The land about the garden was flat, and provided no heights from which to spy down into it. There was a church-steeple nearby, with a black pyramidal roof that loomed like a hooded Inquisitor glowering down on the pagan spectacle below. Supposing anyone was watching from that belfry, by walking round the pool Caroline could vanish behind the upside-down cataract of the great fountain. By the same trick the gloomy spire was eliminated from her prospects and she was left perfectly alone.

The breeze was out of the south. It stretched the fountain-mist out into shimmering, rippling curtains that raced across the pool and rushed up the broad path that led directly to Sophie’s house. The Palace was visible indistinctly, as if seen in a befogged mirror. Caroline thought she could resolve a white frock on one of the stairways, and a white head of hair above it, and a white arm waving off the carriage that had been trotted out, and shooing away the offered sedan chair.

Sophie always told Caroline to stand in the mist because it was good for her complexion. Caroline had managed to get married and have four children notwithstanding all grievances that might be leveled at her skin. But she always tried to stand in the mist anyway because she knew it would please Sophie. It was cold on her cheeks, and smelled fishy. The sheets and vortices of mist looked like pages of ghostly books tumbling towards her. Over the pool they were so white and substantial she could almost read them. But once they hurtled past her they quickly paled and vanished, diluted by vacant air.

A man was standing near her at the rim of the pool. He was already too close. A stranger should never have been in the garden anyway! But she did not cry out, for he was very old. He was not looking at Caroline, but at the fountain. He was habited something like a gentleman, but no wig covered his bald pate and no sword dangled at his side. He was encompassed in a long traveling-cloak. This was no mere affectation of style, for the garment was rumpled and spattered, and the man’s boots had not been touched by a servant in weeks.

When he sensed that Caroline was looking his way, he reached into a cloak-pocket, drew out a gravid purse of crimson leather, and worried it open with parsimonious movements of his worn-out fingers. Out of it he plucked a large golden coin. This he flipped into the air above the pool. It shone, a yellow mote, for an instant before the silver torrent smashed it down into the pool.

“A penny for your royal highness’s thoughts,” the man said, in English.

“To me it looked like a guinea,” she returned. She was annoyed beyond words that this interloper was here; but she was well-brought-up, and would no sooner let her annoyance be known than George Augustus would fall off his horse while inspecting the royal guard.

The old man shrugged, then pulled the purse all the way open and turned it inside out with a thrust of his thumbs, disbursing a shower of golden guineas into the pool.

“A village could live on that for a year,” Caroline observed. “When you have excused yourself I shall have those coins taken up and put in the poor-box.”

“Then do you be prepared for your Lutheran vicar to send them back to you with a curt note,” the old man returned.

“To what effect?”

“He might write, ‘Your Royal Highness should save these artifacts and give them to paupers in England, where they have some worth, because the Sovereign says they do.’ ”

“This is a very odd conversation-” Caroline began.

“Forgive me. I come from people who are no respecters of royals. Our byword is the equality of all men before God. And so when a Princess inflicts upon me an odd, unlooked-for conversation, I cannot rest until I have sought her out and repaid her.”

“When and where did I do you this injury?”

“Injury? Nay, ’twas a sort of curious favor. When? Last October, though you must have set it in motion long before. Where? Boston.”

“You are Daniel Waterhouse!”

“Your humble and obedient servant. Oh, how it would goad my father to hear his son saying that to a Princess.”

“You deserve honors, Doctor, and all the comforts I can afford you. Why are you come to me in the style of a Vagabond? And why do you open with these queer remarks about guineas?”

Daniel Waterhouse was shaking his head. “Queen Anne has writ another of her letters to Sophie…”

“Oh, dear.”

“Or rather Bolingbroke has, and set it before the poor woman to paw her signature at the end. The letter has been sped hence by a delegation of Englishmen: a few Tories, to inflict the humiliation, and some Whigs, to suffer it. The former are grand and consequential-many who would be in Bolingbroke’s graces vied for few positions. But for the whipping-boy slots, there was very little enthusiasm shown, among Whigs. Rather, a few dried-up third-raters had to be herded aboard the ship at Tower Wharf, like so many Blackamoors on the Guinea coast. I construed this as an opportunity to come and repay my debt to your royal highness.”

“What, with guineas?”

“Nay, not a monetary debt. I refer, again, to when you surprized me in Boston with a queer and unlooked-for conversation, which led presently to sea-voyage and adventure.”

“It pleases me to be having the conversation,” Caroline said, “and to be sure, I should like nothing better than to be repaid with a sea-voyage and an adventure. But such things are for picaroon-romances. Not for Princesses.”

“You shall have the voyage soon enough, though it be nothing more than a Channel crossing. Once you set foot on English soil at Greenwich, an adventure-of what sort I daren’t guess-will be inevitable.”

“That much was true whether or not you came here,” Caroline said, “so why did you come? To see Leibniz?”

“He is not in town, alas.”

“It bears on the guineas, does it not?”

“It does.”

“Then by the same token it must have something to do with the man who makes them: Sir Isaac Newton.”

“Leibniz told me that you required little instruction-that you worked things out for yourself. I see that this was more than avuncular pride.”

“Then I am sorry to let you know I have come to the end of my deductions. I asked you to go to London. It pleased me very much that you did. You have sought out Sir Isaac there, and renewed your old acquaintance with him-this is praiseworthy.”

“Only in the sense that a geek at a fair is to be praised for swallowing a sword.”

“Pfui! To cross the Atlantic in winter and enter into the Lion’s Den is a Herculean labor. I could not be more pleased with what you have accomplished to this point.”

“You forget that I do not care whether you are pleased. I do nothing to earn your praise. I have undertaken this work simply because I phant’sy that my ends are akin to yours; and to those ends, you have provided me with some of the means.”

Caroline had to turn her face full into the mist to cool it now-like a red-hot iron that must be tempered in water lest it shatter in proof.

“I have heard that there were still men like you about England,” she said finally, “and it is good that I have now met you privily and in advance, lest I should spoil my first weeks there crying ‘Off with his head!’ several times each day before breakfast.”

“What is at issue today, is whether you, or George Louis, or Sophie, shall ever reign in England at all,” Daniel Waterhouse said. “Or will a Jacobite Mobb, or a Stuart King, cry off with your heads?”

This thought was less frightening than it was interesting. Princess Caroline quite forgot her anger, and entertained it. “Of course I am aware that England contains many Jacobites,” she said. “But the Act of Settlement has been the law of the land since 1701. Our right to the throne cannot really be in question, can it?”

“We decapitated Sophie’s uncle. I was there. There were sound reasons for it. But it brought unforeseen perils. It put the heads of Princes and Princesses into play, as it were, like kick-balls on a field, to be booted back and forth by whichever gang of players was most numerous, or most adroit. Do you believe what some say, that Sophie Charlotte was assassinated in Berlin?”