The problem with the Americans and their eccentric ideas of democracy, she sometimes thinks to herself, is that they do not so much raise up the common man to the level of nobility, as drag down the noblest to a level the village idiot might contemn.
Jefferson had been a bit of a scholar; the man in the White House now probably couldn't write an elegiac if his life depended on it. One of her ancestors had dabbled in mathematics, of all things, and written in his private diaries, as something of a hobby, the basis of all modern statistics, the better sort anyway; the modern governmental turnout don't seem particularly able to count.
Take her primary target, for instance. Clearly a man of some genius, and look what a mess they've made of him. Newton was made Master of the Royal Mint, and that went rather well; what's left of his modern equivalent is stashed away in a university somewhere to rot. And now of all times! Now, when it's clear that kind of clever and above all sensitive mind might hold the keys to heaven!
Well, it's their loss.
She begins with surveillance. Not especially covert surveillance. She'll just arrange to mysteriously be around him. Appear at lectures, wander past his sad little accommodation, that sort of thing. Is he going to be brave enough to look at her?
