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."
"And what came of late to damp that fire?"
"I adopted an orphan."
"Oh."
"It is trite, I know. To defeat Death, or to phant'sy that one has defeated it, by having a child. But I could not manage it before. For the same pox that slew my brothers left me unable to get a woman pregnant. I'll not speak of the motives that led to the taking of the boy from the orphanage where you kept him at Versailles. They were, as you have collected, quite beastly motives. I did not intend to love the boy. I did not even intend to keep him in my house. But as things came out, I did both—first kept him, then loved him—and as time went on, my mind turned to Alchemy, and to the lost Gold of Solomon, less and less frequently. I'd not thought of it for half a year until you reminded me of it just now."
"Then whatever other differences you and I may have, we are united in seeing it as foolishness."
"Oh, I don't think it is the least bit foolish," said Lothar, raising the pocked ridges where eyebrows had once sprouted, "all I said was that I no longer think of it. I'm ready to die. And whether I die rich or poor is of little account to me. But you are gravely mistaken if you believe that you can take Johann away from me. For that truly would be kidnapping; it would break his heart, and that would break yours."
"As to that, I am not mistaken. I know this, and have known it, ever since I learned, from the Doctor, that he was being raised as your son." Eliza looked up to solicit a confirmation from Leibniz. But it seemed that the Doctor had some minutes ago quietly taken Caroline aside, and led her off to some other corner of the courtyard so that Eliza and Lothar could talk privily.
"Son and sole heir," Lothar corrected her, "though, thanks to your intrigues, I have nothing to will to him save debts."
"That could be changed."
"Then why do you not change it? What is it you want? Why are you here?"
"To see him. To hold him."
"Granted! Truly and happily granted. You may move in with me here, for all I care; you're welcome to do so. But you can't take him."
"You are in no position to dictate terms."
"Foolish girl! They're not my terms, and I am not dictating them! They are the terms of the world. You cannot admit to this world that you bore a child out of wedlock. You cannot even admit it to the boy—until he is older, perhaps, and able to fathom such things. You can take him back and give him to the Jesuits, who will raise him up to be a priest, who will fault his mother for having sinned. Or you can leave him in my care, and visit him whenever you will. In a year or two he'll be old enough to travel—he can visit you incognito in France, if that shall please you. He shall be a Baron and a banker, a gentleman, a Protestant, the cleverest scholar in Leipzig; but he shall never be yours."
"I know. I know all of these things—have known them for years."
Lothar's ravaged face was a difficult one to read, but he seemed exasperated now, or bewildered. "After all this," he said, "I did not expect you to be such a confused person."
"You did not? How unreasonable of you. You belabor me for being confused—yet you took the boy, not for love of him, but for hate of me, and out of lust for Alchemical gold—only to change your mind!"
Lothar shrugged. "Perhaps that is the real Alchemy."
"Would that such Alchemy could work its spell on me, and make me as content as you seem."
"I shall grant you this much," said Lothar. "The taking of the gold at Bonanza put me into a vengeful rage that kept me awake at night, and filled all of my days, for a long time, and drove me to hurt you as badly as I supposed you had hurt me. I wanted you to fathom my anger. You then went on to destroy me, cleverly and systematically, over a span of years. You used my own greed as a weapon against me. And if I seem content to you, why, in part it is because I have a son. But in part it is because of you, Eliza, your Barock fury, sustained for so long and expressed so Barockly. You showed, you expressed, what I once felt; and from that, I knew that I had struck home, that a spark had passed between us."
"Very well. Enough of this. Do you have, Lothar, a spare banca at which I could sit down for some minutes, and write a letter?"
Lothar spread his hands out, palms up, as if handing the place over to her. "Take your pick, madame."
SHE WOULDN'T HAVE NOTICED FLAIL-ARM if not for this gesture of Lothar's, so stealthily had the big amputee crept into the House. But as it happened, she turned on the balls of her feet to gaze into the court, and saw in the corner of her eye that a new thing had been added to the jumble-sale: a tall man with a beard, who had chosen this moment to step out from behind a crate. As before, he held a long walking-staff; but now something had been added to its end: the leaf-shaped warhead of a harpoon, its twin edges white where the whetstone had scoured them. This he hefted in his one hand, bringing it up above his shoulder, and he swung the shining adder's head about so that it pointed at the heart of Lothar.
Now Eliza—who only a couple of hours ago had been preaching to Caroline about the importance of noticing, and connecting—at last took her own advice. There was no telling how long it might have taken for her to recognize Flail-arm as Yevgeny the Raskolnik if he had not suddenly appeared gripping a harpoon, and making ready to kill Lothar; but these two data did the trick. She remembered now seeing this Yevgeny in the company of Jack in Amsterdam. Eliza had even borrowed his harpoon, and in a fit of pique hurled it at Jack. Yevgeny must have become, and might still be, a member of Jack's pirate-band. He must have peeled off from the group and come back to Christendom for some reason. He'd been keeping an eye on Eliza, and, in consequence, had found himself in Leipzig, before the gates of the house of the man who, as he supposed, was Jack's worst enemy. And now he was about three heartbeats away from doing what any red-blooded pirate would, when presented with such an opportunity.