“How should I know? You tell me!”
“It’s not easy,” said Nele. “No protection, through the land without a home, no house to keep the wind at bay. Now I have one.”
“If I send you away, you won’t have one anymore. So, then, you fled together, but why isn’t he your husband?”
“A balladeer took us along. In the next market town we met a traveling entertainer, Pirmin. We learned the trade from him, but he was cruel and didn’t give us enough to eat, and he hit us too. We headed north, away from the war, almost made it to the sea, but then the Swedes landed, and we turned west to avoid them.”
“You and Tyll and Pirmin?”
“By then it was the two of us again.”
“Did you run away from Pirmin?”
“Tyll killed him. May I ask a question again now, madame?”
Liz was silent for a moment. Nele spoke a strange peasant German; perhaps she had misunderstood something. “Yes,” she then said, “now you may ask a question again.”
“How many maids did you used to have?”
“Under my marriage contract I had forty-three servants for myself alone, among them six noble ladies-in-waiting, each of whom had four maids.”
“And today?”
“Now it’s my turn again. Why isn’t he your husband? Don’t you like him?”
“He is like a brother and parents. He is all I have. And I am all he has.”
“But you don’t want him as a husband?”
“Is it my turn again, madame?”
“Yes, it is.”
“Did you want him as a husband, madame?”
“Whom?”
“His Majesty. Did Your Majesty want His Majesty as a husband to Your Majesty when Your Majesty married him?”
“That’s different, child.”
“Why?”
“It was an affair of state. My father and two ministers negotiated for months. And therefore I wanted him before I had ever seen him.”
“And when Your Majesty saw him?”
“Then I wanted him all the more,” Liz said with a furrowed brow. She was no longer enjoying this conversation.
“His Majesty is indeed a very majestic gentleman.”
Liz looked her sharply in the face.
Nele returned her gaze with eyes wide open. It was impossible to tell whether she was making fun of her.
“Now you can dance,” said Liz.
Nele curtsied. Then she began. Her shoes clacked on the parquet floor, her arms swung, her shoulders rolled, her hair flew. It was one of the most difficult dances in the latest style, and she did it so gracefully that Liz regretted not having musicians anymore.
She closed her eyes, listened to the clatter of Nele’s shoes, and thought about what she should sell next. There were a few paintings left, among them her portrait, painted by that kind man from Delft, and the one by the self-important wretch with the large mustache who had brandished his brush with such pomp; she found his painting somewhat clumsy, but it was probably worth a great deal. She had already given away her jewelry, yet there was still a diadem and two or three necklaces; the situation wasn’t hopeless.
The clatter had stopped. She opened her eyes. She was alone in the room. Where had Nele gone? How could she be so presumptuous? No one was permitted to leave the presence of a sovereign without having been dismissed.
She looked outside. On the lawn there was already a thick layer of snow, the branches of the trees bent—but hadn’t it just begun to snow? All at once she was no longer certain how long she had been sitting here, in this chair by the window beside the cold fireplace, the patched blanket on her knees. Had Nele been here just now, or was that a while ago? And how many people had Friedrich taken with him to Mainz? Who had remained with her?
She tried to count: The cook was with him, the fool too, the second lady’s maid had asked for a week’s leave to visit her ailing parents, she probably would not come back. Perhaps there was still someone in the kitchen, perhaps not, how was one supposed to know, she had never been in the kitchen before. There was a night watchman too—so she assumed, but since she didn’t leave her bedroom at night, she had never seen him. The cupbearer? He was a fine elderly gentleman, very distinguished, but now all at once it seemed to her as if he hadn’t appeared in a long time; either he had remained in Prague or died somewhere on their way from exile to exile—just as Papa too had died without her having seen him again, and suddenly her brother reigned in London, whom she hardly knew and from whom there was even less reason to expect anything.
She listened. In the next room something rustled and clicked, but when she held her breath to hear better, she could no longer make it out. It was completely silent.
“Is someone there?”
No one answered.
Somewhere there was a bell. When she rang it, someone appeared. So it had always been, as was proper, so it had been her whole life. But where was it, this bell?
Perhaps everything would change soon. If Gustav Adolf and Friedrich, that is, the man she had almost married and the one she then actually had, came to an agreement, then there would again be celebrations in Prague, then they could return to the high castle, at the end of the winter, when the war resumed. For that was what happened every year: when snow fell, the war took a break, and when the birds came back and the flowers sprouted and the ice released the streams, the war too got going again.
A man was standing in the room.
That was odd—for one thing, because she hadn’t rung, and for another, because she had never seen this man before. For a moment she wondered whether she ought to be afraid. Assassins were cunning, they could sneak in anywhere, nowhere was safe. But this man didn’t look dangerous, and he bowed as was proper, and then he said something that was far too strange for a murderer.
“Madame, the donkey is gone.”
“What donkey? And who is that?”
“Who is the donkey?”
“No, who is that. Who is…that there?” She pointed to him, but the idiot didn’t understand. “Who are you?”
He spoke for a while. She found it hard to understand him, for her German was still not good, and his was especially coarse. Only gradually did it dawn on her that he was trying to explain that he was responsible for the stable and that the fool had returned and taken the donkey. The donkey and Nele—he had taken her too. The three of them had departed together.
“Just a donkey? The other animals are still there?”
He answered, she didn’t understand, he answered again, and she comprehended that there were no other animals. The stable was now empty. Which was why, the man explained, he was standing here before her: he needed a new job.
“But why did the fool come back at all, what about His Majesty? Did His Majesty come back too?”
Only the fool had come back, said the man who due to the empty stable was no longer a stable master, and then he had gone again, with the woman and the donkey. He had left the letter behind.
“A letter? Let me see it!”
The man reached into his right pants pocket, reached into the left, scratched himself, reached into the right again, found a folded piece of paper. He was sorry about the donkey, he said. It had been an unusually clever animal. The fool had had no right to take it. He had tried to prevent him from doing so, of course, but the fellow had played a nefarious prank on him. It was very embarrassing, and he didn’t want to talk about it.
Liz unfolded the piece of paper. It was crumpled and stained, the black letters were smudged, but she recognized the handwriting at one glance.
For a moment, in which she had skimmed it with one part of her mind already and with another part not yet, she was inclined to tear the letter up and simply forget that she had ever received it. But she couldn’t do that, of course. She gathered her strength, clenched her fists, and read.
II
Gustav Adolf had no right to keep him waiting. Not only because it was impolite. No, he literally wasn’t permitted to do it. How one behaved toward other royal personages was not at one’s discretion, it was governed by strict rules. The crown of Saint Wenceslas was older than the crown of Sweden, and Bohemia was the older and richer of the two lands, thus the ruler of Bohemia enjoyed seniority over a king of Sweden—not to mention the fact that an elector too had royal rank, the Palatine court had once had an official opinion issued on it, it was proven. Now, it was true, he had been placed under the imperial ban, but the Swedish king had declared war on the Kaiser who had imposed the ban, and the Protestant Union had never accepted the revocation of the electoral dignity, therefore the King of Sweden was obliged to treat him as an elector and as such he had equal status to him—an equal status in general princely rank, and if one took into account how far back the family traced its lineage, the Palatine House clearly outranked the House of Vasa. Thus, however you looked at it, it wouldn’t do that Gustav Adolf was keeping him waiting.