Rossignol snorted.
“But I had done so,” Eliza went on, “under the ?gis of Louis’s sister-in-law, whose homeland Louis was invading, and continues to ravage at this very moment.”
“He does not ravage, mademoiselle, but pacifies it.”
“I stand corrected. Now, William of Orange has secretly made me a Duchess. But this is like a bill of exchange drawn on a Dutch house and payable only in London.”
This commercial metaphor made Rossignol confused, and perhaps a little queasy.
“In France it is not honored,” Eliza explained, “for France deems James Stuart the rightful King of England and does not grant William any right to create Duchesses. Even if they did, they would dispute his sovereignty over Qwghlm. At any rate, these facts were all new to Lieutenant Bart. It required some time for me to convey them to him, for, of course, I had to do so diplomatically. When he had absorbed all, and pondered, and finally made to speak, the care with which he considered each utterance was extraordinary; he was like a pilot maneuvering his vessel through a harbor crowded with drifting fire-ships, pausing every few words to, as it were, take soundings or gauge the latest shift in the wind.”
“Or maybe he is just not, in the end, very intelligent,” Rossignol suggested.
“I shall let you be the judge of that, for you shall meet him presently,” Eliza said. “Either way, my situation is the same. Let me put it to you baldly. The money that Bart’s men had stripped off my person was gold or, as some name it, hard money, spendable anywhere in the world for any good or service, and extremely desirable on both sides of the English Channel. Such is terribly scarce now because of the war. Living so near Amsterdam and dealing so rarely in hard money, I had quite lost sight of this. As you know, Bon-bon, Louis XIV recently had all of the solid silver furniture in his Grands Appartements melted down, literally liquidating 1.5 million livres tournoises in assets to pay for the new army he is building. At the time I heard this story, I had dismissed it as a whim of interior decoration, but now I am thinking harder about its meaning. The nobles of France have hoarded a stupendous amount of metal in the past few decades, probably banking it against the day Louis XIV dies, when they phant’sy they may rise up and reassert their ancient powers.”
Rossignol nodded. “By melting his own furniture, his majesty was trying to set an example. So far, few have emulated it.”
“Now, my assets—all in the most liquid possible form—had been seized by Jean Bart, a privateer, holding a license to plunder Dutch and English shipping and turn the proceeds over to the French crown. If I had been a Dutch or an English woman, my money would already have been swallowed up by the French treasury, and available for the contr?leur-général, Monsieur le comte de Pontchartrain, to dispense as he saw fit. But since I was arguably a French countess, the money had been put in escrow.”
“They were afraid that you would lodge an objection to the confiscation of your money—for how can a French privateer steal from a French countess?” said Rossignol. “Your ambiguous status would make it into a complicated affair legally. The letters that passed back and forth were most amusing.”
“I am glad you were amused, Bon-bon. But I was faced with the question: Why not claim my rights and demand the money back?”
“It is good that you have posed this question, mademoiselle, for I, and half of Versailles, have been wondering.”
“The answer is, because they wanted it. They wanted it badly enough that if I were to put up a fight, they might turn against me, denounce me as a foreign spy and a traitor, void my rights, throw me into the Bastille, and take the money. Put to work in the war, it might save thousands of French lives—and balanced against that, what is one counterfeit Countess worth?”
“Hmmm. I understand now that Lieutenant Bart was presenting you with an opportunity to do something clever.”
“He dared not come out and say it directly. But he wanted me to know that I had a choice. And this little Hercules, who would not hesitate to send a ship full of living men to David Jones’s Locker, if they were enemies of France, did not wish to see me taken off in chains to the Bastille.”
“So you did it.”
” ‘The money is for France, of course!’ ” I told him. ” ‘That is why I went to such trouble to smuggle it out of Amsterdam. How could I do otherwise when le Roi is melting down his own furniture to save French lives, and to defend French rights?’ ”
“That must have cheered him up.”
“More than words can express. Indeed he was so flummoxed that I gave him leave to kiss my cheeks, which he did with great élan, and a lingering scent of eau de cologne.”