“When a man is being torn apart with pliers, there’s no telling what he’ll blurt out.”
“Aha.”
“The last time I saw you, you were ordinary Vagabond scum. If there happened to be an old connexion between the two of us, it scarcely mattered. Now you are legendary Vagabond scum, a picaroon, much talked of in salons. Now if the old link between us came to be widely known, it would be inconvenient for me.”
“But you could have let that other fellow run me through with his rapier.”
“And probably should have,” Churchill said ruefully, “but I wasn’t thinking. It is very odd. I saw him lunging for you. If I had only stood clear and allowed matters to take their natural course, you’d be dead. But some impulse took me-”
“The Imp of the Perverse, like?”
“Your old companion? Yes, perhaps he leapt from your shoulder to mine. Like a perfect imbecile, I saved your life.”
“Well, you make a most splendid and gallant perfect imbecile. Are you going to kill me now?”
“Not directly. You are now a galerien. Your group departs for Marseille tomorrow morning. It’s a bit of a walk.”
“I know it.”
Churchill sat on a bench and worried off one boot, then the other, then reached into them and pulled out the fancy Turkish slippers that had become lodged inside, and drew the slippers on. Then he threw the boots at Jack and they lodged in the manure, temporarily scaring away the flies. At about the same time, a stable-boy came in carrying two pipes stuffed with tobacco, and a taper, and soon both men were puffing away contentedly.
“I learned of the duc’s Barbary connexions through an escaped slave, who seems to consider the information part of a closely guarded personal secret,” Jack said finally.
“Thank you,” said Churchill. “How’s the leg, then?”
“Someone seems to’ve poked it with a sword… otherwise fine.”
“Might need something to lean on.” Churchill stepped outside the door for a moment, then returned carrying Jack’s crutch. He held it crosswise between his two hands for a moment, weighing it. “Seems a bit heavy on this end-a foreign sort of crutch, is it?”
“Exceedingly foreign.”
“Turkish?”
“Don’t toy with me, Churchill.”
Churchill spun the crutch around and chucked it like a spear so that it stuck in the manure-pile. “Whatever you’re going to do, do it soon and then get the hell out of France. The road to Marseille will take you, in a day or two, through the pays of the Count of Joigny.”
“Who’s that?”
“That’s the fellow you knocked off his horse. Notwithstanding my earlier reassuring statements, he does not find you amusing-if you enter his territory…”
“Pliers.”
“Just so. Now, as insurance, I have a good friend lodging at an inn just to the north of Joigny. He is to keep an eye on the road to Marseille, and if he sees you marching down it, he is to make sure that you never get past that inn alive.”
“How’s he going to recognize me?”
“By that point, you’ll be starkers-exposing your most distinctive feature.”
“You really are worried I’ll make trouble for you.”
“I told you I’m here on a diplomatic mission. It is important.”
“Trying to work out how England is to be divvied up between Leroy and the Pope of Rome?”
Churchill puffed on his pipe a few times in a fine, but not altogether convincing, display of calmness, and then said, “I knew we’d reach this point in the conversation, Jack-the point where you accused me of being a traitor to my country and my religion-and so I’m ready for it, and I’m actually not going to cut your head off.”
Jack laughed. His leg hurt a great deal, and it itched, too.
“Through no volition of my own, I have for many years been a member of His Majesty’s household,” Churchill began. Jack was confused by this until he recollected that “His Majesty” no longer meant Charles II, but James II, the whilom Duke of York. Churchill continued: “I suppose I could reveal to you my innermost thoughts about what it’s like to be a Protestant patriot in thrall to a Catholic King who loves France, but life is short, and I intend to spend as little of it as possible standing in dark stables apologizing to shit-covered Vagabonds. Suffice it to say that it’s better for England if I do this mission.”
“Suppose I do get away, before Joigny… what’s to prevent me from telling everyone about the longstanding connexions between the Shaftoes and the Churchills?”
“No one of Quality will ever believe a word you say, Jack, unless you say it while you are being expertly tortured… it’s only when you are stretched out on some important person’s rack that you are dangerous. Besides, there is the Shaftoe legacy to think of.” Churchill pulled out a little purse and jiggled it to make the coins ring.
“I did notice that you’d taken possession of my charger, without paying for it. Very bad form.”
“The price in here is a fair one-a handsome sum, even,” Churchill said. Then he pocketed the purse.
“Oh, come on-!”
“A naked galerien can’t carry a purse, and these French coins are too big to stuff up even your asshole, Jack. I’ll make sure your spawn get the benefit of this, when I’m back in England.”
“Get it, or get the benefit of it? Because there is a slipperiness in those words that troubles me.”
Churchill laughed again, this time with a cheerfulness that really made Jack want to kill him. He got up and plucked the empty pipe from Jack’s mouth, and-as stables were notoriously inflammable, and he did not wish to be guilty of having set fire to the duc’s-went over to the little horseshoe-forge, now cold and dark, and whacked the ashes out of the pipes. “Try to concentrate. You’re a galley slave chained to a post in a stable in Paris. Be troubled by that. Bon voyage, Jack.”
Exit Churchill. Jack had been meaning to advise him not to sleep with any of those French ladies, and to tell him about the Turkish innovation involving sheep-intestines, but there hadn’t been time-and besides, who was he to give John Churchill advice on fucking?
Equipped now with boots, a sword, and (if he could just reach it, and slay a few stable-boys) a horse, Jack began considering how to get the damned chain off his neck. It was a conventional slave-collar: two iron semicircles hinged together on one side and with a sort of hasp on the other, consisting of two loops that would align with each other when the collar was closed. If a chain was then threaded through the loops, it would prevent the collar from opening. This made it possible for a single length of chain to secure as many collars, and hence slaves, as could be threaded onto it, without the need for expensive and unreliable padlocks. It kept the ironmongery budget to a minimum and worked so handily that no French Chateau or German Schloss was without a few, hanging on a wall-peg just in case some persons needed enslaving.
The particular chain that went through Jack’s collar-hasp had a circular loop-a single oversized link-welded to one end. The chain had been passed around the stone pillar and its narrow end threaded through this loop, then through Jack’s collar, and finally one of the duc’s smiths had heated up the chain-end in the stable’s built-in forge, and hammered an old worn-out horseshoe onto it, so it could not be withdrawn. Typical French extravagance! But the duc had an infinite fund of slaves and servants, so it cost him nothing, and there was no way for Jack to get it off.
The tobacco-embers from the pipes had formed a little mound on the blackened hearth of the forge and were still glowing, just barely. Jack squirmed free of the manure-pile and limped over to the forge and blew on them to keep them alive.