The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and the System of the World (196 page)

She got them all into the big cabin: four women in all. Brigitte was of a mind to heave furniture against the door. But that did not work as well here as it would have ashore, since the significant furniture was bolted down. Some trunks, a chair, and a mattress were all that they could shift for in the way of a barricade. Eliza urged them all to bend their efforts to this task, even though she knew it was absurd. A glance out the windows told her that
Météore
was moving. The English had cut her anchor cable, made her fast to a longboat or two, and were towing her out into the Channel. Better for them to attend to barricade-making than to think too hard about what this portended.

A most unsettling noise radiated through the air all round, and made their breakfasts quiver in their stomachs. Eliza went to a window and saw one of Cherbourg’s shore-batteries obnubilated by powder-smoke. The artillerymen had opened fire; she guessed they were hoping to sink
Soleil Royal
before she drifted into the anchorage and set fire to other ships, or exploded. She explained as much to her companions. Fortunately none of them was swift enough to ask how long it might be before the same batteries opened up on
Météore
.

They had been ignored, for a time, by those who had taken the ship—which made perfect sense once Eliza understood that their intention was to take the entire vessel. But now that
Météore
was under way, albeit slowly, English marines had begun to pound desultorily on the door of the cabin. Hammers and prybars were mined from tool-lockers. Splinters began to fly out of
the wall
—rather than waste effort on the barricaded door, they were simply smashing their way through a bulkhead.

Such was the noise that Eliza might almost have overlooked the sudden arrival of the immense one-armed man in her cabin.
Almost;
for he entered through a window, swinging in on the end of a rope, and a chunk of glass hit her in the ear. And the maidservant must have seen him hurtling toward the glass, for she began screaming an instant before the implosion, and kept it up for a few moments after; long enough for the intruder to catch her about the waist by his one proper arm, pick her up, and throw her out of the ship. In the end, the scream was terminated only by her impact with the water. A few seconds later it resumed, sounding a bit gurgly. The large man had big pale blue eyes and seemed distracted; so much to take in, so
many things to do. He looked around the cabin, making a quick count of the number of women who had not yet been thrown out (three). He turned and looked back at the ruined window. It was partly blocked by a skein of crazed glass, shredded wood, and caulking, which had complicated the defenestration of the maidservant. The man shrugged and one of his arms tripled in length. For it had been severed below the elbow and replaced with a three-part flail, segments made of some sort of dark, heavy-looking wood, bound and capped with iron, and joined one to the next by short segments of chain. He turned toward the window, judged the distance, and went into a curious shrugging and shivering movement that propagated down the length of the flail and sent its distal segment ripping through what was left of the window-frame like chainshot launched from a cannon. That and a few kicks sufficed to make a clean rectangular aperture through which he presently hurled a screaming Nicole.

Before he could pursue this wench-flinging project any further, he was distracted by the rude irruption into the cabin of a man’s arm. The English boarders had made a hole, and one of them was reaching in to see what he might grab. At the top of his list was the brass bolt holding the cabin door closed.

The ramshackle and skeletal arm of the flail rattled across the cabin, a strangely unfolding train of dire consequences, and struck the new intruder round about the elbow with a splintery sort of noise. The arm was withdrawn, leaving a dark cavity through which the one-armed man flung a dagger that had appeared in his hand from nowhere. “Shoot him!” someone screamed, from the other side of the bulkhead; but Brigitte had the presence of mind to topple Eliza’s mattress—which had been propped against the cabin door—so that it obscured the rift in the bulkhead. The men on the other side could reach through the hole and thrust it away, but it only flopped back again; which, if Eliza had had more time for reflection, she might have taken as some sort of lesson in how soft defenses could be more effective than hard ones.

Eliza had gone to the missing window. Below was a two-oared skiff. A line ran from it straight up to a grapple snared in the rigging of
Météore’
s mizzen-mast, above; this was how the one-armed man had gotten aboard, though, being one-armed, it seemed he had had to make use of some ingenious block-and-tackle arrangement, much too complicated for Eliza to work out under these circumstances.

The two women who had been flung out earlier were bobbing like lilies on the water, for their skirts had inflated as they had dropped. Eventually they would become waterlogged and sink, but
they had both got hold of the little boat’s gunwale and seemed fine for now. Which was the very least that Eliza looked for, from her personal staff. Indeed she made a mental note to ask this question of all prospective employees she interviewed in future: You are on your mistress’s
jacht
preparing for her
petit levée
when the vessel is taken by English marines and towed out to sea under fire from shore batteries. Barricaded in a cabin, waiting for a fate worse than death, you are picked up and hurled into the sea by a mysterious one-armed giant who has swung into a window on a rope. Do you (a) struggle bootlessly until you sink and drown, (b) scream until someone rescues you, or (c) dog-paddle to the nearest floating object and wait calmly for your mistress to resolve the difficulty?

Eliza had suspected very early that the one-armed man might be some sort of a godsend, and was now convinced of it. She hitched up her skirt, snaked a leg under her bed, caught her bag-handle on the point of her slipper, and jerked it out. Turning to the open window, she paused for a few moments to time her breathing, and the rolling of the seas; then she tossed out the bag, and it landed square in the middle of the rowboat. Then she turned around. Flail-arm, it seemed, had fastened his gaze upon Brigitte with a look that seemed to say, “I mean to throw
you
out next, mademoiselle,” and she had declined the honor. Now he was trying to get one arm about her waist (a factitious narrowing of Brigitte’s midsection, owed to laces and whalebones). Few men were big, strong, and reckless enough to pick up Brigitte and toss her, when she was not of a mind to be. This fellow
had been
, prior to the loss of his arm. As matters stood, they were evenly matched, unless he elected to beat her senseless with the terrible flail first. And this he was not of a mind to do; though he was plainly enough tempted, Eliza thought she could see a tenderness about his eyes. And so a dire, ungainly, loud struggle, destructive of property and of the dignity of the participants, ranged all across the cabin.

“Brigitte!” Eliza called, at a moment when the one-armed man had tripped over his flail and was slow getting up. Brigitte raised her hot gaze from the intruder and looked up to see Eliza framed in the window. “You may stay and flirt with him all you want, or take him to bed for all I care! But I am departing and shall await you below.” And then she vanished from Brigitte’s sight.

In spite of herself she let out a yell just before she hit the water. Then she was speechless for a moment, it was so cold; but before more than a few moments had passed, she began paddling toward the wee boat, as best she could. She did this partly out of a thought to the Interview Question, and partly out of fear that Brigitte and
Monsieur Flail-arm might hurtle down atop her at any moment. Heavy splashes behind her confirmed that she’d made the correct choice.

To get four sopping
femmes
aboard so small a boat was no simple thing. Flail-arm, as soon as he’d gone into the water, had prestidigitated another sharp object and severed the line linking the rowboat to
Météore,
and the gap between them had begun to widen. Eliza glanced up at her stolen
jacht
only once. She saw English marines at the poop-deck rail, and English marines in the windows of her cabin (for they had finally got past Brigitte’s improvisations). One of them had the bad manners to aim a pistol down at Flail-arm. But just then a boom sounded from not far away, and something whined over their heads and ripped two pounds of oak out of the railing. The marines jumped back, and some flung themselves to the deck. Eliza followed Flail-arm’s startled gaze across the water and spied a boat coming on rapidly, under full sail.

Eliza was no great aficionado of ship-types, and made a practice of quitting any conversation in which the men drifted off into, and got stuck on, ship-prattle. But at a glance she guessed this one was eighty feet long. It had no transom and no superstructure, had two masts, was lug-rigged. In Holland it might have gone under the name of
galjoot
. In any case, it was a coastal trading-ship, adequate to cross the Channel, and it was obviously armed with at least one swivel-gun. The shot they had fired at the English marines had been mostly for effect. Never could this little smuggler’s craft have challenged
Météore
, had
Météore
been under sail, and properly manned; but as matters stood, the
galjoot
had enough sting in her swivel-guns to give the English second thoughts about standing in plain view and taking pot-shots at Men Overboard. Eliza had spied the boat a few minutes ago, and hoped it might be the one she had hired; this confirmed as much. It made no effort to pursue
Météore,
but wore around so as to make itself a barrier between
Météore
and the rowboat, and then released the air from its sails.
Arbalète
(for that was the name painted on her bows) approached with a curious mixture of charity and hostility, on the one hand flinging out lines for the ladies to snatch from the air, or rake up out of the water, on the other hand keeping loaded muskets at the ready. The only part of this morning’s proceedings that they had been led to expect was that they might be collecting an anonymous passenger from the vicinity of
Météore
. All else—the assault of the English longboats, the apparition of the flaming
Soleil Royal,
and Flail-arm with his rowboat—had been unexpected. Eliza was already dreading the re-negotiation of the deal that probably lay ahead with the captain of
Arbalète
. That it had even
ventured
this
far into the melee could probably be attributed solely to a bloke standing amidships holding a musket: Bob Shaftoe.

“All is well, Sergeant Bob. No, I don’t know who he is. He is a mute, or something. But he seems well-intentioned. The worst I can say of him is that he is more forthright in his methods than would be considered proper at Versailles.”

“I have noted him about the waterfront, spying on
Météore,
” was Bob’s answer.

“Come to mention it, so have I,” said Eliza, “but lacking your penetration, sir, I could not make out whether he was
spying,
or merely satisfying his curiosity.”

“Perhaps lovely Duchesses are more accustomed to being stared at for hours at a time than mangled Sergeants,” Bob said. “To me it looked like spying.”

“As perhaps it was, Sergeant Bob; but this morning he has been of service to a boat-load of women.”

“Is it to be you alone, or the entire boat-load?” demanded the incredulous Monsieur Rigaud, Captain of
Arbalète
. Until this point, he had been preoccupied by the spectre—even more terrifying to a ship-captain than to any other sort of person—of the
Soleil Royal
drifting past them with gouts of flame spurting from her hundred gun-ports. Rigaud seemed at last to have convinced himself that the English, before setting fire to her, had extracted her stores of gunpowder—i.e., that they wanted her to burn for a long time, make a memorable spectacle for the citizenry of Cherbourg, and perhaps set fire to a few other ships—not simply blow up. If he was right, then the danger to
Arbalète
was past, for the flagship had unequivocally drifted beyond them. He had, accordingly, turned his mind to a threat almost as dire: an onslaught of female passengers.

“Only I,” said Eliza, and slung her bag at Rigaud’s head.

This was news to the other women, and caused a little flurry of gasps and outcries. Eliza considered trying to explain matters.
Mommy must run off to England and steal three tons of silver
. Instead she reached up—for the rowboat was grinding against
Arbalète’s
side—and let Bob seize one of her hands, and a French sailor the other. The weight came off of her feet. She was hoisted aboard
Arbalète
like a bale of silk. “Lovely Brigitte,” she called, “I hope that one day you will forgive me for now pressing you in to service as
galérienne
. But you must get in to shore before matters get any worse; and this man, I am afraid—”

“Rows in circles. The same had occurred to me, my lady.” Brigitte seized the oars.

“We shall keep our swivel-guns charged, and watch you in to the
shore,” volunteered Monsieur Rigaud, who had become considerably more pliant now that the rowboat full of women was working
away
from
Arbalète
.

“Send a despatch to Captain Bart in Dunkerque,” Eliza called.

“Saying what, Madame?”

“That it is going to happen after all.”

“A
MPUTATIONS ARE DICEY THINGS,”
remarked Bob Shaftoe some hours later. For a while, he had had that look on his face that warned Eliza he was pondering something, and likely to blurt out just such a ghoulish observation as soon as he took a whim to speak. “One strives to preserve the elbow, or the knee, at all costs, for that additional degree of articulation in the stump makes all the difference. In a below-the-elbow amputation, the hand is gone, and with it the ability to sense, to grasp, to caress. But yet there is the elbow, and the sinews to make it act. To turn the arm into a flail—a whole train of articulations, unfeeling, ungrasping, yet capable of action—yes, to put a flail on a stump is wholly fitting in a way.”