“What I did. You just fidgeted and shuddered.”

“Well it’s like some modish dance, isn’t it, where only one knows the steps. You just have to teach me the other part of it.”

“I am honored, Your Grace-does that mean we’ll be seeing each other again?”

Monmouth, miffed and slightly buffaloed: “I was sincere about making you a Duchess.”

“First you have to make yourself a King.”

The Duke of Monmouth sighed and slammed back into the mattress, driving out an evoluting cloud of dust, straw-ends, bedbugs, and mite f?ces. All of it hung beautifully in the lambent air, as if daubed on canvas by one of those Brueghels.

“I know it is ever so tiresome,” Eliza said, stroking the Duke’s hair back from his brow and tucking it neatly behind his ear. “ Lateryou’ll be slogging round dreadful battlefields. Tonight we go to the Opera!”

Monmouth made a vile face. “Give me a battlefield any time.”

“William’s going to be there.”

“Eeeyuh, he’s not going to do any tedious acting, is he?”

“What, the Prince of Orange-?”

“After the Peace of Breda he put on a ballet, and appeared as Mercury, bringing news of Anglo-Dutch rapprochement. Embarrassing to see a rather good warrior prancing about with a couple of bloody goose-wings lashed to his ankles.”

“That was a long time ago-he is a grown man, and it is beneath his dignity now. He’ll just peer down from his box. Pretend to whisper bons mots to Mary, who’ll pretend to get them.”

“If he is coming, we can go late,” Monmouth said. “They’ll have to search the place for bombs.”

“Then we must go early,” Eliza countered, “as there’ll be that much more time for plots and intrigues.”

LIKE ONE WHO HAS ONLYread books and heard tales of a foreign land, and finally goes there and sees the real thing-thus Eliza at the Opera. Not so much for the place (which was only a building) as for the people, and not so much for the ones with titles and formal ranks (viz. the Raadspensionary, and diverse Regents and Magistrates with their fat jewelled wives) as for the ones who had the power to move the market.

Eliza, like most of that caterwauling, hand-slapping crowd who migrated between the Dam and the Exchange, did not have enough money to trade in actual V.O.C. shares. When she was flush, she bought and sold ducat shares, and when she wasn’t, she bought and sold options and contracts to buy or sell them. Strictly speaking, ducat shares didn’t even exist. They were splinters, fragments, of actual V.O.C. shares. They were a fiction that had been invented so that people who weren’t enormously wealthy could participate in the market.

Yet even above the level of those who traded full V.O.C. shares were the princes of the market, who had accumulated large numbers of those shares, and borrowed money against them, which they lent out to diverse ventures: mines, sailing-voyages, slave-forts on the Guinea coast, colonies, wars, and (if conditions were right) the occasional violent overthrow of a king. Such a man could move the market simply by showing his face at the Exchange, and trigger a crash, or a boom, simply by strolling across it with a particular expression on his face, leaving a trail of buying and selling in his wake, like a spreading cloud of smoke from a bishop’s censer.

Allof those men seemed to be here at the Opera with their wives or mistresses. The crowd was something like the innards of a harpsichord, each person tensed to thrum or keen when plucked. Mostly it was a cacophony, as if cats were lovemaking on the keyboard. But the arrival of certain Personages was a palpable striking of certain chords.

“The French have a word for this: they name it a frisson, ” muttered the Duke of Monmouth behind a kid-gloved hand as they made their way toward their box.

“Like Orpheus, I struggle with a desire to turn around and look behind me-”

“Stay, your turban would fall off.”

Eliza reached up to pat the cyclone of cerulean Turkish silk. It was anchored to her hair by diverse heathen brooches, clips, and pins. “Impossible.”

“Anyway, why would you want to look behind you?”

“To see what has caused this frisson.”

“It is we, you silly.” And for once, the Duke of Monmouth had said something that was demonstrably true. Countless sets of jewelled and gilded opera-glasses had been trained on them, making the owners look like so many goggle-eyed amphibians crowded together on a bank.

“Never before has the Duke’s woman been more gloriously attired than he, ” Eliza ventured.

“And never again, ” Monmouth snarled. “I only hope that your magnificence does not distract them from what we want them to see.”

They stood at the railing of their box as they talked, presenting themselves for inspection. For the proscenium where the actors cavorted was only the most obvious of the Opera House’s stages, and the story that they acted out was only one of several dramas all going on at once. For example, the Stadholder’s box, only a few yards away, was being ransacked by Blue Guards looking for French bombs. That had grown tedious, and so now the Duke of Monmouth and his latest mistress had the attention of most everyone. The gaze of so many major V.O.C. shareholders, through so many custom-ground lenses, made Eliza feel like an insect ‘neath a Natural Philosopher’s burning-glass. She was glad that this Turkish courtesan’s get-up included a veil, which hid everything but her eyes.

Even through the veil’s narrow aperture, some of the observers might’ve detected a few moments’ panic, or at least anxiety, in Eliza’s eyes, as the frisson drew out into a general murmur of confusion: opera-goers all nudging one another down below, pointing upwards with flicks of the eyeballs or discreet waftings of gloved and ringed fingers, getting their wigs entangled as they whispered speculations to each other.

It took a few moments for the crowd to even figure out who Eliza’s escort was. Monmouth’s attire was numblingly practical, as if he were going to jump on a war-horse immediately following the Opera and gallop through fen, forest, and brush until he encountered some foe who wanted slaying. Even his sword was a cavalry saber-not a rapier. To that point, at least, the message was clear enough. The question was, in what direction would Monmouth ride, and what sorts of heads, specifically, did he intend to be lopping off with that saber?

“I knew it-to expose your navel was a mistake!” the Duke hissed.

“On the contrary-’Tis the keyhole through which the entire riddle will be unlocked, ” Eliza returned, the t’s and k’s making her veil ripple gorgeously. But she was not as confident as she sounded, and so, at the risk of being obvious, she allowed her gaze to wander, in what she hoped would be an innocent-seeming way, around the crescent of opera-boxes until she found the one where the comte d’Avaux was seated along with (among other Amsterdammers who had recently gone on shopping sprees in Paris) Mr. Sluys the traitorous lead-hoarder.

D’Avaux removed a pair of golden opera-glasses from his eyes and stared Eliza in the face for a ten-count.

His eyes shifted to William’s box, where the Blue Guards were making an endless thrash.

He looked at Eliza again. Her veil hid her smile, but the invitation in her eyes was clear enough.

“It’s… not… working,” Monmouth grunted.

“It is working flawlessly, ” Eliza said. D’Avaux was on his feet, excusing himself from the crowd in that box: Sluys, and an Amsterdam Regent, and some sort of young French nobleman, who must have been of high rank, for d’Avaux gave him a deep bow.

A few moments later he was giving the same sort of bow to the Duke of Monmouth, and kissing Eliza’s hand.