Thus Eliza and Caroline. But too Eliza and Eleanor have been talking, late at night, when Caroline is asleep in her bedchamber in the Binnenhof. We have been talking about Dynamics. Not the dynamics of rolling balls on inclined planes, but the dynamics of royal and noble families. She and I are both a little bit like mice scurrying around on a bowling-green, trying not to be crushed by the rolling and colliding balls. We must understand dynamics in order to survive.
Only a few months before I became pregnant, I visited London. I was at Whitehall Palace with Daniel Waterhouse when the son of James II-now Pretender to the throne-was supposedly born. Was Mary of Modena really pregnant, or only stuffing pillows under her dress? If she was pregnant, was it really by the syphilitic King James II, or was a healthy stud brought in to the royal apartments to father a robust heir? Supposing she was really pregnant, did the baby survive childbirth? Or was the babe brought forth from that room really an orphan, smuggled into Whitehall in a warming-pan, and triumphantly brought forth so that the Stuart line could continue to reign over England? In one sense it does not matter, since that king is deposed, and that baby is being reared in Paris. But in another sense it matters very much, for the latest news from across the sea is that the father has taken Derry, and is on the march elsewhere in Ireland, trying to win his kingdom back for his son. All because of what did or did not happen in a certain birthing-room at Whitehall.
But I insult your intelligence by belaboring this point. Have you found any changelings or bastards in Sophie’s line? Probably. Have you made these facts known? Of course not. But burn this anyway, and sift the ashes into that canal you are always writing about, making sure beforehand that there are no ill-tempered gondoliers beneath your window.
As a Christian noblewoman, never married, I could not be pregnant, and could not have a child. Eleanor knew this as well as I. We talked about it for hours and hours as my belly grew larger and larger.
My pregnancy was hardly a secret-various servants and women of the household knew-but I could deny it later. Gossips would know I was lying, but in the end, they are of no account. If, God forbid, the baby was stillborn, or died in infancy, then it would be as if it had never happened. But if the baby throve, then matters would be complicated.
Those complications did not really daunt me. If there was one thing I learned at Versailles, it was that Persons of Quality have as many ways of lying about their affairs, perversions, pregnancies, miscarriages, births, and bastards as sailors have of tying knots. As the months of my pregnancy clunked past, ponderous but inexorable, like one of Huygens’s pendulums, I had some time to consider which lie I would choose to tell when my baby was born.
Early, when my belly was just a bit swollen, I considered giving the baby away. As you know, there are plenty of well-funded “orphanages” where illegitimate children of the Quality are raised. Or if I searched long enough I might find some decent mother and father who were barren, and would be more than happy to welcome a healthy infant into their house.
But on the first day that the baby began to kick inside of me, the idea of giving him away faded to an abstraction, and shortly vanished from my mind.
When I reached my seventh month, Eleanor sent to Eisenach for a certain Frau Heppner. Frau Heppner arrived some weeks later, claiming to be a nurse who would look after Princess Caroline and teach her the German language. And this she did; but in truth, Frau Heppner is a midwife. She delivered Eleanor, and has delivered many other noble and common babies since then. Eleanor said that she was loyal and that her discretion could be relied on.
The Binnenhof, though far from luxurious by the standards of French palaces, contains several suites of apartments, each appointed in such a way that a royal house guest can dwell there in the company of her ladies-in-waiting, Lady of the Bedchamber, amp;c. As you will understand from my earlier letters, Princess Eleanor did not have enough of a household to occupy a suite fully; she had a couple of servants who had come out from Eisenach, and two Dutch girls who’d been assigned to her, by William’s household staff, as an act of charity. And now she had Frau Heppner. This still left an empty room in her suite. And so, when Frau Heppner was not giving Caroline lessons, she began organizing the bedsheets and other necessaries of the midwife’s art, making that extra room into a birthing-chamber.
The plan was that when I went into labor I would be carried across the square into the Binnenhof in a sedan-chair, and taken direct to Eleanor’s suite. We practiced this, if you can believe such a thing: I hired a pair of brawny Dutchmen to serve as porters, and once a day, during the final weeks of my pregnancy, had them carry me from Huygens’s house to the Binnenhof, not stopping or slowing until they had set the sedan chair down inside Eleanor’s bedchamber.
These dress rehearsals seemed a good idea at the time, because I did not know the strength of my enemy, and the number of his spies in the Binnenhof. In retrospect, I was telling him everything about my plan, and giving him all he needed to lay a perfect ambush.
But again I get ahead of myself. The plan was that Frau Heppner would preside over the delivery. If the baby died and I lived, no word of it need ever leave that chamber. If I died and the infant lived, it would become a ward of Eleanor, and inherit my wealth. If both I and the baby survived, then I would recuperate for a few weeks and then move to London as soon as the obvious symptoms of childbirth were gone from my body. I would bring the infant along with me, and pass it off as an orphaned niece or nephew, the sole survivor of some massacre in the Palatinate. There is no shortage of massacres to choose from, and no want of Englishmen who would be eager to credit such a tale be it never so patchy-particularly if the tale came from a Duchess who had been of great service to their new King.
Yes, it all sounds absurd. I never would have dreamed such things went on if I had not gone to Whitehall and seen (from a distance) the retinue of high and mighty persons gathered there for no reason other than to stand in the Queen’s bedchamber and stare fixedly at her vagina all day, like villagers at a magic-show, determined to catch the magician out in some sleight-of-hand.
I supposed that my own vagina, so humble and common, would never draw such a large and distinguished audience. So by making some simple arrangements ahead of time, I should be able to adjust matters to my satisfaction after it was over.
You may refer to the plaintext now, doctor, to become acquainted with all of the delightful sensations that preoccupied me during my first several hours of labor (I assume it was several hours; at first ’twas dark outside and then light). When my bag of waters broke, and I knew that the time had come, I sent word for the porters. Between contractions, I made my way carefully downstairs and climbed into the sedan chair, which was kept waiting in a room at the side of the house, at street-level. Once I was inside the box, I closed the door, and drew the curtains across the little windows, so that curious eyes should not look in on me as I was taken across the square. The darkness and confinement did not really trouble me, considering that the baby inside my womb had been living with far worse for many weeks, and had suffered it patiently, aside from a few kicks.