The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and the System of the World (86 page)

“If so, you should withdraw now.”

“Too late—the victuals are paid for and stowed in the hold of
God’s Wounds.
But perhaps there is room for one more investor.”

Eliza snorted. “What’s come over you? Vagabonding you do very well, and you cut a fine figure doing it. But investing—it’s not your
métier.
”

“I wish you had mentioned that before,” Jack said. “From the first moment Mr. Foot mentioned it to me, I saw this trading-voyage as a way I might become worthy in your eyes.” Then Jack nearly toppled into a canal, as recklessly telling the truth had given him an attack of giddiness. Eliza, for her part, looked as if she’d been butt-stroked by Yevgeny’s harpoon—she stopped walking, planted her feet wide, and crossed her arms over her bodice as if nursing a stomach-ache; looked up the canal with watery eyes for a moment; and sniffled once or twice.

Jack ought to’ve been delighted. But all he felt, finally, was a dull sense of doom. He hadn’t told Eliza about the rotten fish or the pink-eyed horses. He
certainly
had not mentioned that he could have killed, but had idiotically spared, the villain who had once made her a slave. But he knew that someday she would find out, and when that happened, he did not want to be on the European continent.

“Let me see the ship,” she said finally.

They came round a bend and were greeted by one of those sudden surprising Amsterdam-vistas, down the canal to the ship-carpeted Ijsselmeer. Planted on the Ij-bank was the Herring-Packers’ Tower, a roundish brick silo rising above a sloppy, fragrant quay where three vessels were tied up: a couple of hulks that were shuttling victuals out to bigger ships in the outer harbor, and
God’s Wounds,
which looked as if she were being disassembled. All her hatches were removed for loading, and what remained had a structurally dubious look—especially when great sweating barrels of herring, and these mysterious sacks from the warehouse, were being dropped into it.

But before Jack could really dwell on the topic of sea-worthiness, Eliza—moving with a decisiveness he could no longer muster—had gone out onto the quay, her skirts sweeping up all manner of stuff that she would later regret having brought home. A sack had split open and spilled its contents, which snapped, crackled, and popped beneath the soles of her shoes as she drew up close. She bent over and thrust her hand into the hole, somewhat like doubting Thomas, and raised up a handful of the cargo, and let it spill in a colorful clinking shower.

“Cowrie shells,” she said distractedly.

Jack thought, at first, that she was dumbfounded—probably by the brilliance and magnificence of the plan—but on a closer look he saw that she was showing all the symptoms of thinking.

“Cowrie shells to you,” Jack said. “In Africa, this is money!”

“Not for long.”

“What do you mean? Money’s money. Mr. Vliet has been sitting on this hoard for twenty years, waiting for prices to drop.”

“A few weeks ago,” said Eliza, “news arrived that the Dutch had acquired certain isles, near India, called the Maldives and Laccadives, and that vast numbers of cowrie shells had been found there. Since that news arrived, these have been considered worthless.”

It took Jack some time to recover from this.

He had a sword, and Mr. Vliet, a pudgy flaxen-haired man, was just a stone’s throw away, going over some paperwork with a ship’s victualer, and it was natural to imagine simply running over and inserting the tip of the sword between any two of Mr. Vliet’s chins and giving it a hard shove. But this, he supposed, would simply have proved Eliza’s point (viz. that he was not cut out to be a businessman), and he did not want to give her such satisfaction. Jack wasn’t going to get the kind of satisfaction
he
had been craving for
the last six months, and so why should
she
get any? As a way of keeping his body occupied while the mind worked, he helped roll some barrels over the plank to the deck of the ship.

“Now I understand the word
Windhandel
in a new way,” was all that he could come up with. “This is real,” he said, slapping a barrel-head, “and this” (stomping the deck of
God’s Wounds
) “is real, and these” (lofting a double handful of cowrie shells) “are real, and all of them every bit as real,
now,
as they were, ten minutes ago, or before this rumor arrived from the Maldives and the Laccadives…”

“The news came over land—faster than ships normally travel, when they have to round the Cape of Good Hope. So it is possible that you will reach Africa in advance of the great cargo-ships of cowrie-shells that, one can only presume, are headed that way now from the Maldives.”

“Just as Mr. Vliet had it planned, I’m sure.”

“But when you get to Africa, what will you buy with your cowrie-shells, Jack?”

“Cloth.”

“Cloth!?”

“Then we sail west—there is said to be a great market for African cloth in the West Indies.”

“Africans do not export cloth, Jack. They import it.”

“You must be mistaken—Mr. Vliet is very clear on this—we will sail to Africa and exchange our cowrie-shells for
pieces of India,
which as I’m sure you know means India cloth, and then carry it across the Atlantic…”

“A
piece of India
is an expression meaning a male African slave between fifteen and forty years of age,” Eliza said. “India cloth—just like cowrie shells—is money in Africa, Jack, and Africans will sell other Africans for one piece of it.”

Now a silence nearly as long as the one at the duc d’Arcachon’s party. Jack standing on the slowly moving deck of the
God’s Wounds,
Eliza on the quay.

“You are going into the slave trade,” she said, in a dead voice.

“Well…I had no idea, until
now.
”

“I believe you. But now you have to get off that boat and walk away.”

This was a superb idea, and part of Jack was thrilled by it. But the Imp of the Perverse prevailed, and Jack decided to take Eliza’s suggestion in a negative and resentful spirit.

“And simply
throw away
my investment?”

“Better than throwing away your immortal soul. You threw away
the ostrich plumes and the horse, Jack, I know you did—so why not do the same now?”

“This is more valuable
by far.”

“What about the other item you looted from the Grand Vizier’s camp, Jack?”

“What, the sword?”

Eliza shook her head no, looked him in the eye, and waited.

“I remember that item,” Jack allowed.

“Will you throw her away, too?”

“She is far more valuable, true…”

“
And
worth more money,” Eliza put in slyly.

“You’re not proposing to sell yourself—?”

Eliza went into a strange amalgam of laughing and crying. “I mean to say that I have already made more money than the plumes, sword, and horse were
worth,
and stand to make far more, soon—and so if it is money that concerns you, walk away from the
God’s Wounds
and stay with me, here in Amsterdam—soon you’ll forget this ship ever existed.”

“It does not seem respectable—being supported by a woman.”

“When in your life have
you
ever cared about
respect
?”

“Since people began to respect me.”

“I am offering you safety, happiness, wealth—and
my
respect,” Eliza said.

“You would not respect me for
long.
Let me take this one voyage, and get my money back, then—”

“One voyage for
you.
Eternal wretchedness for the Africans you’ll buy, and their descendants.”

“Either way I’ve lost my Eliza,” Jack said with a shrug. “So that makes me something of an authority when it comes to eternal wretchedness.”

“Do you want your life?”

“
This
life? Not especially.”

“Get off the boat, if you want to have a life at all.”

Eliza had noticed what Jack hadn’t, which was that
God’s Wounds
had finished being loaded. The hatch-covers were back in place, the herring was paid for (in silver coins, not cowrie-shells), and the sailors were casting off lines. Only Mr. Vliet, and Yevgeny, remained on the quay—the former haggling with an apothecary over a medicine-chest, and the latter being blessed by an outlandish Raskolnik priest in a towering hat. This scene was so curious that it diverted Jack’s attention completely, until all of the sailors began to holler. Then he looked at
them.
But
they
were all looking at some apparently horrid spectacle on the quay, putting Jack suddenly in fear that ruffians, or something, were assaulting Eliza.

Jack turned around just in time to discover that Eliza had seized the harpoon, which Yevgeny had left leaning against a stack of crates, and was just in the act of launching it toward Jack. She was not, of course, a professional harpooneer, but she had the womanly knack of aiming for the heart, and so the weapon came at him straight as Truth. Jack, recalling a dim bit of sword-fighting lore from his Regimental days, twisted sideways to present a narrower target, but lost his balance and fell toward the mainmast and threw out his left arm to break his fall. The broad flukes of the harpoon made a slashing attack across the breadth of his chest and glanced off a rib, or something, so that its point struck his forearm and passed sideways through the narrow space between the two bones and buried itself in the mast—pinning him. He felt all of this before he saw it because he was looking for Eliza. But she’d already turned her back on him and was walking away, not even caring whether she had hit him or not.

Amsterdam

JUNE
1685

D’
AVAUX AND A PAIR OF
tall, uncommonly hard-bitten “valets” saw her to the brink of a canal, not far from the Dam, that ran westwards toward Haarlem. A vessel was tied up there, accepting passengers, and from a distance Eliza thought it a tiny one, because it had an amusing toylike look, with the stem and the stern both curved sharply upwards—giving it the profile of a fat boy doing a bold belly-flop. But as they drew closer she saw it was a large (albeit lightly built) ship, at least twenty yards long, and narrower of beam than she’d expected—a crescent moon.

“I do not mean to belabor you with tedious details—that sort of thing is the responsibility of Jacques, here, and Jean-Baptiste…”

“
These
are coming with me!?”

“The way to Paris is not devoid of perils, mademoiselle,” d’Avaux said drily, “even for the
weak
and the
innocent.
” Then he turned his head in the direction of the still lightly smoking wrack of Mr. Sluys’s string of houses, only a musket-shot away along this very canal.

“Evidently you think I am
neither,
” Eliza sniffed.

“Your practice of harpooning sailors along the waterfront would make it difficult for even the most
lubrique
to harbor illusions as to your true nature—”

“You’ve heard about that?”

“Miracle you weren’t arrested—here, in a city where
kissing
someone is a misdemeanour.”

“Have you had me followed, monsieur?” Eliza looked indignantly at Jacques and Jean-Baptiste, who pretended, for the time being, to be deaf and blind, and busied themselves with a cartload of rather good luggage. She’d never seen most of these bags before, but d’Avaux had implied, more than once, that they and their contents all belonged to her.

“Men will ever follow you, mademoiselle, you’d best
adapt.
In any event—setting aside the odd harpooning—in this town are certain busybodies, scolds, and
cancaniers
who insist that you were involved in the financial implosion of Mr. Sluys; the invasion fleet that sailed for England, from Texel, the other day, flying the Duke of Monmouth’s colors; and the feral mob of Orangist patriots who, some say, set Mr. Sluys’s dwelling afire. I, of course, do not believe in any of these nonsenses—and yet I worry about you—”

“Like a fretful uncle. Oh, how dear!”

“So. This
kaag
will take you, and your escorts—”

“Over the Haarlemmermeer to Leiden, and thence to Den Briel via the Hague.”

“How did you guess?”

“The coat of arms of the City of Den Briel is carved on the taffrail, there, opposite that of Amsterdam,” Eliza said, pointing up at the stern. D’Avaux turned to look, and so did Jacques and Jean-Baptiste; and in the same moment Eliza heard behind her a weird sighing, whistling noise, like a bagpipe running out of wind, and was jostled by a passing boer headed for the gangplank. As this rustic clambered up onto the
kaag
she saw his oddly familiar humpbacked profile, and caught her breath for a moment. D’Avaux turned to peer at her. Something told Eliza that this would be an awkward time to make a fuss, and so she let her mouth run: “She carries more sail than the usual canal-barge—presumably for crossing
the Haarlemmermeer. She is a slender vessel, made to pass through that narrow lock between Leiden and the Hague. And yet she’s too flimsy to traverse Zeeland’s currents and tides—she could never afford the insurance.”

“Yes,” d’Avaux said, “at Den Briel you must transfer to a
more insurable
ship that will take you to Brussels.” He was looking at Eliza queerly—so suspicious! The boer, meanwhile, had disappeared into the clutter of passengers and cargo on the
kaag
’s deck. “From Brussels you will travel over land to Paris,” d’Avaux continued. “The inland route is less comfortable during summer—but much
safer
during an armed rebellion against the King of England.”

Eliza sighed deeply, trying to hold in her mind the phant’sy of a million slaves being released from bondage. But it was a frail gauzy construction ripped apart by the strong summer-light of Amsterdam, the hard clear shapes of black buildings and white windows. “My lovely Dukie,” she said, “so impetuous.”

“Étienne d’Arcachon—who asks about you, by the way, in every one of his letters—suffers from a similar fault. In
his
case it is tempered by breeding and intelligence; yet he has lost a hand to a Vagabond because of it!”

“Oh, nasty Vagabonds!”

“They say he is recovering as well as can be expected.”

“When I get to Paris, I’ll send you news of him.”

“Send me news of
everything,
especially what does not
appear
to be news,” d’Avaux insisted. “If you can learn to read the comings and goings at Versailles as well as you do the taffrails and insurance-policies of Dutch boats, you’ll be running France in a trice.”

She kissed the cheeks of the comte d’Avaux and he kissed hers. Jacques and Jean-Baptiste escorted her up the plank and then, as the
kaag
began to drift down the canal, busied themselves storing her luggage away in the small cabin d’Avaux had procured for her. Eliza meanwhile stood at the
kaag
’s railing, along with many other passengers, and enjoyed the view of Amsterdam’s canal-front. When you were on dry land in that city you could never slow down, never stop moving, and so it was strange and relaxing to be so close to it, yet so still and placid—like a low-flying angel spying on the doings of men.

Too, that she was escaping cleanly from Amsterdam, after all that had happened of late, was something akin to a miracle. D’Avaux was right to wonder why she had not been arrested for the matter of the harpoon. She had stumbled away from the scene—the Herring Packers’ Tower—weeping with anger at Jack. But soon
anger had been shouldered aside by fear as she’d realized she was being followed, rather obviously, by several parties at once. Looking back wouldn’t’ve done her any good and so she’d kept walking, all the way across the Dam and then through the Exchange, which was as good a place as any to lose pursuers—or at least to remind them that they could be doing more profitable things with their time. Finally she’d gone to the Maiden and sat by a window for several hours, watching—and had seen very little. A couple of tall loiterers, whom she now knew to’ve been Jacques and Jean-Baptiste, and one lolling Vagabond-beggar, identifiable by his humpbacked posture and insistent hacking cough.

The
kaag
was being towed in the direction of Haarlem by a team of horses on the canal-bank, but on deck the crew were making preparations to swing her side-boards down into the water and deploy her clever folding mast, so that they could hoist a sail or two. The horses faltered as they came to a section of pavement that was broken and blackened, and ridged with trails of lead that had flowed molten from Mr. Sluys’s house, and spread across the paving-stones in glowing rivers that had divided and combined as they crept toward the bank. Finally the streams of molten lead had plunged gorgeously over the stone quay and dropped into the canal, where they’d flung up a column of steam that dwarfed and enveloped the pillar of smoke from Mr. Sluys’s burning houses. By that time, of course, those who’d set the fire had long since disappeared. It was up to the
drost
to interrogate the very few witnesses and to figure out whether it had really been done by infuriated Orangers, taking revenge on Sluys for backing the French, or by arsonists in the pay of Mr. Sluys. Sluys had lost so much, so fast, in the recent crash of V.O.C. stock
^*
that his only way of getting any liquidity would have been to set fire to everything he still owned and then make claims against those who’d been rash enough to sell him insurance. This morning—three days since the fire—salvagers in the pay of those insurers were busy with pry-bars and hoists, pulling congealed rivulets and puddles of lead from the canal.

She heard that whining sound next to her again, but it suddenly crescendoed, as if a cart-wheel were rolling over that leaky bagpipe and forcing the last bit of air through its drones. Then it broke open into a croaking, hacking laugh. That humpbacked boer had taken up a spot on the
kaag
’s rail not far from Eliza, and was
watching the salvagers. “The Duke of Monmouth’s rebellion has made lead a valuable commodity again,” he said (Eliza could understand that much Dutch, anyway). “It’s as valuable as gold.”

“I beg your pardon,
meinheer,
but—though it’s true the price of lead has risen—it is nowhere near as valuable as gold, or even silver.” Eliza said this in stumbling Dutch.

The wheezing boer startled her by coming back in passable English. “That depends on
where you are.
An army, surrounded by the enemy, running low on balls, will happily exchange coins of gold for an equal weight of lead balls.”

Eliza didn’t doubt the truth of this, but it struck her as an oddly bleak point of view, and so she broke off the conversation, and spoke no more to that boer as the
kaag
passed through a water-gate in Amsterdam’s western wall and entered flat Dutch countryside, diced by drainage ditches into pea-green bricks that were arrayed by the canal-side as if on a table in the market. The other passengers likewise gave the fellow a wide berth, partly because they didn’t want to catch whatever was afflicting his lungs, and mostly because they tended to be prosperous mercers and farmers coming back from Amsterdam with bags of gold and silver coins; they did not want to come anywhere near a man who would contemplate using florins as projectiles. The boer seemed to understand this all too well, and spent the first couple of hours of the voyage regarding his fellow-passengers with a glum knowingness that verged on contempt, and that would have earned him a challenge to a duel in France.

Aside from that, he did nothing noteworthy until much later in the day, when, all of a sudden, he murdered Jacques and Jean-Baptiste.

It came about like this: the
kaag
sailed down the canal to Haarlem, where it stopped to pick up a few more passengers, and then it raised more sails and set out across the Haarlemmermeer, a fairly sizable lake ventilated by a stiff maritime breeze. The fresh air had an obvious effect on the boer. The pitiable wheezing and hacking stopped with miraculous speed. His ribcage no longer labored with each breath. He stood up straighter, bringing him to average height, and seemed to shed a decade or two. He now appeared to be in his mid-thirties. He lost his dour expression and, instead of lurking at the stern glowering at the other passengers, began striding round the deck almost cheerfully. By the time he’d made several laps around the deck, all the other passengers had gotten used to this, and paid him no mind—which is how he
was able to walk up behind Jacques, grab both of his ankles, and pitch him overboard.

This happened so quickly, and with so little ado, that it might have been easy to believe it had never happened at all. But Jean-Baptiste believed it, and rushed at the boer with sword drawn. The boer had no sword, but the Antwerp merchant standing nearby had a perfectly serviceable one, and so the boer simply yanked it out of the owner’s scabbard and then dropped neatly into a defencing stance.

Jean-Baptiste stopped to think, which probably did him no good, and much harm. Then he charged anyway. The pitching of the
kaag
ruined his attack. When he actually stumbled close enough to cross swords with the boer, it was obvious that Jean-Baptiste was the inferior swordsman—miserably so. But even setting aside these differences, the boer would have prevailed anyway, because to him, killing other men in close combat was as kneading dough was to a baker. Jean-Baptiste considered it to be an important matter, requiring certain formalities. A ring of dark windmills, ranged around the shore of the Haarlemmermeer, looked on like grim Dutch eminences, chopping the air. Rather soon, Jean-Baptiste had a couple of feet of bloody steel protruding from his back, and a jeweled hilt fixed to his chest like an awkward piece of jewelry.

That was all that Eliza was allowed to take in before the gunny sack descended over her head, and was made snug—but not tight—around her neck. Someone hugged her around the knees and lifted her feet off the deck while another caught her by the armpits. She feared, only for a moment, that she was about to be thrown overboard like Jacques (and—to judge from a booming splash audible through the gunny sack—Jean-Baptiste). As she was being carried belowdecks she heard a terse utterance in Dutch, then, all around the
kaag
, a storm of thudding and rustling: passengers’ knees hitting the deck, and hats being whipped off their heads.

When the sack came off her head, she was in her little cabin with two men: a brute and an angel. The brute was a thick-set boer, who had managed the gunny sack and borne most of her weight. He was immediately dismissed and sent out by the angel: a blond Dutch gentleman, so beautiful that Eliza was more inclined to be jealous of, than attracted to, him. “Arnold Joost van Keppel,” he explained curtly, “page to the Prince of Orange.” He was looking at Eliza with the same coolness as she was showing him—obviously he had little interest in women. And yet rumor had it that William
kept an English mistress—so perhaps he was the sort who could love
anything.

William, Prince of Orange, Stadholder, Admiral-General, and Captain-General of the United Provinces, Burgrave of Besançon, and Duke or Count or Baron of diverse other tiny fragments of Europe,
^*
entered the cabin a few minutes later, ruddy and unshaven, slightly blood-flecked, and, in general, looking anything but Dutch. As d’Avaux never got tired of pointing out, he was a sort of European mongrel, with ancestors from all corners of the Continent. He looked as comfortable in that rough boer’s get-up as Monmouth had in Turkish silk. He was too excited and pleased with himself to sit down—which anyway would have led to a tedious welter of protocol, since there was only one place to sit in this cabin, and Eliza had no intention of vacating it. So William shooed Arnold Joost van Keppel out of the place, then braced his shoulder against a curving overhead knee-brace and remained on his feet. “My god, you’re but a child—not even twenty yet? That’s in your favor—it excuses your foolishness, while giving hope that you may improve.”