The Confusion

Starting from that night in the Gulf of Cadiz when they’d sacked the ex-Viceroy’s treasure-brig, Moseh had kept, in his mind, a ledger-book of all that the Cabal had gained and lost. At certain times, as when they’d fallen into the hands of Queen Kottakkal, whole pages had been torn out and thrown away. Some of the Cabal had died, others had joined in late, some had taken their shares out in intangibles, such as Gabriel Goto, who only wanted to see Japan. Some of the Cabal’s value was in Minerva, which, God willing, would continue generating revenues, other was in the quicksilver-hoard that they’d brought across the Pacific. This had been split into two batches, one for New Spain and one for Peru; the former had already been liquidated, the latter might have been sold for greater or lesser amounts of money that, now, might or might not be on the bottom of the Straits of Magellan. Whatever the current Bottom Line might be, part was owed to Queen Kottakkal and part to Electress Sophie of Hanover. But Moseh worked through all of these complications, committing it to paper so that Jack could show it to van Hoek later, and patiently explaining the difficult bits until Jack agreed.

 

This reckoning stretched over three days, and in the end Moseh was reduced to bringing in a sack of dried beans and making piles of them on the table, shoving them from place to place to demonstrate to Jack where the money had gone. A great many beans ended up on the floor, representing what they’d simply lost. But when Moseh was finished, an impressive pile of beans still remained on the table, and when Moseh told him that each bean amounted to a hundred pieces of eight, Jack had to admit that the Plan Moseh had proposed to him long ago in Algiers had been a pretty good one after all.

 

Jimmy and Danny and Tomba meanwhile ventured out into certain desolate places and recovered enough silver pigs to pay Moseh what was due him. Lacking banks, they had deposited their assets in holes in the ground, carefully hidden.

 

On the fifth of January 1702, then, Moseh and a score of others donned their sanbenitos and dunce-caps and formed a mule-train on the edge of this little adobe town, and set out for New Mexico. Jack rode with them until they were well out of sight of the bell-tower beside the town’s church. There, every man except Jack stripped off his sanbenito and his cap, and they made a bonfire of them by the roadside. Jack shook every man’s hand, but he embraced Moseh, and with tears washing the dust from his face, issued several ludicrous promises, e.g., that after he’d bought himself an earldom in England he’d come out to New Mexico for a social call. The parting lasted for a long time, which only made it worse when Moseh finally climbed astride his mule and hauled on one rein and got it pointed north. Jack stood there for an hour or so, making sure the sanbenitos were thoroughly burnt to ashes, and watching the dust-trail of the mule-train swirl up into a blue sky: ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and…

 

“Quicksilver to silver,” he said, turning towards the town. “Then Jack to London.”

 

 

 

“AS FAR AS I CAN DISCERN, all that remains here is to collect the final remnants of what was cached around Cabo Corrientes, make certain deliveries, and get the pigs down to Vera Cruz, where we’ll await Minerva,” said Edmund de Ath that evening, as they sat in front of the cantina availing themselves of the liquor of the maguey.

 

“It is not so easy as you make it sound,” Jimmy growled.

 

“On the contrary, I think it is much too difficult for a man of my limited capacities,” said de Ath. “Here, I’ll be an impediment. In Vera Cruz, on the other hand, there is much I could be doing to smooth the way for us, when Minerva, God willing, arrives.”

 

“Get thee to Vera Cruz, then,” Jack suggested.

 

“I am interested to see the place,” said de Ath. “Properly it is called New Vera Cruz. The old city was burnt to the ground, almost twenty years ago, by the notorious and terrible outlaw called El Desamparado…”

 

“I have already heard the story,” Jack said.

 

 

 

WINDING UPMINERVA‘S affairs in New Spain took several months. Jack, Jimmy, Danny, and Tomba moved north to a frontier town in Zacatecas where no one cared if Jack failed to wear his sanbenito—or if they did, they were too scared to say anything, because this was a town of desperadoes, and every man went armed all the time. When Jack had lived in Europe, he had enjoyed and even profited from being a picaroon in a world of Lords, Ladies, and Chamber of Commerce members. But he found living in a whole society of picaroons to be tiresome if not downright dangerous. So he did not linger in that border-town long, but went west over the Sierra Madre Occidental with a mule-train to recover the last of the goods they’d cached around Cabo Corrientes: a ton of quicksilver, and all of van Hoek’s books—which he had left in the mountains so that they would not be seized and burnt by the Inquisition when Minerva called at Acapulco or Lima.

 

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