Now a man in Bob Shaftoe’s trade owed his longevity, in part, to his alertness-his sensitivity to (among other things) significant noises. Even the dimmest recruits could be relied on to notice the loud noises. A senior man like Bob was supposed to scrutinize the faint ones. Eliza got the impression that Bob was the sort of bloke who was forever shushing every man in the room, demanding absolute stillness so that he could hold his breath and make out whether that faint sporadic itching was a mouse in the cupboard, or enemy miners tunnelling under the fortifications. Whether that distant rhythm was a cobbler next door or an infantry regiment marching into position outside of town.
Every gear and bearing in this room was making the sort of sound that normally made Bob Shaftoe freeze like a startled animal. Even after he’d gotten it through his head that they were all clocks, or studies for clocks, he was hushed and intimidated by a sense of being surrounded by patient mechanical life. He stood at attention in the middle of the big room, hands in his pockets, blowing steam from his mouth and darting his eyes to and fro. These clocks were made to tell time precisely and nothing else. There were no bells, no chimes, and certainly no cuckoos. If Bob was waiting for such entertainments, he’d wait until he was a dusty skeleton surrounded by cobweb-clogged gears.
Eliza noted that he had shaved before going out on this morning’s strange errand, something that would never have entered Jack’s mind, and she wondered how it all worked-what train of thoughts made a man say, “I had better scrape my face with a blade before undertaking this one.” Perhaps it was some sort of a symbolic love-offering to his Abigail.
“It is all a question of pride, isn’t it?” Eliza said, stuffing a cube of peat into the iron stove. “Or honor, as you’d probably style it.”
Bob looked at her instead of answering; or maybe his look was his answer.
“Come on, you don’t have to be that quiet,” she said, setting a kettle on the stove to heat.
“What Jack and I have in common is an aversion to begging,” he said finally.
“Just as I thought. So, rather than beg Abigail’s ransom from me, you are proposing a sort of financial transaction-a loan, to be paid back in service.”
“I don’t know the words, the terms. Something like that is what I had in mind.”
“Then why me? You’re in the Dutch Republic. This is the financial capital of the world. You don’t need to seek out one particular lender. You could propose this deal to anyone.”
Bob had clutched a double handful of his cloak and was wringing it slowly. “The confusions of the financial markets are bewildering to me-I prefer not to treat with strangers…”
“What am I to you if not a stranger?” Eliza asked, laughing. “I am worse than a stranger, I threw a spear at your brother.”
“Yes, and that is what makes you not a stranger to me, it is how I know you.”
“It is proof that I hate slavery, you mean?”
“Proof of that and of other personal qualities-qualities that enter into this matter.”
“I am no Person of Quality, or of qualities-do not speak to me of that. It is proof only that my hatred of slavery makes me do irrational things-which is what you are asking me to do now.”
Bob lost his grip on his cloak-wad and sat down unsteadily on a stack of books.
Eliza continued, “She threw a harpoon at my brother-she’ll throw some money at me-is that how it goes?”
Bob Shaftoe put his hands over his face and began to cry, so quietly that any sounds he made were drowned out by the whirring and ticking of the clocks.
Eliza retreated into the kitchen, and went back to a cool corner where some sausage-casings had been rolled up on a stick. She unrolled six inches-on second thought, twelve-and cut it off. Then she tied a knot in one end. She fit the little sock of sheep-gut over the handle of a meat-axe that was projecting firmly into the air above a chopping-block, then, with her fingertips, coaxed the open end of it to begin rolling up the handle. Once it was started, with a quick movement of her hand she rolled the whole length up to make a translucent torus with the knotted end stretched across the middle like a drum-head. Gathering her skirts up one leg, she tucked the object into the hem of her stocking, which came up to about mid-thigh, and finally went back into the great room where Bob Shaftoe was weeping.
There was not much point in subtlety, and so she forced her way in between his thighs and stuffed her bosom into his face.
After a few moment’s hesitation he took his hands away from between his wet cheeks and her breasts. His face felt cold for a moment, but only a moment. Then she felt his hands locking together behind the small of her back, where her bodice was joined to her skirt.
He held her for a moment, not weeping anymore, but thinking. Eliza found that a bit tedious and so she left off stroking his hair and began going to work on his ears in a way he would not tolerate for long. Then, finally, Bob knew what to do. She could see that for Bob, knowing what to do was always the hard part, and the doing was easy. All those years Vagabonding with Jack, Bob had been the older and wiser brother preaching sternly into Jack’s one ear while the Imp of the Perverse whispered into the other, and it had made him a stolid and deliberate sort. But having made up his mind, he was a launched cannonball. Eliza wondered what the two of them had been like, partnered together, and pitied the world for not allowing it.
Bob cinched an arm around the narrowest part of her waist and hoisted her into the air with a thrust of rather good thigh-muscles. Her head grazed a dusty ceiling-beam and she ducked and hugged his head. He yanked a blanket from a couch; the books that had been scattered all over the blanket ended up differently scattered on the couch. Carrying Eliza and dragging the blanket, he trudged in a mighty floorboard-popping cadence to an elliptical dining-table scattered with the remains of a scholarly dinner: apple-peels and gouda-rinds. Making a slow orbit of this he flipped the corners of the tablecloth into the center. Gathering them together turned the tablecloth into a bag of scraps, which he let down gently onto the floor. Then he broadcast the blanket onto the table, slapped it once with his palm to stop it from skimming right off, and rolled Eliza’s body out into the middle of the woolly oval.
Standing above her, he’d already begun fumbling with his breeches, which she deemed premature-so bringing a knee up smartly between his thighs and pulling down on a grabbed handful of his hair, she obliged him to get on top of her. They lay there for a while with thighs interlocked, like fingers of two hands clutching each other, and Eliza felt him get ready as she was getting ready. But long after that they ground away at each other, as if Bob could somehow force his way through all those layers of masculine and feminine clothing. They did this because it felt good, and they were together in a cold echoing house in the Hague and had no other demands on their time. Eliza learned that Bob was not a man who felt good very often and that it took him a long time to relax. His whole body was stiff at first, and it took a long time for that stiffness to drain out of his limbs and his neck, and concentrate in one particular Member, and for him to agree that this did not all have to happen in an instant. At the beginning his face was planted between her breasts, and his feet were square on the floor, but inch by inch she coaxed him upwards. At first he showed a fighting man’s reluctance to sever his connection with the ground, but in time she made it understood that additional delights were to be found toward the head of the table, and so he kicked his boots off and got his knees, and eventually his toes, up on the tabletop.