Ring of Fire - 1635_ The Legions of Pestilence
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“Ship most of it ahead,” Bismarck suggested. “Directly to Besançon. That way, we won’t be the ones who have to wrestle it from Amsterdam all the way up the Rhine.”
“We won’t be in Amsterdam long enough for you to shop,” Ruvigny said. “If we shop for anything there, it will be a pair of spectacles. They have some of the best lens grinders in Europe. If not there, a special trip to Augsburg, later on, will not be out of the question. Beyond that, you may have time to buy some handkerchiefs and collars, perhaps, but we won’t be able to stay long enough for you to order clothing or shoes and have them sewn. I’m presuming that you would not want the new pre-made shoes that are being manufactured now. I’m told that in Magdeburg and some of the other USE cities, it is even possible to purchase pre-made clothing–not second hand, but new, made in a range of sizes.”
The concept of mass manufacturing had thus far passed Sophia by. She found it fascinating, opening entirely new vistas of shopping possibilities.
“Jewelry,” she said hopefully. “Surely I can buy some while we are in the Netherlands. Papa, may I take my jewelry and ornaments with me? They are mine, really, mostly presents.” She snapped her mouth shut before she mentioned that they almost all had come from Grandma Ellen rather than from him. “Not part of the royal regalia.”
“Of course,” the king said. He shook his head. “Generous. Generous to a fault, everyone would agree. Overindulgent.”
“If there’s any significant amount of it,” Bismarck said, “we’ll need to arrange security. That’s always necessary for highly portable valuables. Do you have any idea how much...?”
“Something over 15,000 rigsdaler,” Sophia said promptly. “I knew that if Papa arranged for me to marry Corfitz Ulfeldt, I would have to do something to cover the debts he is bound to have made to keep up his style of life since he returned to Denmark, so I had all my trinkets appraised. The jewelry undoubtedly cost more than that when it was purchased, though. That’s one of the rules of life,...” She slipped up and forgot to guard her tongue before she added, “my Grandma Ellen says. You always pay more for things than you get back if you have to sell them.”
The king lapsed into a tirade directed at the absent Ellen Marsvin.
The king’s private secretary looked at Bismarck, who started a “to do” list.
✽ ✽ ✽
King Christian’s secretary also made private arrangements for Sophia’s luggage to depart, not exactly surreptitiously by night, but at least with no obvious indication that the items being dispatched belonged to her or were for her use. It was just for some vague someone, in care of someone else. The palace received deliveries regularly and sent things out, if not so regularly, at least not so rarely that this attracted an unusual amount of attention.
Of course, the maids who did the packing knew.
King Christian tapped his fingers on the arm of his chair. Sophia’s current chaperone had once been her governess, although only for a year or so. She still was, in fact, the governess for Sophia’s younger sisters. This effort at economy had been one of the reasons that Sophia wandered around the palace unchaperoned so often, except when her sister-in-law, Prince Christian’s young Saxon wife, took pity and kept her company. But Magdalene Sybille had been in mourning for her parents and brother Moritz during most of the first year after Sophia had been officially freed from formal lessons, while the governess still had to supervise the other three girls. Elisabeth was just thirteen; the twins only ten. The whole situation had been inconvenient.
To be or not to be? Keep Fräulein von Blixen or send her off to the Netherlands with Sophia? Palm her off into the household of Frederik Hendrik’s German wife? He suspected that the noblewoman from Mecklenburg reported regularly to Kirsten’s mother–Sophia’s “Grandma Ellen.” That old harpy would probably live for a century. Should he retain a suspected informer or replace her?
Tap, tap, tap. He had gotten rid of Karen Sehested at the time of the whole flap with that impertinent up-timer woman he had ordered the up-timers to send him because the children complained so bitterly about her severity. Well, really, she should not have beaten Leonora–his little Nora, how he was missing her–so badly that, for several weeks, she limped when she walked. As the investigation turned out, all of his children who were under Sehestad’s care had to hide their bruises when presented to foreign ambassadors. In any case, she was too high-born for him to send off on this wild expedition on such short notice.
Tap, tap, tap. Frøken Lund would do for this trip. Armgard Lund was of the second tier of ladies-in-waiting, an obscure Norwegian brought to the Danish court by her mistress’ marriage and somewhat stranded by that lady’s recent death. She was middle-aged, widowed, childless, plain, and, as far as he could tell, furnished with ample common sense, if also amply sagging buttocks. Not a chaperone to wink at frivolity. Yes, Frøken Lund would do.
✽ ✽ ✽
One of the maids who helped pack Sophia’s luggage sent a message to Corfitz Ulfeldt. She had been on his payroll for a while. Not bribed, really. She thought of the regular modest amounts she received from him more as a reasonable supplement to her inadequate wages.
Hille might have headed that off, if she had realized, but she was too frantically throwing her few possessions into a laundry bag that she could carry over her shoulder. Without notice, she had been told that she was going somewhere with Lady Sophia, or maybe somewhere else if plans changed, hundreds of miles away in any case, and most certainly would not have time to walk ten miles out of Copenhagen to say goodbye to her family and then walk the ten miles back again. No, not even if she ran the whole way, both directions. Someone might let them know, if anyone remembered.
Hille started a list of grievances.
Christian IV saw off one daughter, one chaperone who was not enthusiastic about going, one lady’s maid who didn’t want to go at all, and one lieutenant in command of assorted soldiers of lesser rank. He only hugged the daughter, rather perfunctorily. The group left the palace by way of a corridor that was, not fortuitously, temporarily blocked off for construction purposes. The king stomped back to his study.
The ship’s boat and the royal yacht were where they were supposed to be, everything had been loaded the previous afternoon when it was supposed to be, and the captain and crew were who they were supposed to be. The king’s private secretary had not left anything to chance, as far as he knew. They crossed the gangplank to the ship’s boat without incident. No difficulty arose as the sailors rowed them out to the Dutch-built yacht. The night was clear, with reasonable illumination from the moon. Only a few clouds occasionally scudded in front of it. The transfer did not take long.
Sophia, Frøken Lund, and the maid all chose to go up to the yacht in the bosun’s chair, even though it did not ride very high in the water. The chaperone went first, so she would be on the yacht when her charge arrived. The lieutenant was profoundly grateful that Lady Sophia had voluntarily accepted the option of the chair rather than trying to climb the ladder. The members of the palace guard were...not unacquainted with the temperaments of their monarch’s assorted numerous offspring and that of Lady Sophia was difficult. Very difficult. Over the years, he had seen her younger sister, Lady Leonora, and her brother climb trees, walls, small cliffs, and on one unnerving occasion, a drainpipe up to a low roof at Stjernholm, where their mother was being kept under house arrest. This royal daughter did not scramble like a monkey. She was awkward, prone to tripping, slipping, and occasionally even falling. He had not been looking forward to an altercation in regard to the ladder.
As soon as the yacht was clear of the harbor, the captain started to issue rapid orders. The maid wrapped the royal daughter in a blanket, dragged a hood down over her ears, and settled her near the stern where she could, per Frøken Lund’s piously expressed hope, watch everything without making any trouble for anyone. Sophia watched: sails, sailors, ropes, rudders. Sea voyages were always chancy. The worst that could happen, probably, would be that
the fluyt capsized and everyone drowned. There were worse fates.
Once the royal yacht was out of the harbor, another ship’s boat rowed away from a nearby pier. The passengers boarded a slightly smaller yacht, which followed the royal vessel at a distance.
Chapter 40
At sea
November-December 1636
The next morning the sun dawned, peeking though an increasingly overcast sky and highlighting flickering small white ripples on the basically quiet, gray, water. There was hardly any wind and the captain of the yacht had no problem locating the anchored fluyt. It drew up at a safe distance and began the trans-ship procedures. To Sophia, it seemed as if they were taking an eternity. Finally, the sailors let down the ship’s boat.
The crew members who would be rowing scampered down the rope ladder; the deck crew brought out the bosun’s chair. They let Hille the maid down safely; then Frøken Lund. On such matters, protocol went in reverse order. The person of highest rank should be exposed to the perils of the sea for the least possible amount of time.
A sailor called from high in the rigging that there was another ship on the horizon. Sophia looked up at the caller and then behind her. Then the crew hurried her into the chair, where she dangled alongside the yacht for a few minutes before getting all the way down for unloading.
The other ship drew up near.
“Must have been on our tail all night,” one of the sailors handling the bosun’s chair muttered. “Too near; not safe.”
Then the other yacht let its boat down. A group of men scrambled down into it and started rowing as fast as they could toward the boat in which Sophia was sitting.
Up on the deck of the fluyt, men started yelling, with the name “Ulfeldt” repeated several times.
The second boat appeared to be coming straight toward “her” boat. No; the rowers were trying to get between the little boat she was starting to think of as her own and the fluyt, averting their rendezvous.
Now the fluyt’s boat was coming down, with several men already on the steps mounted to the ship’s side and on a rope ladder tossed down immediately next to it, ready to jump into the smaller craft at the first chance. Mixed in among the sailors, Sophia recognized the four soldiers who had been sent as Waldemar’s bodyguards. As soon as it was loaded, it moved to get between Ulfeldt’s yacht and “her” boat.
For which she was grateful, because the captain of Ulfeldt’s yacht had not gone to anchor. Maybe its movements were accidental, but it almost looked as if he were considering an attempt to bring his vessel into the narrow space between the fluyt and the royal yacht, which would force “her” boat to row away from the fluyt if the lieutenant didn’t want to risk being overrun.
One of the enforcers–that’s what Papa called them–brought out a gun. Between the weak sun and the motion of the waves, she couldn’t tell what kind. Ulfeldt himself, from the deck of the pursuing yacht, screamed, “Don’t start shooting, you idiot. She’s only any good to me if she’s alive! A corpse can’t become a bride.”
Some hot-heads on the fluyt proposed shooting at Ulfeldt’s thugs, with cheerful comments such as, “Maybe we can hole their boat and sink it.” Ulfeldt’s boat pulled up directly next to the one on which she was huddled, some of his thugs using swords against “her” rowers and others trying to pull the women out of the yacht’s boat. The lieutenant and his soldiers fended them off as best as possible.
“Hell and damn it, no. The last thing we want is for some stray shot to hit the Lady Sophia,” the fluyt’s captain yelled at the soldiers on his deck. “They’re too close. You’re as like to hit Lady Sophia and her companions as you are to hit Ulfeldt’s men, the way the water is starting to heave. Get out of the way of my crew.”
I suppose there’s some comfort in the concept that I’m only of value to either side if I’m alive, Sophia thought sardonically.
The sailors in the fluyt’s boat brought it around, nosing in between the other two. Once they had enough separation to use the oars on both sides, the rowers on “her” boat pulled for the other side of the fluyt as fast as they could, yelling up to its crew to bring the bosun’s chair over there. With the three ships near one another and the three boats moving so close together, the water began, she thought, to heave more than it had done earlier. Water splashed over the edge, soaking the bottom of her skirts, her stockings, and her shoes.
The sailors in the fluyt’s boat kept repositioning it between Sophia and her pursuers; “her” boat pulled up next to the fluyt, which let the chair down, also tossing rope ladders on either side of it so once the women were aboard, the lieutenant and his men could scramble up faster than one-by-one using the steps built into its side.
Up on the fluyt’s deck, she heard Ruvigny and Bismarck yelling that it was more important to transfer Lady Sophia than it was to follow the protocol that called for her chaperone to arrive on the destination-ship before her.
The sailors ignored them. They were outside the chain of command.
“Take Lady Sophia up first,” the fluyt’s captain yelled. “Get her out of there. Bedamned with protocol.”
Sophia looked up. The classic three-masted, square-rigged, wide-cargo-hold, ship was a design she had seen hundreds of times in the Copenhagen harbor. Somehow, it just looked very much larger, the narrow deck very much farther away, when she was looking at it from water level. Certainly the distance looked immensely farther than that from the yacht’s deck to the ship’s boat.
As she got into the chair, a higher wave splashed water over her back and down her neckline. The deck crew began to hoist her up.
Before anyone could stop him, Waldemar scampered down one of the ladders, into the royal yacht’s boat, with a pretty efficient-looking sword in his scabbard.
Hille, the maid, screeching, “This is no time to worry that someone might look up my skirts,” started up one of the rope ladders.
Everyone started to yell at Waldemar: the captain on the deck and the lieutenant in the boat; Ruvigny, Bismarck; the chaplain, and four bodyguards who weren’t in a position to do anything.
Ulfeldt’s boat came around the fluyt; one of his men, thinking who knows what, jumped onto the ladder and started after Hille, trying to pull her off into the water.
Sophia, dangling half-way up in the bosun’s chair, looked down. Did the man think that Hille was her? Did he have some idea that if he got her into the water, then Ulfeldt could fish her out and make off with her? That was stupid. Anyone who fell into this water would die of the cold in just a few minutes. The wind was cutting through her wet clothes every moment as she was pulled up, up, up, in the chair.
Waldemar, sword in hand, scrambled from the boat up the other ladder, got high enough that he was between Hille and her pursuer, and cut one of the ropes of the ladder they were on. The enforcer hung on to the ladder steps, which were dangling at an angle, and to the uncut rope. Hille almost fell when the lower part of the ladder began to swing back and forth, but kept climbing.
Ulfeldt’s boat deliberately bumped “hers,” trying to push it away from under the ladders.
The bosun’s chair reached the deck and Sophia pulled herself out.
Hille made it over the rail.
Frøken Lund was still huddling down in the yacht’s boat, surrounded by frantically rowing sailors and pushing, shoving, soldiers. As the men stood, moved, bent over, the boats heaved from side to side, sloshing the water, If one side came up too far, the oars rose from the water, causing additional splashes when the tilt moved in the other direction and the wood again hit the water.
The sailors tried to push Ulfeldt’s boat away, but one of his men jumped onto the second ladder where Waldemar was hanging on by one hand, trying to sheathe his sword rather than doing the reasonable thing and drop it so he could hold on with both hands. The sailor grabbed Waldemar’s ankles, unbalancing him. He slipped off the step and fell, hitting the edge of one of the boats a glancing blow with his left leg as he went down into the water.
Sophia, shivering, was hanging over the rail on the fluyt’s deck, trying to see what was happening down below, Ruvigny grasping her skirts to prevent her tipping over.
Hille crawled behind a long, sturdy, semi-wall on the deck and refrained from poking her head up.
Waldemar, sword long gone, came up and grabbed onto the edge of the nearest boat–which, unfortunately, was Ulfeldt’s. Both the other boats turned, trying to retrieve the king’s son.
“He’ll freeze,” Sophia looked back and cried out at Ruvigny. “He was acting stupid and now he’ll freeze to death.” She couldn’t make out anything. There was a general melee of flailing oars, waving swords, and wrestling men.
The fluyt’s captain was screaming again. “Ten thousand curses, no, don’t shoot. You’re as like to hit the boy or one of our own men as anything else.”
Ulfeldt yelled much the same thing at the men who were on the deck of his yacht, while trying to make rapid calculations as to whether it would do him more good or more harm to return to Copenhagen in possession of the king’s son. “I rescued him with great personal heroism.” as compared to a wrathful royal, “What were you doing out there in the first place, you S.O.B.?”
Concluding that royal wrath was more likely, he ordered his men to unlatch Waldemar’s freezing hands from the edge of the boat and pull away.
Waldemar started to sink.
The lieutenant went in after him and, with some difficulty, pulled him out. The sailors repositioned the boat, dumped out the contents of the bosun’s chair, and loaded Waldemar.
It seemed to Sophia that it had all lasted forever.
Bismarck came up beside her. “I don’t think he was in the water for more than five minutes, My Lady. If we can get him warm quickly, perhaps he won’t take any lasting harm.”