IT WAS FAR FROM A warm day, especially with the wind coming in off the Channel; but the sky was perfectly cloudless, the waves of the sea had nothing to reflect except the saturated azure radiance of the sky, and in consequence this was one of those rare days when the ocean really was blue. That, and the glints of gold from wave-facets catching the direct light of the sun, seemed like a favorable omen for France.
Météore nearly had not been able to get in to the harbor at Dunkirk. It wasn’t that she’d found a hostile reception. Midway across the Channel her crew had struck the Cross of St. George and run the fleur-de-lis up the mizzenmast, and the coastal batteries at Dunkirk had accepted this, or at least refrained from pulverizing them long enough for Daniel to explain himself, and send messages ashore. The difficulty had lain, rather, in finding room for one more ship in Dunkirk’s harbor. (1) A modest invasion force had gathered there in the expectation that King William would be assassinated. This was nothing like the army that had massed near Cherbourg in ’92, but it had been large enough that even now, a week after the plot had failed and the invasion had been cancelled, its remnants took up moorage-space. (2) Jean Bart, though he and his home town were as always well-fed, kept hearing reports from the interior of France that people were starving to death in large numbers; so he had sailed his fleet up north and fallen upon a hundred-ship convoy bringing Russian and Polish wheat out of the Baltic. He had defeated the Dutch naval squadron escorting it toward Amsterdam and diverted the entire convoy to Dunkirk. They were being unloaded as fast as cranes and stevedores could work, and the wheat was being taken in to famished France on endless wagon-trains that darkened the shore, and plugged the narrow ways of the town. (3) As bad as things were in France, they were worse to the north; reports had come in that during the winter just ending, one out of three Finns had died. And Scotland was not much better. Finland and Scotland were as far north as it was possible to go, and so those Finns and Scots who had been able to straggle out to the coasts and take ship had sailed south, and converged on harbors where food might be had. Many had ended up in Dunkirk.
No other ship would have been able to pass the Dunkirk breakwater, under such conditions; but when word made it up the chain of command that Météore had inexplicably returned, Captain Bart gave orders that room must be made for her; and so after some idling, Météore had been towed down a narrow lead among Baltic wheat-hulks, refugee-boats, invasion-transports, and ordinary Dunkirk fishing-and smuggling-craft to the anchorage of Bart’s privateer fleet, and given a place of honor alongside Bart’s flagship Alcyon. The first to come aboard had been a six-year-old boy armed with a wooden sword; the second, a noblewoman. She was gaunt, drawn, and black-patched compared to the last time Daniel had seen her, but he recognized her as the Duchess of Arcachon and (in England, and countries that recognized William) the Duchess of Qwghlm. And after he had talked to her for two hours, he was surprised by the awareness that she was still beautiful; just different.
And her internal fires had been banked. By the pox, he assumed at first. Then he guessed it was age—but she was not even thirty years old. On further consideration he decided it was because she had actually achieved things, and so needed not be as fierce as before. She was a Duchess twice over. She had made more fortunes than she’d lost. She had this six-year-old bastard, who seemed a fine lad, and gave every appearance of being one of those unusual children who survived to adulthood. She had a daughter of three, and a babe in arms, Louis de Lavardac, only a few weeks old—this implied she’d gone through at least as many miscarriages, stillbirths, and small-coffin funerals. Men sailed jachts across the sea and gave them to her, just to get her attention. And so perhaps her fires had been banked by choice; she’d had the sound judgment to know when to draw back, and let her investments and her children grow, and her plans come to fruition.