“I shall let you be the judge of that, for you shall meet him presently,” Eliza said. “Either way, my situation is the same. Let me put it to you baldly. The money that Bart’s men had stripped off my person was gold or, as some name it, hard money, spendable anywhere in the world for any good or service, and extremely desirable on both sides of the English Channel. Such is terribly scarce now because of the war. Living so near Amsterdam and dealing so rarely in hard money, I had quite lost sight of this. As you know, Bon-bon, Louis XIV recently had all of the solid silver furniture in his Grands Appartements melted down, literally liquidating 1.5 million livres tournoises in assets to pay for the new army he is building. At the time I heard this story, I had dismissed it as a whim of interior decoration, but now I am thinking harder about its meaning. The nobles of France have hoarded a stupendous amount of metal in the past few decades, probably banking it against the day Louis XIV dies, when they phant’sy they may rise up and reassert their ancient powers.”
Rossignol nodded. “By melting his own furniture, his majesty was trying to set an example. So far, few have emulated it.”
“Now, my assets—all in the most liquid possible form—had been seized by Jean Bart, a privateer, holding a license to plunder Dutch and English shipping and turn the proceeds over to the French crown. If I had been a Dutch or an English woman, my money would already have been swallowed up by the French treasury, and available for the contrôleur-général, Monsieur le comte de Pontchartrain, to dispense as he saw fit. But since I was arguably a French countess, the money had been put in escrow.”
“They were afraid that you would lodge an objection to the confiscation of your money—for how can a French privateer steal from a French countess?” said Rossignol. “Your ambiguous status would make it into a complicated affair legally. The letters that passed back and forth were most amusing.”
“I am glad you were amused, Bon-bon. But I was faced with the question: Why not claim my rights and demand the money back?”
“It is good that you have posed this question, mademoiselle, for I, and half of Versailles, have been wondering.”
“The answer is, because they wanted it. They wanted it badly enough that if I were to put up a fight, they might turn against me, denounce me as a foreign spy and a traitor, void my rights, throw me into the Bastille, and take the money. Put to work in the war, it might save thousands of French lives—and balanced against that, what is one counterfeit Countess worth?”
“Hmmm. I understand now that Lieutenant Bart was presenting you with an opportunity to do something clever.”
“He dared not come out and say it directly. But he wanted me to know that I had a choice. And this little Hercules, who would not hesitate to send a ship full of living men to David Jones’s Locker, if they were enemies of France, did not wish to see me taken off in chains to the Bastille.”
“So you did it.”
“ ‘The money is for France, of course!’ ” I told him. “ ‘That is why I went to such trouble to smuggle it out of Amsterdam. How could I do otherwise when le Roi is melting down his own furniture to save French lives, and to defend French rights?’ ”
“That must have cheered him up.”
“More than words can express. Indeed he was so flummoxed that I gave him leave to kiss my cheeks, which he did with great élan, and a lingering scent of eau de cologne.”
Rossignol twisted his head away from Eliza so that she would not see the look on his face.
“Some part of me still phant’sied that I’d be aboard a Dover-bound boat within hours, penniless but free,” Eliza said. “But of course it was more complicated than that. I still was not free to go; for as Jean Bart now informed me with obvious regret, I was being held on suspicion of being a spy for William of Orange.”
“D’Avaux had made his move,” said Rossignol.
“That is what I came to understand, from hints given me by Lieutenant Bart. My accuser, he said, was a very important man, who was in Dublin, and who had given orders that I was to be detained, on suspicion of spying, until he could reach Dunkerque.”
“How long ago was this?”
“Two weeks.”
“Then d’Avaux might get here at any moment!” Rossignol said.
“Behold his ship,” said Eliza, and directed Rossignol’s attention to a French Navy vessel moored elsewhere in the basin. “I was watching it come round the end of the jetty when I saw you riding up the street.”
“So d’Avaux has only just arrived,” said Rossignol. “We have little time to lose, then. Please explain to me, briefly, how you have ended up in this house; for only a moment ago you told me that you were detained on the ship there.”
“I was already ensconced in one of her cabins. It was practical to remain there. Bart caused the ship to be anchored where you see it, so that he could keep an eye on it—both to protect me from lusty French sailors and to be sure that I would not escape. He rounded up a few female servants from gin-houses and bordellos and put them aboard to stoke the galley fires and boil water and so on. As weeks went by, I learned which were good and which weren’t, and fired the latter. Nicole, whom you saw a minute ago, has turned out to be the best of these. And I sent to the Hague for a woman who had become a loyal lady-in-waiting to me there, named Brigitte. Letters began to reach me from Versailles.”
“I know.”
“As you have already read them, to list their contents would be redundant. Perhaps you remember one from Madame la marquise d’Ozoir, inviting me to—nay, demanding that I make myself at home in this, her Dunkerque residence.”
“Remind me please of your connexion to the d’Ozoirs?”
“Before I was ennobled, I required some excuse to be hanging around Versailles. D’Avaux, who had put me there in the first place, concocted a situation for me whereby I worked as a governess for the daughter of the d’Ozoirs, and followed them on their migrations back and forth between Versailles and Dunkerque. This made it easy for me to travel up the coast to Holland when business called me thither.”
“It sounds, by your leave, somewhat farcical.”
“Indeed, and the d’Ozoirs knew as much; but I had treated their daughter well, and a kind of loyalty had arisen between us nonetheless. So I have moved into this house.”
“Other servants?”
“Brigitte has arrived, and brought another good one with her.”
“I saw men?”
“To ‘guard’ me, Lieutenant Bart chose two of his favorite marines: ones who have grown a bit too old to be swinging from grappling-hooks.”
“Yes, they had that look about them. And if I may ask an indelicate question, mademoiselle, how do you pay all of these servants when by your own tale you have not a sou in hard money?”
“A reasonable question. The answer lies in my status as a Countess and benefactress of the French treasury. Because of this Lieutenant Bart has been willing to open his purse and lend me money.”
“All right. It is improper, but clearly you had no choice. We shall try to improve on these arrangements. Now, there is one other thing I must understand if I am to assist you, and that is the bundle of letters from Ireland.”
“After I had been living on that boat for two weeks, my mail began to catch up with me, and one day I received that packet, sewn up in tent-cloth, which had been posted to me from Belfast. It turned out to be correspondence stolen from the desk of Monsieur le comte d’Avaux in Dublin. It contained many letters and documents that were state secrets of France.”
“And so knowing that d’Avaux was en route to accuse you of spying, you have held on to them as bargaining counters.”
“Indeed.”
“Excellent. Is there a place where I could spread them out and go through them?”
Here, though she would never show it, Eliza felt a sudden upwelling of affection for Rossignol. In a world full of men who only wanted to take her to bed, it was somehow comforting to know that there was one who, given the opportunity, would
prefer to read through a big pile of stolen correspondence.
“You may ask Brigitte—she is the big Dutch woman—to show you to the Library,” Eliza said. “I will keep an eye on the harbor. I believe that the longboat over yonder, just rounding the end of that pier, might be carrying d’Avaux.”
“Carrying him hither?” Rossignol asked sharply.
“No, to the flagship of Lieutenant Bart.”
“Good. I need at least a little bit of time.”
ELIZA REPAIRED TO AN UPPER storey of the house, where a prospective-glass was mounted on a tripod before a window, and watched Lieutenant Bart receive d’Avaux in the cabin of his flagship. This cabin extended across the full width of the ship’s sterncastle, and was illuminated by a row of windows looking abaft; at either end these curled around like a great golden scroll wrapped around the transom of the ship, creating small turrets from which Jean Bart might gaze forward to port or starboard. The sky was clear, and the afternoon sun was shining in through these windows.
The interview proceeded as follows: first, courteous greetings and chit-chat. Second, a momentary pause and adjustment of postures (because of a recent exploit, Jean Bart still could not sit down without suffering the torments of the damned, and d’Avaux, ever the gentleman, spurned all offers of chairs). Third, a long and, Eliza did not doubt, most entertaining Narration from Lieutenant Bart, enlivened by diverse zooming and veering movements of his hands. Slowly mounting impatience shown in d’Avaux’s posture. Fourth, interrogation of Bart by d’Avaux, during which Bart held up a ledger and ticked off several items (presumably rendering an accompt of all the jewels, purses, etc., that had been taken from Eliza). Fifth, d’Avaux jumped to his feet, face red, and worked his jaw violently for some minutes; Bart was startled at first, and went a bit slack, but gradually stiffened into a dignified and aggrieved posture. Sixth, both men came over to the window and looked at Eliza (or so it seemed through her spyglass; they could not see her, of course). Seventh, aides were summoned and coats and hats were donned. Which was Eliza’s cue to summon Brigitte and Nicole and the other female servants of her little household, and to begin putting on clothes. She borrowed a dress from the closet of Madame la marquise d’Ozoir. It was from last year; but d’Avaux had been in Dublin since then, and so to him it would look fashionable. And it was too big for Eliza, but with some artful pinning and basting in the back, it would serve, as long as she did not stand up. And she had no intention of standing up for d’Avaux. She arranged herself, a bit stiffly, in an armchair in the Grand Salon, and discoursed sotto voce with Bonaventure Rossignol. For Bart and d’Avaux had only required a few minutes of time to reach this house from Bart’s flagship, and were being made to wait in another room, so nearby that Bart’s pacing boots and d’Avaux’s sniffling nose (he had caught a catarrh en route) were clearly audible.
Rossignol had had time by now to sort through the stolen letters. Certain of these he gave into Eliza’s hands, and she arranged them on her lap, as if she had been reading them. The rest he took away, at least for the time being. He withdrew into another part of the house, not wishing to be seen by d’Avaux. A few minutes later Eliza sent word that the caller was to be admitted. The furniture had been arranged so that the sun was shining hard into the side of d’Avaux’s face. Eliza sat with her back to a window.
“His majesty has summoned me to his château at Versailles, so that I may report on the progress of the campaign that his majesty the King of England wages to wrest that island from the grip of the Usurper,” d’Avaux began, once they had got the opening formalities out of the way. “The Prince of Orange has sent out a Marshal Schomberg to campaign against us near Belfast, but he is timid or lethargic or both and it appears he’ll do nothing this year.”
“Your voice is hoarse,” Eliza observed. “Is it a catarrh, or have you been screaming a lot?”
“I am not afraid to raise my voice to inferiors. In your presence, mademoiselle, I shall comport myself properly.”
“Does that mean you no longer intend to have me dangled over hot coals in a sack full of cats?” Eliza turned over a letter, written by d’Avaux, in which he had proposed to someone that such was the most fitting treatment for spies.
“Mademoiselle, I am shocked beyond words that you would connive with Irishmen to enter my house and ransack it. There is much that I would forgive you. But to violate the sanctity of an ambassadorial residence—of a nobleman’s home—and to commit theft, makes me fear I over-estimated you. For I believed you could pass for noble. But what you have done is common.”
“These distinctions that you draw ’tween noble and common, what is proper and what is not, seem as arbitrary and senseless to me, as the castes and customs of Hindoos would to you,” Eliza returned.
“It is in their very irrationality, their arbitrariness, that they are refined,” d’Avaux corrected her. “If the customs of the nobility made sense, anyone could figure them out, and become noble. But because they are incoherent and meaningless, not to mention ever-changing, the only way to know them is to be inculcated with them, to absorb them through the skin. This makes them a coin that is almost impossible to counterfeit.”
“’Tis like gold, then?”
“Very much so, mademoiselle. Gold is gold everywhere, fungible and indifferent. But when a disk of gold is stamped by a coiner with certain pompous words and the picture of a King, it takes on added value—seigneurage. It has that value only in that people believe that it does—it is a shared phant’sy. You, mademoiselle, came to me as a blank disk of gold—”
“And you, sir, tried to stamp nobility ’pon me, to enhance my value—”
“But then—” he said, gesturing to the letter, “to steal from my house, shows you up as a counterfeit.”
“Which do you suppose is a worse thing to be? A spy for the Prince of Orange, or a counterfeit Countess?”
“Unquestionably the latter, mademoiselle, for spying is rampant everywhere. Loyalty to one’s class—which means, to one’s family—is far more important than loyalty to a particular country.”
“I believe that on the other side of yonder straits are many who would take the opposite view.”
“But you are on this side of those straits, mademoiselle, and will be for a long time.”
“In what estate?”
“That is for you to decide. If you wish to continue in your common ways, then you will have a common fate. I cannot send you to the galleys, as much as that would please me, but I can arrange for you to have a life as miserable in some work-house. I believe that ten or twenty years spent gutting fish would re-awaken in you a respect for noble things. Or, if your recent behavior is a mere aberration perhaps brought about by the stresses of childbirth, I can put you back at Versailles, in much the same capacity as before. When you vanished from St. Cloud everyone assumed you had gotten pregnant and had gone off somewhere to bear your child in secrecy and give it away to someone; now a year has gone by, and it has all come to pass, and you are expected back.”
“I must correct you, monsieur. It has not all come to pass. I have not given the child away to anyone.”
“You have adopted a heretick orphan from the Palatinate,” d’Avaux explained with grim patience, “that you may see him raised in the True Faith.”
“See him raised? Is it envisioned, then, that I am to be a mere spectator?”
“As you are not his mother,” d’Avaux reminded her, “it is difficult to envision any other possibility. The world is full of orphans, mademoiselle, and the Church in her mercy has erected many orphanages for them—some in remote parts of the Alps, others only a few minutes’ stroll from Versailles.”
Thus d’Avaux let her know the stakes of the game. She might end up in a work-house, or as a countess at Versailles. And her baby might be raised a thousand miles away from her, or a thousand yards.
Or so d’Avaux wished her to believe. But though she did not gamble, Eliza understood games. She knew what it was to bluff, and that somet
imes it was nothing more than a sign of a weak hand.
WELL-READ AND-TRAVELED GENTLEMAN that he was, Bonaventure Rossignol had learned that in the world there were countries—and even in this country, there were religious communities and social classes—where men did not always go about carrying long sharp stabbing-and slashing-weapons ready to be whipped out and driven into other men’s flesh at a moment’s notice. This was a thing that he knew and understood in theory but could not entirely comprehend. Take for example the present circumstance: two men, strange to each other, in the same house as Eliza, neither of them knowing where the other was, or what his intentions might be. It was a wildly unstable state of affairs. Some would argue that to add edged weapons to this mix was to render it more volatile yet, and hence a bad idea; but to Rossignol it seemed altogether fitting, and an apt way to bring into the light a conflict that, in other countries or classes, would be suffered to fester in the dark. Rossignol had been—this could not be denied—sneaking around the house, trying not to be detected by d’Avaux. A winding and backtracking course had led him to a gloomy hallway, bypassed by the redecoration project, paneled in slabs of wood that had not yet been painted to make them look like marble, and cluttered with the d’Ozoirs’ portraits and keepsakes—some mounted on the walls, most leaning against whatever would hold them up. For if it was a sign of high class and elevated tastes to adorn the walls of one’s dwelling with paintings, then how infinitely more sophisticated to lean great stacks of homeless art against walls, and stash them behind chairs! Reaching this gallery, anyway, he smelled eau de cologne, and placed his left hand on the scabbard of his rapier (a style of weapon that had gone out of fashion, but it was the one his father, Antoine Rossignol, the King’s cryptanalyst before him, had taught him how to use, and he would be damned if he would make a fool of himself trying to learn how to fence with a small-sword) and thumbed it out an inch or two, just to be sure it would not turn out to be stuck when the time came. At the same time he lengthened his pace to a confident stride. For to skulk about would be to admit some kind of bad intentions and invite preemptive retribution. As he pounded along the gallery he took note of chairs, busts on pedestals, stacks of paintings, carpet-humps, and other impedimenta, so that he would not trip over them when and if some sort of melee were to break out. Ahead of him, on the left, another, similar gallery intersected this one; the man with the cologne was back in there. Rossignol slowed, turning to the left, and edged around the corner just until the other became visible. Because of this slow crab-wise movement, Rossignol’s right arm and shoulder led the remainder of his body around the corner, which wrought to his advantage in that he could whip out the rapier and lunge around the corner at any foe, while his body would be shielded from any right-handed counter-attack. But alas, the other fellow had foreseen all of this, and re-deployed himself by crossing to the opposite side of the side-corridor and turning his back upon Rossignol so that he could pretend to study a landscape mounted to the wall there; thus, the corner was entirely out of his way, and his right shoulder was situated closest to Rossignol. A slight turn of the head sufficed to bring Rossignol into his peripheral vision. He had crossed his right arm diagonally over the front of his body and then clasped his left hand over the elbow to hold it in that position; this would place his right hand very near, if not on, the grip of the cutlass that was dangling from his hip. The pose was forced and artificial, but well-thought-out; in a moment he could draw, turn, and deliver a backhanded slash through the middle of the gallery-intersection. It was, therefore, a standoff.