The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and the System of the World

by Neal Stephenson

  Now tears were a watery thing, and so a pedantic schoolman might insist that they were opposite in nature to fire, and could have naught in common with that element. Yet, just as Eliza had never been far from little fires, so she had never been far from the shedding of tears. Children were everywhere, and they cried all the time. Full-grown people did it less often, but they still cried. Especially women. In the banyolar of Algiers, the harim of the Topkapi Palace, and various European households, Eliza had spent most of her time in the company of women of all ages and stations, and rarely did a single day pass without her seeing at least one person get a little sniffly and moist about the eyes, whether out of pain, anger, sadness, or joy. Eliza often allowed even herself to shed a tear or two in private, and had done so more freely since the birth of Jean-Jacques. But these sheddings of tears were like so many candle-flames or kitchen-fires: elements of domestic life, controlled, unremarkable.

  Eliza had seen, on occasion, crying of an altogether different nature: wild, hair-pulling, clothes-rending, spine-warping tear-rage. It had never happened to her, though, and she did not really ken it, until that evening when she walked down to the paddock out behind the stables of the Duc d’Arcachon, on the Plateau of Satory, and found herself standing face to face with Pasha: an albino Arabian stallion whom she had last encountered at dockside in the harbor of Algiers, eleven years ago. She and her mother had been snatched from the beach of Outer Qwghlm by a coastal raiding-galley of the Barbary Corsairs, and taken off into slavery; but presently they had learned that these Corsairs were operating in concert with a Christian ship. For they had spent the entire journey to Algiers being molested in a dark cabin by an uncircumcised man with white skin, who liked to dine on rotten fish. Delivered to Algiers, they had been assigned to a banyolar and become assets of some enterprise there, of which it was not possible to know very much, save that it imported certain goods—including slaves—from Christendom, exporting in exchange silks, perfumes, blades, delicacies, spices, and other luxuries of the East. When Eliza had reached puberty, she had been traded to Constantinople in exchange for this stallion—though according to what the Duke had just claimed, the exchange had been much more complicated than that, which only added insult to injury, since it implied that Eliza, by herself, was not worth as much as this horse. She had vowed then and there to find the smelly man in the dark cabin and kill him one day. Christendom being a large place—France alone had twenty millions of souls—she had supposed that finding the villain might take a while.

  She had been wrong-footed by the easiness of it. She had only been in Christendom for seven years! And it had only taken her two years to meet her first de Lavardac, and three or four to lay eyes, from a distance, on the duc d’Arcachon himself. Had she been a little more perceptive she might have recognized the duc for what he was, and done him in, a long time ago.

  What had she been doing instead? Socializing with Natural Philosophers. Putting on airs. Making money; all of which was now gone.

  The tears that came over her, then, when she let herself into the paddock, and came face to face with Pasha, and saw and knew all, were to normal everyday tears as the burning of Mr. Sluys’s house had been to the flame of a candle. It raged up in her so fast that it seemed, for a few moments, as if it might have the power to burst free from the confines of her body and make blades of grass bend double and flood the pasture with salty dew, make Pasha crumple to his arthritic knees, blow the fences down, make the trees sag and groan as in an ice-storm. Which might have been better for Eliza; but as it was, this self-feeding vortex of sorrow, humiliation, and rage could not escape her ribcage, and so it was her ribs that took all the punishment. For once it was a good thing to be wearing a corset, for without that reinforcement she might have broken her own back with these sobs. Like the burning house of Sluys, she howled, she creaked, and the tears coming out of her felt no less hot than streams of molten lead. Fortunate it was for Eliza that all of the guests were gathered some distance away, deafened by their own happy uproar. The only witness was Pasha. A younger horse might have been spooked by the transmogrification of the Countess de la Zeur into a Fury, a Medea. Pasha merely turned sideways, the better to keep Eliza within view, and nuzzled the green grass.

  “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.”

  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 any 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.

  “Y
ou 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.