“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.”
SEVERAL 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
“FRANCE 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.”