Eliza clamped a hand on Rossignol’s wrist and dragged him through a door. They had been conversing in a foyer that communicated with the stables. She took him now down a corridor into a little salon, and thence into a larger drawing-room that was illuminated by several great windows facing toward the harbor.
At some point in its history, Dunkerque must have been an apt name for this place. For it literally meant Dune-church, and one could easily see it, some centuries back, as a dune with a church on, below, or near it, and nothing else, save an indifferent creek that reached the sea there, not so much impelled by gravity as blundering into it by accident. This stark dune-church-creek-scape had over ages been complicated, though never obscured, by the huts, houses, docks, and wharves of a modest fishing-and smuggling-port. More recently it had come to be thought of as a strategic asset, and been juggled back and forth between England and France for a while; inevitably Louis XIV had made it his, and begun to aggrandize it into a base navale, which was a little bit like mounting cannons and armor-plates on a fishing-boat. To anyone approaching the place from England, it looked fearsome enough, with a massive stout rubble-wall along the shore for cannonballs to bounce off of, and divers fortifications and batteries set up wherever the sand would bear their weight. But seen from within—which was how Eliza and Monsieur Bonaventure Rossignol were seeing it—the place looked like a perfectly innocent little port-town that had been hurled into a prison, or had had a prison erected around it.
All of which was to say that it was not and never would be a place for a great lord to pile up a brilliant chateau, or a great lady to spread a fragrant garden; and while those dunes might be speckled with watch-towers and mortar-batteries, no grand maréchal would ever make them terrible with a high citadel. The Marquis and the Marquise d’Ozoir had had the discretion to know as much, and so had contented themselves with acquiring a compound in the middle of things, near the harbor, and improving it, building up rather than out. The exterior of the main house was still old Norman half-timbered style, but one would never know it if all one saw was the interior, which had been remade in Barock style—or as close to it as one could come without using stone. Much wood, paint, and time had been devoted to fashioning pilasters and columns, wall-panels and balusters that would pass for Roman marble unless you went up and rapped on them with a knuckle. Rossignol had the good grace not to, and attended, instead, to what Eliza wished to show him: the view out the window.
From here they could see most of the ship-basin: a pool, deepened by dredging, and a-mazed by moles, causeways, wharves, sea-walls, &c. Beyond it the view was chopped off by the rectilinear bluff of the fortress-wall. Eliza did not have to explain to her guest that part of the basin was still used by the ordinary sea-faring folk who had always dwelled here, while another part was for the Navy; as much was obvious from looking at the ships.
She gave him a moment to take this in, then said: “How did I end up here? Well, once I had recovered from childbirth—” then she caught herself short, and smiled. “What a ridiculous expression; I see now that I shall be recovering until the day I die.”
Rossignol ignored the remark, and so, blushing slightly, she went back to the main thread: “I began to liquidate all of my short-term positions in the Amsterdam markets. It would be impossible to manage them from across the sea during a war. This was done easily enough—the result was a pretty hoard of gold coins, loose gemstones, and vulgar jewelry, as well as Bills of Exchange payable in London, and a few payable in Leipzig.”
“Ah,” said Rossignol, drawing some connexion in his mind, “those would be the ones that you gave to Princess Eleanor.”*
“As usual, you know everything.”
“When she turned up in Berlin with money, people there gossiped. It sounds as though you were most generous.”
“I booked passage on a Dutch ship that was to take me, along with several other passengers, from the Hook of Holland to London. This was early in September. We were baffled by strong winds out of the northeast, which prevented us from making any headway towards England, while driving us inexorably south towards the Straits of Dover. To make a long, tediously nautical story short, we were captured off Dunkerque by—voilà!”
Eliza gestured toward much the finest ship in the basin, a Ship of Force with a sterncastle magnificently sculpted, and spread thick with gold leaf.
“Lieutenant Jean Bart,” Rossignol muttered.
“Our captain surrendered immediately, and so we were boarded without violence by Bart’s men, who went through and confiscated everything of value. I lost all. The ship itself became Bart’s, of course—you can see it there if you care to look, but it is not much to look at.”
“That is putting it kindly,” said Rossignol after he had picked it out among the warships. “Why on earth does Lieutenant Bart suffer it to be moored so close to his flagship? It is like an ass sharing a stall with a cheval de bataille.”
“The answer is: the innate chivalry of Lieutenant Bart,” said Eliza.