"Well, of course not!" Lukasz began to throw up his hands with exasperation. Fortunately, he remembered to stop the gesture before he slopped wine all over the floor. And a very fine floor it was, too. Of course, like the floors of all Polish noblemen, be they never so high and exalted, it would be no stranger to spilled liquor.

Still, it would have been a waste of good wine. What was possibly worse, they would have had to summon a servant to clean up the spill. These were difficult subjects to discuss openly under the best of circumstances. Doing so in the presence of a servant's ears would be impossible.

Jozef smiled slightly, then. He could remember a time when he wouldn't have thought twice about discussing anything in the presence of servants. Servants were like furniture. There for a useful purpose, that was all. The fact that the useful purpose might coincidentally happen to be a human being was not something that registered very clearly or very often.

But if there was one thing he'd learned thoroughly since he'd agreed to organize and lead the hetman's spy network in the United States of Europe, it was that servants did indeed have ears. And what was more, they had brains to process the information they heard and pass it on to others.

Others such as Jozef Wojtowicz himself. And the Lord only knew how many spymasters active in the Polish and Lithuanian Commonwealth on behalf of its enemies. They'd certainly have an easy time of it. What the Americans would call a "field day." Between their arrogance and their drunkenness, Polish and Lithuanian szlachta wouldn't even notice the servants moving about them while they babbled whatever they chose to in the "privacy" of their homes.

"And now you're looking very solemn," Lukasz said. "I'd even say, 'glum,' if I didn't know you for the insouciant sprite that you are."

Jozef smiled at him. "I was just thinking-not with any great pleasure, I assure you-that I'll probably find myself organizing my own spy network soon enough. Here at home, so to speak. And how easy it would be, compared to the relative difficulty of operating among the Germans and Americans. Especially the Americans. Who, as naive as they so often are, almost never forget that servants have ears."