“For the first three days, Father, she did not rise from that bed,” said Prince Heinrich, pointing through the astronomer’s chest to the bed that stood in the darkness behind him. Even on the evening of the third day, when, through a stonemason employed in the Castle Workshop who spoke both of their languages fluently, Prince Heinrich suggested to Ludmila as sweetly and discreetly as he could that she repair to Margaretha’s boudoir to cleanse herself and dress herself, in preparation for the act he had in mind for that night and which could—“forgive me, Father!”—be postponed no longer, she refused, so that he had to have Greta’s ladies-in-waiting cleanse and clothe her in the bed. As they did so she whimpered continually for the man who had abandoned her, “a whimpering which began to infuriate me,” the Prince told the astronomer, “for what apart from begetting her had he done to warrant such unremitting devotion? Would she ever be as devoted to me as she was to him? Is not the unremittingness of the devotion of a daughter to her father even in the face of the father’s iniquity a sign that it is something less than love, something more mechanistic than love, something more deterministic?” Naturally Heinrich thought of the unremitting nature of the clocks he dismantled, how they ticked and tocked unflaggingly till the moment he took out their innermost gear. Mustn’t a feeling be able to flag to be love, indeed to be a feeling? Heinrich mused, the astronomer quoted him as saying, and the act that ensued once Ludmila had been scrubbed and scoured was consumed, on his end, by such ruminations on the quirks, oddities, and clocklike qualities of the filial bond. This did not, Heinrich noted, lessen the pleasure they took in it.

That night the Prince slept six hours. And in the morning, another miracle: although the Sun, by design, had not penetrated his turret in years, he awoke in a beam of light. Propping himself up on an elbow he saw that Ludmila had not only risen at last, she had also torn down the dark Flemish tapestries he had hung over the windows three, four, even five thick to stop natural light from interfering with his “investigations into the mechanism or mechanisms of nature and man.” In the fur-lined nightgown Margaretha’s ladies-in-waiting had lent her from Katharina’s wardrobe, Ludmila stood there staring at one such investigation. In her primitive German she demanded: What is this? And he, elated, leapt out of bed, summoned the stonemason, and through him explained that this was a clock in an early stage of being dismantled. That seemed to please her. She said: And this? This, replied Heinrich, by way of the stonemason, is a clock in a late stage of being dismantled. That, too, seemed to please her. She said: And this? This, he replied, is a clock that has been completely dismantled. “Please tell her,” he told the stonemason, “that I am someone who likes to take clocks apart, please tell her completely apart, I like to take clocks completely apart to see how they work. You cannot understand how something works until you take it apart, say that. To know something, tell her this verbatim, is to have taken it apart, completely.” This seemed to please her also. Later there occurred to him a different explanation of her pleasure, namely relief at learning that these perhaps frightful-looking apparatuses were instruments of science and not, as he realized the poor thing might have feared, as though he were an agent of the Inquisition, instruments of torture; and later still he realized that her pleasure sprang from another source altogether; but that sunny morning he took it as a sign of her interest in the properties of time, of duration, or if not her interest in the properties themselves, then of her interest in his interest in them. He took it as an overture. The first sign that their worlds “might be made to merge on a plane higher than that of mere matter, Father.”