“Very doubtful. He has too many real enemies to indulge himself so-and besides, he is very far from losing his grip!”
“Hmph. None of my explanations is satisfactory, it seems.”
“Now that you are out of France you must shed the habit of pouting, my Duchess. You do it exquisitely, but if you try it on a Dutchman he’ll only want to slap you.”
“Will you share your explanation with me, if I promise not to pout?”
“Obviously the King’s admonition was intended for someone other than the comte d’Avaux.”
This left Eliza baffled for a minute. William of Orange fussed with the rigging of his sand-sailer while she turned it over in her head. “You are saying then that the King knows my letters to d’Avaux are being decyphered and read by Dutch agents… and that his warning was intended for you. Have I got it right?”
“You are only starting to get it right… and this is becoming tedious. So let me explain it, for until you understand this, you will be useless to me. Every letter posted abroad from Versailles, whether it originates from you, or Liselotte, or the Maintenon, or some chambermaid, is opened by the Postmaster and sent to the cabinet noir to be read.”
“Heavens! Who is in the cabinet noir?”
“Never mind. The point is that they have read all of your letters to d’Avaux and conveyed anything important to the King. When they are finished they give the letters back to the Postmaster, who artfully re-seals them and sends them north… my Postmaster then re-opens them, reads them, re-seals them, and sends them on to d’Avaux. So the King’s admonition could have been intended for anyone in that chain: d’Avaux (though probably not), me, my advisors, the members of his own cabinet noir… or you.”
“Me? Why would he want to admonish a little nothing like me?”
“I simply mention you for the sake of completeness.”
“I don’t believe you.”
The Prince of Orange laughed. “Very well. Louis’ entire system is built on keeping the nobility poor and helpless. Some of them enjoy it, others don’t. The latter sort look for ways of making money. To whatever degree they succeed, they threaten the King. Why do you think the French East India Company fails time and again? Because Frenchmen are stupid? They are not stupid. Or rather, the stupid ones get despatched to India, because Louis wants that company to fail. A port-city filled with wealthy commercants- a London or an Amsterdam-is a nightmare to him.”
“Now, some of those nobles who desire money have turned their attentions toward Amsterdam and begun to engage the services of Dutch brokers. This was how your former business associate, Mr. Sluys, made his fortune. The King is pleased that you ruined Sluys, because he took some French counts down with him, and they serve as object lessons to any French nobles who try to build fortunes in the market of Amsterdam. But now you are being approached, yes? Your ‘Spanish Uncle’ is the talk of the town.”
“You can’t possibly expect me to believe that the King of France views me as a threat.”
“Of course not.”
“ You,William of Orange, the Protestant Defender, are a threat.”
“I, William, whatever titles you wish to hang on me, am an enemy, but not a threat. I may make war on him, but I will never imperil him, or his reign. The only people who can do that are all living at Versailles.”
“Those dreadful dukes and princes and so on.”
“And duchesses and princesses. Yes. And insofar as you might help these do mischief, you are to be watched. Why do you imagine d’Avaux put you there? As a favor? No, he put you there to be watched. But insofar as you may help Louis maintain his grip, you are a tool. One of many tools in his toolbox-but a strange one, and strange tools are commonly the most useful.”
“If I am so useful to Louis-your enemy-then what am I to you?”
“To date, a rather slow and unreliable pupil,” William answered.
Eliza heaved a sigh, trying to sound bored and impatient. But she could not help shuddering a bit as the air came out of her-a premonition of sobs.
“Though not without promise,” William allowed.
Eliza felt better, and hated herself for being so like one of William’s hounds.
“None of what I have written in any of my letters to d’Avaux has been of any use to you at all.”
“You have only been learning the ropes, so far,” William said, plucking like a harp-player at various lines and sheets in the rigging of his sand-sailer. He climbed aboard and settled himself into the seat. Then he drew on certain of those ropes while paying out others, and the vehicle sprang forward, rolling down the slope of the dune, and building speed back towards Scheveningen.
ELIZA MOUNTED HER HORSEand turned around. The wind off the sea was in her face now, like a fine mixture of ice and rock salt fired out of blunderbusses. She decided to cut inland to get out of the weather. Riding up over the crest of the dune was something of a project, for it had grown to a considerable height here.
In the scrubby plants of the beach-shrubs as tall as a man, with wine-colored leaves and red berries-spiders had spun their webs. But the mist had covered them with strings of gleaming pearls so that she could see them from a hundred feet away. So much for being stealthy. Though a stealthy human, crouching among those same shrubs to look down on the beach, would be perfectly invisible. Farther up the slopes grew wind-raked trees inhabited by raucous, irritable birds, who made it a point to announce, to all the world, that Eliza was passing through.
Finally she reached the crest. Not far away was an open sea of grass that would take her to the polders surrounding the Hague. To reach it, she’d have to pass through a forest of scrubby gnarled trees with silvery gray foliage, growing on the lee side of the dune. She stopped for a moment there to get her bearings. From here she could see the steeples of the Hague, Leiden, and Wassenaar, and dimly make out the etched rectangles of formal gardens in private compounds built in the countryside along the coast.
As she rode down into the woods the susurration of the waves was muted, and supplanted by the hissing of a light, misty rain against the leaves. But she did not enjoy the sudden peace for very long. A man in a hooded cloak rose up from behind one of those trees and clapped his hands in the horse’s face. The horse reared. Eliza, completely unready, fell off and landed harmlessly in soft sand. The cloaked man gave the horse a resounding slap on the haunches as it returned to all fours, and it galloped off in the direction of home.
This man stood with his back to Eliza for a moment, watching the horse run away, then looked up at the crest of the dune, and down the coast to that distant watch-tower, to see if anyone had seen the ambuscade. But the only witnesses were crows, flapping into the air and screaming as the horse charged through their sentry-lines.
Eliza had every reason to assume that something very bad was planned for her now. She had barely seen this fellow coming in the corner of her eye, but his movements had been brisk and forceful-those of a man accustomed to action, without the affected grace of a gentleman. This man had never taken lessons in dancing or fencing. He moved like a Janissary-like a soldier, she corrected herself. And that was rather bad news. A fair proportion of the murder, robbery, and rape committed in Europe was the work of soldiers who had been put out of work, and just now there were thousands of those around Holland.
Under the terms of an old treaty between England and Holland, six regiments of English and Scottish troops had long been stationed on Dutch soil, as a hedge against invasion from France (or, much less plausibly, the Spanish Netherlands). A few months earlier, when the Duke of Monmouth had sailed to England and mounted his rebellion, his intended victim, King James II, had sent word from London that those six regiments were urgently required at home. William of Orange-despite the fact that his sympathies lay more with Monmouth than with the King-had complied without delay, and shipped the regiments over. By the time they had arrived, the rebellion had been quashed, and there had been nothing for them to do. The King had been slow to send them back, for he did not trust his son-in-law (William of Orange) and suspected that those six regiments might one day return as the vanguard of a Dutch invasion. He had wanted to station them in France instead. But King Louis-who had plenty of his own regiments-had seen them as an unnecessary expense, and William had insisted that the treaty be observed. So the six regiments had come back to Holland.