She stopped in a bar for a macchiatone, ate a tuna tramezzino, and had a glass of water. Her reader’s card got her into the Marciana without trouble and with no search, and she found her way—telling herself she must be using the same system that passenger pigeons used, feeling the electromagnetic waves from the various places she passed near—to the second-floor reading room with its view to the Palazzo Ducale. She set her bag down and took her notebook over to the card catalogue. Before pulling open the drawer marked “K,” she patted the cabinet on the top, quite as though it were the dog or cat of an old friend. Not only did the catalogue have eleven books, in three different languages, for the Königsmarck Affair, but it contained a number of handwritten cards in a series of hands best described as “spidery” that directed her to other books and collections in which further information was contained; in two cases these were held in the manuscript collection.
She jotted down the names, authors, and call numbers of these last two and took them down to the main desk. She spoke to the librarian, who gave her the forms that would summon them from their store-cupboard. When she gave the completed forms to the librarian, the woman took them with an almost total lack of interest or enthusiasm, leaving Caterina to suspect that her grandchildren might someday see the tomes from the manuscript collection, whereupon she slipped into Veneziano and said she was a friend of Ezio’s.
“Ah,” the librarian said with a smile, “in that case I’ll go get them and bring them to you at your carrel.” She looked at the paper, studying the numbers on it. “Take about half an hour,” she said and smiled again.
Caterina thanked her and went back to her carrel, stopping to collect the books about Königsmarck. One, she was surprised to see, was a nineteenth-century French novel. She shrugged and placed it unopened on the shelf in front of her.
A half hour later, the librarian found her hunched over her desk, notebook open at her side, pages covered in pencil-written notes. Caterina was as incapable of using a pen in a library as she was of punching a hole in a lifeboat. When the librarian set the two large manuscripts on the table, Caterina jumped, as if the woman had poked her with a stick. The librarian ignored her reaction and said that she had logged the books out to Ezio, so Caterina could keep them there as long as she needed to.
When the woman was gone, Caterina lowered her face into her hands and rubbed at it, ran her fingers through her hair to pull it back from her face. She was suddenly hungry, ravenously, desperately hungry. She opened her bag and dug to the bottom and found half of a dusty Toblerone, which she’d been eating on a train to—how long ago it seemed—Manchester. She looked around guiltily and saw the backs of two men seated at carrels at the other end of the room. She got to her feet and took two steps away from her carrel, and from the books and manuscripts. Holding the wrapper close in her hands to muffle the sound, she tore free a dusty triangle. She leaned forward and slipped it into her mouth and let it melt, then chewed at the nougat, enjoying the way it clung to her teeth to prolong the sensation of eating.
Seeing how close, still, she was to the desk and the volumes on them, she moved over to the window, where she stayed until the chocolate was gone. She folded up the wrapper, put it back in her bag, brushed at the front of her clothing, and wiped her hands on a cotton handkerchief before going back to sit at the carrel.
She looked at her notes. Königsmarck had disappeared on the night of 1 July 1694, when he was seen to enter the palace and make his way toward Sophie Dorothea’s apartment. It was generally accepted that he had been the victim of four courtiers, their names, at least according to the Danish ambassador to Hanover, well known and spoken of at the time. His corpse was said to have been wrapped in a sack, weighted with stones, and tossed into the river Leine, never to be found.
In less than a month, the English envoy to Hanover, George Stepney, relayed to one of his colleagues that in the House of Hanover a political murder had taken place. “Political murder,” Caterina muttered under her breath as she read over her notes. Hearing it like that urged Caterina to get to her feet and go over to study the facade of the Palazzo.
“Political murder,” she said again, and then only “political.” Not a murder for honor and not a murder for love, though the second type were always really the first. Political. The involvement of the Hanoverians in the murder would not only weaken but perhaps destroy their claim to the electorship. What then of their claim to the succession to the throne of England, which they so desperately coveted? Surely even the English would balk at inviting a murderer or the son of one to become king.
Although this was not her field, it was her century of study, and Caterina had a wealth of background information. Aristocrats were free to have lovers, so long as those women who did had already given their husband an heir and a spare and then were relatively discreet in their choice of lover. Don’t endanger the bloodline; don’t imperil the passing of the estate from father to son. Men could legitimize their bastards; women never.
Caterina remembered a conversation she had had with the Romanian, years ago, when she had first gone to Manchester. It was, in fact, the first time she had eaten dinner in the commons. Drunk, he had pulled out a chair beside her, asked if he could sit there, and sat down with only a glass and a bottle of red wine. He had said nothing while she ate her salad and then a piece of swordfish she remembered had been overcooked and covered with a sauce that added to the unpleasantness of the meal.
“We never know who our children are,” he said, then turned and asked, “Do we?”
“Who’s we?” she asked, making those the first words she ever spoke to him.
“Men.”
“You never know?”
“No,” the Romanian said sadly, shaking his head and taking a long drink from his glass. He refilled it, shook his head again, and said, “We think we know, we believe, but we never know. Do we?”
“If it looks like you?” she asked.
“Men have brothers. Men have uncles,” he said, this time sipping from the glass.
“But?” she asked, certain that this was a point he meant to lead somewhere.
“Women know,” he said with heavy emphasis. “They know.”
Caterina thought it incorrect to mention DNA tests to a man the first time she spoke to him; furthermore, he was a colleague and not a native speaker of English. Instead, she said, “More proof of our superiority,” and sipped from her own glass, though her wine was white.
The Romanian looked at her, smiled, took her hand, and kissed it, then he gathered up his bottle and glass, got to his feet, and started to walk away. When he had gone three steps, he turned back and said, “There’s no need of proof, my dear.”
Eighteen
THE MEMORY FADED; CATERINA RETURNED TO THE BOOK SHE had been reading. She dipped back into Steffani’s life at the time he was working as a diplomat, first in Hanover and then in Düsseldorf, where he moved in 1703. He worked to facilitate the making of treaties and to arrange princely marriages, though with little apparent success. He failed to prevent his former patron Maximilian Emanuel from getting mixed up in a war against England and Germany he had no chance of winning, and he failed to arrange a marriage between Maximilian Emanuel and Sophie Charlotte, who turned him down, got an upgrade, and ended as Queen of Prussia. Poor woman, she held the title for only a few years before dying at the age of thirty-six, though in the few years she was queen she won the friendship of Leibniz. Caterina recalled the frequent references to her in the letters found in the trunk, the queen who “had so honored” Steffani with her friendship. Did Andrea Moretti, she wondered, feel himself so honored by the friendship of Caterina Pellegrini?