To re-roof such a thing was to waste money; but to embed a whole brand-new Barock chateau in it, as the duc d’Arcachon had recently finished doing, was to make some sort of ringing proclamation. In the visual language of architects and decorators, the proclamation said something about whatever glorious principles were personified by all its swooping, robed, wreathed, winged demigods. Translated into English it said, “I am rich and powerful, and you are not.”
Jack got the message. They put him under house-arrest in a grand bedchamber with a high Barock window through which the Duke and Duchess, presumably, could watch the comings and goings of ships in the harbor. The room’s back wall, facing these windows, consisted mostly of mirrors-which as even Jack knew was an homage to the Galerie des Glaces at Versailles.
Jack lay in bed for several days, unable to bring himself to look into any mirrors, or to go near that window and see Minerva stuck on the Dutch-hammer. Sometimes he would get out of bed and hug the cannonball that was attached to his neck-collar by a four-foot length of chain and carry it into the en suite garderobe: a closet with a wooden bench decorated with a hole. Being ever so careful not to let the cannonball fall into that hole-for he’d not quite decided to kill himself yet-he’d sit down and void himself into a chute that spilled out onto the stone cliff-side far below.
Years ago-the last time a collar of iron had been locked around his neck by an Arcachon-John Churchill had warned him that angry Frenchmen were bound to come after him with pliers sooner or later. Jack could only assume that this was still true, and that in the meantime he was being kept in luxurious surroundings as part of some highly refined campaign of sarcasm.
After a week they moved him to a stone chamber. The windows were crossbow-embrasures that had recently been chocked up with pigs of glass. But they did afford him a view of the Dutch-hammer and its latest victim. Minerva had languished there, an object of ridicule, as gold and silver were extracted from her hold, and replaced with rocks to keep her ballasted.
“Did Vrej survive the fall, and the water?” was Jack’s first question when Edmund de Ath-who had revealed himself to be, in fact, one Edouard de Gex, a Jesuit, and a hater of the Jansenists and of the Enlightenment both-came around to taunt him.
Edouard de Gex looked surprised. “Why do you ask? Surely you’re not naive enough to think you’ll have an opportunity to kill him.”
“Oh no, I was just wondering how it came out in the end.”
“How what came out?”
“The story. You see, all along I’ve been supposing that this was my story, but now I see it has really been Vrej’s.”
Edouard de Gex shrugged. “He lives. He has a bit of a catarrh. When he’s feeling better he’ll probably come around and explain matters to you.”
“That should be a lively conversation…but pray tell, why the hell are you here?”
“I am here to look after your immortal soul.”
De Gex had traded his former garb for a Jesuit’s black robes, and even his language had changed. Formerly he had spoken Sabir, but now it was English. “It is my intention to convert all of Britain to the true faith,” he remarked, “and so I have made a study of your language.”
“And you’re going to begin with me? Weren’t you paying attention in Mexico City?”
“The Inquisition there has grown lax. You said you were a Catholic and they took you at your word… I prefer a more rigorous approach.” De Gex produced a letter from his sleeve. “Does this look familiar?”
“It looks like the one Eliza sent me in New Spain…” Jack blinked and shook his head. “The one we opened and read on the ship…which was obviously a fake…but that one hasn’t even been opened.”
“Poor Jack. This is the true letter that was delivered to you in New Spain, and that you sealed up inside van Hoek’s book-chest. But it was not sent by Eliza. It was sent by Elizabeth de Obregon. That fickle bitch smuggled it out of the convent where she was being held in Mexico City. Then later, when we were in Vera Cruz-”
“You took it out of the crate where I’d stored it, and substituted a fake one you’d written. Van Hoek complained that the caulking was badly done… I should’ve suspected tampering.”
“I am a better forger than a caulker, it would seem,” de Gex said.
“The forgery worked,” Jack allowed.
“Monsieur Esphahnian listened to your talk of Eliza for years, and knew every detail of the story by heart…without his information, I could never have composed that letter.”
De Gex broke the seal on the letter of Elizabeth de Obregon. “It would weigh on my conscience, Jack, if I did not read you your mail. This is written in florid Spanish… I will translate it into English. She begins with the usual complicated salutation and apology…then complains of persistent nightmares that have plagued her ever since she arrived in New Spain, and prevented her from getting a single good night’s sleep. In these nightmares, she is on the Manila Galleon, in the middle of the Pacific, when it falls into the hands of the Inquisition. There is no mutiny and no violence…one day the Captain is simply gone, as if he had fallen overboard when no one was looking, and the officers are in irons, confined to their cabins, but none of them knows it yet because they are all in a drugged sleep. A man in a black robe has seized control of the ship…like any other Inquisitor, he has a staff of familiars, who until now have been disguised as merchants’ servants. They have been gathering information about their employers’ blasphemies and heresies. And, too, he has bailiffs, alguaciles, who’ve been disguised as ordinary seamen but who are now armed with pistols, whips, and blunderbusses, and are not slow to use them against anyone who challenges the authority of the man in the black robe… She goes on, Jack, to narrate this nightmare (she calls it a nightmare) in considerable detail, but much of it is well-known to you, who have such an intimate knowledge of the workings of the Inquisition. Suffice it to say that the Holy Office carried out its duties exactingly on that ship, and many of the merchants aboard were discovered to be Jews. Really, the entire Galleon was a nest of vipers, a ship of infamous degradation…”
“Is that what she wrote, or are you ‘translating’ a bit freely?”
“But even as he was decorating the yard-arms with dangling merchants, giving them the strappado so that they would unburden themselves of their sins, this black-robe was keeping lookouts posted for any sign of Minerva.”
“Does she explain the firing of the signal-cannon?”
“The hereticks mutinied. They fired the cannon in an attempt to summon help. There was general warfare-the black-robe was driven belowdecks…”
“Where he kindled a fire, to make an auto da fe of the entire ship.”
“When Elizabeth de Obregon woke aboard Minerva, the first thing she saw was that same black-robe staring her in the face. With opium and with clever arguments he induced her to believe that the burning of the Galleon had been an accident, and that now, on Minerva, they were prisoners of the hereticks, who would kill the black-robe if they knew him to be a Jesuit. After that they would make her their whore. So she played the role that the black-robe devised for her…but after recuperating in Mexico City, and suffering diverse tortures from want of opium, and coming out from the influence of the black-robe, these nightmares had begun. She decided that they were not nightmares but true memories, and that all the black-robe’s doings must have been part of a plan having something to do with Minerva, and something to do with the gold of Solomon, which Minerva’s owners had stolen from the ex-Viceroy.”
“And she wrote to warn us of this? That was a noble act on the lady’s part,” Jack mused, “but I cannot imagine why she cared whether we lived or died.”
“She was of a converso family,” de Gex said. “She was a Jewess.”
“I cannot help but notice you are using the past tense.”
“She lies in a pauper’s grave outside Mexico City. The Inquisition there, so corrupt and pusillanimous, gave her nothing more than routine treatment. She died of some pestilence that was sweeping through the prison. But one day I will see her burned in effigy in a great auto da fe in St. James’s Park, Jack. You’ll be there, too-you’ll put the torch to her pyre and pray the rosary while her effigy burns.”