“Lothar von Hacklheber,” she continued, “is not the sort who gladly suffers an employee to while away the afternoons sipping coffee in the cafe.”
“I should think not!”
“He has so arranged it that Mann has more work than he can handle. This forces him to make choices. He is always dashing about town on horseback like a Cavalier. Carriages are too slow for him. Arranging the meeting was absurdly difficult. It required half a dozen exchanges of notes. Finally I did what was simplest, namely remained still at the pied-a-terre and waited for him to come to me. He galloped up, naturally, just as I was beginning to suckle Jean-Jacques. And so rather than send him away, I invited him in, and bade him sit down across the table from me even as Jean-Jacques was hanging off my tit.”
“Appalling!”
“But I did this as a sort of test, Bon-bon, to see if he’d be appalled by it.”
“Was he?”
“He pretended not to notice, which was not an easy thing for him.”
Rossignol shuddered. “What did you talk about?”
“We talked about Lothar von Hacklheber.”
“YOU MET HIM IN LEIPZIG?” Mann asked.
“It had to do with a silver-mining project in the Harz,” Eliza said, “in which he elected not to invest: a typically shrewd decision.”
Eliza explained to Mann what she had in mind. He pondered it for a few moments. At first she saw concern, or even fear, on his face, which made her suspect that he did not really wish to do it, yet was loath to refuse, for fear of what he might say, were Eliza to go to him and pout. Mann was a young man-indeed, would have to be, to last for very long, working as he did-and Eliza saw clearly enough that he had been posted to this place to prove himself, or to fail, so that he could decide where to send Mann next. Mann had blue eyes a little too close together, and a broad brow, so expressive that in its creases and corrugations she could read his feelings like sonnets on parchment. He was intelligent, but lacking in resolution. She guessed that someone of strong personality would one day get the better of him, and that he would end up sitting at a banca on an upper floor of the House of the Golden Mercury in Leipzig, peering down into the courtyard with a mirror on a stick.
After a few moments’ thought, Mann relaxed, and began to sift through the vocabularies of diverse languages to express his thoughts. “It would be-” he began, and then switched to German in which Eliza could make out the word-part “sonder,” which to them meant “special” or “exceptional” or “peculiar.” This was his polite way of telling her that the sum involved was too small to be worth his time. “But we are encouraged to make such transactions. Sometimes they are like the first trickle of water coming through a tiny crevice in a dike; the amount that comes through is not as important as the channel that it cuts along its way, which presently carries a much greater volume.” Which was his way of saying that he had heard she was backed by the French government, and wanted to participate in what she was doing, now that expenditures were rising because of the war.
“It is not a similitude that shall be of any comfort to Dutchmen,” Eliza said, having in mind her colleagues, the de la Vegas.
“Ah, but if you cared about the comfort of Dutchmen you would not be on such an errand,” Gerhard Mann reminded her.
“SO THROUGH HIS OWN CLEVERNESS Gerhard Mann had devised a way to escape from the interview without giving me or him any cause to be angry,” Eliza said. Tired of sitting on Bon-bon, she now rolled back and sat cross-legged on the bed between his spread knees.
“I let the de la Vegas know that we had now a way to get hard money out of Lyon,” she continued. “Within a few hours, they were making the rounds of the timber wholesalers, and within a day, had struck two separate deals: one for a shipment of Massif Central oak logs, which were stacked near the bank of the Saone a mile upstream, another for some Alpine softwood at the confluence of the Rhone and the Saone. If you’d like, Bon-bon, I can devote an hour or two, now, to explaining in detail the negotiations amongst ourselves, the two merchants who sold us the timber, Monsieur Castan, various other members of the Depot, Gerhard Mann, and certain insurers and shippers.”
Rossignol said something under his breath about la belle dame sans merci.
“Very well then,” said Eliza, “suffice it to say that some entries were made in some ledgers. A fast coach went to Geneva, which is some seventy-five miles away as the crow flies, though considerably farther as the horse gallops. Abraham got his Bill of Exchange, though the margin of profit was scarcely enough to cover their time and expense. The timber was ours.
“At this point-mid-November-we supposed the matter concluded. For we had the timber, and had arranged shipping. An Amsterdammer would consider the deal closed. For to such people it is a perfectly routine matter to ship any amount of goods to Nagasaki, New York, or Batavia with the stroke of a quill.
“We, as well as the logs, had to go north: Jacob Gold to Paris and the rest of us to Dunkerque, whence the de la Vegas could find sea-passage north to Amsterdam.
“The fastest way would have been for me to climb back into the carriage I had borrowed from Monsieur le marquis d’Ozoir and go north by road. But there was no room in it for the de la Vegas. The weather had turned cold. We were in no particular hurry. And so we decided to send the horses and carriages north by road to Orleans, where the drivers could rent mounts, or hire another carriage, for the de la Vegas.
“In the meantime, we would take the river route to the same place, arriving a few days later.* Our plan was to go to Roanne, and buy passage on riverboats as far as Orleans, which would be infinitely more spacious and comfortable than making the same passage by road. At Orleans we would make rendezvous with our horses and vehicles, which would convey us north to Paris and then Dunkerque.
“The Loire, as you know, flows on past Orleans to Nantes. So the route I have just described to you was the same as that of the timber. And so there was another advantage to the plan I have described, which was that as we went along, we would be able to keep an eye on the King’s logs. In the unlikely event that some problem arose en route, we would be on hand to fix it.”
“But, mademoiselle,” said Rossignol, “by your account, this was almost a month ago. What on earth has been happening in the meantime?”
“A full recitation would take another month yet. You know that each of the component pays of la France controls its own stretch of road or river and has the right to extract tolls and tariffs, et cetera. Likewise you know that the population is a quilt of guilds and corporations and parishes, each with its own peculiar privileges.”
“Which are granted by the King,” said Rossignol. For he seemed a little bit nervous that Eliza was about to say something impolitic.
Which she was; but she felt safe in doing so here, in the kingdom of secrets. “The King grants those privileges in order to make people want to join those guilds and corporations! And thus the King gets power by offering to broaden, or threatening to restrict, the same privileges.”
“What of it?” Rossignol sniffed.
“After a few days, Abraham joked that this voyage was impossible unless one went accompanied by a whole squadron of lawyers. But this makes it sound too easy. Since every pays has its own peculiar laws and traditions, there is no one lawyer who comprehends them all; and so what one really has to do is stop every few miles and hire a different lawyer. But I have only mentioned, so far, the entities with formal legal rights to impede the movement of logs on a river. This leaves out half of the difficulties we faced. There are on these rivers people who used to be pirates but have degenerated into extortionists. We paid them in hard money until we ran out, at which point we had to begin paying them in logs. Every night, others who were less formally organized would come around and help themselves. We suspected this was happening, but the night-watchmen we hired were barely distinguishable from the thieves. The only reliable sentry we had was Jean-Jacques. He would wake me every couple of hours through the night, and I would sit in my boat-cabin feeding him and watching through a window as the locals made off with our logs.”