'That insipid truism can be turned around easily: when it comes so dear, then I demand first-rate intelligence. What did you learn from the two Englishmen, by the way?' William glanced at a dirty spoon and flared his nostrils. A Dutch houseboy, fairer and more beautiful than Eliza, bustled over and began to clear away the gleaming, crusted evidence of a long chocolate binge. The clattering of the cups and spoons seemed to irritate William more than gunfire on a battlefield. He leaned back deep into his armchair, closed his eyes, and turned his face toward the fire. To him the world was a dark close cellar with a net-work of covert channels strung through it, frail and irregular as cobwebs, transmitting faint cyphers of intelligence from time to time, and so a fire broadcasting clear strong radiance all directions was a sort of miracle, a pagan god manifesting itself in a spidery Gothick chapel. Eliza did not speak until the boy was finished and the room had gone quiet again and the folds and creases in the prince's face had softened. He was a couple of years shy of forty, but time spent in sun and spray had given him the skin, and battles had given him the mentality, of an older man.