The Confusion

The Dunkerque Residence of
the Marquis and the Marquise d’Ozoir
21 OCTOBER 1689

BONAVENTURE ROSSIGNOL HAD MANY eccentric traits, even by the standards of cryptologists; but none more striking than his tendency to gallop into town alone when most needed and least looked-for. He had done it thirteen months ago, knowing (for he knew everything) that Eliza was in peril on the banks of the Meuse. The four-month-old infant she now carried was evidence of how it had wrought on her passions. Now, here he was again, wind-blown, mud-spattered, and horse-scented to a degree that was incorrect and absurd for a gentleman of the King’s court; yet suddenly Eliza felt as if she had just sat down in a puddle of warm honey. She closed her eyes, drew a breath, let it out slowly, and dumped her burden into his arms.

“Mademoiselle, I had held, until this moment, that your recent letter to me was the most exquisite flirtation that could be devised by the human mind,” said Rossignol, “but I perceive now that it was merely a prelude to the delicious torment of the Three Bundles.”

This snapped her head around-as he’d known it would-because it was a sort of riddle.

Rossignol had coal-black eyes. He was gaunt, and held to be unattractive by most of the ladies at Court. He was as lean as a riding-crop, which made him look awkward in court-dress; but bulked up in a cassock and flushed from the breeze off the sea, he looked well enough to Eliza. Those black eyes glanced briefly at the blanket-wrapped object she had dropped into his arms, then flicked up to a side-table where rested a packet of moldy tent-cloth, tied up in twine. Two tight little bundles. Then, finally, his eyes locked on Eliza’s for a moment-she was looking back over her shoulder at him-and traveled slowly down her back until they came to rest on her arse.

“The last time you galloped to my rescue thus,” she said, “there was only one bundle to contend with; a simple matter, therefore, which you were man enough to handle.” Her eyes now jumped down to the bundle in Rossignol’s arms, which urped up some curdled milk onto his sleeve, coughed, and began to cry. “As we grow older the number of bundles waxes,” she added, “and we must all become jugglers.”

Rossignol stared, with a kind of Natural-Philosophick detachment, at the viscous streak of baby-vomit probing a fold of his sleeve. His son let out a howl; the father winced and turned his head away. A door at the other end of the room was ripped open, and a woman pounded in, already cooing for the baby; then, seeing a strange man, she drew herself up and looked to Eliza. “Please, mademoiselle, be my guest,” said Rossignol, and extended his arms. He had never seen the woman before, and had no idea who she was, but it did not require a Royal cryptanalyst to read the situation: Eliza, despite being trapped and detained in Dunkerque with no money, had not only figured out a way to move into this vacant chateau, but had also managed to retain at least one competent, loyal, and trusted servant.

Nicole-for that was this woman’s name-did not move until she had seen Eliza nod. Then she stepped forward and snatched the infant away, glaring at Rossignol-who responded with a grave bow. By the time she had reached the room’s exit, the baby had stopped crying, and as she hustled him off down the corridor he began to make a contented “aaah.”

Rossignol had forgotten the baby already. The bundle count was down to two. But he had the good manners not to pay undue attention to the packet on the side-table, even though he knew it to be filled with stolen diplomatic correspondence. All his attention, for now, was fixed on Eliza.

Eliza was accustomed to being looked at, and did not mind it. But she was preoccupied now for a little while. Rossignol had no feelings whatsoever for the baby. He had not the slightest intention of being its father. This did not surprise her especially. If anything, it was simpler and easier that way. He wanted her for what lay at either end of her spinal column-it was not clear which end he favored-and not for her spiritual qualities. Certainly not for her offspring.

King Louis XIV of France had found it convenient to make Eliza a Countess. Among other privileges, this had granted her admittance to the Salon of Diana in the royal chateau at Versailles. There she had noticed this bored and lonesome man studying her. She had been every bit as bored. As it had turned out, they had been bored for the same reason: They both knew the odds of these games, and saw little point in staking money on them. But to talk about the odds, and to speculate as to ways of systematically beating such games, was absorbing. It had seemed unwise, or at least impolite, to hold such conversations around the gaming-tables, and so Eliza and Rossignol had strolled in the gardens, and had moved quickly from the odds of card-games to more elevated talk of Leibniz, Newton, Huygens, and other Natural Philosophers. Of course they had been noticed by gossips looking out the windows; but those foolish Court girls, who mistook fashion for taste, had not considered Rossignol desirable, had not understood that he was a genius, unrecognized as such by the savants of Europe.

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 chateau 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 Etienne 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 Etienne, 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 Etienne 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 chateau, or a great lady to spread a fragrant garden; and while those dunes might be speckled with watch-towers and mortar-batteries, no grand marechal would ever make them terrible 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, amp;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-voila!”

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 levee 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 cross with me.”

Rossignol snorted.

“But I had done so,” Eliza went on, “under the ?gis 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.

“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 controleur-general, 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 elan, 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 chateau 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 sometimes 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.

It was also, admittedly, ridiculous. Rossignol, for his part, had not killed anyone in years. Jean Bart (for this had to be Jean Bart) probably did it more frequently, but never in rich people’s houses. If it had somehow come to swordplay, they’d have been civil enough to take it outside. And yet they did not know each other. There was no harm in taking precautions, particularly if they were as inoffensive as standing in a certain position, and maintaining a certain distance. These measures did not even require conscious thought; Rossignol had been thinking about something he had read in one of d’Avaux’s letters, and Bart (he could safely assume) was thinking about fucking Eliza, and both men had relied upon habit to plan and execute all of these maneuvers.

Bart was dressed in the habit of a naval officer, which was not terribly different from what any other civilian gentleman would wear, viz. breeches, waistcoat, Persian coat over that, periwig, and three-cornered hat. The costume’s color (tending to blue), its decoration (facings, piping, epaulets, cuffs), and the selection of plumes that erupted from the folds of the hat marked him as a Lieutenant in the Navy. He was not a tall man, and Rossignol belatedly saw that he was not a slender one either (the tailoring of his jacket had concealed this at first). Bart was, by the standards of this part of France, swarthy. According to rumor he was of very common extraction-his people had been fishermen, and probably pirates, around Dunkerque for ?ons. If so, there was no guessing what mongrel ichor pulsed in his veins. Like many who were short; many who were stout; and many who were of questionable ancestry; he paid close attention to his appearance. He affected the great Sun King mane-wig (a bit out-moded, but no more so than Rossignol’s rapier) and the ridiculous tiny moustache, like a pair of commas cemented to the upper lip, that must cost him an hour at his toilette every morning. In his costume there was rather too much of lace and of hardware (buckles and buttons) for Rossignol’s taste; but by the standards of Versailles, this Jean Bart would not even be rated as a fop. Rossignol made a conscious effort to ignore the clothes and the cologne, and instead concentrated his mind on the fact that the man standing before him had recently escaped from a prison in England, stolen a small boat, and, alone, rowed it all the way back to France.

Bart made a half-turn on the balls of his feet so that he could look Rossignol in the eye. Still his right arm was wrapped across the front of his body. His eyes popped down to Rossignol’s left hip and, spying a rapier, checked Rossignol’s left hand for a dagger, or the intention to draw one.

If Rossignol had been dressed en grand habit it might have gone otherwise, but as it was, he looked no better than a highwayman. So he spoke: “Lieutenant. Pray forgive my interruption.” He had prudently drawn up short of cutlass-backhand range, but now, as a sort of peace-offering, he drew back an additional pace, so that Bart was no longer in range of a long rapier-lunge. Bart noted this and responded by turning more fully towards him, causing his right hand to become visible, and then raising that hand a bit, so that his arms were crossed over the barrel of his torso.

“I have not had the pleasure of meeting you, and you will rightly wonder who I am, and what is my business in this house. As I am a visitor in your town, Lieutenant, I beg leave to introduce myself to you. I am Bonaventure Rossignol. I have come here from my home in Juvisy in the hope that I might be of service to Mademoiselle la comtesse de la Zeur, and she has done me the honor of suffering me to cross the threshold of this house and bide here for some hours. It is, in other words, my privilege to be an invited guest here, as she would tell you, if you were to go and ask her. But I beg you not to do so while Monsieur le comte d’Avaux is present, for the matter is-”

“Complicated,” said Jean Bart, “complicated, delicate, and dangerous, like Mademoiselle la comtesse herself.” Both of his arms sprang free, which made Rossignol jerk; but those hands were moving towards Rossignol, away from the weapon. Rossignol let his own hands drift farther from hilts, pommels, amp;c., and even allowed Bart a glimpse of his palms.

“I am Lieutenant Jean Bart.” Bart advanced a step towards Rossignol, venturing within rapier-thrust range. Rossignol rewarded Bart’s gesture of trust by extending his hands farther and showing more palm, then glided to within cutlass-backhand range. Like two men groping through smoke they found each other’s hands and shook-a double-handed shake, just to be extra safe. “Though I am admittedly disappointed,” said Bart, “I am in no way surprised, that a gallant gentleman has ridden out from Paris to place himself at the lady’s service. Indeed, I had been wondering when someone of your description would show up.”

This was triple-edged, in that Bart was admitting to an interest in Eliza, conceding Rossignol’s priority in the matter, and needling him for having been too long getting here, all at once. Rossignol tried to think of a way to defuse this little granadoe while they were still safely gripping each other’s hands. “I have heard some in the same vein from the lady in question,” he admitted drily.

“Ha ha, I’ll bet you have!”

“I do all in my power to satisfy her,” said Rossignol, “and when that fails I can do no more than throw myself upon her mercy.”

“It is good to meet you!” Bart exclaimed, seeming genuine enough, then let go Rossignol’s hands. The two men burst asunder. But there was no more of furtive glancing at hands. “Now we wait, eh?” Bart said. “You wait for her, and I wait for d’Avaux. You have the better of me there.”

“I am certain that Monsieur le comte will not tarry in Dunkerque, if that will cheer you up.”

“It must be wonderful to know so many things,” said Bart-a way of stating that he knew what Bonaventure Rossignol did for a living.

“Many of those things are very tedious, I’m afraid.”

“Yes, but the power, the understanding it gives you! Take this painting.” Bart extended a blunt, thick hand toward the landscape he had been pretending to inspect a moment earlier. It depicted rolling countryside, a village, and a church, all seen from the garden of a manor house. In the foreground, children sported with a little dog. “What does it mean? Who are these people? How did they end up there?” He indicated another landscape, this one in a dark mountainous country. “And what significance do all of these sieges and battles have to the d’Ozoirs?” For, despite the occasional pastoral landscape, the art in the gallery was heavily skewed towards massacres, martyrdoms sacred and s?cular, and set-piece battles.

“Forgive me for saying so, Lieutenant, but given the importance of the Marquis d’Ozoir to the Navy, it strikes me as remarkable that you do not know everything about his family.”

“Ah, monsieur, but that is because you are a gentleman of Court. I am a dog of the sea, oblivious. But Mademoiselle la comtesse de la Zeur has instructed me that I must attend to such matters if I am ever to rise beyond the rank of Lieutenant.”

“Then as we are both doomed to cool our heels as we await our betters,” said Rossignol, “let me do what would most please her, and spin you a little yarn that will tie together all of these paintings and plaques and busts.”

“I should be in your debt, monsieur!”

“Not at all. Now, even if you are as deaf to politics as you claim, you must know that Monsieur le marquis d’Ozoir is a bastard of Monsieur le duc d’Arcachon.”

“That has never been a secret,” Bart agreed.

“Since the Marquis cannot inherit the name or the property of his father, it follows, by process of elimination, that all of these paintings and whatnot are from the family of-”

“Madame la marquise d’Ozoir!” said Bart. “And that is where I want instruction, for I know nothing of her people.”

“Two families, very different, forged into one.”

“Ah. One dwelling in the countryside of the north, I’m guessing,” said Bart, nodding at the first landscape.

“De Crepy. Petty nobles. Not especially distinguished, but middling affluent, and fecund.”

“The other family must have been Alp-dwellers, then,” said Bart, turning to regard the gloomier and more horrid of the two landscapes.

“De Gex. A poor dwindling clan. Die-hard Catholics living in a place, not far from Geneva, that had become dominated by Huguenots.”

“So the two families were quite different! How did they come to be joined?”

“The family de Crepy were tied, first by proximity, then by fealty, and at last by marriage, to the Counts of Guise,” said Rossignol.

“Err…I am vaguely aware that those Guises were important, and got into some sort of trouble with the Bourbons, but if you could refresh my memory, monsieur…”

“It would be my pleasure, Lieutenant. A century and a half ago, a comte de Guise distinguished himself so well in battle that the King created him duc de Guise. Of his aides, squires, lackeys, mistresses, captains, and hangers-on, several were of the de Crepy line. Some of these developed a taste for adventure, and began to conceive ambitions beyond the parochial. They lashed themselves to the mast, as it were, of the House of Guise, which seemed like a good idea, and served them well. Until, that is, a hundred and one years ago, when the two leading men of that House-Henry, duc de Guise, and Louis, cardinal de Guise-were assassinated by the King or his supporters. For they had waxed more powerful than the King himself.”

There was a pause now to look at some rather sanguinary art-work.

“How could such a thing happen, monsieur? How could this rival House become so powerful?”

“Nowadays, when le Roi is so strong, it is difficult for us to conceive of, is it not? It may help you to know that much of the power that so appalled the King was rooted in a thing called the Holy Catholic League. It had its beginnings in towns and cities all over France, where local priests and gentlemen had, in the wake of the Reformation, found themselves engulfed in Huguenots, and so banded together to defend their faith from that heresy and to oppose its spread.”

“Ah, here is where the de Gex family enters the picture, no?”

“I am almost to that part of the story. You are correct that the de Gexes were typical of the sorts of men who in those days founded local chapters of the Holy Catholic League. The House of Guise had forged these scattered groups into a national movement. After the assassinations of Henry and Louis de Guise, the decapitated League rose up in revolt against the King-who was himself assassinated not long after-and there was chaos throughout the country for a number of years. The new Huguenot King, Henry IV, converted to Catholicism and re-established control, generally at the expense of the ultra-Catholics and to the benefit of the Huguenots. Or so it seemed to many fervent Catholics, including the one who assassinated him in 1610. Now, during this time the fortunes of the de Crepy family went into eclipse. Some were killed, some went back to their ancestral lands in northern France and melted back into bourgeois obscurity, some scattered abroad. But a few of them ended up far from home, in that part of France that borders on Lake Geneva. It was the best, or the worst, place for Catholic warriors to be at the time. They were directly across the lake from Geneva, which to them was like an ant’s nest from which Huguenots continually streamed out to preach and convert in every parish in France. Accordingly, the Catholics in that area were more ardent than anywhere else-the first to create local branches of the Holy Catholic League, the first to swear fealty to the House of Guise, and, after the assassinations, the most warlike. They had not assassinated Henry IV, but only because they could not find him. The leading nobleman of that district-one Louis, sieur de Gex-had gathered around him a small, ragged, but ferocious coterie of like-minded sorts who had been driven out of other pays, and gravitated to this remote outpost from all over France as the fortunes of their party had declined.”

“Among them, I’m quite sure, must have been several of the de Crepy clan.”

“Indeed. So your question of how they got from here, to there,” said Rossignol, indicating the two landscapes, “is answered. The newcomers were fertile and affluent where the family de Gex were dwindling and poor.”

“I suppose most of the people in their district who knew how to make money had become Huguenots,” mused Bart.

This drew from Rossignol a sharp look, and a reprimand. “Lieutenant Bart. I believe I understand, now, why Mademoiselle la comtesse de la Zeur sees a need to instruct you in how to be politic.”

Bart shrugged. “It is true, monsieur. All the best merchants of Dunkerque were Huguenots, and after 1685-”

“It is precisely because it is true, that you must not come out and state it,” said Rossignol.

“Very well then, monsieur, I vow not to say anything true for the remainder of this conversation. Pray continue!”

After a moment to collect himself, Rossignol stepped over to a stack of portraits leaning against a wall, and began to paw through them: men, women, children, and families, dressed in the fashions of three generations ago. “When the Wars of Religion finally came to an end, both families, having nothing else to do, began to produce children. A generation later, these began to marry each other. Here I may get some of the details wrong, but if memory serves, this is how it went: the scion of the de Gex line, Francis, married one Marguerite Diane de Crepy around 1640 and they had several children one after the other, then none for twelve years, then a surprise pregnancy. This ended in the death of Marguerite only a few hours following the birth of a boy, Edouard. The father construed the former as a sacrifice to, the latter as a gift from, the Almighty; and considering himself too old to raise a boy by himself, gave him to a Jesuit school in Lyon where he was found to be a sort of child prodigy. He joined the Society of Jesus at an exceptionally young age. He is now Confessor to de Maintenon herself.”

Rossignol had found a portrait of a lean young man, dressed in a Jesuit’s robes, glaring out of the canvas in a way that suggested he could actually see Rossignol and Bart standing in this back-hallway, and did not approve much of either one of them.

“I have heard of him,” said Bart, and edged out of the portrait’s sight-line.

Rossignol found an older portrait of a plump woman in a blue dress. “The sister of Francis de Gex was named Louise Anne. She married one Alexandre Louis de Crepy. They had two boys, who died at the same time from smallpox, and two girls, who survived it.” He pulled out of the stack a gouache of two post-pubescent girls: one older, bigger, more beautiful than the other, who peered over her shoulder, as if hiding behind her. “The older of the girls, Anne-Marie, who was unscarred by the disease, married the comte d’Oyonnax, who was much older. Anne-Marie was his second or third wife. This fellow Oyonnax had originally been a petty noble, but even that modest rank had stretched his wits and his wealth thin. His ancestral lands lay just at the doorstep of the Franche-Comte.”

“Even I have heard of that!”

“Really, Lieutenant? I am surprised, for it is landlocked.”

Rossignol’s jest almost went by Bart, for Rossignol was not, by and large, a fount of clever bon mots. But Bart caught it after a few awkward moments, and acknowledged it with a smile and a nod. “It is a part of the world over which the Kings of France have been fighting with the Hapsburgs for a long time, is it not-like two enemies trapped in a longboat together and struggling for the possession of the one dagger.”

“The analogy, though nautical, is apt,” said Rossignol. “During the reign of Louis XIII-whom it was my father’s great honor to serve as Royal cryptanalyst-Oyonnax had allowed the King’s armies to use his land as a base for invading the Franche-Comte, which they did frequently. In exchange for which he had been elevated to a Count. Such was his rank when he married the young Anne-Marie de Crepy. A few years after, he performed a like service for the legions of Louis XIV, which, since it led to the annexation of the whole of the Franche-Comte to France, caused the King to elevate him to a Duke. He and the new Duchess moved to Versailles, where he got to enjoy his new status for only a few months before she poisoned him.”

“Monsieur! And you accuse me of not being politic!”

Rossignol shrugged. “It is a harsh thing to say, I know, but it is true; everyone was doing it in those days-or at least all of the Satan-worshippers.”

“Now I think you are only pulling my leg.”

“You may believe me, or not,” said Rossignol. “Sometimes I cannot believe it myself. Such behavior has all been suppressed by de Maintenon, with the help of Father Edouard de Gex-who probably has no idea that his cousine was one of the ringleaders.”

“That is quite enough of such topics! What about the younger daughter?”

“Charlotte Adelaide de Crepy was scarred by the smallpox, though she goes to great lengths to hide it with wigs, patches, and so forth. Marrying her off was more of a challenge; but that of course makes it a more interesting story.”

“Good! Let’s have it, then! For it seems that Monsieur le comte and Mademoiselle la comtesse will never finish.”

“You have obviously heard of the de Lavardacs. You may know that they are a sort of cadet branch of the Bourbons. If you have had the misfortune of seeing any of their portraits you will have guessed that they have undergone quite a bit of Hapsburg adulteration over the centuries. You see, many of their lands are in the south, and they make tactical marriages across the Pyrenees. Through all of the troubles with the Guises, they were stolidly loyal to the Bourbons.”

“They switched religion whenever the King did, then!” exclaimed Lieutenant Bart, trying to muster a small witticism of his own. But it only drew a glare from Rossignol.

“To the de Lavardacs it is not such an amusing topic, for they suffered diverse assassinations and other reversals. As you know far better than I, they have developed a family association with the French Navy, which is passed on from father to son by survivance. The current Duke, Louis-Francois de Lavardac, duc d’Arcachon, like his father before him, is Grand Admiral of France. He held that position during the time that Colbert expanded the French Navy from a tiny flotilla of worm-eaten relics to the immense force it is today.”

“Seven score Ships of the Line,” Bart proclaimed, “and God knows how many frigates and galleys.”

“The Duke profited commensurately, both in material wealth and in influence. His son and heir is, of course, Etienne de Lavardac d’Arcachon.”

It was not necessary for Rossignol to add what Bart, along with everyone else, already believed: He is the one who got Eliza pregnant.

“I have only seen Etienne from a distance,” said Bart, “but I gather he is a good bit younger than his half-brother.” He gestured to a recent painting that depicted the owners of this house, the marquis and the marquise d’Ozoir.

“The Duke was but a stripling when he begat this fellow off a woman in the household. Her surname was Eauze. The bastard was raised under the name of Claude Eauze. He went off to India for a while to seek his fortune, and later made enough money in the slave trade that he was able-with a loan from his father-to buy a noble title in 1674 when they went on sale to finance the Dutch war. Thus he became the Marquis d’Ozoir, which I take to be a play on words, as his name, to that point, had been Eauze. Only a year before buying this title, he married none other than Charlotte Adelaide de Crepy: the younger sister of the duchesse d’Oyonnax.”

“You’d think he could have found someone of higher rank,” said Bart.

“By all means!” said Rossignol. “But there is something at work you have forgotten to take into account.”

“And what is that, monsieur?”

“He actually loves her.”

“Mon Dieu, I had no idea!”

“Or, barring that, he knows that they form an effective and stable partnership, and is too cunning to do anything that might queer it. They have a daughter. Our friend tutored her for a while, last year.”

“That must have been before the King woke up one morning and remembered that she was a countess.”

“Let us hope,” Rossignol, “that she will still be one, when d’Avaux is finished.”

“IT IS A PITY,” Eliza began, “that Irishmen broke into your house, and stole your papers and sold them on the open market. What an embarrassment it must be for you that everyone knows that your personal correspondence, and drafts of treaties written in your hand, are being bartered for drinks by scullery-maids in Dunkerque gin-houses.”

“What! I was not informed of this!” D’Avaux turned red so fast it was if a cup of blood had been hurled in his face.

“You have been on a boat for a fortnight, how could you be informed? I am informing you now, monsieur.”

“I was led to believe that those papers had come into your possession, mademoiselle, and it is you I shall hold responsible for them!”

“What you have been led to believe does not matter,” said Eliza, “only what is. And so let me tell you what is. The thieves who stole your papers sent them to Dunkerque, it is true. Perhaps they even entertained a phant’sy that I would buy them. I refused to lower myself to such a dishonorable transaction.”

“Then perhaps you will explain to me, mademoiselle, why you have some of those very papers on your lap at this moment!”

“As the saying goes, there is no honor among thieves. When these ruffians saw that I was adamant in my refusal to do business with them, they began to seek other buyers. The packet was broken up into small lots, which were offered for sale, on various channels. To add to the complexity of the matter, it seems that the thieves had a falling-out amongst themselves. I cannot follow the business, to tell you the truth. When it became evident that these papers were being scattered to the four winds, I began making efforts to purchase them, as available. The ones on my lap are all that I have been able to round up, so far.”

D’Avaux was at a loss for civil words, and could only shake his head and mutter to himself.

“You may be chagrined, monsieur, and ungrateful; but I am pleased that I have been able to repay some small part of my personal debt to you by recovering some of your papers-”

“And returning them to me?”

“As I am able,” Eliza answered with a shrug. “To recover them all does not happen in a single day, week, or month.”

“…”

“Now,” Eliza went on, “a minute ago, you were indulging in some speculations as to where I shall end up. Some of your ideas on this topic are quite fanciful-Barock, even. Some of them are distasteful to persons of breeding, and I shall pretend I did not hear them. I can see well enough that you have lost confidence in me, monsieur. I know that you must do as honor dictates. Go then to Versailles-for I cannot travel as fast as you, encumbered as I am with an infant and a household, and busy as I am with this project of recovering your papers. State your case to the King. Let him know that I am no noble, but a common wench who deserves no better treatment. He will be startled to learn these things, for he considers me to be a hereditary Countess. I am a dear friend of his sister-in-law and moreover have recently loaned him above a million livres tournois of my own money. But your persuasive powers are renowned-as you demonstrated during your posting in the Hague, where you so effectively reined in the ambitions of that poseur, William of Orange.”

This was truly a knee to the groin, and rendered d’Avaux speechless, not so much from pain as from a curious admixture of shock and awe.

Eliza continued, “You may induce the King to believe anything-particularly given that you have such strong evidence. What was it again? A journal?”

“Yes, mademoiselle-your journal.”

“Who is in possession of this book?”

“It is not a book, as you know perfectly well, but an embroidered pillowcase.” Here d’Avaux began to pinken again.

“A…pillowcase?”

“Yes.”

“In English they call it a sham, by the way. Tell me, are there any other bedlinens implicated in the scandal?”

“Not that I am aware of.”

“Curtains? Rugs? Tea-towels?”

“No, mademoiselle.”

“Who has possession of this…pillowcase?”

“You do, mademoiselle.”

“Such items are bulky and soon go out of fashion. Before I left the Hague, I sold most of my household goods and burned the rest-including all pillowcases.”

“But a copy was made, mademoiselle, by a clerk in the French Embassy in the Hague, and given to Monsieur Rossignol.”

“That clerk died of the smallpox,” Eliza told him-which was a lie that she had made up on the spot, but it would take him a month to find this out.

“Ah, but Monsieur Rossignol is alive and well, and trusted implicitly by the King.”

“Does the King trust you, monsieur?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Monsieur Rossignol sent a copy of his report to the King but not to you. It made me curious. And what of the monk?”

“Which monk?”

“The Qwghlmian monk in Dublin to whom Monsieur Rossignol sent the plaintext to be translated.”

“You are most well-informed, mademoiselle.”

“I do not think that I am particularly well-or ill-informed, monsieur. I am simply trying to be of service to you.”

“In what way?”

“You have a difficult interview awaiting you at Versailles. You shall come before the King. In his treasury-which he watches with utmost care-he has a fortune in hard money, lately deposited by me. You will make him believe that I am a commoner and a traitor by describing a report you have never seen about a pillowcase that no longer exists, supposedly carrying an encrypted message in Qwghlmian, which no one reads except for some three-fingered monk in Ireland.”

“We shall see,” said d’Avaux. “My interview with Father Edouard de Gex will be a simple matter by comparison.”

“And how does Edouard de Gex enter into it?”

“Oh, of all the Jesuits at Versailles, mademoiselle, he is the most influential, for he is the confessor of de Maintenon. Indeed, when anyone” (raising an eyebrow at Eliza) “misbehaves at Versailles, Madame de Maintenon complains of it to Father de Gex, who then goes to the confessor of the guilty party so that the next time she goes to confession she is made aware of the Queen’s displeasure. Yes, you may smirk at the idea, mademoiselle-many do-but it gives him great power. For when a courtier steps into the confessional and has his ears blistered by the priest, he has no way to know whether the criticism is really coming from the Queen, the King, or de Gex.”

“What will you confess to de Gex, then?” Eliza asked. “That you have had impure thoughts about the Countess de la Zeur?”

“It is not in a confessional where I shall meet him,” d’Avaux said, “but in a salon somewhere, and the topic of conversation will be: Where is this orphan boy to be raised? What is his Christian name, by the way?”

“I have been calling him Jean.”

“But his Christian name? He has been baptized, of course?”

“I have been very busy,” Eliza said. “He is to be baptized in a few days, here at the Church of St.-Eloi.”

“How many days exactly? Surely it is not such a demanding calculation for one of your talents.”

“Three days.”

“Father de Gex will be, I’m sure, suitably impressed by this display of piety. The christening is to be performed by a Jesuit, I presume?”

“Monsieur, I would not think of having it done by a Jansenist!”

“Excellent. I look forward to making the acquaintance of this little Christian when you bring him to Versailles.”

“Are you certain I’ll be welcome there, monsieur?”

“Pourquoi non? I only pray that I shall be.”

“Pourquoi non, monsieur?”

“Certain important papers of mine have gone missing from my office in Dublin.”

“Do you need them immediately?”

“No. But sooner or later-”

“It will certainly be later. Dublin is far away. The inquiry proceeds at a snail’s pace.” Which was Eliza’s way of saying he’d not get his precious papers back unless he gave a good report of her at Versailles.

“I am sorry to trouble you about such matters. To common people, such things are important! To us they are nothing.”

“Then let us let nothing come between us,” Eliza said.

AS BONAVENTURE ROSSIGNOL HAD FORESEEN, d’Avaux did not tarry by the sea-side, but was en route for Paris before cock-crow the next day.

Rossignol stayed for two more nights after that, then rose one morning and rode out of town with as little fuss as when he’d ridden into it. He must have met the carriage of the Marquis d’Ozoir around mid-morning, for it was just before the stroke of noon when Eliza-who was upstairs getting dressed for church-heard the stable-gates being thrown open, and went to the window to see four horses drawing a carriage into the yard.

The coat of arms painted on the door of that carriage matched the one on the gates. Or so she guessed. To verify as much would have required a magnifying-glass, a herald, and more time and patience than Eliza had just now. The arms of Charlotte-Adelaide were a quartering of those of de Gex and de Crepy, and to make the arms of d’Ozoir, these had been recursively quartered with those of the House of de Lavardac d’Arcachon-themselves a quartering of something that included a lot of fleurs-de-lis, with an arrangement of black heads in iron collars, slashed with a bend sinister to indicate bastardy. At any rate, what it all meant was that the lord of the manor was back. Just as he stepped down from his carriage, the bells in the old, alienated belfry down the street began to toll noon. Eliza was late for church, and that was an even worse thing than usual, because on this day the proceedings could not go forward until she and her baby arrived. She sent an aide down to explain matters, and to tender apologies, to the Marquis, and hustled out one door with her baby and her entourage just as Claude Eauze entered through another. Presently he did the chivalrous thing, viz. got his carriage turned round and sent it rattling down the street after her. But so close was one thing to another in Dunkerque that, by the time the carriage caught up with her, Eliza was already standing at the church’s door. She might have given it the slip altogether if she had gone in directly. But she had paused to look at the Eglise St.-Eloi, and to think.

She favored the looks of this church. It was late-Gothic, and could have passed for old, but was in fact a new fabrique. The Spaniards had levelled the old one some decades past in a dispute as to the ownership of Flanders. All that remained of it was the belfry, and if its looks were any indication, the Spaniards had wrought a great improvement on the appearance of this town. The new one had a great rose window filled with a delicate tracery of stone, like the rosette on the belly of a lute, and Eliza always liked to stop and admire it when she passed by. Now, holding her baby to her bosom, she stopped to admire it one more time. At that moment a counter-factual vision entered her phant’sy, wherein Rossignol was by her side, and the two of them went in to be joined in marriage, and then walked down to the water and boarded ship and sailed off to Amsterdam or London to raise their baby in exile.

The dream was interrupted by the raucous vehement on-rush of the carriage of the Marquis d’Ozoir, which was about as fitting and about as welcome in this scene as musketry at a seduction. Lest she get trapped outside exchanging pleasantries with the Marquis, she hurried through the door.

The church’s vault was supported by several columns that were arranged around the altar in a semicircle, reminding Eliza of the bars of a giant birdcage: a birdcage into which she had been chased, not only by the banging and rattling carriage, but by divers other sudden and frightening onslaughts as well. She could fly no farther. She was caught. Best to flutter up onto her new perch, preen, and peer about. The Marquis slipped in alone, and took a seat in his family pew. She peered at him; he peered, discreetly, at her. Jean Bart watched them watching each other. They, and several servants and acquaintances who’d showed up, joined in the standings, sittings, kneelings, mumblings, and gestures of the Mass. Jean-Jacques turned out to be one of those infants who accepts the dunking, not with hysterical protests but with aghast curiosity; this made his godfather immensely proud, while giving his mother a vision of long rambunctious years ahead. The Jesuit crossed his forehead with oil and said that he was a priest and a prophet and that his name was Jean-Jacques: Jean after Jean Bart, who became his godfather, and Jacques after another man of Eliza’s acquaintance who was unable to attend the rite, being either dead, or crazy and chained to an oar. No mention was made of the child’s natural father. Indeed very little notice was given to the mother; for the story being given out was that Jean-Jacques was an orphan rescued from some massacre in the Palatinate and only being looked after by Eliza.

Over joyous bonging from the belfry, the Marquis-who, she now remembered, was a tall man, physically impressive, and handsome in a disreputable way-insisted on a celebration at his place. The produce of local vines, orchards, and distilleries was made available to a small and select list of guests. Some hours later, Jean Bart could be seen making his way home, tacking down the street in the manner of a ship working to windward.

The comtesse de la Zeur and the Marquis d’Ozoir kept an eye on Bart from the same room where Eliza had had her audience with d’Avaux three days earlier. She and the Marquis got along very well, which, given his past association with the slave trade, rather made her flesh crawl. He took a sort of avuncular interest in Jean-Jacques, which perhaps stood to reason given that the two had been born in such similar circumstances.*

The conversation that took place after Jean Bart had gone home, and the servants had been sent away, would have been altogether different if these two had inherited their titles. As matters stood, however, there were no illusions between them, and they could converse freely and without pretense. Though to do so for a few minutes (Eliza decided) was to be reminded that inhibited and pretentious chatter was not always such a bad thing.

“You and I are alike,” the Marquis said. Which he meant as a compliment!

He continued, “We have our titles because we are useful to the King. If I were a legitimate son of the Lavardacs, I’d not be permitted to do anything with my life other than sit around Versailles waiting to die. Because I am a bastard, I have traveled to India, Africa, and the Baltic as far as Russia, and in all of these places I have engaged in trade. Trade! Yet no one thinks less of me for it.”

He went on to explain why, in his view, Eliza was useful to the King. It all had to do with finance, and her links to Amsterdam and London, which he described aptly. This was unusual in a French noble. The very few of them who actually comprehended what went on in a Bourse, and why it mattered, affected ignorance for fear of seeming common. To them Eliza made as much sense as the Oracle of Delphi. By contrast, the Marquis affected to understand more than he really did. To him Eliza was a petty commercant. Or so ’twould seem from his next remark: “Fetch me some timber, if you please.”

“I beg your pardon, monsieur?”

“Timber.”

“Why do you require timber?”

“You do know that we are at war with practically everyone now?” he asked, amused.

“Ask the controleur-general whether the Countess de la Zeur knows it!”

“Touche. Tell me, my lady, what do you see when you gaze out the window?”

“Brand-new fortifications, very expensive-looking.”

“Closer.”

“Water.”

“Closer yet.”

“Ships.”

“Closer yet.”

“Timber on the shore, piled up like ramparts.”

“You know, of course, of my family’s connections to the Navy.”

“Tout le monde knows that your father is Grand Admiral of France and that the Navy has grown prodigiously during his tenure.”

“During his tenure as a man in a glorious uniform, attending ship-christenings and twenty-one-gun salutes, and throwing magnificent fetes. Yes. But tout le monde also knows that it was Colbert who was responsible for it. In addition to Grand Admiral, my father was Secretary of State for the Navy until 1669, did you know that? Then he sold the post to Colbert, for a lot of money. Did he want to sell it? Did he need the money? No. But he knew that the funds had been advanced to Colbert-a commoner-by the King himself, and so he could not refuse.”

“He was fired,” Eliza said.

“In the most polite and remunerative way imaginable, he was fired. Colbert became his superior-for of course the Grand Admiral of France is accountable to the Secretary of State for the Navy!”

“When you put it that way, it must have been an interesting time for the Duke.”

“It is just as well I was living as a Vagabond in India at the time. I could almost hear his screaming from Shahjahanabad,” said the Marquis. “In any case, he was well paid for the demotion, and he went on to make a great fortune out of the ship-building program that Colbert then instituted. For whenever so much money flows from the Treasury to the military, there are countless ways for those within the system to profit. I should know, mademoiselle.” And he glanced around the interior of the salon. Like much in Dunkerque, it was small. But everything in it was magnificent.

“You had your title in ’74,” Eliza said, “and made yourself useful as a part of this Navy-building project.”

“I am always eager to be useful to my King,” he said.

“God save the King,” Eliza said. “I of course share the same eagerness to be of service to his majesty. Did you say you required some timber?”

“Oh, but of course. There’s a war on. To this point, naval engagements have been few-a small battle in Bantry Bay when our ships were taking the soldiers to Ireland, and of course the heroics of your friend Jean Bart. But great battles will come. We need more ships. We require timber.”

“France is blessed with enormous size, and deep forests,” Eliza pointed out.

“Indeed, my lady.” His eyes strayed inland, to the crests of the dunes, which were held together with scrub, which here and there gave way to the firm straight lines of new earth-works concealing mortar-batteries. “I do not see any forests hereabouts.”

“No, this is like Holland, or Ireland. But farther inland, as you must know, are forests that cannot be traversed in less than a fortnight.”

“Fetch me some timber, then, if you wish to be of service to the King.”

“Would it be as useful to le Roi, if the timber came instead to Le Havre, or Nantes? For Dunkerque is not at the mouth of any great river, but those places are, and this would make the shipping infinitely easier.”

“We have shipyards in those places, too; why not?”

Here, Eliza ought to have paused to wonder why there was a shipyard in Dunkerque at all, given its location; but after weeks of boredom here, she was so pleased to have been given something to do that she did not give any thought to this paradox.

“Timber costs money,” she reminded him, “and I have given all of mine away.”

He laughed. “To the French Treasury, mademoiselle! And you shall be buying the timber on behalf of the King! I shall send letters to the Place au Change in Lyon. Everyone there shall know your credit is backed by the controleur-general. Speak to Monsieur Castan there-it is he who makes payments to those who have had the honor of lending money, or selling goods, to the King of France.”

“You are suggesting I am to journey to Lyon?”

“It is a terribly important matter, my lady. My coach is at your disposal. You seem in need of an airing-out. Whether the timber is delivered to Nantes or Le Havre, or even here, is all the same to me; but you, mademoiselle, I will meet back here in six weeks.”