The Confusion

“Mademoiselle. You had been witnessed by many Persons of Quality carrying out what was obviously a spy-mission. D’Avaux and his minions were doing all in their power-and they have much power-to drag your name through the muck. To direct the attention of le Roi elsewhere would have booted you nothing. Rather, I produced for his majesty an account of your actions that was tame compared to the fabrications of d’Avaux; it deflated that man’s pretensions while cementing the belief that the baby had been fathered by Etienne de Lavardac d’Arcachon. I was not trying to rehabilitate you-that would have required a miracle-only to mitigate the damage. For I feared that they might send someone to assassinate you, or abduct you, and bring you back to France.”

And now he stopped because he had talked himself into a faux pas, and was mortified. “Er…”

“Yes, monsieur?”

“I did not anticipate this.”

“Is that why it took you so long to get here?”

“I have already told you that the King’s cryptanalyst has responsibilities-none of which, as it turns out, place him in Dunkerque. I came as soon as I could.”

“You came as soon as I incited your jealousy by praising Lieutenant Bart in a letter.”

“Ah, so you admit it!”

“I admit nothing, monsieur, for he is every bit as remarkable as I made him out to be, and any man in his right mind would be jealous of him.”

“It is just so difficult for me to follow,” said Rossignol.

“Poor Bon-bon!”

“Please do not be sarcastic. And please do not address me by that ridiculous name.”

“What is it, pray tell, that the greatest cryptanalyst in the world cannot follow?”

“At first you described him as a corsair, a boca-neer, who took you by force…”

“Took the ship I was on by force-pray watch your language!”

“Later, when it was to your advantage to make me jealous, he was the most perfect gentle knight of the seas.”

“Then I shall explain it, for there is no contradiction. But first take off that cassock and let us make ourselves more comfortable.”

“The double entendre is noted,” said Rossignol crisply, “but before I become dangerously comfortable, pray tell, what are you doing in the residence of the Marquis and the Marquise d’Ozoir? For that is where we are, to judge from the scutcheon on the gates.”

“You have decyphered the coat of arms correctly,” said Eliza. “Fear not, the d’Ozoirs are not here now. It is just me, and my servants.”

“But I thought you were under arrest on a ship, and had no servants…or did you write those things solely to make me come here the faster?”

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.