“Bob sends greetings from sunny Dunkirk,” said Churchill. “If you shut up, there is an infinitesimal chance of my being able to save you from being tortured to death before sundown.”
Jack said nothing.
The Art of War is so well study’d, and so equally known in all Places, that ’Tis the longest Purse that conquers now, not the longest Sword. If there is any Country whose people are less martial, less enterprising, and less able for the Field; yet if they have but more Money than their Neighbors, they shall soon be superior to them in Strength, for Money is Power…
-DANIELDEFOE,A Plan of the English Commerce
“IT WAS PHANTASTICKALin the extreme-Mademoiselle, it was beyond French -”
Like a still pond into which a boy has flung a handful of gravel, the Duke of Monmouth’s beauty-aglow in the golden light of an Amsterdam afternoon-was now marred by a thought. The eyebrows steepled, the lips puckered, and the eyes might’ve crossed slightly-it was very difficult to tell, given his and Eliza’s current positions: straight out of a Hindoo frieze.
“What is it?”
“Did we actually achieve sexual, er, congress, at any point during those, er, proceedings?”
“Poh! What’re you, then, some Papist who must draw up a schedule of his sins?”
“You know that I am not, mademoiselle, but-”
“You’re the sort who keeps a tally, aren’t you? Like a tavern-goer who prides himself on the Ps and Qs chalked up on the wall next his name-save in your case it’s wenches.”
Monmouth tried to look indignant. But at the moment his body contained, of the yellow bile, less than at any time since infancy, and so even his indignation was flaccid. “I don’t think there’s anything untoward in wanting to know whom I have, and haven’t, rogered! My father-God rest his soul-rogered simply everyone. I’m merely the first and foremost of a legion of royal bastards! Wouldn’t be proper to lose track.”
“… of your royal bastards?”
“Yes.”
“Then know that no royal bastards can possibly result from what we just did.”
Monmouth got himself worked round to a less outlandish position, viz. sitting up and gazing soulfully into Eliza’s nipples. “I say, would you like to be a Duchess or something?”
Eliza arched her back and laughed. Monmouth shifted his attention to her oscillating navel, and looked wounded.
“What would I have to do? Marry some syphilitic Duke?”
“Of course not. Be my mistress-when I am King of England. My father made all his mistresses into Duchesses.”
“Why?”
Monmouth, scandalized: “Elsewise, ‘tweren’t proper!”
“You already have a mistress.”
“It’s common to have one…”
“And noble to have several?”
“What’s the point of being a king if you can’t fuck a lot of Duchesses?”
“Just so, sir!”
“Though I don’t know if ‘fuck’ is le mot juste for what we did.”
“What I did. You just fidgeted and shuddered.”
“Well it’s like some modish dance, isn’t it, where only one knows the steps. You just have to teach me the other part of it.”
“I am honored, Your Grace-does that mean we’ll be seeing each other again?”
Monmouth, miffed and slightly buffaloed: “I was sincere about making you a Duchess.”
“First you have to make yourself a King.”
The Duke of Monmouth sighed and slammed back into the mattress, driving out an evoluting cloud of dust, straw-ends, bedbugs, and mite f?ces. All of it hung beautifully in the lambent air, as if daubed on canvas by one of those Brueghels.
“I know it is ever so tiresome,” Eliza said, stroking the Duke’s hair back from his brow and tucking it neatly behind his ear. “ Lateryou’ll be slogging round dreadful battlefields. Tonight we go to the Opera!”
Monmouth made a vile face. “Give me a battlefield any time.”
“William’s going to be there.”
“Eeeyuh, he’s not going to do any tedious acting, is he?”
“What, the Prince of Orange-?”
“After the Peace of Breda he put on a ballet, and appeared as Mercury, bringing news of Anglo-Dutch rapprochement. Embarrassing to see a rather good warrior prancing about with a couple of bloody goose-wings lashed to his ankles.”
“That was a long time ago-he is a grown man, and it is beneath his dignity now. He’ll just peer down from his box. Pretend to whisper bons mots to Mary, who’ll pretend to get them.”
“If he is coming, we can go late,” Monmouth said. “They’ll have to search the place for bombs.”
“Then we must go early,” Eliza countered, “as there’ll be that much more time for plots and intrigues.”
LIKE ONE WHO HAS ONLYread books and heard tales of a foreign land, and finally goes there and sees the real thing-thus Eliza at the Opera. Not so much for the place (which was only a building) as for the people, and not so much for the ones with titles and formal ranks (viz. the Raadspensionary, and diverse Regents and Magistrates with their fat jewelled wives) as for the ones who had the power to move the market.
Eliza, like most of that caterwauling, hand-slapping crowd who migrated between the Dam and the Exchange, did not have enough money to trade in actual V.O.C. shares. When she was flush, she bought and sold ducat shares, and when she wasn’t, she bought and sold options and contracts to buy or sell them. Strictly speaking, ducat shares didn’t even exist. They were splinters, fragments, of actual V.O.C. shares. They were a fiction that had been invented so that people who weren’t enormously wealthy could participate in the market.
Yet even above the level of those who traded full V.O.C. shares were the princes of the market, who had accumulated large numbers of those shares, and borrowed money against them, which they lent out to diverse ventures: mines, sailing-voyages, slave-forts on the Guinea coast, colonies, wars, and (if conditions were right) the occasional violent overthrow of a king. Such a man could move the market simply by showing his face at the Exchange, and trigger a crash, or a boom, simply by strolling across it with a particular expression on his face, leaving a trail of buying and selling in his wake, like a spreading cloud of smoke from a bishop’s censer.
Allof those men seemed to be here at the Opera with their wives or mistresses. The crowd was something like the innards of a harpsichord, each person tensed to thrum or keen when plucked. Mostly it was a cacophony, as if cats were lovemaking on the keyboard. But the arrival of certain Personages was a palpable striking of certain chords.
“The French have a word for this: they name it a frisson, ” muttered the Duke of Monmouth behind a kid-gloved hand as they made their way toward their box.
“Like Orpheus, I struggle with a desire to turn around and look behind me-”
“Stay, your turban would fall off.”
Eliza reached up to pat the cyclone of cerulean Turkish silk. It was anchored to her hair by diverse heathen brooches, clips, and pins. “Impossible.”
“Anyway, why would you want to look behind you?”
“To see what has caused this frisson.”