Tyll Read online

  Then they had hidden in a small house at Coventry, and Liz had not been permitted to leave her room. She had had only a doll with her, no books, and from the second day on the boredom had been so agonizing that she would have preferred even the Jesuit Tesimond to the desolation of the room: always the same chest of drawers, the same floor tiles she had already counted so often—the third in the second row, counting from the window, had cracked, as had the seventh in the sixth row—and then the bed and the chamber pot, which one of the men emptied outside twice a day, and the candle that she was not permitted to light, lest someone see the glow through the window, and on a chair next to the bed her lady’s maid, who had already told Liz the whole story of her life three times, though nothing interesting had ever happened in it. The Jesuit couldn’t be so bad. He didn’t want to hurt her, after all, he wanted to make her queen!

  “Your Royal Highness misunderstands,” Harington said. “You wouldn’t be free. You would have to do whatever the Pope says.”

  “And now I have to do whatever you say.”

  “Correct, and later you will be grateful.”

  By that time the danger had passed. But none of them had known. The powder under the Parliament had been found before the conspirators had been able to ignite it, her parents had survived unscathed, the Catholics had been caught, and the hapless kidnappers were now themselves hunted and were hiding in the forests. But because they didn’t know this, Liz stayed another seven endless days in the room with the two cracked tiles, seven days next to her lady’s maid telling her about her uninteresting life, seven days without books, seven days with only a doll that as of the third day she had already hated more than she ever could have hated the Jesuit.

  She hadn’t known that Papa had meanwhile dealt with the conspirators. He summoned not only the best torturers of his two kingdoms but also three pain experts from Persia and the Emperor of China’s most learned tormentor. He commanded them to cause the prisoners every kind of agony that was known to be possible for a person to cause other people, and in addition he had tortures invented that no one had yet envisioned. All the specialists were ordered to devise procedures more refined and dreadful than anything the great painters of the inferno had dreamed. The one condition was that the light of the soul not be extinguished and that the prisoner not go mad: the perpetrators still had to name their confidants, after all, and they should have time to ask God’s forgiveness and to repent. For Papa was a good Christian.

  In the meantime the court had sent a troop of one hundred soldiers to protect Liz. But her hiding place was so good that the soldiers could no more find it than the conspirators might have done. So the days passed. And even more days passed and then even more, and all at once the boredom had abated, and it seemed to Liz in her room as if she now understood something about the nature of time that she had not grasped before: Nothing passed. Everything was. Everything remained. And even if things changed, it always happened in the one, same, never-changing now.

  During the flights that came later she often thought back to this first flight. After the defeat at White Mountain it seemed to her as if she had prepared for it early and as if fleeing were familiar to her from time immemorial. “Fold the silk,” she exclaimed, “leave the dishes behind, better to take the linen, it’s worth more on the road! And as for the paintings, take the Spanish ones and leave the Bohemian, the Spaniards are better painters!” And to her poor Friedrich she said: “Pay it no mind. You run away, you hunker down for a while in a hiding place, and then you come back.”

  For that was how it had been in Coventry. Eventually, they had learned that the danger had been averted, and had come back to London just in time for the great service of thanksgiving. The streets between Westminster and Whitehall were filled with cheering crowds. Then the King’s Men performed a play that their leading dramatist had written specially for the occasion. It was about a Scottish king who was killed by a rogue, a man with a black soul, spurred on by witches, who lied by telling the truth. It was a black play, full of fire and blood and diabolical power, and when it was over, she knew that she never wanted to see it again, even though it had been perhaps the best play she had seen in her life.

  But her poor stupid husband wouldn’t listen to her when they were fleeing Prague. He was too horrified by the loss of his army and of his throne and only muttered again and again that it had been a mistake to accept the Bohemian crown. Everyone who mattered had told him that it was a mistake, everyone, time and again, but in his stupidity he had listened to the wrong people.

  By which he meant her, of course.

  “I listened to the wrong people!” he said again, just loud enough that she could hear it, as the coach—the least conspicuous one they had—left the capital.

  At that moment she realized that he would not forgive her for this. But he would still love her, just as she loved him. The nature of marriage consisted not only in the fact that you had children, it also consisted of all the wounds you had inflicted on each other, all the mistakes you had made together, all the things you held against each other forever. He would not forgive her for persuading him to accept the crown, just as she would not forgive him for having always been too stupid for her. Everything would have been simpler if only he had been somewhat quicker-witted. In the beginning she had thought she would be able to change this, but then she had recognized that nothing could be done. That disappointment had never entirely faded, and whenever he entered a room with his well-bred firm steps or she looked into his beautiful face, she felt at the same time as love a slight pang.

  She raised the curtain and looked out the coach window. Prague: the second capital of the world, the center of scholarship, the old seat of the Kaiser, the Venice of the East. Despite the darkness, the contours of the castle could be made out, illuminated by the glow of countless tongues of fire.

  “We shall return,” she said, although even now she no longer believed it. But she knew that the only way to endure a flight was to cling to a promise. “You are the King of Bohemia, as God wills. You shall return.”

  And as awful as it was, there was still something about this moment that pleased her. It reminded her of the theater: acts of state, a crown changing heads, a great lost battle. All that was missing was a speech.

  For here too Friedrich had failed. When he had hastily taken leave of his followers, who were pale with worry, that would have been the moment for a speech; he would have had to climb onto a table and speak. Someone would have committed it to memory, someone taken it down and passed it on. A great speech would have made him immortal. But naturally nothing had occurred to him, he had mumbled something unintelligible, and then he and she were out the door, on the way into exile. And all the noble Bohemian lords whose names she had never been able to pronounce, all the Vrshvitshkys, Prtshkatrts, and Tshrrkattrrs that the court tutor responsible for the Czech language had whispered in her ear at every reception without her ever being able to repeat them, would no longer live to see the dawn of the new year. The Kaiser was not playing games.

  “It’s all right,” she whispered in the coach, without meaning it, for it was not all right. “It’s all right, it’s all right.”

  “I should not have accepted the damned crown!”

  “It’s all right.”

  “I listened to the wrong people.”

  “It’s all right!”

  “Is it still possible to go back?” he whispered. “To make a change? With an astrologer? It would have to work, wouldn’t it, with the help of the stars, what do you think?”

  “Yes, perhaps,” she replied, without knowing what he meant. And when she stroked his tearstained face, she thought, strangely enough, of their wedding night. She had known nothing, no one had deemed it necessary to explain such things to a princess, whereas someone had apparently told him that it was quite simple, you just had to take the woman, she woul
d be shy at first, but then you seized her; you had to meet her with strength and determination like an adversary in battle. He must have been trying to follow this advice. But when suddenly he grabbed hold of her, she thought he had gone mad, and since he was a head shorter than she, she shook him off and said: “Stop this nonsense!” He made another attempt, and she pushed him away so hard that he staggered into the sideboard: A carafe shattered, and for the rest of her life she remembered the puddle on the stone inlays, on which three rose petals floated like little ships. There had been three—that she remembered clearly.

  He straightened up and tried again.

  And since she had noticed that she was stronger, she didn’t cry for help, but only held him firmly by the wrists. He could not break free. Gasping, he pulled; gasping, she held him; their eyes wide with fear, they stared at each other.

  “Stop it,” she said.

  He began to weep.

  And as she would later in the coach, she whispered: “It’s all right, it’s all right!” and sat down on the edge of the bed and stroked his head.

  He pulled himself together, tried one last time and grabbed at her breast. She slapped his face. Almost with relief he gave up. She gave him a kiss on the cheek. He sighed. Then he curled up, slipped so deep under the blanket that even his head could no longer be seen, and fell asleep immediately.

  Only a few weeks later they conceived their first son.

  He was a kind child, alert and as if suffused with light, he had bright eyes and a clear voice, and he was beautiful like his father and clever like Liz, and she remembered distinctly his rocking horse and a little castle he built out of little wooden blocks and how with a high, strong voice he had sung English songs, instructed by her. At the age of fifteen he drowned under a capsized ferryboat. They had lost children before, but never so late. When the children were little, you expected it almost daily, but they had become accustomed to this one for fifteen years, he had grown up before their eyes, and then, all at once, he was gone. She found herself thinking about him all the time, and always about the moments when he was trapped under the overturned vessel, yet when she managed to put him out of her mind, he only haunted her dreams all the more vividly.

  But she knew nothing about this yet on their wedding night; nor did she know it later in the coach when they were fleeing Prague; only now did she know it, in the house at The Hague that they called their royal residence, even though it was only a villa with two floors: downstairs the sitting room, which they called the reception hall and sometimes even the throne room, and a kitchen, which they called the servants’ wing, and the little annex, which they called the stables, and on the second floor their bedroom, which they called their apartments. In front was a garden, which they called the park, surrounded by a hedge too infrequently trimmed.

  She could never keep track of how many people were living with them. There were lady’s maids, there was a cook, there was Count Hudenitz—an old idiot who had fled Prague with them and whom Friedrich had without further ado appointed chancellor—there was a gardener, who was also the stable master, which didn’t mean much, since they had barely any animals in the stable, and there was a lackey, who announced the guests with a loud voice and afterward served the food. One day she realized that the lackey and the cook didn’t merely resemble each other, as she had previously thought, but were one and the same—how had she not noticed it before? The servants lived in the servants’ wing, except for the cook, who slept in the foyer, and the gardener, who spent the night in the throne room with his wife, if she was his wife, Liz was not sure, it was beneath the dignity of a queen to concern herself with such things, but the woman was round and winsome and a dependable minder of the children. Nele and the fool slept upstairs in the corridor, or perhaps they didn’t sleep at all; Liz never saw them sleep. Housekeeping not being her forte, she left it to the majordomo, who, incidentally, also cooked.

  “Can I take the fool with me to Mainz?” asked Friedrich.

  “What do you want with the fool?”

  He had to appear there like a ruler, he explained in his awkward way. A court simply required a fool.

  “Well, if you think it will help.”

  And so they departed, her husband and the fool and Count Hudenitz and then also, so that the retinue wouldn’t look too small, the cook. She saw them receding against the gray November sky. From the window she watched them until they were out of sight. Some time passed. The movement of the trees in the wind was scarcely perceptible. Nothing else stirred.

  She sat down in her old favorite spot, the chair between window and fireplace, in which there had not been a fire in a long time. She would have liked to ask her lady’s maid for another blanket, but unfortunately her lady’s maid had run away the day before yesterday. A new one would be found. There were always some commoners who wanted their daughter to serve a queen—even if it was a mocked queen, of whom funny little pictures circulated. In Catholic lands it was claimed that she had slept with every nobleman of Prague; she had long been aware of this, and she could do nothing about it but be especially dignified and kind and queenly. She and Friedrich had been placed under the imperial ban, and anyone who wanted to kill them could do so without any priest denying him blessing and salvation.

  It began to snow. She closed her eyes and whistled softly to herself. People called her poor Friedrich the Winter King, but when it grew cold, he froze quite terribly. Soon the snow in the garden would be knee-deep, and no one would shovel the path, for her gardener too had disappeared. She would write to Christian von Braunschweig and ask him for a few men to shovel snow pour Dieu et pour elle.

  She thought of the day that had changed everything. The day when the letter had come and, with it, doom. All the signatures: in sweeping strokes, one name as unpronounceable as the next. Lords she had never heard of were offering the Elector Friedrich the crown of Bohemia. They no longer wanted their old king who, in personal union, was also the Kaiser; their new ruler should be a Protestant. To seal their decision, they had thrown the imperial governors out the window of Prague Castle.

  Only they had fallen into a pile of shit and had survived. There was always a lot of shit below castle windows due to all the chamber pots being emptied every day. The stupid thing was that thereupon in all the land the Jesuits preached that an angel had caught the governors and set them gently on the ground.

  No sooner had the letter arrived than Friedrich wrote to Papa.

  Dearest Son-in-Law, Papa replied by mounted courier, don’t do it under any circumstances.

  Then Friedrich asked the princes of the Protestant Union. For days messengers came, breathless men on steaming horses, and every letter said the same thing: don’t be stupid, Your Serene Electoral Highness, don’t do it.

  Friedrich asked anyone he could find. One must think it through carefully, he explained time and again. Bohemia was not part of the Empire’s territory; to accept the crown was thus, according to the opinion of authoritative legal scholars, not a violation of the oath of allegiance to the Imperial Majesty.

  Don’t do it, Papa wrote again.

  Only now did he ask Liz. She had been waiting for it; she was prepared.

  It was late in the evening, and they were in the bedroom, surrounded by little flames standing motionless in the air—only the most expensive wax candles burned so still.

  “Don’t be stupid,” she said too. Then she let a moment pass and added: “How often is one offered a crown?”

  That was the moment that had changed their lives, the moment for which he never forgave her. For the rest of her life she would see it before her eyes: their four-poster bed with the coat of arms of the House of Wittelsbach on the canopy, the candle flames reflected in the carafe on the bedside table, the enormous painting of a woman with a little dog on the wall. Later she couldn’t remember who had painted it—it didn’t matt
er, they hadn’t taken it with them to Prague, it was lost.

  “How often is one offered a crown? How often does it happen that it is a deed pleasing to God to accept it? The Bohemian Protestants were given the letter of tolerance, then it was taken back, the noose keeps tightening. You alone can help them.”

  All at once she felt as if this bedroom with the four-poster bed, wall painting, and carafe were a stage and as if she were speaking before a hall full of spectators in spellbound silence. She thought of the great dramatist, the hovering magical power of his sentences; she felt as if she were surrounded by the shades of future historians, as if it weren’t she who spoke but the actress who later, in a play in which this moment occurred, had the task of portraying Princess Elizabeth Stuart. The play was about the future of Christendom and a kingship and a Kaiser. If she persuaded her husband, the world would take one course, and if she didn’t persuade him, it would take another course.

  She stood up, walked up and down with measured steps, and delivered her speech.

  She spoke of God and of duties. She spoke of the faith of the simple people and of the faith of the wise. She spoke of Calvin, who had taught all humanity not to take life lightly but as a test that one could fail every day, and once you had failed, you were a failure forever. She spoke of the obligation to take risks with pride and courage. She spoke of Julius Caesar, who, with the words “The die is cast,” had crossed the Rubicon.

  “Caesar?”

  “Let me finish!”

  “But I wouldn’t be Caesar, I would be his enemy. At best I’d be Brutus. The Kaiser is Caesar!”

  “In this analogy you are Caesar.”

  “The Kaiser is Caesar, Liz. Caesar means Kaiser! It’s the same word.”

  Perhaps it was the same word, she exclaimed, but that didn’t change the fact that in this analogy Caesar was not the Kaiser, even if Caesar meant Kaiser, rather he was the man who crossed the Rubicon and cast the die, and looking at it that way, Caesar was he, Friedrich, because he wanted to defeat his enemies, and not the Kaiser in Vienna, even if he bore the title Caesar!