“And you, Daniel?” Isaac inquired.

“I made myself ready twenty-five years ago, when I was dying of the Stone,” Daniel said, “and have oft wondered when Death would bother to come for me.”

“Then neither of us has anything to fear,” said Isaac. Which Daniel agreed with on a purely intellectual level; but still he flinched when a hefty mechanical clunk sounded from the chest, and its lid sprang open, driven by a pair of massive springs. Daniel missed what happened next because (as he was ashamed to realize) he had jumped behind Isaac. But now he stepped clear. He let the lanthorn drop to his side. It was no longer of any use. The chest was emitting its own light. Fountains of colored sparks gushed from several metal tubes that splayed from its rim, a bit like the iron pikes that adorned London Bridge’s Great Stone Gate. Their light blinded him for a few moments. But when his eyes adjusted he saw a little carved and painted figure-a poppet-jutting from the top of the box, bobbling up and down atop a coil spring that had thrust it into the air. The poppet was adorned with a motley fool’s cap with wee bells on the ends of its tentacles, and its face had been carven into a foolish grin. Illuminated from beneath by the fizzing sparklers, it wore a ghoulish and sinister aspect.

“Jack in the Box!” Daniel exclaimed.

Isaac approached the chest. The poppet had sprung up out of a mound of hundreds of coins. These had avalanched over the rim of the chest when the lid had sprung open, and were still tumbling to the deck in ones and twos. One of them rolled to within inches of Isaac’s toe. He stooped and picked it up. Daniel, ever the lab-assistant, held the light near to hand. Isaac stared at it for a quarter of a minute. Daniel’s lanthorn-arm began to ache, but he dared not move.

Finally it occurrred to Isaac to resume breathing. A tiny smacking noise came from his mouth as he re-animated his parts of speech.

“We must get back to the Tower of London straightaway.”

“I am all for it,” Daniel said, “but I’m afraid that the currents of the Thames and the Medway disagree with us.”

Book 7

Currency

There was the usual amount of corruption, intimidation, and rioting.

–SIR CHARLES PETRIE, DESCRIBING A PARLIAMENTARY ELECTION OF THE ERA

Do not pity me. I am at last going to satisfy my curiosity about the origin of things, which even Leibniz could never explain to me, to understand space, infinity, being and nothingness…

-SOPHIE CHARLOTTE, QUEEN OF PRUSSIA, ON HER DEATHBED AT AGE THIRTY-SIX

“ONCE UPON A TIME there was a penniless orphan girl named Wilhelmina Caroline, or Caroline for short. Father was a brilliant if odd man, who died young of the smallpox, leaving Mother at the mercy of his son by an earlier marriage. But this son had inherited neither his father’s wisdom nor his love for the beautiful mother of Caroline; and, conceiving of her as a wicked stepmother, and of the infant as a future rival, he cast them out. Mother took little Caroline up in her arms and fled to a house deep in the woods. The two lived almost as Vagabonds for some years, making occasional sojourns in the houses of more fortunate relations. But when the compassion of her family was spent, Mother was left with no choice but to marry the first suitor who came along: a brute who had been hit on the head when he was a child. This fellow cared little for Caroline’s mother and less for Caroline. He relegated them to a miserable life on the fringe of his household while he openly made love to his vile, ignorant, and wicked mistress.

“In time both stepfather and mistress died of smallpox. Not long after, Caroline’s mother also perished, leaving the little girl alone, penniless, and destitute.

“Only one heirloom passed to Caroline upon her mother’s death, for it was the only thing that could not be separated from her by pestilence or theft: the title of Princess. Without this inheritance, she would soon have ended up in a poorhouse, a nunnery, or worse; but because, like her mother before her, she was a Princess, two wise men came and bore her away in a carriage to a palace in a distant city, where a clever and beautiful young Queen named Sophie Charlotte took her under her wing, and gave her all she needed.

“Of all that was offered to Princess Caroline in the years that followed, two mattered above all others: first Love. For Sophie Charlotte was both an elder sister and a foster mother to her. And second Knowledge. For in the palace was a great library, to which Caroline was given a key by one of the wise men: a Doctor who was the Queen’s mentor and advisor. She spent every minute that she could in that library, doing what she loved most, which was reading books.

“Years later, after she had grown to a woman and begun to have children of her own, Caroline was to ask the Doctor how he had been so clever as to know that she would want a key to the library. The Doctor explained: ‘As a little boy, I lost my own father, who, like your royal highness’s, was a well-read man; but later I came to know him, and to feel his presence in my life, by reading the books he left behind.’ ”

Henrietta Braithwaite trailed off hereabouts, and shaped her brow into a tasteful and courtly little frown. Her finger plowed a crooked trail back up the terrain of the last paragraph, like a pig’s snout rooting for a truffle. “Rather fine to this point, your royal highness, but the story becomes confused when this Doctor enters into it, and you begin to jump back and forth between tenses, and tell things in his voice-pray, how does a Doctor enter into a f?ry-tale anyhow? Up to here, it’s all palaces, stepmothers, and houses in the woods, which fit. But a Doctor-?”

“Es ist ja ein Marchen-”

“In English if you please, your royal highness.”

“It is indeed a f?ry-tale, but it is also my story,” said Princess Wilhelmina Caroline of Brandenburg-Ansbach, “and my story has a Doctor in it.”

She glanced out a window. Today’s English lesson was in a salon of the Leine Schlo?, on the side that faced away from the river. The view was across a small paved courtyard that spilled onto a busy Hanover street. Leibniz’s house was only two or three doors down-near enough that she could shout a philosophical inquiry out the window and half expect to get an answer back.

“The next chapter will treat of persons, and happenings, not found in f?ry-tales,” Caroline continued, after a pause to get the English words queued up in the right order. “For what I have written on the leaves you hold in your hands only goes up to when Sophie Charlotte died-or, as some say, was poisoned by the Prussian court.”

Mrs. Braithwaite now turned in a workmanlike effort to conceal her horror and loathing of the fact that Princess Caroline had given voice to this thought. It was not that this Englishwoman had any particular love for the courtiers who infested the Charlottenburg. Mrs. Braithwaite, wife of an English Whig, would have taken Sophie Charlotte’s side in just about any imaginable debate-supposing she had the kidney to choose sides. What troubled her was Caroline’s forthrightness. But the ability to say things directly, and get away with it, was a birthright that came along with the title of Princess.

“It has indeed been an eventful nine years since that dolorous day,” Mrs. Braithwaite allowed, “but it would still read much like a f?ry-tale to the common reader, if you but changed a few words. The Doctor could become a wizard, the aged Electress a wise Queen-no one in England would object to that change!”