Quicksilver

  He saw the wisdom of this. But now he had recognized me. “Shaftoe!” he said, “have you lost your nerve so soon?” I recognized him now as a fellow I had passed time with while we waited in the queue in Lyme Regis to enlist in Monmouth’s army.

  I am accustomed to the regular and predictable evolutions of the march, the drill, and the siege. Yet now within a few days of my conceiving a boyish infatuation with Abigail Frome, I had worked my way round to one of those farcical muddles you see in the fourth act of a comedy. I was forsaking the rebellion in order to forge a new life with a rebel lass, who had fallen in love, not with me, but with my brother, who was dead. I who have slain quite a few men had been caught and recognized because I would not hurt a mongrel. And I who was—if I may say so—doing something that demanded a whiff of courage or so, and that demonstrated my loyalty, would now be denounced as a coward and traitor, and Abigail would consider me in those terms forever.

  A civilian—by your leave—would have been baffled, amazed. My soldier’s mind recognized this immediately as a screw-up, a cluster-fuck, a Situation Normal. This sort of thing happens to us all the time, and generally has worse consequences than a pretty girl deciding that she despises you. Fermented beverages and black humor are how we cope. I extricated myself without further violence. But by the time I made my way into the camp of John Churchill, the pitchfork-wound on my back had suppurated, and had to be opened up and aired out by a barber. I could not see it myself, but all who gazed upon it were taken a-back. Really ‘twas a shallow wound, and it healed quickly once I became strong enough to fend off the barber. But that I had staggered into the camp bleeding and feverish at the head of a column of loyal militia troops was made into something bigger than it really was. John Churchill heaped praise and honor upon me, and gave me a purse of money. When I related the entire tale to him, he laughed and mused, “I am doubly indebted to your brother now—he has furnished me with an excellent horse and a vital piece of intelligence.”

  Jack tells me you are literate and so I will let you read about the details of the fighting in a history-book. There are a few particulars I will mention because I doubt that historians will consider them meet to be set down in print.

  The King declined to trust John Churchill, for the reasons I stated earlier. Supreme command was given to Feversham, who despite his name is a Frenchman. Years ago Feversham undertook to blow up some houses with gunpowder, supposedly to stop a fire from spreading, but really, I suspect, because he was possessed of that urge, common to all men, to blow things up for its own sake. Moments after he satisfied that urge, he was brained by a piece of flying debris, and left senseless. His brain swelled up. To make room for it, the chirurgeons cut a hole in his skull. You can imagine the details for yourself—suffice it to say that the man is a living and breathing advertisement for the Guild of Wigmakers. King James II favors him, which, if you knew nothing else about His Majesty, would give you knowledge sufficient to form an opinion about his reign.

  It was this Feversham who had been placed in command of the expedition to put down the Duke of Monmouth’s rebellion, and he who received credit for its success, but it was John Churchill who won the battles, and my regiment, as always, that did the fighting. The Duke of Grafton came out at the head of some cavalry and did battle with Monmouth at one point. The engagement was not all that important, but I mention it to add some color to the story, for Grafton is one of Charles II’s bastards, just like Monmouth himself!

  The campaign was made exciting only by Feversham’s narcolepsy. That, combined with his inability to come to grips with matters even when he was awake, made it seem for a day or two as if Monmouth had a chance. I spent most of the time lying on my stomach recovering from the pitchfork-wound. And I count myself fortunate in that, because I had, and have, no love for the King, and I liked those rustic Nonconformists with their sickles and blunderbusses.

  In the end Monmouth deserted those men even as they were fighting and dying for him. We found him cowering in a ditch. He was shipped off to the Tower of London and died groveling.

  The farmers and tradesmen of Lyme Regis and Taunton who had made up Monmouth’s army were Englishmen through and through, which is to say not only were they level-headed decent sensible moderate folk, but they could not conceive of, and did not know about, any other way of being. It simply did not occur to them that Monmouth would abandon them and try to flee the island. But it had occurred to me, because I had spent years fighting on the Continent.

  Likewise they never imagined the repression that followed. Living in that open green countryside or settled in their sleepy market-towns, they had no understanding of the feverish minds of the Londoners. If you go to a lot of plays, as Jack and I used to do, you notice, soon enough, that the playwrights only have so many stories to go around. So they use them over and over. Oftimes when you sneak into a play that has just opened, the characters and situations will seem oddly familiar, and by the time the first scene has played out, you will recall that you’ve already seen this one several times before—except that it was in Tuscany instead of Flanders, and the schoolmaster was a parson, and the senile colonel was a daft admiral. In like manner, the high and mighty of England have the story of Cromwell stuck in their heads, and whenever anything the least bit upsetting happens—especially if it’s in the country, and involves Nonconformists—they decide, in an instant, that it’s the Civil War all over again. All they want is to figure out which one is playing the role of Cromwell, and put his head on a stick. The rest must be put down. And so it will continue until the men who run England come up with a new story.

  Worse, Feversham was a French nobleman to whom peasants (as he construed these people) were faggots to be stuffed into the fireplace. By the time he was finished, every tree in Dorset had dead yeomen, wheelwrights, coopers, and miners hanging from its branches.

  Churchill wanted no part of this. He got himself back to London as directly as possible, along with his regiments—myself included. Feversham had not been slow to spread tales of the glorious fight. He had already made himself into a hero, and every other part of the tale was likewise made into something much grander than it really was. The ditch in which we captured Monmouth was swollen, by the tale-tellers, into a raging freshet called the Black Torrent. The King was so taken with this part of the story that he has given my regiment a new name: we are now, and forever, the King’s Own Black Torrent Guards.

  Now at last I can speak to you of slavery, which according to Jack is a practice on which you harbor strong opinions.

  The Lord Chief Justice is a fellow name of Jeffreys, who was reputed for cruelty and bloody-mindedness even in the best of times. He has spent his life currying favor with the Cavaliers, the Catholics, and the Frenchified court, and when King James II came to the throne Jeffreys got his reward and became the highest judge of England. Monmouth’s rebellion brought a whiff of blood on the west wind, and Jeffreys followed it like a slavering hound and established a Court of Assizes in that part of the country. He has executed no fewer than four hundred persons—that is, four hundred in addition to those slain in battle or strung up by Feversham. In some parts of the Continent, four hundred executions would go nearly unnoticed, but in Dorset it is reckoned a high figure.

  As you can see, Jeffreys has been ingenious in finding grounds for putting men to death. But there are many cases where not even he could justify capital punishment, and so instead the defendants were sentenced to slavery. It says something about his mind that he considers slavery a lighter punishment than death! Jeffreys has sold twelve hundred ordinary West Country Protestants into chattel slavery in the Caribbean. They are on their way to Barbados even now, where they and their descendants will chop sugar cane forever among neegers and Irishmen, with no hope of ever knowing freedom.

  The girl I love, Abigail Frome, has been made a slave. All the schoolgirls of Taunton have been. For the most part these girls have not been sold to sugar plantations; they would never survive the vo
yage. Instead they have been parceled out to various courtiers in London. Lord Jeffreys gives ‘em away like oysters in a pub. Their families in Taunton then have no choice but to buy them back, at whatever price their owners demand.

  Abigail is now the property of an old college chum of Lord Jeffreys: Louis Anglesey, the Earl of Upnor. Her father has been hanged and her mother died years ago; of her cousins, aunts, and uncles, many have been sent to Barbados, and the ones who remain do not have the money to buy Abigail back. Upnor has amassed heavy gambling debts, which drove his own father to bankruptcy and forced him to sell his house years ago; now Upnor hopes to repay some of those debts by selling Abigail.

  It goes without saying that I want to kill Upnor. One day, God willing, I shall. But this would not help Abigail—she’d only be inherited by Upnor’s heirs. Only money will buy her freedom. I think that you are skilled where money is concerned. I ask you now to buy Abigail. In return, I give you myself. I know you hate slavery and do not want a slave, but if you do this for me I will be your slave in all but name.

  AS BOB SHAFTOE HAD TOLD his story, he had led Eliza through a maze of paths through the lee woods, which he appeared to know quite well. Before long they had reached the edge of a canal that ran from the city out to the shore at Scheveningen. This canal was not lined with sharp edges of stone, as in the city, but was soft and sloping at the edges, and in some places lined with rushes. Cows stood chewing on these, and watched Bob and Eliza walk by, interrupting him from time to time with their weird, pointless lamentations. As they had drawn closer to the Hague, Bob had begun to show uncertainty at certain canal-intersections, and Eliza had stepped into the lead. The scenery did not change very much, except that houses and small feeder canals become more frequent. Woods appeared to their left side, and continued for some distance. The Hague sneaked up on them. For it was not a fortified city, and at no point did they pass through anything like a wall or gate. But suddenly Eliza turned to the right on the bank of another canal—a proper stone-edged one—and Bob realized that they had penetrated into something that could be called a neighborhood. And not just any neighborhood, but the Hofgebied. Another few minutes’ walk would take them to the very foundations of the Binnenhof.

  In the woods by the sea, it might have been foolhardy for Eliza to speak frankly; but here she could summon the St. George Guild from their clubhouse with a shout. “Your willingness to repay me is of no account,” she told Bob.

  This was a cold answer, but it was a cold day, and William of Orange had treated her coldly, and Bob Shaftoe had knocked her off her horse. Now Bob looked dismayed. He was not accustomed to being beholden to anyone save his master, John Churchill, and now he was in the power of two girls not yet twenty: Abigail, who owned his heart, and Eliza, who (or so he imagined) had it in her power to own Abigail. A man more accustomed to helplessness would have put up more of a struggle. But Bob Shaftoe had gone limp, like the Janissaries before Vienna when it had come clear to them that their Turkish masters were all dead. All he could do was look with watery eyes at Eliza and shake his head amazed. She kept walking. He had no choice but to follow.

  “I was taken a slave just like your Abigail,” Eliza said. “ ‘Twas as if Mummy and I’d been plucked off the beach by a rogue wave and swallowed by the Deep. No man came forward to ransom me. Does that mean it was just that I was so taken?”

  “Now you’re talking nonsense. I don’t—”

  “If ‘tis evil for Abigail to be a slave—as I believe—then your offer of service to me is neither here nor there. If she should be free, all the others should be as well. That you’re willing to do me a favor or two should not advance her to the head of the queue.”

  “I see, now you’re making it into a grand moral question. I am a soldier and we have good reasons to be suspicious of those.”

  They had entered into a broad square on the east side of the Binnenhof, called the Plein. Bob was looking about alertly. A stone’s throw from here was a guard-house that served as a gaol; he might have been wondering whether Eliza was trying to lead him straight into it.

  But instead she stopped in front of a house: a large place, grand after the Barock style, but a little odd in its decorations. For atop the chimneys, where one would normally expect to see crosses or statues of Greek gods, there were armillary spheres, weathercocks, and swivel-mounted telescopes. Eliza fished in the folds of her waistband, nudged the stiletto out of the way, found the key.

  “What’s this, a convent?”

  “Don’t be absurd, do I look like some French mademoiselle who stays at such places?”

  “A rooming-house?”

  “It is the house of a friend. A friend of a friend, really.”

  Eliza swung the key round on the end of the red ribbon to which she had tied it. “Come in,” she finally said.

  “Beg pardon?”

  “Come inside this house with me that we may continue our conversation.”

  “The neighbors—”

  “Nothing that could happen here could possibly faze this gentleman’s neighbors.”

  “What of the gentleman himself?”

  “He is asleep,” Eliza said, unlocking the front door. “Be quiet.”

  “Asleep, at noon?”

  “He stirs at night—to make observations of the stars,” Eliza said, glancing upwards. Mounted to the roof of the house, four stories above their heads, was a wooden platform with a tubular device projecting over the edge—too frail to shoot cannonballs.

  The first floor’s main room might have been grand, for its generous windows looked out over the Plein and the Binnenhof. But it was cluttered with the debris of lens- and mirror-grinding—always messy, sometimes dangerous—and with thousands of books. Though Bob would not know this, these were not only about Natural Philosophy but history and literature as well, and nearly all of them were in French or Latin.

  To Bob these artifacts were only moderately strange, and he learned to overlook them after a few moments’ nervous glancing around the room. What really paralyzed him was the omnipresent noise—not because it was loud, but because it wasn’t. The room contained at least two dozen clocks, or sub-assemblies of clocks, driven by weights or springs whose altitude or tension stored enough energy, summed, to raise a barn. That power was restrained and disciplined by toothy mechanisms of various designs: brass insects creeping implacably around the rims of barbed wheels, constellations of metal stars hung on dark stolid axle-trees, all marching or dancing to the beat of swinging plumb-bobs.

  Now a man in Bob Shaftoe’s trade owed his longevity, in part, to his alertness—his sensitivity to (among other things) significant noises. Even the dimmest recruits could be relied on to notice the loud noises. A senior man like Bob was supposed to scrutinize the faint ones. Eliza got the impression that Bob was the sort of bloke who was forever shushing every man in the room, demanding absolute stillness so that he could hold his breath and make out whether that faint sporadic itching was a mouse in the cupboard, or enemy miners tunnelling under the fortifications. Whether that distant rhythm was a cobbler next door or an infantry regiment marching into position outside of town.

  Every gear and bearing in this room was making the sort of sound that normally made Bob Shaftoe freeze like a startled animal. Even after he’d gotten it through his head that they were all clocks, or studies for clocks, he was hushed and intimidated by a sense of being surrounded by patient mechanical life. He stood at attention in the middle of the big room, hands in his pockets, blowing steam from his mouth and darting his eyes to and fro. These clocks were made to tell time precisely and nothing else. There were no bells, no chimes, and certainly no cuckoos. If Bob was waiting for such entertainments, he’d wait until he was a dusty skeleton surrounded by cobweb-clogged gears.

  Eliza noted that he had shaved before going out on this morning’s strange errand, something that would never have entered Jack’s mind, and she wondered how it all worked—what train of thoughts made a man say, “I had bett
er scrape my face with a blade before undertaking this one.” Perhaps it was some sort of a symbolic love-offering to his Abigail.

  “It is all a question of pride, isn’t it?” Eliza said, stuffing a cube of peat into the iron stove. “Or honor, as you’d probably style it.”

  Bob looked at her instead of answering; or maybe his look was his answer.

  “Come on, you don’t have to be that quiet,” she said, setting a kettle on the stove to heat.

  “What Jack and I have in common is an aversion to begging,” he said finally.

  “Just as I thought. So, rather than beg Abigail’s ransom from me, you are proposing a sort of financial transaction—a loan, to be paid back in service.”

  “I don’t know the words, the terms. Something like that is what I had in mind.”

  “Then why me? You’re in the Dutch Republic. This is the financial capital of the world. You don’t need to seek out one particular lender. You could propose this deal to anyone.”

  Bob had clutched a double handful of his cloak and was wringing it slowly. “The confusions of the financial markets are bewildering to me—I prefer not to treat with strangers…”

  “What am I to you if not a stranger?” Eliza asked, laughing. “I am worse than a stranger, I threw a spear at your brother.”

  “Yes, and that is what makes you not a stranger to me, it is how I know you.”

  “It is proof that I hate slavery, you mean?”

  “Proof of that and of other personal qualities—qualities that enter into this matter.”