The house was sixty feet wide, and fifty from where Eliza came in to the front of the orchestra pit, where a man in a wig was standing with his back to her, moving a staff up and down in time with the music. The floor was scored into semicircular tracks by low walls that sprang in concentric arcs from one side-wall to the other, all focused inwards on center front stage. It recalled a Greek amphitheatre, without the weather and without the Greeks. An aisle ran down the middle in a straight line connecting Eliza to the man with the staff. She began to walk down that aisle. Bob had recommended she stay near an exit, in case the theatre should be torched by the Mobb; but the musicians did not suspect they were in any peril, and she ought to warn them. It would have been reasonable to shout out an alarum from the back of the house. But theatre-etiquette had somehow taken over from street-instincts, and she was disinclined to make a fuss. By the time she reached the place where she could rest her arms on the top of the little parapet that enclosed the orchestra pit, the music seemed to be drawing to some sort of coda; the up-and-down movement of the conductor’s staff became more pronounced, and when he feared that matters were getting out of hand, he allowed it to slip down in his grip, so that it produced an audible thump on the floor with every beat.
The music stopped.
“Herr Handel,” Eliza said, for she had recognized the conductor, “pardon me, but—”
She was interrupted by a voice from the stage, incredibly loud. It was Sir Epicure Mammon in the latest fashions, prancing across a London square with his dodgy sidekick, Surly.
Come on, sir. Now, you set your foot on shore
In novo orbe; here’s the rich Peru;
And there within sir,
[gesturing at the front of a noble town-house fronting on the square] are the golden mines, Great Solomon’s Ophir!
Eliza cowered for a moment—those theatre-going habits again. Then she returned to the pit wall to discover Georg Friedrich Handel looking at her, a bit slack-jawed. Having confirmed that this really was the Duchess of Arcachon-Qwghlm, albeit in a state of déshabille only dreamed of by most gentlemen, he executed a perfect court-bow, deploying his conducting-staff as counterbalance.
“I am sorry, I did not understand that this was a full rehearsal!” she exclaimed.
Behind Epicure Mammon and Surly, a carpenter was kneeling down to tack a bit of stage-dressing in place, and to one side, a painter was daubing away at a trompe l’œil sky. Mammon scowled at her. She raised a hand to her mouth in apology.
“My lady,” exclaimed Handel, reverting, in his astonishment, to German, “what has brought you here?”
“This night,” insisted Mammon, “I’ll change all that is metal in thy house, to gold. And early in the morning, will I send to all the plumbers, and the pewterers, and buy their tin, and lead up; and to Lothbury, for all the copper.”
“What, and turn that, too?” asked Surly, expertly feigning amazement, but at the same time, somehow managing to favor Eliza with a wink; Mammon might scorn her, but Surly knew a beautiful woman when he saw one.
“Yes,” said Sir Epicure Mammon, “and I’ll purchase Devonshire, and Cornwall, and make them perfect Indies! You admire now?”
“No, faith,” said Surly. But he muttered the line distractedly. Having Eliza below was bad enough; but, too, it was impossible to ignore the uncouth noises off from stage right: blurted exclamations, grunts, and ring of steel on steel. Even the musicians, who had been transfixed, for a few moments, by the apparition of a Duchess, had begun turning their heads to look.
The stage of the Italian Opera was uncommonly deep, making it famous among those who loved magnificent sets, and infamous among those who wanted to hear the words. A vast canvas had been stretched across the back of it, and painted to look like an idealized vision of Golden Square, stretching off into a hazy distance; before it, model town-houses had been erected, to perfect the illusion. It tricked the eye very well until a bloody, slashed-up man vaulted over the parapets and rolled to the ground in the deep upstage; he looked like a giant, thirty feet tall, fe-fi-fo-fumming around Golden Square and bleeding on the bowling-green. Which was most inexplicable, until a moment later the very fabric of the Universe was rent open; for a blade of watered steel had been shoved through the taut canvas upstage, and slashed across it in a great arc, tearing the heavens asunder. Through the gap leapt Jack Shaftoe; and then giants duelled in Golden Square.
Jack had a blade that would slash through limbs as if they were melons, but it was heavy and slow. With his tiny small-sword, de Gex could not slash, but he could poke a man through in five places before the victim could say “ouch.” Jack kept humming his scimitar through the space separating him from de Gex, to keep the other from advancing in range for a fatal lunge. De Gex maneuvered round those terrifying cuts, though diverse slashes on his arms suggested he had only just avoided some. He was studying Jack, awaiting the one mistake that would give him an opening to lunge through.
Epicure Mammon and Surly had conceded center stage to the duellists, and now stood at the edges of the proscenium—bit players, forgotten. The painter and the carpenter were on their feet, each torn between fear of the blades, and lust to avenge the damage wreaked on their work by Jack and de Gex respectively. It presently became clear that each of the duellists had a strategy as well as tactics. De Gex was waiting for Jack to become exhausted, which must happen soon. Jack was backing de Gex towards the brink of the stage; this would put him in a position to be hacked to pieces, unless he wanted to chance a jump down into the pit. Understanding this well enough, the musicians had already gone into motion: the violins and woodwinds were crowding into the corner farthest from de Gex and filing out through a door, not far from Eliza, that gave access to the floor of the house. The cellists and bassists were trying to decide between saving themselves, and saving their instruments. Handel was absolutely disgusted. “Get back in your chairs, all of you! You are being paid for five acts, not two!” But de Gex’s boots were already at the edge of the stage, his blood was dripping onto the kettledrums, with faint sounds like reports of distant cannons, and the pit was depopulated. Handel tried to collar a fleeing cellist, and wound up holding a cello. Eliza passed its owner on his way out as she was going in. For she feared Handel did not reck the danger. She rushed across the pit and divested him of the cello and set it down on its tail-pin, cradling its narrow neck in her hand. “Let us find a way out,” she said. She reached to place her hand on his epaulet but grasped only air, for the composer was storming toward the kettledrums. “Let us leave these very dangerous men to—”
But all was now overturned in an instant. Jack had got de Gex where he wanted him, and was winding up for a death-blow, when the painter ducked in, and flung a whole bucket of white paint into Jack’s face.
There was a moment of stillness. Then de Gex began hopping round into a new position: he’d been ready for a leap into the percussion section, and now needed to make a lunge for Jack’s heart. He had nearly gotten ready when Handel, standing below him in the pit, tossed his staff straight up, caught the end of it in both hands, and swung it round in a mighty hay-maker, catching one of de Gex’s shins with such violence that the blood-slick foot was knocked back and off the edge of the stage. The rest of de Gex shortly followed. He made a flailing backwards fall into a kettledrum. One leg and an arm—his sword-arm—ruptured the drumhead and ended up beneath him in the immense copper kettle. The other limbs sprawled over its rim like claws of a lobster that does not wish to be cooked.
Handel had been left off-balance by his mighty swing. De Gex lashed out with his free hand and caught the composer’s lace cravat in a bloody grip. He jerked hard, desperately trying to pull himself out. Eliza reacted before she could think. Her free hand dropped to the bridge of the cello. She raised it on high as her other hand levered the neck down toward the floor, and she launched it across the pit in a high arc. It rotated as it hurtled through apogee, and came down like a javelin, its whole weight concentrated behind th
e tail-pin. When it stopped, it was sitting on de Gex’s chest. It lodged there at an angle, emitting a spectral chord as the life sighed out of de Gex. He let go of Handel’s cravat.
The composer picked up his staff from the floor and righted his periwig. “Fifth page, second bar!” he called out. But the musicians were slow to return.
Eliza looked up and found a burst of paint where Jack had been, and a trail of white footprints leading out to backstage and Unicorn Court.
She was thinking about the prophecy Jack had alluded to. Jack styled it a prophecy, anyway; in her mind, it had been more in the nature of a blunt promise. She had spoken it to Jack twelve years ago, in the Petit Salon of the Hôtel Arcachon in Paris, with Louis XIV as witness. Most inconveniently, she had forgot the exact wording of it. It had been something along the lines of that Jack would never see her face nor hear her voice until the day he died. Eliza being something of a stickler for promises and commitments, she now reviewed the last few minutes’ events in her mind, and satisfied herself that this one had not yet been broken. At no time had Jack gotten a look at her, for his gaze had been fixed on de Gex the whole time, or at least until he’d gotten a bucket of paint in the face. And she had not spoken any words he was likely to have heard.
And now he was gone, and could neither hear nor see her.
She turned around to face the house. Musicians and Actors had withdrawn to the farthest corners, and were looking to her, as if for a cue.
“It is safe now,” she announced. “Jack Shaftoe has left the building.”
Golden Square
THE SAME TIME
“YOU TOLD HIM WHAT!?” said Daniel.
“You heard me,” said Roger; then, when he had grown weary of Daniel’s gape and stare, “Really.”
“Really? What does that mean?”
“You are so tediously parson-like sometimes. I think it must be the lingering influence of Drake.”
“I am being pragmatic. What if Bolingbroke demands proof that we have Jack? I haven’t the faintest idea where the man is.”
“Daniel, look about you.”
Daniel did. He and Roger were at a corner of Golden Square, down the way a bit from Bolingbroke’s house, in a sort of caravan-camp of pricey coaches and good horses: the field headquarters of Whigdom. Isaac had already gone home in the phaethon. Mohawks were galloping hither and cantering thither proclaiming news, and shaking encyphered writs. The house of Bolingbroke was desolate: the curtains and shutters had been drawn, most lights had been snuffed, and it was not really known whether Bolingbroke himself was still in the place. Rumor had it he’d gone to his club.
“Behold,” Roger said, “we have won.”
“How do you know that!?”
“I can just tell.”
“How?”
“I saw it in his face.”
Roger excused himself, not by word, or by gesture, but by somehow changing, for a moment, the way his eyes looked at Daniel. He strolled over to a little war party of Mohawks who were standing near their horses, and addressed them: “We have won. Let the word go forth; light the beacons.” He then turned round and began making his way toward some cluster of notables. The Mohawks behind him began hip-hip-hooraying, and pretty soon everyone in Golden Square was doing it.
Daniel was slow to take up the cheer. But when he did, he meant it. This was politics. It was ugly, it was irrational, but it was preferable to war. Roger was being cheered because he had won. What did it mean to win? It meant being cheered. So Daniel huzzahed, as lustily as his dry pipes and creaky ribs would permit, and was astounded to see the way people came a-running: not only the Quality from their town-houses, but hooligans and Vagabonds from bonfire-strewn fields to the north, to throng around Roger and cheer him. Not because they agreed with his positions, or even knew who he was, but because he was plainly enough the man of the hour.
Billingsgate Dock
A BIT LATER
“IT IS A WONDER,” exclaimed Johann von Hacklheber, wrapping an arm tight round Caroline’s waist, and lifting her off the brink of the wharf, “how many people will do favors for one who is expected to be the next Queen of England.” He was ankle-deep in Thames-water on Billingsgate Stair; severed fish-heads nuzzled his boot and ogled Caroline’s bum as he toddled round and got in position to set her into the waiting longboat. She had her arm round his neck very tight, as if meaning to shut him up by stuffing one of her breasts into his mouth. He did not complain, but only gripped her buttock that much tighter through her breeches. All of these mutual gropings could be excused on grounds that the Princess must not be allowed to fall into the cold stew of fish-innards that was Billingsgate Dock. It was a chancy maneuver; the night was dark and the steps slick. Johann thought he was being decorous enough. But the thirty or so men who had brought Caroline here, in a royal progress of coaches, sedan-chairs, and out-riders, were having none of it. They were all drunk as lords. As a matter of fact, to judge by the escutcheons gilded onto their carriage-doors, most of them were lords. There was no aspect of the scene on the stairs that was not suggestive, to them, of something.
“I smell fish!” one of them shouted. And there were a hundred other remarks, most of them a good deal more direct and to the point.
“Gentlemen!” Johann shouted, once Caroline was in the longboat, and her tit was out of his gob. “We are at Billingsgate, it is true; but this does not mean you must try to out-do the fishwives in execration. They are not here now. Return in the day-time and woo them then.”
“I say, who are these fishwives?” exclaimed someone, so intoxicated that his tongue was swishing around in his mouth like a mop in a bucket. “He makes them sound like very merry wenches indeed.” He snorted a great draught of that bracing fish-market atmosphere into his nostrils. “And I do fancy their perfume.”
Johann was getting it from both directions now. “You are too cynical, love,” said Caroline from the longboat, “and now you see I am pouting like a great big fish. They are gallant, nothing more. They do not even believe I am a Princess! They think I am a whore who came for Dr. Waterhouse.”
“They know perfectly well who you are,” said Johann. He offered a bow, sarcastically obsequious, to the men of the Kit-Cat Clubb, who stood above them at the top of the stairs, all spread out in a tableau, but difficult to make out in the dark—like a group portrait of themselves gone almost black from tobacco-smoke.
The bow was returned many-fold, but Johann saw none of it, as he had turned to vault over the gunwale into the longboat. Caroline was waving to them—somehow even that made them think of indecent things and spew libidinous ravings up and down the dock.
“We truly are safe from exposure now,” Johann muttered. “For those men, when they are sober, shall be ashamed to relate this story, and no one would believe it if they did.”
The longboat was unnecessarily large for its present mission, viz. to ferry a Baron and a Princess to a ship in the Pool. It had five oars on a side, and ten stout sailors to swing them. As such it could quickly out-distance a waterman’s boat, or most other craft that might try to pursue them. Johann and Caroline sat up in the bow to stay clear of the rowers.
“I am glad you had the wit to come here directly,” Johann said.
“Not so directly, for I was made to be the object of several toasts in the Kit-Cat Clubb,” she said.
Indeed, the toasting was not over yet. Enough time had elapsed, since it had become evident that she was going to depart by water, for the following to have been improvised by one of the crowd of domesticated poets who went round with Kit-Cats.
Off the sea came Aphrodite,
To the Greeks whose lust was mighty.
Soft of wit and firm of P—,
Romans worshipped foam-borne Venus.
’Pon the River dark as wine,
Rides Britons’ love-queen, Caroline.
“That is lovely,” Johann said. “It appears that Dr. Waterhouse shall have some explaining to do, at his Clubb.”
&
nbsp; “As shall I,” Caroline said, “to my husband.”
From Billingsgate a lone wag was chanting
May her Womb
Be Popery’s Tomb
But pray the German
Keeps his sperm in.
He was immediately shouted down by indignant, even scandalized Kit-Cats. Really! Some chaps knew no bounds! Someone drew a sword halfway, and made a great show of having to be restrained, all the while glancing river-wards to be sure his gallantry was being noted by Caroline. But the longboat had been swallowed by shadow, from their point of view. The sword-fight fizzled. The Kit-Cat Caravan began to mount up: and so the last they saw of the Clubb were scintillations of cut-crystal stirrup-cups and of the silver trays on which they were brought around, faint as gleaming of fish-scales on the black waters that lapped at Billingsgate Stairs.
“I pray that we are vanishing from their ken as much as they from ours,” Johann said. “We are going downriver some miles to make rendezvous with a sloop that rides at anchor before Greenwich. If we board the sloop quickly and get underway without delay, perhaps no one shall know that your royal highness is aboard.”
“It is all a great farce,” was Princess Caroline’s verdict. In the darkness she could not see Johann collapsing, but she could see the air coming out of him. “I am sorry,” she said.
“On the contrary. La belle dame sans merci is a role that becomes you—’twill serve you well when you are Queen, and Greenwich is one of your country houses.”
“I am being without mercy to myself,” Caroline said, “not just to you. It was stupid for me to have come to England.”
“On the contrary—you were not safe, in Hanover, from that assassin.”
“That assassin, who followed me to London without the least difficulty,” Caroline said, “and might be preying on Eliza at this very moment.”
The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and the System of the World Page 299
