The composer picked up his staff from the floor and righted his periwig. “Fifth page, second bar!” he called out. But the musicians were slow to return.
Eliza looked up and found a burst of paint where Jack had been, and a trail of white footprints leading out to backstage and Unicorn Court.
She was thinking about the prophecy Jack had alluded to. Jack styled it a prophecy, anyway; in her mind, it had been more in the nature of a blunt promise. She had spoken it to Jack twelve years ago, in the Petit Salon of the Hotel Arcachon in Paris, with Louis XIV as witness. Most inconveniently, she had forgot the exact wording of it. It had been something along the lines of that Jack would never see her face nor hear her voice until the day he died. Eliza being something of a stickler for promises and commitments, she now reviewed the last few minutes’ events in her mind, and satisfied herself that this one had not yet been broken. At no time had Jack gotten a look at her, for his gaze had been fixed on de Gex the whole time, or at least until he’d gotten a bucket of paint in the face. And she had not spoken any words he was likely to have heard.
And now he was gone, and could neither hear nor see her.
She turned around to face the house. Musicians and Actors had withdrawn to the farthest corners, and were looking to her, as if for a cue.
“It is safe now,” she announced. “Jack Shaftoe has left the building.”
Golden Square
THE SAME TIME
“YOU TOLD HIM WHAT!?” said Daniel.
“You heard me,” said Roger; then, when he had grown weary of Daniel’s gape and stare, “Really.”
“Really? What does that mean?”
“You are so tediously parson-like sometimes. I think it must be the lingering influence of Drake.”
“I am being pragmatic. What if Bolingbroke demands proof that we have Jack? I haven’t the faintest idea where the man is.”
“Daniel, look about you.”
Daniel did. He and Roger were at a corner of Golden Square, down the way a bit from Bolingbroke’s house, in a sort of caravan-camp of pricey coaches and good horses: the field headquarters of Whigdom. Isaac had already gone home in the phaethon. Mohawks were galloping hither and cantering thither proclaiming news, and shaking encyphered writs. The house of Bolingbroke was desolate: the curtains and shutters had been drawn, most lights had been snuffed, and it was not really known whether Bolingbroke himself was still in the place. Rumor had it he’d gone to his club.
“Behold,” Roger said, “we have won.”
“How do you know that!?”
“I can just tell.”
“How?”
“I saw it in his face.”
Roger excused himself, not by word, or by gesture, but by somehow changing, for a moment, the way his eyes looked at Daniel. He strolled over to a little war party of Mohawks who were standing near their horses, and addressed them: “We have won. Let the word go forth; light the beacons.” He then turned round and began making his way toward some cluster of notables. The Mohawks behind him began hip-hip-hooraying, and pretty soon everyone in Golden Square was doing it.
Daniel was slow to take up the cheer. But when he did, he meant it. This was politics. It was ugly, it was irrational, but it was preferable to war. Roger was being cheered because he had won. What did it mean to win? It meant being cheered. So Daniel huzzahed, as lustily as his dry pipes and creaky ribs would permit, and was astounded to see the way people came a-running: not only the Quality from their town-houses, but hooligans and Vagabonds from bonfire-strewn fields to the north, to throng around Roger and cheer him. Not because they agreed with his positions, or even knew who he was, but because he was plainly enough the man of the hour.
Billingsgate Dock
A BIT LATER
“IT IS A WONDER,” exclaimed Johann von Hacklheber, wrapping an arm tight round Caroline’s waist, and lifting her off the brink of the wharf, “how many people will do favors for one who is expected to be the next Queen of England.” He was ankle-deep in Thames-water on Billingsgate Stair; severed fish-heads nuzzled his boot and ogled Caroline’s bum as he toddled round and got in position to set her into the waiting longboat. She had her arm round his neck very tight, as if meaning to shut him up by stuffing one of her breasts into his mouth. He did not complain, but only gripped her buttock that much tighter through her breeches. All of these mutual gropings could be excused on grounds that the Princess must not be allowed to fall into the cold stew of fish-innards that was Billingsgate Dock. It was a chancy maneuver; the night was dark and the steps slick. Johann thought he was being decorous enough. But the thirty or so men who had brought Caroline here, in a royal progress of coaches, sedan-chairs, and out-riders, were having none of it. They were all drunk as lords. As a matter of fact, to judge by the escutcheons gilded onto their carriage-doors, most of them were lords. There was no aspect of the scene on the stairs that was not suggestive, to them, of something.
“I smell fish!” one of them shouted. And there were a hundred other remarks, most of them a good deal more direct and to the point.
“Gentlemen!” Johann shouted, once Caroline was in the longboat, and her tit was out of his gob. “We are at Billingsgate, it is true; but this does not mean you must try to out-do the fishwives in execration. They are not here now. Return in the day-time and woo them then.”
“I say, who are these fishwives?” exclaimed someone, so intoxicated that his tongue was swishing around in his mouth like a mop in a bucket. “He makes them sound like very merry wenches indeed.” He snorted a great draught of that bracing fish-market atmosphere into his nostrils. “And I do fancy their perfume.”
Johann was getting it from both directions now. “You are too cynical, love,” said Caroline from the longboat, “and now you see I am pouting like a great big fish. They are gallant, nothing more. They do not even believe I am a Princess! They think I am a whore who came for Dr. Waterhouse.”
“They know perfectly well who you are,” said Johann. He offered a bow, sarcastically obsequious, to the men of the Kit-Cat Clubb, who stood above them at the top of the stairs, all spread out in a tableau, but difficult to make out in the dark-like a group portrait of themselves gone almost black from tobacco-smoke.
The bow was returned many-fold, but Johann saw none of it, as he had turned to vault over the gunwale into the longboat. Caroline was waving to them-somehow even that made them think of indecent things and spew libidinous ravings up and down the dock.
“We truly are safe from exposure now,” Johann muttered. “For those men, when they are sober, shall be ashamed to relate this story, and no one would believe it if they did.”
The longboat was unnecessarily large for its present mission, viz. to ferry a Baron and a Princess to a ship in the Pool. It had five oars on a side, and ten stout sailors to swing them. As such it could quickly out-distance a waterman’s boat, or most other craft that might try to pursue them. Johann and Caroline sat up in the bow to stay clear of the rowers.
“I am glad you had the wit to come here directly,” Johann said.
“Not so directly, for I was made to be the object of several toasts in the Kit-Cat Clubb,” she said.
Indeed, the toasting was not over yet. Enough time had elapsed, since it had become evident that she was going to depart by water, for the following to have been improvised by one of the crowd of domesticated poets who went round with Kit-Cats.