“The practical result in my case was that every one of Bart’s men had at least a general notion of how much had been pilfered and from whom, and they knew that the gold taken from my strong-box and the jewels plucked from my body were worth more than all the other passengers’ effects summed and multiplied by ten. Bon-bon, I do not wish to boast, but the rest of my story will not make any sense to you unless I mention that the fortune I had lost was really quite enormous.”
Rossignol winced. From this, Eliza knew that he must have seen the figure mentioned somewhere.
“I have not dwelled on it,” she went on, “because a noblewoman-which I purport to be-is not supposed to care about anything as vulgar as money. And when Bart’s men took the jewels away from me I did not feel any different from the minute before. But as days went by I thought more and more about the fortune I had lost-enough to purchase an earldom. The only thing that saved me from going mad was the blue-eyed treasure I cradled in my arms.”
She purposely refrained from saying our baby, as this sort of remark only seemed to make him restive.
“In time I was put aboard a longboat and taken to the flagship. Lieutenant Bart emerged from his cabin to welcome me aboard. I think he was expecting some dowager. When he saw me, he was shocked.”
“It is not shock,” Rossignol demurred. “It is an altogether different thing. You have witnessed it a thousand times, but you’ll go to your grave without understanding it.”
“Well, once Captain Bart had recovered a little from this mysterious condition that you speak of, he ushered me into his private cabin-it is the one high in the sterncastle, there-and caused coffee to be served. He was-”
“Here I beg you to skip over any further adoring description of Lieutenant Bart,” said Rossignol, “as I got quite enough of it in the letter that caused me to wear out five horses getting here.”
“As you wish,” Eliza said. “It was more than simple lust, though.”
“I’m sure that’s what he wanted you to think.”
“Well. Let me jump ahead, then, to review my situation briefly. I am rated a Countess in France only because le Roi decided to make me one; he simply announced one day at his levee that I was the Countess de la Zeur-which is a funny French way of denoting my home island.”
“I wonder if you know,” said Rossignol, “that, by doing so, his majesty was implicitly reasserting an ancient Bourbon claim to Qwghlm that his lawyers had dredged out of some pond. Just as his majesty has made a base navale here, to one side of England, he would make another like it in Qwghlm, to the opposite side. So your ennoblement-startling as it might have been to you-was done as part of a larger plan.”
“I’d expect nothing less of his majesty,” said Eliza. “Whatever his motives might have been, the fact is that I had repaid the favor by spying on his army and reporting what I saw to William of Orange. So le Roi had reason to be a bit cross with me.”
Rossignol snorted.
“But I had done so,” Eliza went on, “under the ?gis of Louis’s sister-in-law, whose homeland Louis was invading, and continues to ravage at this very moment.”
“He does not ravage, mademoiselle, but pacifies it.”
“I stand corrected. Now, William of Orange has secretly made me a Duchess. But this is like a bill of exchange drawn on a Dutch house and payable only in London.”
This commercial metaphor made Rossignol confused, and perhaps a little queasy.
“In France it is not honored,” Eliza explained, “for France deems James Stuart the rightful King of England and does not grant William any right to create Duchesses. Even if they did, they would dispute his sovereignty over Qwghlm. At any rate, these facts were all new to Lieutenant Bart. It required some time for me to convey them to him, for, of course, I had to do so diplomatically. When he had absorbed all, and pondered, and finally made to speak, the care with which he considered each utterance was extraordinary; he was like a pilot maneuvering his vessel through a harbor crowded with drifting fire-ships, pausing every few words to, as it were, take soundings or gauge the latest shift in the wind.”
“Or maybe he is just not, in the end, very intelligent,” Rossignol suggested.
“I shall let you be the judge of that, for you shall meet him presently,” Eliza said. “Either way, my situation is the same. Let me put it to you baldly. The money that Bart’s men had stripped off my person was gold or, as some name it, hard money, spendable anywhere in the world for any good or service, and extremely desirable on both sides of the English Channel. Such is terribly scarce now because of the war. Living so near Amsterdam and dealing so rarely in hard money, I had quite lost sight of this. As you know, Bon-bon, Louis XIV recently had all of the solid silver furniture in his Grands Appartements melted down, literally liquidating 1.5 million livres tournoises in assets to pay for the new army he is building. At the time I heard this story, I had dismissed it as a whim of interior decoration, but now I am thinking harder about its meaning. The nobles of France have hoarded a stupendous amount of metal in the past few decades, probably banking it against the day Louis XIV dies, when they phant’sy they may rise up and reassert their ancient powers.”
Rossignol nodded. “By melting his own furniture, his majesty was trying to set an example. So far, few have emulated it.”
“Now, my assets-all in the most liquid possible form-had been seized by Jean Bart, a privateer, holding a license to plunder Dutch and English shipping and turn the proceeds over to the French crown. If I had been a Dutch or an English woman, my money would already have been swallowed up by the French treasury, and available for the controleur-general, Monsieur le comte de Pontchartrain, to dispense as he saw fit. But since I was arguably a French countess, the money had been put in escrow.”
“They were afraid that you would lodge an objection to the confiscation of your money-for how can a French privateer steal from a French countess?” said Rossignol. “Your ambiguous status would make it into a complicated affair legally. The letters that passed back and forth were most amusing.”
“I am glad you were amused, Bon-bon. But I was faced with the question: Why not claim my rights and demand the money back?”
“It is good that you have posed this question, mademoiselle, for I, and half of Versailles, have been wondering.”
“The answer is, because they wanted it. They wanted it badly enough that if I were to put up a fight, they might turn against me, denounce me as a foreign spy and a traitor, void my rights, throw me into the Bastille, and take the money. Put to work in the war, it might save thousands of French lives-and balanced against that, what is one counterfeit Countess worth?”
“Hmmm. I understand now that Lieutenant Bart was presenting you with an opportunity to do something clever.”
“He dared not come out and say it directly. But he wanted me to know that I had a choice. And this little Hercules, who would not hesitate to send a ship full of living men to David Jones’s Locker, if they were enemies of France, did not wish to see me taken off in chains to the Bastille.”
“So you did it.”
“ ‘The money is for France, of course!’ ” I told him. “ ‘That is why I went to such trouble to smuggle it out of Amsterdam. How could I do otherwise when le Roi is melting down his own furniture to save French lives, and to defend French rights?’ ”
“That must have cheered him up.”
“More than words can express. Indeed he was so flummoxed that I gave him leave to kiss my cheeks, which he did with great elan, and a lingering scent of eau de cologne.”
Rossignol twisted his head away from Eliza so that she would not see the look on his face.
“Some part of me still phant’sied that I’d be aboard a Dover-bound boat within hours, penniless but free,” Eliza said. “But of course it was more complicated than that. I still was not free to go; for as Jean Bart now informed me with obvious regret, I was being held on suspicion of being a spy for William of Orange.”