“A Calvinist Kaiser?” she asked.
“Never. Unthinkable. But a formerly Calvinist elector who has found his way to the Catholic faith. Just as France’s Henry once became Catholic or”—he tapped himself with a gentle gesture on his chest—“we became Protestants. The House of Habsburg is losing influence. Spain has almost forfeited Holland. The Bohemian nobility has extorted religious tolerance from the Kaiser.” He fell silent once again. Then he asked: “Do you like him, then?”
The question came as such a surprise that she didn’t know what to say. With a faint smile she tilted her head. This gesture usually worked; people were then satisfied without your having had to commit yourself to anything. But it had no effect on Papa.
“It’s a risk,” he said. “You didn’t know her, my aunt, the virgin, the old dragon. When I was young, no one thought that I would be her successor. She had my mother beheaded, and she didn’t like me very much. They thought that she would have me killed too, but it didn’t happen. She was your godmother, you bear her name, but she didn’t come to the baptism, a sign of her aversion to us. And nonetheless I came after her in the line of succession to the throne. No one thought that she would permit a Stuart king. I didn’t think so either. I will die before this year is over, that’s what I thought every year, but then, at the end of every year, I was still alive. And here I am, and she is rotting in the grave. So, then, do not shy from risk, Liz. And never forget that the poor fellow will do what you tell him. He doesn’t measure up to you.” He reflected. Then he added as if out of nowhere: “The gunpowder under the Parliament, Liz. We could all be dead. But we are still here.”
That was the longest speech she had ever heard him give. She waited, but instead of continuing to speak, he folded his hands behind his back again and without another word left the room.
And she remained behind alone. She looked out the window he had just been looking out as if she could in this way better understand her father, and thought of the gunpowder. It was only eight years ago that the assassins had tried to kill Papa and Mama and make the country Catholic again. Deep in the night Lord Harington had shaken her awake and cried: “They’re coming!”
At first she hadn’t known where she was and what he was talking about, and when her consciousness had gradually freed itself from the mists of sleep, it occurred to her how improper it was that this grown man was standing in her bedroom. Nothing of the sort had ever happened before.
“Do they want to kill me?”
“Worse. First you must convert, and then they will put you on the throne.”
Then they had journeyed, a night, a day, another night. Liz had sat beside her lady’s maid in a coach that had jerked so much that she had to vomit out the window several times. Behind the coach rode half a dozen armed men. Lord Harington rode in front. When they took a rest in the early morning hours, he explained to her in a whisper that he himself knew almost nothing. A messenger had come and had reported that a band of murderers under the command of a Jesuit was searching for Mary Stuart’s granddaughter. They wanted to kidnap her and make her queen. Her father was probably dead, her mother too.
“But there are no Jesuits in England. My great-aunt drove them out!”
“There are still a few. They conceal themselves. One of the worst is named Tesimond. We have been searching for him a long time, but he has always escaped, and now he is searching for you.” Lord Harington stood up with a groan. He was no longer the youngest, and it was hard for him to ride for hours. “We must go on!”
Then they had hidden in a small house at Coventry, and Liz had not been permitted to leave her room. She had had only a doll with her, no books, and from the second day on the boredom had been so agonizing that she would have preferred even the Jesuit Tesimond to the desolation of the room: always the same chest of drawers, the same floor tiles she had already counted so often—the third in the second row, counting from the window, had cracked, as had the seventh in the sixth row—and then the bed and the chamber pot, which one of the men emptied outside twice a day, and the candle that she was not permitted to light, lest someone see the glow through the window, and on a chair next to the bed her lady’s maid, who had already told Liz the whole story of her life three times, though nothing interesting had ever happened in it. The Jesuit couldn’t be so bad. He didn’t want to hurt her, after all, he wanted to make her queen!
“Your Royal Highness misunderstands,” Harington said. “You wouldn’t be free. You would have to do whatever the Pope says.”
“And now I have to do whatever you say.”
“Correct, and later you will be grateful.”
By that time the danger had passed. But none of them had known. The powder under the Parliament had been found before the conspirators had been able to ignite it, her parents had survived unscathed, the Catholics had been caught, and the hapless kidnappers were now themselves hunted and were hiding in the forests. But because they didn’t know this, Liz stayed another seven endless days in the room with the two cracked tiles, seven days next to her lady’s maid telling her about her uninteresting life, seven days without books, seven days with only a doll that as of the third day she had already hated more than she ever could have hated the Jesuit.
She hadn’t known that Papa had meanwhile dealt with the conspirators. He summoned not only the best torturers of his two kingdoms but also three pain experts from Persia and the Emperor of China’s most learned tormentor. He commanded them to cause the prisoners every kind of agony that was known to be possible for a person to cause other people, and in addition he had tortures invented that no one had yet envisioned. All the specialists were ordered to devise procedures more refined and dreadful than anything the great painters of the inferno had dreamed. The one condition was that the light of the soul not be extinguished and that the prisoner not go mad: the perpetrators still had to name their confidants, after all, and they should have time to ask God’s forgiveness and to repent. For Papa was a good Christian.
In the meantime the court had sent a troop of one hundred soldiers to protect Liz. But her hiding place was so good that the soldiers could no more find it than the conspirators might have done. So the days passed. And even more days passed and then even more, and all at once the boredom had abated, and it seemed to Liz in her room as if she now understood something about the nature of time that she had not grasped before: Nothing passed. Everything was. Everything remained. And even if things changed, it always happened in the one, same, never-changing now.
During the flights that came later she often thought back to this first flight. After the defeat at White Mountain it seemed to her as if she had prepared for it early and as if fleeing were familiar to her from time immemorial. “Fold the silk,” she exclaimed, “leave the dishes behind, better to take the linen, it’s worth more on the road! And as for the paintings, take the Spanish ones and leave the Bohemian, the Spaniards are better painters!” And to her poor Friedrich she said: “Pay it no mind. You run away, you hunker down for a while in a hiding place, and then you come back.”
For that was how it had been in Coventry. Eventually, they had learned that the danger had been averted, and had come back to London just in time for the great service of thanksgiving. The streets between Westminster and Whitehall were filled with cheering crowds. Then the King’s Men performed a play that their leading dramatist had written specially for the occasion. It was about a Scottish king who was killed by a rogue, a man with a black soul, spurred on by witches, who lied by telling the truth. It was a black play, full of fire and blood and diabolical power, and when it was over, she knew that she never wanted to see it again, even though it had been perhaps the best play she had seen in her life.