Quicksilver (49 page)

“Who has been making sausages in here?” Daniel inquired. Which sent Tess into a fit of the giggles. She had just about got his new breeches off.

“I should say
you
have made a pretty one!” she finally managed to get out.

“I should say
you
are responsible for making it,” Daniel demurred, and then (now that it was in plain view) added: “and it is anything but pretty.”

“Wrong on both counts!” said Tess briskly. She stood up and grabbed it. Daniel gasped. She gave it a tug; Daniel yelped, and drew closer. “Ah, so it
is
attached to you. You shall have to accept responsibility for the making of it, then; can’t blame the lasses for everything. And as for pretty—” she relaxed her grip, and let it rest on the palm of her hand, and gave it a good look. “You’ve never seen a
nasty
one, have you?”

“I was raised to believe they were
all
quite nasty.”

“That may be true—it is all metaphysickal, isn’t it? Quite. But please know some are nastier than others. And that is why we have sausage-casings in a bedchamber.”

She proceeded to do something quite astonishing with ten inches of knotted sheepgut. Not that he needed ten inches; but she was generous with it, perhaps to show him a kind of respect.

“Does this mean it is not actually coitus?” Daniel asked hopefully. “Since I am not really touching you?” Actually he was touching her in a lot of places, and vice versa. But where it counted he was touching nothing but sheepgut.

“It is very common for men of your religion to say so,” Tess said.
“Almost as common as this irksome habit of talking while you are doing it.”

“And what do
you
say?”

“I say that we are not touching, and not having sex, if it makes you feel better,” Tess said. “Though, when all is finished, you shall have to explain to your Maker why you are at this moment buggering a dead sheep.”

“Please do not make me laugh!” Daniel said. “It hurts somehow.”

“What is funny? I simply speak the truth. What you are feeling is not hurting.”

He understood then that she was right. Hurting wasn’t the word for it.

When Daniel woke up in that bed, sometime in the middle of the following afternoon, Tess was gone. She’d left him a note (who’d have thought she was literate? But she had to read the scripts).

Daniel,

We shall make more sausages later. I am off to act. Yes, it may have slipped your mind that I am an actress.

Yesterday I worked, playing the role of mistress. It is a difficult role, because dull. But now it has become fact, not farce, and so I shall not have to act any more; much easier. As I am no longer professionally engaged, pretending to be your mistress, I shall no longer be receiving my stipend from your friend Roger. As I am now your mistress in fact, some small gift would be appropriate. Forgive my forwardness. Gentlemen
know such things,
Puritans
must be instructed.

Tess

P.S. You want instruction in acting. I shall endeavour to help.

Daniel staggered about the room for some minutes collecting his clothes, and tried to put them on in the right order. It did not escape his notice that he was getting dressed, like an actor, in the backstage of a theatre. When he was done he found his way out among sets and properties and stumbled out onto the stage. The house was empty, save for a few actors dozing on benches. Tess was right. He had found his place now: he was just another actor, albeit he would never appear on a stage, and would have to make up his own lines
ad libitum.

His role, as he could see plainly enough, was to be a leading Dissident who also happened to be a noted savant, a Fellow of the Royal Society. Until lately he would not have thought this a difficult role to play, since it was so close to the truth. But whatever illusions
Daniel might once have harbored about being a man of God had died with Drake, and been cremated by Tess. He very much phant’sied being a Natural Philosopher, but that simply was not going to work if he had to compete against Isaac, Leibniz, and Hooke. And so the role that Roger Comstock had written for him was beginning to appear very challenging indeed. Perhaps, like Tess, he would come to prefer it that way.

That much had been evident to him on that morning in 1673. But the ramifications had been as far beyond his wits as Calculus would’ve been to Mayflower Ham. He could not have anticipated that his new-launched career as actor on the stage of London would stretch over the next twenty-five years. And even if he had foreseen that, he could never have phant’sied that, after forty, he would be called back for an encore.

NOVEMBER
1713

B
LACKBEARD IS AFTER
HIM
! Daniel spent the day terrified even
before
he knew this—now’s the time to be struck dead with fear. But he is calm instead. Partly it’s that the surgeon’s not sewing him together any more, and anything’s an improvement on
that.
Partly it’s that he lost some blood, and drank some rum, during the operation. But those are mechanistic explanations. Despite all that Daniel said to Wait Still concerning Free Will,
et cetera,
on the eve of his departure from Boston, he is not willing to believe, yet, that he is controlled by his balance of humours. No, Daniel is in a better mood (once he’s had an hour or two to rest up, anyway) because things are beginning to make sense now. Albeit scantly. Pain scares him, death doesn’t especially (he never expected to live so long!), but chaos, and the feeling that the world is not behaving according to rational laws, put him into the same state of animal terror as a dog who’s being dissected alive but cannot understand why.
To him the rolling eyes of those bound and muzzled dogs have ever been the touchstone of fear.

“Out for a stroll so soon, Doctor?”

Dappa’s evidently recognized him by the tread of his shoes and walking-stick on the quarterdeck—he hasn’t taken the spyglass away from his eye in half an hour.

“What about that schooner is so fascinating, Mr. Dappa? Other than that it’s full of murderers.”

“The Captain and I are having a dispute. I say it is a floaty and leewardly Flemish pirate-bottom. Van Hoek sees idioms in its rigging that argue to the contrary.”

“
Bottom
meaning her hull—
floaty
meaning she bobs like a cork, with little below the water-line—which is desirable, I gad, for Flemings and pirates alike, as both must slip into shallow coves and harbors—”

“Perfect marks so far, Doctor.”

“
Leewardly,
then, I suppose, means that because of that faintness in the keel, the wind tends to push her sideways through the water whenever she is sailing close-hauled—as she is now.”

“And as are we, Doctor.”

“
Minerva
has the same defect, I suppose—”

This slander finally induces Dappa to take the spyglass away from his eye. “Why should you assume any such thing?”

“All these Amsterdam-ships are flat-bottomed of necessity, are they not? For entering the Ijsselmeer…”

“
Minerva
was built on the Malabar coast.”

“Mr. Dappa!”

“I would not dishonor you with jests, Doctor. It is true. I was there.”

“But how—”

“ ’Tis an awkward time to be telling you the entire Narration,” Dappa observes. “Suffice it to say that she is
not
leewardly. Her
apparent
course is as close as it can be to her
true
course.”

“And you’d like to know, whether the same is true of yonder schooner,” Daniel says. “It is not unlike the problem an astronomer faces, when—imprisoned as he is on a whirling and hurtling planet—he tries to plot the true trajectory of a comet through the heavens.”

“Now it’s
my
turn to wonder whether
you
are jesting.”

“The water is like the Cœlestial Æther, a fluid medium through which all things move. Cape Cod, over yonder, is like the distant, fixed stars—by sighting that church-steeple in Provincetown, the High Land of Cape Cod to the south of it, the protruding mast of
yonder wrack, and then by doing a bit of trigonometry, we may plot our position, and by joining one point to the next, draw our trajectory. The schooner, then, is like a comet—also moving through the æther—but by measuring the angles she makes with us and with the church-steeple,
et cetera,
we may find her
true
course; compare it with her
apparent
heading; and easily judge whether she is, or is not, leewardly.”

“How long would it take?”

“If you could make sightings, and leave me in peace to make calculations, I could have an answer in perhaps half an hour.”

“Then let us begin without delay,” Dappa says.

Plotting it out on the back of an old chart in the common room, Daniel begins to understand the urgency. To escape the confines of Cape Cod Bay, they must clear Race Point at the Cape’s northernmost tip. Race Point is northeast of them. The wind, for the last few hours, has been steady from northwest by north.
Minerva
can sail six points
^*
from the wind, so she can just manage a northeasterly course. So leaving aside pirate-ships and other complications, she’s in a good position to clear Race Point within the hour.

But as a matter of fact there are two pirate-ships paralleling her course, much as the schooner-that-sucked and the ketch were doing earlier. To windward (i.e., roughly northwest of
Minerva
) is a big sloop—Teach’s flagship—which has complete freedom of movement under these circumstances. She’s fast, maneuverable, well-armed, capable of sailing four points from the wind, and well to the north of the dangerous shallows, hence in no danger of running aground off of Race Point. The schooner, on the other hand, is to leeward, between
Minerva
and the Cape. She can also sail four points from the wind—meaning that she should be able to angle across
Minerva
’s course and grapple with her before Race Point. And if she does, there’s no doubt that Teach’s sloop will come in along the larboard side at the same moment, so that
Minerva
will be boarded from both sides at once. If that is all true, then
Minerva
’s best course is to turn her stern into the wind, fall upon the schooner, attack, and then come about (preferably before running aground on the Cape) and contend with the sloop.

But if Dappa is right, and the schooner suffers from the defect of leewardliness, then all’s not as it seems. The wind will push her sideways,
away
from
Minerva
and
toward
the Race Point shallows—she won’t be able to intercept
Minerva
soon enough, and, to avoid running aground, she’ll have to tack back to the west, taking her
out of the action. If that is true,
Minerva
’s best course is to maintain her present close-hauled state and wait for Teach’s sloop to make a move.

It’s all in the arithmetic—the same sort of arithmetic that Flamsteed, the Astronomer Royal, is probably grinding through at this very moment at the Observatory in Greenwich, toiling through the night in hopes of proving that Sir Isaac’s latest calculation of the orbit of the moon is wrong. Except here
Minerva
’s the Earth, that schooner is Luna, and fixed Boston is, of course, the Hub of the Universe. Daniel passes an extraordinarily pleasant half-hour turning Dappa’s steady observations into sines and cosines, conic sections and fluxions. Pleasant because it is imbued with the orderliness that taketh away his fear. Not to mention a fascination that makes him forget the throbbing and pulling stitches in his flesh.

“Dappa is correct. The schooner drifts to leeward, and will soon fall by the wayside or run aground,” he announces to van Hoek, up on the poop deck. Van Hoek puffs once, twice, thrice on his pipe, then nods and goes into Dutch mutterings. Mates and messenger-boys disseminate his will into all compartments of the ship.
Minerva
forgets about the schooner and bends all efforts to the expected fight against Teach’s wicked sloop-of-war.

In another half-hour, the leewardly schooner provides some coarse entertainment by actually running aground at the very knuckle of Cape Cod’s curled fist. This is ignominious, but hardly unheard-of; these English pirates have only been in Massachusetts for a couple of weeks and can’t expect to have all the sand-banks committed to memory. This skipper would rather run aground in soft sand, and refloat later, than flinch from battle and face Black-beard Teach’s wrath.

Van Hoek immediately has them come about to west by south, as if they were going to sail back to Boston. His intent is to cut behind Teach’s stern and fire a broadside up the sloop’s arse and along her length. But Teach has too much intelligence for that, and so breaks the other way, turning to the east to get clear of
Minerva
’s broadside, then wearing round to the south, pausing near the grounded schooner to pick up a few dozen men who might come in useful as boarders. After a short time he comes up astern of
Minerva.

A tacking duel plays out there off of Race Point for an hour or so, Teach trying to find a way to get within musket-range of
Minerva
without being blown apart, van Hoek trying to fire just a single well-considered broadside. There are some paltry exchanges of fire. Teach puts a small hole in
Minerva
’s hull that is soon patched,
and a cloud of hurtling junk from one of
Minerva
’s carronnades manages to carry away one of the sloop’s sails, which is soon replaced. But with time, even van Hoek’s hatred of pirates is worn down by the tedium, and by the need to get away from land while the sun is shining. Dappa reminds him that the Atlantic Ocean is just a mile or two thataway, and that nothing stands any more between them and it. He persuades van Hoek that there’s no better way to humiliate a pirate than to leave him empty-handed, his decks crowded with boarders who have nothing to throw their grappling-hooks at. To out-sail a pirate, he insists, is a sweeter revenge than to out-fight him.

So van Hoek orders
Minerva
to come about and point herself toward England. The men who’ve been manning the guns are told to make like Cincinnatus, walking away from their implements of war at the very moment of their victory so that they may apply themselves to peaceful toils: in this case, spreading every last sail that the ship can carry. Tired, smoke-smeared men lumber up into the light and, after a short pause to swallow ladles of water, go to work swinging wide the studdingsail booms. This nearly doubles the width of the ship’s mightiest yards. The studdingsails tumble from them and snap taut in the wind. Like an albatross that has endured a long pursuit through a cluttered wilderness, tediously dodging and veering from hazard to hazard, and that finally rises above the clutter, and sees the vast ocean stretching before it,
Minerva
spreads her wings wide, and flies. The hull has shrunk to a mote, dragged along below a giant creaking nebula of firm canvas.

Teach can be seen running up and down the length of his sloop with smoke literally coming out of his head, waving his cutlass and exhorting his crew, but everyone knows that
Queen Anne’s Revenge
is a bit crowded, not to mention under-victualled, for a North Atlantic cruise in November.

Minerva
accelerates into blue water with power that Daniel can feel in his legs, crashing through the odd rogue swell just as she rammed a pirate-boat earlier today, and, as the sun sets on America, she begins the passage to the Old World sailing large before a quartering wind.