The Confusion

Eliza to Jean Bart
MAY 1694

Captain Bart,

My dear friend Monsieur le comte de Pontchartrain, being the controleur-general of France, has, and shall have, numberless opportunities to channel the flow of the King’s revenues in those ways that are most satisfactory to him, and so I feel I do him no great disfavor by suggesting that you sail your treasure-ship to the port of Dieppe, so that the King’s loan to the House of Hacklheber may at last be repaid. France is helpless to defend her interests on foreign soil, so long as her credit, in foreign eyes, is bad; and repayment of even a single loan shall go far towards repairing the damage done in recent years. The German and Swiss bankers have already abandoned Lyon, but this need not prevent the payment from being sent through more modern channels, perhaps in Paris. It might help if you could suggest as much to the gentleman in Dieppe.

I thank you for having consulted me before taking action in this matter. Please know that one of the beneficiaries shall be your long-lost godson, who, as I write these words, is creeping up on me from behind with a bow and arrow, like a dirty little Cupid.

Eliza

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING, MADAME?”

“Finishing up a letter.” She scattered sand across the page to blot it.

“To whom?”

“The most famous and daring pirate-captain in the world,” Eliza said matter-of-factly. She let the sand slide off onto the ground, folded the letter up, and began ransacking the old desk’s drawers for a bit of sealing-wax.

“Do you know him?”

Using a scrap of paper as a spatula, Eliza scraped some beads of sealing-wax out of a drawer-bottom. “Yes-and he knows you. He held you when you were baptized!”

Johann von Hacklheber quite naturally wanted to know more-which was how Eliza wanted it. He pursued her like an Indian tracker through the dusty rooms of the House of Hacklheber, pelting her not with arrows but with questions, as she scared up a melting-spoon, a candle, and fire. Presently she had a flame going under the blackened belly of the spoon. Into it she poured the crumbs of wax that she had looted from the desk: mostly scarlet, but a few black, and some the natural color of beeswax. Those on the bottom quickly succumbed to the heat. Those above stubbornly maintained their shapes. The similarity of these to smallpox-vesicles was very obvious to her. “When a thing such as wax, or gold, or silver, turns liquid from heat, we say that it has fused,” Eliza said to her son, “and when such liquids run together and mix, we say they are con-fused.”

“Papa says I am confused sometimes.”

“As are we all,” said Eliza. “For confusion is a kind of bewitchment-a moment when what we supposed we understood loses its form and runs together and becomes one with other things that, though they might have had different outward forms, shared the same inward nature.” She gave the melting-spoon a little shake, and the beads of wax that had been floating on its top-which had become sacs of liquid wax, held together by surface tension-burst and collapsed into the pool of molten wax below, giving off a puff of sweet fragrance, vestiges of the flowers visited long ago by the bees that had made this stuff. It was sweeter by far than the telltale fragrance of smallpox, which she hoped never to smell again, though she caught a whiff of it from time to time as she moved about the town.

Before the black and red could mix together into mud, Eliza dumped the contents of the spoon onto her folded letter, and mashed her ring into it. The seal, when she pulled her ring away from it, was of scarlet marbled through with black and pale streaks-most attractive, she thought, and perhaps the beginning of a new trend at Court.

Lothar had summoned a rider who was willing to carry the message at least as far as Jena, where other messengers might be found to take it into the west. The rider waited just inside the gates with one horse that was saddled, and a second to spell it. Eliza handed him the letter and wished him Godspeed, and he mounted up without further ceremony and set to trotting down the street. When he reached the great square, he got his mount turned toward the west gate, and cantered out of sight. Along his wake were any number of curious onlookers, peering out the windows, and opening up the doors, of diverse factories and trading-houses. A man emerged from a door, pulling a big wig down over his stubbled scalp. He turned toward the House of the Golden Mercury and began to hustle toward it, eager to get some explanation from Lothar; and before he’d reached Lothar’s gate, two others, not to be outdone, had fallen in stride with him. Eliza returned their courteous greetings as they went in the gate, curtseying to each in turn. But she did not follow them in. She stayed out in the street to watch the news spread and to hear the slow-building murmur of Leipzig coming alive.