“But what is the point?”

“The Doctor has taught me to hide messages in letters.”

“It’s your intention to be writing letters to this man?”

“If I do not,” she said innocently, “how can I expect to receive any?”

“Why would you want to?” Jack asked.

“To continue my education.”

“Owff!” blurted Jack, and he doubled over as if Turk had kicked him in the belly.

“A guessing-game?” Eliza said coolly. “It’s got to be either: you think I’m already too educated, or: you hoped it would be something else.”

“Both,” Jack said. “You’ve put hours into improving your mind-with nothing to show for it. I’d hoped you had gotten financial backing out of the Doctor, or that Sophie.”

Eliza laughed. “I’ve told you, over and over, that I never came within half a mile of Sophie. The Doctor let me climb a church-steeple that looks down over Herrenhausen, her great garden, so that I could watch while she went out for one of her walks. That’s as close as someone like me could ever come to someone like her.”

“Why bother, then?”

“It was enough for me simply to lay eyes on her: the daughter of the Winter Queen, and great-granddaughter of Mary Queen of Scots. You would never understand.”

“It’s just that you are always on about money, and I cannot see how staring at some bitch in a French dress, from a mile away, relates to that.”

“Hanover is a poor country anyway-it’s not as if they have much money to gamble on our endeavours.”

“Haw! If that’s poverty, give me some!”

“Why do you think the Doctor is going through such exertions to find investors for the silver mine?”

“Thank you-you’ve brought me back to my question: what does the Doctor want?”

“To translate all human knowledge into a new philosophical language, consisting of numbers. To write it down in a vast Encyclopedia that will be a sort of machine, not only for finding old knowledge but for making new, by carrying out certain logical operations on those numbers-and to employ all of this in a great project of bringing religious conflict to an end, and raising Vagabonds up out of squalor and liberating their potential energy-whatever that means.”

“Speaking for myself, I’d like a pot of beer and, later, to have my face trapped between your inner thighs.”

“It’s a big world-perhaps you and the Doctor can both realize your ambitions,” she said after giving the matter some thought. “I’m finding horseback-riding enjoyable but ultimately frustrating. ”

“Don’t look to me for sympathy.”

The canal came together with others, and at some point they were on the river Amstel, which took them into the place, just short of its collision with the river Ij, where it had long ago been dammed up by the beaver-like Dutchmen. Then (as Jack the veteran reader of fortifications could see), as stealable objects, lootable churches, and rapable women had accumulated around this Amstel-Dam, those who had the most to lose had created Lines of Circumvallation. To the north, the broad Ij-more an arm of the sea than a proper river-served as a kind of moat. But on the landward side they’d thrown up walls, surrounding Amstel-Dam in a U, the prongs of the U touching the Ij to either side of where the Amstel joined it, and the bend at the bottom of the U crossing the Amstel upstream of the Dam. The dirt for the walls had to come from somewhere. Lacking hills, they’d taken it from excavations, which conveniently filled with ground-water to become moats. But to the avid Dutch there was no moat that could not be put to work as a canal. As the land inside each U had filled up with buildings, newly arrived strivers had put up buildings outside the walls, making it necessary to create new, larger Us encompassing the old. The city was like a tree, as long as it lived surrounding its core with new growth. Outer layers were big, the canals widely spaced, but in the middle of town they were only a stone’s throw apart, so that Jack and Eliza were always crossing over cleverly counter-weighted drawbridges. As they did so they stared up and down the canals, carpeted with low boats that could skim underneath the bridges, and (on the Amstel, and some larger canals) creaking sloops with collapsible masts. Even the small boats could carry enormous loads below the water-line. The canals and the boats explained, then, why it was possible to move about in Amsterdam at all: the torrent of cargo that clogged roads in the countryside was here transferred to boats, and the streets, for the most part, opened to people.

Long rows of five-story houses fronted on canals. A few ancient timber structures still stood in the middle of town, but almost all of the buildings were brick, trimmed with white and painted over with tar. Jack marvelled like a yokel at the sight of barn doors on the fifth story of a building, opening out onto a sheer drop to a canal. A single timber projected into space above to serve as a cargo hoist. Unlike those Leipziger houses, with storage only in the attic, these were for nothing but.

The richest of those warehouse-streets was Warmoesstraat, and when they’d crossed over it they were in a long plaza called Damplatz, which as far as Jack could tell was just the original Dam, paved over. It had men in turbans and outlandish furry hats, and satin-clad cavaliers sweeping their plumed chapeaus off to bow to each other, and mighty buildings, and other features that might have given Jack an afternoon’s gawking. But before he could even begin, some kind of phenomenon on the scale of a War, Fire, or Biblical Deluge demanded his attention off to the north. He turned his face into a clammy breeze and stared down the length of a short, fat canal to discover a low brown cloud obscuring the horizon. Perhaps it was the pall of smoke from a fire as big as the one that had destroyed London. No, it was a brushy forest, a leafless thicket several miles broad. Or perhaps a besieging army, a hundred times the size of the Turk’s, all armed with pikes as big as pine-trees and aflutter with ensigns and pennants.

In the end, it took Jack several minutes’ looking to allow himself to believe that he was viewing all of the world’s ships at one time-their individual masts, ropes, and spars merging into a horizon through which a few churches and windmills on the other side of it could be made out as dark blurs. Ships entering from, or departing toward, the Ijsselmeer beyond, fired rippling gun-salutes and were answered by Dutch shore-batteries, spawning oozy smoke-clouds that clung about the rigging of all those ships and seemingly glued them all into a continuous fabric, like mud daubed into a wattle of dry sticks. The waves of the sea could be seen as slow-spreading news.

Once Jack had a few hours to adjust to the peculiarity of Amsterdam’s buildings, its water-streets, the people’s aggressive cleanliness, their barking language, and their inability to settle on this or that Church, he understood the place. All of its quarters and neighborhoods were the same as in any other city. The knife-grinders might dress like Deacons, but they still ground knives the same way as the ones in Paris. Even the waterfront was just a stupendously larger rendition of the Thames.

But then they wandered into a neighborhood the likes of which Jack had never seen anywhere- or rather the neighborhood wandered into them, for this was a rambling Mobb. Whereas most of Amsterdam was divided among richer and poorer in the usual way, this roving neighborhood was indiscriminately mixed-up: just as shocking to Vagabond Jack as it would be to a French nobleman. Even from a distance, as the neighborhood came up the street towards Jack and Eliza, he could see that it was soaked with tension. They were like a rabble gathered before palace gates, awaiting news of the death of a King. But as Jack could plainly see when the neighborhood had flowed round them and swept them up, there were no palace gates here, nor anything of that sort.