The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and the System of the World

by Neal Stephenson

  “Assume what you like—that would still place the gold far away from you,” Jack pointed out. He was gazing out to sea, watching Minerva trim her sails as she came out of the lee of the Sghr and picked up a leading wind across her larboard beam. One by one the yards traversed round, and their sails stopped shivering as the crew braced the yards and made her close-hauled. Immediately Minerva began to heel over and pick up speed. But de Gex now blocked Jack’s view, squaring his shoulders and getting his face directly in front of his. “Your ship may be free now, Jack, but you seem to have forgotten that you are not on her. You are in my power now.”

  “I thought I was in Leroy’s power,” Jack said, which was nothing more than an audacious guess; but the look on de Gex’s face told him he’d guessed right.

  “My Order is not without influence in his majesty’s court,” de Gex said. “In his efforts to find the gold that the Jew stole, Vrej Esphahnian could do nothing more than bore you. I can do much more.”

  Jack rolled his eyes. “Oh come now! If our aim had been to steal from Vrej, we’d have made a proper job of it. We were only chaffing him—we’re not thieves.”

  “Where, then, is King Solomon’s gold?”

  “Turn around,” Jack said.

  De Gex finally turned around. The harbor below the Castle was crowded with French ships, most of them riding at anchor; the few that were in a position to get under way were now, however, frantically trying to raise more sail. Their decks were a-swarm with sailors coming up from below, like ants from a damaged hill. De Gex could not fathom why, until he noticed that every spyglass and pointing finger in the harbor was aimed at Minerva, now several miles ahead of the French ships that were trying to organize a pursuit. Van Hoek—commanding from a sick-bed lashed into place on the poop deck—had heeled her perilously far over for one so lightly ballasted, but she did not capsize, and seemed to be skimming over the water rather than plowing it up. A ship that hadn’t been careened since before Vera Cruz would normally have been too encrusted with barnacles to make much headway, but Minerva moved as if her hull had been freshly scraped and painted. Not until she altered course slightly, and the sun glanced off her exposed hull, did de Gex understand why: the underside of the ship, below the waterline, had been sheathed, from stem to stern, in plates of hammered gold.

  Only a sliver of that plating was now visible, but it shone out across the harbor like a gleam of light through a cracked door. Everyone had seen it, and a few French ships were now setting out on a forlorn pursuit, but most of the mariners were content to stand at the railings of their anchored vessels and only gaze in adoration. Jack knew what those sailors were thinking. They did not care about the value of the gold, and they certainly believed no nonsense about King Solomon’s hoard. They were thinking, instead: If I were a sailor on that ship, I’d never have to scrape another barnacle.

  JACK SAW IT AS ODD that de Gex had set Minerva free so hastily, considering that he had been pursuing this matter for above ten years, and traveled all the way around the world, survived the wrack of the Manila Galleon, given himself up to torture, &c. The next day Jack understood why de Gex had wanted to get Minerva, and most of the French fleet, clear of the harbor. Sails breached the southern horizon, a ship came into view, maneuvered adroitly round the Dutch-hammer, and dropped anchor directly below the Castle. Jack recognized her from miles out. He’d last seen her in Alexandria, holed and dismasted. Since then Météore had been refitted and cleaned up by ship-wrights who, to judge from the looks of what they’d done, charged a lot of money.

  He was taken back to his cell long before the jacht came close enough that anyone on its decks might have picked him out through a spyglass. This gave him another hint as to who might be aboard. His suspicions were confirmed later by faint sounds of women’s and children’s laughter, audible when he lay with his ear to the crack under his door. This was not a Naval Expedition but a pleasure-cruise, timed to call at Qwghlm during the magic fortnight around late August and early September when blizzards were least oft observed. The chilly cannonball that Jack had been carrying around for the last fortnight now seemed to have been implanted in his chest, and his heart ripped out to make room for it. De Gex had been oddly disinclined to torture him thus far, which had caused Jack to wonder what new, excruciating horrors might be in store for him. But he’d never phant’sied it’d be this bad! He could see how this would end: He would be dragged out naked and chained, and displayed before Eliza, and de Gex would relate the hilarious tale of how Jack had twice had all the money in the world, and twice lost it.

  A few hours after Météore’s arrival, when aromas of French cooking had suffused the entire castle, large Bretons came to Jack’s cell and dragged him to a part of the château that, as best as Jack could make out, was near the bedchambers. It was a windowless, hence torch-lit corridor joining an irregular series of chambers, closets, and wide spots. It had received little attention during the remodel, and still looked much as the last band of Vikings, Saracens, or Scots had left it. Here and there Jack glimpsed the backside of a wall: strips of lath, or wattle, with curls of plaster, or daub, squirting through. Casks and crates were piled in some places. They took him to a wide place in the passage where an iron grid had been leaned against the wall: a portcullis hammered out by some blacksmith a thousand years ago, torn down and thrown aside in some upheaval, and left to gather rust and cobwebs ever since. The Bretons pinned Jack against this, spreadeagled, and lashed him to it with cords. Here it became obvious that they were sea-faring men. When Jack opened his mouth to issue some remark to that effect, one of them opportunely shoved a rag-wad into his mouth, and lashed that in place, and lashed his head to the grate. They lashed his fingers down even, which struck Jack as gratuitous, unless they were afraid of his rapping out some message. When they were satisfied, they dragged the gridiron, Jack and all, down the passageway a short distance and through a curtain of mildewy sailcloth. Jack was then blinded for a few moments by sudden light. But as his eyes adjusted, he began to think he was back in the bedchamber where they had kept him for the first week. As he saw clearer, though, he came to understand he was gazing into that bedchamber from without. He was looking through the back sides of the mirrors that glazed the wall. His view of the room, from here, was total; he was positioned at the head of the canopied bed, arm’s length from where a sleeper would lay his, or her, head.

  “It is a style of architecture that has served me well,” said a voice in French.

  Jack would have jumped out of his skin, had he not been restrained, for the Bretons had taken their leave, and he hadn’t suspected anyone else was in here. All he could move was his eyeballs. By swiveling these as far as they’d go, he was able to perceive movement in a dim corner of this hidden chamber.

  A man came into view. He wore a periwig—powdered white, as was the new vogue—and what Jack could only assume were the most excellent fashions from France, so ridiculous were they. Something was funny about one of his hands, but, beyond that, he was splendid to look upon, and (as Jack could now detect, even with dirty rags jammed into his gob) he smelled good.

  “You shan’t recognize me, I’m afraid,” said the only man in the room who could talk. “I scarcely recognize you. We last met in the Grand Ballroom of my residence in Paris: the Hôtel Arcachon. You took your leave of most of me hastily, and impolitely; though you did carry my hand for several miles, tangled in the bridle of that magnificent horse. Later it was found in the middle of the post-road to Compiègne with my signet-ring still on it; which is how it was traced back to me. Still you were not done re-arranging the body-parts of Lavardacs, for some years later you kindly shipped me the head of my father.”

  Étienne de Lavardac, duc d’Arcachon, raised now the stump of his arm so that Jack could view it. A cup had been strapped thereto, and extending from this was a black leather riding-crop. If Jack hadn’t been gagged, he’d now have volunteered some observations as to how Étienne had a paltry and disappointing view of h
ow to inflict pain, compared to the Spanish Inquisition; but Étienne anticipated him. “Oh, this is not for you. My revenge on you I have contemplated, and prepared for, these seventeen years, and it shall involve more than a riding-crop. It takes time to build a place like this, you know! I have had several of them made: there is another at St.-Malo and yet another at La Dunette. I have stood in them and watched my wife whore herself to sergeants and cryptologists. That, however, is not why I caused them to be made. Only today are these chambers being put to their true purpose. Vrej Esphahnian is in the one at La Dunette even at this moment. He is trussed up like you, staring through such a mirror, and listening as his brothers, dressed in the finest clothing, serve expensive coffee to dinner-guests.

  “You see, we fooled Monsieur Esphahnian into believing that his brothers had been betrayed by you, Jack, and were perishing of typhus in debtors’ prisons all around Paris. His joy at learning that this is not true will be balanced by some embarrassment that he turned you in to us for no good reason, and lost his share of the silver and gold in Minerva’s hold. I do wonder which of these three causes him the greatest anguish: that he betrayed his friends, that he threw away a fortune, or that he was duped. Father Édouard should reach Versailles in a few more days—he’ll inform Monsieur Esphahnian that the missing gold was attached to the ship’s hull the entire time—this ought to perfect his agony. It is a better torture, I believe, than anything the Spanish Inquisition could devise. But better yet is in store for you, Jack!”

  He walked out.

  A door opened and a woman entered the bedchamber. Jack did not know her instantly, only because he did not wish to. She’d changed, but not that much. He simply could not bear to open his eyes to her.

  Nasr al-Ghuráb had told them that in the sack of Constantinople the Ottomans had discovered, in a dungeon, a device that the Byzantines had once used to put out the eyes of noble prisoners. There was none of poking or gouging. Rather, it was a great hemispherical bowl, wrought of copper, with a sort of vise in its center. The bowl would be heated first until it was glowing, and then the prisoner’s head—masked, except for the eyes—would be clamped into the vise. The apparatus was so laid out that the pupils of the victims’ eyes were positioned at the center of the hemisphere. When the lids were pulled up, the eyes could see nothing but a featureless heaven of red wrath that ruined even as it dazzled. The sensitive parts of the eyes were incinerated in a few moments, and the victim rendered perfectly blind without the eyes themselves ever having been touched by anything save that awful last glimpse.

  In idle moments since having heard this story, Jack had sometimes wondered what thoughts went through the mind of the one who was being clamped into it. Did he resist? Could he? Were unwilling eyelids peeled back with tongs, or was the victim compelled somehow to open them himself?

  It was in much the same frame of mind that he followed Eliza’s entry into the bedchamber without looking at her directly. But in the end he couldn’t not open his eyes, of his own free will, and gaze upon what was there, burn him and blind him though it might.

  She had been at dinner with rich people, and was some time taking her gown off, washing her face, peeling off the black patches, and letting her hair down. Ladies-in-waiting came and went. A girl of perhaps nine, with eyes and face marred by smallpox, came into the room and crawled into Eliza’s lap for a few minutes’ rocking and snuggling; Eliza read to her from a book, then sent her off to bed with kisses all over her wrecked face. A nurse led in a boy of about seven, who had escaped the pox so far—but in a way he was worse for Jack to look upon, for his jaw had the same deformity as both of the two last ducs d’Arcachon. But Eliza smiled when he came in, and cuddled him and read to him just as she had done to the pock-marked girl. The nurse took the boy away and Eliza sat alone for some time, tending to correspondence; she read a scattering of notes and wrote two letters.

  Étienne came in to the bedchamber now and twirled off his coat, and tossed his small-sword onto a window-bench. Eliza gave him a perfunctory over-the-shoulder greeting. Étienne strolled up along the side of the bed, walking towards Jack, loosening his cravat, idly swishing the riding-crop. He stopped before the mirror, pretending to study his own reflection, but in fact staring Jack directly in the eye. “I believe I shall ride bare-back to-night,” he announced, loudly enough to penetrate the silvered glass.

  Eliza was a bit surprised. But she mastered that quickly, and then had to hide a flush of annoyance. She finished a sentence, parked her quill in an inkwell, stood up, and peeled her gown back over her head. What greeted Jack, then, viewed through forty-odd-year-old eyes and a mottled, half-silvered mirror by candlelight, was not a bit less lovely than what he had last seen of her seventeen years ago. He could tell there had been a hard-fought dispute with the Pox and that Eliza had won it. Of course she had won it!

  Her husband came up and struck her across the face with his hand, twisting her around so that she fell face-down on the bed. Then he whipped her across the arse and the backs of her thighs with the crop, occasionally looking up to smirk at Jack through the mirror. He commanded her to rise to all fours, and she obeyed. Fucking, interspersed with more whipping, ensued. Étienne did it from a position bolt upright on his knees on the bed behind Eliza, so that he could stare Jack down until the last moments when his eyes closed.

  Now in the dungeons of the Inquisition, Jack had himself noted a phænomenon oft discoursed of by prisoners, namely that after a bit of torture the body went numb and it simply did not hurt that much any more. Perhaps the same thing was at work here. It had hurt just to see Eliza—to be so close to her. Seeing her little Lavardac boy had perhaps been the worst. This scene of “riding bare-back,” however grisly it was in a certain way, simply did not trouble him as much as Étienne clearly supposed it did. If Eliza had jumped up from her writing-desk to smother her husband with kisses and then dragged him to bed and made rapturous love to him, that would have hurt. But instead she had shrugged, and parked her quill. Before the ink was dry on the sentence she’d been writing when Étienne had entered the room, he had exhausted himself, she had her clothes back on, and was approaching the desk with a look on her face that said, Now where was I when what’s-his-name interrupted me?

  LATER JACK WAS TAKEN AWAY and returned to his cell. The next night, the whole thing was repeated—almost as if Étienne knew in his heart that it had failed the first time. The chief difference was that when Étienne came into the bedchamber and announced his intentions, Eliza was, this time, truly astonished.

  On the third night, she was out-and-out flabbergasted, and asked Étienne a number of probing questions clearly meant to establish whether he might be developing a brain tumor.

  Jack, a theatre-goer of long standing, now saw how it was going to be. For Étienne had explained to him that his doom was to be locked up in a cell here for the rest of his life, and that once a year, when the weather cleared, Étienne was going to sail up here with Eliza and repeat this procedure a few times before turning round and sailing home. As Étienne told him this, Jack was, of course, gagged, and could not answer; but what he was thinking was that this was indeed an excruciating torture, but for wholly different reasons than Étienne imagined. The premise was excellent, granted; but the road to dramaturgickal perdition was thick strewn with excellent premises. The difficulty lay in that this show was wretchedly staged and, in a word, botched. This made it almost more painful to view than if it had been carried off brilliantly. Jack’s fate, it seemed, was to languish in a chilly dungeon three hundred and sixty-odd days out of each year and, on the other few days, to be a captive audience to a bad play. He had to grant that it would be a humiliating fate if he had been a member of the French nobility. But as a Vagabond who’d already lived thrice as long as he ought to’ve, it wasn’t bad at all; it was pleasing, in fact, to see how not under Étienne’s thumb was Eliza. Jack’s chief source of discomfort, then, was a feeling well known to soldiers of low rank, to doctors’ patients, and t
o people getting their hair cut; namely, that he was utterly in the power of an incompetent.

  After the third night, the set was struck, as it were. Jack was locked in his cell to begin the first year of his ordeal, and Météore sailed away south.

  Jack settled in, and began to make friends with his gaolers. They were under strict orders not to talk to him, but they couldn’t help hearing him when he talked, and he could tell that they fancied his stories.

  He was there for all of a month. Then a French frigate came and took him away. They gave him clothes, soap, and a razor. Jack had a most enjoyable journey to Le Havre, for he knew that there was only one man in the world who could have countermanded the orders of Étienne de Lavardac, duc d’Arcachon.

  Book 5

  The Juncto

  Hôtel Arcachon

  OCTOBER 1702

  “WE ARE VERY SORRY to hear of your little ship-wreck,” said King Louis XIV of France. “But consider yourself fortunate you did not book passage on the Spanish treasure-fleet. The English Navy fell upon it in Vigo Bay and sent several millions of pieces of eight to the locker of David Jones.”

  The King of France did not seem especially troubled by this news; if anything, discreetly amused. His majesty was sitting in the biggest armchair that Western Civilization had to offer, in the center of the Grand Ballroom of the Hôtel Arcachon in Paris. Jack, somewhat to his surprise, had been allowed to sit down on a stool. The Kings of France and of the Vagabonds were alone together; the former had made a great show of dismissing his glorious courtiers, who had made a great show of being astonished. Now Jack could hear the murmur of their voices in the gallery outside as they smoked pipes and batted witticisms at each other.