The Confusion (79 page)

APRIL
1694

P
RINCESS
W
ILHELMINA
C
AROLINE
of Brandenburg-Ansbach had been sending letters to Eliza almost every week since the summer of 1689, which was when they had last seen each other. Caroline had been six years old then. Now she was almost eleven. The handwriting, and the contents of her letters, had changed accordingly. Yet as Eliza stood on the deck of her
Zille
—the slim, hundred-foot-long river-barge she had chartered in Hamburg—and scanned the green banks of the Elbe, she was looking for the young mother and the little
girl she had bid farewell to in the Hague five years earlier. There was no helping it. To a child, nothing seemed more stupid in adults than their inability to come to grips with the fact that people grew. Unfathomably moronic seemed the aunt or grandpapa who exclaimed “You have grown!” at each reunion. Eliza knew this as well as anyone who has ever been a child. And yet she was ambushed by the two women on the quay. They had been waving to her as the
Zille
drew near, and she had paid no more notice to them than to the cattle grazing in the undulating fields that rose up from the river’s edge.

In her defense—if she needed any—she was exhausted from the length of the journey, and feeling especially woolly-headed today. And even if she’d been at her very sharpest, she might not have marked this quay because it was so humble. She had been on this river for a month, and had seen an uncountable number of wharves, piers, bridges, fords, and landings. Some, in cities, were vibrating entrepôts—little Amsterdams. Some, at the foot of barons’ country estates, were Barock stone-piles and iron-snarls, meant to overawe the other Barons. Others were little more than flat places on the bank where farmers could bring their carts down to trade with barge-men. But the only reason this thing outside of Pretzsch rated a second look was that two women had risked their lives to come out and put their weight on it. A hundred years ago it might have supported a carriage and a team; two hundred, a house. Today, it was a slumping huddle of black piles slowly being transubstantiated into slime. Half the decking had been pilfered, and the other half was being used by shrubs and grass in lieu of soil. Those madly waving women showed bravery by putting themselves in its trust. The slenderer of the two showed a kind of reckless bravado by jumping up and down. They’d at least had the good sense to leave their wagon on terra firma—it was drawn up at the base of a mud track that meandered down the hill from a shaggy copse that might conceal a building. To either side of the wagon, a finger of stone was thrust into the air, as if to test the wind. Around these spread moraines of alienated blocks, bricks, and vous-soirs, remnants of an arch that had been pulled down in some forgotten disturbance. In summer the loose stones would have been concealed by the leaves of the bushes and the sickly weed-trees that had insinuated roots among them, but winter had been even longer and deeper here than in France, and so most of these had not yet arrived at a firm decision as to whether they should put forth the effort of growing leaves, or simply stiffen up and die.

All of which made it no more or less decrepit than any other Elbe-side attractions that had passed in front of Eliza’s uncaring eyes during the last month. It was not, however, the sort of place she
would look for an Electress and a Princess.

Eleanor Erdmuthe Louisa, born a Princess, the daughter of the Duke of Saxe-Eisenach, had married the Margrave of Ansbach, John Frederick. When he had died, Eleanor and three-year-old Caroline had been turned out of the household and took up a poor wandering life among diverse minor courts of northern Europe. The center of gravitation round which they looped, and to which they frequently returned, was the court of the Elector and Electress of Brandenburg-Prussia, in Berlin. And a fine choice it was, for the Electress, Sophie Charlotte, had made of it a fair and fascinating place, replete with savants (e.g., Leibniz), writers, artists, musicians, &c. Sophie Charlotte and her redoubtable Mum, the Electress Sophie of Hanover, had taken Eleanor and Caroline under their wings, and been good to them.

But royalty was a family, which was to say that anyone fortunate enough to stay alive to the age when she became a sentient being would know in her bones that by having emerged from her mother’s womb she had agreed to a pact, never to be broken or even questioned, whereby she’d receive all kinds of love and loyalty, but must repay every bit of it in kind. And whereas to a peasant family “loyalty” might mean slopping the hogs, to a royal it might mean
marrying
one, if that would help.

Brandenburg wished to form an alliance with Saxony, which lay immediately to its south, and thereby to worry it loose from the stern embrace of Austria. The alliance was to be sealed by the physical union of Johann Georg IV, the Elector of Saxony, with a suitable Princess from the House of Brandenburg. Eleanor was suitable, was available, and was there. And so she had married Johann Georg in Leipzig in 1692 and thereby become Electress of Saxony—so, equal in dignity to Sophie Charlotte, to Sophie, and to the six other Electors of the Holy Roman Empire. The newlyweds had moved to the Saxon electoral court at Dresden (which lay another sixty or so miles up the river from where Eliza was at this moment). Eliza had received a spate of Caroline-letters, and one Eleanor-letter, from there. But after a few months the Caroline-letters had begun to originate from this Pretzsch and the Eleanor-letters had stopped coming altogether. Even the maps of the father of Bonaventure Rossignol did not list any Pretzsch and so Eliza had had to ask Leibniz where it was. “A few hours’ ride from Wittenberg,” he had answered, and then declined to say anything more of it, which ought to have signified something to Eliza.

Caroline-letters tended to be full of talk about trees she had climbed, squirrels who had admitted her into their circle of trust,
boys who had disgusted her, chess-games she had played via post against Leibniz, dreadful books she’d studied, wonderful books she’d read, the weather, logarithms, and timeless disputes among domestic animals. They told Eliza nothing about Johann Georg IV, about Dresden, or why they had moved to Pretzsch, or how Eleanor was doing. And so Eliza had assumed what would have been the case in France, namely that Pretzsch was some outlying château of the Saxon court, as Marly was to Versailles, and that Eleanor, for whatever reason, favored it over life in the capital. And so ever since the spires of Wittenberg had receded from view aft, Eliza had been scanning the hilltops above the river for some new Barock palace, with terraced gardens leading down to a stone quay along the river, the Electoral household drawn up in formation to greet her, perhaps a consort playing music, the mother on the arm of her strapping husband the Elector, and the little girl. Her only concern had been that, tired as she was, she might not be equal to the magnificence of it all. Instead, this: above, a few leaning turrets and slumping eaves discernible through overgrown trees, a mud trough winding down to the ruined dock where the two women were madly waving. It was so at odds with Eliza’s expectations that it made almost no impression on her.

The day was saved by Adelaide, who could not talk yet, but who had developed a keen interest in waving, and being waved to. The apparition, in this empty countryside, of two women in bright dresses, waving and waving and waving, could not have been better calculated to draw her notice, and before long she was not only waving back but had to be chased down, snatched from the brink of a watery demise, and physically restrained as she flung out both chubby arms again and again toward the wavers. So it was that a preverbal fourteen-month-old was able to perceive a simple truth that had eluded Eliza: that they had reached the end of their journey and were welcome among friends. Eliza gave word to the skipper. He maneuvered the
Zille
alongside what remained of the quay. Eliza pulled herself up out of the chair where she had been watching Germany go by, wiped sweat off her brow, and tried the experiment of seeing whether the platform would support a third human.

Eleanor had broadened, sagged, lost teeth, shorn her hair, and given up trying to conceal her old pox-scars beneath black patches, as had been her practice in the Hague. She well knew how her looks had declined, for she would not meet Eliza’s eye, and kept turning her face aside. What she did not understand was that the joy in her face made up for all else; and moreover Eliza, who
felt
as run down as
Eleanor
looked,
was not of a mind to judge her unkindly. Eleanor stood back half a pace, granting precedence to her daughter, who was a glory. She was not exceptionally beautiful by the standards of Versailles; however, she was more comely than nine out of ten
princesses
. She had some spark about her, anyway, that would have enabled her to outshine pretty people even if she’d been ugly, and she had a self-possession that made her more watchable than anything Eliza had laid eyes on since her weird audience with Isaac Newton. Eleanor hugged Eliza for a solid minute; in the same interval of time, Caroline greeted everyone on the
Zille
, asked the skipper three boat-questions, stuffed a bouquet of wildflowers into Adelaide’s hand, hitched the toddler up on her hip, told her to stop eating the flowers, pranced across the cratered and shifting deck of the quay to the shore, taught Adelaide how to say “river” in German, told her a second time not to eat the flowers, pulled the flowers out of her chubby fist, got into a violent row with her, patched it all up, and got the little one giggling. She was now ready to go back to the house and play chess with her Aunt Eliza; why the delay?

APRIL
1694

MAY
1694

APRIL AND MAY
1694

L
IKE A GUINEA WORM,
Eleanor’s story had to be drawn out of her inch by inch. Its telling extended over a week, and was broken into a dozen installments, each of which was preceded by exhausting maneuvers and manipulations from Eliza and brought to a premature end by Eleanor’s changing the subject or breaking down in tears. But the tiredness that Eliza had felt on the last day of the river-journey had developed into an influenza that kept her in bed for some days with aches and chills. So there was nothing else to pass the hours, and time favored Eliza.

The telling began when Eliza, sick, sore, woozy from mildew-smell and irritable because damp plaster kept falling from the ceiling onto her bed, asked: “A dower-house is where a dowager goes to live out her days after her husband has passed on; but yours still lives. So why are you in a dower-house?”

The answer—when all of the bits were spliced together and the preliminaries and digressions trimmed—was: The Elector Johann Georg IV belonged to a sort of fraternity whose members were to be found in every country in the world, and among every class of society: Men Who Had Been Hit on the Head as Boys. As MWHBHHB went, Johann Georg was a beauty. For some, the insult to the brain led to defects of the body, viz. wasting, unsightly curling of the fingers, twitches, spasms, drooling, &c. Johann Georg was not one of those; now in his late twenties, he could easily have found employment in Versailles as a gigolo for male or female clients—or both at the same time, as he was a great strapping stallion of a man, and who knew the limits of his body?

But
everyone
knew the limits of his mind. Eleanor might have known better than to marry him; but she had wanted to do her bit for the Brandenburgs, and to find a home for Caroline. He was rich and handsome; and though everyone knew he was a MWHBHHB, she had been assured, by many who knew him (Ministers of the Saxon court who in retrospect might not have been the most reliable sources) that he had not been hit all that hard. They pointed to his physical perfection as evidence of this. And (again, so easy to see in retrospect) they’d presented him to her, during their first few encounters, in settings ingeniously devised so that those aspects of his character attributable to his having been hit on the head as a boy had not been obvious. The wedding had been set for a certain date in Leipzig, a city easily reached from either capital (Berlin or Dresden) and large enough to accommodate two Electoral courts and a wedding party of noble men and women from all parts of Protestant Europe. Eleanor had gone there in the train of the Brandenburgs, and they had paid a call on her betrothed. The Elector of Saxony had received his bride-to-be in the company of a ravishing, expensively dressed young woman, and introduced her as Magdalen Sybil von Röohlitz.

Eleanor had heard the name before, always in a context of tawdry gossip. This woman had been Johann Georg’s mistress for some years. Indeed they were said to be admirably matched, for though there was no evidence, visible or anecdotal, of her having been hit on the head as a girl, she might as well have been; despite lengthy and expensive efforts of her noble family to educate her, she could not read or write. And yet she was as perfect, as desirable a specimen of
female
beauty as Johann Georg was of
male
. The union made sense, in its way. There was a notable lack of brain power, but (a) the Doctors of Saxony were as one in saying that the imbecility of the Elector and of Fraülein von Röohlitz were not of the sort that is passed down to children, i.e., their offspring might be of sound mind, provided he were not hit on the
head as a boy, and (b) the Countess’s mother was said to be a clever one.
Too
clever; for she was in the pay of the Court of Austria, and doing all that she could to make Saxony into a fiefdom of that Realm. The Fräulein von Röohlitz had been Johann Georg’s wife in all but name for some years and he’d given her a fortune, a Schloß, and a Court to go with it. Yet she was not of a rank to wed an Elector, or so insisted the old wise heads of the Saxon court, who were anti-Austria and pro-Brandenburg to a man. What Eleanor had seen and heard of these Saxons, from her distant and imperfect vantage-point in Berlin, had been only the faint noises off of a titanic struggle that had been carried out, over several years, in Dresden, between the pro-Brandenburg ministers of Saxony and the pro-Austria von Röohlitz faction. That Johann Georg had come to Brandenburg to woo her was evidence only that those ministers had, for a few months, got the upper hand. That her fiancé had now chosen to receive her, on the eve of their wedding, with his mistress draped all over him, and her draped in jewels that ought to have been gifts to Eleanor, proved that the struggle had lately swung the other way. Another prince, in such a circumstance, would have kept the mistress hidden away in her Schloß. The reality would have been no different but the presentation would have been comelier. But Johann Georg was a MWHBHHB and did not do things as other men. As Frederick, Elector of Brandenburg, looked on incredulously, and von Röohlitz watched in obvious delight, Johann Georg openly spurned Eleanor. And yet he had come to Leipzig with every apparent intention of going through with the wedding!

Frederick by now was acting in much the same rôle as Father of the Bride—though it was combined with that of one head of state negotiating an alliance with another, as well as that of a Doctor ministering to a village idiot. The meeting broke off. Most of those on the Brandenburg side of it were too nonplussed to be angry.

She married him. Eleanor Erdmuthe Louisa married Johann Georg IV, Elector of Saxony, albeit a few days later than planned, as everything had to be re-jiggered at the last minute. They moved to Dresden. The Elector promoted Magdalen Sybil von Röohlitz to the rank of Countess and kept her around. Libels began to circulate in the streets of Dresden in which it was argued that bigamy was no bad thing, having been practiced by any number of Biblical kings, and ought to be revived in Saxony. At about the same time, the Elector openly promised to marry the Countess von Röohlitz—
at the same time as he was still married to Eleanor
. The good Lutherans of Saxony pushed back against the idea of making bigamy the new law of the land, and even Johann Georg’s impaired mind came to understand that he would never be able to marry two women at once.

Attempts to poison Eleanor’s food commenced not long after. She might have been an easy victim in some other courts—a court, let us say, in which she had more enemies, and in which the enemies were not all mental defectives. But poisoning was a difficult and exacting business even for persons who had never been hit on the head, and the attempts of Johann Georg and Magdalen Sybil von Röohlitz were obvious, and were failures. Eleanor took as many clothes as she could pack in a hurry, and as many servants (three) as Johann Georg would allow her, and departed without taking another meal. This was how she and Caroline had landed at the dower-house of Pretzsch. Her sojourn here had hardened into a sort of exile, or imprisonment. As she had no money of her own, there was little practical difference. She and Caroline slept in the same room and barricaded the door at night in case Johann Georg should conceive some hare-brained plan to send assassins. Caroline, despite being an abnormally acute young lady when it came to squirrels and logarithms, had no idea that any of this was happening.

A
T THE END OF TELLING THIS TALE
, Eleanor looked better, albeit puffy around the eyes. She looked more like the dogged young Princess that Eliza had known at the Hague five years ago.

But any ground that she had gained by unburdening herself thus to Eliza, she gave back again in a few moments when, on the eighth day of Eliza’s visit, she opened and read an ornate document that had been brought to the dower-house by a galloping courier. “Whatever is the matter?” Eliza asked. For she could not phant’sy what, to a woman in Eleanor’s estate, could possibly be accounted Bad News; any conceivable change, it seemed, would be a step up.

“It is from the Elector,” she announced.

“The Elector of—?”

“Saxony.”

“Your husband?”

“Yes.”

“What says it?”

“He has got word that I am entertaining a visitor, whose beauty and charm are renowned in all the courts of Christendom. He is pleased to learn that his Realm is graced by such a distinguished personage as the Duchess of Arcachon and of Qwghlm, and announces that he and the Countess shall arrive tomorrow to pay their respects to the Duchess, and to stay for a few days.”

Eliza had summoned the strength to move to a chair by the sick-room’s sole window. Cramped and dingy the dower-house of Pretzsch
might be, but open fields surrounded it, with good climbing-trees. For some days Eliza had been too drained and listless even to read books; but she’d spent many hours in this chair, doing what she was doing now: watching Caroline and Adelaide play. The sheer number of hours that they could put into playing were a prodigy to Eliza, especially given that she felt a hundred years old. This had been her only form of contact with either of the girls since the day she’d arrived, for all had agreed it were best if Eliza were quarantined until she got better.

Eliza, draped in blankets like a statue for shipment, was rubbing the palms of her hands together. “Has the Elector ever had smallpox?” she asked.

“He does not bear scars of it, as far as I know. But as the marriage was never consummated, I have seen little of him. Why do you ask?”

“We have journeyed a great distance,” Eliza said, “and called at more towns along the Elbe than I can remember. Given that, and given the sheer size of my entourage, there is always the possibility of someone’s having picked up a disease en route. That is why travelers from abroad are frequently quarantined. Now, having heard so many lovely stories about the Elector of Saxony and the Countess von Röohlitz, I should be crestfallen if I missed the opportunity to make their acquaintances. But it would be most unfortunate if one of them were to fall ill of some malady that we brought up the Elbe. You will apprise them of this—?”

“I shall throw words in their general direction, to that effect,” Eleanor said, “whether any shall stick I cannot say.”

“B
Y A LONG SHOT,
however, the most sophisticated practice of the Turks is the institution of polygamy,” Eliza said.

The Elector of Saxony, who really was a great penis of a man, all purple-red, and laced about with throbbing veins, and crowned with a tremendous curling black wig, sat up just a bit straighter. One eye, then the other, strayed in the direction of the Countess von Röohlitz.
She
was everything that Eliza could have anticipated from Eleanor’s narration. Stuffed into a bag and smuggled a thousand miles to the southeast, she’d have sold, in a Constantinople slave-mart, for a whole stable of Arab race-horses. To ask her to make conversation, however, was a little bit like expecting a dog to cook his meat before eating it. Eliza had talked herself hoarse rather than shut up and listen to what these two would attempt to say to her. And like groundlings in a theatre, they were more than content simply to watch with open eyes, and, most of the time, open mouths.

“You don’t say,” said the Elector, after a while. “How do they…
do it?”

Eliza let a beat or two pass in silence before letting go with a titter. She was not a great titterer by and large. This was a titter she had borrowed from a certain Duchess she had sat next to once at Versailles. She did not duplicate it very precisely, but here in the dower-house of Pretzsch it would serve. “Oh, monsieur,” she went on, “your double entendre almost got by me.”

“I beg your pardon—?”

“At first I supposed you meant, ‘How did they institute the practice of polygamy?’ but of course now I perceive you were really asking, ‘How does the Sultan make love to two women, or more, at the same time?’ I should be pleased to let you in on the secret, but I fear some of a more prudish disposition might object.” And she kicked Eleanor in the shin under the table, and jerked her head toward the room’s exit: which Eleanor had been pining for, as a prisoner regards a high window in the wall of his cell.

“I am exhausted,” Eleanor announced.

“You look it,” said the Countess, “or perhaps that is just age.”

“Exhaustion or age—who can guess? I shall let it remain my little secret,” Eleanor said equably. “I am sorry to leave the party so early, and when it appears that the conversation is about to take such a fascinating turn—”

“Or,” said Eliza, catching the eye of Johann Georg, “to turn into something else.”

“Pray, don’t get up!” Eleanor said to her husband, who had shown not the slightest intention of doing so. “I’ll to my bed, and shall see you all, I suppose, whenever you crawl out of yours. I do apologize once more for the miserable state of the accommodations.” This last was aimed at her husband, who did not penetrate its meaning.

“Right,” said Eliza, once the staircase, and the floorboards overhead, had let off creaking under the movements of Eleanor. She was in the salon now with the Elector of Saxony and his mistress, and she had their undivided attention. She brushed a bit of damp plaster out of her hair. “Where were we? Oh yes, the Chariot.”

“Chariot?”

“I’m sorry, it is the name given to the technique that—in those countries that are enlightened enough to sanction the ancient Biblical practice of polygamy—is used by a Sultan when he is at a numerical disadvantage to his wives. I could try to describe it. A picture would be ever so much more effective, but I can’t draw to save my life. Perhaps I should demonstrate it. Why, yes! That would be best. Would you be a dear, my good Elector, and flip yonder table upside
down? I’ll fetch an ottoman from the other room—”

“A what!?” barked Johann Georg, and his hand shifted to the hilt of his sword.

“As in a piece of furniture. We’ll want something in lieu of reins—my dear Countess, if you’d care to unwind that silk sash from about your waist, ’twould serve.”