The Confusion

Daniel was invited to dine aboard Alcyon on the second day of his stay in Dunkirk—the day of the perfectly blue sky—and after he and Eliza and Jean Bart, the Marquis d’Ozoir, and a few other guests had sat round the table for some time, drinking coffee, talking, and letting the meal settle in their stomachs, Bart got up and took Jean-Jacques, or Johann as he was familiarly known, over to Météore to inspect her rigging. Daniel strolled round the decks with Eliza, drinking in the air and the sun, and watching Bart and his godson cavort about the decks, tops, and ratlines. For those two had forgotten about the ostensible purpose of the visit before they’d even come aboard the jacht, and it had turned into a sword-fighting tutorial. Bart was one of those who deemed it somehow dangerous to practice with anything other than a live, sharp, steel blade, and accordingly had armed Johann with a long knife. Bart drew a small-sword—a landlubber’s weapon, as he was dressed for dinner, not privateering. He had drawn Johann into an exercise that appeared to consist mostly of knocking Johann down (not too roughly) whenever he committed the sin of being off balance.

 

“In London have people heard of Father édouard de Gex, and what befell him?” Eliza wanted to know.

 

“I am too retiring, too peculiar to make the social rounds and hear all the latest,” Daniel said, “and so maybe you are asking the wrong Englishman. He is a fierce Jesuit, close to the Marquise de Maintenon, and I have the vague notion that something bad happened to him—”

 

“You could say that,” said Eliza. “He was strolling in the gardens of Versailles late in the summer. There is a place there called the Bosquet de l’Encelade—a pool and a fountain of several jets, depressed in the center of a great encircling bower, the whole surrounded by woods, and rather remote from the chateau. I used to read there. As de Gex was strolling along the circuit of the bower, he became aware—or so he told the story later—that someone else was there, padding along in the same direction, but lagging far enough behind as to remain hidden from view by the curvature of the bower. And so de Gex stepped through one of the portals that gives access to the lawn within—terraced rings of turf descending toward the pool. Cutting across the lawn, he turned around abruptly to look behind him, and saw what was recognizable as a human form. But it was difficult to make out through the lattice-work of the bower. ‘Show yourself, whoever you are,’ de Gex called, and after a brief hesitation his stalker emerged from one of those portals and was revealed as an immense one-armed man carrying a long staff—which proved, on second glance, to be a harpoon. Now, the fountain lay between them, and de Gex wanted to keep it that way, whereas this other chap wanted to get closer to de Gex, so that he could launch the weapon from shorter range and without having to pitch it through jets and spray. De Gex called for help, but in this secluded part of the garden, with the roar and hiss of the fountain, he could not know whether his cry had been heard. The harpooneer took to pursuing him. De Gex was uncertain whether to keep circling the fountain—which had the advantage that it kept his adversary in view—or to exit through the bower, flee into the grove, and go for help. In any event he did not have to dither over it for long, for as it turned out someone had heard his cry and come running to see what was the matter. De Gex took his eye off the harpooneer for a moment as his would-be rescuer emerged from the bower. When he looked back he saw the harpoon inbound; for his hunter, seeing that he was losing his chance, had made a desperate fling. De Gex tried to dodge it. Meanwhile it was diverted by a surging jet from a fountain. The details are unclear; suffice it to say that the fluked head of the weapon had to be excavated, by the King’s surgeon, from deep in de Gex’s upper thigh. It passed through the muscle on the outside of the limb and spared the great vessels and nerves that run along the inside; but the bone was damaged, an infection developed, and de Gex has, ever since, lingered at Death’s door, in a sick-room at the chapter-house of the Jesuits in the town of Versailles.”

 

“The attacker?”

 

“Bolted into the forest of the King’s hunting-park and was tracked for some miles but never caught. Today I heard the news that de Gex has died. His cousin, Madame la duchesse d’Oyonnax, is looking after the arrangements—probably his body will be taken back to the family seat to be interred.”

 

“It is an extraordinary tale,” said Daniel. “As you have reasons for everything you do, I presume you had a reason for relating it to me?”

 

Eliza shrugged. “There was a feeling among some at Court that this was an assassin acting on orders from London, or some other Protestant capital. The plot to assassinate William on Turn-ham Green might have been tit-for-tat. I thought the Juncto might want to know as much.”

 

“I shall pass it along, then, madame. The Juncto shall consider itself in your debt.”

 

“I shall consider myself in yours, if you deliver the message.”

 

“On the contrary, it will be my honor to be of service, madame.”

 

“You might also be of service by escorting him home,” said Eliza, nodding over toward Johann, “assuming he survives his fencing-lesson.”

 

Johann had quickly tired of being knocked down by his godfather, and so the lesson had moved along to parts of the syllabus more fun and less practical: viz. hanging from ratlines with one hand whilst duelling the opponent with the other.

 

“I had supposed he was home,” said Daniel.

 

“Home is Leipzig,” said Eliza. “It is a long story—much longer than that of de Gex and the harpoon.”

 

“I wonder if I might engage in some tit-for-tat by telling you a bit of news from my side of the water.”

 

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