“I was taken a slave just like your Abigail,” Eliza said. “ ’Twas as if Mummy and I’d been plucked off the beach by a rogue wave and swallowed by the Deep. No man came forward to ransom me. Does that mean it was just that I was so taken?”

“Now you’re talking nonsense. I don’t-”

“If ’Tis evil for Abigail to be a slave-as I believe-then your offer of service to me is neither here nor there. If she should be free, all the others should be as well. That you’re willing to do me a favor or two should not advance her to the head of the queue.”

“I see, now you’re making it into a grand moral question. I am a soldier and we have good reasons to be suspicious of those.”

They had entered into a broad square on the east side of the Binnenhof, called the Plein. Bob was looking about alertly. A stone’s throw from here was a guard-house that served as a gaol; he might have been wondering whether Eliza was trying to lead him straight into it.

But instead she stopped in front of a house: a large place, grand after the Barock style, but a little odd in its decorations. For atop the chimneys, where one would normally expect to see crosses or statues of Greek gods, there were armillary spheres, weathercocks, and swivel-mounted telescopes. Eliza fished in the folds of her waistband, nudged the stiletto out of the way, found the key.

“What’s this, a convent?”

“Don’t be absurd, do I look like some French mademoiselle who stays at such places?”

“A rooming-house?”

“It is the house of a friend. A friend of a friend, really.”

Eliza swung the key round on the end of the red ribbon to which she had tied it. “Come in,” she finally said.

“Beg pardon?”

“Come inside this house with me that we may continue our conversation.”

“The neighbors-”

“Nothing that could happen here could possibly faze this gentleman’s neighbors.”

“What of the gentleman himself?”

“He is asleep,” Eliza said, unlocking the front door. “Be quiet.”

“Asleep, at noon?”

“He stirs at night-to make observations of the stars,” Eliza said, glancing upwards. Mounted to the roof of the house, four stories above their heads, was a wooden platform with a tubular device projecting over the edge-too frail to shoot cannonballs.

The first floor’s main room might have been grand, for its generous windows looked out over the Plein and the Binnenhof. But it was cluttered with the debris of lens- and mirror-grinding-always messy, sometimes dangerous-and with thousands of books. Though Bob would not know this, these were not only about Natural Philosophy but history and literature as well, and nearly all of them were in French or Latin.

To Bob these artifacts were only moderately strange, and he learned to overlook them after a few moments’ nervous glancing around the room. What really paralyzed him was the omnipresent noise-not because it was loud, but because it wasn’t. The room contained at least two dozen clocks, or sub-assemblies of clocks, driven by weights or springs whose altitude or tension stored enough energy, summed, to raise a barn. That power was restrained and disciplined by toothy mechanisms of various designs: brass insects creeping implacably around the rims of barbed wheels, constellations of metal stars hung on dark stolid axle-trees, all marching or dancing to the beat of swinging plumb-bobs.

Now a man in Bob Shaftoe’s trade owed his longevity, in part, to his alertness-his sensitivity to (among other things) significant noises. Even the dimmest recruits could be relied on to notice the loud noises. A senior man like Bob was supposed to scrutinize the faint ones. Eliza got the impression that Bob was the sort of bloke who was forever shushing every man in the room, demanding absolute stillness so that he could hold his breath and make out whether that faint sporadic itching was a mouse in the cupboard, or enemy miners tunnelling under the fortifications. Whether that distant rhythm was a cobbler next door or an infantry regiment marching into position outside of town.

Every gear and bearing in this room was making the sort of sound that normally made Bob Shaftoe freeze like a startled animal. Even after he’d gotten it through his head that they were all clocks, or studies for clocks, he was hushed and intimidated by a sense of being surrounded by patient mechanical life. He stood at attention in the middle of the big room, hands in his pockets, blowing steam from his mouth and darting his eyes to and fro. These clocks were made to tell time precisely and nothing else. There were no bells, no chimes, and certainly no cuckoos. If Bob was waiting for such entertainments, he’d wait until he was a dusty skeleton surrounded by cobweb-clogged gears.

Eliza noted that he had shaved before going out on this morning’s strange errand, something that would never have entered Jack’s mind, and she wondered how it all worked-what train of thoughts made a man say, “I had better scrape my face with a blade before undertaking this one.” Perhaps it was some sort of a symbolic love-offering to his Abigail.

“It is all a question of pride, isn’t it?” Eliza said, stuffing a cube of peat into the iron stove. “Or honor, as you’d probably style it.”

Bob looked at her instead of answering; or maybe his look was his answer.

“Come on, you don’t have to be that quiet,” she said, setting a kettle on the stove to heat.

“What Jack and I have in common is an aversion to begging,” he said finally.

“Just as I thought. So, rather than beg Abigail’s ransom from me, you are proposing a sort of financial transaction-a loan, to be paid back in service.”

“I don’t know the words, the terms. Something like that is what I had in mind.”

“Then why me? You’re in the Dutch Republic. This is the financial capital of the world. You don’t need to seek out one particular lender. You could propose this deal to anyone.”

Bob had clutched a double handful of his cloak and was wringing it slowly. “The confusions of the financial markets are bewildering to me-I prefer not to treat with strangers…”

“What am I to you if not a stranger?” Eliza asked, laughing. “I am worse than a stranger, I threw a spear at your brother.”

“Yes, and that is what makes you not a stranger to me, it is how I know you.”

“It is proof that I hate slavery, you mean?”

“Proof of that and of other personal qualities-qualities that enter into this matter.”

“I am no Person of Quality, or of qualities-do not speak to me of that. It is proof only that my hatred of slavery makes me do irrational things-which is what you are asking me to do now.”

Bob lost his grip on his cloak-wad and sat down unsteadily on a stack of books.

Eliza continued, “She threw a harpoon at my brother-she’ll throw some money at me-is that how it goes?”

Bob Shaftoe put his hands over his face and began to cry, so quietly that any sounds he made were drowned out by the whirring and ticking of the clocks.

Eliza retreated into the kitchen, and went back to a cool corner where some sausage-casings had been rolled up on a stick. She unrolled six inches-on second thought, twelve-and cut it off. Then she tied a knot in one end. She fit the little sock of sheep-gut over the handle of a meat-axe that was projecting firmly into the air above a chopping-block, then, with her fingertips, coaxed the open end of it to begin rolling up the handle. Once it was started, with a quick movement of her hand she rolled the whole length up to make a translucent torus with the knotted end stretched across the middle like a drum-head. Gathering her skirts up one leg, she tucked the object into the hem of her stocking, which came up to about mid-thigh, and finally went back into the great room where Bob Shaftoe was weeping.