The Confusion

Pretzsch, Saxony
APRIL 1694

PRINCESS WILHELMINA CAROLINE 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 entrepots-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, amp;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 chateau 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?