It was at such times that a physician would emerge to tell a room of hand-wringing loved ones that the case was very grave, and that the patient's life hung in the balance. Had it gone any further, the report would have changed to "not expected to survive," and everyone would have known, from this, that the disease had moved on to its sausage-grinder phase. In Eliza's case this had not happened. Fate had flipped a coin, and it had come up heads. The disease had nearly flayed her lower back and some parts of her arms and legs, and done damage internally, too. But it had spared her eyesight and left perhaps three dozen pocks on her face, of which most could be seen only in direct sun; of the ten or so that were obvious even by candlelight, some could be hid by a lock of hair or a high-collared dress, and the remainder got the black patch treatment. Eliza did not seriously intend to begin every day for the rest of her life by gluing these horrid objects to her skin, but today was special; she was venturing out of the dower-house of Pretzsch for the first time since she had arrived there six weeks earlier. She was going into Leipzig—which passed for a big city in these parts—and she was going to meet some people.
Of the six weeks at the dower-house, the first had been spent in (in retrospect) the prodrome of the illness, and culminated with the sending away of Caroline and Adelaide and the visit of the Elector and his mistress. After that it had been all pustules for two weeks. Eliza had not really come awake and begun to weave her impressions into coherent memories again until the twenty-fourth day; which happened to be the same day that the distant church-bells of Torgau and Wittenberg had begun to toll, announcing the deaths of the Elector of Saxony and his mistress. Eleanor was a widow for the second time. She was henceforth the Electress-Dowager of Saxony. Which meant she was living in the right house for once: The dower-house was where a dowager was supposed to live. The new Elector was Johann Georg's brother, August. August the Strong. He already had a hundred illegitimate children and was said to be hard at work on the second hundred, and his passion for engaging wild beasts in single combat would do nothing to improve Saxony's reputation at Versailles; but he had not been hit on the head, he bore no ill will toward Eleanor, and he didn't want to screw Caroline, so it looked like a win.
Eleanor had been called away to Dresden to attend her husband's funeral. And after Eliza's mattress and bedclothes had been immolated in a great bonfire down by the Elbe, and the scabs had fallen away to reveal her new face and body, Caroline and Adelaide had at last returned from Leipzig along with most of Eliza's retinue. So much for the fourth week; weeks five and six, then, had been time for Eliza to get her strength back. She had an idea that the pox had done to her entrails the same sort of things as it had done to her back, and so there had been problems for a while with eating, digestion, and elimination. Even if she'd bounced back like a rubber ball, there'd have been a delay while new garments were sewn for her, in smaller dimensions to fit her wasted frame, and with collars, sleeves, &c., to cover heavily cratered parts of her body. But the day before yesterday she'd noticed, all of a sudden, that she was bored. Yesterday had been devoted to the laying of plans. This morning she'd departed from the dower-house in a little train of borrowed and rented carriages. On the spur of the moment she'd decided to bring Caroline along with her (for Eleanor was busy organizing a Dowager-household), and little Adelaide, too (for she became obstreperous now if she did not have her Caroline to play with).
"WHAT IS THIS VENTURE of yours that Captain Bart speaks of in his letter?" Caroline asked her.
"Ay! That's difficult to explain!" Eliza said. "But I do not have to explain it, for you to get the point—which is that Captain Bart, ordinarily the most decisive, the most ruthless man on earth, cannot make up his mind whether to take his cargo to Dieppe or Le Havre, and feels obliged to send me a letter in Leipzig before acting. If I sat at home knitting and playing cards, he would feel no such compulsion, believe you me; but because I'm on the move, I am an unknown variable in the equation—"
"Which makes it more difficult for him to solve!" Caroline said. "Uncle Gottfried has been teaching me how to solve such problems using a thing he invented called matrices."
"Then you know more of it than I," said Eliza, not for the first time feeling a bit envious of this girl. "And you may show off your skills to your teacher now."
"Uncle Gottfried is here?"
The carriage had rolled to a stop. Eliza opened the door herself and allowed a footman to help her down. Caroline leapt out a moment later, landing bang on both feet, followed, after brief intervals, by her skirts and her braid.
They were in a square before a church from whose open doors organ-music was chanting. Not far away was the town square of Leipzig with its great dark Rathaus along one side, and narrow streets radiating from it, lined with trading-houses. Eliza was slowly turning round and round, taking the place in. But the look on her face was not of wonder but rather distracted, even a bit suspicious. "It is so small," she said.
"If you'd been living in Pretzsch it would seem ever so large!"
"Oh, but when we came here last—ten years ago, almost to the day—we'd been living in a shack in the mountains and it did seem large!"
"Who is this ‘we?' "
"Never mind…but it is funny how one's mind works. I have built up a phant'sy of this as a great metropolis, whose trading-houses are immensely rich and powerful, but look at it…there are merchants in London, in Amsterdam, who could buy this whole town and slip it into a vest-pocket."
"Perhaps you should buy it then!" Caroline said, as a jest.
"Perhaps I already have." Eliza paused, blinked, and let out a breath, as if purging herself of all old memories and overblown phant'sies, then peered around sharply. "I have affairs to transact, and must leave you, for a few hours. Come!" She led Caroline through the doors of the church. It was empty just now. The organ-music was just someone practicing—someone not very accomplished, for he kept making mistakes, and each time he did, he came to a stop, and struggled to find the rhythm.
This place—the Nikolaikirche—lacked the dark, spooky look of so many churches. The vault was a semicircular barrel supported by fluted columns—but not of the Doric, Ionian, Corinthian, or any other known order of architecture. For the capitals were made to resemble sheaves of slender vertical palm leaves. The high vaults above, sluiced with clear white light rushing in through high windows, gathered themselves together and plunged down into these rich bundles of light green leaves, from which clusters of fruit peeked out. The altar rail described a broad half-circle with a gap in the center, like a pair of arms sweeping out to embrace the congregants. The font was a gilded goblet. Behind it, steps led up to an altar, above which a quicksilver Jesus hung from a plank. This part of the church—the Altarraum—was a sanctum of polished wine-colored and fleece-gray marble with many windows, giving a view of budding linden trees startled by pockets of breeze speeding invisibly through a blue heaven. The patterns in the marble suggested powerful turbulent motion—rapids, say, or lightning streaking through boiling clouds—arrested and silenced. Recalling the notion that if you knew the position and velocity of every particle in the universe at one moment of time, you'd know all—you'd be God. At the back of the church was a balcony claimed by a great organ of silver pipes in a white case in Roman style, lilies and palm leaves rampant. Hunched doggedly at the console was a man in a great periwig and a coat brocaded with hundreds of wee flowers. An elderly man in academician's robes loitered nearby, gazing down curiously at Eliza, Caroline, and other members of the entourage who were now straggling up the aisle; for Adelaide had been woken out of a nap by the stoppage of her coach, and had pursued her mother, and been pursued in turn by nurses, and by Eliza's guards, who were under orders not to let Adelaide out of their sight so long as they were on the hostile ground of Leipzig. The organist noticed all this, and raised his hands from the manuals, and the throaty singing of the organ-pipes seeped away, leaving in the still air of the church only the faint hiss of some leakage in the valves, and panting of a couple of pudgy schoolboys who'd been dragooned into pumping the bellows. Eliza applauded, and after a moment Caroline, recognizing the organist, followed suit.