Father Édouard de Gex looked up at a black sky, framed in the aperture of his coffin. It was an uncommonly plush model, for a Jesuit. The brothers of his order had loaded him at first into a Spartan pine-plank box. But Madame la duchesse and her entourage had appeared just in time, and put a stop to it. “Imitation of Christ is all well and good during life, but my cousin is in Heaven now, and nothing prevents me from treating his earthly remains with decent respect; besides, I must accompany him all the way home, and I’d have the casket well sealed.” And she had caused to be brought in to the sick-room a coffin so heavy it took four men to lift it: a coffin of oak, lined with lead, and cushioned better than most of the beds that courtiers slept on in Versailles. And so cunningly had it been wrought that even the pallbearers who carried it and its contents out to the street and set it on a flower-strewn gun-carriage would never have guessed that not only was it not sealed, but ventilation-slots ran all the way round the lip where the lid overhung the sides.
Oyonnax was now waving a phial of smelling-salts around under her cousin’s nose. He tried to fend it off, but his arms were sluggish, and pinned to his sides by the overwhelming cushions. Finally he sat up, or tried to and failed and regretted it all in the same instant. The contraction of his abdominal muscles had ramifications as far down as the wounded thigh. The pain must have been desperate, for it brought him out of his stupor better than any smelling-salts. He managed to get an elbow under him, and Oyonnax reached in and rearranged cushions to prop him up. Then he was able to relax and look about himself. He could not have seen this from the satiny depths of the coffin, but: the gun-carriage, with him and the coffin on it, had been dragged up the aisle of a burnt-out church. The servants of Oyonnax had lifted the coffin up and set it crosswise on the altar—a granite plinth with all of its decorations burnt, weathered, gnawed, and looted away. The stone walls of the church stood mostly intact, though smoke had rendered them charcoal-black. The great beams of the roof had crashed to the floor as they’d burnt, and still lay there, like so many charred pews strewn around a floor that was knee-deep in shards of roof-tiles. Though from place to place, especially nearer the altar, wicker mats had been laid upon the burnt timbers so that well-dressed persons could sit upon them without soiling their fashions. Around the altar itself, the floor had been shoveled and swept clean, creating an open space where a pentagram had been daubed out in something that had dried to a thick brown crust. The altar, and de Gex, stood at the center of the pentagram.
“Holy Jesus, what I have I done—” said de Gex, and tried again to move; but the pain in his leg nearly killed him. He fell back and crossed himself.
Oyonnax laughed indulgently, and reached out to cradle her cousin’s head in her hand. “I wondered how you would react.”
“I had to escape from Versailles,” said de Gex. “I was an imbecile before—it took me so long to understand the enormity of this conspiracy. Madame la duchesse d’Arcachon, of course, is at the center—but she is in league—always has been—with L’Emmerdeur. The Baron von Hacklheber was her enemy, but is now her friend. She operates with the Juncto hand-in-glove. Newton—the recoinage in England—all part of the same conspiracy! What could I do? D’Avaux displeased her, and was sent packing to Stockholm! Lucky he was not poisoned—or harpooned, as I was!”
“This sounds,” said the Duchess, “like a little speech that you memorized, before you swallowed my sleeping-draught, so that you could recite it to St. Peter if you never woke up. I am not St. Peter, and this is the gateway to Hell, not Heaven. But if it pleases you to recite the speech anyway, pray continue.”
“You must understand, cousine, that if there was nothing more to the conspiracy, I needn’t have troubled you. For my Order is not without resources of its own; and when conjoined to the Office of the Holy Inquisition there is little in heaven or earth that could not be accomplished. But that was before I came to understand that she had seduced none other than Bonaventure Rossignol himself!”
“As much as I loathe her, I must admit this was a master-stroke. For who, other than le Roi himself, could be a more powerful ally for a subtle and conniving bitch like Madame la duchesse d’Arcachon?”
“Just so! I realized, then, that I was trapped like a fly in her web. For there is nothing that I do in this life that is not observed by hundreds of courtiers, all of whom gossip, and many of whom write letters. In consequence Rossignol must know everything I do, and must pass it on to Madame la duchesse d’Arcachon while they are fornicating! I then saw myself to be helpless, as long as I remained in this life—in this world. The failed assassination had given me—praise God and His mysterious ways—a convincing pretext for dying young. Hence the request I whispered into your ear—which must have struck you as very strange.”
“Look about yourself, having been resurrected in this of all places, and tell me what is strange,” said Oyonnax.
“Our Savior, having died on the cross, descended to the very pit of Hell before ascending once more into the light,” de Gex remarked. “Still, I must know, cousine, if you invoked any of the Fallen ones—if my death and resurrection were effected by dæmonic necromancy or—”
“Dæmonic necromancy is so tedious, and fraught with unintended consequences,” said Oyonnax, “when syrup of poppies does the job perfectly well. It is all a question of dosage—tricky to calculate, especially for one like you who was weakened.”
“Why did you choose to bring me around here of all places, then?”
“It was ever my plan that if I were to miscalculate the dose, and if I opened the coffin to find you dead in fact as well as in appearance, then I should employ the arts of the necromancer to bring you back to life.”
It took de Gex some moments to absorb this.
“But, cousine, I had always believed that you had only affected an interest in the Black Arts, when it was fashionable, years ago, when you were young and foolish. That you considered it all perfect nonsense.”
“You have been furious at me, Édouard, for deeming it all nonsense! For to call Satan a figment of man’s phant’sy is but one step from saying the same of God, is it not?”
“Indeed, cousine, I should rather you were a sincere Satanist than a pretend one; for the former recognizes God’s majesty, and may be reformed, while the latter is an atheist, and doomed to the Lake of Fire.”
“Then look about yourself, and draw your own conclusions.”
“I see the relics and signs of the Black Mass, the candles still burning, the inverted cross. I conclude that there is hope for you. But I do not know yet whether there is hope for me.”
“What do you mean, Édouard?”
“You have been strangely reticent on the question of whether I was alive or dead when the lid came off the coffin; whether, that is, I am alive now because of smelling salts, or because you used necromancy on my corpse.”
“Perhaps I shall tell you one day,” said Oyonnax. She lifted a bundle of clothes off the floor and dropped it into his lap. “Change out of those Jesuit weeds and into these.”
It was too much, in too short a time, for the opiated mind of de Gex. “I do not understand.”
“Understand this: You ask too many favors of me. Perhaps I’m not as different as you phant’sy from Eliza. She is a businesswoman—she does nothing for free. You, cousin, have put me to an immense amount of trouble and expense. I have given you death, a splendid bespoke coffin, resurrection, safe transit out of Eliza’s web, and now a new identity.” She patted the bundle: it was a clerical robe, but light gray, not the black of the Jesuits. “You are now Edmund de Ath, a Belgian Jansenist.”
“A Jansenist!?”
“What better disguise for a Jesuit than to become a Jesuit’s nemesis? Put these on, shave your beard, and the transformation is complete. You can go on your quest to the East a new man. I’m sure the Jansenists in Goa, Macao, Manila, will be glad of your company!”
“The disguise should serve,” said de Gex. “I thank you for it. For it and
for all the rest.”
“Have I not done much for you?”
“Obviously you have, cousine, but—”
“Then shave, put on your new garments, and let us be on our separate ways.”
“I want only to know whether it was a chymist’s receipt, or the Powers of Darkness, that brought me back to life!”
“Yes. You have already made that plain.”
“And—?”
“And I thought I made it clear to you, Edmund de Ath, that I do not wish to answer your question at this time.”
“But it is a simple thing for you to do! And it makes all the difference.”
Oyonnax smiled and shook her head. “You contradict yourself—how like a Jansenist! Because it makes such a difference, it can never be simple. Édouard, apply your Jesuitical logic for a moment. If I brought you to life with necromancy, it means you belong to the Legions of Hell now—and that I am a necromancer—which means I believe that both Satan and God are real—and therefore have hope of redemption, if only I agree to switch sides. Am I correct so far?”
“Indeed, cousine, you have reasoned as soundly as any man.”
“On the other hand, if I did it all with drugs from the apothecary, then your soul belongs to God as it ever did. These trappings—” she indicated the pentagram, the candles “—are stage-props, nothing more—fetishes and relics of a ludicrous pseudo-religion that I hold in contempt, which I trotted out only to throw a fright into you—much as priests frighten peasants at church by prating about hellfire. In which case I am a cynical atheist. Am I correct?”
“Yes, cousine.”
“And so one of us shall go to hell, the other to heaven. But we cannot both end up in the same place. I know which, you do not. I have the power to tell you, but I choose to withhold the knowledge. You may embark, whenever you feel ready, on your quest to recover the Solomonic Gold, but you’ll do so not knowing the answer to your question.”
De Gex shook his head, too a-mazed to feel the horror of his predicament. “They say necromancers hold in thrall those whom they have brought back to life,” he said, “but I never thought it would work this way.”
“To me a more apt similitude is the way a priest enslaves the minds of his parishioners,” said Oyonnax. “But that is neither here nor there. I have lost count of the number of times some courtier has minced up to me and claimed he was enthralled by my beauty, wit, or perfume; of course it always turns out in the end that they are not enthralled at all. Still and all, I have often wondered what it would be like to have a thrall; and as you have so much hectored me, ever since we were children, about the prospects of my immortal soul, I can’t think of anyone who more deserves it. Know that your empty coffin shall be interred with all due ceremony in the family mausoleum at Gex. Where Edmund de Ath shall lie one day, there’s no telling; and where his soul shall end up is my secret.”
Winter Quarters of the King’s Own
Black Torrent Guards Near Namur
MARCH 1696
“SERGEANT SHAFTOE REPORTING as ordered, sir,” came a voice from the dark.
“I have got a letter addressed to you, Shaftoe,” answered a different voice from the dark—a college-cultivated voice. “As a training exercise, I thought we might sally forth in search of some source of light, so that I could do something other than run my fingers over it.”
“Captain Jenkins’s company gathered some brush on their ‘training exercise’ this afternoon, and are burning it yonder.”
“Ah, I phant’sied I smelled smoke. Where the devil did they find something to burn?”
“A wee sand-bar in the Meuse, three miles upstream. We’ve had our eye on it for several weeks. The French had not got to it yet, lacking swimmers. But Captain Jenkins’s company has a man who can dog-paddle, when he has to. Today, he had to. He got over to this sand-bar with a line, and stripped it bare while the French watched shivering, and threw stones, from the opposite bank.”
“That is the sort of initiative I look for in the Black Torrent Guards!” exclaimed Colonel Barnes. “’Twill serve them well in the years to come!”
The conversation to this point had been transacted through a wall of mildewy canvas, for Colonel Barnes was on the inside, and Sergeant Shaftoe the outside, of a tent. The sentences of Barnes were punctuated by thumping and clanking as he got sword, boot, peg-leg, and topcoat on. The tent was a ghostly cloud under starlight. It bulged at one end as Barnes pushed his way out through the flaps; then he became perfectly invisible. “Where are you?”
“Here.”
“Can’t see a bloody thing,” Barnes exclaimed, “it is an excellent training exercise.”
“You could be living in a house, with candles,” said Bob Shaftoe, not for the first time.
Indeed, Barnes had passed most of the winter in a house up the road from this, the winter camp of his regiment; but some piece of news from England, recently received and digested, had prompted him to vacate, to take up lodgings in a tent among his men, and to begin referring to everything they did as a training exercise. The change had been much noted but little understood. They’d not taken part in anything like a military engagement since half a year ago, when they had participated in King William’s successful siege of Namur. Since, they’d done naught but live on the land, like field-mice. And since the trees and brush had all long since been cut down and burnt, and the farms trampled to unproductive mud-flats, and the animals hunted and eaten, living on this land required some ingenuity.
The brush-fire was, as both men knew, on the opposite side of a swell in the earth, where Captain Jenkins’s company had made its camp. To get there, they had to walk through the camp of Captain Fletcher’s company, which in daylight would have taken all of thirty seconds. With a lanthorn it might have taken a minute or two. But the Black Torrent Guards’ last candle had vanished several days previously, and in the most ignominious way possible, viz. nicked from Colonel Barnes’s coat-pocket by rats when he ventured out to use the latrine, and carried away to be eaten. And so the passage through Captain Fletcher’s company’s camp was, as both men knew, to be an infinitely gradual shuffling and sliding through a three-dimensional labyrinth of tent-ropes and clotheslines. It seemed an opportune time to speak of difficult matters—for there was no way, in darkness, to look someone in the eye.
“Err…it is my duty to inform you,” said Bob, “that private soldiers James and Daniel Shaftoe are absent without leave.”
“Since how long?” asked Barnes, sounding interested, but not surprised.
“That might be debated. Three days ago, they claimed they had come upon the spoor and tracks of a feral pig, and requested leave to hunt it down. They vanished over the horizon, in the direction of Germany, not long after permission was granted.”
“Very good—an excellent training exercise.”
“When they did not return after one, then two days, yet their sergeant was disinclined to think the worst of them—”
“The expectation of bacon for breakfast had impaired his judgment. As my own mouth is almost too full of saliva for me to speak, I must say that I understand.”
“Now still Jimmy and Danny are not back. I must assume that they have deserted.”
“They trained only too well, and learned the lesson too soon,” Barnes reflected. “Now their lives shall be forfeit, if they are caught.”
“Oh, they shan’t be caught,” Bob assured him. “You forget that before I taught them to be English soldiers, Teague Partry taught them to be rapparees.”
“Do you want leave to hunt them down? It would be an excellent—”
“No, sir,” said Bob, “and would you please explain your incessant jesting about everything we do being a training exercise?”
“I have a soft spot in my heart for the men of my regiment—most of them, anyway,” said Barnes, “and would see as many of them as possible survive what is to come.”
“What, then, is to come?” Bob asked, “and how does brush-gathering and pig-ch
asing make us more fit for it?”
“This war is over, Bob. Ssh! Don’t tell the men. But you may be assured there’ll be no fighting in the year to come. We shall occupy this ground, as a bargaining-chit for diplomats to shove to and fro on a polished tabletop somewhere. But there’ll be no more fighting.”
“That is what is always claimed,” said Bob, “until a new front is opened, and a campaign launched.”
“True enough—in your boyhood,” said Barnes. “But you must adjust your thinking now, and take into account that the money is all gone. England has ninety thousand men under arms. She can afford perhaps nine thousand; and she is willing to pay for many fewer than that—especially if the Tories throw down the Juncto, as seems likely.”
“The Black Torrent Guards are an elite regiment—”
“You really must fucking listen to me, Shaftoe…”
Barnes’s voice was getting fainter and falling away aft.
“I am listening sir,” said Bob, “but mind you don’t stand still and declaim for too long in one place, lest mud swallow up your peg.”
“Shut up, Shaftoe!” said Barnes; but renewed sucking and squelching noises told that he had heard Bob’s counsel too late. There was a long grunt of effort terminated by a succulent pop as he drew his prosthesis out of the mire.
“Yes, sir.”
“It is all going away, man! Every bit of it. An elite regiment, you say? Then some draughty chamber in the Tower of London may be set aside, and a sign nailed to the door reading ‘King’s Own Black Torrent Guards,’ and if I am very fortunate, and if my lord Marlborough intercedes, and fights hard for us, I may be allowed to go behind that door from time to time and push a quill about. On frightfully important occasions of state, I may be prevailed upon to rake together a skeleton Company and dress them up in uniforms so that they may parade before a visiting Embassy, or some such. But I say to you, Bob, that a year from now everyone in this regiment, with a very few lucky exceptions, shall be a Vagabond. If Jimmy and Danny have deserted, and taken to the road, it is only because they have had the wit to anticipate this.”
The Confusion: Volume Two of the Baroque Cycle Page 82