The Confusion

They walked across Leipzig’s town square, which, the last time Eliza had seen it, had been a maze of leads and gaps among fragrant stacks of baled, barrelled, and trade-marked goods. Today it was all but empty, and sheets of dust skimmed across its paving-stones driven by spring gusts. Here and there, well-dressed men had clumped in twos and threes to smoke pipes and converse-not in the amused, aghast tones of merchants haggling over terms, but more as old men do on Sunday afternoons as they stroll out of church. As Eliza and Caroline followed the Doctor into the streets that issued from the square on the yonder side, they began to see business transacted, of a kind-but only at open-air coffee-houses, and nothing more weighty than a third cup of coffee, or a second slice of cake. The street was ventilated with broad vaulted arches, each of which, as Eliza knew, led into the courtyard of a trading-house. But half of them were closed, and in those that were open, Eliza spied, not throngs of hollering commercants but unraveling knots of semi-idle men, smoking and sipping. For all that, though, the scene was never gloomy. It felt as though a holiday had been declared, not only for Christians, or Jews, or Mahometans, but for all at once. And this holiday was all the more enjoyable for being unwanted and unplanned. Leipzig was calm-as if the quicksilver that, as a rule, intoxicated these merchants were ebbing from their bloodstreams. When they all came together in a place like Leipzig, a madness came over them, and transformed them into a new kind of organism, as fish schooled. One such jumping, irritable, rapier-quick creature, if he were to appear in the town square of a medieval village, would be a useless, incomprehensible nuisance. But a thousand of them together amounted to something that worked, and that wrought prodigies that could never be imagined by villagers. That spell had been undone today, and the quiet of the village reigned.

A golden Mercury leapt from the keystone of an especially grand arch halfway up the street. The gates below it were closed. But they were not locked. The Doctor pushed one of them open, and extended an arm, inviting Eliza to precede him. She hesitated and looked both ways. This was a habit from Versailles, where merely to step over a threshold in the company of a person constituted a Move in the social chess-game, sure to be noted, talked of, and responded to; indeed people there might devote hours to engineering the details: seeing to it that certain persons were in positions to notice the event, and encoding messages in who preceded whom. Here it was faintly ridiculous, and she knew it; but the habit died hard. She looked, and acquired the knowledge that her entry into the House of the Golden Mercury was witnessed by half a dozen persons: an idler collapsed in a doorway, a Lutheran minister, a widow sweeping a stoop, a boy running a message, a Jew in a furry hat, and a very large bearded man with one sleeve empty and the opposite hand gripping a long staff.

This latter she recognized. From time to time, during the long barge-ride up the Elbe, she’d glimpsed such a figure striding along the riverbank, or betimes wading like a three-hundred-pound stork, darting at the water with a fish-spear. Here, he almost blended in. For Leipzig was the crossroads of the Venice-Lubeck and the Cologne-Kiev highways, and served as a catch-pot for all sorts of exotic ramblers, human oddities, and people who could not make up their minds which turn to take. She marked him only because she had seen him before. And in other circumstances she would have devoted the remainder of the week to puzzling over what he was doing here; but too much else was on her mind now, and this crowded Flail-arm out of her consciousness. She walked into the court of the House of the Golden Mercury as if she owned the place.

It was like a graveyard, save that instead of cenotaphs and head-stones, it was cluttered with stacks and piles of goods: bales of cloth, barrels of oil, crates of china. She could not see far in any direction; but craning her neck she could see up five stories to the big cargo-doors let into the gables of the House. These were a-gape, swinging untended in the breeze. Within, the attics of the House of Hacklheber were empty. Their contents had all been let down into the courtyard, as if Lothar had decided to liquidate all. But there were no buyers.