Newton's Cannon (17 page)

She found the guardsman snoring outside her door. An unwilling smile flitted across her face, as she briefly considered trying to steal off without him. Instead she squatted down and poked him in the forehead with her finger.

“Awake, Monsieur,” she told him.

“Shit!” he exclaimed. Then he stopped, flushing scarlet. “Beg pardon, milady,” he finished sheepishly.

“I am going for a walk,” she announced.

He struggled to his feet and adjusted his twisted baldric. “I am already with you.”

“I've never understood these gardens,” the guardsman admitted. The marble eyes of several Nereids watched them pass a fountain and continue toward the Grand Canal.

“What is there to understand?”

“They are unpleasant. I always thought that gardens should be pleasant.”

Adrienne could not hide a broad smile. “Whatever gave you that idea, sir?”

The fellow shrugged. “I grew up in Béarn. There are many vineyards there. We were poor, but my mother always kept a garden.”

“And?” she prompted.

“My mother's gardens, the vineyards—I always found them pleasant. I always assumed that if my mother's garden was
nice
, a king's garden would be paradise.”

Adrienne nodded. “They are nice from the window or from the hill near the orangery, are they not?”

“They are grand,” he admitted. “But here, among them, they are torturous.”

“I agree with you,” Adrienne replied. Then, changing the subject, she said, “You say you are from Béarn.”

“All of the Hundred Swiss are not Swiss,” he said. “Even one of our lieutenants is French. My father was a member of the Hundred, and his father was a musketeer in the days of Louis XIII when
they
were the favored household guard. My family has a long history of such service to the kings of France.”

Adrienne nodded. “As does mine. What is your family?”

“D'Artagnan,” he replied.

She hesitated and then glanced at him. “I am of Montchevreuil.”

“I know,” he said shyly. “My father knew your uncle well. He spoke very highly of him.”

“How ironic. Your father and my uncle, both staunch defenders of the king—friends even—and now you are my
guardian
.”

His face reddened again. “Please, milady,” he said, “you mustn't suspect that
I
believe you need watching.”

“No, of course not,” she said, a little more angrily than she had intended. “Who could
possibly
think that?”

They plodded on for another thirty yards, Adrienne struggling to maintain her anger. She finally gave up. “How long ago did you come to Versailles? May I call you by your Christian name?”

“It is Nicolas, milady.”

“Good. You must call me Adrienne. And how long ago did you come to Versailles, Nicolas?”

“It's been almost three years I've been one of the Hundred Swiss,” he said, a trace of pride in his tone.

“Three years. That's a long time, still not to understand the gardens.”

They continued on, the silence growing awkward again, Adrienne trying to think of some polite topic to continue the conversation upon, but to her surprise, Nicolas preempted her. “If you agree that the gardens are not comfortable to walk in,” he asked, “why are you walking in them?”

“Because,” Adrienne answered, “they are between me and my destination.”

“That being …”

“The barge. I want to have a look at it. I heard that most of it had been salvaged.”

“I'm sorry, milady, but the barge was burned yestereve,” Nicolas told her.

“Why was it burned? How could it have been burned without being carefully examined for evidence?”

“I believe that it
was
examined, milady Adrienne. And the king himself ordered it burned.”

How can Torcy expect me to find evidence that has been burned?
she thought angrily.

But Torcy, of course, was not the king.

“Well, Nicolas, it appears we have subjected ourselves to these unpleasant gardens for no good reason, and so I beg your pardon.

“It's nearly time for me to be in the laboratory anyway,” she observed.

Nicolas nodded, then said, “I must admit that I find these gardens less unpleasant than I once did.”

“Why is that?”Adrienne asked.

He was silent for a moment, and then unexpectedly laughed. “That was an attempt to be charming and complimentary, Mademoiselle. It is not something at which I excel.”

Adrienne returned the laugh with a small but honest chuckle of her own. “No, it is not,” she agreed, “but I am stupid in that
way as well.” To her own surprise, she reached out and patted his arm.

“Besides,” she went on, a bit clumsily, “what need have you to flatter me? You and I are inseparable.”

He did not take it as she intended. He fell silent. She knew that she had hurt his feelings, but she had no idea how to apologize. She was trying to think of some way to make him understand that she was only joking when she suddenly understood what she had been trying to grasp that morning.

The observatory
, Fatio had said. Fatio and Gustavus needed a telescope.

Why?

It seemed to Ben that a great spider was probing his eyelids and ears with rasplike limbs. He could not quite work up the energy to be terrified, but he did reach to brush the horrible creature from his face, and in doing so grasped the edge of the waking world. He pulled himself awake, thankful to avoid a second nightmare.

He could still hear the scratching of the spider's legs, though he began to recognize that it was the aetherschreiber downstairs, scribbling away.

Ben bolted up and stumbled down to the press room.

The schreiber chose that instant to cease. Ben managed to reach it and give its key several twists, but the machine remained still.

He recalled that it was still tuned to the schreiber of Mr. F. The clock on the wall told him that about an hour had passed since he penned his own message, and here was the reply. He took up the sheet and as he read, his lips slowly spread into a smile.

They did not believe him. In fact, they probably thought that their regular correspondent had sent the message as a joke. Of course, if their regular correspondent also happened to be near
his
machine they would both have his message, and so they would soon confirm to each other his reality. Not surprisingly, “F” also understood his “Janus” identity and had joked about it at the beginning of the letter.

Whoever these men were, they
must
be leading philosophers, members of the Royal Academy in London. Who was
he, a young boy from the Colonies, to have the effrontery to lecture them on what to do?

He was Janus, that was who he was. And if Janus made a fool of himself, no one would ever know that Ben Franklin was Janus.

Ben looked back at the schreiber. At that instant, someone sat at the other end of it, wondering if he would reply. But to be taken seriously, he must explain his solution in the language of mathematics—and John was to deliver their joint treatise tomorrow.

Though the note was clearly in the handwriting of “F” it was signed this time “Minerva”—the Roman goddess of wisdom. But the really odd thing about the letter was its
date
. Today was April eleventh, but the note from Minerva was dated April twenty-second. But he
knew
that the letter had just now been written—the schreiber was instantaneous.

Could “F” be so absentminded as to be eleven days off? He was very tired, and undoubtedly he was missing something.

He took the mystery to sleep with him, but it did not solve itself in the darkness.

The question of the telescope haunted Adrienne all the following day and into the next. Given the calculus she had glimpsed, there was now no question in her mind but that the two men were observing some celestial body, and yet that seemed completely out of keeping with the secrecy and obvious importance of the project—and with the unsolved affinitive equation. The only explanations that suggested themselves were bizarre: Were the two men designing some sort of vehicle for traveling into the outer reaches of the universe?

In the afternoon, the aetherschreiber delivered another message from Janus. It consisted mostly of a formula. When neither Fatio nor Gustavus were looking, she secreted it in her manteau. She did not read it until that night, in her room.

Helen and Charlotte both came running at her small, involuntary cry, but she reassured them and sent them away, turning her unbelieving eyes back to the scrawled formula. There was a certain crudity to it; a few symbols were not used in precisely
the right manner, and at points the author was clearly out of his depth. And yet the essence was astonishingly clear, and it was, without a doubt, the answer to Fatio's dilemma. Almost unconsciously she reached for blank paper, a quill, and ink, and went to work. She could see the entire proof in her head. It was so simple it was actually childish; the correct affinity could be found by moving through all the possible affinities. That was certainly the method by which this Janus had modified his aetherschreiber. That was clear because the sliding potentialities he offered to solve Fatio's dilemma were couched in only a single dimension; he had worked out how to make a tunable chime. Fatio needed a formula that could operate on at least three axes. Her pen fairly raced, and twice she actually laughed aloud in delight. She forgot the king, Torcy, the duke and duchess of Orléans, and the terrible ordeal of a few days before. Only the equation mattered, and it was elegant—not a simple proof but an entire
method
.

Well past midnight she finished it, and then she carefully copied it, disguising her handwriting, and signed it with the initials of M. Two. She was smiling when she fell asleep, the equation still singing in her mind like a chorus of angels.

“… like Prometheus unfetter'd you have brought a new fire to the world, and you may be assur'd that it is a flame that shall burn brightly,” Ben read, and broke off to laugh and slap John on the back. “Prometheus we are, John!”

John was trying to be serious, but his glee kept breaking through. “See how they changed it?” he said. “They've done things to it I never imagined, but its still
my
formula—
our
invention. We shall be famous, Benjamin Franklin!”

“When we trade ‘Janus’ for our own names,” Ben reminded him cautiously.

John shrugged. “I'm not even provoked at that. We have the drafts to show we proved this out.”

“In fact,” Ben said, “I have already mailed a letter to the Royal Academy in London. The postmark on it will show our precedence. It's signed Janus, of course, but I think we can demonstrate that it was our discovery.”

John actually skipped for the next several paces, forgetting his dignity. The two of them were walking across the broad meadow of the Commons. “Who do you think they are, Ben? Whom have we written to?”

“Someone important. See, here, where it says that the Crown will thank us?”

“Oh, yes,” John said, gesturing as if he were a king bestowing grace, “ ‘shine his Apollonian light upon us,’ he will! Yet we still don't know what they are about, do we? We helped them solve a small piece of some larger puzzle—”

“I should say a very large piece,” Ben interrupted. “My impression was that this was their last stumbling block.”

“Yes, but what are they stumbling toward?”

Ben shrugged. “Perhaps, some sort of new cannon to use against the French.”

“No, it still isn't a cannon.”

“I have a better puzzle for you, John,” Ben said. “Why is this dated eleven days ahead?”

“What?” John snatched the paper from him, frowning. “It must be a mistake,” he muttered.

Ben shrugged. “I've checked;
all
the communications are dated eleven days ahead.”

“Eleven? That reminds me of something,” John mused.

“I've wondered if it might not be some message to us, but the earlier communications eavesdropped upon follow suit,” Ben stated.

“That
is
a puzzlement,” John said, kicking at a tuft of grass. “Unless … Unless they are following the Romish calendar. It is some number of days removed from our own. It might be eleven.”

Ben stopped dead in his tracks, staring at his friend in horror. “Oh, God,” he said, “that must be it.”

“What do you mean?” John snapped. “What are you being so dramatic about?”

“We've been assuming that this Mr. F is
English
, and that we have been writing to him in
England
.”

“He
writes
in English,” John pointed out reasonably.

“But that might be because he was corresponding with an
Englishman. John, what if this Mr. F is Spanish, or …” He stopped again.

“John,” he said quietly, “what if he's
French
? His Apollonian light? God, John, that doesn't refer to King George but to Louis of France!”

“Wait,” John cautioned, “just wait, Ben.
You
started this theme of gods and goddesses. You signed as Janus, he wrote as Minerva, called you Prometheus, and so on.”

“No Englishman would call King George Apollo. Zeus or Jove, maybe. Louis XIV, the Sun King—that's what they call
him
. Oh, God, John, whatever we've done just now, we've done for the enemies of our country!”

John could only stare at him, speechless.

Louis awoke to the sound of his watch being wound. Versailles did not care whether Apollo could see its splendors or not—it would carry him through his day regardless.

To Louis, that was strength. It had saved him from going mad more than once, and it would do so again.

“How are you this morning, Sire?” Louis-Alexandre asked from quite near.

“I am very well,” Louis answered, mustering all of his ancient strength. He had never needed to see his own face to understand what it was projecting, to twist this or that nuance into a smile, a frown. Far less so, now, when he was so much more aware of his muscles. What worried him was that he could not see the faces of others, could not read their moods—the unwilling confession of a dropped gaze, the murderous glint of a too-bright smile. He knew that if he could
see
who had tried to kill him, he would recognize him by his look.