Eliza planted herself on the shore, took out the pistol, cocked the hammer, and took dead aim at the dragoon from perhaps ten paces. “This may fire or it may not,” she said in French. “You have until I count to ten to decide whether you’ll gamble your life and your immortal soul on it. One… two… three… did I mention I’m on the rag? Four…”
He lasted until seven. It was not the pistol that concerned him so much as her overall jaggedness, the look in her eye. He dropped the rope in the sea, raised his hands, and sidled up onto the beach, keeping well clear of Eliza, then turned and took off running toward the other group. ‘Twas not a bad play. If he’d stayed, the pistol might have fired, and he’d be dead and they’d lose the boat for certain. But there was a good chance that they could get it back from Eliza if he got help from the others.
Eliza let the hammer down gently, tossed the pistol into the longboat, waded out a few steps, reached up over her head to grip the boat’s transom, and hauled herself up. After a few kicks she was able to get an ankle hooked over the top of the transom, and then she brought herself up out of the water and rolled sideways over the stern and dropped into the bottom of the boat.
Her first view was of a caulked sea-chest. Pulling herself up on it, she saw that it was one of several massive lockers that rested on the deck. Presumably they contained weapons. But if it came to gunplay they were all lost.
The weapons she needed were oars, and these were lying out in plain sight on the boat’s simple plank benches. She tried to snatch one up and was dismayed to find it was twice as long as she was tall, too heavy and unwieldy to be snatched; but at any rate she heaved it up off the benches and rotated its blade down into the water. Standing in the stern, where the water under the keel was shallowest, she stabbed down through the surf and into the firm sand. The longboat was reluctant to move, and one who had not recently familiarized herself with the contents of Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica might have given up. But the elemental precepts of that work were certain laws of motion that stated that, if she pushed on the oar, the boat had to move; at first it might move too slowly to be perceived, but it had to be moving. Eliza ignored the unreliable evidence of her senses, which were telling her that the boat was not moving at all, and pushed steadily with all her might. Finally she felt the oar’s angle change as the boat moved out from shore.
The moment she pulled the oar out, wind and surf began pushing her back, sapping the vis inertiae she had imparted to the longboat. She planted the oar a second time. The water seemed very little deeper than the first time around.
She wanted in the worst way to look up the beach, but looking would not do any good. Only getting the boat clear of the beach would serve their purposes. And so she waited until she had planted the oar half a dozen times, and doubled her distance from the surf-line, before she dared to look up.
Fatio was down. A dragoon was sitting on him, holding something near his head. William was at bay, sword still drawn, but surrounded by four dragoons who were leveling guns at him. One of these seemed, from his stance and his gestures, to be talking to the Prince-negotiating terms of surrender, Eliza guessed. The dragoon who had been left behind to hold the longboat’s bow-rope had finally reached the others and was gesticulating, trying to get their attention. The ones who surrounded William ignored him, but the one who was sitting on Fatio took notice, and looked at Eliza.
Eliza glanced toward shore and perceived that the surf had pushed her back in a few yards; the water below the longboat was only waist-deep. In a hurry now, she planted the oars in their locks, sat down, and began to row. Her first several strokes were useless, as the seas, summing and subtracting chaotically, exposed the blades of one or both oars so that they flailed and skittered across the surface. But the dragoons were re-deploying themselves with admirable coolness and she decided she’d better learn from their example. She half-stood and raised the oar-handles high, driving the blades deep, and fell back, thrusting with her legs and arching her body backwards, and felt the boat move. Then she did it again.
Fatio was unguarded and unmoving. William was bracketed between two dragoons who were leveling muskets at his head. The remaining four Frenchmen had run down the beach and were now staring at Eliza across perhaps fifty feet of rough water. One of them had already stripped off most of his clothes, and as Eliza stood up for another oar-stroke she saw him race out into the surf several paces and dive in. The remaining three knelt in the sand, aimed their muskets at the boat, and waited for Eliza to show herself again.
By crouching in the bilge she could remain out of their line of fire-but she couldn’t row the longboat.
A hand gripped the gunwale. Eliza smashed it with the butt of the pistol and it went away. But a minute later it reappeared, bleeding, somewhere else-followed by another hand, then elbows, then a head. Eliza aimed the pistol between the blinking eyes and pulled the trigger; the flint whipped around and cast off a feeble spark but nothing further happened. She turned the weapon around, thinking to smash him on the head, but he raised a hand to parry the blow, and she thought better of it. Instead she stood up, gripped the handles of a gun-chest, heaved it up off the deck, and, just as he was whipping one leg over the gunwale, launched it into his face with a thrust of her hips. He fell off the boat. The dragoons on the shore opened fire and splintered a bench, but they missed Eliza. Still, the sight of those craters of fresh clean wood that had been torn into the benches crushed any sense of relief she might have felt over getting rid of the swimmer.
She had an opportunity now to pull on the oars several times while the dragoons re-loaded. As she stood up for an oar-stroke, movement caught her eye off to the south. She turned that way to see a dozen of the Prince’s Blue Guards cresting the hummock, or circumventing it along the beach, all riding at a dead gallop on foaming and exhausted chargers. As they took in the scene ahead they stood up in their stirrups, raised sabers high, and erupted in shouts of mixed indignation and triumph. Disgustedly, the French dragoons all flung their weapons down into the sand.
“YOU MUST NOT COME NEARme now for a good long while,” said William of Orange. “I shall make arrangements to spirit you out of this place, and my agents shall spread some story or other that shall account for your whereabouts this morning.”
The Prince paused, distracted by shouts from the far side of a dune. One of the Blue Guards ran up onto its crest and announced he had found fresh horse-tracks. A rider had tarried for some time recently there (the manure of his horse was still warm) and smoked some tobacco, and then galloped away only moments ago (the sand disturbed by his horse’s hooves was still dry). On hearing this news three of the Blue Guards spurred their horses into movement and took off in pursuit. But those mounts were exhausted, whereas the spy’s had been well rested-everyone knew the pursuit would be bootless.
“’Twas d’Avaux,” William said. “He would be here, so that he could come out of hiding and taunt me after I had been put in chains.”
“Then he knows about me!”
“Perhaps, and perhaps not,” said the Prince, showing a lack of concern that did nothing for Eliza’s peace of mind. He glanced curiously at Fatio, who was sitting up now, having a bloody head-wound bandaged. “Your friend is a Natural Philosopher? I shall endow a chair for him at the university here. You, I will proclaim a Duchess, when the time is right. But now you must return to Versailles, and make love to Liselotte.”
“What!?”
“Do not put on this show of outrage, it is very tedious. You know what I am, I think, and so you must know what she is.”