23. September

Tlaxcala had held out against the Aztecs for decades. Its armies fought the Spaniards for about three weeks, then made peace and joined them. Without Tlaxcalan warriors, porters and food the conquest could not have happened.

Refused leave, Wolfgang resigned, and Colloredo dismissed him. He set off to find a post with his mother as chaperone: Munich, Augsburg, four months in Mannheim, six in Paris. Nobody hired him, his mother died, and he came home to Salzburg sixteen months later with nothing but new music and debts.

Leopold II was crowned Emperor in Frankfurt, and Mozart, not among the court musicians sent, went anyway at his own cost, pawning silver to pay for it, in the hope of concerts.

With the current they covered in six weeks what had taken five months going up, sometimes over seventy miles a day. Every week they met more traders’ boats coming the other way.

we Suffered the party to fire off their pieces as a Salute to the Town. we were met by all the village and received a harty welcom — Clark Lewis wrote to Jefferson that day. Congress gave the men double pay and land; York and Sacagawea got nothing. York asked Clark for his freedom and was refused,…

Van Helsing reads Jonathan’s journal and the diaries are joined. The group that critics call the Crew of Light hunts the Count’s boxes from Carfax to Piccadilly, until his flight on the night of 3–4 October.

From Lucy’s return to Hillingham to her burial, with four transfusions of blood given by Arthur, Dr. Seward, Van Helsing and Quincey Morris, and the deaths of Lucy’s mother and of Arthur’s father.

Jonathan is better and busy at his new work. Mina, left at home, takes “his foreign journal”, the book she sealed with her wedding ring, and locks herself in her room to read it.

Roland Garros flew his Morane-Saulnier from Fréjus to Bizerte in Tunisia in 7 hours 53 minutes, about 730 kilometres over open water, landing with little fuel left.

Promulgated before a crowd in the Plaza de Mayo, where Juan Perón handed the law to Eva Perón. At the first election under it, in November 1951, Eva voted from her hospital bed.

An all-white, all-male jury acquitted Bryant and Milam after deliberating for about an hour. Moses Wright had stood in the witness box and pointed out the men who took his nephew. Shielded by double jeopardy, the two admitted the killing to Look magazine in January 1956.

After Russia’s default, the hedge fund whose partners included two Nobel laureates had lost most of its capital. At the New York Fed’s urging, fourteen banks put in 3.6 billion dollars to wind it down.

Ground software supplied thruster data in pound-force seconds where the navigation team expected newton-seconds. The orbiter came in far too low and was destroyed. Mars Polar Lander went silent on landing ten weeks later.

Berkshire Hathaway bought preferred shares paying 10 per cent a year, plus the right to buy 5 billion dollars more of common stock at 115 dollars a share. Goldman raised as much again from the public the next day.