“And it would still be crowded with stored objects, like this garret.”

“Is that what you call it?”

“Starving writers live in them.”

“Is that an offer of lodgings, or a threat of starvation?”

“It depends on whether you bring back some apt Narrations from your next sea-voyage,” she said with a smile. She’d come abreast of him now, and took his arm. “Where to next?”

“Boston again.”

They could see down those stairs now. Servants were standing anxiously below, coming in earshot. “And your grace?” Dappa added, distinctly.

“Oh-do you mean, where am I off to next?”

“Yes, my lady. You’ve just returned from Hanover, I gad?”

“Antwerp,” she whispered. “I am here now, Dappa, for-what do you call it-the long haul.”

They descended the stairs-a simple procedure made longer and more complicated than it ought to have been by the helpful strivings of the servants, and of some members of the Duchess’s household. Dappa’s ear, ever tuned to languages, picked out an exchange in German between two young women. They were dressed as if they were merely Gentle. But Dappa thought they carried themselves Nobly.

DAPPA HAD FIRST SEEN ELIZA some twenty years earlier. He’d been eager to hate her. He, Jack, van Hoek, and Vrej Esphahnian had sailed from Vera Cruz on a ship full of gold, bound for London or Amsterdam, and had diverted to Qwghlm only because of Jack’s infatuation with this woman. The letter that had lured them there had turned out to be a trick, a forgery from the hand of the Jesuit father Edouard de Gex, and Minerva had fallen into a trap laid for them there by the French. A kind of justice had been served on Jack. Dappa, van Hoek, and the crew of Minerva had been allowed to sail away, but only after the gold in Minerva’s hold had been seized by the French. They’d been left with nothing more than the thin plates of gold that had been put on the hull, below the water-line, when the ship had been built on a Hindoostan beach. That, and the ship itself. Minerva was a home and an income, but only as long as they continued sailing her to and fro. They had, in other words, been condemned to spend the rest of their lives in dangerous toils and wanderings. This suited van Hoek perfectly. Not so much Dappa.

They did not own Minerva. The owners were, in order of precedence, Queen Kottakkal of Malabar, Electress Sophie of Hanover, van Hoek, Dappa, Jack Shaftoe, and some old comrades of theirs who at last report were dwelling on the isle of Queenah-Kootah, off Borneo. For the most part these investors were far away and had not the faintest idea of how to reach them, which were good investors to have. Even Sophie reigned over a land-locked Electorate. But in time they received a message written in her hand and bearing her seal, letting them know that she was naming Eliza, Duchess of Arcachon and of Qwghlm, as her proxy, and that they should report to her whenever they dropped anchor in the Pool of London, to hand over Sophie’s share of the profits, and to be managed.

Dappa had gone to the first such meeting with dim expectations. He and the others had heard so much of this Duchess’s beauty from Jack, and, at the same time, had learned to harbor such grave reservations as to Jack’s powers of discernment, that he could only expect to be confronted with some one-toothed, poxy hag.

The event was rather different. To begin with, the woman had been all of about thirty-five years old. She had all of her teeth and had come through smallpox with only moderate scarring. So she was, for a start, not loathsome. She had keen blue eyes and yellow hair, which of course looked bizarre to Dappa. But he’d grown used to van Hoek, a red-head, which proved he could adjust to anything. Her small nose and mouth would have been considered beautiful among the Chinese, and in due time he understood that many European men’s tastes ran along similar lines. If her nose and cheeks had not been disfigured by freckles, Dappa might have been able to bring himself round to thinking she was attractive. But she was small-waisted and bony. In every way, Eliza was the opposite of voluptuous. Voluptuous was what Dappa liked, and from the looks of the sculptures and frescoes he observed round London and Amsterdam, his tastes seemed to be shared by many a European man.

The topic of their first meeting had been Accounting. And so even if Dappa had felt the slightest attraction for the woman at the beginning of the day, it would long since have vanished when he stumbled out the door of her town-house twelve hours later. Eliza, it turned out, had a vicious head for numbers, and wanted to know where every farthing had gone since Minerva’s keel had been laid. Considering all they’d been through, her questions had been impertinent. Many a man would have back-handed her across the face, most would have stormed out. But Eliza was representing one of the most powerful persons in Christendom, a woman who could destroy Minerva in so many different ways, that her only difficulty would lay in choice of weapon. Dappa had checked his temper partly because of that, but also partly because he knew in his heart that Minerva ought to keep her books more carefully. They had lost their two members who knew how to keep accounts: Moseh de la Cruz, who had gone to colonize the country north of the Rio Grande, and Vrej Esphahnian, who had given his life revenging himself on the ones who had ensnared them. Since then, the books had become a mess. He’d known for a long time that a settling of accounts would have to come some day and that it would be ugly and painful. It could have come about in worse ways than over a table with this funny-looking young Duchess.

In the years since, they’d met from time to time to settle accounts. She’d learned of his strange habit of collecting and writing down slave-stories (“Why do you spend so much of our money on paper and ink!? What are you doing, throwing it overboard?”) and she had become his publisher (“We can at least endeavour to make your hobby pay its own way.”). Years had gone by. He had wondered how she would age. Unable to think of her as a woman (for to him Queen Kottakkal, six feet tall and three hundred pounds, was a woman), he had made up his mind, after seeing a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in London, that she was a f?ry. What did an old, or even a middle-aged, f?ry-queen look like?

THEY SAT DOWN now in a little upstairs chamber of Leicester House, less formal than a Withdrawing Room, and she fearlessly took a seat facing a window. Moreover, a west-facing window that was admitting red sunset-light. Dappa studied her.

“What do you see?” she asked, studying him back.

“I can no longer see you as anything other than my friend, patroness, and Lady, Eliza,” he answered. “Marks of age, health, experience, and character, which a stranger might phant’sy he perceived in your face, are invisible to me.”

“But what do you really see?”

“I have not looked at enough skinny white women to be an apt judge. But I see that bone structure is a good thing to have, and that you have it; lo, the Creator hung you on an excellent frame.”

She found this curiously amusing. “Have you ever seen an Arcachon, or an honest rendering of one?”

“Only you, my lady.”

“I mean, an hereditary Arcachon. Suffice it to say that they are not hung on good frames, and they well know it. And I owe my position in the world today, not to wit or courage or goodness, but to my being hung on a good frame, and being able to propagate it. And what think you of that, Dappa?”

“If it provides you with a sort of purchase on the sheer cliff that the world is, from which to make use of your abundant wit, courage, and goodness, why, here’s to bone structure!” Dappa returned, raising a teacup high.

She lost a struggle with a smile. Creases flourished around her eyes and mouth, but they did not look bad on her; they looked well earned and fairly won. She raised her own teacup and clinked it against Dappa’s. “Now you really do sound like the Apology of a book,” she said, and sipped.