The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and the System of the World (215 page)

“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
Dépôt
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
commerçants
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-Lübeck 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?”