“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.