“Mr. Sluys, watching him commit suicide would ruin my evening!”
“Very well. Thank you, mademoiselle. I am in your debt enormously. ”
“Mr. Sluys-you have no idea.”
IT LED TO HUSHED INTRIGUESin dim corners, palmed messages, raised eyebrows, and subtle gestures by candle-light, continuing all through the final acts of the opera-which was fortunate, because the opera was very dull.
Then, somehow, d’Avaux arranged to share a coach with Eliza and Monmouth. As they jounced, heaved, and clattered down various dark canal-edges and over diverse draw-bridges, he explained: “It was Sluys’s box. Therefore, he was the host. Therefore, it was his responsibility to make a formal introduction of Etienne d’Arcachon to you, mademoiselle. But he was too Dutch, drunk, and distracted to perform his proper role. I never cleared my throat so many times-but to no avail. Monsieur d’Arcachon was placed in an impossible situation!”
“So he tried to take his own life?”
“It was the only honourable course,” d’Avaux said simply.
“He is the politest man in France,” Monmouth added.
“You saved the day,” d’Avaux said.
“Oh, that-’twas Mr. Sluys’s suggestion.”
D’Avaux looked vaguely nauseated at the mere mention of Sluys. “He has much to answer for. This soiree had better be charmante.”
AARON DE LAVEGA,who was assuredly not going to a party tonight, treated balance-sheets and V.O.C. shares as a scholar would old books and parchments-which is to say that Eliza found him sober and serious to a fault. But he could be merry about a few things, and one of them was Mr. Sluys’s house-or rather his widening collection of them. For as the first one had pulled its neighbors downwards, skewing them into parallelograms, popping window-panes out of their frames, and imprisoning doors in their jambs, Mr. Sluys had been forced to buy them out. He owned five houses in a row now, and could afford to, as long as he was managing the assets of half the population of Versailles. The one in the middle, where Mr. Sluys kept his secret hoard of lead and guilt, was at least a foot lower than it had been in 1672, and Aaron de la Vega liked to pun about it in his native language, saying it was “ embarazada,” which meant “pregnant.”
As the Duke of Monmouth handed Eliza down from the carriage in front of that house, she thought it was apt. For-especially when Mr. Sluys was burning thousands of candles at once, as he was tonight, and the light was blazing from all those conspicuously skewed window-frames-hiding the secret was like a woman seven months pregnant trying to conceal her condition with clever tailoring.
Men and women in Parisian fashions were entering the pregnant house in what almost amounted to a continuous queue. Mr. Sluys-belatedly warming to his role as host-was stationed just inside the door, mopping sweat from his brow every few seconds, as if secretly terrified that the added weight of so many guests would finally drive his house straight down into the mud, like a stake struck with a maul.
But when Eliza got into the place, and suffered Mr. Sluys to kiss her hand, and made a turn round the floor, gaily ignoring the venomous stares of pudgy Dutch churchwives and overdressed Frenchwomen-she could see clear signs that Mr. Sluys had brought in mining-engineers, or something, to shore the house up. For the beams that crisscrossed the ceiling, though hidden under festoons and garlands of Barock plasterwork, were uncommonly huge, and the pillars that rose up to support the ends of those beams, though fluted and capitalled like those of a Roman temple, were the size of mainmasts. Still she thought she could detect a pregnant convexity about the ceiling…
“Don’t come out and say you want to buy lead-tell him only that you want to lighten his burdens-better yet, that you wish to transfer them, forcefully, onto the shoulders of the Turks. Or something along those lines,” she said, distractedly, into Monmouth’s ear as the first galliard was drawing to a close. He stalked away in a bit of a huff-but he was moving towards Sluys, anyway. Eliza regretted-briefly-that she’d insulted his intelligence, or at least his breeding. But she was too beset by sudden worries to consider his feelings. The house, for all its plaster and candles, reminded her of nothing so much as the Doctor’s mine, deep beneath the Harz: a hole in the earth, full of metal, prevented from collapsing in on itself solely by cleverness and continual shoring-up.
Weight could be transferred from lead to floor-boards, and thence into joists, and thence into beams, and from beams into pillars, then down into footings, and thence into log piles whose strength derived from the “stick” (as Dutchmen called it) between them and the mud they’d been hammered into. The final settling of accounts was there: if the “stick” sufficed, the structure above it was a building, and if it didn’t, it was a gradual avalanche…
“It is very curious, mademoiselle, that the chilly winds of the Hague were balmy breezes to you-yet in this warm room, you alone clutch your arms, and have goosebumps.”
“Chilly thoughts, Monsieur d’Avaux.”
“And no wonder-your beau is about to leave for Hungary. You need to make some new friends-ones who live in warmer climes, perhaps?”
No. Madness. I belong here. Even Jack, who loves me, said so.
From a corner of the room, clouded with men and pipe-smoke, a trumpeting laugh from Mr. Sluys. Eliza glanced over that way and saw Monmouth plying him-probably reciting the very sentences she’d composed for him. Sluys was giddy with hope that he could get rid of his burden, frantic with anxiety that it might not happen. Meanwhile the market was in violent motion all over Amsterdam as Aaron de la Vega sold the V.O.C. short. It would all lead to an invasion of England. Everything had gone fluid tonight. This was no time to stand still.
A man danced by with an ostrich-plume in his hat, and she thought of Jack. Riding across Germany with him, she’d had nought but her plumes, and his sword, and their wits-yet she’d felt safer then than she did now. What would it take to feel safe again?
“Friends in warm places are lovely to have,” Eliza said distractedly, “but there is no one here who would have me, monsieur. You know very well that I am not of noble, or even gentle, birth-I’m too exotic for the Dutch, too common for the French.”
“The King’s mistress was born a slave, ” d’Avaux said. “Now she is a Marquise. You see, nothing matters there save wit and beauty.”
“But wit fails and beauty fades, and I don’t wish to be a house on piles, sinking into the bog a little each day,” Eliza said. “Somewhere I must stick. I must have a foundation that does not always move.”
“Where on this earth can such a miracle be found?”
“Money,” Eliza said. “Here, I can make money.”
“And yet this money you speak of is but a chim?ra-a figment of the collective imagination of a few thousand Jews and rabble bellowing at one another out on the Dam.”
“But in the end I may convert it-bit by bit-into gold.”
“Is that all you want? Remember, mademoiselle, that gold only has value because some people say it does. Let me tell you a bit of recent history: My King went to a place called Orange-you’ve heard of it?”
“A principality in the south of France, near Avignon-William’s fiefdom, as I understand it.”
“My King went to this Orange, this little family heirloom of Prince William, three years ago. Despite William’s pretensions of martial glory, my King was able to walk in without a battle. He went for a stroll atop the fortifications. Le Roi paused, there along a stone battlement, and plucked out a tiny fragment of loose masonry-no larger than your little finger, mademoiselle-and tossed it onto the ground. Then he walked away. Within a few days, all the walls and fortifications of Orange had been pulled down by le Roi ’s regiments, and Orange had been absorbed into France, as easily as Mr. Sluys over there might swallow a bit of ripe fruit.”