AFTER CARDINAL RICHELIEU HAD RECOGNIZED, and Louis XIII had rewarded, the genius of Monsieur Antoine Rossignol, he had built himself a little chateau. In later years he had hired no less a gardener than Le N?tre to fix up the grounds. The chateau was at Juvisy. This had made sense at the time, as the King’s court had been in Paris, and Juvisy lay just outside of it.
When the son of Louis XIII had moved his court to Versailles, the son of Antoine Rossignol—who had inherited Antoine’s chateau, his knowledge of cryptanalysis, and his responsibilities—had found himself exiled. He had not moved, but the center of power had, and Juvisy had all of a sudden begun to seem like a remote outpost. Another man might have sold the place at a loss, and built a new chateau somewhere around Versailles. But Bonaventure Rossignol had been content to remain in the old place. His work did not require continual attendance at Court. If anything, the distance, and the peace and quiet that came with it, made him more productive. Le Roi had ratified the younger Rossignol’s decision by coming to visit him at Juvisy from time to time. In its smallness, its seclusion, and the prim perfection of its walled garden, the chateau at Juvisy seemed to Eliza like a perfect little kingdom of secrets, with Bon-bon its king, and Eliza its queen, or at least concubine.
The garden was of an altogether different style from what Le N?tre had done at Versailles, being, of course, much smaller, with fewer sculptures. But it had in common with the King’s garden that it was made to look splendid when seen from the high windows of the chateau, which was how Eliza was seeing it. Bon-bon’s bedchamber was on the upper storey, in the center of the building, so that when Eliza climbed out of his bed she could walk three paces over a cold floor and stand in a dormer and gaze straight down the path that formed the garden’s axis. Of course the plantings were dead and brown now, but the curlicues of its sculpted hedges still drew her eye, and gave her something to stare at while she began to answer a question that Bon-bon had just asked her.
He wanted to know, in effect, what the hell she was doing here. For some reason the question irked her a little bit.
She had showed up exhausted and dirty last night, with no thought of doing anything save putting Jean-Jacques to bed somewhere, and then collapsing into some bed of her own and sleeping for a few decades. Instead she’d been up half the night making love to Bon-bon. Yet she felt more awake, more refreshed now than if she’d spent the same amount of time slumbering. And so perhaps what she had taken for tiredness, yester evening, had been some other condition.
He’d had the good grace not to inquire what was going on. Instead he had accepted, with grace and even humor, the sudden arrival of Eliza and her entourage at his gates. She’d liked it that way, and she’d liked what had happened after. But now that the sun was up and they had gotten the sex out of their systems, there was this tedious need to explain matters. Certain parts of her mind had to be woken up, and were not happy about it. She stared at the dead garden, tracing the patterns of the hedges with her eyes, and mastered her annoyance.
“You had mentioned in a note to me that you contemplated a journey to Lyon,” Rossignol said, trying to prime the pump. “That was six weeks ago.”
“Yes,” Eliza said. “The journey to Lyon took ten days.”
“Ten days! Did you walk?”
“I could have done it faster by myself, but I was traveling with a five-month-old. The train consisted of two carriages, a baggage-cart, and some outriders and footmen borrowed from Lieutenant Bart and from the Ozoirs,” Eliza said.
Rossignol grimaced. “Unwieldy.”
“The first twenty miles were the most difficult, as you know.”
“Dunkerque is scarcely connected to France at all,” Rossignol agreed.
“Have you been to Lyon?”
“Only a little, passing through en route to Marseille.”
“And did you find it strangely bleak and austere compared to Paris?”
“Mademoiselle, I found it bleak and austere even compared to the Hague!”
Eliza did not laugh at the witticism, but only turned her back on the window, for a moment, to regard Rossignol. He was propped up in bed on a mountain of pillows, exposed to the chilly air from the waist up. The man burned food like a forge burned coal, and never grew fat, and never seemed to feel cold.
“That is because you have no regard for commerce. I found it most interesting.”
“Oh. Yes, I know about that,” Rossignol conceded. “The great crossroads where the Mediterranean trades with the North. It sounds as if it ought to be interesting. But if you go there, you see only warehouses and silk-factories, and tracts of plain open ground.”