The Confusion: Volume Two of the Baroque Cycle

by Neal Stephenson

  “I have not the remotest idea what has come over you, mademoiselle,” said a woman’s voice. “It is quite the strangest reaction I have ever seen, to a horse.”

  The Duchess of Oyonnax had timed the intrusion well. A minute before, Eliza wouldn’t have been able to stop herself even if the entire guest list had suddenly appeared around her. But the outburst had insensibly faded to a long slow run of sobs, which skidded to a halt when Eliza realized she was being watched.

  She straightened up, took a deep breath, shuddered it out, and hiccuped. She must look red-faced and perfectly ridiculous; this she knew. She must look as if she hadn’t aged a day, in body or mind, since her first encounter with Pasha. This made her wince a little bit; for on that day, she had lost her mother forever; and now, all of a sudden, here she was with a bigger, older, richer and stronger woman, who had materialized just as suddenly and inexplicably as Mum had vanished eleven years ago. This was perilous.

  “Say nothing,” said Madame la duchesse d’Oyonnax, “you’re in no condition to, and I don’t desire to know why this horse has such an effect on you. Given who it belongs to, I can only assume it is something unspeakable. The details are probably gross and tedious and in any event they are not important. All that I need to know of you, mademoiselle, I have seen on your face before, during and after dinner: that in general you are strangely fascinated by tales of women in a condition of slavery. That in particular you have found yourself in a like predicament; for you do not love Étienne de Lavardac, but will soon be cornered into marrying him. That you loathe his father the Duke. Please do not attempt to deny these things, or I am very much afraid that I shall laugh out loud at you.”

  And she paused, to give Eliza the opportunity; but Eliza said nothing.

  The Duchess continued: “I understand situations of this type as perfectly as Monsieur Bonaventure Rossignol understands cyphers. I phant’sied my predicament unique in all the world, until I came to Versailles! It did not take me long to understand that no one need put up with such unfair situations. There are ways to arrange it. No one lives forever, mademoiselle, and many do not deserve to live as long as they do.”

  “I know what you are talking about,” said Eliza. Her voice sounded quite strange at first, as though it belonged to a different Eliza altogether, one who had just been born screaming out of the old. She cleared her burnt throat and swallowed painfully. She could not keep her eyes from straying over to the shack where the Duchess had her soap made.

  “I see that you do,” said the Duchess.

  “There is nothing you could say to me that would change my intentions.”

  “Of course not, proud girl!”

  “My ends are fixed, and have been for many years. But as to means, it is possible that I might benefit from advice. For I do not care what happens to me; but if I pursue my ends through means that are obvious, it could lead to the little one in the orphanage being injured.”

  “Then know that you are in the most tasteful and cultivated society the world has ever seen,” said the Duchess, “where there is a refined and subtle way of doing anything that a person could conceive a wish for. And it would be disgraceful for one of your quality to go about it in a rude and obvious style.”

  “I would that you know one thing, which is that this is not about succession. It is not a matter of inheritance. It is a question of honor.”

  “This is to be expected. You loathe me. I have seen it in the way you look at me. You loathe me because you believe that my late husband’s money was the only thing that I cared about. Now, you want my advice; but first you are careful to stipulate that you are better than I, your motives purer. Now, listen to me, Mademoiselle la comtesse. In this world there are very few who would kill for money. To believe that the Court of France is crowded with such rare specimens is folly. There used to be, at court, many practitioners of the Black Mass. Do you really think that all of these people woke up one morning and said, ‘Today I shall worship and offer sacrifices to the Prince of Evil?’ Of course not. Rather, it was that some girl, desperate to find a husband, so that she would not be sent off to live out the rest of her life in some convent, would hear a rumor that such-and-such person could prepare a love potion. She would save her money and go into Paris and buy a magic powder from some mountebank. Of course it had no effect at all; but she would cozen herself into believing that it had worked a little bit, and so conceive a desperate hope, and a desire for something a little bit stronger: a magic spell, perhaps. One thing would lead to another, and in time she might find herself stealing the consecrated Host from some church, and taking it to a cellar where a Black Mass would be sung over her naked body. Errant foolishness all of it. Foolishness leading to evil. But did she set out to do evil? Did she ever conceive of herself as evil? Of course not.”

  “So much for lonely hearts, desperate for love,” said Eliza. “What of those who were married, and whose husbands dropped dead? Did they act out of love?”

  “Do you propose to act out of love, mademoiselle? I have not heard the word love escape your pretty mouth. I heard something about honor instead; which tells me that you and I have more in common than you would like to admit. You are not the only woman in the world who is capable of taking offense at a violation of her honor, and who has the steel to respond. Tout le monde knows that Étienne de Lavardac seduced you—”

  Eliza snorted. “Do you think it’s that? I don’t care about that.”

  “Frankly, mademoiselle, I could not care less why it is that you want your marriage to be brief and your widowhood long.”

  “Oh, no. It is not Étienne who deserves this.”

  “The duc d’Arcachon, then? Very well. There is no accounting for taste. But you must understand that refinement is not compatible with haste. If you want the Duke dead now, go and stab him. If you want to enjoy his being dead for a little while, and to see your orphan grow up, you will have to be patient.”

  “I can be patient,” Eliza said, “until the fourteenth of October.”

  *For the French did not recognize William’s title as King of England

  Book 4

  Bonanza

  The Gulf of Cadiz

  5 AUGUST 1690

  The Spaniards tho’ an indolent Nation, whose Colonies were really so rich, so great, and so far extended, as were enough even to glut their utmost Avarice; yet gave not over, till, as it were, they sat still, because they had no more Worlds to look for; or till at least, there were no more Gold or Silver Mines to discover.

  —DANIEL DEFOE,

  A Plan of the English Commerce

  WITH ONE EYE JACK peered through his oar-lock across the gulf. He was looking edge-on through a slab of dry heat that lay dead on the water, as liquefacted glass rides above molten tin in a glass-maker’s pan. On a low flat shore, far away, white cabals of ghosts huddled and leaped, colossal and formless. None of the slaves quite knew what to make of it until they crawled in closer to shore, a cockroach on a skillet, and perceived that this Gulf was lined with vast salt-pans, and the salt had been raked up into cones and hillocks and step-pyramids by workers who were invisible from here. When they understood this, their thirst nearly slew them. They had been rowing hard for days.

  Cadiz was a shiv of rock thrust into the gulf. White buildings had grown up from it like the reaching fingers of rock crystals. They put into a quay that extended from the base of its sea-wall, and took on more fresh water; for one of the ways that the Corsairs kept them on a leash was by making sure that the boat was always short of it. But the Spanish harbor-master did not suffer them to stay for very long, because (as they saw when they came around the point) the lagoon sheltered in the crook of the city’s bony arm was crowded with a fleet of Ships that Jack would have thought most remarkable, if he had never seen Amsterdam. They were mostly big slab-sided castle-arsed ships, checkered with gun-ports. Jack had never seen a Spanish treasure-galleon in good repair before—off Jamaica he had spied the wrack of one slumped over a reef. In a
ny event, he had no trouble recognizing these. “We have not arrived too early,” he said, “and so the only question that remains is, have we arrived too late?”

  He and Moseh de la Cruz, Vrej Esphahnian, and Gabriel Goto were all looking to one another for answers, and somehow they all ended up looking to Otto van Hoek. “I smell raw cotton,” he said. Then he stood up and looked out over the gunwale and up into the city. “And I see cargadores toting bales of it into the warehouses of the Genoese. Cotton, being bulky, would be the first cargo to come off the ships. So they cannot have dropped anchor very long ago.”

  “Still, it is likely we are too late—surely the Viceroy’s brig would waste no time in going to Bonanza and unloading?” This from the raïs or captain, Nasr al-Ghuráb.

  “It depends,” van Hoek said. “Of these anchored fleet-ships, only some are beginning to unload—most have not broken bulk yet. This suggests that the customs inspections are not finished. What do you see to larboard, Caballero?”

  Jeronimo was peering towards the anchored fleet through an oar-lock on his side. “Tied up alongside one of the great ships is a barque flying the glorious colors of His Majesty the Deformed, Monstrous Imbecile.” Then he paused to mutter a little prayer and cross himself. When Jeronimo attemped to say the words “King Carlos II of Spain,” this, or even less flattering expressions, would frequently come out of his mouth. “More than likely, this is the boat used by the tapeworms.”

  “You mean the customs inspectors?” Moseh inquired.

  “Yes, you bloodsucking, scalp-pilfering, half-breed Christ-killer, that is what I meant to say—please forgive my imprecision,” answered Jeronimo politely.

  “But the Viceroy’s brig would not have to clear customs here at Cadiz—it could do so at Sanlúcar de Barrameda, and avoid the wait,” Moseh pointed out.

  “But as part of his ransackings, the Viceroy would be certain to have cargo of his own loaded on some of these galleons. He would have every reason to linger until the formalities were complete,” Jeronimo said.

  “Hah! Now I can see up into the Calle Nueva,” said van Hoek. “It is gaudy with silks and ostrich-plumes today.”

  “What is that,” Jack asked, “the street of clothes-merchants?”

  “No, it is the exchange. Half the commerçants of Christendom are gathered there in their French fashions. Last year these men shipped goods to America—now, they have gathered to collect their profits.”

  “I see her,” said Jeronimo, with a frosty calm in his voice that Jack found moderately alarming. “She is hidden behind a galleon, but I see the Viceroy’s colors flying from her mast.”

  “The brig!?” said several of the Ten.

  “The brig,” said Jeronimo. “Providence—which buggered us all for so many years—has brought us here in time.”

  “So the thunder that rolled across the Gulf last night was not a storm, but the guns of Cadiz saluting the galleons,” Moseh said. “Let us drink fresh water, and take a siesta, and then make for Bonanza.”

  “It would be useful if we could send someone into the city now, and let him loiter around the House of the Golden Mercury for a while,” van Hoek said. Which to Jack would have meant no more than the singing of birds, except that the name jogged a memory.

  “There is a house in Leipzig of the same name—it is owned by the Hacklhebers.”

  Van Hoek said, “As salmon converge from all the wide ocean toward the mouths of swift rivers, Hacklhebers go wherever large amounts of gold and silver are in flux.”

  “Why should we care about their doings in Cadiz?”

  “Because they are sure to care about ours,” van Hoek said.

  “Be that as it may, there’s not a single man, free or slave, aboard this galleot who could get through the city-gate. So this discussion is idle,” said Moseh.

  “You think it will be any different at Sanlúcar de Barrameda?” van Hoek scoffed.

  “Oh, I can get us into that town, Cap’n,” Jack said.

  AFTER THE HEAT of midday had broken, they rowed north, keeping the salt-pans to starboard. Their ship was a galleot or half-galley, driven by two lateen sails (which were of little use today, as the wind was feeble and inconstant) and sixteen pairs of oars. Each of the thirty-two oars was pulled by two men, so the full complement of rowers was sixty-four. Like everything else about the Plan, this was a choice carefully made. A giant war-galley of Barbary, with two dozen oar-banks, and five or six slaves on each oar, and a hundred armed Corsairs crowding the rails, would of course bring down the wrath of the Spanish fleet as soon as she was sighted. Smaller galleys, called bergantines, carried only a third as many oarsmen as the galleot that they were now rowing across the Gulf of Cadiz. But on such a tiny vessel it was infeasible, or at least unprofitable, to maintain oar-slaves, and so the rowers would be freemen; rowing alongside a larger ship they’d snatch up cutlasses and pistols and go into action as Corsairs. A bergantine, for that reason, would arouse more suspicion than this (much larger) galleot; it would be seen as a nimble platform for up to three dozen boarders, whereas the galleot’s crew (not counting chained slaves) was much smaller—in this case, only eight Corsairs, pretending to be peaceful traders.

  The galleot was shaped like a gunpowder scoop. Beneath the bare feet of the oarsmen there was loose planking, covering a shallow bilge, but other than that there was no decking—the vessel was open on the top along its entire length, save for a quarterdeck at the stern, which in the typical style of these vessels was curved very high out of the water. So any lookout gazing down into the galleot would clearly see a few dozen naked wretches in chains, and cargo packed around and under their benches: rolled carpets, bundles of hides and of linen, barrels of dates and olive oil. A spindly swivel-gun at the bow, and another at the stern, both fouled by lines and cargo, completed the illusion that the galleot was all but helpless. It would take a closer inspection to reveal that the oarsmen were uncommonly strong and fresh: the best that the slave-markets of Algiers had to offer. The ten participants in the Plan were distributed in outboard positions, the better to peer through oarlocks.

  “In this calm we’ll have at least a night and a day to await the Viceroy’s ship,” Jack noted.

  “Much hangs on the tides,” van Hoek said. “We want a low tide in the night-time. And the weather must remain calm, so that we can row away from any pursuers during the hours of darkness. At sunrise the wind will come up, and then anyone who can see us will be able to catch us…” His voice trailed off to a mumble as he pondered these and other complications, which had seemed hardly worth mentioning when they had been developing the Plan, and now, like shadows at sunset, stretched out vast, vague, and terrifying.

  The brassy light of late afternoon was gleaming in through their larboard oar-locks when the galleot sank slightly lower into the water, and began to quiver and squirm in a current. At first they did not even recognize it—this was the first river of any significance they’d encountered since passing Gibraltar, or for that matter since leaving Algiers. Jack knew in his arms and his back why the Moors who’d roved up this way ages ago had named it al-Wadi al-Kabir, the Great River. When Jeronimo felt it tugging at his oar, he stood up and thrust an arm through his oar-lock to clip the top of a wave with one cupped hand. Slurping up a mouthful of water, he coughed, and then affected a blissful expression. “It is fresh water, the water of the Guadalquivir, rushing down from the mountains of my ancestors,” he announced, and more in that vein. During this ceremony his oar did not move, which meant that no oars on that side could.

  “Speaking personally,” Jack said loudly, “I have more experience of sewers than of mountain streams, and cannot believe we have come all this distance to row in circles in the run-off of Seville and Cordoba!”

  Jeronimo thrust out his chest and prepared to challenge Jack to a duel—but then the nerf du boeuf came down across the Spaniard’s shoulder blades as their overseer reminded them that they were yet slaves. Jack wondered how long it would take Jeronimo t
o get into a sword-fight after he was allowed to have a sword.

  The next few hours provided more reminders of their lowly station in the world as they stroked upstream with the sun clawing at their faces. Van Hoek cursed almost without letup, and Jack reflected that, for an officer, nothing could be more humiliating than to face backwards, and never see where you were headed. But at some point they began to see tops of masts around them, and heard the blessed sound of the anchor-chains rumbling through their hawse-holes, and bent forward over their warm oars to stretch out the muscles of their backs.

  Nasr al-Ghuráb, the raïs, was kul oglari, meaning the son of a Janissary by a woman native to the territory round Algiers—in any event, he spoke passable Spanish as well as Sabir. In the latter tongue, he now said, “Bring out the spare wretches.” Planking was pulled up and four damp oar-slaves climbed out of the bilge and quickly replaced Jack, Moseh, Jeronimo, and van Hoek. This took place under cover of a sail that had been spread out above them as if to be mended, so that any curious sailors who might be looking down from a yard or maintop of a nearby ship would not witness the ennoblement going on in the aisle of this newly arrived galleot. Meanwhile—in case anyone was counting heads—four of the Corsair crew retreated beneath the shade of the quarterdeck to take refreshment and doze. A canvas sack full of old clothes—looted from persons who were now captives in Algiers—was also brought up, and the four began to paw through it like children playing dress-up.