The Confusion

 

That is all. Father édouard, who was hoping for news more definite, is beside himself, and divides his time between the following three activities: one, uttering oaths that should never be heard from a priest. Two, seething, and trying to prevent himself from uttering any further oaths. Three, doing penance in various churches and chapels, to seek forgiveness for having let slip oaths. And so it is not an especially productive time for him; but between famine and lack of money it is no productive time for France either and so he does not stand out from the crowd.

 

 

 

Bonaventure Rossignol

 

 

 

 

 

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 entrep?ts—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.

 

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