The Confusion

"All is well, Sergeant Bob. No, I don't know who he is. He is a mute, or something. But he seems well-intentioned. The worst I can say of him is that he is more forthright in his methods than would be considered proper at Versailles."

"I have noted him about the waterfront, spying on Météore," was Bob's answer.

"Come to mention it, so have I," said Eliza, "but lacking your penetration, sir, I could not make out whether he was spying, or merely satisfying his curiosity."

"Perhaps lovely Duchesses are more accustomed to being stared at for hours at a time than mangled Sergeants," Bob said. "To me it looked like spying."

"As perhaps it was, Sergeant Bob; but this morning he has been of service to a boat-load of women."

"Is it to be you alone, or the entire boat-load?" demanded the incredulous Monsieur Rigaud, Captain of Arbalète. Until this point, he had been preoccupied by the spectre—even more terrifying to a ship-captain than to any other sort of person—of the Soleil Royal drifting past them with gouts of flame spurting from her hundred gun-ports. Rigaud seemed at last to have convinced himself that the English, before setting fire to her, had extracted her stores of gunpowder—i.e., that they wanted her to burn for a long time, make a memorable spectacle for the citizenry of Cherbourg, and perhaps set fire to a few other ships—not simply blow up. If he was right, then the danger to Arbalète was past, for the flagship had unequivocally drifted beyond them. He had, accordingly, turned his mind to a threat almost as dire: an onslaught of female passengers.

"Only I," said Eliza, and slung her bag at Rigaud's head.

This was news to the other women, and caused a little flurry of gasps and outcries. Eliza considered trying to explain matters. Mommy must run off to England and steal three tons of silver. Instead she reached up—for the rowboat was grinding against Arbalète's side—and let Bob seize one of her hands, and a French sailor the other. The weight came off of her feet. She was hoisted aboard Arbalète like a bale of silk. "Lovely Brigitte," she called, "I hope that one day you will forgive me for now pressing you in to service as galérie

"Rows in circles. The same had occurred to me, my lady." Brigitte seized the oars.

"We shall keep our swivel-guns charged, and watch you in to the shore," volunteered Monsieur Rigaud, who had become considerably more pliant now that the rowboat full of women was working away from Arbalète.

"Send a despatch to Captain Bart in Dunkerque," Eliza called.

"Saying what, Madame?"

"That it is going to happen after all."

"AMPUTATIONS ARE DICEY THINGS," remarked Bob Shaftoe some hours later. For a while, he had had that look on his face that warned Eliza he was pondering something, and likely to blurt out just such a ghoulish observation as soon as he took a whim to speak. "One strives to preserve the elbow, or the knee, at all costs, for that additional degree of articulation in the stump makes all the difference. In a below-the-elbow amputation, the hand is gone, and with it the ability to sense, to grasp, to caress. But yet there is the elbow, and the sinews to make it act. To turn the arm into a flail—a whole train of articulations, unfeeling, ungrasping, yet capable of action—yes, to put a flail on a stump is wholly fitting in a way."

"Remind me to ask you later for your thoughts on disembowelment," said Eliza, then regretted it, for she was already queasy. They were out on the Cha

Bob squinted at her. "I've had any number of such thoughts this morning, and have held them back from you." He was alluding to the scenes that they had all beheld from the deck of Arbalète as they had sailed east-northeast along the tip of the Cotentin—that stump of an arm that France thrust out toward England. For the first hour or so, their view had been of Cherbourg, and of the waters north of it, which had gradually been unveiled as the last traces of the four-day fog had dissolved into plain air. A goodly part of the Anglo-Dutch fleet was there. The burning of Soleil Royal and the invasion of Cherbourg Harbor by longboats were only aspects of a larger action, which they came better to understand as they drew back from it. The English and Dutch had cut a few ships from the French fleet and were going about the tedious and ungallant work of mopping them up: trying to get enough ca

Arbalète, which under these circumstances could be overlooked as an insignificant smuggler's boat, now made her course due north, threaded her way between a pair of laggardly English men-of-war, and began a sprint for Portsmouth. Before the anchorage of La Hougue was lost to view astern, they noted a spark of light drifting out of it, trying to catch up with its own column of smoke. The burning of the French fleet had begun. Those aboard Arbalète could at least turn their backs on the scene, and run away from it. Not so fortunate, as Eliza knew, was James Stuart, who was camped in a royal tent on a hill above La Hougue. He'd have to watch the whole thing. For all that she despised the man and his reign, Eliza couldn't but feel sorry for him: chased out of England once in girl's clothes, during the Commonwealth, and a second time with a bloody nose during the Glorious Revolution; loser of the Battle of the Boyne; chased out of Ireland; and now this. It was while she was mulling over these cheerful matters that Bob Shaftoe unexpectedly piped up with his ruminations on the topic of stumps; which gives a fair portrait of the mood aboard Arbalète during her passage to England.

"I HAVE SEEN altogether too many men in my day, living as I have in Vagabond-camps and Regimental quarters. And so it could be that my memory has been overfilled and is now playing tricks on me. But I think that I have seen that man before," Bob said.