Ruvigny thought that frostbite, pneumonia, chills, and lasting damage to the boy’s lungs were more probable than no lasting harm, but didn’t say so.
The chair went down again, finally retrieving a miserable, soaked, shuddering, Frøken Lund. “I am,” she proclaimed, “an utterly wretched mortal.”
On the royal yacht, the captain was tempted to give chase to Ulfeldt, but decided it was more prudent simply to get his men and boat back – a good ship’s boat was not cheap – and report to the king.
The men in the fluyt’s boat sorted themselves out and managed to get back on board. The crew pulled up the boat. Sophia heard a sailor cursing in the background about having to mend the rope ladder that Waldemar had slashed. “That was the good one, too!”
“Hey,” a still-shivering Waldemar said cheerfully, holding a mug of hot broth and looking at his splint. “That was fun. I think I’m okay with going to the Low Countries, now.”
✽ ✽ ✽
The fluyt pulled away into an advancing bank of charcoal gray clouds and a North Sea voyage that caused the adjectives wretched and miserable to take a prominent place in the conversations of passengers other than Sophia’s chaperone. Even the captain described the passage through the Øresund as “unusually difficult, even for this season.”
He described it in those words to his high-status passengers; the terminology he used when discussing it with his officers and men differed to a degree.
The seas were so high that the cook did not dare to light a fire in the galley, so all the food was cold, not that very many people wanted to eat. Almost all of the passengers and even some of the crew were so sea-sick that the ship reeked with vomit. Waldemar was miserably ill, sounding as if he would cough his lungs inside out. Two of his toes turned black; the ship’s doctor amputated them.
One morning, Frøken Lund half-woke with such an immediate need to relieve herself that she forgot to poke her finger into the little container of goose grease and run a daub around the rim of the metal slop jar in the cabin that the three women shared. She froze her nether parts to the nearly full jar; Hille the maid and Sophia had some difficulty separating her from the sloshing container of human waste, since the water in the cabin’s pitcher was frozen, which meant that there was nothing they could use to melt her off. Frøken Lund lost a rounded circle of skin, half of it taking off a layer of flesh as well. By two days later, the raw area was red and infected, so painful that she had to lie on her stomach, which aggravated her nausea.
Bismarck pointed out that the ship had not, at least, gotten frozen into the Sound for the winter, to be found the next spring with its entire complement frozen, starved to death, or both.
Some days, Sophia managed to smirk sarcastically in spite of it all, “I have never been in any place, M. de Ruvigny, that was so supportive of the idea of premarital chastity as this ship. Even if each of us was not crowded into a cabin with several other people–separate cabins, mind you–even if we were already married and permitted to share a cabin, we are wearing so many layers of clothing that access would be nearly impossible. Even if my hair”–she pulled at a limp string of drab light brown something that had crept out of her hat–“didn’t look like it had been dipped into the goose grease too.”
Chapter 41
Copenhagen
December 1636-June 1637
Ulfeldt returned to Copenhagen with the intent of getting a larger ship and following his vanishing hoped-for-fiancée all the way to the Netherlands, where he planned to make a big scene in front of the Stadhouder, garner a lot of favorable publicity, and bring Sophia home to general approbation and considerable advancement at court.
He found a reception committee consisting of two companies of the Danish army, who promptly imprisoned his thugs and hauled him off to the Copenhagen Palace. “You will stay alive because at least you ordered your men not to shoot,” the king howled. “If you had killed my daughter, even if it is just Sophia, you would be on your way to the execution block this very minute. As it is....”
Is, in its implementation, involved such things as deprivation of honors, confiscation of property, derogation of status, and a cold, damp, dirt-floored cell in the dungeon of the Blue Tower.
Christian’s handling of Ulfeldt caused great resentment among Denmark’s high families–the same kind of resentment that had been festering since the way he had treated Anne Lykke a decade earlier. When the resentment expanded to resistance, the king was just as glad to have an excuse to take stern measures. He set out to restructure the government in such a way as to tilt the balance of power much more in the direction of the Estates and much less toward the Council of the Nobility. Even in the Council, he diluted the influence of the “ancient noble” families who had held their status since before the Reformation by suddenly discovering, and announcing to the convened Estates, that he, like the erstwhile holy roman emperors, had an inherent right to ennoble, not just in Schleswig and Holstein, but in Denmark itself. He packed the Estates with 250 brevadel, carefully selected men from among the royal bureaucrats and bourgeois merchant community, who abruptly discovered (if, after personal interviews in which His Majesty made the royal viewpoint clear to them, they averred that they most certainly understood his perspective on the problem, quite agreed with his proposed remedies, and signed a pledge affirming this conviction) that they were suddenly nobles by royal fiat. Now constituting a majority, they obliged him by voting to reduce the noble privileges claimed by the Lords High Councillors dramatically.
One ecstatic bursar and one astonished accountant were among them.
Elisabeth, Christiane, and Hedwig found themselves unbetrothed.
Even at the ages of thirteen and ten, they didn’t expect this status to last long. Their father might have changed his political plans, but he undoubtedly still had political plans. On the Danish chessboard, they were still the king’s pawns. If they had not realized this for themselves, their grandmother, their governess, and their attendants would have assured them of it very quickly.
All of which took several months.
Chapter 42
Amsterdam
December 1636
Upon their disembarkation in Amsterdam. Frøken Lund, the instant she stepped upon solid ground, gave vociferous thanks to God for their safe arrival and salvation from disaster.
The captain, safely in harbor, announced that he was not going out again. In the harbor he would stay, reconditioning the ship, until the season opened again some time between March and May, depending upon God’s grace, how hard the winter would prove to be, and the whims of war. No other ships were going out, either.
They only stayed long enough to shop for spectacles.
“What are those spots on your face?” Sophia asked.
Ruvigny rubbed his cheek. “Ah, freckles. They get much brighter in summer. You hadn’t noticed them?”
“Everything that small was a blur to me before. The world looks quite different.”
Overland, the thirty-odd miles between Amsterdam and the Hague took four days to cover using the roundabout route required by the new spur off Don Fernando'’s one-line railroad. It ran west from the main Amsterdam-Brussels line. Frøken Lund, furnished with a mustard poultice promised to be of superior efficiency by one of Amsterdam’s modern pharmacists, lay on her stomach on one of the seats of the carriage. Waldemar, with a green herbal ointment on his amputated toes and his splinted leg cushioned to prevent jolting and propped up on Frøken Lund’s feet, crammed himself into another of the narrow seats.
“They keep telling us,” the pharmacist had said wistfully, “that soon we will have much better salves for things like this, with penicillin in them to fight infections. We hear that it’s already being made in Cologne, but in very limited quantities. Perhaps there is some produced elsewhere, but if so, it is going to the USE military and not to us. ‘Soon,’ they say. ‘Soon, soon, soon.’ I’m afraid it’s going to be more like ‘maybe some day.’”
Their
party filled one of the two cars that ran along the spur; the escort provided for them in Amsterdam occupied all of the second, to the disgust of other would-be travelers whose tickets were pre-empted for the convenience of the Stadhouder’s guests.
It was not as cold as it had been on the fluyt. On the contrary, it was just enough above below freezing at night that the roadbed froze a little, while with the rising of the sun it thawed enough to make a slippery footing whenever the railwaymen had to jump out to deal with some minor emergency.
There had been a lot of days, on the ship, when Sophia had thought, ‘“anything would be better than this.” She was willing to declare that the odd little one-track railroad was better.
Her maid Hille looked at the forlornly waiting passengers at the various stations as the train passed them by and added one more instance to her accumulating list of incidents illustrating the principle that even if all men were created equal by God, they weren’t ordinarily treated that way by other men.
The Hague
early December 1636
They stayed at The Hague only long enough to process paperwork.
The Daily Court Reporter, the rather stiff-necked news vehicle that daily issued a single-page placard outlining the schedule of government activities, welcomed the visit of Count Waldemar Christian of Schleswig-Holstein on the day the party arrived.
The Daily Court Reporter announced the impending wedding two days after the party arrived.
The unofficial newspapers went into tizzies of ecstasy at this unexpected mid-winter likely boost to their circulation and advertising revenues. Oh, there was a “runaway bride” who was “marrying for love.” What could be better?
Frederik Hendrik positively welcomed the arrival of the prospective bride and all the “elopement” publicity, pointing out that the flurry of documents needed to make the wedding happen would nicely disguise the flurry of documents necessary for making Bernhard’s subsidy happen.
“As things stand,” he said to Ruvigny and Bismarck, “things are stable. King Fernando has acted like a reasonable man; our investments in oil from the New World, which I’m sure you have not missed, appear to be profitable now and potentially far more profitable. The partnership with the USE adds some stability. If Spain should move toward violence, the response to that would mainly be naval: not on land. Still, this mortal realm is by nature an uncertain place. If something–unwonted and most certainly not desired by me–should happen to Fernando, especially if the infanta had predeceased him, there is no guarantee that Maria Anna could maintain the rights of an infant heir to the kingdom ‘in the Low Countries.’ There’s no predicting what Gaston may do, especially not because Anne of Austria and the infant prince are in sanctuary in Brussels. It can’t hurt the United Provinces to have a bit of insurance in the way of a few regiments tucked away on the side that I can call upon in case of sudden need.”
The Stadhouder picked up his pen and began a methodical process of signing the stacks of papers in front of him.
For a change, something worked. The Amsterdam papers picked up the wedding story. Readers were charmed. From there, newspapers all over Europe covered the wedding, with occasional minor mentions of Waldemar, long enough to keep most reporters from thinking about possible underlying political implications of the trip that two of Grand Duke Bernhard’s officers were now widely known to have taken.
Sophia was borne off by the Stadhouderin to be furnished with suitable, if borrowed, finery. One of the Stadhouder’s second-tier valets was chased off to perform the same task for the prospective groom.
“I am not going wear orange for my wedding,” the royal daughter proclaimed, “nor any shade of red that even verges on orange. It would clash terribly with M. de Ruvigny’s hair. Nor rust color. No shade of yellow that verges on orange. Not marigold. Mama wears those colors a lot; they look good on her. She makes my sisters and me wear them; they don’t look good on me.” Her smile became wolfish. “But they look even worse on Leonora.”
Of the available options, she chose a serviceable deep green with an ivory underskirt and high collar, saying that would show off her pearls very well.
Bismarck turned over the jewelry box that the lieutenant had stored securely. The court ladies were properly impressed.
The bride, whenever she could escape the Stadhouderin’s attendants, spent her time in the Stadhouder’s beautifully laid-out gardens. Although they were largely dormant in mid-winter, she inspected evergreen needles and twigs through her new spectacles with never-diminishing interest.
Marc Cavriani’s Aunt Alis came up from Brussels to “be a witness” for the wedding and incidentally arrange for some discreet monetary transfers from Frederik Hendrik to Bernhard by less than standard routes.
She was duly impressed by the size of the dowry and, after some discussion with the bride and groom, let the amount leak to the newspapers, thereby garnering Christian IV some favorable publicity as a sentimental papa. The leak simultaneously garnered him some unfavorable publicity as an example of fathers who exercise insufficiently stern parental authority, but you can’t have everything.
“We really should take advantage of Frederik Hendrik’s facilities and send the grand duke a brief notice of the results by radio,” Ruvigny said in a fit of conscientiousness.
Bismarck shook his lead. “Nah, it’s not long now. We notified him when we got to Denmark. He knows from all the wedding coverage that we’re on our way back. We might as well surprise him. No sense in letting him build up a head of steam because they modified the contract terms. I want to see his face when he spots the bottom lines.”
“It wasn’t hard for us to come from Burgundy in September,” Bismarck said to Sophia. Ruvigny was still negotiating some particulars with one of Frederik Hendrik’s clerks. “It’s easy enough to get on a boat (for some definition of a of boat; on the upper Rhine, they are more like rafts) and float down the Rhine (for some definition of float; on the upper Rhine we kept having to get off and walk for a while so the crew could get it over shoals and shallows) all the way to the Netherlands. Once we reached the middle Rhine, the going was easy. September is usually good traveling weather and there was a good flow.
“Right now, boats are still running on the lower Rhine, but conditions are iffy-er upstream according to the most recent weather data to come in. Getting back up the river in December is more of a challenge.”
Frøken Lund refused to go one step farther, worming her way into the Stadhalderin’s household until the day arrived that she could find a way back to Norway.
“Well,” Ruvigny said, “you’re a married lady now, Sophia. You don’t really need a chaperone any more. We can find you a companion to keep you company when we get to Besançon rather than trying to deal with an additional, unfamiliar, person during a winter trip. Someone you’ll like. Your choice.”
Waldemar didn’t have a choice. Frederik Hendrik said no to having Waldemar. He was too busy, had too many other responsibilities right now, to mentor the son of a monarch. The Daily Court Reporter tactfully refrained from announcing that the Count of Schleswig-Holstein would not be staying. Bismarck, considering the logistics of December travel up-river, subvocalised, it’s definitely more difficult when you have a 14-year-old with a splinted leg in tow. He added purchase of a sedan chair to his “to do” list.
Hille didn’t have a choice either. Maids hardly ever did. She stocked up on CoC pamphlets to read on her way to Burgundy.
Chapter 43
Besançon
Christmas week 1636
Travel conditions weren’t quite as bad as Bismarck had expected. More in the category of, it could be a lot worse. When they arrived, he and Ruvigny went at once to the Quartier Battant to report to the grand duke, having sent a message ahead requesting that Rohan and Rehlinger sit in on the meeting.
Bismarck opened with a direct volley. “Yes, we negotiated subsidies for you, in this amount,” and tossing two sets of documents on the table.
&n
bsp; Ruvigny followed closely with, “On somewhat modified terms.”
Bernhard opened his mouth to yell, but then the amounts on the bottom lines caught his eye.
✽ ✽ ✽
Carey Calagna was the one who supervised getting Sophia off the boat, collecting her traveling luggage, and removing her to the rooms she had managed to rent for the newly married couple.
Carey ended up hiring the staff also, since Sophia didn’t know anyone and Ruvigny was too busy to handle the matter. That didn’t keep the Danish king’s daughter from expressing her preferences and opinions as she inspected her new environment, the Amsterdam spectacles magnifying her pale blue-gray eyes and her hair....
“Um, what happened to your hair?” Shae finally asked.
“It was a belief at the court that the king’s daughters should have curly hair of a reddish blonde color. Since I am no longer at the court, I am growing it out. As you can see,” Sophia glared, “left to itself, it is as black as a coal and as straight as a stick – even darker than Waldemar’s. Since the dye is wearing off, it is more this dreary, drab, mouse brown than the strawberry blonde it was meant to become. But it’s mine and I’m keeping it that color from now on.
“The scars are from smallpox. They aren’t as bad as they might be, mostly on my neck and shoulder. Papa had the court at Glückstadt when I caught it, soon after he divorced Mama. It’s been over five years, so they’re fading. I’m not likely to give up my high collars, though.”
Then she added, as an afterthought, “Papa truly loves Glückstadt. He would like to have it back. Or at least, he would like to have the customs revenues back, coming to him in Denmark rather than going to the Westphalian provincial government.”
“I have a feeling,” Dominque Bell said to Marguerite de Rohan, “just the tiniest bit of a little suspicion, that whatever other advantages this marriage may bring to Ruvigny and his future career, she’s very unlikely to be the docile, supportive “‘Madame de Ruvigny”’ that you envisioned for him. She fired her brother’s chaplain, using the excuse that since Bernhard is Lutheran and there are plenty of Lutheran clergymen here, the one that came along with them is superfluous. She grants, as a concession, that the new tutor, whoever he may be, can teach Latin to me and Shae and the other kids, too, if we want to learn it.”
Ring of Fire - 1635_ The Legions of Pestilence Page 33