“I did a long time ago-you nearly broke it!” Peeling off the knotted length of sheep-gut like an elegant lady removing a silken glove.

“So this is a permanent condition?”

“Stop whining. A few moments ago, Jack, unless my eyes deceived me, I observed a startlingly large amount of yellow bile departing your body, and floating away downstream.”

“What are you talking about? I didn’t barf.”

“Think harder, Jack.”

“Oh- thatkind. I should not call it yellow but a pearly off-white. Though it has been years since I saw any. Perhaps it has yellowed over time, like cheese. Very well! Let’s say ’twas yellow.”

“Do you know what yellow bile is the humour of, Jack?”

“What am I, a physician?”

“It is the humour of anger and ill-temper. You were carrying a lot of it around.”

“Was I? Good thing I didn’t let it affect my behavior.”

“Actually I was hoping you might have a change of heart concerning needle and thread.”

“Oh, that? I was never opposed to it. Consider it done Eliza.”

From all I hear of Leibniz he must be very intelligent, and pleasant company in consequence. It is rare to find learned men who are clean, do not stink, and have a sense of humour.

–LISELOTTE IN A LETTER TO SOPHIE, 30JULY 1705

“JACQUES, SHOW THE GENTLEMAN THATbolt of the yellow watered silk… Jacques? Jacques!” Eliza moved on smoothly to some cruel jest about how difficult it was to find reliable and hard-working varlets nowadays, speaking in a French that was too good for Jack to understand. The gentleman in question-evidently a Parisian in the rag trade-took his nose out of Eliza’s cleavage long enough to glance up into her eyes and chuckle uncertainly-he sensed a bon mot had been issued but he hadn’t heard it.

“Cor, he’s surprised your tits come wi’ a head attached,” Jack observed.

“Shut up… one of these days, we’re going to meet someone who speaks English,” Eliza returned, and nodded at the bolt. “Would you please stay awake?”

“Haven’t been so awake in half a year-that’s the difficulty,” Jack said, stooping down to unroll an arm’s length of silk, and drawing it through the air like a flag, trying to make it waft. A shaft of sunlight would’ve been useful. But the only radiant heavenly body shedding light into this courtyard was Eliza’s-turned out in one of a few dresses she’d been working on for months. Jack had watched them come together out of what looked to him like scraps, and so the effect on him was not as powerful. But when Eliza walked through the market, she drew such looks that Jack practically had to bind his right arm to his side, lest it fly across his body and whip out the Damascus blade and teach the merchants of Leipzig some manners.

She got into a long difference of opinion with this Parisian, which ended when he handed her an old limp piece of paper that had been written on many times, in different hands, and then collected the bolt of yellow silk from Jack and walked away with it. Jack once again had to restrain his sword-hand. “This kills me.”

“Yes. You say that every time.”

“You’re certain that those scraps are worth something.”

“Yes! Says so right here,” Eliza said. “Would you like me to read it to you?” A dwarf came by selling chocolates.

“Won’t help. Nothing will, but silver in my pocket.”

“Are you worried I’m going to cheat you-being that you can’t read the numbers on these bills of exchange?”

“I’m worried something’ll happen to ’em before we can turn ’em into real money.”

“What is ‘real’ money, Jack? Answer me that.”

“You know, pieces of eight, or, how d’you say it, dollars-”

“Th-it starts with a T but it’s got a breathy sound behind it-‘thalers.’”

“D-d-d-dollars.”

“That’s a silly name for money, Jack-no one’ll ever take you seriously, talking that way.”

“Well, they shortened ‘Joachimsthaler’ to ‘thaler,’ so why not reform the word even further?”

AKIND OF STEADILY WAXINGmadness had beset them after a month or so at their hot-springs encampment-Jack had assumed it was the slow-burning fuse of the French Pox finally reaching significant parts of his mind, until Eliza had pointed out they’d been on bread and water and the occasional rasher of carp jerky for months. A soldier’s pay was not generous, but put together with what Jack had previously looted from the rich man’s house in Strasbourg, it would supply not only Turk with oats but also them with cabbages, potatoes, turnips, salt pork, and the occasional egg- as long as Jack didn’t mind spending all of it.As his commission-agents, he employed those two brimstone-miners, Hans and Hans. They were not free agents, but employees of one Herr Geidel of Joachimsthal, a nearby town where silver was dug out of the ground. Herr Geidel hired men like Hans and Hans to dig up the ore and refine it into irregular bars, which they took to a mint in the town to be coined into Joachimsthalers.

Herr Geidel, having learned that a strange armed man was lurking in the woods near his brimstone mine, had ridden out with a few musketeers to investigate, and discovered Eliza all alone, at her sewing. By the time Jack returned, hours later, Eliza and Herr Geidel had, if not exactly become friends, then at least recognized each other as being of the same type, and therefore as possible business partners, though it was by no means clear what kind of business. Herr Geidel had the highest opinion of Eliza and voiced confidence that she would make out handsomely at the Leipzig Fair. His immediate opinion of Jack was much lower-the only thing Jack seemed to have going for him was that Eliza was willing to partner up with him. Jack, for his part, put up with Herr Geidel because of the flabbergasting nature of what he did for a living: literally making money. The first several times this was explained to Jack, he put it down to a translation error. It couldn’t be real. “That’s all there is? Dig up some dirt, run it through a furnace, stamp a face and some words on it?”

“That’s what he seems to be saying,” Eliza had answered, puzzled for once. “In Barbary, all the coins were pieces of eight from Spain-I’ve never been anywhere near a mint. I was about to say ‘wouldn’t know a mint from a hole in the ground,’ but apparently that’s just what it is. ”

When it had gotten warm enough to move, they’d gone down into Joachimsthal and confirmed that it was little more than that. In essence the mint was a brute with a great big hammer and a punch. He was supplied with blank disks of silver-these were not money-put the punch on each one and bashed it with the hammer, mashing the portrait of some important hag, and some incantations in Latin, into it-at which point it was money. Officials, supervisors, assayers, clerks, guards, and, in general, the usual crowd of parasitical gentlefolk clustered around the brute with the hammer, but like lice on an ox they could not conceal the simple nature of the beast. The simplicity of money-making had fascinated Jack into a stupor. “Why should we ever leave this place? After all my wanderings I’ve found Heaven.”

“It can’t be that easy. Herr Geidel seems depressed-he’s branching out into brimstone and other ores-says he can’t make any money making money.”

“Obvious nonsense. Just trying to scare away competition.”

“Did you see all those abandoned mines, though?”

“Ran out of ore,” Jack had attempted.

“Then why were the great mining-engines still bestriding the pit-mouths? You’d think they’d’ve moved them to shafts that were still fruitful.”

Jack had had no answer. When next they’d seen Herr Geidel, Eliza had subjected him to a round of brutal questioning that would’ve gotten Jack into a duel had he done it, but coming from Eliza had only given Herr Geidel a heightened opinion of her. Geidel’s French was as miserable as Jack’s and so the discussion had gone slowly enough for Jack to follow: for reasons that no one around here fathomed, the Spanish could mine and refine silver in Mexico, and ship it halfway round the world (in spite of the most strenuous efforts by English, Dutch, French, Maltese, and Barbary pirates) cheaper than Herr Geidel and his drinking buddies could produce it in Joachimsthal and ship it a few days’ journey to Leipzig. Consequently, only the very richest mines in Europe were still operating. Herr Geidel’s strategy was to put idle miners to work digging up brimstone (before the European silver mines had crashed, this never would’ve worked because they had a strong guild, but now miners were cheap), then ship the brimstone to Leipzig and sell it cheap to gunpowder-makers, in hopes of bringing the cost of gunpowder, and hence of war, down.*Anyway, if war got cheap enough, all hell would break loose, some Spanish galleons might even get sunk, and the cost of silver would climb back to a more wholesome level.