No gratitude is expected, or desired; my only wish, as ever, is to be of service.
Eliza, duchesse d’Arcachon My lady,
APRIL 1694
My lady,
I hope this finds you on a tidy and well-skippered Zille halfway up the Elbe. Please forgive me for the intemperate remarks contained in my previous letter. The situation in all places has become so bizarre, so suddenly, that I know not what to make of it. Half of London-the better half-is said to have been abandoned. Because there is no silver, Persons of Quality have no means of conveying rents from their lands in the country, to town; so they have no choice but to board up their town-houses and move to the country, where they can live on barter. It seems the worst possible moment for the Whigs to have taken power, and to have put in the Marquis of Ravenscar at the Exchequer; but perhaps it is the case that he, like you, perceives some opportunity where others see only confusion, and has chosen this moment to strike.
To business. You asked for the latest on the Esphahnians. I will tell you what I know.
You’ll recall that after the severed head of your father-in-law turned up at his own birthday party on the evening of 14 October 1690, we heard little that was of any use on this channel for several years. Vrej Esphahnian had contrived to get a letter out from Egypt a few days before the duc d’Arcachon’s demise, and several months later he posted a brief note from Mocha in which he directed his family not to make any effort to reply, as he could not predict where the currents of trade would next take him.
In the meantime I had not been idle. It was clear to me that the Esphahnians used some form of steganography in their letters, but I could not make out how they did it. The family was scattered among several hovels, entresols, and prisons around Paris. I hired thieves to rifle through their possessions, and at length found some letters that Vrej had sent to them from Spain and Barbary beginning in 1685. In the margins and interlinear spaces of these, I saw an inscription writ in letters of vermilion. It was plain enough that this was some sort of invisible ink, which had been made visible by some secret art known to the Esphahnians. By reading these, I was able to learn more of Vrej’s story.
He had been sent to Spain early in 1685 to establish a family trading circuit there. But he had been taken by the Barbary Corsairs and enslaved. Yet his owner soon recognized that he had talents beyond pulling oars, and put him to work in a port city near Morocco, whence he was able to correspond with his family. From them, he learned of the disaster that had befallen the Paris Esphahnians after they had made the mistake of sub-letting their entresol to Jack Shaftoe. By this time they had been released from the Bastille, but one of them had died in prison, and their business was of course destroyed, so that in coming years many would drift in and out of debtors’ prisons.
In 1688 Vrej’s owner traded him to Algiers. There he became acquainted with another literate slave, a Jew of great intelligence, and over the course of several conversations with this Jew learned that Jack Shaftoe was still alive, as a galley-slave in the same city. During the winter of 1688-89, Vrej wrote to his family in Paris apprising them of this and proposing to find Jack and cut his throat, or arrange for it to be done, as revenge. Of course I do not have a copy of what was sent back in response; but it is easy enough to infer, from what Vrej wrote in his next letter, that older and wiser heads in Paris had prevailed. Jack Shaftoe was looked on as a sort of madman, a victim of possession, not responsible for his actions (though Vrej questions this, and suspects it is all an act), and no advantage to the family, temporal or spiritual, is seen in killing the poor man. Rather, it is suggested that Vrej seek some advantage in his dealings with the Jew.
As you will have anticipated, my lady, this Jew, this Armenian, and Jack, as well as several other galley-slaves, developed into the corps of pirates who have caused so much trouble since then.
All of these things were known to me, and to Father Edouard de Gex, by the end of the Year of Our Lord 1690. As you know, de Gex took the keenest imaginable interest in this. He began to ransack books of Alchemy for information about the vermilion ink: how it was concocted, and what vapor or infusion was required to make the hidden letters manifest on the page. With the connivance of his cousine the duchesse d’Oyonnax, he made the Esphahnians a great success among all the coffee-fanciers at Court, with the result that they have been able to move to Versailles and build that coffee-house on the Rue de l’Orangerie where you and I have spent so many stimulating hours. This had the effect that de Gex desired: All of the Esphahnians were gathered together in one house where they could be spied on with ease. When a letter came to them from some place such as Mocha, de Gex and I knew it first; and when a member of this family went out to buy something from a chymist, he was of necessity dealing with one of the Esoteric Brotherhood, well known to de Gex. And so by the middle of 1692 we had learned everything there was to know about the vermilion ink: how to compound it, and how to render it visible. Too, we knew of Vrej’s movements about the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. The one person who was wholly in the dark was Vrej himself. Because of his erratic movements, his family had not been able to send a letter to him since 1689, when they had been clinging to a wretched existence in Paris.
Finally in September of 1692 the pirates sailed to Surat, in Hindoostan, to get away from the Hell-hounds sent after them by Lothar von Hacklheber and various others they had injured. They were assaulted from an unexpected quarter by pirates of Malabar and their treasure was taken from them. Several, including Vrej, waded up on to the shores of Hindoostan where they dispersed. Vrej was press-ganged into the army of a regional king, a vassal of the Great Mogul whose nom de guerre is Dispenser of Mayhem. One might imagine that a man in such a position would be little better than a slave; however, it seems that, in the armies of the Mogul, Christian mercenaries enjoy a kind of elevated status-even when they are serving against their will! Or so I infer from the fact that Vrej was at last able to assemble the materials needed to concoct the invisible ink. And for the first time since his wanderings had begun, he was able to specify a return address. His letter reached France in November of 1692. De Gex and I steeped it in the chymical vapour that caused the scarlet letters to appear, and extracted the information I have just given you. Then I put my forgers to work making an exact duplicate of the letter, including the part written in invisible ink. This was delivered to the Cafe Esphahan and duly read by Vrej’s kin. They immediately produced a letter in reply. Its outward contents were just the sort of mawkish drivel you would expect, but when de Gex and I exposed it to the vapour and read the hidden inscription, we found it to be rather more businesslike. In neat vermilion letters they told Vrej about the good fortune that the family had lately achieved.
I had been planning to have my forgers produce an exact copy of this, as we had done with the incoming letter; but de Gex had come under the spell of an idea, and formed a resolve to play a deeper game. He was extremely vexed that he had patiently bided his time for so many years only to learn that the Solomonic Gold had been lost to Malabar pirates, and had decided to grasp the nettle, as it were, and go to Hindoostan himself. To that end, he wished to cultivate Vrej as a source of intelligence, and, if possible, as an accomplice. But it was necessary to keep the matter a secret from other members of this pirate-band. The hidden channel of the vermilion ink was ideally suited to that purpose. And so the letter crafted by my forgers ended up being rather different from the original. It was written out on the cheapest paper we could gather up, with ink of miserable quality. The plaintext was much the same as in the original. But the invisible message was altogether different. In the letter that was actually posted back to Vrej, he is given the bad news that life has only gotten worse for the Esphahnians; two more of his brothers have perished in debtors’ prisons, amp;c. However (according to this account, which de Gex concocted himself), the star of Jack Shaftoe has only soared higher; he is accounted a sort of picaresque hero now, and the story goes that he has pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes, especially those of the pirates he travels with; for hidden in the treasure that was stolen is something of unimaginable value, known to Jack and to the Jew, but that they are concealing from their brethren.