The Confusion

“Now as you may know, Bon-bon, every pirate and privateer has lurking within him the soul of an accountant. Though some would say ’tis the other way round. This arises from the fact that their livelihood derives from sacking ships, which is a hurried, disorderly, murky sort of undertaking; one pirate may come up with some gentleman’s lucky rabbit’s foot while the fellow on his left pulls an emerald the size of a quail’s egg from a lady’s cleavage. The whole enterprise would dissolve into a melee unless all the takings were pooled, and meticulously sorted, appraised, tallied, and then divided according to a rigid scheme. That is why the English euphemism for going a-pirating is going on the account.

“The practical result in my case was that every one of Bart’s men had at least a general notion of how much had been pilfered and from whom, and they knew that the gold taken from my strong-box and the jewels plucked from my body were worth more than all the other passengers’ effects summed and multiplied by ten. Bon-bon, I do not wish to boast, but the rest of my story will not make any sense to you unless I mention that the fortune I had lost was really quite enormous.”

Rossignol winced. From this, Eliza knew that he must have seen the figure mentioned somewhere.

“I have not dwelled on it,” she went on, “because a noblewoman-which I purport to be-is not supposed to care about anything as vulgar as money. And when Bart’s men took the jewels away from me I did not feel any different from the minute before. But as days went by I thought more and more about the fortune I had lost-enough to purchase an earldom. The only thing that saved me from going mad was the blue-eyed treasure I cradled in my arms.”

She purposely refrained from saying our baby, as this sort of remark only seemed to make him restive.

“In time I was put aboard a longboat and taken to the flagship. Lieutenant Bart emerged from his cabin to welcome me aboard. I think he was expecting some dowager. When he saw me, he was shocked.”

“It is not shock,” Rossignol demurred. “It is an altogether different thing. You have witnessed it a thousand times, but you’ll go to your grave without understanding it.”

“Well, once Captain Bart had recovered a little from this mysterious condition that you speak of, he ushered me into his private cabin-it is the one high in the sterncastle, there-and caused coffee to be served. He was-”

“Here I beg you to skip over any further adoring description of Lieutenant Bart,” said Rossignol, “as I got quite enough of it in the letter that caused me to wear out five horses getting here.”

“As you wish,” Eliza said. “It was more than simple lust, though.”

“I’m sure that’s what he wanted you to think.”

“Well. Let me jump ahead, then, to review my situation briefly. I am rated a Countess in France only because le Roi decided to make me one; he simply announced one day at his levee that I was the Countess de la Zeur-which is a funny French way of denoting my home island.”

“I wonder if you know,” said Rossignol, “that, by doing so, his majesty was implicitly reasserting an ancient Bourbon claim to Qwghlm that his lawyers had dredged out of some pond. Just as his majesty has made a base navale here, to one side of England, he would make another like it in Qwghlm, to the opposite side. So your ennoblement-startling as it might have been to you-was done as part of a larger plan.”

“I’d expect nothing less of his majesty,” said Eliza. “Whatever his motives might have been, the fact is that I had repaid the favor by spying on his army and reporting what I saw to William of Orange. So le Roi had reason to be a bit cross with me.”

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.