King Louis XIV of France had found it convenient to make Eliza a Countess. Among other privileges, this had granted her admittance to the Salon of Diana in the royal château at Versailles. There she had noticed this bored and lonesome man studying her. She had been every bit as bored. As it had turned out, they had been bored for the same reason: They both knew the odds of these games, and saw little point in staking money on them. But to talk about the odds, and to speculate as to ways of systematically beating such games, was absorbing. It had seemed unwise, or at least impolite, to hold such conversations around the gaming-tables, and so Eliza and Rossignol had strolled in the gardens, and had moved quickly from the odds of card-games to more elevated talk of Leibniz, Newton, Huygens, and other Natural Philosophers. Of course they had been noticed by gossips looking out the windows; but those foolish Court girls, who mistook fashion for taste, had not considered Rossignol desirable, had not understood that he was a genius, unrecognized as such by the savants of Europe.

At the same time—though she had not realized this until later—he had been observing her even more shrewdly. Many of her letters to Leibniz, and Leibniz's letters back to her, had crossed his desk, for he was a member of the Cabinet Noir, whose purpose was to open and read foreign correspondence. He had found her letters to be curiously long, and filled with vapid chatter about hairstyles and the cut of the latest fashions. His true purpose in strolling with her in the gardens of Versailles had been to determine whether she was as empty-headed as she seemed in her letters. The answer, clearly, was no; and moreover she had turned out to know a lot about mathematics, metaphysics, and Natural Philosophy. This had sufficed to send him back to his family château at Juvisy, where he had broken the steganographic code that Eliza had been using to correspond with Leibniz. He could have destroyed, or at least damaged, her then, but he had lacked the desire to. For a kind of seduction had taken place between the two of them, which had not been acted upon until thirteen months ago.

It would have made matters a good deal simpler if he had fallen in love with the baby and proposed to elope with her, and him, to some other country. But this, as she now saw clearly, was unthinkable in so many different ways that to dream of it any more was a waste of time. Oh, well (she thought), if the world were populated solely by persons who loved and desired each other symmetrically, it might be happier, but not so interesting. And there would be no place in such a world for a person such as Eliza. During her weeks in Dunkerque, she had gotten better than ever at making do with what Fortune sent her way. If there was to be no doting father, so be it. Nicole was an ex-whore, recruited from one of Dunkerque's waterfront brothels. But she had already given the baby more love than he would get in a lifetime with Bonaventure Rossignol.

"Now you show up!" she said finally.

"The cryptanalyst to His Majesty the King of France," said Rossignol, "has responsibilities." He was not being arch—merely stating facts. "Things are expected of him. Now. The last time you got into trouble, a year ago—"

"Correction, monsieur: the last time you know about."

"C'est juste. On that occasion, war was brewing on the Rhine, and I had a plausible reason to go that way. Finding you, mademoiselle, in a most complex predicament, I endeavoured to assist you."

"By impregnating me?"

"I did that out of passion—as did you, mademoiselle, for our flirtation had been lengthy. And yet it did militate in your favor—perhaps even saved your life. You seduced Étienne d'Arcachon the very next day."

"I let him believe he was seducing me," Eliza demurred.

"Just as I said. Tout le monde knew about it. When you turned up pregnant in the Hague, everyone, including le Roi, and Étienne, assumed that the baby was the spawn of Arcachon; and, when it was born healthy, this made it seem that you were that rarest of specimens: one who could mate with a scion of the de Lavardac line without passing on its well-known hereditary imperfections to the child. I did as much as I could to propagate this myth through other channels."

"Are you referring to how you stole, and decyphered, my journal, and gave it to the King?"

"Wrong on all counts. Monsieur le comte d'Avaux stole it—or would have, if I had not galloped post-haste to the Hague and co-opted him. I did not decypher it so much as produce a fictionalized version of it. And since the King owns me, and all my work, I did not so much give it to his majesty as direct his majesty's attention to it."

"Couldn't you have directed his majesty's attention elsewhere?"

"Mademoiselle. You had been witnessed by many Persons of Quality carrying out what was obviously a spy-mission. D'Avaux and his minions were doing all in their power—and they have much power—to drag your name through the muck. To direct the attention of le Roi elsewhere would have booted you nothing. Rather, I produced for his majesty an account of your actions that was tame compared to the fabrications of d'Avaux; it deflated that man's pretensions while cementing the belief that the baby had been fathered by Étienne de Lavardac d'Arcachon. I was not trying to rehabilitate you—that would have required a miracle—only to mitigate the damage. For I feared that they might send someone to assassinate you, or abduct you, and bring you back to France."

And now he stopped because he had talked himself into a faux pas, and was mortified. "Er…"

"Yes, monsieur?"

"I did not anticipate this."

"Is that why it took you so long to get here?"

"I have already told you that the King's cryptanalyst has responsibilities—none of which, as it turns out, place him in Dunkerque. I came as soon as I could."

"You came as soon as I incited your jealousy by praising Lieutenant Bart in a letter."

"Ah, so you admit it!"

"I admit nothing, monsieur, for he is every bit as remarkable as I made him out to be, and any man in his right mind would be jealous of him."

"It is just so difficult for me to follow," said Rossignol.

"Poor Bon-bon!"

"Please do not be sarcastic. And please do not address me by that ridiculous name."

"What is it, pray tell, that the greatest cryptanalyst in the world cannot follow?"

"At first you described him as a corsair, a boca-neer, who took you by force…"

"Took the ship I was on by force—pray watch your language!"

"Later, when it was to your advantage to make me jealous, he was the most perfect gentle knight of the seas."

"Then I shall explain it, for there is no contradiction. But first take off that cassock and let us make ourselves more comfortable."

"The double entendre is noted," said Rossignol crisply, "but before I become dangerously comfortable, pray tell, what are you doing in the residence of the Marquis and the Marquise d'Ozoir? For that is where we are, to judge from the scutcheon on the gates."

"You have decyphered the coat of arms correctly," said Eliza. "Fear not, the d'Ozoirs are not here now. It is just me, and my servants."

"But I thought you were under arrest on a ship, and had no servants…or did you write those things solely to make me come here the faster?"

Eliza clamped a hand on Rossignol's wrist and dragged him through a door. They had been conversing in a foyer that communicated with the stables. She took him now down a corridor into a little salon, and thence into a larger drawing-room that was illuminated by several great windows facing toward the harbor.

At some point in its history, Dunkerque must have been an apt name for this place. For it literally meant Dune-church, and one could easily see it, some centuries back, as a dune with a church on, below, or near it, and nothing else, save an indifferent creek that reached the sea there, not so much impelled by gravity as blundering into it by accident. This stark dune-church-creek-scape had over ages been complicated, though never obscured, by the huts, houses, docks, and wharves of a modest fishing-and smuggling-port. More recently it had come to be thought of as a strategic asset, and been juggled back and forth between England and France for a while; inevitably Louis XIV had made it his, and begun to aggrandize it into a base navale, which was a little bit like mounting cannons and armor-plates on a fishing-boat. To anyone approaching the place from England, it looked fearsome enough, with a massive stout rubble-wall along the shore for cannonballs to bounce off of, and divers fortifications and batteries set up wherever the sand would bear their weight. But seen from within—which was how Eliza and Monsieur Bonaventure Rossignol were seeing it—the place looked like a perfectly innocent little port-town that had been hurled into a prison, or had had a prison erected around it.