Jack followed her look and discovered a kind of shrine against the wall. It was a glass-fronted display case, but all gold-leafed and decked out with trumpet-tooting seraphs, as if its niches had been carved to house pieces of the True Cross and fingernail-parings of Archangels. But in fact the niches contained little heaps of dull everyday things like ingots of lead, scraps of wool, mounds of saltpeter and sugar and coffee-beans and pepper-corns, rods and slabs of iron, copper and tin, and twists of silk and cotton cloth. And, in a tiny crystal flask, like a perfume bottle, there was a sample of quicksilver.
“So, I’m meant to believe that you’re transacting business in there?” he asked, once she had extricated herself, and they were out on the Damplatz together.
“You believed that I was doing what, then?”
“It’s just that I saw no goods or money changing hands.”
“They call it Windhandel. ”
“The wind business? An apt name for it.”
“Do you have any idea, Jack, how much quicksilver is stored up in these warehouses all around us?”
“No.”
“I do.”
She stopped at a place where they could peer into a portal of the Stock Exchange. “Just as a whole workshop can be powered by a mill-wheel, driven by a trickle of water in a race, or by a breath of air on the blades of a windmill, so the movement of goods through yonder Weigh-House is driven by a trickle of paper passing from hand to hand in there ” (pointing to the Stock Exchange) “and the warm wind that you feel on your face when you step into the Maiden.”
Movement caught Jack’s eye. He imagined for a moment that it was a watch-tower being knocked down by a sudden burst of French artillery. But when he looked, he saw he’d been fooled for the hundredth time. It was a windmill spinning. Then more movement out on the Ij: a tidal swell coming through and jostling the ships. A dredger full of hapless Hollandganger moved up a canal, clawing up muck-muck that according to the Doctor would swallow and freeze things that had once been quick, and turn them to stone. No wonder they were so fastidious about dredging. Such an idea must be anathema to the Dutch, who worshipped motion above all. For whom the physical element of Earth was too resistant and inert, an annoyance to traders, an impediment to the fluid exchange of goods. In a place where all things were suffused with quicksilver, it was necessary to blur the transition from earth to water, making out of the whole Republic a gradual shading from one to the other as they neared the banks of the Ij, not entirely complete until they got past the sandbanks and reached the ocean at Texel.
“I must go to Paris.”
“Why?”
“Partly to sell Turk and those ostrich plumes.”
“Clever,” she said. “Paris is retail, Amsterdam wholesale-you’ll fetch twice the price there.”
“But really it is that I am accustomed to being the one fluid thing in a universe dumb and inert. I want to stand on the stone banks of the Seine, where here is solid and there is running water and the frontier between ’em is sharp as a knife.”
“As you wish,” Eliza said, “but I belong in Amsterdam.”
“I know it,” Jack said, “I keep seeing your picture.”
JACK RODE WEST OUT OFAmsterdam, through Haarlem, and then found himself suddenly alone, and perilously close to being under water: autumn rains had submerged the pastures, leaving the walled towns as islands. Soon he reached the line of dunes that fenced the country off from the North Sea. Not even Dutchmen could find a use for this much sand. Turk was unsettled by the change in the ground, but then he seemed to remember how to go on it-perhaps his Turkish master had used to take him for gallops in some Mohametan desert. With a plodding and swimming kind of gait he took Jack up to the crest of a dune. Below them, a mile away, Alp-sized green waves were hurling themselves up onto the sand with monstrous roaring and hissing. Jack sat there and stared until Turk grew annoyed. To the horse it was cold and foreign, to Jack it was just this side of cozy. He was trying to count the years since he’d seen open salt water.
There had been the voyage to Jamaica-but after that, his life (he began to think) had been impossibly confusing. Either that, or else the French Pox had amazed and riddled his memories. He had to count on his fingers. Nay, he had to dismount and use his crutch-tip to draw family trees and maps on the sand.
His return from Jamaica was a good place to start: 1678. He had bedded the fair Mary Dolores, six feet of Irish vigor, and then fled to Dunkirk to avoid a warrant, and then there’d been the penis incident. While he’d been recovering from that, Bob had showed up with news: Mary Dolores was pregnant. Also, that John Churchill fellow, improbably, was married, and had been made a Colonel-no, wait, a Brigadier-and had any number of regiments under him now. He was avidly recruiting, and still remembered the Shaftoes-did Jack want a steady job, perhaps, so that he could wed Mary Dolores and raise his offspring?
“Just the sort of tidy plan that Bob would come up with,” Jack shouted at the waves, still annoyed, six or seven years later. Turk was becoming edgy. Jack decided to talk to him, as long as he was speaking out loud anyway. Did horses understand what was going on, when you spoke to people who weren’t there? “So far, simple enough-but here it becomes very deep,” he began. “John Churchill was in the Hague-then he was in Brussels-why? Even a horse can see the contradiction in that- but I forget you’re an Ottoman horse. All right, then: all of this land-” (stomping the dune for emphasis) “was part of Spain-you heard me-Spain! Then these fucking Dutchmen turned Calvinist and revolted, and drove the Spanish away, down south of the Maas and a bunch of other rivers with hard-to-remember names-past Zeeland, anyway-we’ll be seeing more than we want to of those rivers soon. Leaving only a wedge of Papist Spain trapped between the Dutch Republic on its north, and France on its south. This Spain-wedge contains Brussels and Antwerp and a large number of battlefields, basically-it is like the jousting-ground where Europe goes to have its wars. Sometimes the Dutch and the English ally against France, and they have battles in the Spanish Netherlands. Sometimes England and France ally against the Dutch, and they have battles in the Spanish Netherlands. Anyway-at this particular time, I believe, it was England and the Dutch against France, for the reason that all England was up in arms against Popery. Importation of French goods had been outlawed-that’s why I was in Dunkirk-obvious opportunities for smuggling. And that’s also why John Churchill was raising new armies. He went to Holland to parley with William of Orange, who was thought to know more’n anyone about staving off the Catholic hordes, as he’d stopped King Looie at the cost of turning half his country into a moat.
“So far it makes sense, then. But why-an intelligent horse might ask-why was John Churchill also in Brussels-part of Spain’s, and therefore the Pope’s, dominions? Why, it’s because-thanks to the maneuverings of his daddy Winston-ever since John had been just a lad, he’d been in the household of James, King Chuck’s brother, the Duke of York. And York-then, and now, first in line for the throne-was, and is today-you’ll like this-a fanatical Papist! Now do you understand why London was, and probably still is, nervous? The King decided it’d be better if his brother took a long vacation out of the country, and naturally James chose the Catholic city that was closest at hand: Brussels! And John Churchill, being in his household, was obliged to follow him, at least part of the time.