“You say this—’for your own purposes’—as if I am the only one in the world who had purposes.”
“Very well, very well…damned lot of buttons, ain’t it?”
“You did not seem to mind so much when you were undoing them ten minutes ago.”
“Twenty minutes, by your leave, madame, do allow me some pride. Ten minutes! Am I really so perfunctory?”
“Perhaps I am.”
“Hmm, now, that is an unusual turning of the tables…it is supposed to be he who is perfunctory and selfish, and she who wants to stretch it out.”
“Ah, but I did stretch it out, Sergeant, when I was inspecting it for signs of the French Pox. And a long stretch it was.”
“You try to change the subject, and to distract me with flattery—but this methodical inspection of my yard is further proof of the businesslike nature of the transaction just concluded, is it not?”
“Very well…I hope that Number Three, as you count them, or Two, as étienne does, will be half-Shaftoe rather than half-Lavardac, and, in consequence, altogether fitter, handsomer, and cleverer than Number Two/One, bless his poor little heart.”
“I…I…I am shocked!”
“Why so shocked, you who’ve been in battles and seen, and done, the worst that men can do?”
“P’raps that is not so terrible, set against the worst that women can do.”
“You protest too much. You are not serious. Though ’tis true there are terrible women in the world, I am not one of them.”
“Why, to use a man in such a way…am I to have no knowledge of my own offspring!?”
“Why did you not ask such penetrating questions prior to fucking me in a haystack, Sergeant Shaftoe? Were you not aware, until now, that fucking leads to babies?”
“Very well, very well…that is not why I am shocked.”
“Why then, Bob?”
“Of course, I know you don’t really fancy me. So, ’tis not that I have been let down on that score.”
“Just as I know you do not really fancy me.”
“Of course not. Though you are fetching, a bit.”
“Just as are you in your own mottled way, Bob.”
“But I always assumed that you had me simply because you couldn’t have Jack.”
“Just as you have me because you can’t have Abigail?”
“Just so, madame. But it did never enter my head that it was, at root, a baby-making proposition…what is wrong with Number Two/One?”
“Lucien is, to use an English expression, a funny-looking kid. ’Tis common among Lavardacs. Moreover, he is listless and slow to thrive.”
“What of Number One/Null?”
“The most beautiful child who ever lived. Bright, happy, vigorous, altogether radiant.”
“What’s his name?”
“He was baptized Jean-Jacques.”
“I can guess where the Jacques is from.”
“Yes, and the Jean is from Jean Bart.”
“You named your firstborn after a pirate and a Vagabond?”
“Don’t be so haughty. One of them is your brother, after all.”
“But why this careful phrasing: ‘He was baptized Jean-Jacques’?”
“He answers to Johann.”
“How’s that again?”
“Johann. Johann von Hacklheber.”
“Peculiar name that, for the bastard of a French duchess.”
“He has been…visiting in Leipzig for a few days short of eighteen months. When he went there, he was not quite a year and a half old. I have got reports of him from friends who dwell in that part of the world, and they inform me that he is called by the name Johann von Hacklheber there.”
“Now, anything with a ‘von’ in it is a noble name—like ‘de’ here, am I right?”
“Oh yes. He dwells in the household of a German baron.”
“I know nothing of the ways of Continental nobility, but it strikes me as an unusual sort of arrangement.”
“You have no idea.”
“You may not know it, Madame, but you have got a sort of burning glow about the face and eyes now, a bit like during sex, but different.”
“It is another form of desire, that’s all.”
“You want the boy back. You are not happy with the arrangement…oh, Jesus!”
“Go ahead and say it.”
“He was taken from you!?”
“Yes.”
“Jesus. Why!?”
“Never mind. My purpose is to get to him who took my boy, and…”
“Get your boy back, I assume?”
“...”
“Or, to judge from the look on your face, perhaps I should not make assumptions.”
“Let me tell you what is truly evil about what was done to me eighteen months ago.”