The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and the System of the World (81 page)

Eliza reached up behind her head, untied her veil, and let it fall down onto her bosom. Then she enjoyed the opera.

A hundred feet away, Abraham de la Vega was hiding in the wings with a spyglass, made of lenses ground, to tolerances of a few thousandths of an inch, by his late second cousin, Baruch de Spinoza. Through those lenses, he saw the veil descend. He was nine years old. He moved through the backstage and out of the opera-house
like the moon-shadow of a nightingale. Aaron de la Vega, his uncle, was waiting there astride a swift horse.

“H
AS HE OFFERED
to make you a Duchess yet?” d’Avaux asked during the intermission.

“He said that he
would have
—had he not renounced his claim to the throne,” Eliza said.

D’Avaux was amused by her carefulness. “As your gallant is renewing his Platonic friendship with the Princess, may I escort you to Mr. Sluys’s box? I cannot stand to see you neglected.”

Eliza looked at the Stadholder’s box. Mary was there but William had already sneaked out, leaving the field clear for Monmouth, whose brave resolve to go East and fight the Turk had Mary almost in tears.

“I never even
saw
the Prince,” Eliza said, “just glimpsed him scurrying in at the last minute.”

“Rest assured, mademoiselle, he is nothing to look at.” And he offered Eliza his arm. “If it’s
true
that your beau is leaving soon for the East, you’ll need new young men to amuse you. Frankly, you are overdue for a change.
La France
did her best to civilize Monmouth, but the Anglo-Saxon taint had penetrated too deeply. He never developed the innate discretion of a Frenchman.”

“I’m
mortified
to learn that Monmouth has been indiscreet,” Eliza said gaily.

“All of Amsterdam, and approximately half of London and Paris, have learned of your charms. But, although the Duke’s descriptions were unspeakably vulgar—when they were not completely incoherent—
cultivated
gentlemen can look beyond ribaldry, and infer that you possess qualities, mademoiselle, beyond the merely gynæcological.”

“When you say ‘cultivated’ you mean ‘French’?”

“I know you are teasing me, mademoiselle. You expect me to say ‘Why yes, all French gentlemen are cultivated.’ But it is not so.”

“Monsieur d’Avaux, I’m shocked to hear you say such a thing.”

They were almost at the door to Sluys’s box. D’Avaux drew back. “Typically only the
worst
sort of French nobility would be in the box that you and I are about to enter, associating with the likes of Sluys—but tonight is an exception.”

“L
OUIS LE
G
RAND
—as he’s now dubbed himself—built himself a new château outside of Paris, at a place called Versailles,” Aaron de la Vega had told her, during one of their meetings in Amsterdam’s narrow and crowded Jewish quarter—which, by coincidence,
happened to be built up against the Opera House. “He has moved his entire court to the new place.”

“I’d heard as much, but I didn’t believe it,” Gomer Bolstrood had said, looking more at home among Jews than he ever had among Englishmen. “To move so many people out of Paris—it seems insane.”

“On the contrary—it is a master-stroke,” de la Vega had said. “You know the Greek myth of Antaeus? For the French nobility, Paris is like the Mother Earth—as long as they are ensconced there, they have power, information, money. But Louis, by forcing them to move to Versailles, is like Hercules, who mastered Antaeus by raising him off the ground and slowly strangling him into submission.”

“A pretty similitude,” Eliza had said, “but what does it have to do with our putting a short squeeze on Mr. Sluys?”

De la Vega had permitted himself a smile, and looked over at Bolstrood. But Gomer had not been in a grinning mood. “Sluys is one of those rich Dutchmen who craves the approval of Frenchmen. He has been cultivating them since before the 1672 war—mostly without success, for they find him stupid and vulgar. But now it’s different. The French nobles used to be able to live off their land, but now Louis forces them to keep a household in Versailles, as well as one in Paris, and to go about in coaches, finely dressed and wigged—”

“The wretches are desperate for lucre,” Gomer Bolstrood had said.

A
T THE
O
PERA
, before the door to Sluys’s box, Eliza said, “You mean, monsieur, the sort of French nobleman who’s not content with the old ways, and likes to play the markets in Amsterdam, so he can afford a coach and a mistress?”

“You will spoil me, mademoiselle,” d’Avaux said, “for how can I return to the common sort of female—stupid and ignorant—after I have conversed with you? Yes, normally Sluys’s box would be
stuffed
with
that
sort of French nobleman. But
tonight
he is entertaining a young man who came by his endowment
properly.
”

“Meaning—?”

“Inherited it—or is going to—from his father, the Duc d’Arcachon.”

“Would it be vulgar for me to ask how the Duc d’Arcachon got it?”

“Colbert built our Navy from twenty vessels to three hundred. The Duc d’Arcachon is Admiral of that Navy—and was responsible for much of the building.”

The floor around Mr. Sluys’s chair was strewn with wadded scraps. Eliza would have loved to smooth some out and read them, but his hard jollity, and the way he was pouring champagne, told her that the evening’s trading was going well for him, or so he imagined. “Jews don’t go to the Opera—it is against their religion! What a show de la Vega has missed tonight!”

“ ‘Thou shalt not attend the Opera…’ Is that in Exodus, or Deuteronomy?” Eliza inquired.

D’Avaux—who seemed uncharacteristically nervous, all of a sudden—took Eliza’s remark as a witticism, and produced a smile as thin and dry as parchment. Mr. Sluys took it as stupidity, and got sexually aroused. “De la Vega is still selling V.O.C. stock short! He’ll be doing it all night long—until he hears the news tomorrow morning, and gets word to his brokers to stop!” Sluys seemed almost outraged to be making money so easily.

Now Mr. Sluys looked as if he would’ve been content to drink champagne and gaze ’pon Eliza’s navel until any number of fat ladies sang (which actually would not have been long in coming), but some sort of very rude commotion, originating from this very box, forced him to glance aside. Eliza turned to see that young French nobleman—the son of the Duc d’Arcachon—at the railing of the box, where he was being hugged, passionately and perhaps even a little violently, by a bald man with a bloody nose.

Eliza’s dear Mum had always taught her that it wasn’t polite to stare, but she couldn’t help herself. Thus, she took in that the young Arcachon had actually flung one of his legs over the railing, as if he were trying to vault out into empty space. A large and rather good wig balanced precariously on the same rail. Eliza stepped forward and snatched it. It was unmistakably the periwig of Jean Antoine de Mesmes, comte d’Avaux, who must, therefore, be the bald fellow wrestling young Arcachon back from the brink of suicide.

D’Avaux—demonstrating a weird strength for such a refined man—finally slammed the other back into a chair, and had the good grace to so choreograph it that he ended up down on both knees. He pulled a lace hanky from a pocket and stuffed it up under his nose to stanch the blood, then spoke through it, heatedly but respectfully, to the young nobleman, who had covered his face with his hands. From time to time he darted a look at Eliza.

“Has the young Arcachon been selling V.O.C. stock short?” she inquired of Mr. Sluys.

“On the contrary, mademoiselle—”

“Oh, I forgot. He’s not the sort who dabbles in markets. But why else would a French duke’s son visit Amsterdam?”

Sluys got a look as if something were lodged in his throat.

“Never mind,” Eliza said airily, “I’m sure it is
frightfully
complicated—and I’m no good at such things.”

Sluys relaxed.

“I was only wondering why he tried to kill himself—assuming that’s what he was doing?”

“Étienne d’Arcachon is the politest man in France,” Sluys said ominously.

“Hmmph. You’d never know!”

“Sssh!” Sluys made frantic tiny motions with the flesh shovels of his hands.

“Mr. Sluys! Do you mean to imply that this spectacle has something to do with
my
presence in your box?”

Finally Sluys was on his feet. He was rather drunk and very heavy, and stood bent over with one hand gripping the box’s railing. “It would help if you’d confide in me that, if Étienne d’Arcachon slays himself in your presence, you’ll take offense.”

“Mr. Sluys, watching him commit suicide would ruin my evening!”

“Very well. Thank you, mademoiselle. I am in your debt
enormously.
”

“Mr. Sluys—you have no idea.”

I
T LED TO HUSHED INTRIGUES
in dim corners, palmed messages, raised eyebrows, and subtle gestures by candle-light, continuing all through the final acts of the opera—which was fortunate, because the opera was very dull.

Then, somehow, d’Avaux arranged to share a coach with Eliza and Monmouth. As they jounced, heaved, and clattered down various dark canal-edges and over diverse draw-bridges, he explained: “It was Sluys’s box. Therefore, he was the host. Therefore, it was his responsibility to make a formal introduction of Étienne d’Arcachon to you, mademoiselle. But he was too Dutch, drunk, and distracted to perform his proper rôle. I never cleared my throat so many times—but to no avail. Monsieur d’Arcachon was placed in an
impossible
situation!”

“So he tried to take his own life?”

“It was the only honourable course,” d’Avaux said simply.

“He is the politest man in France,” Monmouth added.

“You saved the day,” d’Avaux said.

“Oh, that—’twas Mr. Sluys’s suggestion.”

D’Avaux looked vaguely nauseated at the mere mention of Sluys. “He has much to answer for. This
soirée
had better be
charmante.
”

A
ARON DE LA
V
EGA
, who was assuredly
not
going to a party tonight, treated balance-sheets and V.O.C. shares as a scholar would old books and parchments—which is to say that Eliza found him sober and serious to a fault. But he could be merry about a few things, and one of them was Mr. Sluys’s house—or rather his widening collection of them. For as the first one had pulled its neighbors downwards, skewing them into parallelograms, popping window-panes out of their frames, and imprisoning doors in their jambs, Mr. Sluys had been forced to buy them out. He owned five houses in a row now, and could afford to, as long as he was managing the assets of half the population of Versailles. The one in the middle, where Mr. Sluys kept his secret hoard of lead and guilt, was at least a foot lower than it had been in 1672, and Aaron de la Vega liked to pun about it in his native language, saying it was “
embarazada
,” which meant “pregnant.”

As the Duke of Monmouth handed Eliza down from the carriage in front of that house, she thought it was apt. For—especially when Mr. Sluys was burning thousands of candles at once, as he was tonight, and the light was blazing from all those conspicuously skewed window-frames—hiding the secret was like a woman seven months pregnant trying to conceal her condition with clever tailoring.

Men and women in Parisian fashions were entering the pregnant house in what almost amounted to a continuous queue. Mr. Sluys—belatedly warming to his rôle as host—was stationed just inside the door, mopping sweat from his brow every few seconds, as if secretly terrified that the added weight of so many guests would finally drive his house straight down into the mud, like a stake struck with a maul.

But when Eliza got into the place, and suffered Mr. Sluys to kiss her hand, and made a turn round the floor, gaily ignoring the venomous stares of pudgy Dutch churchwives and overdressed Frenchwomen—she could see clear signs that Mr. Sluys had brought in mining-engineers, or something, to shore the house up. For the beams that crisscrossed the ceiling, though hidden under festoons and garlands of Barock plasterwork, were uncommonly huge, and the pillars that rose up to support the ends of those beams, though fluted and capitalled like those of a Roman temple, were the size of mainmasts. Still she thought she could detect a pregnant convexity about the ceiling…

“Don’t come out and say you want to buy lead—tell him only that you want to lighten his burdens—better yet, that you wish to transfer them, forcefully, onto the shoulders of the Turks. Or
something along those lines,” she said, distractedly, into Monmouth’s ear as the first galliard was drawing to a close. He stalked away in a bit of a huff—but he was moving towards Sluys, anyway. Eliza regretted—briefly—that she’d insulted his intelligence, or at least his breeding. But she was too beset by sudden worries to consider his feelings. The house, for all its plaster and candles, reminded her of nothing so much as the Doctor’s mine, deep beneath the Harz: a hole in the earth, full of metal, prevented from collapsing in on itself solely by cleverness and continual shoring-up.

Weight could be transferred from lead to floor-boards, and thence into joists, and thence into beams, and from beams into pillars, then down into footings, and thence into log piles whose strength derived from the “stick” (as Dutchmen called it) between them and the mud they’d been hammered into. The final settling of accounts was there: if the “stick” sufficed, the structure above it was a building, and if it didn’t, it was a gradual avalanche…

“It is very curious, mademoiselle, that the chilly winds of the Hague were balmy breezes to you—yet in this warm room, you alone clutch your arms, and have goose-bumps.”

“Chilly thoughts, Monsieur d’Avaux.”

“And no wonder—your beau is about to leave for Hungary. You need to make some new friends—ones who live in warmer climes, perhaps?”

No. Madness. I belong here. Even Jack, who loves me, said so.

From a corner of the room, clouded with men and pipe-smoke, a trumpeting laugh from Mr. Sluys. Eliza glanced over that way and saw Monmouth plying him—probably reciting the very sentences she’d composed for him. Sluys was giddy with hope that he could get rid of his burden, frantic with anxiety that it might not happen. Meanwhile the market was in violent motion all over Amsterdam as Aaron de la Vega sold the V.O.C. short. It would all lead to an invasion of England. Everything had gone fluid tonight. This was no time to stand still.