When the son of Louis XIII had moved his court to Versailles, the son of Antoine Rossignol—who had inherited Antoine's château, 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 château 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 château 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 Nôtre 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 château, 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."
"Of course it seems boring if all you do is look at it," Eliza said. "What renders it interesting is to take part in what goes on in those boring warehouses."
Rossignol's black eyes strayed to some papers resting on a bedside table. He was already regretting having asked her to explain this, and was hoping she'd make it quick.
Eliza stepped over to the side of the bed and swept the papers off onto the floor. Then she got a knee up on the bed and crab-walked across it until she was straddling Rossignol, sitting down firmly on his pelvis. "You asked," she reminded him. "and I have got an answer for you, which you are going to listen to, and what is more, by the time I am finished, you will confess that it is interesting."
"You have my attention, mademoiselle," said Rossignol.
"Lyon. I suppose they used to hold sprawling country-style fairs there, two hundred years ago. It was colonized, you know, by Florentines hoping to make fortunes selling goods to this wild northern place called France. There are still fairs, four times a year, but it is not so rustic. It is more like Leipzig now."
"That means nothing to me."
"It means people standing in courtyards of trading-houses, screaming at each other, and trading goods not physically present."
"But the warehouses—?"
"Silly, the goods are not present in the trading-houses. But neither can they be terribly remote, for they must be inspected before and delivered after the sale. Much of the traffic on the streets is commerçants going to this or that warehouse to look at a shipment of silks, herring, figs, hides, or what-have-you."
"That helps me to understand some of what was, to a gentleman, so incomprehensible about the place."
"You'd never guess that the place does more business than all of Paris. From the street it is desolate. You can die of loneliness or starvation there. It is not until you get inside the houses that you discover the inner life of the place. Bon-bon, all of the people who have been lured here by trade have created, behind their iron-bound doors and shuttered windows, little microcosms of the worlds they left behind in Genoa, Antwerp, Bruges, Geneva, Isfahan, Augsburg, Stockholm, Naples, or wherever they came from. When you are in one of those houses, you might as well be in one of those faraway cities. So think of Lyon as a capital of trade, and the streets around the Place au Change as its diplomatic quarter, where the Jews, Armenians, Dutch, English, Genoans, and all the other great trading-nations of the world have established their embassies: shards of foreign territory embedded in a faraway land."
"What were you doing there, mademoiselle?"
"Buying timber for Monsieur le marquis d'Ozoir. I required some expert help. After I had been a week in Lyon, I was joined by my Dutch associates: Samuel and Abraham de la Vega and their cousin. I had sent a letter to them before I left Dunkerque, for I knew they were in London. It had caught up to them at Gravesend. They had changed their plans and made direct for Dunkerque, which they passed through five days after I had departed. As they passed through Paris they enlisted their cousin, one Jacob Gold, and the three of them followed me down and encamped at the house of a man they knew there—a wholesaler of beeswax that he imports from Poland-Lithuania."
"Now I see why this thing took six weeks! Ten days to creep down to Lyon, a week to wait for all of these Jews to show up—"
"The delay was not a problem for me. It took me and my staff that long anyway to recover from the journey, and to set up housekeeping in Lyon. Monsieur le marquis d'Ozoir, bless him, had sent word ahead, and arranged for us to stay at the pied-à-terre of someone who owed him a favor. Once we had established ourselves, I had begun to make contacts among the crowd who frequent the Place au Change. For I knew that the brothers de la Vega would spare no effort in ransacking the wholesale timber market and finding the best wood on the best terms. But their efforts would be of no use unless I had made arrangements for a bill of exchange to be drawn up, transferring the agreed-on sum from the King's treasury to whomever sold us the timber. Likewise we would need to strike a deal with the shipper, and to purchase insurance, et cetera. So even if the de la Vegas had arrived at the same time as I, they should have little to do for a few days. And the need to feed little Jean-Jacques posed the most absurd complications."