Two days later and all the crew were aboard. Every single one. They had been delivered in manacles the previous night having been caught en masse boarding a frigate bound for Trebizon. They were chained below decks right now. Hamit himself had to oversee the revictualling. He watched as old barrels of rotten fish were unloaded and new ones put in their place. A cargo of saltpetre for the arsenal at Midilli was stowed all about the lower deck, this being the purpose of his recall, as he understood it. Its destination called to him, recalling days climbing rope ladders and nights studying trigonometry under the cruel but fair supervision of the sergeants with their unusual and comforting punishments, their shaggy caresses in the Ægean moonlight….
Hamit was suddenly distracted from these fond recollections by a crate swinging over the side. Roughly five feet square, it landed with a thump on the quarterdeck. An official from the Beylik section of the Office of the Imperial Divan wanted him to sign something.
‘There has been a slight change of plan….’ began the official as he scribbled.
Within the hour, the cargo stowed, the crew unmanacled and instantly idle, the Tesrifati ran through the strait of Bosporus before a gentle following wind. Hamit stood below decks contemplating the crate. It was to be delivered to Liverre forthwith. That was his overriding command and he was not to concern himself with its contents. After that, duty on the Ægean patrol would resume. Hamit’s crew looked on sullenly. Unchaining them he had had to choke back the impulse to apologise for their discomfort. They looked hungry. They would not meet his eye. They were waiting for a calamity. Now, Hamit gave the crate an encouraging pat. Instantly a voice from within began shouting.
‘I demand safe conduct! I demand access to the Venetian ambassador, proper facilities, a translator, my possessions, an audience with the Divan….’ The demands went on for some time. Hamit listened to them as they grew less strident, ending forlornly with, ‘I am the Imperial Internuncio to the Sublime Porte and I demand water.’ Then, ‘Water please,’ then, ‘Please,’ and then silence once more. Halil Hamit weighed up his duties, then went to fetch a crow-bar, a cup and a pitcher of clear cold water for his guest.
The crate was where the extreme ends of the debate had finally met, middle ground between sending back the Internuncio’s severed head in a burlap sack and escorting him to the border with all possible pomp in compensation for his imprisonment, now explained as a junior official’s ghastly mistake. Of course the implications ran much further. Decapitation of the Internuncio would suggest reckless warmongering, in line with recent gains in Transylvania and the late Drave massacres, a strong hint that the Turkic forces were prepared to fight until doomsday. An escort, on the other hand, betokened appeasement and a quick end to a war which helped no-one. The stalemate around Belgrade and various anti-Ottoman insurrections within Serbia supported this line. Within the heady atmosphere of the crate, an unstable compromise was found. If the Internuncio survived, all well and good. If not, well, he was the enemy after all. The crate marked a nodal point in the war. Trails converged here, all the arguments and counter-arguments within the Porte, balances of policy and practice, and from the altitude of the gulls wheeling noisily above it was possible to see in the Tesrifati’s phosphorescent wake one last correspondence with the Emperor’s soiled bed linen, a final spurting vector of the glistening cryptic slime as it shot prophetically towards a fate stranger even than these.
A mutinous capsule toiling on the spread sea, the Tesrifati was one beacon amongst many as night descended over Europe. Peasant-mutterings over the robot-labour draft, a rebellion amongst the dwarves of a Magdeburg circus, Anabaptist ferment in Thuringia, these too wink in and out, on and off. And there are others. The configuration is still unclear in April, but as popular ferment grows, such outbreaks will become more frequent, the beacons more numerous until a long-destined shape emerges from lines implied between one point and another, as a message sent by heliograph confirms the network of stations, relaid from mountain-top to campanile, from watch tower to platform in flashes, bright junctions of x and y directed to precise degrees of arc in accordance with exact timetables of transmission and reception. Compared to the network which supports its brief and flickering life, the message itself seems of little import, just as the letter itself is nothing to the mighty Thurn und Taxis postal system and the leg-capsule negligible compared to the flight of the carrier pigeon. So, the message emerging this April night is secondary at best to the means of its emergence, which is the system. The problem is scale, human unit to geopolitical mass, monoculture to Euro-system. Coming volcanic eruptions will seem random and totally out of the blue to mortal observers despite literally aeons of warning through regular seismic motions of the earth’s plates - but how to relate the explosive violence, the rain of molten debris shooting through thousands of feet per second to the inches per century tectonic creep which preceded and caused it? The middle terms are missing and only primitive augury fills the gap. Can the Emperor’s bed linen truly portend the voyage of the Tesrifati this April night? Charlatans grow prosperous on these discontinuities. For lack of a sufficiently lofty vantage-point, haruspices resort to reading entrails and bird-flights, all kinds of geomancy and weird divination are practised. Quite innocent structures and arrangements become potent as indices prefiguring catastrophe and other forms of disorder. Take, as an instance, the orange trees.
In Le Notre’s plan it was quite clear. The orange trees ran in straight lines, a double terrace on either side of the gardens, away from the back of the palace towards the artificial lake. Louis’s first tutor of mathematics had told him that parallel lines met at a point infinitely distant from the observer or more obviously at the foot of the throne of God. Louis preferred the second metaphor and recalled it often, linking it vaguely with his own divine right. Looking out over the terrace after the levée, he derived a faint comfort from the neatly sculpted orange trees in their cubic slatted pots which ran in rows towards the lake. If he screwed up his eyes, the lines met and God was in the lake.
The first change came a month ago, a subtle realignment to begin with but growing more noticeable towards the end of March. By April it was indisputable. The orange trees were converging. His first thought was an over-zealous sycophant busily rearranging them by moonlight, waiting only for a favourable sign to declare himself. Or herself. Accordingly, he smiled a lot in the vicinity of the orange trees, clapped his hands, pointed, said ‘ha!’ in a joyful tone. No-one came forward. The gardeners perhaps. A guard was placed on the orange trees but no underlings were caught. The orange trees, which once peaceably affirmed his topmost position in the order of things, now only added to his worries.
The pattern repeated itself. In the Vendée, renegade tax officers had taken to brigandage, enforcing their own covert tariff-system through the organisation he had supposedly abolished. Officers sent to stamp out this fiscal subversion were hounded with violence, their families threatened. A clamorous Parlement had quieted itself when he announced the abolition and afterwards he had felt reconfirmed, serene in his placement. Now the business had turned on him. He heard the words ‘tax reform’ with acute unease and wondered what disaster his next helpful measure would occasion. Standing still, he was aware that matters moved of their own accord. Moving himself, everything stopped. Orange trees again.
His plan to revive the watchmaking trade (women watchmakers) was encouraging and at least the new Board of Marine Affairs was safely appointed. Still events conspired against him. Reports of the Bank’s directors coming to blows at their general meeting had reached the press and the resignation of Monsieur Caburrus had seemed to endorse those reports. Various agencies took delight in recalculating the deficit from Necker’s figures which rose and rose as the new amounts were published on a weekly basis. Apparently he had sanctioned taxes called ‘vingtièmes’ which the Parlements of Toulouse, Rouen and Montpellier now refused to pay. Small riots were taking place in these towns, and others where his arrêt met its usual host
ile reception. The works at Cherbourg were horren-dously delayed and the costs, four, perhaps five millions, rising by the month. This at least was the Marine Board’s pigeon. Vaudreuil and Bougainville had delegated extraordinary powers to their secretaries to bring the project in on time and under budget. They had left the week previously. On secondment from the Finance Office where their labyrinthine damage-limitation exercise on the deficit had drawn universal if slightly baffled praise, Monsieurs Duluc and Protagoras would proceed from Cherbourg to La Rochelle. Here some other task awaited them. Vaudreuil set great store by them, even the Cardinal gave his recommendation. The deficit was still huge, naturally, but how much worse might it have been without their efforts? He dreaded to think.
Sunlight cleared the gables behind him to shine down onto the terrace and himself, to glitter off the lake, warm the yawning palace corridors and ripen tiny shrivelled oranges on the anxious trees before him.
The same sun beat down on his trusted under-secretaries who stood now on the heights above Cherbourg.
‘Folly,’ said Protagoras. His companion surveyed the scene with weary eyes shaking his head in agreement. Their journey from Paris had taken a full week. It might have been done in three days, but a number of minor detours had taken longer than expected. None of these would have excited much comment in the turbulent capital, but nor would they have been readily explicable. Even with the full breadth of their extraordinary powers the relevance of minor officials from the Parlements of Toulouse, Rouen and Montpellier to their assignment was questionable. And why should they meet at night in a village outside Argentan? Given even their almost limitless remit, informal contacts with disaffected tax-farmers from the Vendée seemed somewhat outside their official roles. Travelling in short stages, unobtrusively by public coach, their journey had been punctuated by such diversions until the previous evening, at an inn a few miles outside Cherbourg, they had met the contact the Cardinal had been at special pains to procure.
No introductions were made. The three sat in an upstairs room around a table which was piled with papers. The talk was in English. Duluc and Protagoras watched as the third man drew long columns of figures, underlining and marking totals in a complex system of cross references.
‘You might liken them to pools within a reservoir,’ he said as they watched him across the table. ‘The levels in individual pools may go up and down, but the volume of water within the reservoir remains constant. Only the distribution differs. Europe, and the whole world for that matter, does its business in this way. Each pool is a country with more or less wealth. Here is France for example with none at all, a minus value. France can still do business because, were it to be sold, lock, stock and barrel, the amount would erase the deficit many times over. Now, by balancing imported goods against exported ones, weighing foreign debts against investments and adding the per capita wealth of each of its subjects, a state can be “valued”, given a number corresponding to its worth. This much is familiar. When these values are combined they give a further number corresponding to the volume of the whole reservoir, or the wealth of all nations. My concern, however, is with the pools.’
‘Pools?’ Protagoras interrupted.
‘Individual nations. These can be calculated by subtracting repayments and expenses from borrowings and earnings, plus the cost of imports from exports of course. The final figure is the nation’s wealth. In theory it is simple. In practice,’ he gestured to his trunk which overflowed with papers, ‘a different story. Still, your Cardinal paid handsomely enough for….’
‘Cardinal?’ Duluc broke in sharply. ‘We know of no Cardinal.’ The third man looked bewildered for a moment, then recovered himself.
‘Of course,’ he said quickly. ‘Now, your friend commissioned an overview of England’s last three fiscal years. As I said, the calculations are never exact. Mathematically speaking the task is tedium itself. Errors creep in. There are also factors which cannot be accounted for, smuggled goods, informal loans, goods in transit and the like. But generally these are negligible and allowances can be made when they are not. I claim an accuracy to within two or three per cent. That is why these figures puzzle me. I have rechecked them twice now. In each of the three years, there is a discrepancy of almost four per cent. That represents several millions of pounds. It is as if someone somewhere is running a national bank, but quite outside the banking system. Stranger yet, the money never re-enters the system, no other country shows a corresponding rise. The money is not being used. In one form or another it simply sits somewhere. Where I do not know and how I do not know. But it exists gentlemen, that is certain.’ He looked up then, expecting surprise, curiosity at least. Protagoras and Duluc merely nodded confirmation.
‘There is one more thing,’ he said. ‘I performed the same calculation for the same years a century ago. The results were the same and I’ll wager the intervening years show the same deficit. Whoever, or whatever, controls this process controls a sum greater than the capital of any state in the world.’
When the man had packed up his papers and departed in a hurry for the morning pacquet-boat, Duluc sat down at the same table and wrote two brief notes. The first was to the Cardinal. It read, “All Jaques claimed for himself and his associates is true. We have our confirmation. We proceed to the final arrangements at Rochelle. Our cause is safe.” The second was to Jaques himself. It merely identified their recent companion and outlined the findings of his calculation. That would be enough. Jaques, or his partners, would take the matter from there. He signed off, “Until the thirteenth,” by way of his mark, and carefully sealed the letter. It would probably travel by the same paquet as its victim.
The following morning, he watched with Protagoras as the pacquet tacked gingerly past the “improvements” and out of the harbour. For larger ships the entry into the port had become a pilot’s nightmare. The reason for this was plain. A wooden monster wallowed in the harbour at Cherbourg. It was two hundred metres long, of varying width with sprouting piles and bizarre projections running off at angles all along its length which undulated where heaps of unused building materials had been dumped to rot or warp. The first section was roughly straight, the second roughly curved and the third roughly both. The monster lay at a diagonal across the harbour pool, ending in a squat tower which, he squinted, seemed to be constructed from wheel-barrows. This whole structure, in the officialese of a correspondence now so incumbent that it had overflowed into the offices of the Marine Board Directors and grown there until their resignations were added to its bulk, was the New Jetty. It was the sacred crocodile of the Marine Board and it had eaten its priests.
‘Sheer folly,’ Protagoras said once more. The fortifications were more modest, spindly scaffolding and planking for the most part. It was the jetty had done the damage. The citizens of Cherbourg claimed that ships putting in there for ten or twenty years were now using ports to the north and south. The inns were empty and the wharves idle. The town was dying. A petition was being got up to be sent to the King himself. The wood-shortage was contrived. Less wood, not more was needed and none at all in the harbour. In the fortnight which followed, Duluc and Protagoras would pay lip service to their roles by listening carefully to these complaints. They would turn blind eyes to minor acts of sabotage and deaf ears to reports of every barn for miles around being stacked high with intercepted wood-consignments. Their recommendation would be to abandon the project at the first opportunity. Far below, a league or more out, a frigate which would later feature in the petition was sailing north-east. Duluc and Protagoras turned from their vantage point and walked to the waiting coach. Already their thoughts were flying southwards down the coast towards La Rochelle where a very different project awaited them.
Chased by a stiff breeze, the converted frigate Tisiphone sailed on up the channel for Deal. Loaded with powdered charcoal, her commander still had hopes of catching the next day’s tide. The tail wind lasted until late afternoon then died. Reaching Deal at four in the following after
noon the tide had already turned. The sloop Cockatrice and cutter Nimble already lay at anchor. The Tisiphone joined them overnight, setting off the next morning for the Upper Pool. The fading wakes of ships further advanced and cross-currents shot from the river bed’s basins rebounded from bank to bank, gently rocking the three-master as it advanced with the slow surges of the tide towards the city. Belowdecks, within its close-packed barrels, charcoal shifted to form invisible patterns, prolific whorls and unfolding carousels of black on black, slow rotations and undulations as the strata shuffled top to bottom in a secret echo of the waters’ conflicting forces. Docking at Queen’s Wharf on the legal quays around six that evening, the three-master drew Captain Guardian’s vigilant eye fifty yards upstream from the Vendragon to view this new arrival.
‘Tisiphone,’ he announced to Captain Roy who was peering up approvingly at his mantelpiece. ‘From Lisbon via Cherbourg, carrying charcoal.’ He had read the ship news which had reported her departure a month before. ‘She’s early,’ he said.
‘Probably avoided Cherbourg,’ speculated Captain Roy.
‘Ah.’
The works at Cherbourg were familiar by report. Eben glanced back down the quay to the Vendragon. As promised, he had kept a watchful eye on the Indiaman though there was little to report. Loading had come to a halt some weeks back and, a solitary watchman apart, the wharf in front of the ship had been deserted. Several times he imagined he had seen lights moving below deck, brief flashes escaping through the planking, but no one had boarded the vessel for weeks and no provisions had been taken on. It seemed an unlikely berth for stowaways. His concerns during this vigil had been of a less obvious nature, nothing he could specifically describe, nothing very particular, but still a vague anxiety gripped him in these weeks. How would he put it? The quays running up and down the river’s edge were changing, their character was different from before. It was indistinct this change, ill-defined still, but it was for the worse.
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