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

by Neal Stephenson

  “Lung?” Upnor guessed.

  “Liver,” Bob said, “or else I could never do this.” He inhaled and then spat at Upnor’s face, but it came out as a feckless spray.

  “’Twill be a slow-festering wound then,” Upnor said. “I will gladly supply you with a quicker death if you will be so good as to let go my weapon.” He glanced up for a moment, distracted by the sound of hurtling cavalry. “Sarsfield,” he pronounced. “Let us finish, I must go to them.”

  Bob turned his head sideways, just to get Upnor’s visage out of his sight. He saw a queer thing silhouetted against the deepening gray sky above the hill: a fellow in a gray coat perched on a pole above a ditch, not far away. No, he was not perched, but swinging across it, a matted ponytail trailing behind him like a profusion of battle-streamers from a regimental flag. It was an Irish infantryman, pole-vaulting across the ditch. Coming to the aid of Upnor, his English overlord. He would probably have a dirk or something to finish Bob off with.

  “When you go to the next world,” Upnor said, “tell the angels and demons that we know everything about your infamous cabal, and that we will have the gold of Solomon!”

  “What the bloody hell are you talking about!?” Bob exclaimed. But before answering, Upnor peeled Bob’s hand off the guard, pinky first. He planted his foot in Bob’s stomach and stood up, yanking the blade out.

  “You know perfectly well,” he said indignantly, “Now go and do as I have instructed you!” He aimed a death-blow at Bob’s heart. Bob put his hands up to slap it aside. Then a large object hurtled across the sky and smashed into the rapier’s guard, crumpling the bars and sending it spinning away.

  Upnor staggered back, gripping a damaged hand. Bob looked up to see a bulky figure in a ragged muddy gray coat, gripping eight feet or so of pike-staff: the same bit that Bob had broken off the cavalry standard.

  Bob levered himself up on his elbow and rose to a seated position to find the cool, level gaze of Teague Partry directed his way. Teague had a head like a cube of limestone, and brown hair pulled back tight against his skull, though many strands had come loose during the day’s fighting and been plastered back with mud. His blue-gray eyes were set close together, redoubling the intensity of his glare.

  “What d’you think y’are, a character in a friggin’ novel, Bob? Can you not perceive that the gentleman is wearin’ armor, and knows more concernin’ swordsmanship than you ever will?”

  “I perceive it well enough now, Teague.”

  Upnor had, during Teague’s scolding of Bob, gone over and retrieved his rapier. He held it now in his left hand, advancing crab-wise toward Teague.

  “Look out, Teague, he’s as dangerous with his left as he is with his right—”

  “Bob! You make too much and too little of him at the same time. As a ’fencer he’s a caution, ’tis plain enough to see, but in the larger scheme, Bob, what is he but a friggin’ tosser wavin’ a poker around in the dark.” By this time Upnor had advanced to within about eight feet and so Teague gave his stave a toss upward, gripped it with both hands at the end, and with a grunt, swung it round in a long arc parallel to the ground, catching Upnor in the side and flattening him. Upnor made a grab at the end of the staff, which had ended up hovering over his face, but his movements were cramped by his steel cuirass, which now sported a huge dent jabbing deep into his side. Teague withdrew the stave, shifted his grip so that he was holding it in the middle, raised it up above his head, and began to execute a series of brisk stabbing motions, with the occasional mighty swing. These were accompanied by metallic bashing sounds and screams from Upnor’s end of the stick.

  Between these efforts he sent the following, loosely connected string of comments and observations Bob’s way:

  “You have responsibilities now, Bob. You must lose this naïve understanding of violence! You are embarrassin’ me in front of the lads! You can’t play by their rules or they’ll win unfailingly! You don’t engage in courtly play-fightin’ with one such as this. You get a great friggin’ tree-branch and keep hittin’ him with it until he dies. Like that. D’you see, boys?”

  “Aye, Uncle Teague,” came back two voices in unison.

  Bob looked to the other side of the ditch and saw a pair of blond lads there, each holding the reins of a horse. One of them—it looked like Jimmy—had the horse Bob had rode in on, and the other—by process of elimination, Danny—had the standard-bearer’s.

  “There,” Teague said. “Now get you over the ditch and be gone with the lads.”

  “I’ve been run through the liver.”

  “All the more reason to stop your lollygaggin’. You’ll bleed to death shortly or heal up in a few weeks—the liver has a miraculous power of regeneration, while the body lives. Take it from an Irishman.”

  Bob slumped forward on his hands, then got his knees under him. He could hear blood dripping onto the ground. But it was only dripping, not coming in a continuous stream, or (worse) a series of spurts. If he had seen a private soldier with such a wound, he’d have guessed that the fellow would live, once the wound was packed with something to stop the bleeding. Upnor had been right; if Bob died of this, it would be because it festered in the days to come.

  “I’m not askin’ you to walk. You may ride one horse and the boys may share the other.”

  “And you, Teague?”

  “Oh, it’s into the ditch with me, Bob, into the bog. I’ll collect a musket from one of the Englishmen I killed today, and go a-rappareein’.” Teague’s eyes now turned into running pools, and he tilted his head back and sniffled. “Get you gone, none of us has a moment to waste.”

  “I’ll raise a monument in London,” Bob promised, and got up slowly. He did not pass out.

  “To me? They wouldn’t have it!”

  “To Upnor,” Bob said, staggering past the Earl’s smashed corpse, and kicking the rapier aside into the watercourse. “A fine statue of him, looking just as he does now, and an inscription: ‘In Memoriam, Louis Anglesey, Earl of Upnor, finest swordsman in England, beaten to death with a stick by an Irishman.’ ”

  Teague considered it for a moment, then nodded. “In Connaught,” he added.

  “In Connaught,” Bob agreed, then eyed the ditch. It looked as wide as the Shannon. But the boys were waiting on the other side: Jack’s boys, and now Bob’s. For under the circumstances they were likely the only children Bob would ever have. Teague gave him a mighty shove in the arse as he flew back over the water. By the time Bob got up from a rough, agonizing tumble on the far side and turned to thank him, Teague Partry was gone.

  A Hay-rick, St.-Malo, France

  9 APRIL 1692

  The mind is its own place, and in it self

  Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.

  —MILTON,

  Paradise Lost

  “THIS MUST BE how syphilis spreads: blokes like me, hopping from place to place.”

  “Why, Bob! I don’t believe anyone’s ever said anything quite so romantick to me.”

  “I can’t guess what you were expecting when you roger an old sergeant in hay.”

  “Come, lace me back up.”

  “Would you hold your hair up out of the way? There, that’s better…”

  “…”

  “…tedious work, ain’t it?”

  “Oh, stop complaining.”

  “I’ve no complaints. But we could have left this bit on, you know.”

  “Yes, and the stockings as well, and we could have done it standing up, and you with your boots and breeches on. But for me to enjoy it, Bob, I require a sense of abandon, of freedom, that only comes with removal of clothes.”

  “This tight enough?”

  “It is fine…for the same reason, Bob, I could do without your idle ruminations on syphilis, and how it spreads.”

  “I don’t have it, mind you. Haven’t rogered anyone in years.”

  “Nor do I. And neither have I.”

  “What d’you mean, you told me you’ve a baby boy, si
x months old—”

  “Last time we met. Now, seven months.”

  “Be that as it may, how can you say you haven’t rogered anyone in years?”

  “Sex with my husband I leave out of the reckoning altogether.”

  “Strikes me as a large omission.”

  “It would not, if you had ever had sex with Étienne de Lavardac, duc d’Arcachon.”

  “Can’t say as I have, Madame.”

  “Unless you did, and forgot about it. At any rate—he has been doing it to me again lately.”

  “Lately…ah. You are saying that there was a cessation, round about the time of the birth of number two, and now he is trying for three.”

  “In his mind they are One and Two respectively. For the first, being a bastard, is a zero; which means a nullity, something that does not exist.”

  “That—the bastard I mean—is the one you had round about the time I shipped out to Dundalk, and you got marooned in Dunkerque?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “Just refreshing my memory, my lady, no need to be getting all stiff in the spine—cor! It’s gone loose, I shall have to re-lace from the beginning.”

  “It is not necessary. Just get to work buttoning up the bodice.”

  “Got ripped a bit, I’m afraid.”

  “I’ll have it mended. Come, I am apprehensive that someone will happen along and discover us.”

  “Ah, but not to worry—I’m naked!”

  “How is it better to be naked?”

  “As long as I keep my mouth shut, I’ll be indistinguishable from one of your French nobility. They’ll run away in terror.”

  “Especially when they see your scars. Very impressive.”

  “You would never think so, if you had any notion of the pain that comes with these scars, the weakness, the helplessness—draining pus for months—not knowing from one moment to the next whether you shall live or die—”

  “You forget that I have given birth twice.”

  “Touché. Ah, but now you’ve brought me back round to my topic.”

  “What is your topic?”

  “You never talk about the bastard.”

  “Perhaps, from that, you should collect that I do not wish to speak of him.”

  “I was merely asking as a routine courtesy, as is common among parents.”

  “How are Jack’s boys?”

  “Jimmy and Danny are Regimental boys like their father and nuncle. If they’re doing as they ought to—which is unlikely—they are, at this moment, peeling potatoes at our camp outside of Cherbourg.”

  “Do they have any inkling that you are acting as a spy for Marlborough?”

  “Why, what an impolite question, Madame la duchesse! I am in no way certain that I am a spy. Haven’t made up my mind yet. Haven’t sent any information his way.”

  “Well, when you decide to do so, you may send it through me.”

  “If I decide to do so.”

  “You will. An invasion of England is planned, is it not?”

  “When French and Irish regiments march up to the tip of the Cotentin Peninsula and form great camps in the spring-time, it does make one tend to think ’long those lines, don’t it?”

  “In the end you’ll not suffer England to be invaded. You’ll inform Marlborough.”

  “Marlborough’s in disgrace. He and his meddlesome wife got on the wrong side of William and Mary. He had to sell his offices, his commissions. He is nothing now.”

  “Yes, it is the talk of every salon in Versailles. But if England is invaded, he will be un-disgraced very rapidly, and put at the head of some regiments. And you will rally to him.”

  “As you seem so certain of these things, I deem all your questions answered, madame—so I turn them round. Does the Duke of Arcachon have any inkling that you are a spy?”

  “Your supposition is mistaken. I spied for England once. Now I do it for myself.”

  “Ah. So, if we are to cross the Channel, you should like to know of it for your own purposes.”

  “You say this—‘for your own purposes’—as if I am the only one in the world who had purposes.”

  “Very well, very well…damned lot of buttons, ain’t it?”

  “You did not seem to mind so much when you were undoing them ten minutes ago.”

  “Twenty minutes, by your leave, madame, do allow me some pride. Ten minutes! Am I really so perfunctory?”

  “Perhaps I am.”

  “Hmm, now, that is an unusual turning of the tables…it is supposed to be he who is perfunctory and selfish, and she who wants to stretch it out.”

  “Ah, but I did stretch it out, Sergeant, when I was inspecting it for signs of the French Pox. And a long stretch it was.”

  “You try to change the subject, and to distract me with flattery—but this methodical inspection of my yard is further proof of the businesslike nature of the transaction just concluded, is it not?”

  “Very well…I hope that Number Three, as you count them, or Two, as Étienne does, will be half-Shaftoe rather than half-Lavardac, and, in consequence, altogether fitter, handsomer, and cleverer than Number Two/One, bless his poor little heart.”

  “I…I…I am shocked!”

  “Why so shocked, you who’ve been in battles and seen, and done, the worst that men can do?”

  “P’raps that is not so terrible, set against the worst that women can do.”

  “You protest too much. You are not serious. Though ’tis true there are terrible women in the world, I am not one of them.”

  “Why, to use a man in such a way…am I to have no knowledge of my own offspring!?”

  “Why did you not ask such penetrating questions prior to fucking me in a haystack, Sergeant Shaftoe? Were you not aware, until now, that fucking leads to babies?”

  “Very well, very well…that is not why I am shocked.”

  “Why then, Bob?”

  “Of course, I know you don’t really fancy me. So, ’tis not that I have been let down on that score.”

  “Just as I know you do not really fancy me.”

  “Of course not. Though you are fetching, a bit.”

  “Just as are you in your own mottled way, Bob.”

  “But I always assumed that you had me simply because you couldn’t have Jack.”

  “Just as you have me because you can’t have Abigail?”

  “Just so, madame. But it did never enter my head that it was, at root, a baby-making proposition…what is wrong with Number Two/One?”

  “Lucien is, to use an English expression, a funny-looking kid. ’Tis common among Lavardacs. Moreover, he is listless and slow to thrive.”

  “What of Number One/Null?”

  “The most beautiful child who ever lived. Bright, happy, vigorous, altogether radiant.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “He was baptized Jean-Jacques.”

  “I can guess where the Jacques is from.”

  “Yes, and the Jean is from Jean Bart.”

  “You named your firstborn after a pirate and a Vagabond?”

  “Don’t be so haughty. One of them is your brother, after all.”

  “But why this careful phrasing: ‘He was baptized Jean-Jacques’?”

  “He answers to Johann.”

  “How’s that again?”

  “Johann. Johann von Hacklheber.”

  “Peculiar name that, for the bastard of a French duchess.”

  “He has been…visiting in Leipzig for a few days short of eighteen months. When he went there, he was not quite a year and a half old. I have got reports of him from friends who dwell in that part of the world, and they inform me that he is called by the name Johann von Hacklheber there.”

  “Now, anything with a ‘von’ in it is a noble name—like ‘de’ here, am I right?”

  “Oh yes. He dwells in the household of a German baron.”

  “I know nothing of the ways of Continental nobility, but it strikes me as an unusual sort of arrangement.”

  “Y
ou have no idea.”

  “You may not know it, Madame, but you have got a sort of burning glow about the face and eyes now, a bit like during sex, but different.”

  “It is another form of desire, that’s all.”

  “You want the boy back. You are not happy with the arrangement…oh, Jesus!”

  “Go ahead and say it.”

  “He was taken from you!?”

  “Yes.”

  “Jesus. Why!?”

  “Never mind. My purpose is to get to him who took my boy, and…”

  “Get your boy back, I assume?”

  “…”

  “Or, to judge from the look on your face, perhaps I should not make assumptions.”

  “Let me tell you what is truly evil about what was done to me eighteen months ago.”

  “I am listening.”

  “You are probably phant’sying parallels, similitudes, between what was done to your Abigail and what was done to my Jean-Jacques. But put such thoughts out of your mind. Abigail is a slave, held against her will, misused. A prisoner. This is no longer true of my Jean-Jacques. He is better off as Johann in Leipzig than he was as Jean-Jacques in Versailles. The captors of Abigail are imbeciles—guilty of a failure of imagination. By keeping her in a miserable estate, they make you miserable, ’tis true—but your path is clear: It is the path so familiar from myths and legends, the path of righteous fury, revenge, retribution, rescue. Lothar von Hacklheber has done something infinitely more cruel. He has made my boy happy. If I were able, somehow, to go to Leipzig and steal him back, the child would be terrified and miserable. And perhaps justly so, for when I got back I should have no choice but to deposit him in some Church orphanage outside of Versailles to be raised by nuns and made over into a Jesuit priest.”

  “Hoosh. I am glad for my own sake, madame, that I was not anywhere near you at the moment when you first came to understand this…”

  “…”

  “Why are you staring at me thus? It makes me think I had better put my clothes back on—perhaps arm myself as well.”