“Your voice is hoarse,” Eliza observed. “Is it a catarrh, or have you been screaming a lot?”
“I am not afraid to raise my voice to inferiors. In your presence, mademoiselle, I shall comport myself properly.”
“Does that mean you no longer intend to have me dangled over hot coals in a sack full of cats?” Eliza turned over a letter, written by d’Avaux, in which he had proposed to someone that such was the most fitting treatment for spies.
“Mademoiselle, I am shocked beyond words that you would connive with Irishmen to enter my house and ransack it. There is much that I would forgive you. But to violate the sanctity of an ambassadorial residence-of a nobleman’s home-and to commit theft, makes me fear I over-estimated you. For I believed you could pass for noble. But what you have done is common.”
“These distinctions that you draw ’tween noble and common, what is proper and what is not, seem as arbitrary and senseless to me, as the castes and customs of Hindoos would to you,” Eliza returned.
“It is in their very irrationality, their arbitrariness, that they are refined,” d’Avaux corrected her. “If the customs of the nobility made sense, anyone could figure them out, and become noble. But because they are incoherent and meaningless, not to mention ever-changing, the only way to know them is to be inculcated with them, to absorb them through the skin. This makes them a coin that is almost impossible to counterfeit.”
“’Tis like gold, then?”
“Very much so, mademoiselle. Gold is gold everywhere, fungible and indifferent. But when a disk of gold is stamped by a coiner with certain pompous words and the picture of a King, it takes on added value-seigneurage. It has that value only in that people believe that it does-it is a shared phant’sy. You, mademoiselle, came to me as a blank disk of gold-”
“And you, sir, tried to stamp nobility ’pon me, to enhance my value-”
“But then-” he said, gesturing to the letter, “to steal from my house, shows you up as a counterfeit.”
“Which do you suppose is a worse thing to be? A spy for the Prince of Orange, or a counterfeit Countess?”
“Unquestionably the latter, mademoiselle, for spying is rampant everywhere. Loyalty to one’s class-which means, to one’s family-is far more important than loyalty to a particular country.”
“I believe that on the other side of yonder straits are many who would take the opposite view.”
“But you are on this side of those straits, mademoiselle, and will be for a long time.”
“In what estate?”
“That is for you to decide. If you wish to continue in your common ways, then you will have a common fate. I cannot send you to the galleys, as much as that would please me, but I can arrange for you to have a life as miserable in some work-house. I believe that ten or twenty years spent gutting fish would re-awaken in you a respect for noble things. Or, if your recent behavior is a mere aberration perhaps brought about by the stresses of childbirth, I can put you back at Versailles, in much the same capacity as before. When you vanished from St. Cloud everyone assumed you had gotten pregnant and had gone off somewhere to bear your child in secrecy and give it away to someone; now a year has gone by, and it has all come to pass, and you are expected back.”
“I must correct you, monsieur. It has not all come to pass. I have not given the child away to anyone.”
“You have adopted a heretick orphan from the Palatinate,” d’Avaux explained with grim patience, “that you may see him raised in the True Faith.”
“See him raised? Is it envisioned, then, that I am to be a mere spectator?”
“As you are not his mother,” d’Avaux reminded her, “it is difficult to envision any other possibility. The world is full of orphans, mademoiselle, and the Church in her mercy has erected many orphanages for them-some in remote parts of the Alps, others only a few minutes’ stroll from Versailles.”
Thus d’Avaux let her know the stakes of the game. She might end up in a work-house, or as a countess at Versailles. And her baby might be raised a thousand miles away from her, or a thousand yards.
Or so d’Avaux wished her to believe. But though she did not gamble, Eliza understood games. She knew what it was to bluff, and that sometimes it was nothing more than a sign of a weak hand.
WELL-READ AND-TRAVELED GENTLEMAN that he was, Bonaventure Rossignol had learned that in the world there were countries-and even in this country, there were religious communities and social classes-where men did not always go about carrying long sharp stabbing-and slashing-weapons ready to be whipped out and driven into other men’s flesh at a moment’s notice. This was a thing that he knew and understood in theory but could not entirely comprehend. Take for example the present circumstance: two men, strange to each other, in the same house as Eliza, neither of them knowing where the other was, or what his intentions might be. It was a wildly unstable state of affairs. Some would argue that to add edged weapons to this mix was to render it more volatile yet, and hence a bad idea; but to Rossignol it seemed altogether fitting, and an apt way to bring into the light a conflict that, in other countries or classes, would be suffered to fester in the dark. Rossignol had been-this could not be denied-sneaking around the house, trying not to be detected by d’Avaux. A winding and backtracking course had led him to a gloomy hallway, bypassed by the redecoration project, paneled in slabs of wood that had not yet been painted to make them look like marble, and cluttered with the d’Ozoirs’ portraits and keepsakes-some mounted on the walls, most leaning against whatever would hold them up. For if it was a sign of high class and elevated tastes to adorn the walls of one’s dwelling with paintings, then how infinitely more sophisticated to lean great stacks of homeless art against walls, and stash them behind chairs! Reaching this gallery, anyway, he smelled eau de cologne, and placed his left hand on the scabbard of his rapier (a style of weapon that had gone out of fashion, but it was the one his father, Antoine Rossignol, the King’s cryptanalyst before him, had taught him how to use, and he would be damned if he would make a fool of himself trying to learn how to fence with a small-sword) and thumbed it out an inch or two, just to be sure it would not turn out to be stuck when the time came. At the same time he lengthened his pace to a confident stride. For to skulk about would be to admit some kind of bad intentions and invite preemptive retribution. As he pounded along the gallery he took note of chairs, busts on pedestals, stacks of paintings, carpet-humps, and other impedimenta, so that he would not trip over them when and if some sort of melee were to break out. Ahead of him, on the left, another, similar gallery intersected this one; the man with the cologne was back in there. Rossignol slowed, turning to the left, and edged around the corner just until the other became visible. Because of this slow crab-wise movement, Rossignol’s right arm and shoulder led the remainder of his body around the corner, which wrought to his advantage in that he could whip out the rapier and lunge around the corner at any foe, while his body would be shielded from any right-handed counter-attack. But alas, the other fellow had foreseen all of this, and re-deployed himself by crossing to the opposite side of the side-corridor and turning his back upon Rossignol so that he could pretend to study a landscape mounted to the wall there; thus, the corner was entirely out of his way, and his right shoulder was situated closest to Rossignol. A slight turn of the head sufficed to bring Rossignol into his peripheral vision. He had crossed his right arm diagonally over the front of his body and then clasped his left hand over the elbow to hold it in that position; this would place his right hand very near, if not on, the grip of the cutlass that was dangling from his hip. The pose was forced and artificial, but well-thought-out; in a moment he could draw, turn, and deliver a backhanded slash through the middle of the gallery-intersection. It was, therefore, a standoff.