"I suppose that's logical."
"Why would they wish to be mistaken about me—or you?"
"Monsieur Bernard, it has been so long since I began a conversation so briskly! Allow me a moment to catch my breath. Would you care to order something? Not that you are in need of further stimulation."
"I shall have coffee!" Bernard called out to an Armenian boy with a peach-fuzz moustache, dressed like a Turk, who had been edging toward them, impelled by significant glares and subtile finger-flicks from the proprietor, Christopher Esphahnian, but intimidated by Bernard. The garçon sped into the back, relieved to have been given orders. Bernard glanced about the coffee-house. "I could almost believe I was in Amsterdam," he remarked.
"From the lips of a financier, that is flattery," Eliza said. "But I believe that the intent of the decorator was to make you believe you were in Turkey."
Bernard snorted. "Does it work for you, madame?"
"No, for I have been in the coffee-houses of Amsterdam, and I share your opinion."
"You do not say that you have been in Turkey."
"Do I need to? Or have others been saying it for me?"
Bernard smiled. "We return to our subject! People say of me that I am a Jew, and of you that you are an odalisque, sent here by the Grand Turk as a spy—"
"They do!?"
"Yes. Why?"
The good thing about Bernard was that when he said something jarring he would quickly move on to something else. Eliza decided 'twere better to keep pace with him than to dwell on this matter of her and the Grand Turk. "The only thing I can think of that you and I have in common, monsieur, is a predilection for finance."
Bernard let it be seen that he was not fully satisfied with this attempt. He had a long, complicated French nose, close-set eyes, and a mouth turned up tight, like a recurved bow, at the corners. The look on his face might have been one of frustration, or intense concentration; perhaps both. He was trying to get her to see something. "Why do I wear cloth of gold? Because I am some kind of a fop? No! I dress well, but I am not a fop. I wear this to remind me of something."
"I supposed it was to remind others that—"
"That I am the richest man in France? Is that what you were going to say?"
"No, but it is what I was thinking."
"Another rumor—like that I am a Jew. No, madame, I wear this because it used to be my trade."
"Did you say trade!?"
"My family were Huguenots. I was baptized in the Protestant church of Charenton. You can't see it any more, it was pulled down by a Catholic mob a few years ago. My grandfather was a painter of portraits for the Court. My father, a miniaturist and an engraver. But God did not bestow on me any artistic talent, and so I was apprenticed to a seller of cloth-of-gold."
"Did you serve out your whole apprenticeship, monsieur?"
"Pourquoi non, madame, for then as now, I always fulfill my contracts. My formal métier is maître mercier grossiste pour draps d'or, d'argent, et de soie de Paris."
"I think I finally begin to understand your point, Monsieur Bernard. You are saying that you and I have in common that we do not belong."
"We make no sense!" Bernard exclaimed, throwing up both hands and raising his eyebrows in dismay, mocking a certain type of courtier. "To these people—" and he shoveled his hands across the Rue de l'Orangerie at Versailles—"we are what meteors, comets, sunspots are to astronomers: monstrous deviations, fell portents of undesired change, proof that something is wrong in a system that was supposedly framed by the hand of God."
"I have heard some in this vein, too, from Monsieur le marquis d'Ozoir—"
Bernard would not allow such a foolish sentence to be finished; he spewed air and rolled his eyes. "Him! What would he know of us? He is the epitome of who I mean—son of a Duke! A bastard, I'll grant you, and enterprising, in his way; yet still wholly typical of the established order."
Eliza now judged it best to stop talking, for Bernard had led her off into some wild territory—as if enlisting her, a Duchess, in some sort of insurgency. Bernard saw her discomfort, and physically drew back. The Armenian boy whispered up on slippered feet, bearing on a gaudy salver a tiny beaker of coffee clenched in a writhen silver zarf. Eliza gazed out the windows for a few moments, letting Bernard enjoy the first few sips. His guards had long since set up a perimeter defense around the Café Esphahan. But if she looked beyond that, cater-corner across the Rue de l'Orangerie, she could see deep into a vast rectangular plot embraced on three sides by a vaulted gallery-cum-retaining wall that supported the southern wing of the King's palace. This garden was open to the south so that during the winter it could gather in the feeble offerings of the sun. The King's orange trees, which lived in portable boxes of dirt, were still cowering back inside the warm gallery, for the last few nights had been clear and cold. But the garden was crowded with palm trees; and it was the sight of their blowing fronds, and not the faux-Turkish decor inside the café, that made it possible for her to phant'sy that she was sitting along some walled garden of the Topkapi Palace.
Bernard had settled down a bit. "Never fear, madame, for my father and I both converted to Catholicism after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Just as you have married a hereditary Duke."
"I don't really see what those two have to do with each other."
"They were, if you will, sacraments that we undertook to show that we were submitting to the established order of this country—the same order that we undermine by pursuing what you so aptly described as our predilection for finance."
"I don't know that I agree with that, monsieur."
Bernard ignored Eliza's weak protest. "Sooner or later the King will probably make me a Count or some such, and people will pretend to forget that I once served an apprenticeship. But do not be fooled. To them, you and I are as noble; as French; and as Catholic; as him!" and Bernard shot out one hand as if hurling a dagger. The target was a painting on the ceiling that depicted an immense, shirtless, muscle-bound, ochre-skinned hashishin with a red turban and a handlebar moustache raising a scimitar above his head. "And that is why they say Iama Jew; for this amounts to saying, an inexplicable monster."
"As long as it's just us inexplicable monsters here," said Eliza (as indeed it was; for most of the other patrons had bolted) "shall we—"
"Indeed, yes. Let us review the figures," said Bernard, and blinked twice. "The number of invasion troops is some twenty thousand. Each receives five sols per day; so that is five thousand livres a day. The number of sergeants is, in round numbers, a tenth of the number of troops, but they receive twice the pay; add another thousand livres a day. Lieutenants receive a livre a day, captains get two and a half; at any rate, when you add it all up, reckoning dragoons, cavalry, et cetera, it comes to some eight thousand a day—"
"I have made it ten thousand, to allow for other expenses," said Eliza.
"C'est juste. So why do you ask for half a million livres in London?"
"Monsieur, England is not so large as France, 'tis true; and yet it is much larger than some scraps of land in the Netherlands that have been fought over for months. Years."
"Those places you speak of in the Low Countries are fortified. England is not."
"The point is well taken, but the distance between the landing-sites in Devon and London is considerable. It took William of Orange a month and a half to cover the same interval, when he invaded."
"Very well, I grant you that fifty days' pay—almost two months—for this army comes to half a million livres. But why must every last penny of it be minted in advance, in London? Surely if the campaign progresses beyond a beach-head there will be opportunities to ship specie to the island later."