“Who?” I asked.
“The queen, the queen. . ”
I stared in astonishment. “The queen of England! Dying?” I punched the air. “But Jimmy, what marvelous news!”
My God, what a coincidence, and what a disastrous one. Though for diametrically opposed reasons, both Jimmy and I were set to benefit from the news.
The balance of power in England is a very delicate thing, swinging between Tories and Whigs, who alternate in power. With Queen Anne dead, a change of government was inevitable, and with it, a reversal of the policy of conciliating the Beast, of which she had been the principal supporter. And if London turned against Paris, an alliance with Barcelona was also inevitable.
They honor a certain power in England, something unfamiliar in autocracies: that of public opinion. Catcalling critiques of foreign policy are constantly being published in the London gazettes. The “Catalan case” being a glaring example. There were debates about it in their Parliament.
Let’s not fool ourselves. Pericles’s Greece sent an expedition to Sicily, but not due merely to the goading of the demagogues. England was never altruistic, quite the opposite; public opinion and private interests spurred it on. But if there was a chance that they might come to our aid, what did it matter to us why? England had the strongest navy, and the French blockade would be broken. And as had happened at the first Bourbon siege, in 1706, when the English fleet came into port, they’d inject reinforcements and supplies and do wonders for morale. The besieging of a port that is not blockaded is, by nature, unpracticable: dixit Vauban.
With Anne’s death, it would make sense to defer the sentence. Even two or three days could change everything. And my trench was the deferral.
And Jimmy? That royal death made sense of everything that had happened so far in his life. England in turmoil, the succession to be decided. Jimmy was born to be king, and now that the opportunity had arisen, where was he? Pinned down thousands of miles south by a cause that was anything but close to his heart. Managing a full-blown siege in the south and a dynastic rebellion in the north at the same time — not possible. He would have to choose.
As cosmopolitan as Jimmy seemed, he was also a dyed-in-the-wool Englishman. When his father, the last Catholic king of England, was exiled, Jimmy was raised at the French court. The Beast’s ministers were good to him and let his talents develop, in spite of his being a bastard. But as a mercenary in France’s pay, he could aspire only to a secondary role, and by 1714 he had all the credentials needed to put himself forward in London. He’d been on the winning side in countless battles, he was a marshal, and he’d seen a few things. He was tolerant of different religious beliefs (he had none), conciliatory to factions (he didn’t believe particularly in any one), and would apply himself in the name of any cause that would reflect well on him (he had served, and would be served by, all kinds). Vauban, as politically naive as Cicero, believed in a republic made up of virtuous males. Jimmy didn’t believe in any regime that he (along with one or two vicious males) wasn’t ruling. His continuing service under the Beast, however, had brought him to Spain. To abandon the siege of Barcelona, just after replacing Pópuli, was unthinkable. Anne’s death forced him to decide between obligations he’d accrued in France since childhood, and his destiny.
He had plenty of reason to hate us. The war that had raged across the world for fourteen years was over, to all intents and purposes, but those blind Barcelonans, by refusing to face the truth, were going to hamstring his royal aspirations. Many were the days I spent at his side; I could have tried to understand what made him so fanatical. But I never did. Jimmy began and ended the sieges not bothering to find out who his enemies were or what cause they were fighting for. I believe that he didn’t hate us, because he didn’t have strong feelings about good and evil. We were an obstacle to him, more than an object of loathing.
And then he fell ill. The doctors failed to see the blindingly obvious: It wasn’t so much a bodily sickness as the core of his soul being fractured. He could stay loyal to the Beast and bring the siege to an end. Or he could betray him and go and pursue his destiny in England as a contender for the throne. Finally be a ruler himself, or via one of his mad half brothers. Carry on as a lackey with no future, or try for the ultimate prize.
The tension manifested in a virulent fever, which his military zeal only succeeded in aggravating. He spent his days buzzing around, supervising everything, especially the arrival of the matériel needed for the trench to progress. He’d get back to Mas Guinardó too tired to take off his armor — I had to undo the cinches and straps for him. The sweats had made his chest guard swell and harden, and it was like prising off a tortoise’s shell. As I took off his clothes, feeling full of hate for him, he turned and begged me: “You’ll never betray me, isn’t that right?”
Jimmy’s bottomless, insatiable egoism; his despot nature. His whispered fever ravings—Trench!. . Go! — put me on edge.
One morning he couldn’t get out of bed. He spent the day there, soaking several changes of sheets. Come nightfall, the officer of the watch arrived to ask for that night’s password. He was none other than Bardonenche.
He struck me that day as more committed to service than ever, kindness in his eyes, a total lack of prejudice. When he came in, I was helping the marshal sit up in the bed, my hands bathed in his sweat, our odors intermixed. But not a peep from Bardonenche, no judgment. He took a couple of tentative steps closer, arching his eyebrows, looking at the shivering Jimmy. The only words he had were ones of compassion: “Dear, dear sir,” he whispered.
Feeling a sense of urgency, I slapped Jimmy a little. “Jimmy, Jimmy. The army needs the password.”
Still writhing, as though possessed, his eyes rolling upward, he half whispered, half gurgled: “Loyalty.”
“If he dies,” said Bardonenche feelingly, “it will be a disaster. A siege can’t withstand three changes at the helm in such a short space of time.”
Jimmy’s poor state had an outside witness now. After that, it would have been very easy for me to kill him myself; no one would have been able to pin such an inevitable death on me.
But no, I didn’t kill him. I couldn’t. May my dead forgive me.
His shivers became more and more violent. He spent that final night clinging to me, and he held on so tightly that my ribs hurt for three days after.
“Tell me you’ll never leave me, not you,” he whispered as the fever took him over. “Trench. . Go. . King. . Kingdom. . ”
At around five in the morning, he went slack. I laid a hand against his forehead. The fever had passed. I was thankful and at the same time lamented it. I know that doesn’t add up. Put it in, though!
And as he slept, I dressed and left.
There was one thing covering my flight from Mas Guinardó: What castaway abandons ship to go back to the sinking bit of flotsam? No one would suspect a French officer, particularly one as good-looking as me in my new uniform, of wanting to cross the lines to flee to the moribund city.
The first light of dawn had begun to show on the horizon. I walked a long way along the inside edge of the cordon in search of the gate farthest from the trench to my left, which was lit up regularly by the flashes of fire from either side’s cannons. Thousands of men were working in the furrows, the bustle of battle concentrated in that one zone. The greater the distance between all that and me, then, the better.