Eleanor and Frau Heppner were sitting there drinking coffee. Princess Caroline was reading a book aloud. As you might imagine, they were all taken aback; but Frau Heppner, the midwife, took one look at me, muttered something in German, and got to her feet.

Eleanor’s face appeared above me. “Frau Heppner says, ‘At last, the day becomes interesting!’”

People who are especially bad, and know that they are, such as Father Edouard de Gex, may be drawn to religion because they harbor a desperate hope that it has some power to make them virtuous-to name their demons and to cast them out. But if they are as clever as he is, they can find ways to pervert their own faith and make it serve whatever bad intentions they had to begin with. Doctor, I have come to the conclusion that the true benefit of religion is not to make people virtuous, which is impossible, but to put a sort of bridle on the worst excesses of their viciousness.

I do not know Eleanor well. Not well enough to know what vices may be lurking in her soul. She does not disdain religion (as did Jack, who might have benefited from it). Neither does she cling to it morbidly, like Father Edouard de Gex. This gives me hope that in her case religion will do what it is supposed to do, namely, stay her hand when she falls under the sway of some evil impulse. I have no choice but to believe that, for I let her take my baby. The child passed straightaway from the midwife’s hands to Eleanor’s arms, and she gathered it to her bosom as if she knew what she was doing. I did not try to fight this. I was so exhausted I could scarcely move, and afterwards I slept as if I did not care whether I ever woke up or not.

In the plaintext version of my story of labor and delivery, Doctor, I tell the version that everyone at the Binnenhof believes, which is that because of the disgraceful cowardice of Marie and of that midwife, my baby died, and that I would have died, too, if brave Brigitte had not taken me to the room where the good German nurse, Frau Heppner, saw to it that the afterbirth was removed from my womb so that the bleeding stopped, and thereby saved my life.

That is all nonsense. But one paragraph of it is true, and that is where I speak of the physical joy that comes over one’s body when the burden it has borne for nine months is finally let go-only to be replaced a few moments later by a new burden, this one of a spiritual nature. In the plaintext story it is a burden of grief over the death of my child. But in the real story-which is always more complicated-it is a burden of uncertainty, and sadness over tragedies that may never happen. I have gone back to live by myself at the house of Huygens, and the baby remains at the Binnenhof in the care of Frau Heppner and Eleanor. We have already begun to circulate the story that he is an orphan, born to a woman on a canal-boat on the Rhine as she escaped from a massacre in the Palatinate.

It seems likely that I shall live. Then I will take up this baby and try to make my way to London, and build a life for both of us there. If I should sicken and die, Eleanor will take him. But sooner or later, whether tomorrow or twenty years from now, he and I shall be separated in some way, and he shall be out in the world somewhere, living a life known to me only imperfectly. God willing, he will outlive me.

In a few weeks or months, there shall be a parting of ways here at the Hague. The baby and I will go west. Eleanor and Caroline will journey east and enjoy the hospitality, and take part in the schemes of, the women whom you serve.

When, God willing, I reach London I shall write you a letter. If you receive no such letter, it means that while I was recuperating I fell victim to some larger scheme of d’Avaux. He may or may not want the baby dead. He certainly wants me at Versailles, where I shall be none the less in his power for being the unwilling wife of Etienne d’Arcachon. The next few weeks, when I am too weak to move, are the most dangerous time.

There remain only two loose ends to clear up: one, if Etienne is the father, why is the baby flawless? And two, if my cypher has been broken, and my private writings are being read by thecabinet noir , why am I telling you all of these secrets?

Actually there is a third loose end, of a sort, which may have been troubling you: why would I sleep with Etienne in the first place, when I had my pick of ten million horny Frenchmen?

All three of these loose ends may be neatly tied up by a single piece of information. During my time at Versailles I got to know Bonaventure Rossignol, the King’s cryptanalyst. Rossignol, or Bon-bon as I like to call him (hello, Bon-bon!) was sent out to the Rhine front last autumn during the build-up to the invasion of the Palatinate. When I blundered in to the middle of it all, and got into trouble, Bon-bon became aware of it within a few hours, for he was reading everyone’s despatches, and came galloping-literally-to my rescue. It is difficult to tell the story right under present circumstances, and so I’ll jump to the end of it, and admit that his gallantry made my blood hot in a way I had never known before. It seems very crude and simple when I set it down thus, but at root it is a crude and simple thing, no? I attacked him. We made love several times. It was very sweet. But we had to devise a way out for me. Choices were few. The best plan we could come up with was that I seduced Etienne d’Arcachon, or rather stood by numbly in a sort of out-of-body trance while he seduced me. This I then parlayed into an escape north. I wrote it all down in a journal. When I got to the Hague, d’Avaux became aware of the existence of that journal and prevailed upon the King’s cryptanalyst to translate it-which he did, though he left out all the best parts, namely, those passages in which he himself played the romantic hero. He could not make me out to be innocent, for d’Avaux already knew too much, and too many Frenchmen had witnessed my deeds. Instead Bon-bon contrived to tell the story in such as way as to make me into the paramour of Etienne: the true-breeding woman of his, and his family’s, dreams.

I must stop writing now. My body wants to suckle him, and when at night I hear him cry out from across the square, my breasts let down a thin trickle of milk, which I then wash away with a heavier flood of tears. If I were a man, I’d say I was unmanned. As I am a woman, I’ll say I am over-womanned. Good-bye. If when you go back to Hanover you meet a little girl named Caroline, teach her as well as you have taught Sophie and Sophie Charlotte, for I prophesy that she will put both of them in the shade. And if Caroline is accompanied by a little orphan boy, said to have been born on the Rhine, then you shall know his story, and who is his father, and what became of his mother.

Eliza

Thou art too narrow, wretch, to comprehend

Even thy selfe: yea though thou wouldst but bend

To know thy body. Have not all soules thought

For many ages, that our body’is wrought

Of Ayre, and Fire, and other Elements?

And now they thinke of new ingredients,

And one Soule thinkes one, and another way

Another thinkes, and ’Tis an even lay.

Knowst thou but how the stone doth enter in

The bladders cave, and never break the skinne?

–John Donne, Of the Progresse of the Soule,

The Second Anniversarie

THE VISITOR-FIFTY-SIX YEARSold, but a good deal more vigorous than the host-feigned aloofness as he watched his bookish minions fan out among the stacks, boxes, shelves, and barrels that now constituted the personal library of Daniel Waterhouse. One of them strayed towards an open keg. His master warned him away with a barrage of clucking, harrumphing, and finger-snaps. “We must assume that anything Mr. Waterhouse has placed in a barrel, is bound for Boston!”