The forged letter concludes by urging Vrej not to worry too much over the fate of his family in Paris, for, praise be to God, they have at last found an ally and a protector in one Father Edouard de Gex, a saintly man who knows of all the injustices perpetrated against the family, and who has taken a solemn vow to see to it that justice is done.
That forgery was sent off to Vrej in Hindoostan in December of 1692. The following April-about one year ago-Vrej’s reply came in, and the scarlet letters might have been written in some unholy concoction of blood and fire, so infused were they with fury and lust for revenge. “The Lord has delivered him into my hands!” was what de Gex said upon reading it. I think he meant Jack Shaftoe, rather than Vrej. At any rate we produced a forged version whose invisible text was, of course, wholly different. In this version Vrej congratulates his family on their good fortune and asks to learn more of the glorious Cafe Esphahan, amp;c.
In this manner the correspondence has gone back and forth a few more times between Vrej and his brothers. Every word of it, of course, has passed through the mind and hand of de Gex, and been twisted one way or the other, so that Vrej and his brothers have developed utterly divergent pictures of what is going on.
Had you taken the trouble to ask me, you might have learned of all of these things prior to your departure for Germany. Since then, however, one more letter has come in from Vrej.
This letter was written in the court of the Great Mogul at Shahjahanabad where (one imagines) Vrej was reclining on silken pillows and being fed peeled grapes by bejewelled virgins, as he and what remained of his pirate-band had won a great battle against the Maratha rebels and thereby re-opened the high road from Surat to Delhi. Vrej relates the story in some detail. Word of it has already reached the courts of Europe via more than one channel and so I shall not say much about it here, on the assumption that you have heard or read other accounts. The general drift of Vrej’s letter is that although he is being showered with rewards in Shahjahanabad, he cannot take any pleasure in them as long as he knows that his family are suffering in Paris; indeed, he would come home in the blink of an eye were it not for this saintly benefactor, Father Edouard de Gex, who was now looking after the family. Instead, Vrej proposes to tarry in Hindoostan so that he can get to the bottom of this story that I mentioned before-namely that there was something of extraordinary value secreted in the treasure of Bonanza. One would think that this had been irretrievably lost; but Vrej reports that some members of the pirate-band were taken as prisoners by the Malabar pirates. There exists the possibility that not all of them were slain instantly, tortured to death presently, or driven insane; i.e., that they are still alive in Malabar and know something about the lost treasure’s whereabouts.
For his services to the Great Mogul, Jack Shaftoe has been made King of a region in southern Hindoostan for a term of three years, which, as bizarre as it sounds, is a customary way for that potentate to reward his generals. Soon Jack and the remnants of his band shall journey to his new kingdom for him to be enthroned. Vrej shall go with them, and promises to send his family news as soon as he has any to write down, and the means to post it.
That is all. Father Edouard, who was hoping for news more definite, is beside himself, and divides his time between the following three activities: one, uttering oaths that should never be heard from a priest. Two, seething, and trying to prevent himself from uttering any further oaths. Three, doing penance in various churches and chapels, to seek forgiveness for having let slip oaths. And so it is not an especially productive time for him; but between famine and lack of money it is no productive time for France either and so he does not stand out from the crowd.
Bonaventure Rossignol
APRIL 1694
PRINCESS WILHELMINA CAROLINE of Brandenburg-Ansbach had been sending letters to Eliza almost every week since the summer of 1689, which was when they had last seen each other. Caroline had been six years old then. Now she was almost eleven. The handwriting, and the contents of her letters, had changed accordingly. Yet as Eliza stood on the deck of her Zille-the slim, hundred-foot-long river-barge she had chartered in Hamburg-and scanned the green banks of the Elbe, she was looking for the young mother and the little girl she had bid farewell to in the Hague five years earlier. There was no helping it. To a child, nothing seemed more stupid in adults than their inability to come to grips with the fact that people grew. Unfathomably moronic seemed the aunt or grandpapa who exclaimed “You have grown!” at each reunion. Eliza knew this as well as anyone who has ever been a child. And yet she was ambushed by the two women on the quay. They had been waving to her as the Zille drew near, and she had paid no more notice to them than to the cattle grazing in the undulating fields that rose up from the river’s edge.
In her defense-if she needed any-she was exhausted from the length of the journey, and feeling especially woolly-headed today. And even if she’d been at her very sharpest, she might not have marked this quay because it was so humble. She had been on this river for a month, and had seen an uncountable number of wharves, piers, bridges, fords, and landings. Some, in cities, were vibrating entrepots-little Amsterdams. Some, at the foot of barons’ country estates, were Barock stone-piles and iron-snarls, meant to overawe the other Barons. Others were little more than flat places on the bank where farmers could bring their carts down to trade with barge-men. But the only reason this thing outside of Pretzsch rated a second look was that two women had risked their lives to come out and put their weight on it. A hundred years ago it might have supported a carriage and a team; two hundred, a house. Today, it was a slumping huddle of black piles slowly being transubstantiated into slime. Half the decking had been pilfered, and the other half was being used by shrubs and grass in lieu of soil. Those madly waving women showed bravery by putting themselves in its trust. The slenderer of the two showed a kind of reckless bravado by jumping up and down. They’d at least had the good sense to leave their wagon on terra firma-it was drawn up at the base of a mud track that meandered down the hill from a shaggy copse that might conceal a building. To either side of the wagon, a finger of stone was thrust into the air, as if to test the wind. Around these spread moraines of alienated blocks, bricks, and vous-soirs, remnants of an arch that had been pulled down in some forgotten disturbance. In summer the loose stones would have been concealed by the leaves of the bushes and the sickly weed-trees that had insinuated roots among them, but winter had been even longer and deeper here than in France, and so most of these had not yet arrived at a firm decision as to whether they should put forth the effort of growing leaves, or simply stiffen up and die.