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 to 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.
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.
But he could not make out any of their words. And this, he began to suspect, was all by design. This room was large enough to race horses in, but it had been emptied of furniture, except for the big armchair and the stool, which were in its center. The King could be certain that any words he spoke would be heard by Jack, and no one else.
"You know," said Jack, "I was a King for a while in Hindoostan, and my subjects would get worked up into a lather about a potato, which to them was worth as much as a treasure-chest. At first I'd want to know everything about the potato in question, and I would take a large stake in the matter, but towards the end of my reign—"
Here Jack rolled his eyes, as Frenchmen frequently did during encounters with Englishmen. Leroy seemed to take his meaning very clearly. "It is the same with every King."
"Potatoes grow back," Jack pointed out.
Louis took this as a witty and yet profound apothegm. "Indeed, mon cousin; and in the same way, there will always be more pieces of eight, as long as the metallic heart in Mexico City continues to beat."
Jack was a bit unsure as to why King Louis XIV was referring to him as my cousin, but he reckoned it must be a matter of protocol. Jack had been a king once. King of a ditch in Hindoostan, true; but no less a king.
"There is so much that is better ignored," Jack tried, hoping Leroy would agree, and apply the principle to his particular case.
"The King must not descend into these broils," said Leroy. "He is Apollo, riding above all in his bright chariot, seeing the entire world as if it were a courtyard."
"I could not have put it better myself," Jack said.
"But even bright Apollo had his adversaries: other Gods, and loathsome monsters, spawned before Time from the Earth and the Deep. The legions of Chaos."
"I never had to contend with those legions of Chaos myself, cuz, but then everything you do is on a much, much larger scale."
"There is another Heart that beats in London."
Jack had to ponder this ænigma for a moment. The happiest possible interpretation was that the King was speaking of Eliza, and that she was waiting for Jack on London Bridge. But given the general turn of recent events, this did not seem likely; the Jack-Eliza matter would definitely be classed as a "broil," not worth bringing up in conversation. Thinking of London Bridge reminded him of the water-pumps there at the northern end, which banged away like giants' hearts; this, then, reminded him of the Tower, and finally he got it.