"And then?"
"Why, then, I shall devise some means of ending up with my boot on his throat. And we shall enter into a discussion concerning Abigail."
"You attempted that with his brother—Abigail's previous owner. He almost killed you, and you did not get Abigail."
"I do not claim 'tis a likely plan, but 'tis my plan, and it gives me something to do."
"Can I not simply buy the girl from Sheerness?"
"It would raise questions. Why should you care about one English slave?"
"That is my business."
"And Abigail is mine—"
"Would Abigail agree? Or would she prefer that plan that is most likely to lead to her freedom?"
This made Bob a bit stormy-looking. He strove with his temper for a bit. Then he chuckled. "What's the point of flapping my jaw when you'll go and do just what you please, no matter what I say? Be off to Dunkerque, then. But if my wishes have any gravity, you'll tend to yourself and not to me. For I ween you are in a delicate way just now. That is all."
"I am ever in a delicate way," said Eliza, "but men pick and choose the time to take notice of it, as it suits their purposes." At this Bob chuckled again, which provoked her. "Let us speak plainly," she said, "for this is where our ways part—you must to the Tower to attend your master in his prison-cell, I must to dockside to arrange passage to Dunkerque." They had arrived at the cross where Grace Church Street changed its name to Fish Street, and plunged down to the Bridge. From their right entered Great Eastcheap; under the name of Little Eastcheap it then wended its way off in the direction of the Tower. A stone's throw down the hill, a lone, stupendous column jutted up from the city, casting a finger of shadow down the length of the street. They'd come nigh to the place where the Fire of London had been kindled a quarter-century before. The column was the Monument that Wren and Hooke had put up to it.
"When you promise to speak plainly, I know to brace myself," said Bob, and then he did literally, leaning back against a brick wall.
"You have seen me sick, and suppose that I am pregnant. This has wrought powerfully on your mind, for you know that Abigail was given syphilis by Upnor and may not be able to give you children, even if you do pry her free from the clutches of Count Sheerness. You have stopped thinking of me as ‘Eliza the woman I roger from time to time' and begun to think of me as ‘Eliza the expectant mother of my only child.' This has queered your judgment and led you to consider schemes that are not likely to produce Abigail's freedom. Know then that the fœtus—which might have been yours, or my husband's, or any of several other men's—miscarried the night before last. It is with the angels. I would still produce a competent heir for my husband, but must begin a new pregnancy once I have reached France. Perhaps I shall seduce Jean Bart, perhaps the Marquis d'Ozoir, perhaps a Marine who catches my fancy on the street. In any case you must give up hope that any progeny of yours shall come from here—" and Eliza rested her hand on the front of her bodice "—for I am done with being the other woman in the life of Bob Shaftoe and Abigail Frome. Done with being the poppy-elixir that makes you forget your pain, and leads you to dream stratagems that shall never avail you or her a thing. Abigail may be waiting for you, Bob. I am not. Get thee to thy projects, then."
She was gone from Bob's sight before the words penetrated all the way to his heart, for she was a small woman, quick, and dissolved into the traffic down Fish Street Hill like a mote of sugar in a stream of boiling water. Bob did not move, but let the brick wall hold him up for some while, until the proprietor—an insurance-man—thrust his head out the window and gave him that look that Gentlemen give to Vagabonds when it is time for them to be moving on. Bob had a soldier's knack for moving when he did not wish to. He levered himself away from the wall, rounded the corner, and marched down Little Eastcheap toward the Tower, where his Captain would be waiting for him with orders.
SEPTEMBER 1693
When Men fly from danger, it is natural for them to run farther than they need.
—The Mischiefs that ought justly to be apprehended from a Whig-government, ANONYMOUS (ATTRIBUTED TO BERNARD MANDEVILLE), 1714
EVERY MORNING A MOB OF angry Hindoos convened outside the hospital hoping to have a conversation with Jack on his way in, and so every day Jack came a little earlier, stealing in through a back door where manure was carried out and food brought in. Because of that latter function it was the correct entrance for him to use anyway. He walked across an enclosed stable-yard, holding one hand before his face as a sort of visor, to break a trail through the horseflies. At least, he hoped that they were horseflies.
His passage was noticed and commented upon by insomniacal horses and camels, standing on splinted and bandaged limbs, or dangling from formidable slings, in stalls all round the yard. A tiger was here, too, being treated for an abscessed tooth, but she was kept in a cage in an out-building. Otherwise her fragrance, and the nearly inaudible sound she made when she yawned, would drive the horses and camels into frenzies. A horse supporting itself on two legs, and kicking with the remaining two, was dangerous enough; a horse in a sling, kicking with all four legs at once, was as dangerous as a cart-load of Afghans.
The insect situation did not improve when he went inside. In part, this was because the distinction between inside and outside was not closely observed in this part of the world; space was divided up by walls and screens, yes. But they all had great bloody holes in them (ornately shaped holes painstakingly carved by master craftsmen, yes, but none the less holes) to let in air and light and (or so Jack supposed in his more peevish moments) to keep buildings from bursting and falling down when the inmates got to farting—for these people ate beans, or, at any rate, a plethora of mysterious bean-like foodstuffs, as if they were all starving—which, come to think of it, they were.
At any rate, the result was that the gallery into which Jack had now entered was thick with flies, zinging through the darkness like spent grapeshot on the fringes of a battle, and crunching into his shaved head and raising welts. They had been drawn here, from all over the Indies, by the smell of diverse sick or injured creatures and their feed and their manure; for this hospital with all its stone screens and lattice-works was like a giant censer dispensing such fragrances into the air of Ahmadabad.
Past the mongoose with the suppurating eye, the jackal with mange, the half-paralyzed king cobra, the stunningly odoriferous civet-cat-with-bone-cancer, the mouse deer with the javelin wound did Jack proceed, and then entered a room filled with bird-cages of bent bamboo, where diverse broken-winged avians were on the mend. A peacock with an arrow stuck sideways all the way through his neck shuffled around, bumping into things and getting hung up on the cages and squawking in outrage. Jack gave him a wide berth, not wanting to get lockjaw off that arrowhead if the peacock should happen to execute a sharp turn in the vicinity of his knees.
Through a rickety door was a room piled floor to ceiling with even smaller cages housing sick or injured mice and rats, some of which sounded distinctly rabid. The less time spent here the better, and so Jack forged on to another room, and down some stone steps.