Chapter 8: The Frog and the Wire

The cold water came first, in a porcelain ewer that Françoise set upon the escritoire with a reverence usually reserved for holy relics. The frog arrived in a leather pouch, still damp from the moat, its legs kicking against her fingers. She placed it on the table and looked at Marchand with the patience of a woman who had learned long ago that men’s schemes were often best observed from a distance.

“Now what?” she asked.

Marchand did not answer immediately. He uncoiled the copper wire—the finest gauge from the crate, so thin it caught the candlelight like a spider’s thread—and attached one end to the frog’s hind leg with a loop of silk thread. The creature sat placidly on the cold marble, blinking at the flame.

“You have heard the surgeons speak of the torpedo fish,” he said, not looking up. “The numbing shock it gives. They say it comes from the creature itself. But what if the shock could be made to travel along a wire? What if one could send a message faster than any courier, faster than any rider, faster than the King’s own trumpet?”

Françoise’s lips parted, then closed. She touched the wire with one finger. “You speak of lightning.”

“Of something like it. Not to kill. To speak.” He held the other end of the wire, a bare strand, and dipped it into the ewer. The frog’s leg twitched. Marchand watched it, his jaw tight. “The impulse is weak. It will not carry far. But I have another idea—a machine of rubbed glass, a charge that can be stored, released. I have seen it done. I can make it.”

“And what will that buy you?” she asked softly.

“Everything.” He set down the wire and turned to face her. The candlelight carved shadows under his eyes. He had not slept well since the depot had appeared in the mist. The dreams were full of humming wires and clicking machines, voices without bodies. “De Pas thinks I am a magician. Colbert thinks I am a merchant of wonders. The King—the King thinks I am a curiosity, a bauble to be displayed and then shelved. But if I can give them a thing that speaks across a battlefield, that warns of a flanking march before the enemy has even saddled their horses—what then?”

“Then you become indispensable,” she said. “And indispensable men are the first to be killed.”

He smiled, a thin, rueful thing. “Then I must become indispensable to the right man.”

The bells of the chapel had fallen silent. The palace had settled into its evening hush, that peculiar stillness of Versailles where even the servants learned to breathe softly. Somewhere, a harpsichord was playing a sarabande. Somewhere, the King was walking his mirrored gallery, plotting the next war.

Françoise drew a breath. “Colbert has asked for you again. Tomorrow, at the Petite Académie. He wants to discuss the canals of the Midi.”

“I know nothing of canals.”

“You know more than you think.” She looked at the frog, then at the wire. “He believes you are a gift from God, sent to make France the envy of the world. He will ask you about pumps, about locks, about the moving of water. Can you give him something?”

Marchand considered. The crate held a small manual on hydraulics, its pages yellowed but legible, filled with diagrams of water wheels and Archimedes’ screws. He had memorized the plates in the sleepless hours after his arrival. “I can give him a design for a double-action pump that will drain a marsh faster than any engine now in use. It will cost him a fortune to build. But if he believes it is the key to his canal, he will protect me.”

“And the King?”

“The King will see what he wishes to see. A loyal servant, a man of modest birth who asks for nothing but the chance to serve.” He paused. “And de Pas?”

Françoise’s eyes glittered. “De Pas has been asking questions in the stables. He knows you arrived with no horse, no baggage, no letters of introduction. He has written to the Archbishop of Reims, inquiring about a certain seminary student who vanished in the autumn.”

Marchand’s stomach tightened. “Then I have less time than I thought.”

He knelt beside the crate and lifted out the surgeon’s kit. The instruments gleamed—scalpels of steel, forceps, a roll of catgut sutures. He selected a small vial of clear liquid, stoppered with wax, and held it to the light.

“Laudanum,” he said. “A tincture of opium. One drop in a glass of wine will make a man sleep deeply, dream sweetly, and remember nothing. Two drops will make him forget the night before entirely.”

Françoise raised an eyebrow. “You intend to drug de Pas?”

“I intend to give him a gift that will make him forget his suspicions.” Marchand wrapped the vial in a square of linen and pressed it into her hand. “He suffers from the gout. He complains of it constantly. Send this to him with my compliments, and tell him it is a remedy from the Indies, brought by a merchant who owes me a favor. He will drink it, sleep, and wake with a clearer head and a gentler disposition toward me.”

“And the frog?”

Marchand looked down. The creature had not moved, its throat pulsing rhythmically. He unwound the silk thread and let it hop onto the floor, where it sat, staring up at him with unblinking eyes.

“The frog is a reminder,” he said quietly. “That even the smallest creature carries a spark of the divine. Or of something else. I have not yet decided which.”

Françoise took the vial and slipped it into her sleeve. She paused at the door, her hand on the latch, and looked back at him.

“There is a courier who arrives from the front tomorrow,” she said. “Turenne’s army is camped at Charleroi. There are whispers that the Dutch have broken the dikes and flooded the polders. If that is true, the campaign will be fought in mud and water.”

Marchand felt a chill that had nothing to do with the evening air. “And the King?”

“The King will want to know everything.” Her voice dropped. “And he will want to know it before the courier has even dismounted. If you can give him that, Jean-Luc—if you can give him a voice that speaks across the miles—he will make you the most powerful man in France.”

She slipped out, leaving the door ajar.

Marchand stood alone in the candlelight, the copper wire coiled in his hand like a serpent. The frog had disappeared beneath the escritoire. Somewhere in the distance, a horse neighed, and a sentry called out the hour.

The depot was still there, he knew, hidden beneath the floorboards of the old storeroom. Three hundred years of the future, waiting for him to spend it wisely.

He looked down at the wire, and for the first time since the storm, he allowed himself to imagine what he might build with it. Not a message. Not a warning.

A chain of lightning, binding him to the Sun King himself.

And then he heard it—the soft, deliberate tread of boots in the corridor, stopping just outside his door.

A pause.

A knock.

“Monsieur Marchand?” The voice was polite, unhurried, and utterly unfamiliar. “His Majesty requests your presence. At once.”

Marchand’s hand tightened around the wire. The frog croaked beneath the escritoire.

The bells had begun to ring again.