Not knowing what Vrej had in mind, Jack let go his hand and got between him and Eliza. He'd scarcely done so when he heard a loud noise and saw Étienne d'Arcachon collapsing to the floor.
"Pardon the interruption, your majesty," said Vrej. The pistol was in his hand, a cloud of smoke drifting up from it.
Jack had got himself squarely between Vrej and Eliza by now, but she wanted to see what was happening, and kept moving about, which forced him to move as well. A door whammed open at the far end of the ballroom, and a cloud of feathers, lace, and blades—a dozen or so armed noblemen—came at them. It would be some moments before they arrived.
"I could run. Perhaps escape," Vrej went on. "But this would bring suspicion down upon my family—who are wholly innocent, your majesty, and always were."
"We understand," said Leroy, "and always have."
Vrej turned the pistol round and shot himself in the mouth.
"MONSIEUR SHAFTOE, THIS BALLROOM does not seem to agree with you. I do believe you should not be invited back," the King was able to remark, a bit sourly, before they were engulfed in courtiers with drawn swords.
Now Jack had always taken a dim view of Louis, but even he had to admit he was impressed by the aplomb with which this surprising turn of events was managed. There was, of course, an interruption; but only a few minutes elapsed before the conversation resumed. Jack, Eliza, and the King were in the Petit Salon now; the ballroom would require some cleaning-up.
First order of protocol was that the King expressed condolences to the widow d'Arcachon (for Étienne had taken the pistol-ball between the eyes). Then the King of France turned his attention once again to Jack. "Monsieur Shaftoe, it pleases us that when you saw the weapon in the hand of Monsieur Esphahnian, your only thought was to shield Madame la duchesse d'Arcachon. However, this does put us in mind of a certain entanglement that shall impede your work in London if it is not cut immediately. If the tales told of your love for this woman are true, it were useless to ask you to sever the tie. Madame?"
Jack, who'd been so alert to Vrej, was blindsided by Eliza. She was on him, and hugged him side-on, and kissed him once on the cheek and leaned her head against his long enough to breathe into his ear: "Sorry about the harpoon, and sorry about this; but I must do it, lest you end up in the Bastille, and I find poison in my coffee."
Jack reached out to return the embrace but caught only air, for she'd darted back as quick as any defensing-master. "I swear before God that you, Jack Shaftoe, shall never again look on my face, nor hear my voice, until the day you die." Hastily then, before tears came, she turned to the King, who made a little gesture meaning that she was permitted to leave. She curtseyed, spun, and got out of the room as if it were on fire.
"There was to be a third part of the interview," said the King, "in which Monsieur le duc d'Arcachon would have sworn never more to molest you. But this has been obviated. Monsieur Shaftoe, you are free to depart. We must now turn our attentions back to the War; but it shall please us to learn, in a year, or several, that the money of England has been rendered worthless, and the ability of that heretic country to make war beyond its shores thus mitigated. Do take your time and make a proper job of it. No half measures. And know that as the pound sterling suffers, the widow d'Arcachon and her children shall thrive, and shall continue to enjoy all the good things that France has to offer."
The upheavals of the last twenty years have been unbelievable: the kingdoms of England, Holland and Spain have been transformed as fast as scenery in a theatre. When later generations come to read about our history they will think they are reading a romance, and not believe a word of it.
—LISELOTTE IN A LETTER TO SOPHIE, 10 JUNE 1706
OCTOBER 1702
THE KING WAS TOO POLITE to mention the opposite face of the bargain, which was that if Jack failed, consequences would fall on Eliza; but Jack had plenty of time to work that out on the voyage down the Seine and across the Channel. Before the end of the next day, he was on an ostensibly Danish brig pretending to smuggle French wine to England.
The last time he'd been in these waters, seventeen years ago, he'd been bound the other way, harpoon-gashed, and half out of his mind with fever. On this the return trip, his body was sound, but his mind wasn't. The full monstrousness of everything that had happened to Jack in the last weeks finally struck home, and rendered him sub-human for a long time.
The ability of sailing-ships to survive storms and tides depended on starving, drenched, terrified wretches' carrying out certain rote procedures even though their minds were absent. Jack had not sailed around the world without acquiring a few such instincts, and that probably explained how he passed the next day or so. The weather was fine; the storm was in his mind. When he came back to awareness, a day had gone by, but it seemed that he had been eating and drinking and eliminating in the meantime. He soon wished that he had remained in that semi-conscious state, because awareness brought pain.
Even so, tears did not finally come to his eyes and begin to roll down his face until the middle of the next day, when the downs of England thickened the horizon, all treeless and green, and as alien-looking as any landscape Jack had viewed during his travels. That went double for the Dover cliffs. The brig was turning now, bearing round to the north, and one morning she finally came round to a westerly heading and began to ride an incoming tide, skimming above the vast sands of the Thames, all tangled with the wracks of ships, looking like harpsichords that had yielded to the tension of their strings and imploded to black snarls. She picked her way up the estuary for the whole day, past Gravesend and Erith and various places on the Long Reach that the Shaftoe brothers, Jack and Bob and Dick, had once thought of as being extremely far away.
The river was crowded with ships far downstream of where it had been in the days of Jack's boyhood, and so Jack kept thinking that he had passed over Dick's watery death-site, only to learn they'd not be reaching it for quite some time yet. But as evening fell the captain issued blunderbusses to certain crewmen and told them to be on the lookout for mudlarks, and then Jack knew he had come full circle at last. It was strangely comforting to him. Home, as miserable as it was and had been, had some power to balm his wounds. It was all he could do not to jump overboard and wade ashore to lose himself in some Limehouse gin hole.
But that would've been irresponsible. Jack had a job that needed doing. He was a man of affairs now, a City man, and no mudlark. He told the captain to keep making way upstream until the lights of London Bridge were in view.
When they rounded the last river-bend at Wapping, light broke across the mile of water between them and the Bridge, outlining every spar and line of the countless ships riding at anchor in the Pool. Jack had remembered the Bridge as a gleaming dam of light across the Thames, but now he could scarcely make it out for the radiance of the rebuilt city piled up behind it. It was almost as if London had caught fire again, just in time for Jack's homecoming.
But the most brilliant object in Jack's vision was neither the Bridge nor the City. On the northern bank of the river, downstream of the Bridge, rose the Tower. Jack recalled this as a dull stone pile with the occasional candle gleaming through an embrasure. But on this night, anyway, the Tower was a massive stone plinth supporting a pillar of airborne light, and all the ships in the Pool below it seemed to have collected around its radiance like gnats besieging a lanthorn. Actually the eastern end of the place was as dark as ever, but at its western edge hot fires had been kindled. Piles of smoke and steam were rising up to black out the stars, and sparks careered through those clouds like meteors. The flames were concealed behind Tower walls, but they lit up their own smoke from beneath, and made of it a screen to project boiling and flaring light across the water. "Closer, closer," Jack kept demanding—it had become obvious that the captain was under orders to do Jack's bidding no matter what. So sailors were sent below to work the sweeps, and, like a many-legged insect crawling through a crowded burrow, the brig felt its way among anchored ships for hours, shrugging off curses and threats from men on other vessels who did not want to see their anchor cables fouled.