At the same time—though she had not realized this until later—he had been observing her even more shrewdly. Many of her letters to Leibniz, and Leibniz’s letters back to her, had crossed his desk, for he was a member of the Cabinet Noir, whose purpose was to open and read foreign correspondence. He had found her letters to be curiously long, and filled with vapid chatter about hairstyles and the cut of the latest fashions. His true purpose in strolling with her in the gardens of Versailles had been to determine whether she was as empty-headed as she seemed in her letters. The answer, clearly, was no; and moreover she had turned out to know a lot about mathematics, metaphysics, and Natural Philosophy. This had sufficed to send him back to his family château at Juvisy, where he had broken the steganographic code that Eliza had been using to correspond with Leibniz. He could have destroyed, or at least damaged, her then, but he had lacked the desire to. For a kind of seduction had taken place between the two of them, which had not been acted upon until thirteen months ago.
It would have made matters a good deal simpler if he had fallen in love with the baby and proposed to elope with her, and him, to some other country. But this, as she now saw clearly, was unthinkable in so many different ways that to dream of it any more was a waste of time. Oh, well (she thought), if the world were populated solely by persons who loved and desired each other symmetrically, it might be happier, but not so interesting. And there would be no place in such a world for a person such as Eliza. During her weeks in Dunkerque, she had gotten better than ever at making do with what Fortune sent her way. If there was to be no doting father, so be it. Nicole was an ex-whore, recruited from one of Dunkerque’s waterfront brothels. But she had already given the baby more love than he would get in a lifetime with Bonaventure Rossignol.
“Now you show up!” she said finally.
“The cryptanalyst to His Majesty the King of France,” said Rossignol, “has responsibilities.” He was not being arch—merely stating facts. “Things are expected of him. Now. The last time you got into trouble, a year ago—”
“Correction, monsieur: the last time you know about.”
“C’est juste. On that occasion, war was brewing on the Rhine, and I had a plausible reason to go that way. Finding you, mademoiselle, in a most complex predicament, I endeavoured to assist you.”
“By impregnating me?”
“I did that out of passion—as did you, mademoiselle, for our flirtation had been lengthy. And yet it did militate in your favor—perhaps even saved your life. You seduced Étienne d’Arcachon the very next day.”
“I let him believe he was seducing me,” Eliza demurred.
“Just as I said. Tout le monde knew about it. When you turned up pregnant in the Hague, everyone, including le Roi, and Étienne, assumed that the baby was the spawn of Arcachon; and, when it was born healthy, this made it seem that you were that rarest of specimens: one who could mate with a scion of the de Lavardac line without passing on its well-known hereditary imperfections to the child. I did as much as I could to propagate this myth through other channels.”
“Are you referring to how you stole, and decyphered, my journal, and gave it to the King?”
“Wrong on all counts. Monsieur le comte d’Avaux stole it—or would have, if I had not galloped post-haste to the Hague and co-opted him. I did not decypher it so much as produce a fictionalized version of it. And since the King owns me, and all my work, I did not so much give it to his majesty as direct his majesty’s attention to it.”
“Couldn’t you have directed his majesty’s attention elsewhere?”
“Mademoiselle. You had been witnessed by many Persons of Quality carrying out what was obviously a spy-mission. D’Avaux and his minions were doing all in their power—and they have much power—to drag your name through the muck. To direct the attention of le Roi elsewhere would have booted you nothing. Rather, I produced for his majesty an account of your actions that was tame compared to the fabrications of d’Avaux; it deflated that man’s pretensions while cementing the belief that the baby had been fathered by Étienne de Lavardac d’Arcachon. I was not trying to rehabilitate you—that would have required a miracle—only to mitigate the damage. For I feared that they might send someone to assassinate you, or abduct you, and bring you back to France.”
And now he stopped because he had talked himself into a faux pas, and was mortified. “Er…”
“Yes, monsieur?”
“I did not anticipate this.”
“Is that why it took you so long to get here?”
“I have already told you that the King’s cryptanalyst has responsibilities—none of which, as it turns out, place him in Dunkerque. I came as soon as I could.”
“You came as soon as I incited your jealousy by praising Lieutenant Bart in a letter.”
“Ah, so you admit it!”
“I admit nothing, monsieur, for he is every bit as remarkable as I made him out to be, and any man in his right mind would be jealous of him.”
“It is just so difficult for me to follow,” said Rossignol.
“Poor Bon-bon!”
“Please do not be sarcastic. And please do not address me by that ridiculous name.”
“What is it, pray tell, that the greatest cryptanalyst in the world cannot follow?”
“At first you described him as a corsair, a boca-neer, who took you by force…”
“Took the ship I was on by force—pray watch your language!”
“Later, when it was to your advantage to make me jealous, he was the most perfect gentle knight of the seas.”
“Then I shall explain it, for there is no contradiction. But first take off that cassock and let us make ourselves more comfortable.”
“The double entendre is noted,” said Rossignol crisply, “but before I become dangerously comfortable, pray tell, what are you doing in the residence of the Marquis and the Marquise d’Ozoir? For that is where we are, to judge from the scutcheon on the gates.”
“You have decyphered the coat of arms correctly,” said Eliza. “Fear not, the d’Ozoirs are not here now. It is just me, and my servants.”
“But I thought you were under arrest on a ship, and had no servants…or did you write those things solely to make me come here the faster?”
Eliza clamped a hand on Rossignol’s wrist and dragged him through a door. They had been conversing in a foyer that communicated with the stables. She took him now down a corridor into a little salon, and thence into a larger drawing-room that was illuminated by several great windows facing toward the harbor.
At some point in its history, Dunkerque must have been an apt name for this place. For it literally meant Dune-church, and one could easily see it, some centuries back, as a dune with a church on, below, or near it, and nothing else, save an indifferent creek that reached the sea there, not so much impelled by gravity as blundering into it by accident. This stark dune-church-creek-scape had over ages been complicated, though never obscured, by the huts, houses, docks, and wharves of a modest fishing-and smuggling-port. More recently it had come to be thought of as a strategic asset, and been juggled back and forth between England and France for a while; inevitably Louis XIV had made it his, and begun to aggrandize it into a base navale, which was a little bit like mounting cannons and armor-plates on a fishing-boat. To anyone approaching the place from England, it looked fearsome enough, with a massive stout rubble-wall along the shore for cannonballs to bounce off of, and divers fortifications and batteries set up wherever the sand would bear their weight. But seen from within—which was how Eliza and Monsieur Bonaventure Rossignol were seeing it—the place looked like a perfectly innocent little port-town that had been hurled into a prison, or had had a prison erected around it.
All of which was to say that it was not and never would be a place for a great lord to pile up a brilliant château, or a great lady to spread a fragrant garden; and while those dunes might be speckled with watch-towers and mortar-batteries, no grand maréchal would ever make them terri
ble with a high citadel. The Marquis and the Marquise d’Ozoir had had the discretion to know as much, and so had contented themselves with acquiring a compound in the middle of things, near the harbor, and improving it, building up rather than out. The exterior of the main house was still old Norman half-timbered style, but one would never know it if all one saw was the interior, which had been remade in Barock style—or as close to it as one could come without using stone. Much wood, paint, and time had been devoted to fashioning pilasters and columns, wall-panels and balusters that would pass for Roman marble unless you went up and rapped on them with a knuckle. Rossignol had the good grace not to, and attended, instead, to what Eliza wished to show him: the view out the window.
From here they could see most of the ship-basin: a pool, deepened by dredging, and a-mazed by moles, causeways, wharves, sea-walls, &c. Beyond it the view was chopped off by the rectilinear bluff of the fortress-wall. Eliza did not have to explain to her guest that part of the basin was still used by the ordinary sea-faring folk who had always dwelled here, while another part was for the Navy; as much was obvious from looking at the ships.
She gave him a moment to take this in, then said: “How did I end up here? Well, once I had recovered from childbirth—” then she caught herself short, and smiled. “What a ridiculous expression; I see now that I shall be recovering until the day I die.”
Rossignol ignored the remark, and so, blushing slightly, she went back to the main thread: “I began to liquidate all of my short-term positions in the Amsterdam markets. It would be impossible to manage them from across the sea during a war. This was done easily enough—the result was a pretty hoard of gold coins, loose gemstones, and vulgar jewelry, as well as Bills of Exchange payable in London, and a few payable in Leipzig.”
“Ah,” said Rossignol, drawing some connexion in his mind, “those would be the ones that you gave to Princess Eleanor.”*
“As usual, you know everything.”
“When she turned up in Berlin with money, people there gossiped. It sounds as though you were most generous.”
“I booked passage on a Dutch ship that was to take me, along with several other passengers, from the Hook of Holland to London. This was early in September. We were baffled by strong winds out of the northeast, which prevented us from making any headway towards England, while driving us inexorably south towards the Straits of Dover. To make a long, tediously nautical story short, we were captured off Dunkerque by—voilà!”
Eliza gestured toward much the finest ship in the basin, a Ship of Force with a sterncastle magnificently sculpted, and spread thick with gold leaf.
“Lieutenant Jean Bart,” Rossignol muttered.
“Our captain surrendered immediately, and so we were boarded without violence by Bart’s men, who went through and confiscated everything of value. I lost all. The ship itself became Bart’s, of course—you can see it there if you care to look, but it is not much to look at.”
“That is putting it kindly,” said Rossignol after he had picked it out among the warships. “Why on earth does Lieutenant Bart suffer it to be moored so close to his flagship? It is like an ass sharing a stall with a cheval de bataille.”
“The answer is: the innate chivalry of Lieutenant Bart,” said Eliza.
“How does that follow?”
“After we had surrendered, and during the time that we were en route hither, one of Bart’s petty officers remained on board to keep an eye on things. I noticed him talking to one of the other passengers at length. I became concerned. This passenger was a Belgian gentleman who had boarded this ship at the last minute as we made our way towards the breakwater at the Hook. He had been paying me a lot of attention ever since. Not the sort of attention most men pay to me—”
“He was a spy,” said Rossignol, “in the pay of d’Avaux.” It was not clear whether he had guessed this, or already knew it from reading the man’s mail.
“I had guessed as much. It had not troubled me at all when I had thought I was going to end up in London, where this man would be impotent. But now we were on our way to Dunkerque, where the passengers would be left to shift for themselves. I could not guess what sort of mischief might befall me here at this fellow’s hands. And indeed, when we reached Dunkerque, all of the passengers except for me were let off. I was detained for some hours, during which time several messages passed between the ship I was on, and the flagship of Jean Bart.
“Now as you may know, Bon-bon, every pirate and privateer has lurking within him the soul of an accountant. Though some would say ’tis the other way round. This arises from the fact that their livelihood derives from sacking ships, which is a hurried, disorderly, murky sort of undertaking; one pirate may come up with some gentleman’s lucky rabbit’s foot while the fellow on his left pulls an emerald the size of a quail’s egg from a lady’s cleavage. The whole enterprise would dissolve into a melee unless all the takings were pooled, and meticulously sorted, appraised, tallied, and then divided according to a rigid scheme. That is why the English euphemism for going a-pirating is going on the account.
“The practical result in my case was that every one of Bart’s men had at least a general notion of how much had been pilfered and from whom, and they knew that the gold taken from my strong-box and the jewels plucked from my body were worth more than all the other passengers’ effects summed and multiplied by ten. Bon-bon, I do not wish to boast, but the rest of my story will not make any sense to you unless I mention that the fortune I had lost was really quite enormous.”
Rossignol winced. From this, Eliza knew that he must have seen the figure mentioned somewhere.
“I have not dwelled on it,” she went on, “because a noblewoman—which I purport to be—is not supposed to care about anything as vulgar as money. And when Bart’s men took the jewels away from me I did not feel any different from the minute before. But as days went by I thought more and more about the fortune I had lost—enough to purchase an earldom. The only thing that saved me from going mad was the blue-eyed treasure I cradled in my arms.”
She purposely refrained from saying our baby, as this sort of remark only seemed to make him restive.
“In time I was put aboard a longboat and taken to the flagship. Lieutenant Bart emerged from his cabin to welcome me aboard. I think he was expecting some dowager. When he saw me, he was shocked.”
“It is not shock,” Rossignol demurred. “It is an altogether different thing. You have witnessed it a thousand times, but you’ll go to your grave without understanding it.”
“Well, once Captain Bart had recovered a little from this mysterious condition that you speak of, he ushered me into his private cabin—it is the one high in the sterncastle, there—and caused coffee to be served. He was—”
“Here I beg you to skip over any further adoring description of Lieutenant Bart,” said Rossignol, “as I got quite enough of it in the letter that caused me to wear out five horses getting here.”
“As you wish,” Eliza said. “It was more than simple lust, though.”
“I’m sure that’s what he wanted you to think.”
“Well. Let me jump ahead, then, to review my situation briefly. I am rated a Countess in France only because le Roi decided to make me one; he simply announced one day at his levée that I was the Countess de la Zeur—which is a funny French way of denoting my home island.”
“I wonder if you know,” said Rossignol, “that, by doing so, his majesty was implicitly reasserting an ancient Bourbon claim to Qwghlm that his lawyers had dredged out of some pond. Just as his majesty has made a base navale here, to one side of England, he would make another like it in Qwghlm, to the opposite side. So your ennoblement—startling as it might have been to you—was done as part of a larger plan.”
“I’d expect nothing less of his majesty,” said Eliza. “Whatever his motives might have been, the fact is that I had repaid the favor by spying on his army and reporting what I saw to William of Orange. So le Roi had reason to be a bit cros
s with me.”
Rossignol snorted.
“But I had done so,” Eliza went on, “under the ægis of Louis’s sister-in-law, whose homeland Louis was invading, and continues to ravage at this very moment.”
“He does not ravage, mademoiselle, but pacifies it.”
“I stand corrected. Now, William of Orange has secretly made me a Duchess. But this is like a bill of exchange drawn on a Dutch house and payable only in London.”
This commercial metaphor made Rossignol confused, and perhaps a little queasy.
“In France it is not honored,” Eliza explained, “for France deems James Stuart the rightful King of England and does not grant William any right to create Duchesses. Even if they did, they would dispute his sovereignty over Qwghlm. At any rate, these facts were all new to Lieutenant Bart. It required some time for me to convey them to him, for, of course, I had to do so diplomatically. When he had absorbed all, and pondered, and finally made to speak, the care with which he considered each utterance was extraordinary; he was like a pilot maneuvering his vessel through a harbor crowded with drifting fire-ships, pausing every few words to, as it were, take soundings or gauge the latest shift in the wind.”
“Or maybe he is just not, in the end, very intelligent,” Rossignol suggested.