The Confusion

All of these things were known to me, and to Father Edouard de Gex, by the end of the Year of Our Lord 1690. As you know, de Gex took the keenest imaginable interest in this. He began to ransack books of Alchemy for information about the vermilion ink: how it was concocted, and what vapor or infusion was required to make the hidden letters manifest on the page. With the connivance of his cousine the duchesse d’Oyonnax, he made the Esphahnians a great success among all the coffee-fanciers at Court, with the result that they have been able to move to Versailles and build that coffee-house on the Rue de l’Orangerie where you and I have spent so many stimulating hours. This had the effect that de Gex desired: All of the Esphahnians were gathered together in one house where they could be spied on with ease. When a letter came to them from some place such as Mocha, de Gex and I knew it first; and when a member of this family went out to buy something from a chymist, he was of necessity dealing with one of the Esoteric Brotherhood, well known to de Gex. And so by the middle of 1692 we had learned everything there was to know about the vermilion ink: how to compound it, and how to render it visible. Too, we knew of Vrej’s movements about the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. The one person who was wholly in the dark was Vrej himself. Because of his erratic movements, his family had not been able to send a letter to him since 1689, when they had been clinging to a wretched existence in Paris.

Finally in September of 1692 the pirates sailed to Surat, in Hindoostan, to get away from the Hell-hounds sent after them by Lothar von Hacklheber and various others they had injured. They were assaulted from an unexpected quarter by pirates of Malabar and their treasure was taken from them. Several, including Vrej, waded up on to the shores of Hindoostan where they dispersed. Vrej was press-ganged into the army of a regional king, a vassal of the Great Mogul whose nom de guerre is Dispenser of Mayhem. One might imagine that a man in such a position would be little better than a slave; however, it seems that, in the armies of the Mogul, Christian mercenaries enjoy a kind of elevated status-even when they are serving against their will! Or so I infer from the fact that Vrej was at last able to assemble the materials needed to concoct the invisible ink. And for the first time since his wanderings had begun, he was able to specify a return address. His letter reached France in November of 1692. De Gex and I steeped it in the chymical vapour that caused the scarlet letters to appear, and extracted the information I have just given you. Then I put my forgers to work making an exact duplicate of the letter, including the part written in invisible ink. This was delivered to the Cafe Esphahan and duly read by Vrej’s kin. They immediately produced a letter in reply. Its outward contents were just the sort of mawkish drivel you would expect, but when de Gex and I exposed it to the vapour and read the hidden inscription, we found it to be rather more businesslike. In neat vermilion letters they told Vrej about the good fortune that the family had lately achieved.

I had been planning to have my forgers produce an exact copy of this, as we had done with the incoming letter; but de Gex had come under the spell of an idea, and formed a resolve to play a deeper game. He was extremely vexed that he had patiently bided his time for so many years only to learn that the Solomonic Gold had been lost to Malabar pirates, and had decided to grasp the nettle, as it were, and go to Hindoostan himself. To that end, he wished to cultivate Vrej as a source of intelligence, and, if possible, as an accomplice. But it was necessary to keep the matter a secret from other members of this pirate-band. The hidden channel of the vermilion ink was ideally suited to that purpose. And so the letter crafted by my forgers ended up being rather different from the original. It was written out on the cheapest paper we could gather up, with ink of miserable quality. The plaintext was much the same as in the original. But the invisible message was altogether different. In the letter that was actually posted back to Vrej, he is given the bad news that life has only gotten worse for the Esphahnians; two more of his brothers have perished in debtors’ prisons, amp;c. However (according to this account, which de Gex concocted himself), the star of Jack Shaftoe has only soared higher; he is accounted a sort of picaresque hero now, and the story goes that he has pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes, especially those of the pirates he travels with; for hidden in the treasure that was stolen is something of unimaginable value, known to Jack and to the Jew, but that they are concealing from their brethren.