Heinrich added: “It is only in this context that you can understand why the fact of Ludmila’s being different, her being an obviously different kind of being, affected me so.”

The astronomer tugged on his hood and held up his staff. “Go on, my son.”

To Leibniz he noted: “Soon I must begin to pay more attention to the sky.”

Leibniz wrote: “There were fifty minutes until the eclipse he had predicted. Through the slightly warped slat the sky looked the same as it had all morning.” He had the (nonscientific) sense that he would see something at noon, but he did not know what. “That it should in fact be an eclipse of the Sun: this I now felt increasingly to be doubtful.”

Now, having seen with what lack of squeamishness little Ludmila watched his blood gather in the stone bowl, Heinrich resolved one Wednesday not to look away from the bowl but to look directly into it. He wanted to see how blood looked to her, for blood obviously did not look to her as it did to him, or to the royalty by whom he was perpetually surrounded, all of whom shared his aristocratic blood squeamishness. “Blood actually looked different to her. It wasn’t that she thought of blood differently, if she had merely thought of blood differently she would have been squeamish, too, and have had to pit, as I did, her squeamishness against her thoughts, against her will, in the hope that her thoughts and will would overcome her squeamishness instead of her squeamishness her thoughts and will. But there was in Ludmila’s head no such battle of thoughts-and-will versus squeamishness, there was simply no squeamishness for her thoughts and will to overcome. When she looked at blood she saw something different. What did she see? This question possessed me, Father.” Again and again he thought: “Not the Emperor’s son but a bloodletter’s daughter … How the Empire appears to the Emperor’s son, how blood appears to a bloodletter’s daughter…” And he thought: “Which of us is seeing how the Empire actually looks? Which of us is seeing how blood actually looks?” And he thought: “You mustn’t touch her, Heinrich, no touching, no, no, this one’s not to be touched!” So, on that particular Wednesday, in his endeavor to see how blood looked to her, he looked right into instead of away from the stone bowl she was holding, but fainted immediately. He was awoken by Ludmila crouching over him, gently slapping his cheek, he recalled. You mustn’t touch her, Heinrich, he told himself, no, not yet. “From that angle, Father, she actually did look a little like Katharina, as Greta liked to tease me by saying.” To tease him, Heinrich added, Margaretha, the moment she saw the way he gazed at the bloodletter’s daughter, had taken to calling her “the Czech Katharina,” she claimed to see a “remarkable resemblance” between the two and used this resemblance to torment him. Greta, of course, had teased him this way before, he had never taken a lover whom Margaretha had not insisted looked exactly like Katharina, “typical sibling ribbing!,” there had already been an Italian Katharina, a French Katharina, a Portuguese Katharina, and a Big Swedish Katharina, not one of whom resembled Katharina “in the slightest” except insofar as they were all brown-haired, sweet-tempered, finely featured, and, apart from the big Swede, small, Heinrich said. “I suppose,” he said, and he burst into laughter, “it was a funny joke, Margaretha can be very funny, she’s the funniest of all of us, we always say we have no idea where Greta got her sense of humor from, certainly it wasn’t from Father! She makes wonderful jokes, though most of them I admit I don’t totally understand, such as this one about my mistresses all resembling Katharina, since anyone who looks at them can see they look nothing like her.” The likeness if there was any did not go beyond hair color, affect, bone structure, and size: perhaps they shared certain accidental properties “but they did not share her essence.” Standing above him gently slapping him, Ludmila did perhaps resemble Katharina standing above him gently tickling him, but the semblance was physical, not metaphysical, Ludmila had no metaphysical semblance to anyone in the Prince’s world, she was different, different. Katharina for example “is the single most squeamish person I know, Father.”