The Confusion (97 page)

“We’ve another moment now, unfortunately no longer than the first. What’s it to be, Abigail?”

“What do you mean exactly?”

Barnes stepped carefully into the room, eyeing the broken door. He gave Bob a Significant Look; then, remembering his manners, turned smartly toward Abigail and bowed. “Miss Frome! Sergeant Shaftoe has extolled your beauty so many times I have grown bored of him; seeing you in the flesh, I understand, and repent, and shall never again yawn and drum my fingers on the table, when the topic arises, but join in chorus with Sergant Bob.”

“Thank—” Abigail began, but Barnes had already moved on.

“Have you asked her yet?”

“No, he hasn’t,” Abigail said, for Bob was dumbstruck.

“Drop,” said Barnes, “ask.”

Bob smashed down on to his knees. “Will—”

“Yes.”

“Abigail Frome will you take—” began Barnes.

“I do.”

“Robert Shaf—”

“I do.”

“—nounce you man and wife. You may kiss the bride—
later
. Let’s get the bloody hell out of here!” said Colonel Barnes, and fled the room; for he phant’sied he’d spied something through the window.

“Fetch me that hinge-pin, husband,” Abigail said, “in lieu of a ring.”

S
EVERAL PLATOONS OF MUSKETEERS
were already formed up anyway in the forecourt of the house, and so it did not impose any significant further delay for them to line up on both sides of the path and form an arch of bayonets for Mr. and Mrs. Shaftoe to run through. It was too early for spring flowers, but some private had the presence of mind to hack a branch from a budding cherry-tree and slap it into Abigail’s arms. A white horse was pillaged from the stables and bestowed on the newlyweds as a wedding-present. Members of the household staff looked on through windows, and cooed and waved tea-towels. The French musketeers who were supposed to be guarding the place, and who had been disarmed, and herded into a dry fountain, wept for joy and blew their noses. Even the cavalier who had been giving Barnes such a hard time could only look the other way, shake
his head, and blink. He was indignant to have been made the small-minded villain in this story, and wished he could have spoken more to Barnes, and let him know that, if he had only been made aware of the nature of the errand, he might have served Venus instead of Mars.

Barnes and the Shaftoes, distributed between two horses, inspected the troops a last time.

“You have done well by your Sergeant to-day,” Barnes announced, “and repaid a small portion of that debt you owe him for having kept you alive through so many battles. Now, back to training! Today’s exercise is called ‘melt away into the countryside.’ It has already commenced, and you are already doing a miserable job of it, being bunched together in plain view!”

Private soldiers began to break ranks and vault walls. A senior sergeant approached Barnes, and lodged a protest: “There’s no countryside to melt into, sir! We’ve got one foot in bloody France, all the trees are cut down, we are thirty miles behind enemy lines—”

“That is what makes it such a superlative training exercise! If we were in bloody Sherwood Forest, it’d be easy, wouldn’t it? Here is a suggestion: As long as you keep your gob shut, they’ll assume you are starveling deserters from the French Army! Now, get you all gone. I shall see you all back at quarters in a few days. I must convey Mr. and Mrs. Shaftoe to the sea-coast, that they may go to London and set up housekeeping. You shall all be welcome at their house!”

Abigail here for the first time looked a little less than radiant. But the joy came back into her face again as those Black Torrent Guards who had not yet melted away into the countryside broke into cheers. Bob got the white horse moving, and trotted round the circuit of the gardens, accepting in turn the cheers of various small mobs of soldiers, of the French maids in the windows, and the musketeers in the fountain; and then it was through the gate and out on to the road. Following Barnes—who was halfway to the western horizon already—they took off hell-for-leather. Abigail, straddling the horse’s croup, pressed her cheek into the hollow between Bob’s shoulder-blades, wrapped her arms about his waist, and clasped her hands together. Bob, feeling a hard thing jammed into his belly, looked down to see Abigail’s fingers interlocked about the hinge-pin.

AUGUST
1697

“F
RANCE WILL SHED
all of the lands she has conquered since 1678—except for Strasbourg, which Louis seems to have conceived a great liking for—on the condition they remain Catholic,” said the fifty-one-year-old savant. He ticked another item off a list that he had spread out on a Dresden china dinner-plate blazoned with the arms of the Guelphs.

Then he glanced up, expecting to see the hem of the sixty-seven-year-old queen’s ball gown hovering just above the tabletop. Instead, the garment—miles of gathered silk, made dangerous by an underlying framework of bone and steel—whacked him in the face, and stripped off his spectacles, as the Electress of Hanover made a smart about-face.

“It took me a week to grind these lenses.” Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz leaned sideways to rake his spectacles up off the floor. He had to keep his head upright to prevent his biggest and best wig from sliding off his bald, sweaty scalp. This gave him a crick in the neck, however enabled him to get a charming view of muscular white calves pumping in and out as his patroness stormed down the mid-line of the banquet-table.

“This is
news,
” she complained, “I could get it from
any
of my Privy Councillors. From
you
I expect better: gossip, or philosophy.”

Leibniz got to his feet, and took part of his chair with him; his vacant scabbard had got locked up in a bit of Barock wood-carving. The sound of a blade whipping through the air made him cringe and duck. “Almost got it!” Sophie exclaimed, fascinatedly.

“Gossip…I am trying to think of some gossip. Er, your daughter’s palace in Berlin continues to shape up splendidly. The courtiers there are all in an uproar.”

“The same uproar as
last
week, or a
different
one?”

“With every day that passes, with every new statue and fresco that
is added to the Charlottenburg, it becomes more and more difficult to deny the awkward—the embarrassing—the monstrous fact that Frederick, the Elector of Brandenburg and probable future King of Prussia, is in love with your daughter.”

“Why should that be the cause of an uproar?”

“Because they are
married
to each other. It is viewed as bestial—perverse.”

“Really it is because of what the courtiers all believe about me.”

“That you
planted
Sophie Charlotte there to control Frederick?”

“Mmmm.”

“Well,
did
you?”

“If I
did,
it obviously
worked,
and that is what the courtiers cannot abide,” Sophie answered vaguely. She now whirled again, her formidable Hem shredding a few centerpiece snapdragons, and ran down the table with silk ribbons trailing behind her like battle-streamers. She made another vicious cut with the sword. Candle-tops scattered and came to rest in splashes of their own wax, spinning out threads of smoke. “I could finish this in an instant if this
verdammt
burning bush were not in my way,” she said meditatively, pointing the sword at a candelabra that had been hammered together out of several hundred pounds of Harz silver by artisans with a lot of time on their hands.

A few servants, who had to this point kept as far as they could from the Electress, peeled their backs off the wall of the dining-hall and scuttled inwards toward the offending fixture, knees flexed and hands raised. Sophie ignored them and tilted the rapier this way and that, letting the light of the surviving candles trickle up and down the blade. “No wonder you could not wrest it out of its scabbard,” she said, “it was rusted in place, wasn’t it?”

“…”

“What if I had to call upon you to defend my realms, Doctor?”

“Swordsmen are gettable. I could fashion a hell of a siege-engine, or make myself useful in some other wise.”

“Make yourself useful now! I do not need to hear gossip from Berlin. My daughter sends me more than I need, and little Princess Caroline has been posting me the most excellent letters—your doing?”

“I have taken some interest in her education since the untimely death of her mother. Sophie Charlotte has become the next best thing, however, and I sense I am needed less and less.”

“
Ach,
now I can move, but I cannot
see,
” complained Sophie, squinting up towards a fresco shrouded by poor light and ancient congealed smoke. “I can’t tell the painted-on
Furies
from the living
bat.
”

“I believe those would be harpies, your majesty.”

“I will show you what a harpy is, if you do not begin doing your
job!”

“Right…well, Louis XIV has a mickle abscess on his neck. That’s not very good, is it? Right, then…the French will now recognize William as King of England, and all of the titles he has bestowed. So, to mention a few examples, John Churchill is now Earl of Marlborough, the Duchess d’Arcachon is now also the Duchess of Qwghlm.”

“Arcachon-Qwghlm…yes…
we have heard of her,
” Sophie announced, making a momentous decision.

“She’ll be overjoyed, your Electoral Highness, that you recognize her existence. For she respects no monarch in this world more than your Electoral Highness.”

“What about her own liege-lords, Louis and William? Does she not respect
them
?” inquired her Electoral Highness.

“Er…
protocol,
I’m sure, forbids the Duchess from preferring one over the other…besides which, both of them are, sorry to say,
men.
”

“I see what you mean. Does this double Duchess have a Christian name?”

“Eliza.”

“Children? Other than—unless I’m mistaken—that energetic little bastard who is always following my banker around.”

“Two surviving children thus far: Adelaide, four, and Louis, going on two; the latter is the personal unification of the Houses of Arcachon and of Qwghlm, and, if he survives his father, will become lord of a hyphenated Duchy, like Orange-Nassau or Brandenburg-Prussia.”

“Arcachon-Qwghlm doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, I’m afraid. What are her pastimes?”

“Natural Philosophy, amazingly complex financial machinations, and the abolition of slavery.”

“
White,
or
all
of it?”

“I believe she means to begin with white, and then leverage legal precedents thus obtained to extend it to all.”

“Scarcely matters to us,” muttered Sophie, “we have no blackamoors hereabouts, and no fleet with which to go and get them. But it seems a bit, I don’t know, quixotic.”

Leibniz said nothing.

“Quixotic is fine!” Sophie allowed, “we enjoy a dash of quixotic, as long as it is not boring. She is never boring about it, is she?”

“If you take her aside and really press her on it, she can go on at some length about the evils of slavery,” Leibniz conceded, “but otherwise she is the very soul of discretion, and never heard to utter more than a few words on the topic in polite company.”

“Where is she?”

“She spends most of her time in London lately, looking after an
unfathomably lengthy and tedious Judicial Proceeding involving one Abigail Frome, a white slave, but maintains residences in St. Malo, Versailles, Leipzig, Paris, and of course the Castle on Outer Qwghlm.”

“We would meet her. We are grateful that she took Princess Caroline under her wing when the poor child was forgotten and alone. We share her passion for Natural Philosophy. We may require someone of her talents to assist us in the management of our ship
Minerva
and to ensure that the profits are not illicitly diverted to the coffers of our partner, Kottakkal, the Pirate-Queen of Malabar.”

“I am afraid you quite lost me there, your Electoral Highness!”

“
Do
try harder to keep up, Doctor Leibniz, I hired you because people said you were
clever
.”

“It shan’t happen again, your Electoral Highness…er…you were on to something about a ship?”

“Never mind the ship! The most important thing is that this Eliza shall bring us the most excellent gossip from London; gossip that it is our duty to hear, as we or our heirs are likely one day to be crowned monarchs of England. And so if Eliza comes to this part of the world to pay a call on her bastard…”

“I’ll see to it that she puts in an appearance here, your Electoral Highness.”

“Done! What is next on the list?”

“Whitehall Palace burnt down.”

“The whole thing? I was led to believe it was quite…rambling.”

“According to the few people remaining in London who will still write to me, it is all smoking ruins.”

“Ve must speak Englisch ven ve speak of Englant!” the Electress decreed. “I never get to practice othervise.”

“Right. In English, then: As soon as the war ended, the Whigs were cast out—”

“The Yuncto?”

“Very good, your majesty, you have it right, the Yuncto is cast into the outer darkness, the Tories are ascendant.”

“How fortunate for William,” Sophie said drily. “Just when he needs a new palace built, the king-loving party gets its hands on the treasury.”

“Which happens to be completely empty at the moment, but that problem is being worked on by clever fellows, fear not.”

“Now the conversation really is about to become very boring indeed,” Sophie reflected, “as we are on to revenue and taxes. The bat will go to sleep up there, snuggled up next to a naiad or a dryad, and not come awake until the middle of dinner.”

“Everything said of the Tsar would suggest he’ll not be troubled by a
bat.
You could have
wolves
and
bears
in here and he would not look twice.”

“I am not trying to make Peter feel
at home,
” Sophie said frostily, “but to show him that, somewhere between Berlin and here, he at last crossed the frontier of
civilization.
And one lovely thing about civilization is
philosophers
capable of making interesting conversation.”

“Right. So we are finished with gossip, then, and—”

“—and on to the latest developments in philosophy—Natural, or Unnatural, as you prefer. Stand and deliver, Doctor Leibniz! Whatever’s the matter?
Bat
got your tongue?”

“The English savants are all busy toiling at practical matters—Mints, Banks, Cathedrals, Annuities. The French are all under the shadow, if not the actual boot, of the Inquisition. Nothing of interest has been heard out of Spain since they kicked out the Jews and the Moors two hundred years ago. So when you inquire after Philosophy, Majesty, you inquire—and I do not wish to seem self-important when I say this—after
me.
”

“Am I not allowed to inquire after
my
friend in
my
house?”

“Of course, I just…well…never mind. I have been corresponding with those Bernoulli brothers rather a lot. Nothing important. You know I have always been fascinated with symbols and characters. The calculus has brought us new ideas for which we want new symbols. For differentiation, I like a small letter
d
, and for integration, a sort of elongated
S
. That’s how the Bernoullis have been doing it, and it suits them well. But there is another Swiss mathematician, a fellow who was once viewed as quite a promising young savant-in-the-making, by the name of Nicolas Fatio de Duillier.”

“That one who saved William of Orange from a kidnap-plot?” asked Sophie, planting the tip of Leibniz’s rapier in the tabletop and flexing it absent-mindedly.

“The same. He and the Bernoullis have been corresponding.”

“But you said, very meaningfully, that this fellow was
once
viewed as promising.”

“His work the last few years has been laughable. He is not right in his head, or so it would seem.”

“I thought it was
Newton
who had gone out of his mind.”

“I am coming to Newton. He—Fatio, that is—and the Bernoullis have, ’twould seem, been carrying on one of these slow-smoldering disputes. They send him a letter using the little
d
and the stretched-out
S,
and, tit-for-tat, he sends them one back using a little dot for differentiation and some sort of abominable “Q”-notation for integration. This is how Newton writes calculus. It is a sort of shin-kicking
contest that has been going on for years. Well, a few months ago it
blew up.
Fatio published an article saying some very uncomplimentary things about your humble and obedient servant right here, and attributing the calculus to Newton. Then the Bernoullis cooked up a mathematicks problem and began sending it round to the Continental mathematicians to see if any of them could solve it. None of them could—”

“Not even
you
!?”

“Of course I could solve it, it was just a calculus problem and it had only one purpose, which was to separate the men—which is to say, those who understood the calculus—from the boys. They then sent the damned thing to Newton, who worked it out in a few hours.”

“Oh! So he is
not
out of his mind!”

“For all I know, Majesty, he may be
entirely
out of his mind—the point is, he is still without rival, when it comes to mathematicks. And now, thanks to those mischievous Bernoullis, he believes that I and all the other Continental mathematicians do conspire against him.”

“I thought you were going to talk philosophy now, not gossip.”

Leibniz inhaled to say something, stopped, and sighed it all out. Then he did it again. Then a third time. Fortuitously, the bat chose this moment to come out of hiding. Sophie was not slow to jerk the rapier free from the tabletop and return to the hunt. After a bit of random flitting here and there—for the bat seemed to phant’sy that the keening tip of the rapier was some sort of blindingly fast insect—it settled into a hunting pattern, swinging around the long perimeter of the dining room, but judiciously avoiding the corners, plotting therefore a roughly elliptical orbit. The table was planted across one end of the room and so the bat flew across it twice on each revolution. Sophie’s strategy, then, was to plant herself on the table just where she predicted the bat would over-fly it as it came in from its long patrol of the room. Missing it there, she could then rush down to the other end to take another hack at it when it rebounded from the near wall and passed over again, outward-bound.