Leibniz knew, but he was discreet. The same could be said of Enoch Root. Around Leipzig, Jack and Eliza had been seen together by several people, none of whom was likely to be rated as credible by the French nobility. The most high and mighty person who had seen them together—and, as she recalled this, Eliza felt the heat rising into her face like steam from a cauldron when the lid is lifted off—was Lothar von Hacklheber, who had gazed down on her from the balcony of the House of the Golden Mercury in Leipzig. Jack had been right next to her, posing as a manservant, a porter. Unlikely that even Lothar would connect such a figure with L’Emmerdeur.
After that, they had traveled to Amsterdam. A few Dutch people had seen them together. But again, there was no reason for these people to suppose that the ruffian sometimes seen in Eliza’s company was the legendary Vagabond King. Before long, Jack had gone down to Paris. Only then had he truly become famous to these people. He had ridden a horse into this room and wrecked the duc d’Arcachon’s party, fled Paris, and eventually found his way back to Amsterdam—where he had tracked Eliza down in her favorite coffeehouse. The had spent all of an hour together—an hour that had culminated in an unpleasant scene, whose details Eliza did not care to recall to mind, beneath the Herring-Packers’ Tower, just as Jack had set sail on the slave-trading voyage from which he could never return. By now, of course, he’d been dead any number of years. But that was not the question. The question was: Had anyone seen Jack and Eliza together during that hour in Amsterdam?
The answer was of course they had, for as she’d later found out, she’d been tailed, the whole time, by two spies in the employ of d’Avaux. D’Avaux! Who even at this moment was glaring at her from across the ballroom, as if reading minds were as easy for him as reading codes was to Rossignol. D’Avaux’s two spies had later been killed by the hand of William of Orange himself. But d’Avaux was alive, and he knew.
All this time the Duke’s carriage had been sitting in the courtyard, like an egg in a stone sarcophagus. Its door was open, and one of the footmen had thrust his head and upper body into the dark interior, and lit a few candles. His arm shook from time to time, as if he were trying again and again to get a tired passenger to wake up. The delay was perfectly convenient for those inside—close to a hundred of the titled nobility of France—as it afforded them the opportunity to arrange themselves in a long receiving-line that coiled and undulated around the ballroom. Outside the double doors, servants had rolled out a carpet so that the Duke, and later King, could tread on red wool instead of gray snow. An honor guard had formed up to either side of that road of scarlet: members of étienne’s cavalry regiment to one side, and, facing them, a detachment of marines. étienne stood just inside the doors, waiting, with his mother on his arm.
Finally something was happening. The cavalry and the marines drew sabers and cutlasses respectively, and raised them up to form an arch of steel above the red carpet. étienne nodded to a pair of servants, who drew open the ballroom’s immense doors, letting in a blast of snowy air; étienne screwed up his face and stepped back half a pace; his mother the duchess bowed her head and reached up with her free hand to prevent her lace headdress from being sheared off. Outside, the mud-spattered buttocks of the footman could be seen emerging from the door of the white carriage, straining and jolting, as he seemed to be helping someone out who required much help.
Eliza’s view of these proceedings got better and better, for she was being impelled toward the head of the receiving-line by a kind of social peristalsis. Even Dukes and Duchesses, in this circumstance, gave precedence to Eliza, who had come to be seen as an honorary de Lavardac. No one would admit her to the line, but all insisted that she move ahead. And so she kept advancing towards the open doors, and got a very clear view of what came out of that carriage.
It was not a Duke. The word “wretch” came to mind, for this man could barely stand up, and if he owned a periwig, he’d lost it, or forgotten it in the coach. His thinning hair was short and dark, and shellacked with sweat and grease, and his face beneath it was so pale it looked almost green. He could not stand or walk without assistance, and yet he would on no account let go of some great burdensome item of luggage: a sort of strong-box. It had a handle on either end. One of the footmen supported the wretch on his right side. The wretch, then, kept his left hand clenched around one of the strong-box’s handles. The other footman had grabbed the box’s opposite handle just in time to keep it from falling out of the carriage door. And so they formed up three abreast: footman, wretch, footman, and began an ungainly progress along the red carpet.