“P’raps that is not so terrible, set against the worst that women can do.”
“You protest too much. You are not serious. Though ’tis true there are terrible women in the world, I am not one of them.”
“Why, to use a man in such a way…am I to have no knowledge of my own offspring!?”
“Why did you not ask such penetrating questions prior to fucking me in a haystack, Sergeant Shaftoe? Were you not aware, until now, that fucking leads to babies?”
“Very well, very well…that is not why I am shocked.”
“Why then, Bob?”
“Of course, I know you don’t really fancy me. So, ’tis not that I have been let down on that score.”
“Just as I know you do not really fancy me.”
“Of course not. Though you are fetching, a bit.”
“Just as are you in your own mottled way, Bob.”
“But I always assumed that you had me simply because you couldn’t have Jack.”
“Just as you have me because you can’t have Abigail?”
“Just so, madame. But it did never enter my head that it was, at root, a baby-making proposition…what is wrong with Number Two/One?”
“Lucien is, to use an English expression, a funny-looking kid. ’Tis common among Lavardacs. Moreover, he is listless and slow to thrive.”
“What of Number One/Null?”
“The most beautiful child who ever lived. Bright, happy, vigorous, altogether radiant.”
“What’s his name?”
“He was baptized Jean-Jacques.”
“I can guess where the Jacques is from.”
“Yes, and the Jean is from Jean Bart.”
“You named your firstborn after a pirate and a Vagabond?”
“Don’t be so haughty. One of them is your brother, after all.”
“But why this careful phrasing: ‘He was baptized Jean-Jacques’?”
“He answers to Johann.”
“How’s that again?”
“Johann. Johann von Hacklheber.”
“Peculiar name that, for the bastard of a French duchess.”
“He has been…visiting in Leipzig for a few days short of eighteen months. When he went there, he was not quite a year and a half old. I have got reports of him from friends who dwell in that part of the world, and they inform me that he is called by the name Johann von Hacklheber there.”
“Now, anything with a ‘von’ in it is a noble name-like ‘de’ here, am I right?”
“Oh yes. He dwells in the household of a German baron.”
“I know nothing of the ways of Continental nobility, but it strikes me as an unusual sort of arrangement.”
“You have no idea.”
“You may not know it, Madame, but you have got a sort of burning glow about the face and eyes now, a bit like during sex, but different.”
“It is another form of desire, that’s all.”
“You want the boy back. You are not happy with the arrangement…oh, Jesus!”
“Go ahead and say it.”
“He was taken from you!?”
“Yes.”
“Jesus. Why!?”
“Never mind. My purpose is to get to him who took my boy, and…”
“Get your boy back, I assume?”
“…”
“Or, to judge from the look on your face, perhaps I should not make assumptions.”
“Let me tell you what is truly evil about what was done to me eighteen months ago.”
“I am listening.”
“You are probably phant’sying parallels, similitudes, between what was done to your Abigail and what was done to my Jean-Jacques. But put such thoughts out of your mind. Abigail is a slave, held against her will, misused. A prisoner. This is no longer true of my Jean-Jacques. He is better off as Johann in Leipzig than he was as Jean-Jacques in Versailles. The captors of Abigail are imbeciles-guilty of a failure of imagination. By keeping her in a miserable estate, they make you miserable, ’tis true-but your path is clear: It is the path so familiar from myths and legends, the path of righteous fury, revenge, retribution, rescue. Lothar von Hacklheber has done something infinitely more cruel. He has made my boy happy. If I were able, somehow, to go to Leipzig and steal him back, the child would be terrified and miserable. And perhaps justly so, for when I got back I should have no choice but to deposit him in some Church orphanage outside of Versailles to be raised by nuns and made over into a Jesuit priest.”
“Hoosh. I am glad for my own sake, madame, that I was not anywhere near you at the moment when you first came to understand this…”
“…”
“Why are you staring at me thus? It makes me think I had better put my clothes back on-perhaps arm myself as well.”
“…”
“Are you only just understanding it now!?”
“If an idea is terrible enough, the mind is unwilling to swallow it in one go, but regurgitates and chews it like cud many times before it goes down for good. This is one that I have been chewing on for more than a year. It took me several weeks, after Jean-Jacques was abducted, for me to establish his whereabouts. By the time I could formulate even a hasty and ill-conceived plan to go fetch him back, I was pregnant with Lucien. It is only now that Lucien has been born, and I have recovered from it, that I can consider taking any steps in the matter of Jean-Jacques. And now it is too late. There. Done. I have swallowed it.”
“All right. I could see this coming. Put your head there on my breastbone, madame, I’ll hold you in my arms, so you don’t collapse, or come undone. Sob all you want, I have you, no one’s looking, we have time.”
“…”
“…”
“…”
“Now that you mention it, my lady, to have the love of my life enslaved and raped by a syphilitic lord does seem quite mild by comparison.”
“I cannot tell if you are being sarcastic.”
“Neither can I, madame, I honestly cannot. But tell me this: If you cannot get your boy back without destroying his welfare, then what do you intend?”
“In pondering this very question I have hesitated, and in hesitating I have only made matters worse. Soon I shall act.”
“And what is the end you have fixed on?”
“I mean to end up, in some sense, with my boot on the neck of Lothar von Hacklheber, and him looking up helpless into my eyes.”
“Well. Well! Let me just say that the last bloke who had me in such a fix was the Earl of Upnor, and-”
“My powers of organization exceed those of the late Upnor by a significant margin, and so I intend to arrange matters so that I will not end up being beaten to death with a stick by an Irishman.”
“Ah. That is good news.”
“Tell me everything about what is being prepared around Cherbourg, Sergeant Shaftoe, whether you intend for it to be relayed to Marlborough, or not.”
“Very well. But how will this intelligence be of any help to you in your machinations against-oh, never mind. You’re glowering at me.”
“You speak so knowingly of my machinations, as if I were some ridiculous figure in an Italian opera, who does naught but machinate; yet if you could follow me about, you would observe a tired mother who follows her husband from Versailles to St.-Malo, and suckles her infant, and occasionally throws a dinner party, and perhaps once or twice a year fucks a cryptologist in a carriage, or a sergeant in a haystack.”
“How will this lead to your boot on Lothar’s throat again? Never mind, never mind. I’m certain I’d never understand it anyway.”
“You are in good company. If I do it right, not even Lothar will understand it.”
Chateau d’Arcachon, St.-Malo, France
11 APRIL 1692
“THE ENGLISH HAVE DEVISED an extraordinary scheme for the military defense of their homeland, which is that they have no money,” said Monsieur le comte de Pontchartrain, controleur-general of France and (now) Secretary of State for the Navy.
This curious gambit was meant for Eliza, for Pontchartrain was gazing directly into her eyes when he came out with it. But others were privy to the conversation. Five were seated around the basset-table in the Petit Salon: besides Eliza and Pontchartrain, there were Etienne d’Arcachon, who was serving as dealer; a Madame de Bearsul, who was the very young wife of a captain of a frigate; and a Monsieur le chevalier d’Erquy, who was from just down the coast. These latter two were, of course, unique souls, precious in the eyes of God, endowed with any number of more or less interesting personal quirks, virtues, vices, amp;c., but Eliza could scarcely tell them apart from all of the other people who were at this moment seated around card-tables in her Petit Salon, playing at billiards or backgammon in her Grand Salon, bowling outside on her damp lawn, or noodling around on her harpsichord.