"True, it's a foregone conclusion that Eliza—who according to Jack is an ex-slave like us, and a passionate hater of that Institution—would gladly be the patroness of my book, and support its publication," Dappa admitted. "But I have reasons besides that for preferring Qwghlm. To reach London or Amsterdam we'd have to sail up the Channel, practically under the guns of St.-Malo and Dunkerque and diverse other French privateer-havens. This were unwise even if France and England were not involved in a great war."
"We could go north round Britain, conceivably," Vrej muttered, "and approach through the North Sea, which ought to be a Dutch-English lake."
"But if we are going that route anyway, we may as well go to Qwghlm."
"I am coming about to your view," Vrej said, after a moment.
"I don't like it," van Hoek said.
AUGUST 1702
The Seamen returned enriched with the Plunder, not of Ships, but of Fleets, Loaden with Silver; they went out Beggars, and came home Gentlemen; nay, the Wealth they brought Home, not only enrich'd themselves, but the whole Nation.
—DANIEL DEFOE, A Plan of the English Commerce
TWO MONTHS LATER, while Minerva was lost in fog off of Outer Qwghlm, a loud noise came up from her hold, and she stopped moving.
Van Hoek drew his cutlass and went after the pilot, James Hh, and at length tracked him down at the head. He was perched on the bowsprit. "Welcome to Qwghlm," he announced, "you are hard aground on the rock that we call the Dutch-hammer." Then he jumped.
By this point van Hoek had been joined by several other men with pistols, and all of them rushed forward in the hope of getting a shot off at Hh. But they did not see him in that icy water (which soon would have killed him anyway); all they saw was a faint impression in the fog, like a woodcut pressed with diluted ink, of a longboat rowing away. That longboat fired a signal from its swivel-gun, and when the boom had finished echoing among the Three Sghrs, the men on Minerva could hear the distant shouting of men on other ships—a whole squadron, arrayed all around them, riding safely at anchor, well clear of the stony reef. All of these voices were speaking in French except for one or two, shouting through speaking-trumpets: "Welcome home, Jaaack!"
The men on Minerva remained perfectly still. It was not that they were trying to be stealthy—there was little point in hiding now. This was a ceremonial silence, as at a funeral. Too, there was a process of mental rearrangement taking place in the minds of the ship's officers, as they sorted through the memories of everything that had occurred in the last few months, and began to understand it all as an elaborate deception, a trap laid by the French.
As the fog began to lift, and the outlines of French frigates started to resolve and solidify all around them. Van Hoek ambled back to the poop deck, laid his right arm out carefully on the rail, and brought his cutlass down on it, a few inches above the wrist. The blade caught in his bones and he had to worry it out and chop several more times. Finally the hand—already mangled and truncated from diverse mishaps—made a splash in the water below. Van Hoek lay down on the deck and turned white. He probably would have died if he had not been aboard a ship where treating amputations was a routine affair. This at least gave the sailors something to do while the French longboats converged on them.
At some point Dappa got a distracted look on his face, excused himself from van Hoek's side, and began to walk briskly in the direction of Vrej Esphahnian.
Vrej drew one of several pistols from his waist-band and aimed it at Dappa. A whirring blade flew into his arm, like a steel hummingbird, and spoiled his aim. It was a hunting yo-yo and it had been flung by a Filipino crewman standing off to Vrej's side.
Vrej dropped the weapon and flung himself overboard. He was wearing a scarlet cape that billowed up as he fell, like a sail, and formed a bubble on the water below, an island of satin that kept him afloat until a Frenchman on a longboat flung a rope to him.
"Say the word, Dad," said Jimmy, who was manning a loaded swivel-gun, and holding a lighted torch above its touch-hole.
"It's me they want," Jack said, matter-of-factly, as if he were captured by the French Navy every day.
"It's us they have," Danny answered, pointedly, bringing another swivel-gun to bear on another longboat, "and we'll soon make 'em wish they didn't."
Jack shook his head. "This is not to be another Cairo."
QWGHLM CASTLE WAS a Dark Ages citadel that had all too obviously failed its essential purpose. Indeed, most of it was not even competent to keep out sleet and rats. Its lee corner, where it gripped the living rock of the Sghr, had, however, at least put up a struggle against gravity. It supported a row of stark crenels that finger-combed the tangled winds above the crunchy wilderness of smithereens and guano that accounted for the rest of the Castle.
To re-roof such a thing was to waste money; but to embed a whole brand-new Barock château in it, as the duc d'Arcachon had recently finished doing, was to make some sort of ringing proclamation. In the visual language of architects and decorators, the proclamation said something about whatever glorious principles were personified by all its swooping, robed, wreathed, winged demigods. Translated into English it said, "I am rich and powerful, and you are not."
Jack got the message. They put him under house-arrest in a grand bedchamber with a high Barock window through which the Duke and Duchess, presumably, could watch the comings and goings of ships in the harbor. The room's back wall, facing these windows, consisted mostly of mirrors—which as even Jack knew was an homage to the Galerie des Glaces at Versailles.
Jack lay in bed for several days, unable to bring himself to look into any mirrors, or to go near that window and see Minerva stuck on the Dutch-hammer. Sometimes he would get out of bed and hug the cannonball that was attached to his neck-collar by a four-foot length of chain and carry it into the en suite garderobe: a closet with a wooden bench decorated with a hole. Being ever so careful not to let the cannonball fall into that hole—for he'd not quite decided to kill himself yet—he'd sit down and void himself into a chute that spilled out onto the stone cliff-side far below.
Years ago—the last time a collar of iron had been locked around his neck by an Arcachon—John Churchill had warned him that angry Frenchmen were bound to come after him with pliers sooner or later. Jack could only assume that this was still true, and that in the meantime he was being kept in luxurious surroundings as part of some highly refined campaign of sarcasm.
After a week they moved him to a stone chamber. The windows were crossbow-embrasures that had recently been chocked up with pigs of glass. But they did afford him a view of the Dutch-hammer and its latest victim. Minerva had languished there, an object of ridicule, as gold and silver were extracted from her hold, and replaced with rocks to keep her ballasted.
"Did Vrej survive the fall, and the water?" was Jack's first question when Edmund de Ath—who had revealed himself to be, in fact, one Édouard de Gex, a Jesuit, and a hater of the Jansenists and of the Enlightenment both—came around to taunt him.
Édouard de Gex looked surprised. "Why do you ask? Surely you're not naïve enough to think you'll have an opportunity to kill him."
"Oh no, I was just wondering how it came out in the end."
"How what came out?"
"The story. You see, all along I've been supposing that this was my story, but now I see it has really been Vrej's."
Édouard de Gex shrugged. "He lives. He has a bit of a catarrh. When he's feeling better he'll probably come around and explain matters to you."
"That should be a lively conversation…but pray tell, why the hell are you here?"