“All gettable,” Eliza said flatly. “Didn’t you understand what Enoch was telling you?”
“Don’t say it!-don’t tell me-just wait!” Jack said, and went over to the arrow-slit to peer up at the Doctor’s windmill, and down at his ox-carts parked along the edge of the stable-yard. Up and down being the only two possibilities when peering through an arrow-slit. “The Doctor provides quicksilver to the mines whose masters do what the Doctor wants.”
“So,” Eliza said, “the Doctor has-what?”
“Power,” Jack finally said after a few wrong guesses.
“Because he has-what?”
“Quicksilver.”
“So that’s the answer-we go to Amsterdam and buy quicksilver.”
“A splendid plan-if only we had money to buy it with. ”
“Poh! We’ll just use someone else’s money,” Eliza said, flicking something off the backs of her fingernails.
NOW, STARING DOWN THIS CROWDEDcanal towards the city, Jack saw, in his mind, a map he’d viewed in Hanover. Sophie and Ernst August had inherited their library, not to mention librarian (i.e., the Doctor), when Ernst August’s Papist brother-evidently, something of a black sheep-had had the good grace to die young without heirs. This fellow must have been more interested in books than wenches, because his library had (according to the Doctor) been one of the largest in Germany at the time of his demise five years ago, and had only gotten bigger since then. There was no place to put it all, and so it only kept getting shifted from one stable to another. Ernst August apparently spent all of his time either fending off King Louis along the Rhine, or else popping down to Venice to pick up fresh mistresses, and never got round to constructing a permanent building for the collection.
In any event, Jack and Eliza had paused in Hanover for a few days on their journey west, and the Doctor had allowed them to sleep in one of the numerous out-buildings where parts of the library were stored. There had been many books, useless to Jack, but also quite a few extraordinary maps. He had made it his business to memorize these, or at least the parts that were finished. Remote islands and continents splayed on the parchment like stomped brains, the interiors blank, the coastlines trailing off into nowhere and simply ending in mid-ocean because no one had ever sailed farther than that, and the boasts and phant’sies of seafarers disagreed.
One of those maps had been of trade-routes: straight lines joining city to city. Jack could not read the labels. He could identify London and a few other cities by their positions, and Eliza helped him read the names of the others. But one city had no label, and its position along the Dutch coast was impossible to read: so many lines had converged on it that the city itself, and its whole vicinity, were a prickly ink-lake, a black sun. The next time they’d seen the Doctor, Jack had triumphantly pointed out to him that his map was defective. The arch-Librarian had merely shrugged.
“The Jews don’t even bother to give it a name,” the Doctor had said. “In their language they just call it mokum, which means ‘the place.’ ”
From desire, ariseth the thought of some means we have seen produce the like of that which we aim at; and from the thought of that, the thought of means to that mean; and so continually, till we come to some beginning within our own power.
-HOBBES,Leviathan
AS THEY CAME CLOSERto The Place, there were many peculiar things to look at: barges full of water (fresh drinking-water for the city), other barges laden with peat, large flat areas infested with salt-diggers. But Jack could only gawk at these things a certain number of hours of the day. The rest of the time he gawked at Eliza.
Eliza, up on Turk’s back, was staring at her left hand so fixedly that Jack feared she had found a patch of leprosy, or something, on it. But she was moving her lips, too. She held up her right hand to make Jack be still. Finally she held up the left. It was pink and perfect, but contorted into a strange habit, the long finger folded down, the thumb and pinky restraining each other so that only Index and Ring stood out.
“You look like a Priestess of some new sect, blessing or cursing me.”
“D” was all she said.
“Ah, yes, Dr. John Dee, the famed alchemist and mountebank? I was thinking that with some of Enoch’s parlor tricks, we could fleece a few bored merchants’ wives…”
“The letter D,” she said firmly. “Number four in the alphabet. Four is this,” holding up that versatile left again, with only the long finger folded down.
“Yes, I can see you’re holding up four fingers…”
“No-these digits are binary. The pinky tells ones, the ring finger twos, the long finger fours, the index eights, the thumb sixteens. So when the long finger only is folded down, it means four, which means D.”
“But you had the thumb and pinky folded down also, just now…”
“The Doctor also taught me to encipher these by adding another number-seventeen in this case,” Eliza said, displaying her right with the thumb and pinky tip-to-tip. Putting her hand back as it had been, she announced, “Twenty-one, which means, in the English alphabet, U.”
“But what is the point?”
“The Doctor has taught me to hide messages in letters.”
“It’s your intention to be writing letters to this man?”
“If I do not,” she said innocently, “how can I expect to receive any?”
“Why would you want to?” Jack asked.
“To continue my education.”
“Owff!” blurted Jack, and he doubled over as if Turk had kicked him in the belly.
“A guessing-game?” Eliza said coolly. “It’s got to be either: you think I’m already too educated, or: you hoped it would be something else.”
“Both,” Jack said. “You’ve put hours into improving your mind-with nothing to show for it. I’d hoped you had gotten financial backing out of the Doctor, or that Sophie.”
Eliza laughed. “I’ve told you, over and over, that I never came within half a mile of Sophie. The Doctor let me climb a church-steeple that looks down over Herrenhausen, her great garden, so that I could watch while she went out for one of her walks. That’s as close as someone like me could ever come to someone like her.”
“Why bother, then?”
“It was enough for me simply to lay eyes on her: the daughter of the Winter Queen, and great-granddaughter of Mary Queen of Scots. You would never understand.”
“It’s just that you are always on about money, and I cannot see how staring at some bitch in a French dress, from a mile away, relates to that.”
“Hanover is a poor country anyway-it’s not as if they have much money to gamble on our endeavours.”
“Haw! If that’s poverty, give me some!”
“Why do you think the Doctor is going through such exertions to find investors for the silver mine?”
“Thank you-you’ve brought me back to my question: what does the Doctor want?”
“To translate all human knowledge into a new philosophical language, consisting of numbers. To write it down in a vast Encyclopedia that will be a sort of machine, not only for finding old knowledge but for making new, by carrying out certain logical operations on those numbers-and to employ all of this in a great project of bringing religious conflict to an end, and raising Vagabonds up out of squalor and liberating their potential energy-whatever that means.”
“Speaking for myself, I’d like a pot of beer and, later, to have my face trapped between your inner thighs.”
“It’s a big world-perhaps you and the Doctor can both realize your ambitions,” she said after giving the matter some thought. “I’m finding horseback-riding enjoyable but ultimately frustrating. ”