“FRANCE WILL SHED all of the lands she has conquered since 1678—except for Strasbourg, which Louis seems to have conceived a great liking for—on the condition they remain Catholic,” said the fifty-one-year-old savant. He ticked another item off a list that he had spread out on a Dresden china dinner-plate blazoned with the arms of the Guelphs.
Then he glanced up, expecting to see the hem of the sixty-seven-year-old queen’s ball gown hovering just above the tabletop. Instead, the garment—miles of gathered silk, made dangerous by an underlying framework of bone and steel—whacked him in the face, and stripped off his spectacles, as the Electress of Hanover made a smart about-face.
“It took me a week to grind these lenses.” Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz leaned sideways to rake his spectacles up off the floor. He had to keep his head upright to prevent his biggest and best wig from sliding off his bald, sweaty scalp. This gave him a crick in the neck, however enabled him to get a charming view of muscular white calves pumping in and out as his patroness stormed down the mid-line of the banquet-table.
“This is news,” she complained, “I could get it from any of my Privy Councillors. From you I expect better: gossip, or philosophy.”
Leibniz got to his feet, and took part of his chair with him; his vacant scabbard had got locked up in a bit of Barock wood-carving. The sound of a blade whipping through the air made him cringe and duck. “Almost got it!” Sophie exclaimed, fascinatedly.
“Gossip…I am trying to think of some gossip. Er, your daughter’s palace in Berlin continues to shape up splendidly. The courtiers there are all in an uproar.”
“The same uproar as last week, or a different one?”
“With every day that passes, with every new statue and fresco that is added to the Charlottenburg, it becomes more and more difficult to deny the awkward—the embarrassing—the monstrous fact that Frederick, the Elector of Brandenburg and probable future King of Prussia, is in love with your daughter.”
“Why should that be the cause of an uproar?”
“Because they are married to each other. It is viewed as bestial—perverse.”
“Really it is because of what the courtiers all believe about me.”
“That you planted Sophie Charlotte there to control Frederick?”
“Mmmm.”
“Well, did you?”
“If I did, it obviously worked, and that is what the courtiers cannot abide,” Sophie answered vaguely. She now whirled again, her formidable Hem shredding a few centerpiece snapdragons, and ran down the table with silk ribbons trailing behind her like battle-streamers. She made another vicious cut with the sword. Candle-tops scattered and came to rest in splashes of their own wax, spinning out threads of smoke. “I could finish this in an instant if this verdammt burning bush were not in my way,” she said meditatively, pointing the sword at a candelabra that had been hammered together out of several hundred pounds of Harz silver by artisans with a lot of time on their hands.
A few servants, who had to this point kept as far as they could from the Electress, peeled their backs off the wall of the dining-hall and scuttled inwards toward the offending fixture, knees flexed and hands raised. Sophie ignored them and tilted the rapier this way and that, letting the light of the surviving candles trickle up and down the blade. “No wonder you could not wrest it out of its scabbard,” she said, “it was rusted in place, wasn’t it?”
“...”
“What if I had to call upon you to defend my realms, Doctor?”
“Swordsmen are gettable. I could fashion a hell of a siege-engine, or make myself useful in some other wise.”
“Make yourself useful now! I do not need to hear gossip from Berlin. My daughter sends me more than I need, and little Princess Caroline has been posting me the most excellent letters—your doing?”
“I have taken some interest in her education since the untimely death of her mother. Sophie Charlotte has become the next best thing, however, and I sense I am needed less and less.”
“Ach, now I can move, but I cannot see,” complained Sophie, squinting up towards a fresco shrouded by poor light and ancient congealed smoke. “I can’t tell the painted-on Furies from the living bat.”
“I believe those would be harpies, your majesty.”
“I will show you what a harpy is, if you do not begin doing your job!”
“Right…well, Louis XIV has a mickle abscess on his neck. That’s not very good, is it? Right, then…the French will now recognize William as King of England, and all of the titles he has bestowed. So, to mention a few examples, John Churchill is now Earl of Marlborough, the Duchess d’Arcachon is now also the Duchess of Qwghlm.”
“Arcachon-Qwghlm…yes…we have heard of her,” Sophie announced, making a momentous decision.
“She’ll be overjoyed, your Electoral Highness, that you recognize her existence. For she respects no monarch in this world more than your Electoral Highness.”
“What about her own liege-lords, Louis and William? Does she not respect them?” inquired her Electoral Highness.
“Er…protocol, I’m sure, forbids the Duchess from preferring one over the other…besides which, both of them are, sorry to say, men.”