The Confusion: Volume Two of the Baroque Cycle

by Neal Stephenson

  Teague bought him a mug of beer (it being Teague’s turn to do this) and explained to him that James’s foreign cavalry regiments had panicked first and, finding their escape route blocked by the Irish infantry, had opened fire on them to clear the way. He put it to Bob that Irishmen had it in them to fight effectively when they were not being massacred by Continental cavaliers who were supposed to be on their side, and (pointing significantly to his face) when they were provided with guns that projected musket-balls instead of blowing up in their faces. Bob agreed that it was so.

  Later the bulk of William’s army marched west across the island, out of Leinster and into the southern realm of Munster. They laid siege to Limerick, which was one of the few places in Ireland that had proper fortifications, and could serve as the venue for a proper military engagement. Unfortunately, the Irish had little use for proper military engagements. William’s Dutch cannons blasted a hole in the city wall; Bob rushed in at the head of his company and got conked in the head by a bottle hurled at him from the top of a ruin by a massive hag in a wimple, screaming something at him in Gaelic. Bob, who knew nothing about his father, or his mother’s father, had long been preoccupied by the suspicion that he might be partly, or even largely, Irish, and while he lay unconscious on the rubble of the shattered wall of Limerick, he had a strange dream concerning the nun who had thrown the bottle—the import of it was that she was his great-aunt or something, scolding him for everything bad he had ever done.

  His skull was merely dented, but his scalp was nearly taken off, and had to be sewed back on by a barber-surgeon who advised him to grow his hair back again as soon as he could; “And for god’s sake get a wife before you go bald, or women and children will run away from you screaming!” He was only trying to be cheerful, but Bob growled at him that he had already found his true love, and that scars on his pate were the least of his concerns.

  The Earl of Marlborough finally got leave from the distracted King to sail across to Munster. He took the cities of Cork and Kinsale, but he did it without the help of his Black Torrent Guards. Then he went home to spent a comfortable winter in London while Bob and the regiment remained encamped outside of Limerick, fending off occasional sorties by the Irish cavalry, and keeping up a running, sporadic battle with bands of armed peasants who styled themselves “rapparees.”

  The rapparees actually did have firearms that worked, and had learned to strip them down into their parts in seconds. The locks they kept in their pockets, the barrels they corked shut and hid in sloughs or streams, the stocks they thrust into wood-piles, or anywhere else a bare stick might go unnoticed. So what appeared to be a crew of half-naked peat-cutters or a congregation strolling to Mass could scatter into the waste at a word or a gesture, and reconstitute itself an hour later as a band of heavily armed marauders.

  Because of the rapparees there were few places on the island, outside of Ulster, where Englishmen could feel safe in groups of less than an infantry company. But one of those places was the south bank of the river Shannon just downstream of Limerick. As the winter eased, and the hair grew back over his wound, Bob began to go there by himself and sit under a solitary tree overlooking the river and smoke his pipe and brood. The reading of books was not available to him. He’d lost his interest in whoring. He had heard his men’s stories, jokes, and songs so many times he could not suffer them any more. Drink made him feel poorly, and card-playing was pointless. He suffered, in other words, from a want of things that he could do to pass the time.

  So he sat under his brooding-tree and gazed across the wide river Shannon. Like all the other rivers of the British Isles, it had a long estuary leading in from the sea to a port (Limerick in this case) that had been built where the river first became narrow enough to be bridged. The Shannon was the boundary between Munster and Connaught, and so by looking across it Bob could gaze into that land of legend so highly spoken of by the Partrys. From here Connaught looked like the rest of Ireland. But what did he know?

  When King William had come over before the Battle of the Boyne he had brought fresh recruits to replace the ones who had sickened and died over the winter, but not enough of the sort Bob favored. Bob had however managed to recruit half a dozen English Protestants who had never actually been to England. They had grown up on various farms in Ireland that their fathers or grandfathers, who had been Cromwell-soldiers, had taken away from Gaelic Catholics. But the various revolutions of the last decades had turned their families into Vagabonds of an extraordinarily hard and dour cast, roaming around Eire in search of organized violence. Bob knew how to talk to men like that, and so they had spread the word among themselves and gravitated toward the King’s Own Black Torrent Guards, and continued to gravitate still.

  After the Battle of the Boyne, a Protestant wool-merchant of Dublin (who had grown wealthy from the fact that the Irish were not allowed to sell their wool overseas except through England) had donated some portion of his lootings to buy these new recruits weapons and uniforms, and they had formed a company. So the Black Torrent Guards were now a slightly oversized regiment, with 14 companies instead of 13, and a nominal strength of 868 men.

  One day Bob reached his brooding-tree and turned around to discover that he had been followed out by Tom Allgreave and Oliver Good, two of the original Phanatiques he’d recruited last year in Dundalk. They were a quarter of a mile behind him, exchanging the lead position every few steps, as if egging each other on. Each of them had a sword dangling from his belt, part of the motley collection of brought and stolen weaponry that had been showered upon the Fourteenth Company by that wool-merchant.

  To give great long blades to such boys was dangerous. Fortunately the boys knew it, or anyway had found out as much, over the course of the winter, by slashing each other in what were meant to be playful exchanges. By the time Tom and Oliver drew within hailing-distance of Bob, he had guessed why they had come: They required instruction in sword-fighting. Normally this was considered a pastime of effete courtiers, a pointless, useless, out-moded affectation; in a word, idle. But among common folk, especially older ones who remembered Cromwell, the lore of the spadroon continued to circulate. Word had apparently got round to Tom and Oliver that Bob knew something of the practice. Those boys were unreconstructed Puritans who had nothing to do all winter long, as drinking, gambling, and whoring were ruled out on religious grounds. One could pray for only so many hours a day. It was not possible to practice marksmanship because powder and balls were strictly rationed. So it was not clear to Bob whether they had decided to take up the practice of sword-fighting because they genuinely cared about it, or because there was literally nothing else for them to do.

  It did not matter either way, as Bob was idle, too. And so as Tom and Oliver got to within a horseshoe-throw of his brooding-tree, Bob knocked the ashes out of his pipe, stood up, reached around himself, and drew out his spadroon. The Puritans were thrilled. “You’ll want to stand sideways, as you make a narrower target that way, and it gets your sword-arm that much closer to the other bloke,” Bob said. He raised the sword up until its guard was touching his nose, the blade pointing vertically into the air. “This is a sort of salute, and do not on any account mistake it for some foppish affectation, as it says to any man who stands before you, ‘I mean to engage in swordplay with you, do not just stand there and be hit, but either defend yourself, or else retire.’ ”

  Tom and Oliver now nearly killed themselves getting their weapons unsheathed, and then nearly killed each other getting them into the salute position. “Oliver, what you have in your hand is a rapier, and I do not know the method of its use as well as I do that of the spadroon,” Bob said, “but anyway we shall try to make shift with the tools at hand.”

  Thus did Bob open up a new defencing academy on the south bank of the river Shannon. It became popular very quickly and then just as quickly collapsed to some half a dozen men who were genuinely interested in the subject. After a month they were joined by Monsieur LaMotte, a Huguenot cava
lry captain who happened to spy them as he was riding by one day. He was expert with a cavalry saber, which was a somewhat similar weapon to the spadroon, but he had also studied the rapier, and so he was at last able to give Oliver some instruction in what to do with his weapon. In general, cavalry officers (who tended to be Persons of Quality) would never fraternize thusly with common foot-soldiers, but the Huguenots were an exceeding queer lot. Many were common Frenchmen whose families had grown wealthy in trade and then been kicked out of France. Now they were in Ireland, gaining some small revenge by teaching the defencing tricks of the Continental nobility to savage Anglo-Irish Puritans.

  OLIVER GOOD’S GRANDFATHER had dwelt for a dozen years on a farm between Athlone and Tullamore, which placed it in Leinster. But it lay not far from the Connaught frontier, which was regarded by Protestants as the utmost boundary of civilization. He had obtained title to the land by driving off its Catholic inhabitants, the Ferbanes, who had driven their cattle west across a ford of the Shannon and thereby vanished from ken. Good’s justification, if he needed any, was that those Ferbanes had taken part in the Rebellion of 1641 and expanded their farm at the expense of some neighboring Protestants who had come over from England in Elizabethan times. But he had to stop using that justification after he was confronted by several ragged men who appeared on the property one day claiming to be the descendants and rightful heirs of those same Elizabethan Protestants! After that, if anyone dared question his claim to the land, he said it was his by right of conquest, and because he had a piece of paper that said so.

  He and his children toiled on the land as only Puritans could toil on the land, and made many improvements, few of which were obvious, none of which produced results quickly. They bore arms all their days and often rode the countryside hunting down “disorderly elements.” They did not see those ragged Protestants any more, and forgot about them altogether, except for their surname, which could be read from the odd gravestone: Crackington.

  After Charles II restored the monarchy, however, it was learned that the Crackingtons had somehow found their way back to England and made themselves pests and parasites on their relations, who went to the new Parliament (along with thousands of other Anglo-Irish landholders who had been displaced by other Cromwellian soldiers) and demanded that the Phanatiques be cast out of Ireland. As one of the new King’s first acts had been to put Cromwell’s head up on a stick, their chances of success seemed reasonable enough. In the end, they got only part of what they wanted. Some of the Cromwellian settlers were kicked off their land and some were not. The Goods managed to hang on to theirs, but only because of some obscure and contingent political happenstance at Westminster.

  They were not, however, free to practice their religion any more, and that was what drove them off the land in the end, and sent half of them to Massachusetts. The Crackingtons came back and took over the farm, with all of its improvements, and began to prosper, and even paid for the reconstruction of the local Anglican church (which the Goods had made useful as a barn). This had occurred not long after the birth of Oliver Good, with the result that he had only ill-formed childish memories of the farmstead that he intended to re-occupy one day.

  Then when James II became King, he re-Catholicized Ireland. The Crackingtons awoke one morning to find breaches in their fences, and wild Connaught kine grazing in their enclosures, guarded closely by red-haired men who spoke no English and carried French muskets. It was not possible to persuade them to leave because the new Catholic government in Dublin had confiscated the weapons of the English gentry. After not very long the Crackingtons judged it prudent to leave until a judge could rule on the title to the land—or the titles to the lands, rather, as by this point the farm comprised half a dozen contiguous patches of dirt, each of which had an equally complex story. The Ferbanes, it turned out, had been carrying on boundary-feuds with their neighbors for five hundred years—some were mere interlopers who’d been driven inland by the Vikings.

  At any rate the Crackingtons packed up what household effects they could, rounded up a few horses (the Ferbanes had driven most of them off), and set out for Dublin, where they kept a town-house. Along the way they were set upon by rapparees. But just when it looked as if all were lost, they were saved by a Protestant militia band that came on in a grand, noisy rush and drove the rapparees away. The Crackington patriarch thanked these mangy-looking Protestants again and again, and promised to reward them in golden guineas if they would sent a representative to call on him at his town-house in Dublin—“my name,” he said, “is Mr. Crackington and anyone in Dublin—” (by which he meant any Anglican English gentleman) “—will be able to direct you to my house.”

  “Did you say Crackington?” said one of the militia. “My name is Good. Do you know me?”

  After this certain unpleasantries, which Oliver Good declined to speak much of, had been visited upon the Crackingtons, and it was unclear whether any of them had made it as far as Dublin—but if they had, they’d have found their town-house looted, and occupied by Catholics, anyway. But the point was that all of Ulster, Leinster, and Munster were like that farm between Athlone and Tullamore.

  England was divided into parcels of land whose ownership was clearly established. It was like a wall made of bricks, each brick an integral thing surrounded by a clear boundary of white mortar. Ireland was like a daub-wall. Every generation came around with a fresh hod and troweled a new layer of mud atop all of the previous ones, which instantly hardened and became brittle. The land was not merely encumbered; it was the sum of its encumbrances.

  Connaught was supposedly different because it had not succumbed to the incursions of the English. But it had troubles of its own because those Irish who declined to be conquered fled there in times of trouble and squatted on the land of the Irish who had always lived there.

  DEFENCING-PRACTICE WENT ON MUCH LONGER than anyone really wanted. The war was not quick to resume in the spring of 1691. King William’s supreme commander in Ireland was now Baron Godard de Ginkel, another Dutchman. His objective was obviously Connaught, which was guarded by the Shannon and by the fortified cities of Limerick, Athlone, and Sligo. Irish diggers bossed around by French engineers had devoted the whole winter to building up those cities’ earth-works. Therefore Ginkel wanted boats and pontoons for crossing the river, and guns for knocking down the fortifications. Those cost money. Parliament had very little of it, and had become surly about handing it over to their Dutch king, whom they were already sick of. Nothing was forthcoming until the end of May, which convinced Bob and all the rest that they were truly lost and forgotten in Ireland, and destined to be stranded here, and to become the next players in stories of the Ferbane-Crackington-Good type.

  For his part, King Louis XIV of France did little to disabuse the combatants of the feeling that they had dropped off the map of Christendom. The Battle of the Boyne had been the battle for Ireland, or so everyone in Christendom believed, according to a letter Bob had got from Eliza. They believed it not because it had any particular military weight but because there had been a King on each side of a river and one had crossed over it and the other had turned his backside to it and run away, and not stopped running until he’d reached France.

  During the battle that had given the Black Torrent Guards their name, their commander, Feversham, had been asleep. Even when he was awake he was daft, because of his brain injury. John Churchill had been the real commander and Bob and the other foot-soldiers had done the fighting. Yet Feversham had got the credit for all. Why? Because it made a good story, Bob supposed, and people could only make sense of complicated matters through stories. Likewise the war for Ireland, which had ceased to be a good story when the Kings had left the stage.

  Thus Bob in a very bleak mood all through April. On the 9th of May, a flock of sails appeared in the Shannon estuary, and sword-practice came to a halt, and the pupils of Bob’s fencing-academy gathered silent under the shade of the brooding-tree to watch a French convoy coming up
the river towards Limerick. The ships were cheered by small crowds gathered in tiny raucous clumps on the Connaught side, and saluted by guns on the walls of Limerick. It was noted by all of the men around Bob that the cannon-salutes were returned in full measure (they had no lack of powder), but the cheers were not (these were supply-, not troop-ships).

  Monsieur LaMotte took a spyglass from his saddle-bag, climbed halfway up the tree, and made observations. “I see the colors of a field-marshal; the big ship, there, third from the lead, she is carrying the new French commander…” then all the air went out of him in a long sigh, like bagpipes collapsing, and he said nothing for a minute or so, not because he had nothing to say but because he was the sort of fellow who did not like to utter as much as a word until he had made himself master of his emotions. “It is the butcher of Savoy,” he said in French to another Huguenot who was standing under the tree.

  “De Catinat?”

  “No, the other.”

  “De Gex?”

  “This is a field-marshal, not a priest.”

  “Ah.” The other Huguenot ran to his horse and galloped away.

  In English, La Motte explained: “I have recognized the coat of arms of the new French commander. His name is St. Ruth. A nobody. Our victory is assured.”

  The muttering of the men resumed, and there were sporadic outbreaks of laughter. LaMotte climbed down out of the tree wearing an expression as if he’d just seen his mother being keel-hauled under St. Ruth’s flagship. He handed his spyglass to Bob, then went to his horse without a word and cantered away, stiff-backed.

  Bob was glad to have the loan of the spyglass, for one of the smaller ships, farther back in the line, had familiar lines. His eyes unaided could not make out the colors flying from her mizzen-mast. With a bit of fiddling and focusing, and steadying the spyglass against the bole of the tree, he was able to see the coat of arms he had been looking for: for St. Ruth had brought a pair of lieutenant-generals with him, and one of them bore the title Earl of Upnor.