The Confusion

Etienne came in to the bedchamber now and twirled off his coat, and tossed his small-sword onto a window-bench. Eliza gave him a perfunctory over-the-shoulder greeting. Etienne strolled up along the side of the bed, walking towards Jack, loosening his cravat, idly swishing the riding-crop. He stopped before the mirror, pretending to study his own reflection, but in fact staring Jack directly in the eye. “I believe I shall ride bare-back to-night,” he announced, loudly enough to penetrate the silvered glass.

Eliza was a bit surprised. But she mastered that quickly, and then had to hide a flush of annoyance. She finished a sentence, parked her quill in an inkwell, stood up, and peeled her gown back over her head. What greeted Jack, then, viewed through forty-odd-year-old eyes and a mottled, half-silvered mirror by candlelight, was not a bit less lovely than what he had last seen of her seventeen years ago. He could tell there had been a hard-fought dispute with the Pox and that Eliza had won it. Of course she had won it!

Her husband came up and struck her across the face with his hand, twisting her around so that she fell face-down on the bed. Then he whipped her across the arse and the backs of her thighs with the crop, occasionally looking up to smirk at Jack through the mirror. He commanded her to rise to all fours, and she obeyed. Fucking, interspersed with more whipping, ensued. Etienne did it from a position bolt upright on his knees on the bed behind Eliza, so that he could stare Jack down until the last moments when his eyes closed.

Now in the dungeons of the Inquisition, Jack had himself noted a ph?nomenon oft discoursed of by prisoners, namely that after a bit of torture the body went numb and it simply did not hurt that much any more. Perhaps the same thing was at work here. It had hurt just to see Eliza-to be so close to her. Seeing her little Lavardac boy had perhaps been the worst. This scene of “riding bare-back,” however grisly it was in a certain way, simply did not trouble him as much as Etienne clearly supposed it did. If Eliza had jumped up from her writing-desk to smother her husband with kisses and then dragged him to bed and made rapturous love to him, that would have hurt. But instead she had shrugged, and parked her quill. Before the ink was dry on the sentence she’d been writing when Etienne had entered the room, he had exhausted himself, she had her clothes back on, and was approaching the desk with a look on her face that said, Now where was I when what’s-his-name interrupted me?

LATER JACK WAS TAKEN AWAY and returned to his cell. The next night, the whole thing was repeated-almost as if Etienne knew in his heart that it had failed the first time. The chief difference was that when Etienne came into the bedchamber and announced his intentions, Eliza was, this time, truly astonished.

On the third night, she was out-and-out flabbergasted, and asked Etienne a number of probing questions clearly meant to establish whether he might be developing a brain tumor.

Jack, a theatre-goer of long standing, now saw how it was going to be. For Etienne had explained to him that his doom was to be locked up in a cell here for the rest of his life, and that once a year, when the weather cleared, Etienne was going to sail up here with Eliza and repeat this procedure a few times before turning round and sailing home. As Etienne told him this, Jack was, of course, gagged, and could not answer; but what he was thinking was that this was indeed an excruciating torture, but for wholly different reasons than Etienne imagined. The premise was excellent, granted; but the road to dramaturgickal perdition was thick strewn with excellent premises. The difficulty lay in that this show was wretchedly staged and, in a word, botched. This made it almost more painful to view than if it had been carried off brilliantly. Jack’s fate, it seemed, was to languish in a chilly dungeon three hundred and sixty-odd days out of each year and, on the other few days, to be a captive audience to a bad play. He had to grant that it would be a humiliating fate if he had been a member of the French nobility. But as a Vagabond who’d already lived thrice as long as he ought to’ve, it wasn’t bad at all; it was pleasing, in fact, to see how not under Etienne’s thumb was Eliza. Jack’s chief source of discomfort, then, was a feeling well known to soldiers of low rank, to doctors’ patients, and to people getting their hair cut; namely, that he was utterly in the power of an incompetent.

After the third night, the set was struck, as it were. Jack was locked in his cell to begin the first year of his ordeal, and Meteore sailed away south.

Jack settled in, and began to make friends with his gaolers. They were under strict orders not to talk to him, but they couldn’t help hearing him when he talked, and he could tell that they fancied his stories.