way down to Marseille. But these were more miserable than most. Your typical galley slave was a deserter, smuggler, or criminal, hence young and tough. A column of such men setting out from Paris in the winter might expect to lose no more than half its number to cold, disease, starvation, and beatings along the way. But this group—like several others Jack had seen recently—seemed to consist entirely of old men who had no chance whatever of making it to Marseille—or (for that matter) to whatever inn their guards expected to sleep in tonight. They were painting the road with blood as they trudged along, and they moved so slowly that the trip would take them weeks. But this was a journey you wanted to finish in as few days as possible.

Jack rode off to the side and waited for the column to pass him
by. The stragglers were tailed by a horseman who, as Jack watched, patiently uncoiled his
nerf du boeuf,
whirled it round his head a time or two (to make a scary noise and build up speed), and then snapped it through the air to bite a chunk out of a slave’s ear. Extremely pleased with his own prowess, he then said something not very pleasant about the R.P.R. Which made everything clear to Jack, for R.P.R. stood for
Religion Pretendue Réformée
, which was a contemptuous way of referring to Huguenots. Huguenots tended to be prosperous merchants and artisans, and so naturally if you gave them the galley slave treatment they would suffer much worse than a Vagabond.

Only a few hours later, watching another such column go by, he stared right into the face of Monsieur Arlanc—who stared right back at him. He had no hair, his cheeks were grizzly and sucked-in from hunger, but Monsieur Arlanc it was.

There was nothing for Jack to do at the time. Even if he’d been armed with a musket, one of the archers would’ve put an arrow through him before he could reload and fire a second ball. But that evening he circled back to an inn that lay several miles south of where he’d seen Monsieur Arlanc, and bided his time in the shadows and the indigo night for a few hours, freezing in clouds of vapor from the nostrils of his angry and uncomfortable horses, until he was certain that the guards would be in bed. Then he rode up to that inn and paid a guard to open the gate for him, and rode, with his little string of horses, into the stable-yard.

Several Huguenots were just standing there, stark naked, chained together in the open. Some jostled about in a feeble effort to stay warm, others looked dead. But Monsieur Arlanc was not in this group. A groom shot back a bolt on a stable door and allowed Jack to go inside, and (once Jack put more silver in his pocket) lent him a lantern. There Jack found the rest of the galley slaves. Weaker ones had burrowed into piles of straw, stronger ones had buried themselves in the great steaming piles of manure that filled the corners. Monsieur Arlanc was among these. He was actually snoring when the light from Jack’s lantern splashed on his face.

Now the next morning, Monsieur Arlanc set out with his column of fellow-slaves, not very well-rested, but with a belly full of cheese and bread, and a pair of good boots on his feet. Jack meanwhile rode north with his feet housed in some wooden shoes he’d bought from a peasant.

He’d been ready and willing to gallop out of there with Arlanc on one of the spare horses, but the Huguenot had calmly and with the most admirable French logic explained why this would not
work: “The other slaves will be punished if I am found missing in the morning. Most of them are my co-religionists and might accept this, but others are common criminals. In order to prevent it, these would raise the alarm.”

“I could just kill ’em,” Jack pointed out.

Monsieur Arlanc—a disembodied, candlelit head resting on a great misty dung-pile—got a pained look. “You would have to do so one at a time. The others would raise the alarm. It is most gallant of you to make such an offer, considering that we hardly know each other. Is this the effect of the English Pox?”

“Must be,” Jack allowed.

“Most unfortunate,” Arlanc said.

Jack was irritated to be pitied by a galley slave. “Your sons—?”

“Thank you for asking. When
le Roi
began to oppress us—”

“Who the hell is Leroy?”

“The King, the King!”

“Oh, yeah. Sorry.”

“I smuggled them to England. And what of your boys, Jack?”

“Still waiting for their legacy,” Jack said.

“Did you manage to sell your ostrich plumes?”

“I’ve got some Armenians on it.”

“I gather you have not parted with the horse yet—”

“Getting him in shape.”

“To impress the brokers?”

“Brokers! What do I want with a broker? It’s to impress the
customers.
”

Arlanc’s head moved in the lantern-light as if he were burrowing into the manure—Jack realized he was shaking his head in that annoying way that he did when Jack had blurted out something foolish. “It is not possible,” Arlanc said. “The horse trade in Paris is absolutely controlled by the brokers—a Vagabond can no more ride in and sell a horse at the Place Royale than he could go to Versailles and get command of a regiment—it is simply
not done.
”

If Jack had just arrived in France recently he’d have said,
But that’s crazy—why not?
but as it was he knew Arlanc spoke the truth. Arlanc recommended such-and-such a broker, to be found at the House of the Red Cat in the Rue du Temple, but then recollected that this fellow was himself a Huguenot, hence probably dead and certainly out of business.

They ended up talking through the night, Jack feeding him bits of bread and cheese from time to time, and tossing a few morsels to the others to shut them up. By the time dawn broke, Jack had
given up his boots as well as his food, which was stupid in a way. But he was riding, and Monsieur Arlanc was walking.

He rode north cold, hungry, exhausted, and essentially barefoot. The horses had not been rested or tended to properly and were in a foul mood, which they found various ways to inflict on Jack. He groggily took a wrong turn and ended up approaching Paris by an unfamiliar route. This got him into some scrapes that did nothing to improve his state of mind. One of these misadventures led to Jack’s staying awake through
another
night, hiding from some nobleman’s gamekeepers in a wood. The rented horses kept whinnying and so he had no choice but to leave them staked out as decoys, to draw his pursuers while he slipped away with stalwart Turk.

So by the time the sun rose on the next day he was just one step away from being a miserable Vagabond again. He had lost two good horses for which he was responsible, and so all the livery stables and horse-brokers in Paris would be up in arms against him, which meant that selling Turk would be even more thoroughly impossible. So Jack would not get his money, and Turk would not get the life he deserved: eating good fodder and being fastidiously groomed in a spacious nobleman’s stable, his only responsibility being to roger an endless procession of magnificent mares. Jack would not get his money, which meant he’d probably never even see his boys, as he couldn’t bring himself to show up on their Aunt Maeve’s doorstep empty-handed…all of Mary Dolores’s brothers and cousins erupting to their feet to pursue him through East London with their shillelaghs…

It would’ve made him mad even if he hadn’t been afflicted with degeneration of the brain, and awake for the third consecutive day. Madness, he decided, was easier.

As he approached Paris, riding through those vegetable-fields where steam rose from the still-hot shit of the city, he came upon a vast mud-yard, within sight of the city walls, streaked with white quick-lime and speckled with human skulls and bones sitting right out on the surface. Rude crosses had been stuffed into the muck here and there, and jutted out at diverse angles, spattered with the shit of the crows and vultures that waited on them. When Jack rode through it, those birds had, however, all flown up the road to greet a procession that had just emerged from the city-gates: a priest in a long cloak, so ponderous with mud that it hung from his shoulders like chain-mail, using a great crucifix as walking-stick, and occasionally hauling off a dolorous clang on a pot-like bell in the opposite hand. Behind him, a small crowd of paupers employing busted shovels in the same manner as the priest did the crucifix, and then
a cart, driven by a couple of starveling mules, laden with a number of long bundles wrapped and sewn up in old grain-sacks.

Jack watched them tilt the wagon back at the blurred brink of an open pit so that the bundles—looked like three adults, half a dozen children, and a couple of babies—slid and tumbled into the ground. While the priest rattled on in rote Latin, his helpers zigzagged showers of quick-lime over the bodies and kicked dirt back into the hole.

Jack began to hear muffled voices: coming from under the ground, naturally. The skulls all around him began to jaw themselves loose from the muck and to rise up, tottering, on incomplete skeletons, droning a monkish sort of chant. But meanwhile those grave-diggers, now pivoting on their shovels, had begun to hum a tune of their own: a jaunty, Irish-inflected hornpipe.

Cantering briskly out onto the road (Turk now positively sashaying), he found himself at the head of a merry procession: he’d become the point man of a flying wedge of Vagabond grave-diggers, whose random shufflings had resolved into dazzling group choreography, and who were performing a sort of close-order drill with their shovels.

Behind them went the priest, walloping his bell and walking ahead of the corpse-wain, where the dead people—who had hopped up out of the pit and back into the wagon—but who were still wrapped up in their shrouds—made throaty moaning noises, like organ-pipes to complement the grim churchly droning of the skeletons. Once all were properly arranged on the road, the skeletons finally broke into a thudding, four-square type of church-hymn:

        
Switching to Gregorian chant for the chorus:

But at this point, as they were all nearing the city gates, they encountered a southbound column of
galériens,
obviously Huguenots, who were shuffling along in a syncopated gait that made their chains jingle like sleigh-bells; the guards riding behind them cracked their whips in time with a sprightly tune that the Huguenots were singing:

But now at this point the grave-diggers were greeted by an equal number of fishwives, issuing from the city-gates, who paired up with them, kicked in with trilling soprano and lusty alto voices, and drowned out both the Huguenots and the Skeletons with some sort of merry Celtic reel: