The Confusion

“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.”

“And what came of late to damp that fire?”

“I adopted an orphan.”

“Oh.”