Eliza, who did not find this a very satisfying answer, said nothing. Her silence caused Fatio to get that pleading look again. She turned away from him-the only alternative being to scoff and roll her eyes-and gazed down into the Plein. There something caught her eye: a long figure darkly cloaked, silver hair spilling out onto his shoulders. He had lately emerged from the Grenadiers’ Gate, as if he had just excused himself from the party. A gust of steam flourished from his mouth as he shouted, “How is the seeing tonight?”

“Much better than I should like,” returned Eliza.

“Bad, very bad, Mr. Root, because of our troublesome neighbor!”

“Do not be disheartened,” said Enoch the Red, “I believe that Pegasus, to-night, shall be adorned by a meteor; turn your telescope thither.”

Eliza and Fatio both turned and looked towards the telescope, which was situated cater-corner from them, meaning that Huygens and Waterhouse could neither hear nor see Enoch Root. When they turned back around, Root had turned his back on them, and was vanishing into one of the many narrow side-streets of the Hofgebied.

“Most disappointing! I was going to invite him up here… he must have come from the fete at the Binnenhof,” Fatio said.

Eliza finished the thought herself: Where he was hobnobbing with my brethren of the Dutch court-the same ones who cannot keep their mouths shut concerning you, Eliza.

Fatio looked toward Polaris. “It is half past midnight, never mind what the church-bells say…”

“How can you tell?”

“By reading the positions of the stars. Pegasus is far to the west, there. It shall descend beneath the western horizon within two hours. A miserable place to make observations! And in any case, meteors come and go too quickly for one to aim a telescope at ’em… what did he mean?”

“Is this a fair sample of the esoteric brotherhood’s discourse? No wonder that Alchemists are famed mostly for blowing up their own dwellings,” Eliza said, feeling somewhat relieved to get this glimpse into the mystery, and to find nothing but bafflement there.

They spent the better part of an hour looking at, and arguing about, the gap in Saturn’s rings, which was named after Cassini, the French royal astronomer, and which Fatio could explain mathematically. Which was to say that Eliza was cold, bored, and ignored. Only one person could peer into the telescope’s eyepiece at a time, and these men quite forgot their manners, and never offered her a turn.

Then Fatio persuaded the others to point the telescope into Pegasus, or those few stars of it that had not yet been drowned in the North Sea. The search of Pegasus was not nearly so interesting to them as Saturn had been, and so they let Eliza look all she wanted, sweeping the instrument back and forth, hoping to catch the predicted meteor.

“Have you found something, Mademoiselle?” Fatio asked at one point, when he noticed Eliza’s stiff fingers pawing at the focusing-screw.

“A cloud, just peeking over the horizon.”

“Weather as fine as today’s could never last,” said Huygens, in a fair sample of Dutch pessimism; for the weather had been wretched.

“Does it have the appearance of a rain-cloud or…”

“That is what I am trying to establish,” Eliza said, trying to bring it into focus.

“Enoch was having you on a bit,” Huygens said, for the others had by now told him the story of Enoch’s enigmatic turn in the Plein. “He felt his joints aching and knew a change in the weather was in the offing! And he knew it would come out of Pegasus since that is in the west, and that is where the wind is from. Very clever.”

“A few wisps of cloud, indeed… but what I first mistook for heavy rain-clouds, is actually a ship under sail… taking advantage of the moon-light to raise her sails, and make a run up the coast,” Eliza said.

“Cloth-smugglers,” Waterhouse predicted, “coming in from round Ipswich.” Eliza stepped back and he took a turn at the eyepiece. “No, I’m wrong, ’Tis the wrong sail-plan for a smuggler.”

“She is rigged for speed, but proceeding cautiously just now,” Huygens pronounced. Then it was Fatio’s turn: “I would wager she is bringing contraband from France-salt, wine, or both.” And so they continued, more and more tediously, until Eliza announced that she was going down to bed.

SHE WAS AWAKENED BY THEtolling of a church-bell. For some reason she felt it was terribly important to count the strokes, but she woke up too late to be sure. She had left her long winter coat across the foot of her bed to make her toes a little warmer and she now sat up and snatched it and drew it round her shoulders in one quick movement, before the chill could rush through the porous linen of her nightgown. She swung her feet out of bed, poked at the pair of rabbit-pelt slippers on the floor to chase away any mice that might be using them as beds, and then pushed her feet into them.

For in somewhat the same way as rodents may quietly set up house-keeping in one’s clothing during the hours of darkness, an idea had established itself in Eliza’s mind while she had been asleep. She did not become fully conscious of this idea until a few minutes later when she went into the great room to stoke up the fire, and saw all of Huygens’s clocks reading the same time: a few minutes past nine o’clock in the morning.

She looked out a window over the Plein and saw high white clouds. From the myriad chimneys of the Binnenhof, plumes of smoke trailed eastwards before a steady onshore breeze. Perfect day for sand-sailing.

She went to the door of Huygens’s bedchamber and raised a fist, then held off. If she were wrong, it were foolish to disturb him. If she were right, it were foolish to spend a quarter of an hour waking him up and trying to convince him.

Huygens kept only a few horses here. The riding-fields of the Malieveld and the Koekamp lay only a musket-shot from the house, and so when he or any of his guests felt like going riding, they need only stroll to one of the many livery-stables that surrounded those places.

Eliza ran out a back door of the house, nearly knocking down a Dutch woman out sweeping the pavement, and took off round the corner running in her rabbit-slippers.

Then she faltered, remembering she’d not brought any money.

“Eliza!” someone shouted.

She turned around to see Nicolas Fatio de Duilliers running up the street after her.

“Do you have money?” she called.

“Yes!”

Eliza ran away from him and did not stop until she reached the nearest livery stable, a couple of hundred long strides away, far enough to get her heart pounding and her face flushed. By the time Fatio caught up with her she had wrapped up a negotiation with the owner; the Swiss mathematician came in the gate just in time to see Eliza thrusting a finger at him and shouting, “and he pays!”

Saddling the horses would take several minutes. Eliza felt on the verge of throwing up. Fatio was agitated, too, but breeding was at war with common sense in him, and breeding prevailed; he attempted to make conversation.

“I infer, Mademoiselle, that you too have received some communication from Enoch the Red on this morning?”

“Only if he came and whispered in my ear while I was sleeping!”

Fatio didn’t know what to make of that. “I encountered him a few minutes ago at my usual coffee-house… he elaborated on his cryptic statement of last night…”

“What we saw last night was enough for me,” Eliza answered. A sleepy stable-boy dropped a saddle, and instead of bending to pick it up, tried to make some witty comment. The owner was doing sums with a quill-pen that wouldn’t hold its ink. Tears of frustration came to Eliza’s eyes. “Damn it!”

“RIDING BARE-BACK IS LIKE RIDING,only more so,” Jack Shaftoe had said to her once. She preferred to remember Jack as little and as infrequently as possible, but now this memory came to her. Until the day they had met underneath Vienna, Eliza had never ridden a horse. Jack had taken obvious pleasure in teaching her the rudiments, more so when she seemed uncertain, or fell off, or let Turk run away with her. But after she had become expert, Jack had turned peevish and haughty, and lost no opportunity to remind her that riding well in a saddle was no accomplishment, and that until one learned to ride bare-back, one didn’t know how to ride at all. Jack knew all about it, of course, because it was how Vagabonds stole horses.