Tyll Page 16

  And so she said that she was very sorry to hear of the death of his son. The Lord gave and the Lord took away, his will passed our understanding, and his trials made us strong.

  For the blink of an eye, she was proud of herself. It takes quite a bit to manage something like that before the whole court, you have to be well-bred and quick-witted too.

  The dramatist had smiled and bowed his head, and suddenly she had the feeling that she had made a fool of herself in a manner difficult to describe. She sensed herself turning red, and because she felt ashamed of this too, she turned even redder. She cleared her throat once again and asked him the name of his son. Not that it interested her. But nothing else occurred to her.

  He answered in a soft voice.

  “Really?” she asked in surprise. “Hamlet?”

  “Hamnet.” He drew a breath, then said pensively and as if to himself that, although he could not pretend to have borne his trial with that fortitude she praised, yet today, when it was his great fortune to behold the future’s maiden face, he would swear that such a life as his, comprising such currents as had brought him to this sea, could not be counted among the worst, and that thanks to this moment in her gracious presence, he was disposed to accept with gratitude every pain and tribulation that lay in his past or, indeed, in days to come.

  Here she couldn’t think of anything else to say for the time being.

  All well and good, Papa finally said. But shadows were cast on the future. There were more witches than ever. The Frenchman was treacherous. The recent unity of England and Scotland was still untested. Doom was lurking everywhere. But worst of all were the witches.

  Doom might well lurk, the dramatist replied, that was the nature of doom, yet the hand of a mighty ruler held it off, as the mantle of the air held off the heavy cloud and dissolved it into gentle rain.

  Now it was Papa who couldn’t think of anything to say. This was funny, because it didn’t happen often. Papa was looking at the dramatist, everyone was looking at Papa, no one said anything, and the silence had already lasted too long.

  Finally Papa turned away—just like that, without a word. He did this often, it was one of his tricks to unsettle people. Normally they wondered for weeks afterward what they had done wrong and whether they had fallen out of favor. But the dramatist seemed to see through it. Bowing as he walked backward, he departed, a faint smile on his face.

  “Do you think you’re better than everyone else, Liz?” her fool had recently asked her when she had told him about it. “Have seen more, know more, come from a better land than we do?”

  “Yes,” she had said. “I do.”

  “And do you think your father will save you? At the head of an army, is that what you think?”

  “No, I don’t think that anymore.”

  “Yes, you do. You still believe that one fine day he will turn up and make you into a queen again.”

  “I am a queen.”

  At that he laughed derisively, and she had to swallow and push back tears and remember that it was his very duty—to tell her what no one else dared. That was why you had fools, and even if you didn’t want a fool, you had to consent to one, for without a court jester a court was not a court, and if she and Friedrich no longer had a country, at least their court had to be in order.

  There was something strange about this fool. She had sensed it at once when he had first appeared, last winter, when the days had been especially cold and life even more impoverished than usual. At that time, the two of them had suddenly stood outside her door, the scrawny young man in the motley jerkin and the tall woman.

  They had looked exhausted and haggard, ill from traveling and from the dangers of the wilderness. But when they had danced for her, there was a harmony, a consonance of the voices and bodies, such as she had not witnessed ever since she had left England. Then he had juggled, and she had pulled out the flute, and then the two of them had performed a play about a guardian and his ward, and she had feigned death, and he had found her lifeless, and in his grief he had killed himself, whereupon she had awoken and, her face contorted with horror, had seized his knife to now take her life too. Liz knew the story; it was from a play of the King’s Men. Moved by the memory of something that had once had great significance in her life, she had asked the two of them whether they wouldn’t stay. “We don’t yet have a jester.”

  He had made his debut by giving her a painting. No, it was not a painting, it was a white canvas with nothing on it. “Have it framed, little Liz, hang it up. Show it to the others!” Nothing gave him the right to address her like that, but at least he pronounced her name correctly, complete with the English z—he did it as well as if he had been there. “Show it to your husband, the beautiful picture, let the poor king see it. And everyone else!”

  She had done so. She had a green landscape painting, which she didn’t like anyhow, taken out of its frame and replaced with the white canvas, and then the fool had hung up the painting in the large room that she and Friedrich called their throne room.

  “It’s a magic picture, little Liz. No one born out of wedlock can see it. No one stupid can see it. No one who has stolen money can see it. No one up to no good, no one who cannot be trusted, no one who’s a gallows bird or a thievish knave or an arsehole with ears can see it—for him, there’s no picture there!”

  She hadn’t been able to help laughing.

  “No, really, little Liz, tell the people! Bastards and dolts and villains and men ripe for the gallows, none of them can see anything, neither the blue sky nor the castle nor the wonderful woman on the balcony letting down her golden hair nor the angel behind her. Tell them, watch what happens!”

  What had happened still astonished her, every single day, and it would never cease to astonish her. The visitors stood helplessly before the white picture and didn’t know what they were supposed to say. For it was complicated, after all. They knew that nothing was there, of course, but they weren’t sure whether Liz knew it too, and thus it was also conceivable that she would take someone who told her that nothing was there for illegitimate, stupid, or thieving. They racked their brains. Had a spell been cast on the picture, or had someone fooled Liz, or was she playing a joke on everyone? The fact that by then almost everyone who came to the court of the Winter King and Queen was either illegitimate or stupid or a thief or a person with ill intentions didn’t make matters easier.

  In any case, not many visitors came these days. In the past people had come to see Liz and Friedrich with their own eyes, and some had also come to make promises, for even if scarcely anyone believed that Friedrich would rule over Bohemia again, it was nonetheless not completely impossible either. To promise something cost little: as long as the man was out of power, you didn’t have to keep your word, but if he reascended, he would remember those who had stuck by him in dark times. By this time, however, promises were all they received; no one brought presents anymore that were valuable enough to be turned into money.

  With an impassive face she had shown Christian von Braunschweig the white canvas, too. Stupid, deceitful, and illegitimate people, she had explained, could not see the magnificent painting, and then she had observed with a pleasure difficult to describe how her tearful admirer had kept looking helplessly across at the wall where the picture, mocking and blank, withstood his pathos.

  “This is the best gift anyone has ever given me,” she said to her fool.

  “That’s not saying much, little Liz.”

  “John Donne wrote me an ode. Fair phoenix bride, he called—”

  “Little Liz, he was paid, he would have called you a stinking fish too if he had been given money for it. What do you think I would call you if you paid me better!”

  “And I got a ruby necklace from the Kaiser, a diadem from the King of France.”

  “Can I see it?”

 
She was silent.

  “Did you have to sell it?”

  She was silent.

  “And who is John Dung anyway? What sort of fellow is that, and who is fearful Nick’s bride supposed to be?”

  She was silent.

  “Had to give it to the pawnbroker, your diadem? And the necklace from the Kaiser, little Liz, who is wearing it now?”

  Not even her poor king had dared to say anything about the picture. And when she had explained to him that it was only a joke and the canvas was not enchanted, he had merely nodded and gazed at her uneasily.

  She had always known that he wasn’t the cleverest. From the beginning it had been obvious, but for a man of his rank it wasn’t important. A prince did nothing, and if he happened to be unusually clever, it was nearly a blot on his honor. Subordinates had to be clever. He was himself—that was enough, nothing more was necessary.

  This was the way of the world. There were a few real people, and then there were the rest: a shadowy army, a host of figures in the background, a swarm of ants crawling over the earth and having in common with each other that they were lacking something. They were born and died, were like the flecks of fluttering life that made up a flock of birds—if one disappeared, you hardly noticed it. The people who mattered were few.

  The fact that her poor Friedrich was not the cleverest and also somewhat sickly, with a tendency to stomach pain and earaches, had already become apparent when he had come to London at the age of sixteen, in white ermine, with a court of four hundred attendants. He had come because the other suitors had stolen away or had at the decisive moment made no offer; first the young King of Sweden had declined, then Maurice of Orange, then Otto of Hesse. For a while, there had then been the positively foolhardy plan of marrying her to the Prince of Piedmont, who may not have had any money but was the nephew of the Spanish king—Papa’s old dream of a reconciliation with Spain—but the Spaniards had remained skeptical, and all at once there was no one left but the German Electoral Prince Friedrich and his brilliant prospects. The Palatine chancellor had spent months negotiating in London before they reached an agreement: a forty-thousand-pound dowry from Papa to Germany in exchange for ten thousand pounds a year from the Palatinate to London.

  After the signing of the contract Friedrich himself had arrived, rigid with trepidation. He had begun by garbling the words of his speech; it was noticeable how pitiful his French was, and to forestall keener embarrassment, Papa had simply walked up to him and embraced him. Then, with pursed, dry lips, the poor fellow had given her the kiss prescribed by protocol.

  The next day they had taken a boat ride on the largest vessel of the court; only Mama hadn’t wanted to come with them, because she found a prince Palatine beneath their station. Although the Palatine chancellor had claimed with the help of silly official opinions by his court jurists that an elector had the rank of a king, everyone knew that this was sheer nonsense. Only a king was a king.

  On the boat ride, Friedrich had leaned on the railing and tried not to let his seasickness show. He had had the eyes of a child, but he had held himself perfectly erect as only those taught by the best court tutors could. You must be a good fencer, she had thought, and: you’re not ugly. Don’t worry, she would have liked best to whisper to him, I am with you now.

  And now, so many years later, he still had impeccable posture. Whatever else had happened, however much he had been humiliated and made the laughingstock of Europe—to stand up straight was something he could still do as before, his head tilted back slightly, his chin raised, his hands clasped behind him, and he even still had his beautiful calf eyes.

  She was fond of her poor king. She couldn’t help it. She had spent all these years with him, borne him more children than she could count. They called him the Winter King, her the Winter Queen—their fates were indissolubly bound together. That day on the Thames she had had no such foreboding, she had merely thought that she would have to teach the poor boy a few things, for when two people were married, they had to talk to each other. With this fellow here it could become difficult; he had no idea about anything.

  He must have been utterly overwhelmed, so far away from his Heidelberg castle, from the cattle of his native land, from the pointed houses and little German people, in a city for the first time. And here he stood right in front of all the shrewd, fearsome lords and ladies and, to top it all, in front of Papa, who frightened everyone anyhow.

  The evening after the boat ride, she and Papa had had their longest talk of her life. She hardly knew her father. She had not grown up with him but with Lord Harington at Coombe Abbey; families of rank didn’t raise their children themselves. Her father had been a shadow in her dreams, a figure in paintings, a character who appeared in fairy tales—the ruler of the two kingdoms of England and Scotland, the hunter of godless witches, the terror of Spain, the Protestant son of the beheaded Catholic queen. When you met him, you were always surprised that he had such a long nose and such swollen bags under his eyes, which always seemed to be pensively looking inward. He always gave you the feeling that you had said something wrong. But this was on purpose; it had become a habit.

  It had been their first real conversation. How do you, my dear daughter? That was how he had usually greeted her when she came to Whitehall. Excellent, I thank you, my dear father. It pleases your mother and me to see you faring well. Hardly as much as it pleases me to see you in good health, my dear father. In her mind she called him Papa, but she would not have dared to address him like that.

  That evening they had been alone together for the first time. Papa stood by the window, his hands behind his back. For quite a while he didn’t say a word. And because she didn’t know what to say, she too was silent.

  “The oaf has a great future,” he finally said.

  Again he was silent. He took some marble thing from the shelf, gazed at it, and put it back.

  “There are three Protestant electors,” he said, so softly that she had to lean forward, “and the Elector Palatine—that is, yours—is the highest in rank, the head of the Protestant Union in the Empire. The Kaiser is ill, soon there will be a new imperial election in Frankfurt. If our side has grown even stronger by then…” He scrutinized her. His eyes were so small and set so deep in their sockets that it seemed as if he were not even looking at you.

  “A Calvinist Kaiser?” she asked.

  “Never. Unthinkable. But a formerly Calvinist elector who has found his way to the Catholic faith. Just as France’s Henry once became Catholic or”—he tapped himself with a gentle gesture on his chest—“we became Protestants. The House of Habsburg is losing influence. Spain has almost forfeited Holland. The Bohemian nobility has extorted religious tolerance from the Kaiser.” He fell silent once again. Then he asked: “Do you like him, then?”

  The question came as such a surprise that she didn’t know what to say. With a faint smile she tilted her head. This gesture usually worked; people were then satisfied without your having had to commit yourself to anything. But it had no effect on Papa.

  “It’s a risk,” he said. “You didn’t know her, my aunt, the virgin, the old dragon. When I was young, no one thought that I would be her successor. She had my mother beheaded, and she didn’t like me very much. They thought that she would have me killed too, but it didn’t happen. She was your godmother, you bear her name, but she didn’t come to the baptism, a sign of her aversion to us. And nonetheless I came after her in the line of succession to the throne. No one thought that she would permit a Stuart king. I didn’t think so either. I will die before this year is over, that’s what I thought every year, but then, at the end of every year, I was still alive. And here I am, and she is rotting in the grave. So, then, do not shy from risk, Liz. And never forget that the poor fellow will do what you tell him. He doesn’t measure up to you.” He reflected. Then he added as if out of nowhere: “The gunpowde
r under the Parliament, Liz. We could all be dead. But we are still here.”

  That was the longest speech she had ever heard him give. She waited, but instead of continuing to speak, he folded his hands behind his back again and without another word left the room.

  And she remained behind alone. She looked out the window he had just been looking out as if she could in this way better understand her father, and thought of the gunpowder. It was only eight years ago that the assassins had tried to kill Papa and Mama and make the country Catholic again. Deep in the night Lord Harington had shaken her awake and cried: “They’re coming!”

  At first she hadn’t known where she was and what he was talking about, and when her consciousness had gradually freed itself from the mists of sleep, it occurred to her how improper it was that this grown man was standing in her bedroom. Nothing of the sort had ever happened before.

  “Do they want to kill me?”

  “Worse. First you must convert, and then they will put you on the throne.”

  Then they had journeyed, a night, a day, another night. Liz had sat beside her lady’s maid in a coach that had jerked so much that she had to vomit out the window several times. Behind the coach rode half a dozen armed men. Lord Harington rode in front. When they took a rest in the early morning hours, he explained to her in a whisper that he himself knew almost nothing. A messenger had come and had reported that a band of murderers under the command of a Jesuit was searching for Mary Stuart’s granddaughter. They wanted to kidnap her and make her queen. Her father was probably dead, her mother too.

  “But there are no Jesuits in England. My great-aunt drove them out!”

  “There are still a few. They conceal themselves. One of the worst is named Tesimond. We have been searching for him a long time, but he has always escaped, and now he is searching for you.” Lord Harington stood up with a groan. He was no longer the youngest, and it was hard for him to ride for hours. “We must go on!”