Mazarini frowned.
Richelieu clasped his hands behind his back and turned further. A long blink, then, both eyes closed for a whole breath before they opened, and he leaned forward a little. Earnestly: “I beg of you, Monsignor, not to take what I said as a suggestion that you might betray a confidence. I fancy we are both”—a little quirk of a smile to underline it—”professionals. Not so?”
Mazarini nodded. Richelieu had used the English word—a word that the seventeenth-century English almost certainly did not have and certainly would not understand the way that up-time Americans did. Mazarini felt his very frame lighten in his chair with the speed of his thoughts. The sheer celerity that came when one matched wits with a master—there was no thrill like it. To gamble all-or-nothing on one’s own genius—and with a man who might say so much with the mere choice of a synonym! The mere turn of a clever phrase, a well-parsed statement, these were the common coin of diplomacy. Richelieu was one of a select few in another league altogether.
Richelieu closed his eyes again for another breath. “But I must broach a sensitive subject,” he said, and turned back to look out at the dishwater sky.
Richelieu said nothing for some time, and it was Mazarini who broke the silence. He knew it was a trap, a trick he used himself. To break a silence without disadvantage was a delicate business.
“Sensitive?” he asked.
Richelieu, turning, saw Mazarini’s raised eyebrow and smiled. “Monsignor, you are the man I crossed wits with at Lyons three years ago, not so? Perhaps I might be candid. Sub rosa, and the understanding between us that neither shall bear rancor for what passes here today?”
“Oh, surely.” Mazarini permitted himself a broad smile. “Do any of those who were present at Lyon bear rancor?”
Richelieu’s face missed not a beat, segueing into a worldly, knowing chuckle. “Ah, yes. Two of my dupes. I am sure that neither bear any rancor, where they are now. I feel sure they have more burning concerns.”
Mazarini was impressed by that. Discussing the execution of two men who had been to all appearances his faithful allies, Richelieu actually twinkled. “Perhaps, Cardinal. But you were mentioning candor?”
Rubbing it in to begin with would not hurt. After all, the cardinal had asked specifically that neither party take offense. Mazarini harked back to what Cardinal Maurice of Savoy had told him about Richelieu: He must be made to feel that the decision depends on him alone. And there was little to achieve that better than an initial resistance.
“Candor, yes.” Richelieu’s eyes grew hooded. “I have something quite outlandish to suggest.”
“I am sure, Your Eminence, that this room—” Mazarini waved at a wall at random “—and Servien back there has heard more outlandish propositions these last few weeks. And will again. Does not the delegation from Grantville arrive here in a few weeks?”
Richelieu smiled thinly. “Etienne is behind there,” he said, pointing at the wall opposite that at which Mazarini had waved. “He and his clerk take notes. So much more discreet a man than his cousin at the Ministry of War.”
Mazarini noted that Richelieu had neither confirmed nor denied what the Holy See’s spies claimed to have discovered. “And Your Eminence’s proposition?”
“Do you read English?”
“Very well, of late.”
“Perhaps I might trouble you—” Richelieu opened a cabinet and took out a thick volume fringed with ribbon bookmarks, “—to read the passage I have marked.”
Mazarini frowned at the volume as he took it. It was new, and well made, apparently the work of a Parisian bookbinder. He riffled the pages; they were printed on the smooth and slightly marbled Turk’s-paper that French bibliophiles loved so well. He looked inside the front cover to see that the frontispiece was—his eyebrows shot up. “From 1991?” he asked, looking up at the cardinal.
“Just so. I have had printed copies made and more securely bound.” A slight sneer. “Whatever else the next three hundred years may bring, improvements in bookbinding were not among them. The books we have from Grantville began to fall apart quite quickly. I needed copies to refer to, and to distribute to . . . various persons. Hand-copying would have engaged every stationer and monk in Paris for weeks and the originals were too fragile to pass around. So I ordered them typeset and the illustrations carefully cut by the best engravers I could find.”