As I write this we are descending another long tedious grade into what must be the valley of the Meuse. From here that river flows up through the Ardennes and across the Spanish Netherlands into the territory along the Dutch border where the best regiments of the French Army have long been encamped to menace William’s flank and pin down the Dutch Army.
CRYPTANALYST’S NOTE: At this point the account becomes badly disjointed. The countess blundered into the midst of your majesty’s army and had an adventure, which she did not have the leisure to write down. Later, as she was fleeing north in the direction of Nijmegen, she made a few cryptic notes as to what had happened. These are intermingled with more lengthy espionage reports listing the regiments and officers she observed moving south to join your majesty’s forces along the Rhine. I have been able to reconstruct the Countess’s actions, and thereby to make some sense of her notes, by interviewing several of the persons who saw her in the French camp. The narrative that follows is incomparably more discursive than what appears in her needlework but I believe that it is accurate, and I hope that it will be more informative, and therefore more pleasing, to your majesty than the original. At the same time, I have removed all of the Countess’s tedious lists of battalions, et cetera. - B.R.
I am riding north post-haste and can only jot down a few words during pauses to change horses. The carriage is lost. The driver and Dr. von Pfung are dead. I am traveling with the two cavalrymen from Heidelberg. As I write these words we are in a village beside the Meuse, near Verdun I believe. Now I’m told we must ride again.
It is later, and I think we are near where France, the Duchy of Luxembourg, and the Spanish Netherlands come together. We have had to strike up away from the Meuse and into the forest. Between here and Liege, which lies some hundred miles to the north, the river does not run in a direct line, but makes a lengthy excursion to westward, running for much of the way through French lands. This makes it perfectly suited to serve as a conduit for French military traffic from the north, but bad for us. Instead we shall attempt to traverse the Ardennes (as these woods are called) northwards.
Catching our breath and rubbing our saddle-sores along a riverbank while Hans looks for a ford. Will try to explain as I go along.
When we at last reached the Meuse, three days ago (had to count on my fingers, as it seems nearer three weeks!), we immediately saw the evidence we had been looking for. Thousands of ancient trees felled, valley full of smoke, landing-stages improvised on the riverbank. Vanguards of the regiments from the Dutch front had come upriver, made rendezvous with officers sent out from Versailles, and begun preparations to receive the regiments themselves.
For many hours Dr. von Pfung did not say a word. When he did, only slurred meaningless sounds came from his mouth, and I understood that he had suffered a stroke.
I asked him if he wanted to turn back and he only shook his head no, pointed to me, and then pointed north.
Everything had fallen apart. Until that moment I had presumed that we were operating according to some coherent plan of Dr. von Pfung’s, but now in retrospect I understood that we had been plunging into danger heedlessly, like a man carried into a battlefield by a wild horse. I could not think at all for a while. I am ashamed to report that because of this failure we blundered into the camp of a cavalry regiment. A captain rapped on the door of the carriage and demanded that we explain ourselves.
It was already obvious to them that most of our party were German-speaking, and it would not take long for them to understand that Dr. von Pfung and the others were of the Palatinate; this would mark us as enemy spies and lead to the worst imaginable consequences.
During my long journey up the Marne on the chaland I had had plenty of time to imagine bad outcomes, and had concocted and rehearsed several false stories to tell my captors in the event I should be caught spying. But looking into the face of that captain, I was no more able to tell tales than the stricken Dr. von Pfung. The problem lay in that this operation was on a much vaster scale than either Liselotte or I had imagined, and many more people of Court rank were involved; for all I knew, some Count or Marquis might be nearby, with whom I had dined or danced at Versailles, and who would recognize me the moment I got out of the carriage. To adopt some made-up name and elaborate some tale would amount to confessing that I was a spy.
So I told the truth. “Do not look to this man to make introductions, for he has suffered a stroke, and lost the faculty of speech,” I said to the astonished captain. “I am Eliza, Countess de la Zeur, and I am here in the service of Elisabeth Charlotte, the Duchess of Orleans and rightful inheritor of the Palatinate. It is in her name you are about to invade that land. It is she whom my escorts serve, for they are Court officials of Heidelberg. And it is she who has sent me here, as her personal representative, to look into your operations and ensure that the right thing is done.”
This bit of nonsense, “that the right thing is done,” was a list of dead words I tacked on to the end of the sentence because I did not know what to say, and was losing my nerve. For even when I stood beneath the Emperor’s palace in Vienna, waiting to feel the blade of a Janissary’s scimitar biting into my neck, I had not felt so uncertain as I did there. But I think the very vagueness of my words had a great effect on this captain, for he stepped back from the window and bowed deeply, and proclaimed that he would send word of my arrival to his superiors without delay.
Hans has come back saying he has found a place where we may attempt to ford this river and so I will only narrate that in due course, word of our arrival was passed up the chain of command until it reached a man whose rank at Court was high enough that he could entertain me without violating any rules of precedence. That man turned out to be Etienne d’Arcachon.
They think we are somewhere around Bastogne. Have been unable to do needlework for some while as our day-to-day affairs have pressed in on us sorely. The Ardennes Forest is crowded with Vagabonds and highwaymen (and, some say, witches and goblins) at the best of times. To these have now been added a large number of deserters from the French regiments that are being moved southwards. They jump off the slow-moving barges and wade to the bank and infiltrate the forest. We have had to move carefully and to post watches all night long. I am making these notes on my watch. To sit by a crackling fire would be folly and so I am perched up in the fork of a tree, wrapped up in blankets, sewing by moonlight.
Men who have weathered terrible trials are wont to have dull and useless children to demonstrate their power, as rich Arabs grow their fingernails long. So with the duc d’Arcachon and his only legitimate son, Etienne. The Duke survived the bad dream of the Fronde Rebellion and built a navy for the King. Etienne has chosen a career in the Army; this is his notion of youthful rebellion.
It is said of some men that “he would cut off his right arm before doing thus-and-such.” Of Etienne, it used to be said that he would sacrifice a limb before violating the smallest rule of etiquette. But now people say, rather, that he actually did cut off his right arm out of politeness, for several years ago something happened at a party to that general effect-accounts vary, for I get the impression it was in some way disgraceful to his family. At any rate the details are unknown to me, but the tale rings true. He has become a great patron of woodcarvers and silversmiths, whom he pays to make artificial hands for him. Some of them are shockingly lifelike. The hand he extended to help me down out of the carriage was carved of ivory with fingernails fashioned from mother-of-pearl. When we dined on roast grouse in his quarters, he had switched to a hand of carven ebony, permanently gripping a serrated knife, which he used to cut his meat, though it looked as if it would have made an excellent weapon, too! And after dinner, when he undertook to seduce me, he wore a special hand carved out of jade, with an extremely oversized middle finger. That digit was, in fact, a perfect reproduction of a man’s erect phallus. As such it was nothing I had not already seen in various private “art” collections in and around Versailles, for lords, and even ladies, love to have such things in their private chambers, as proof of their sophistication, and many of their rooms are veritable Shrines to the god Priapus. But I was caught unawares by a hidden feature of this hand: it must have been hollow, and stuffed with clockwork, for when Etienne d’Arcachon tripped a hidden lever, it suddenly came alive, and began to hum and buzz like a hornet in a bottle. Inside, it seemed, was a coil spring that had been tightly wound in advance.