No other ship would have been able to pass the Dunkirk breakwater, under such conditions; but when word made it up the chain of command that Meteore had inexplicably returned, Captain Bart gave orders that room must be made for her; and so after some idling, Meteore had been towed down a narrow lead among Baltic wheat-hulks, refugee-boats, invasion-transports, and ordinary Dunkirk fishing-and smuggling-craft to the anchorage of Bart’s privateer fleet, and given a place of honor alongside Bart’s flagship Alcyon. The first to come aboard had been a six-year-old boy armed with a wooden sword; the second, a noblewoman. She was gaunt, drawn, and black-patched compared to the last time Daniel had seen her, but he recognized her as the Duchess of Arcachon and (in England, and countries that recognized William) the Duchess of Qwghlm. And after he had talked to her for two hours, he was surprised by the awareness that she was still beautiful; just different.
And her internal fires had been banked. By the pox, he assumed at first. Then he guessed it was age-but she was not even thirty years old. On further consideration he decided it was because she had actually achieved things, and so needed not be as fierce as before. She was a Duchess twice over. She had made more fortunes than she’d lost. She had this six-year-old bastard, who seemed a fine lad, and gave every appearance of being one of those unusual children who survived to adulthood. She had a daughter of three, and a babe in arms, Louis de Lavardac, only a few weeks old-this implied she’d gone through at least as many miscarriages, stillbirths, and small-coffin funerals. Men sailed jachts across the sea and gave them to her, just to get her attention. And so perhaps her fires had been banked by choice; she’d had the sound judgment to know when to draw back, and let her investments and her children grow, and her plans come to fruition.
Daniel was invited to dine aboard Alcyon on the second day of his stay in Dunkirk-the day of the perfectly blue sky-and after he and Eliza and Jean Bart, the Marquis d’Ozoir, and a few other guests had sat round the table for some time, drinking coffee, talking, and letting the meal settle in their stomachs, Bart got up and took Jean-Jacques, or Johann as he was familiarly known, over to Meteore to inspect her rigging. Daniel strolled round the decks with Eliza, drinking in the air and the sun, and watching Bart and his godson cavort about the decks, tops, and ratlines. For those two had forgotten about the ostensible purpose of the visit before they’d even come aboard the jacht, and it had turned into a sword-fighting tutorial. Bart was one of those who deemed it somehow dangerous to practice with anything other than a live, sharp, steel blade, and accordingly had armed Johann with a long knife. Bart drew a small-sword-a landlubber’s weapon, as he was dressed for dinner, not privateering. He had drawn Johann into an exercise that appeared to consist mostly of knocking Johann down (not too roughly) whenever he committed the sin of being off balance.
“In London have people heard of Father Edouard de Gex, and what befell him?” Eliza wanted to know.
“I am too retiring, too peculiar to make the social rounds and hear all the latest,” Daniel said, “and so maybe you are asking the wrong Englishman. He is a fierce Jesuit, close to the Marquise de Maintenon, and I have the vague notion that something bad happened to him-”
“You could say that,” said Eliza. “He was strolling in the gardens of Versailles late in the summer. There is a place there called the Bosquet de l’Encelade-a pool and a fountain of several jets, depressed in the center of a great encircling bower, the whole surrounded by woods, and rather remote from the chateau. I used to read there. As de Gex was strolling along the circuit of the bower, he became aware-or so he told the story later-that someone else was there, padding along in the same direction, but lagging far enough behind as to remain hidden from view by the curvature of the bower. And so de Gex stepped through one of the portals that gives access to the lawn within-terraced rings of turf descending toward the pool. Cutting across the lawn, he turned around abruptly to look behind him, and saw what was recognizable as a human form. But it was difficult to make out through the lattice-work of the bower. ‘Show yourself, whoever you are,’ de Gex called, and after a brief hesitation his stalker emerged from one of those portals and was revealed as an immense one-armed man carrying a long staff-which proved, on second glance, to be a harpoon. Now, the fountain lay between them, and de Gex wanted to keep it that way, whereas this other chap wanted to get closer to de Gex, so that he could launch the weapon from shorter range and without having to pitch it through jets and spray. De Gex called for help, but in this secluded part of the garden, with the roar and hiss of the fountain, he could not know whether his cry had been heard. The harpooneer took to pursuing him. De Gex was uncertain whether to keep circling the fountain-which had the advantage that it kept his adversary in view-or to exit through the bower, flee into the grove, and go for help. In any event he did not have to dither over it for long, for as it turned out someone had heard his cry and come running to see what was the matter. De Gex took his eye off the harpooneer for a moment as his would-be rescuer emerged from the bower. When he looked back he saw the harpoon inbound; for his hunter, seeing that he was losing his chance, had made a desperate fling. De Gex tried to dodge it. Meanwhile it was diverted by a surging jet from a fountain. The details are unclear; suffice it to say that the fluked head of the weapon had to be excavated, by the King’s surgeon, from deep in de Gex’s upper thigh. It passed through the muscle on the outside of the limb and spared the great vessels and nerves that run along the inside; but the bone was damaged, an infection developed, and de Gex has, ever since, lingered at Death’s door, in a sick-room at the chapter-house of the Jesuits in the town of Versailles.”
“The attacker?”
“Bolted into the forest of the King’s hunting-park and was tracked for some miles but never caught. Today I heard the news that de Gex has died. His cousin, Madame la duchesse d’Oyonnax, is looking after the arrangements-probably his body will be taken back to the family seat to be interred.”
“It is an extraordinary tale,” said Daniel. “As you have reasons for everything you do, I presume you had a reason for relating it to me?”