Quicksilver (118 page)

A series of binary digits can represent a number; for example, 01001 is equal to 9. Five binary digits can represent up to 32 different numbers, sufficient to encypher the entire Roman alphabet. My early efforts assumed that the Countess’s cypher was of that sort; but alas, I found no intelligible message, and no patterns tending to give me hope that my fortunes would ever change.

Presently I departed from the Hague, taking the transcript of ones and zeroes with me, and bought passage on a small ship down the coast to Dunquerque. Most of the crew on this vessel were Flemish, but there were a few who looked different from the rest and who spoke to one another in a pithy, guttural tongue unlike any I had ever heard. I asked where they were from—for they were redoubtable seamen all—and they answered with no little pride that they were men of Qwghlm. At this moment I knew that Divine Providence had led me to this boat. I asked them many questions concerning their extraordinary language and their way of writing: a system of runes that is as primitive as an alphabet can possibly be and yet be
worthy of the name. It contains no vowels, and sixteen consonants, several of which cannot be pronounced by anyone who was not born on that rock.

As it happens, an alphabet of sixteen letters is perfectly suited to translation into a binary cypher, for only four binary digits—or four stitches of embroidery—are required to represent a single letter. The Qwghlmian language is almost unbelievably pithy—one of these people can say with a few grunts, gags, and stutters what would take a Frenchman several sentences—and little known outside of that God-cursed place. Both of which made it perfectly suited to the purposes of the Countess, who need communicate, in this case, only with herself. In sum, the Qwghlmian language need not be encyphered, for it is already a nearly perfect cypher to begin with.

I tried the experiment of breaking down the transcribed 1s and 0s into groups of four and translating each group into a number between 1 and 16, and shortly began to see patterns of the sort that give a cryptographer great confidence that he is progressing rapidly to a solution. Upon my return to Paris I was able to find in the
Bibliothèque du Roi
a scholarly work about Qwghlmian runes, and thereby to translate the list of numbers into that alphabet—some 30,000 runes in all. A cursory comparison of the results against the word-list in the back of this tome suggested that I was on the correct path to a full solution; but to translate it was beyond my powers. I consulted with Father Édouard de Gex, who has lately taken an interest in Qwghlm, hoping to convert it to the True Faith and make it a thorn in the side of the heretics. He referred me to Father Mxnghr of the Society of Jesus in Dublin, who is a Qwghlmian born and bred, and known to be absolutely loyal to your majesty as he travels frequently to Qwghlm, at great risk, to baptize the people there. I sent him the transcript and he replied, some weeks later, with a translation of the text into Latin that ran to almost forty thousand words; which is to say that it requires more than one word in Latin to convey what is signified by a single rune in Qwghlmian.

This text is so pithy and fragmentary as to be nearly unreadable, and makes use of many curious word substitutions—“gun” written as “England stick” and so on. Much of its bulk consists of tedious lists of names, regiments, places,
et cetera,
which are of course staples of espionage, but of little
interest now that the war has begun and everything become fluid. Some of it, however, is personal narrative that she apparently set down in crewel when she was bored. This material solves the riddle of how she got from St. Cloud to Nijmegen. I have taken the liberty of translating it into a more elevated style and redacting it into a coherent, if episodic narrative, which is copied out below for your majesty’s pleasure. From place to place I have inserted a note supplying additional information about the Countess’s activities which I have gleaned from other sources in the meantime. At the end, I have attached a postscript as well as a note from d’Avaux.

If I had to read romances for long stretches at a time, I should find them tiresome; but I only read three or four pages in the mornings and evenings when I sit (by your leave) on my close-stool, and then it is neither fatiguing nor dull.

—L
ISELOTTE IN A LETTER TO
S
OPHIE
, 1 M
AY
1704

J
OURNAL ENTRY
17 A
UGUST
1688

Dear reader,

There is no way for me to guess whether this scrap of linen will, on purpose or through some calamity, be destroyed; or be made into a cushion; or, by some turn of events, fall under the scrutiny of some clever person and be decyphered, years or centuries from now. Though the fabric is new, clean, and dry as I sew these words into it, I cannot but expect that by the time anyone reads them, it will have become streaked with rain or tears, mottled and mildewed from age and damp, perhaps stained with smoke or blood. In any event I congratulate you, whoever you may be and in whatever era you may live, for having been clever enough to read this.

Some would argue that a spy should not keep a written account of her actions lest it fall into the wrong hands. I would answer that it is my duty to find out detailed information, and supply it to my lord, and if I do not learn more than I can recite from memory, then I have not been very industrious.

On 16 August 1688, I met Liselotte von der Pfalz, Elisabeth Charlotte, duchesse d’Orleans, who is known to the French Court as Madame or La Palatine, and to her loved ones in Germany as the Knight of the Rustling Leaves, at the gate of a stable on her estate at St. Cloud on the Seine, just
downstream of Paris. She ordered her favorite hunting-horse brought out and saddled, while I went from stall to stall and selected a mount that would be suitable for riding bareback; that being the outward purpose of the expedition. Together we rode off into the woods that line the bank of the Seine for some miles in the neighborhood of the château. We were accompanied by two young men from Hanover. Liselotte maintains close relations with her family in that part of the world, and from time to time some nephew or cousin will be sent out to join her household for a time, and be “finished” in the society of Versailles. The personal stories of these boys are not devoid of interest, but, reader, they do not pertain to my narration, and so I will tell you only that they were German Protestant heterosexuals, which meant that they could be trusted within the environment of St. Cloud, if only because they were utterly isolated.

In a quiet backwater of the Seine, shielded from view by overhanging trees, a small flat-bottomed boat was waiting. I climbed aboard and burrowed under a tangle of fishing-nets. The boatman shoved off and poled the craft out into the main stream of the river, where we shortly made rendezvous with a larger vessel making its way upstream. I have been on it ever since. We have already passed up through the middle of Paris, keeping to the north side of the Île de la Cité. Just outside the city, at the confluence of the rivers Seine and Marne, we took the left fork, and began to travel up the latter.

J
OURNAL ENTRY
20 A
UGUST
1688

For several days we have been working our languid way up the Marne. Yesterday we passed through Meaux, and [as I believed] left it many miles behind us, but today we came again close enough to hear its church-bells. This is because of the preposterous looping of the river, which turns in on itself like the arguments of Father Édouard de Gex. This vessel is what they call a
chaland,
a long, narrow, cheaply made box with but a single square sail that is hoisted whenever the wind happens to come from astern. But most of the time the mast is used only as a hitching-place for tow-ropes by which the
chaland
is pulled against the current by animals on the banks.

My captain and protector is Monsieur LeBrun, who must live in mortal terror of Madame, for whenever I venture near the gunwale or do anything else the least bit dangerous he begins to sweat, and holds his head in his hands as if it were in danger of falling off. Mostly I sit on a keg of salt near the stern and watch France go by, and observe traffic on the river. I wear the clothes of a boy and keep my hair under my hat, which is sufficient to hide my sex from men on other boats and on the riverbank. If anyone hails me, I smile and say nothing, and after a few moments they falter and take me for
an imbecile, perhaps a son of M. LeBrun who has been hit on the head. The lack of activity suits me, for I have been menstruating most of the time I’ve been on the chaland, and am in fact sitting on a pile of rags.

It is obvious that this countryside produces abundant fodder. In a few weeks’ time the barley will be ripe and then it will be easy to march an army through here. If an invasion of the Palatinate is being planned, the armies will come from the north [for they are stationed along the Dutch border] and the food will come from here; so there is nothing for a spy to look for, except, perhaps, shipments of certain military stocks. The armies would carry many of their own supplies with them, but it would not be unreasonable to expect that certain items, such as gunpowder, and especially lead, might be shipped up the river from arsenals in the vicinity of Paris. For to move a ton of lead in wagons requires teams of oxen, and many more wagon-loads of fodder, but to move the same cargo in the bilge of a
chaland
is easy. So I peer at the
chalands
making their way upriver and wonder what is stored down in their holds. To outward appearances they are all carrying the same sort of cargo as the
chaland
of M. LeBrun, viz. salted fish, salt, wine, apples, and other goods that originated closer to where the Seine empties into the sea.

J
OURNAL ENTRY
25 A
UGUST
1688

Sitting still day after day has its advantages. I am trying to view my surroundings through the eye of a Natural Philosopher. A few days ago I was gazing at another
chaland
making its way up-stream about a quarter of a mile ahead of us. One of the boatmen needed to reach a lashing on the mast that was too high for him. So he gripped the rim of a large barrel that was standing upright on the deck, tipped it back towards himself, and rolled it over to where he wanted it, then climbed up onto its end. From the way he managed this huge object and from the sound that it made under his feet, I could tell that it must be empty. Nothing terribly unusual in and of itself, since empty barrels are commonly shipped from place to place. But it made me wonder whether there was any outward sign by which I could distinguish between a
chaland
loaded as M. LeBrun’s is, and one that had a few tons of musket-balls in the bilge with empty barrels above to disguise the true nature of its cargo from spies?

Even from a distance it is possible to observe the sideways rocking of one of these
chalands
by watching the top of its mast-----for being long, the mast magnifies the small movements of the hull, and being high, it can be seen from far off.

I borrowed a pair of wooden shoes from M. LeBrun and set both of them afloat in the stagnant water that has accumulated in the bilge. Into one of
these, I placed an iron bar, which rested directly upon the sole of the shoe. Into the other, I packed an equal weight of salt, which had spilled out of a fractured barrel. Though the weights of the shoes’ cargoes were equal, the distributions of those weights were not, for the salt was evenly distributed through the whole volume of the shoe, whereas the iron bar was concentrated in its “bilge.” When I set the two shoes to rocking, I could easily observe that the one laden with iron rocked with a slower, more ponderous motion, because all of its weight was far from the axis of the movement.

After re-uniting M. LeBrun with his shoes I returned to my position on the deck of the
chaland,
this time carrying a watch that had been given to me by Monsieur Huygens. First I timed one hundred rockings of the
chaland
I was on, and then I began to make the same observation of other
chalands
on the river. Most of them rocked at approximately the same frequency as the one of M. LeBrun. But I noticed one or two that rocked very slowly. Naturally I then began to scrutinize these
chalands
more carefully, whensoever they came into view, and familiarized myself with their general appearance and their crews. Somewhat to my disappointment, the first one turned out to be laden with quarried stones. Of course, no effort had been made to conceal the nature of its cargo. But later I saw one that had been filled up with barrels.

M. LeBrun really does think I am an imbecile now, but it is of no concern as I shall not be with him for very much longer.

J
OURNAL ENTRY
28 A
UGUST
1688

I have now passed all the way across Champagne and arrived at St.-Dizier, where the Marne comes very near the frontier of Lorraine and then turns southwards. I need to go east and north, so here is where I disembark. The journey has been slow, but I have seen things I would have overlooked if it had been more stimulating, and to sit in the sun on a slow boat in quiet country has hardly been a bad thing. No matter how strongly I hold to my convictions, I feel my resolve weakening after a few weeks at Court. For the people there are so wealthy, powerful, attractive, and cocksure that after a while it is impossible not to feel their influence. At first it induces a deviation too subtle to detect, but eventually one falls into orbit around the Sun King.

The territory I have passed through is flat, and unlike western France, it is open, rather than being divided up into hedgerows and fences. Even without a map one can sense that a vast realm lies beyond to the north and east. The term “fat of the land” is almost literal here, for the grain-fields are ripening before my eyes, like heavy cream rising up out of the very soil. As one
born in a cold stony place, I think it looks like Paradise. But if I view it through the eyes of a man, a man of power, I see that it demands to be invaded. It is spread thick with the fodder and fuel of war, and war is bound to come across it in one direction or the other; so best have it go away from you at a time of your choosing than wait for it to darken the horizon and come sweeping towards you. Anyone can see that France will ever be invaded across these fields until she extends her border to the natural barrier of the Rhine. No border embedded in such a landscape will endure.