Before caving in, Verboom let out a muffled cry. He knelt down on one knee and scanned my face in horror. I was about to lay my sapper boots across that pig’s head of his when a horde of his menservants pulled me away from him. Verboom was slack-jawed, humiliated. Jeanne tried to patch the thing up as best she could. She presented her excuses, swearing that I was nothing to her but an overly protective guardian. And a little unhinged, she had to add, because even being held back by four men, I continued to shout and struggle.
“Martí! Beg pardon of Sir Joris van Verboom. Now!”
Jeanne’s demand prompted the servants to loose their hold on me a little, and I took the chance to launch myself at him again. There was somewhat less swagger to Verboom on this occasion. He turned to run but, unfortunately, slipped and fell flat on the road. I grabbed him by an ankle and dragged him along as the servants tried to hold me back by the legs. Before they carried me away from there, I was able to sink my teeth into his left buttock. You should have heard him shriek.
Youthful impetuousness is, in part, formed by the inability to see the consequences of one’s actions. But if you are a student kept according to the grace of the lord of Bazoches, under his guardianship and in his pay, when you shred the pantaloons of a houseguest with your teeth, well, my boy, it makes sense that the master of the house will want to have words.
As if this were not enough, my brawl with Verboom had been badly timed. Vauban’s meetings with Louis XIV’s ministers had made it clear to him that he had been ostracized. It was purely a matter of form that they had invited him; every one of his suggestions — as to matters of both war and peace — had been rejected out of hand. He returned to Bazoches in a dog of a mood, and the first piece of news he heard was that his reputation as a host had been dented.
Darkly, the Ducroix brothers said to me: “Martí, the marquis wants to see you.”
Jeanne had gone before me. In his absence, the marquis left her to see to the running of the castle, and she was responsible for whatever went on. When I went in, they were in the midst of trading insults. I caught Jeanne saying: “But you yourself have stated a thousand times the low opinion you have of Verboom.”
“We’re not talking about him!” shouted the marquis. “He had crossed my threshold, he should have been provided for! And instead of that, we attack him, we take bites out of him!” Seeing me, he exclaimed, “Ah, here’s the brute!”
He marched over to me. For a moment I thought he was going to give me a slap. “What excuse can that deranged mind of yours offer?” he rebuked. “Answer! What led you to abuse a guest in my home?”
“He was a base man,” I answered.
The truth is sufficiently powerful that it can shock the most eminent of men. The marquis lowered his voice, though not by much.
“And have you not been taught that certain buffers exist between goodness and evil, namely manners? You left the pantaloons of a royal engineer in tatters!”
I wanted to say something, but he cut me off, becoming extremely vexed again.”Silence! I never want to lay eyes on you again! Jamais!” he roared. “You will go to your quarters and stay there until tomorrow, when the diligence carriage arrives. You will then travel on it to your home or to wherever you please. In any case, very far from Bazoches. Now, out of my sight!”
Up in my room, I head-butted the wall. Home! Without a qualification, with no credentials. My father would kill me. Worse, at this point I knew how lucky I’d been. Life had gifted me something no amount of money could buy: being the student, the sole student, of the greatest genius of siege warfare ever to walk the earth. At the same time, I realized how far I was from having completed my studies; I had not received even half of what Bazoches had to offer. And the hardest thing to bear was the thought of being separated from Jeanne.
I had behaved like an idiot, a downright idiot. When it came to it, my mistake had been that of a poor student. If I had been attentive — if, as the Ducroix brothers had taught me, passion had not blinded me — I would have seen that Jeanne could never fall for a man like Verboom. But no, the Zuviría in me had gone and ruined everything.
The point being that, from that day on, I held Verboom in enmity until the end of his days. Later on, the Antwerp butcher would see me shackled, tortured, exiled, and worse things. But never did he cause me such harm as on that first occasion. My enmity for him was boundless, flawless, pure as crystal. A mutual enmity, it goes without saying, and one that lasted until that swine of all swines got the end he deserved. Lamentably, that episode lies outside my present account, for when it comes to that man’s demise, I relish the tale. He suffered greatly; after that, arriving in hell must have seemed like a Turkish bath for him.
Well, be a good girl and I’ll tell you later, my dear vile Waltraud — in one gap or another between chapters. But if your horror provokes you to vomit, at least turn your fat head away from me before you do it! I have heard an old saying from your hometown Vienna, which runs more or less: “Next to a good friend, the best thing one can have in this life is a good enemy!” Pah! If enemies they truly are, there is no such thing as a good one; there are only living enemies and dead, and while they live, they are a constant trouble.
Sponge cake — I shall have sponge cake. Bring it to me.
Thankfully, the angels never sleep. While I was shut in my room, the twins showed Vauban the plans for a project to fortify Arras. They handed him the prints and made comments while the marquis examined them carefully, leaning close to the paper, as his sight was failing. He used a sort of magnifying lens with no handle, a large piece of concave glass girded with iron and held up on three small wheels. It moved around on the paper in search of small errors. In such moments he resembled a simple jeweler.
Arras was a project very close to the maréchal’s heart. For one reason or another, he’d had to defer it constantly, but nonetheless ordered the Ducroix brothers to make plans for the most complete, most powerful, and best-equipped fortress imaginable. When Vauban was studying plans, he never spoke. There could be ten, fifteen, even twenty experts around him, and they could be making continuous remarks as to his marvelous projects. But as I say, Vauban was very sparing in his comments. Only his breathing would be heard, for, as with many men who breathe heavily when deep in thought, he turned his nose up at the general chatter.
At any event, those who knew him could guess his opinion by the sounds escaping from him. Silence was a bad sign, very bad. On the other hand, when an idea excited him, he let out the strangest guttural noises; to those not of his circle, these seemed to indicate annoyance, though it was quite the reverse.
As the Ducroix brothers continued to hand plans to him, the guttural grunts and groans grew even louder. At one point, his lens stopped over a bastion. “Et ça?” he asked, not looking up. “What are these three rises on each of the corners supposed to mean?”
“Turrets, monsieur,” they said. “Fortified turrets.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The mortar is the bastion’s prime enemy,” said Zeno. “The idea is to combat the enemy artillery by using the same weapons: Destroy their mortars using mortars of our own. With the advantage that the mortars inside the bastion will have a solid stone casing protecting them. The enemy must install theirs in exposed positions, making themselves vulnerable to cannonade. Meanwhile, those inside the stronghold, given their iron carapace, will go unharmed.”
Vauban’s guttural sounds grew louder.
“As you can see, the turrets have only a small opening near the top, in the shape of a half-moon. But the base will have a pinion on which it can turn, a platform allowing one hundred and eighty degrees’ turning range; with three mortars up there, any object outside will be covered.”