They walked up such a street to a warehouse where heavy sacks were being lowered into the hold of a sloop. “There it is-our Commodity,” Jack said. “Good as-and in some parts of the world, preferable to-gold.”

“What is it-hazelnuts?” Eliza asked. “Coffee beans?” Jack had no particular reason to keep the secret from her, but this was the first time she’d shown any interest at all in his venture, and he wanted to make it last.

The sloop’s hold was full. So even as Jack, Eliza, and Yevgeny were approaching, the lines were cast off and sails raised, and she began to drift down the canal ahead of a faint breeze, headed for the inner harbor, a few minutes’ walk away.

They followed on foot. “You have insurance?” she asked.

“Funny you should ask,” Jack said, and at this Eliza rolled her eyes, and then slumped like one of those sinking houses. “Mr. Foot says that this is a great adventure, but-”

“He means that you have made Mr. Vliet a loan a la grosse aventure, which is a typical way of financing trading-voyages,” Eliza said. “But those who make such loans always buy insurance- if they can find anyone to sell it to them.I can point you to coffee-houses that specialize in just that. But-”

“How much does it cost?”

“It depends on everything, Jack, there is no one fixed price. Are you trying to tell me you don’t have enough money left to buy insurance?”

Jack said nothing.

“If so, you should withdraw now.”

“Too late-the victuals are paid for and stowed in the hold of God’s Wounds. But perhaps there is room for one more investor.”

Eliza snorted. “What’s come over you? Vagabonding you do very well, and you cut a fine figure doing it. But investing-it’s not your metier.”

“I wish you had mentioned that before,” Jack said. “From the first moment Mr. Foot mentioned it to me, I saw this trading-voyage as a way I might become worthy in your eyes.” Then Jack nearly toppled into a canal, as recklessly telling the truth had given him an attack of giddiness. Eliza, for her part, looked as if she’d been butt-stroked by Yevgeny’s harpoon-she stopped walking, planted her feet wide, and crossed her arms over her bodice as if nursing a stomach-ache; looked up the canal with watery eyes for a moment; and sniffled once or twice.

Jack ought to’ve been delighted. But all he felt, finally, was a dull sense of doom. He hadn’t told Eliza about the rotten fish or the pink-eyed horses. He certainly had not mentioned that he could have killed, but had idiotically spared, the villain who had once made her a slave. But he knew that someday she would find out, and when that happened, he did not want to be on the European continent.

“Let me see the ship,” she said finally.

They came round a bend and were greeted by one of those sudden surprising Amsterdam-vistas, down the canal to the ship-carpeted Ijsselmeer. Planted on the Ij-bank was the Herring-Packers’ Tower, a roundish brick silo rising above a sloppy, fragrant quay where three vessels were tied up: a couple of hulks that were shuttling victuals out to bigger ships in the outer harbor, and God’s Wounds, which looked as if she were being disassembled. All her hatches were removed for loading, and what remained had a structurally dubious look-especially when great sweating barrels of herring, and these mysterious sacks from the warehouse, were being dropped into it.

But before Jack could really dwell on the topic of sea-worthiness, Eliza-moving with a decisiveness he could no longer muster-had gone out onto the quay, her skirts sweeping up all manner of stuff that she would later regret having brought home. A sack had split open and spilled its contents, which snapped, crackled, and popped beneath the soles of her shoes as she drew up close. She bent over and thrust her hand into the hole, somewhat like doubting Thomas, and raised up a handful of the cargo, and let it spill in a colorful clinking shower.

“Cowrie shells,” she said distractedly.

Jack thought, at first, that she was dumbfounded-probably by the brilliance and magnificence of the plan-but on a closer look he saw that she was showing all the symptoms of thinking.

“Cowrie shells to you,” Jack said. “In Africa, this is money!”

“Not for long.”

“What do you mean? Money’s money. Mr. Vliet has been sitting on this hoard for twenty years, waiting for prices to drop.”

“A few weeks ago,” said Eliza, “news arrived that the Dutch had acquired certain isles, near India, called the Maldives and Laccadives, and that vast numbers of cowrie shells had been found there. Since that news arrived, these have been considered worthless.”

It took Jack some time to recover from this.

He had a sword, and Mr. Vliet, a pudgy flaxen-haired man, was just a stone’s throw away, going over some paperwork with a ship’s victualer, and it was natural to imagine simply running over and inserting the tip of the sword between any two of Mr. Vliet’s chins and giving it a hard shove. But this, he supposed, would simply have proved Eliza’s point (viz. that he was not cut out to be a businessman), and he did not want to give her such satisfaction. Jack wasn’t going to get the kind of satisfaction he had been craving for the last six months, and so why should she get any? As a way of keeping his body occupied while the mind worked, he helped roll some barrels over the plank to the deck of the ship.

“Now I understand the word Windhandel in a new way,” was all that he could come up with. “This is real,” he said, slapping a barrel-head, “and this” (stomping the deck of God’s Wounds) “is real, and these” (lofting a double handful of cowrie shells) “are real, and all of them every bit as real, now, as they were, ten minutes ago, or before this rumor arrived from the Maldives and the Laccadives…”

“The news came over land-faster than ships normally travel, when they have to round the Cape of Good Hope. So it is possible that you will reach Africa in advance of the great cargo-ships of cowrie-shells that, one can only presume, are headed that way now from the Maldives.”

“Just as Mr. Vliet had it planned, I’m sure.”

“But when you get to Africa, what will you buy with your cowrie-shells, Jack?”

“Cloth.”

“Cloth!?”

“Then we sail west-there is said to be a great market for African cloth in the West Indies.”

“Africans do not export cloth, Jack. They import it.”

“You must be mistaken-Mr. Vliet is very clear on this-we will sail to Africa and exchange our cowrie-shells for pieces of India, which as I’m sure you know means India cloth, and then carry it across the Atlantic…”

“A piece of India is an expression meaning a male African slave between fifteen and forty years of age,” Eliza said. “India cloth-just like cowrie shells-is money in Africa, Jack, and Africans will sell other Africans for one piece of it.”

Now a silence nearly as long as the one at the duc d’Arcachon’s party. Jack standing on the slowly moving deck of the God’s Wounds, Eliza on the quay.

“You are going into the slave trade,” she said, in a dead voice.

“Well… I had no idea, until now.”

“I believe you. But now you have to get off that boat and walk away.”

This was a superb idea, and part of Jack was thrilled by it. But the Imp of the Perverse prevailed, and Jack decided to take Eliza’s suggestion in a negative and resentful spirit.

“And simply throw away my investment?”

“Better than throwing away your immortal soul. You threw away the ostrich plumes and the horse, Jack, I know you did-so why not do the same now?”

“This is more valuable by far. ”

“What about the other item you looted from the Grand Vizier’s camp, Jack?”

“What, the sword?”

Eliza shook her head no, looked him in the eye, and waited.