The Confusion

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.”

 

 

 

 

 

Eliza to Jean Bart

 

 

MAY 1694

 

 

 

 

Captain Bart,

 

 

 

My dear friend Monsieur le comte de Pontchartrain, being the contr?leur-général 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 confused.”

 

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