The Confusion

Leipzig
MAY 1694

And why then are we to despise Commerce as a Mechanism, and the Trading World as mean, when the Wealth of the World is deem’d to arise from Trade?

–DANIEL DEFOE,

A Plan of the English Commerce

PRINCESS WILHELMINA CAROLINE of Brandenburg-Ansbach wrinkled her nose, and flipped her braid back over her shoulder. “ ‘Tumescent love slave’-is this some sort of French idiom? I can’t make heads or tails of it.”

“Noise! It is an idiocy that Captain Bart threw in at the end, for he knew that he had to wind up the letter, but could not make out how, and became desperate, and lost his wits. Thank God he is more even-tempered in battle! Pray don’t dwell on that, my lady-”

“Why do you call me that? It’s weird. Stop it!”

“You are a born Princess, and very likely to be a Queen some day. I am a made Duchess.”

“But to me you are Aunt Eliza!”

“And to me you are my little squirrel. But the fact remains that you’re doomed to be a Princess whether you like it or not, and you’re going to have to marry someone.”

“As happened to my mother,” said Caroline, suddenly serious.

“Please do not forget that it happened twice. The second time around, she had to marry someone who was not suited for her. But the first time she was in a good marriage-to your father-and a perfectly wonderful Princess came of it.”

Caroline blushed at this, and looked at the floor of the carriage. A whip-pop sounded from outside, and it lurched forward. They’d been stalled, for a time, outside the north gate of Leipzig. Caroline’s eyes came up off the floor and gleamed in the light of the window. Eliza continued: “Why did your mother later end up in a bad marriage? Because things had gone against her-things she was powerless to do anything about, for the most part-and in the end she had very little choice in the matter. Now, why do you suppose I’m letting you read my personal correspondence from Captain Bart? To pass the time on the road to Leipzig? No, for if we only wished to make time pass, we could play cards. I show you these things because I am trying to teach you something.”

“What, exactly?”

It was a good question, and brought Eliza up short. For a few moments there was no sound in the carriage except what came into it from without: the clopping of shod hooves, the crashing of rims on road, the oinking and grunting of the suspension. A shadow enveloped them, then fell away aft: They’d passed through the gate into Leipzig.

“Pay attention, that’s all,” Eliza said. “Notice things. Connect what you’ve noticed. Connect it into a picture. Think of how the picture might be changed; and act to change it. Some of your acts may turn out to have been foolish, but others will reward you in surprising ways; and in the meantime, simply by being active instead of passive, you have a kind of immunity that’s hard to explain-”

“Uncle Gottfried says, ‘Whatever acts cannot be destroyed.’ ”

“The Doctor means that in a fairly narrow and technical metaphysical sense,” Eliza said, “but it’s not the worst motto you could adopt.”

And now for the tenth time in as many minutes Eliza reached up to scratch and probe at her face. In half a dozen places, small disks of black felt had been glued to it, covering crater-like excavations that smallpox had made in her flesh, but not had the good grace to fill back in before it had departed her body.

Most of what she knew about the progress of the disease, she knew second-hand, from Eleanor and the physician who had come to tend to her. Eliza herself had descended into a sort of twilight sleep. Her eyes had been open, and impressions had reached her mind, but the span of time she had spent in this trance-about a week-seemed both very long and very brief. Very brief because she remembered little of it-it was “when I had smallpox” to her now. Very long because, during it, she had heard every tick of the clock, and felt the budding of every pox-pustule, its growth as it peeled layers of skin asunder a slow steady agony that sparked whenever two pustules found each other and fused. In some places-particularly her lower back-those sparks had built to a wide-spread fire. Though Eliza had been too delirious to know it, these had been the moments when her life had hung in the balance, for if that fire had spread any further or burnt any brighter, her skin would have come off, and she’d not have survived it.

It was at such times that a physician would emerge to tell a room of hand-wringing loved ones that the case was very grave, and that the patient’s life hung in the balance. Had it gone any further, the report would have changed to “not expected to survive,” and everyone would have known, from this, that the disease had moved on to its sausage-grinder phase. In Eliza’s case this had not happened. Fate had flipped a coin, and it had come up heads. The disease had nearly flayed her lower back and some parts of her arms and legs, and done damage internally, too. But it had spared her eyesight and left perhaps three dozen pocks on her face, of which most could be seen only in direct sun; of the ten or so that were obvious even by candlelight, some could be hid by a lock of hair or a high-collared dress, and the remainder got the black patch treatment. Eliza did not seriously intend to begin every day for the rest of her life by gluing these horrid objects to her skin, but today was special; she was venturing out of the dower-house of Pretzsch for the first time since she had arrived there six weeks earlier. She was going into Leipzig-which passed for a big city in these parts-and she was going to meet some people.

Of the six weeks at the dower-house, the first had been spent in (in retrospect) the prodrome of the illness, and culminated with the sending away of Caroline and Adelaide and the visit of the Elector and his mistress. After that it had been all pustules for two weeks. Eliza had not really come awake and begun to weave her impressions into coherent memories again until the twenty-fourth day; which happened to be the same day that the distant church-bells of Torgau and Wittenberg had begun to toll, announcing the deaths of the Elector of Saxony and his mistress. Eleanor was a widow for the second time. She was henceforth the Electress-Dowager of Saxony. Which meant she was living in the right house for once: The dower-house was where a dowager was supposed to live. The new Elector was Johann Georg’s brother, August. August the Strong. He already had a hundred illegitimate children and was said to be hard at work on the second hundred, and his passion for engaging wild beasts in single combat would do nothing to improve Saxony’s reputation at Versailles; but he had not been hit on the head, he bore no ill will toward Eleanor, and he didn’t want to screw Caroline, so it looked like a win.

Eleanor had been called away to Dresden to attend her husband’s funeral. And after Eliza’s mattress and bedclothes had been immolated in a great bonfire down by the Elbe, and the scabs had fallen away to reveal her new face and body, Caroline and Adelaide had at last returned from Leipzig along with most of Eliza’s retinue. So much for the fourth week; weeks five and six, then, had been time for Eliza to get her strength back. She had an idea that the pox had done to her entrails the same sort of things as it had done to her back, and so there had been problems for a while with eating, digestion, and elimination. Even if she’d bounced back like a rubber ball, there’d have been a delay while new garments were sewn for her, in smaller dimensions to fit her wasted frame, and with collars, sleeves, amp;c., to cover heavily cratered parts of her body. But the day before yesterday she’d noticed, all of a sudden, that she was bored. Yesterday had been devoted to the laying of plans. This morning she’d departed from the dower-house in a little train of borrowed and rented carriages. On the spur of the moment she’d decided to bring Caroline along with her (for Eleanor was busy organizing a Dowager-household), and little Adelaide, too (for she became obstreperous now if she did not have her Caroline to play with).

“WHAT IS THIS VENTURE of yours that Captain Bart speaks of in his letter?” Caroline asked her.

“Ay! That’s difficult to explain!” Eliza said. “But I do not have to explain it, for you to get the point-which is that Captain Bart, ordinarily the most decisive, the most ruthless man on earth, cannot make up his mind whether to take his cargo to Dieppe or Le Havre, and feels obliged to send me a letter in Leipzig before acting. If I sat at home knitting and playing cards, he would feel no such compulsion, believe you me; but because I’m on the move, I am an unknown variable in the equation-”

“Which makes it more difficult for him to solve!” Caroline said. “Uncle Gottfried has been teaching me how to solve such problems using a thing he invented called matrices.”

“Then you know more of it than I,” said Eliza, not for the first time feeling a bit envious of this girl. “And you may show off your skills to your teacher now.”

“Uncle Gottfried is here?”

The carriage had rolled to a stop. Eliza opened the door herself and allowed a footman to help her down. Caroline leapt out a moment later, landing bang on both feet, followed, after brief intervals, by her skirts and her braid.

They were in a square before a church from whose open doors organ-music was chanting. Not far away was the town square of Leipzig with its great dark Rathaus along one side, and narrow streets radiating from it, lined with trading-houses. Eliza was slowly turning round and round, taking the place in. But the look on her face was not of wonder but rather distracted, even a bit suspicious. “It is so small,” she said.

“If you’d been living in Pretzsch it would seem ever so large!”

“Oh, but when we came here last-ten years ago, almost to the day-we’d been living in a shack in the mountains and it did seem large!”

“Who is this ‘we?’ ”

“Never mind…but it is funny how one’s mind works. I have built up a phant’sy of this as a great metropolis, whose trading-houses are immensely rich and powerful, but look at it…there are merchants in London, in Amsterdam, who could buy this whole town and slip it into a vest-pocket.”

“Perhaps you should buy it then!” Caroline said, as a jest.

“Perhaps I already have.” Eliza paused, blinked, and let out a breath, as if purging herself of all old memories and overblown phant’sies, then peered around sharply. “I have affairs to transact, and must leave you, for a few hours. Come!” She led Caroline through the doors of the church. It was empty just now. The organ-music was just someone practicing-someone not very accomplished, for he kept making mistakes, and each time he did, he came to a stop, and struggled to find the rhythm.

This place-the Nikolaikirche-lacked the dark, spooky look of so many churches. The vault was a semicircular barrel supported by fluted columns-but not of the Doric, Ionian, Corinthian, or any other known order of architecture. For the capitals were made to resemble sheaves of slender vertical palm leaves. The high vaults above, sluiced with clear white light rushing in through high windows, gathered themselves together and plunged down into these rich bundles of light green leaves, from which clusters of fruit peeked out. The altar rail described a broad half-circle with a gap in the center, like a pair of arms sweeping out to embrace the congregants. The font was a gilded goblet. Behind it, steps led up to an altar, above which a quicksilver Jesus hung from a plank. This part of the church-the Altarraum-was a sanctum of polished wine-colored and fleece-gray marble with many windows, giving a view of budding linden trees startled by pockets of breeze speeding invisibly through a blue heaven. The patterns in the marble suggested powerful turbulent motion-rapids, say, or lightning streaking through boiling clouds-arrested and silenced. Recalling the notion that if you knew the position and velocity of every particle in the universe at one moment of time, you’d know all-you’d be God. At the back of the church was a balcony claimed by a great organ of silver pipes in a white case in Roman style, lilies and palm leaves rampant. Hunched doggedly at the console was a man in a great periwig and a coat brocaded with hundreds of wee flowers. An elderly man in academician’s robes loitered nearby, gazing down curiously at Eliza, Caroline, and other members of the entourage who were now straggling up the aisle; for Adelaide had been woken out of a nap by the stoppage of her coach, and had pursued her mother, and been pursued in turn by nurses, and by Eliza’s guards, who were under orders not to let Adelaide out of their sight so long as they were on the hostile ground of Leipzig. The organist noticed all this, and raised his hands from the manuals, and the throaty singing of the organ-pipes seeped away, leaving in the still air of the church only the faint hiss of some leakage in the valves, and panting of a couple of pudgy schoolboys who’d been dragooned into pumping the bellows. Eliza applauded, and after a moment Caroline, recognizing the organist, followed suit.

“My lady. My lady,” said Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz to Caroline and Eliza respectively; and then, to Adelaide: “My lady.” Then, to Eliza: “I am sorry that your arrival in the Nikolaikirche, which ought to have been a moment of Grace and Beauty unalloyed, was dimmed by my maunderings.”

“On the contrary, Doctor, the town is so quiet, your music brings life to it. Was that some new Passacaglia from Herr Buxtehude?”

“Just so, my lady. ’Twas brought hither in the pocket of a merchant of Lubeck, who means to have it printed and sold at the fair, a fortnight hence; I fetched one of the page-proofs and prevailed upon my old schoolmaster, Herr Schmidt-” the old man in the robes bowed “-to let me pick it out as I awaited your arrival.”

Leibniz descended a stair to the floor of the church, and a lengthy round of bowing, curtseying, hand-smooching, and baby-adoration ensued. Leibniz’s eyes lingered on Eliza’s face, but not quite long enough to be offensive. It was to be expected that he’d be curious as to what the pox had done to her, and Eliza was content to have him look. He would return presently to such places as Hanover and Berlin, and propagate the news that the Duchess of Arcachon and of Qwghlm had come through it with only light disfigurement; that she could still see; and that her wits were intact.

“I was recalling my first visit to this town-and my first meeting with you-ten years ago, Doctor,” Eliza said.

“As was I, my lady. But so many things are different now, of course. You mentioned that the town is quiet. Indeed. You will have speculated it is because the spring fair has not begun yet. That is what I supposed, when I arrived, some weeks ago. But since then I have learned that it is quiet for more reasons than meet the eye. Trade has all but stopped-”

“Owing to a mysterious, dire want of specie,” Eliza said, “which is both cause and effect; for all who hear of it are transformed, as if by a magician’s spell, into misers, and hoard whatever coin, plate, or bullion they have.”

“You are familiar with the affliction, I perceive,” Leibniz said drily. “So is our friend Dr. Waterhouse; for he tells me that the same plague has spread to London.”

“Some would say it originated there,” Eliza said.

“Others say Lyon,” tried the Doctor, and watched Eliza’s face a bit too sharply.

“Now you are fishing,” said Eliza. Leibniz was pulled up short, but only for a moment; then he chuckled.

“Fishing for what? Is that another idiom?” Caroline demanded.

“He dangles bait before me, to see if I shall rise to it; for some trading-houses in this town have connexions of long standing to the Depot of Lyon, and if Lyon is bankrupt, why, it has consequences here. Do you have friends in Leipzig, Doctor, hungry for news?”

“I should not call them friends exactly; not any more.”

“Well, I have enemies here. Enemies, and a boy who has not seen his mother in three years and seven months. I must make preparations to meet them. If you would be so good as to entertain the Princess for me, for a few hours-”

“No.”

“What?”

“You are in error. Come with me.” And Leibniz turned his back on Eliza, which was an arrestingly rude thing to do, and walked down the aisle and out of the Nikolaikirche into Leipzig. This left her no choice but to pursue him. Caroline pursued Eliza, and the rest of the train was drawn out behind them. Eliza turned back and with a significant look or two commanded the nurses to bundle Adelaide back into one of the carriages; she screamed at this, loud enough to draw looks from hookah-puffing Turkish merchants half a mile away.

“You are very rude. What is the meaning of this?”

“Life is short,” said Leibniz, and looked Eliza up and down. It was a blunt allusion to smallpox. “I can stand in the aisle of the Nikolaikirche for two hours and try to get it across to you in words, and at the end of it you’ll only say, ‘I must see it with my own eyes.’ Or I can take you on a five-minute walk and see the thing settled.”

“Where are we going? Caroline-”

“Let her come along.”

They walked across Leipzig’s town square, which, the last time Eliza had seen it, had been a maze of leads and gaps among fragrant stacks of baled, barrelled, and trade-marked goods. Today it was all but empty, and sheets of dust skimmed across its paving-stones driven by spring gusts. Here and there, well-dressed men had clumped in twos and threes to smoke pipes and converse-not in the amused, aghast tones of merchants haggling over terms, but more as old men do on Sunday afternoons as they stroll out of church. As Eliza and Caroline followed the Doctor into the streets that issued from the square on the yonder side, they began to see business transacted, of a kind-but only at open-air coffee-houses, and nothing more weighty than a third cup of coffee, or a second slice of cake. The street was ventilated with broad vaulted arches, each of which, as Eliza knew, led into the courtyard of a trading-house. But half of them were closed, and in those that were open, Eliza spied, not throngs of hollering commercants but unraveling knots of semi-idle men, smoking and sipping. For all that, though, the scene was never gloomy. It felt as though a holiday had been declared, not only for Christians, or Jews, or Mahometans, but for all at once. And this holiday was all the more enjoyable for being unwanted and unplanned. Leipzig was calm-as if the quicksilver that, as a rule, intoxicated these merchants were ebbing from their bloodstreams. When they all came together in a place like Leipzig, a madness came over them, and transformed them into a new kind of organism, as fish schooled. One such jumping, irritable, rapier-quick creature, if he were to appear in the town square of a medieval village, would be a useless, incomprehensible nuisance. But a thousand of them together amounted to something that worked, and that wrought prodigies that could never be imagined by villagers. That spell had been undone today, and the quiet of the village reigned.

A golden Mercury leapt from the keystone of an especially grand arch halfway up the street. The gates below it were closed. But they were not locked. The Doctor pushed one of them open, and extended an arm, inviting Eliza to precede him. She hesitated and looked both ways. This was a habit from Versailles, where merely to step over a threshold in the company of a person constituted a Move in the social chess-game, sure to be noted, talked of, and responded to; indeed people there might devote hours to engineering the details: seeing to it that certain persons were in positions to notice the event, and encoding messages in who preceded whom. Here it was faintly ridiculous, and she knew it; but the habit died hard. She looked, and acquired the knowledge that her entry into the House of the Golden Mercury was witnessed by half a dozen persons: an idler collapsed in a doorway, a Lutheran minister, a widow sweeping a stoop, a boy running a message, a Jew in a furry hat, and a very large bearded man with one sleeve empty and the opposite hand gripping a long staff.

This latter she recognized. From time to time, during the long barge-ride up the Elbe, she’d glimpsed such a figure striding along the riverbank, or betimes wading like a three-hundred-pound stork, darting at the water with a fish-spear. Here, he almost blended in. For Leipzig was the crossroads of the Venice-Lubeck and the Cologne-Kiev highways, and served as a catch-pot for all sorts of exotic ramblers, human oddities, and people who could not make up their minds which turn to take. She marked him only because she had seen him before. And in other circumstances she would have devoted the remainder of the week to puzzling over what he was doing here; but too much else was on her mind now, and this crowded Flail-arm out of her consciousness. She walked into the court of the House of the Golden Mercury as if she owned the place.

It was like a graveyard, save that instead of cenotaphs and head-stones, it was cluttered with stacks and piles of goods: bales of cloth, barrels of oil, crates of china. She could not see far in any direction; but craning her neck she could see up five stories to the big cargo-doors let into the gables of the House. These were a-gape, swinging untended in the breeze. Within, the attics of the House of Hacklheber were empty. Their contents had all been let down into the courtyard, as if Lothar had decided to liquidate all. But there were no buyers.

Something plopped to the ground behind Eliza, and she heard Caroline give out a little gasp of surprise. Eliza spun on her heel and confronted a tiny savage-a pygmy with a tomahawk. He’d been stalking her through the courtyard, creeping along behind the piles of goods. He had sprung from the lid of a crate taller than his head to menace her in a narrow pass. But now he was having second thoughts, for he had trapped himself between Eliza and Caroline. He turned around to look at the latter. Gazing now at the back of his head Eliza saw a whorl of blond hair that needed washing, a precipitous cowlick that needed trimming, a small body, just stretching out through its sheath of baby fat, that needed a bath. He was dressed in a breech-clout and moccasins, and carrying a weapon made from a terra-cotta pot-sherd that some grownup had patiently lashed to a stick.

Caroline had got over being startled and was trying to pick between amusement and annoyance. “Boo!” she shouted. The little blond Indian spun around as if to run away, but remembered too late that his escape was blocked by Eliza. His eye met hers for a moment, and she recognized it as an eye that belonged to her. He dropped the tomahawk, the better to scramble over a netted pallet of sugar-loaves, and before she could call his name, he had vanished into a pretend Massachusetts.

Caroline laughed, until she met Eliza’s eye, and took in her face; then she knew.

The court was surrounded by a covered gallery, where, when Eliza had last been here, men of the House of Hacklheber had sat at their bancas writing in their ledgers, and counting streams of outlandish coinage in and out of their massy strong-boxes. Eliza could see little of it now, save the tops of the arches; but a few moments later she heard a piping voice in German, making something known to “Papa,” and a moment later, a rumble of a laugh, followed by some patient explanation.

Hearing that voice, Eliza by some instinct turned and gazed up at a three-storey balcony that projected out into the space above the court, all decked out with golden Mercurys and other Barock commerce-emblems. She had once seen Lothar up there, talking to the Doctor, and staring down at her and Jack; but the thing was deserted now, a still-life of dusty windowpanes, faded curtains, and moss-slicked stone.

The man had begun to declaim in a loping singsong. Eliza knew little German. She looked to Caroline, who explained, “He reads from a book of tales.”

Eliza picked her way among the dusty goods, following the sound of that voice, until she stepped up onto the stone floor of the encircling gallery. This had been cleared of many of its bancas. Several paces away, a massive man squatted upon a black strong-box, all bound about with straps and hasps; but none of them was locked, which she looked on as suggesting it might be empty. The man had a great illustrated story-book open on one of his thighs. Perched on the other was the little blond Indian, who had leaned his head back on the man’s bosom, and drawn up a corner of his breechclout to chew on it. His spindly legs straddled the man’s leg. The moccasins pedaled slow air. He had got a falling look in his eyes, and the lids were unfolding. He glanced up at Eliza when she stepped into his field of view, but presently lost interest, and looked to his dreams. To him the appearance of the strange woman in the court of the house had been diverting, but only for a moment, and alarming, but only until “Papa” told him everything was going to be fine. “Papa,” who was Lothar von Hacklheber, kept reading the story-not, Eliza, thought, out of any studied effort to ignore her, but because no parent who knows the rules of the game interrupts a story just when a child has tucked his wings and settled into the long glide to sleep. A pair of gold-rimmed half-glasses perched on Lothar’s cratered nose, and when he reached the end of a page he would lick a finger, turn a page, and glance up at her with mild curiosity. The boy’s lids drooped lower and lower, more and more of the breechclout made its way into his mouth to be sucked on-a sight that produced an ache in Eliza’s breasts as they remembered what it was to let down milk. Presently Lothar shut the book, and glanced around for a place to set it-a gesture that brought Caroline running up to take it from his hand. Tightening a burly arm around the boy’s chest, he leaned back, making of his body a sort of great pillowy couch, and somehow levitated to his feet. He turned his back on the visitors and padded on bare feet through a doorway, then laid the boy into a sort of makeshift Indian-hammock that had been strung diagonally across a disused office. After spreading some blankets over the child, he straightened up, emerged into the gallery, and pulled the door to behind him-leaving it cracked, as Eliza the mother well knew, so that he could hear if the boy cried.

“I had got the news that the Elector and his whore had died,” said Lothar mildly, in French, “and wondered if a visit from the Reaper might not be in store for me as well.”

Atop a bench on the edge of the court rested an array of weapons, dis-arranged, as if he and the boy had been at fencing-practice. Lothar scooped up a sheathed dagger, and in the same movement tossed it towards Eliza, who clapped it out of the air. “That hashishin stiletto that you have secreted in the sash of your dress is too small to dispatch one of my size with decent speed; pray use this instead.” He was wearing a linen shirt that had not been changed in a while; now he ripped it open to expose his left nipple. “Right about there ought to do it. You may send the Princess of Brandenburg-Ansbach out first, if you would ward her tender eyes from so grisly a sight; or, if it’s your purpose to raise her up to be another such as yourself, by all means let her watch and learn.”

“Until this moment I had believed that the art of the masque had been developed to its highest in the Court of the Sun King,” said Eliza in a quiet voice, so as not to wake the boy. “But now I see you know as much of it as anyone. What sort of mind invents a show like the one I have just witnessed?”

“What sort of mind,” answered Lothar, “invades the tranquillity of a man’s home and then denounces it as a show? This is the world, madame, it is not Versailles; we are not so devious, so recondite here.”

Eliza tossed the dagger on to the floor. “You who kidnapped a baby, should not presume to deliver catechism to its mother.”

“When an orphan, being raised by strangers, is brought to live with a family who loves it, does this even deserve the name of kidnapping? It seems rather like kidnapping’s opposite. If you now announce that you are its mother, then I am disposed to believe you, for there is a marked resemblance; but this is the first time you have admitted it.”

“You know perfectly well that to admit it then would have destroyed me.”

Lothar turned to face his courtyard, and raised both hands. “Behold!”

“Behold what?”

“You speak of being destroyed as an abstraction, a thing you have read about, a phantom you fear as you lie in bed at night. Do not be satisfied with abstractions and phantoms, madame. Instead look upon destruction, for it is here. You have wrought it. You have destroyed me. But I have a boy who calls me Papa. If you had admitted to being his mother, and suffered destruction, what would your estate be to-day? And would it be better or worse than what you have?”

Eliza flushed at this: and not just her face but her whole body. It felt as though warm blood was washing into parts of her body that had been starved and pallid since the pox. She would have faltered, and perhaps even surrendered, if she’d not spent years steeling herself for this. Because the words of Lothar carried in them much that was true. But she had always known he would be formidable and that she’d have to bull ahead anyway. “You need not be destroyed,” she said. “With a word, I can see to it that the loan is repaid, with interest.”

“Stop, I pray you. Do you suppose my mind is as empty as this?” He kicked the strong-box with the side of his foot and it boomed like a drum. “I know that you would never have come to Leipzig had you not so arranged matters that you could hold out to me the choice of destruction or salvation. It is all very ingenious, I am sure, the sort of thing I’d have found fascinating at your age; but I am not your age.”

“Of course I am well aware that you have moved beyond money, to Alchemy-”

“Oh, you are? And I suppose you have some morsel to dangle above my mouth, where the Solomonic Gold is concerned?”

Having been anticipated thus made Eliza disinclined to say it, but she did: “I know who has it, and where; if that is your desire-”

“My desire was to conquer Death, which took my brothers young and unfairly,” said Lothar von Hacklheber. “It is a common desire. Most come to terms with Death sooner or later. My failure to do so was an unintended consequence of a pact that my family had made with Enoch Root. In order for him to dwell among humankind he must don identities, and later, before his longevity draws notice, shed them. My father knew about Enoch-knew a little of what he was-and struck a deal with him: he would vouch for Enoch as a long-lost relative named Egon von Hacklheber, and suffer him to dwell among us under that name for a period of some decades, if, in exchange, ‘Egon’ would serve as a tutor to his three sons. Of the three, I was in some sense the quickest, for I came to know that Enoch was not like us. And I guessed that this was a matter of his having discovered some Alchemical receipt that conferred life eternal. A reasonable guess-but wrong. At any rate, it fired my interest in Alchemy until of late.”

“And what came of late to damp that fire?”

“I adopted an orphan.”

“Oh.”

“It is trite, I know. To defeat Death, or to phant’sy that one has defeated it, by having a child. But I could not manage it before. For the same pox that slew my brothers left me unable to get a woman pregnant. I’ll not speak of the motives that led to the taking of the boy from the orphanage where you kept him at Versailles. They were, as you have collected, quite beastly motives. I did not intend to love the boy. I did not even intend to keep him in my house. But as things came out, I did both-first kept him, then loved him-and as time went on, my mind turned to Alchemy, and to the lost Gold of Solomon, less and less frequently. I’d not thought of it for half a year until you reminded me of it just now.”

“Then whatever other differences you and I may have, we are united in seeing it as foolishness.”

“Oh, I don’t think it is the least bit foolish,” said Lothar, raising the pocked ridges where eyebrows had once sprouted, “all I said was that I no longer think of it. I’m ready to die. And whether I die rich or poor is of little account to me. But you are gravely mistaken if you believe that you can take Johann away from me. For that truly would be kidnapping; it would break his heart, and that would break yours.”

“As to that, I am not mistaken. I know this, and have known it, ever since I learned, from the Doctor, that he was being raised as your son.” Eliza looked up to solicit a confirmation from Leibniz. But it seemed that the Doctor had some minutes ago quietly taken Caroline aside, and led her off to some other corner of the courtyard so that Eliza and Lothar could talk privily.

“Son and sole heir,” Lothar corrected her, “though, thanks to your intrigues, I have nothing to will to him save debts.”

“That could be changed.”

“Then why do you not change it? What is it you want? Why are you here?”

“To see him. To hold him.”

“Granted! Truly and happily granted. You may move in with me here, for all I care; you’re welcome to do so. But you can’t take him.”

“You are in no position to dictate terms.”

“Foolish girl! They’re not my terms, and I am not dictating them! They are the terms of the world. You cannot admit to this world that you bore a child out of wedlock. You cannot even admit it to the boy-until he is older, perhaps, and able to fathom such things. You can take him back and give him to the Jesuits, who will raise him up to be a priest, who will fault his mother for having sinned. Or you can leave him in my care, and visit him whenever you will. In a year or two he’ll be old enough to travel-he can visit you incognito in France, if that shall please you. He shall be a Baron and a banker, a gentleman, a Protestant, the cleverest scholar in Leipzig; but he shall never be yours.”

“I know. I know all of these things-have known them for years.”

Lothar’s ravaged face was a difficult one to read, but he seemed exasperated now, or bewildered. “After all this,” he said, “I did not expect you to be such a confused person.”

“You did not? How unreasonable of you. You belabor me for being confused-yet you took the boy, not for love of him, but for hate of me, and out of lust for Alchemical gold-only to change your mind!”

Lothar shrugged. “Perhaps that is the real Alchemy.”

“Would that such Alchemy could work its spell on me, and make me as content as you seem.”

“I shall grant you this much,” said Lothar. “The taking of the gold at Bonanza put me into a vengeful rage that kept me awake at night, and filled all of my days, for a long time, and drove me to hurt you as badly as I supposed you had hurt me. I wanted you to fathom my anger. You then went on to destroy me, cleverly and systematically, over a span of years. You used my own greed as a weapon against me. And if I seem content to you, why, in part it is because I have a son. But in part it is because of you, Eliza, your Barock fury, sustained for so long and expressed so Barockly. You showed, you expressed, what I once felt; and from that, I knew that I had struck home, that a spark had passed between us.”

“Very well. Enough of this. Do you have, Lothar, a spare banca at which I could sit down for some minutes, and write a letter?”

Lothar spread his hands out, palms up, as if handing the place over to her. “Take your pick, madame.”

SHE WOULDN’T HAVE NOTICED FLAIL-ARM if not for this gesture of Lothar’s, so stealthily had the big amputee crept into the House. But as it happened, she turned on the balls of her feet to gaze into the court, and saw in the corner of her eye that a new thing had been added to the jumble-sale: a tall man with a beard, who had chosen this moment to step out from behind a crate. As before, he held a long walking-staff; but now something had been added to its end: the leaf-shaped warhead of a harpoon, its twin edges white where the whetstone had scoured them. This he hefted in his one hand, bringing it up above his shoulder, and he swung the shining adder’s head about so that it pointed at the heart of Lothar.

Now Eliza-who only a couple of hours ago had been preaching to Caroline about the importance of noticing, and connecting-at last took her own advice. There was no telling how long it might have taken for her to recognize Flail-arm as Yevgeny the Raskolnik if he had not suddenly appeared gripping a harpoon, and making ready to kill Lothar; but these two data did the trick. She remembered now seeing this Yevgeny in the company of Jack in Amsterdam. Eliza had even borrowed his harpoon, and in a fit of pique hurled it at Jack. Yevgeny must have become, and might still be, a member of Jack’s pirate-band. He must have peeled off from the group and come back to Christendom for some reason. He’d been keeping an eye on Eliza, and, in consequence, had found himself in Leipzig, before the gates of the house of the man who, as he supposed, was Jack’s worst enemy. And now he was about three heartbeats away from doing what any red-blooded pirate would, when presented with such an opportunity.

This hefting and pointing of the harpoon was only the first move in some procedure that involved running some steps toward the prey. Yevgeny also extended his stump, which he had fortified with what appeared to be a cannonball on the end of a stick: a counterweight to augment the force of the throw. Eliza began moving sideways toward Lothar. She would interpose herself between harpoon and target, and Yevgeny would break off the attack. Yevgeny’s blue eyes flicked towards her as she moved.

But a small person flitted out of the shades of the gallery. He had built up a running start and so was able to bound up and over the empty strong-box next to Lothar and thence to the top of the baluster that surrounded the courtyard. He already had an arrow nocked to his tiny bow, for as Yevgeny had stolen around the courtyard, getting into position to attack, Johann must have stalked him, and plotted intercepts, and looked for his opportunity. Eliza, seeing him flash across her vision, had already changed course, and flung out both arms toward the boy; but quick as a fingersnap he drew back his arrow and let it fly. Its blunted tip caught Yevgeny in the eye just as he was winding up to throw. The counterweight dropped like Thor’s hammer. His body convulsed forward. The arm cracked like a knout. The harpoon was launched. It hurtled past Lothar’s shoulder and crashed into the banca behind him. Lothar dropped onto his arse. Eliza, unable to stop herself, ran into Johann and hammered him off the railing; he tumbled into the dusty cobbles below and became one large abrasion. Yevgeny had ended up on his knees, staring forward. Eliza assaulted the baluster with her midsection and toppled over it, diving to the courtyard and catching her weight on her hands.

She, Johann, and Yevgeny now formed an equilateral triangle, maybe two yards on a side, in the court. Lothar, enthroned on his empty coffer, gazed down upon them in stupefaction. Yevgeny was no less dumbfounded. Johann was still winding up to bawl. Eliza, having just narrowly evaded death by smallpox, was the least taken aback, and the first to get up. She took a step toward Yevgeny. She didn’t know Russian, and assumed he knew little French. But if he’d been a galley-slave in Algiers, he must know Sabir; so she scraped up a few leavings of that tongue that were to be found in rarely-visited corners of her brain, and said to him-quietly, so that only he could hear-“If your loyalty is to Jack, then know that this man is no longer your enemy. Instead go to Versailles and throw some harpoons at Father Edouard de Gex.”

Yevgeny nodded once, clambered to his feet, and went up to the level of the gallery to extract the tool of his trade from the tool of Lothar’s. Because of the head’s barbed flukes, this was not to be accomplished without half-destroying the banca; a task for which Yevgeny was superbly equipped in that he had the strength of ten men, and in lieu of one hand, a cannonball. A city-sacking’s worth of splintering and shattering was packed into a brief span of time; then he popped up with the terrible head in his hand, and the shaft under one arm. He turned toward Lothar and favored him with a very civil nod and half-bow, then stalked out of the House of the Golden Mercury, glancing up once to get the sun’s bearing.

“Who was that!?” asked Leibniz. He and Caroline had been oblivious to the harpoon-attack but had been drawn to the banca-demolition.

Eliza had Johann on her hip; he had got through all of the bawling and gone into child-shock.

“My dear Doctor,” she answered, “if I explained every little thing to you, you’d grow bored with me, and stop writing me those charming letters.”

“I simply wish to know, for practical reasons, whether you are being stalked by any more giant murderous harpooneers.”

“He is the only one, as far as I know. His name is Yevgeny the Raskolnik.”

“What’s a Raskolnik?”

“As I said before, if I explain everything…”

“All right, all right, never mind.”

Our heart oft times wakes when we sleep, and God can speak to that, either by words, by proverbs, by signs, and similitudes, as well as if one was awake.

–JOHN BUNYAN,

The Pilgrim’s Progress

She chose an ancient desk that had been dragged out into the court and left to die. Rain had fallen on it, and its planks had warped and split, and its drawers were stuck. But the sun shone on it, which felt good on her skin. From another banca she fetched a sheet of foolscap, and in a recess of this one she quarried out a glass inkwell whose cork was cemented in place by a rime of hardened ink. In the end the only way to get it open was to take that stiletto out of her waist-sash and scrape off the crust, then pry the cork loose. The ink had become sludge. She thinned it with saliva and gathered some of it up into a quill.

Leibniz and Caroline were sitting on crates, doing lessons: “Tactics,” said the Doctor, “are what the Duchess of Arcachon has been pursuing; Baron von Hacklheber has quite neglected tactics for strategy.”

“Who won?” Caroline asked.

“Neither,” said the Doctor, “for neither pure tactics nor pure strategy constitutes a wise course for a Prince, or a Princess. Perhaps the winner shall be Johann Jean-Jacques von Hacklheber.”

“Let us hope so,” said Caroline, “for he has been saddled with the most ungainly name I have ever heard.”