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?”
Eliza flushed at this: and not just her face but her whole body. It felt as though warm blood was washing into parts of her body that had been starved and pallid since the pox. She would have faltered, and perhaps even surrendered, if she’d not spent years steeling herself for this. Because the words of Lothar carried in them much that was true. But she had always known he would be formidable and that she’d have to bull ahead anyway. “You need not be destroyed,” she said. “With a word, I can see to it that the loan is repaid, with interest.”
“Stop, I pray you. Do you suppose my mind is as empty as this?” He kicked the strong-box with the side of his foot and it boomed like a drum. “I know that you would never have come to Leipzig had you not so arranged matters that you could hold out to me the choice of destruction or salvation. It is all very ingenious, I am sure, the sort of thing I’d have found fascinating at your age; but I am not your age.”
“Of course I am well aware that you have moved beyond money, to Alchemy-”
“Oh, you are? And I suppose you have some morsel to dangle above my mouth, where the Solomonic Gold is concerned?”
Having been anticipated thus made Eliza disinclined to say it, but she did: “I know who has it, and where; if that is your desire-”
“My desire was to conquer Death, which took my brothers young and unfairly,” said Lothar von Hacklheber. “It is a common desire. Most come to terms with Death sooner or later. My failure to do so was an unintended consequence of a pact that my family had made with Enoch Root. In order for him to dwell among humankind he must don identities, and later, before his longevity draws notice, shed them. My father knew about Enoch-knew a little of what he was-and struck a deal with him: he would vouch for Enoch as a long-lost relative named Egon von Hacklheber, and suffer him to dwell among us under that name for a period of some decades, if, in exchange, ‘Egon’ would serve as a tutor to his three sons. Of the three, I was in some sense the quickest, for I came to know that Enoch was not like us. And I guessed that this was a matter of his having discovered some Alchemical receipt that conferred life eternal. A reasonable guess-but wrong. At any rate, it fired my interest in Alchemy until of late.”