by Norah Lofts
It was May again.
She liked to walk alone in the garden before breakfast, marking the changes that had come overnight. On the first Thursday of the month she went out into a perfect morning, the counterpart of the one on which, in Kew, she had tried to be one with the lilac bush. And suddenly she knew that this would be a momentous day; another turning point in her life. That delightful Mr. Wraxall would arrive today and bring news that would end the waiting. She was so sure of it that as she walked she planned to give him a good dinner. Beef; somebody must go into the town and procure a sirloin of beef. There would be asparagus too, the young bed was, this year, for the first time, in full bearing. I shan’t be here to see the last of it; somebody else will eat the apricots, now small green things the size of hazelnuts against the sunny wall. I shall be in Copenhagen, with Freddy and Louise—and Tammi. They would have parted Freddy and Tammi, his ideas were all in disrepute, but wherever Tammi was she’d seek him out; all together again.
Mentally she took leave of the garden which she loved; she reckoned that at this season, in such good weather, traveling as she would travel, unwearying and eager, she could be in Denmark in five days. By this time next week she would have her children in her arms.
It was a dizzying thought and it dizzied her. She was accustomed to such little spells when everything blurred tilted; they lasted only a few seconds; one had only to wait. She waited, clutching for support at the sundial upon whose worn face the words “Tempus edax rerum,” were still discernible. Time devours all.
It devoured the dizzy spell; but it had lasted longer than any she had known and left her feeling strangely weak. The tulip-lined path from here to the door she must make for was a mile, was infinity.
But here was Mantel.
“Your Majesty, what is the matter?”
“Nothing. A dizzy turn. Your arm.”
He gave it and said, “I have told Your Majesty that walk out without breaking fast is unwise.”
“You were right.” She sagged against his arm so that they seemed to make no progress. The tulip-lined path was a mile long, was infinity.
“Excuse me, Your Majesty; we should do better if you would put your arm around my neck and allow me to put my arm around you. So, is that not better?”
Half dragging, half carrying her he reached the door, cool dim space behind it, and he steered for the stairs.
She said, “No.”
“I think you should go to bed.”
“Not on this day. I shall be all right. Help me to a sofa.”
Seated, her feet up and a cushion behind her, she felt better. She said, “Mantel, I must not give way now. News will come today.”
“We are ready for it,” he said, thinking of his good old grandmother, alert for Mr. Wraxall’s return.
She said, “Mantel, when all is settled, I shall restore the Order of Matilda, but I shall call it the Order of Caroline. And you shall be one of the first...”
Mantel said, “Don’t worry about such things now. May I bring Your Majesty some tea?”
“I should like that. And Mantel, while you are in the kitchen, order beef for dinner; the best beef. And the asparagus can be cut. Mr. Wraxall will like that...”
“I think I should also send for Doctor Leyfer.”
“There is no need. I am better now.”
But she spent the morning on the sofa. Her ladies fluttered around, suggesting a glass of wine, a loosening of stay laces—though hers were never tight—a sniff at a bottle of smelling salts. She said thank you, and thank you, and said she was feeling better, would be well by dinnertime.
Dinnertime brought the asparagus, heaped high, and a splendid sirloin, but no Mr. Wraxall. She dragged herself to the table, but could eat nothing, was faintly nauseated by seeing others eat. When Mantel suggested for the second time that she should go to bed, she said, “Yes. Perhaps that would be as well.” Her ladies undressed her and when she was in bed she dismissed them. “I shall do now. Go to your cards.”
Doctor Leyfer came. Five days earlier he had been sent for to attend a sick page in the castle. A few questions had made him reasonably certain that the symptoms indicated putrid fever, so he had sent one of his assistants. An assistant could not be sent to Her Majesty, so, cherishing his preconceived idea, he came, in some fear, and feeling her racing pulse said to himself, oh, dear dear!
“Does Your Majesty feel a soreness of the throat?”
“I feel ill all over.” On this day of all days; she still expected Mr. Wraxall to arrive before nightfall.
“The page, recently dead,” Doctor Leyfer said, making himself small, drawing little cautious breaths, “did Your Majesty come into close contact with him?”
Stop pestering me; suggest some cure or go away!
“Her Majesty visited him. She visits anyone who is sick,” Mantel said.
So there was no doubt about it, Doctor Leyfer thought, drawing himself smaller, breathing more shallowly. Putrid fever was most contagious; there was no cure and no palliative except laudanum. The mechanics of contagion were not understood, but its results were plain; with some diseases one victim meant another and another and putrid fever moved fast. Doctor Leyfer, who did not share Struensee’s cheerful belief that a doctor who lived to be thirty was immune, could hardly get himself out of the sick room quickly enough.
The Queen would die. He was her doctor, so he must make the hopelessness of her case clear from the start, thus forestalling criticism afterward. The words putrid fever ran around the castle like a cold draught. It seemed sensible to leave Mantel, who had helped her indoors and spent most of the day by her side, to continue to attend her. It was remembered with dismay that she had been present at the dinner table, but the thought that precaution might now be too late made nobody bold.
Mantel did not accept Doctor Leyfer’s diagnosis. No other page had sickened—though they had shared sleeping quarters with the dead boy; Her Majesty’s visit had been short, just long enough for her to see that he was comfortably bedded, to say, “Be of good heart, Erich; you will soon be better,” and to order the window to be opened. Why should she be smitten?
Under the impact of the fever, and the laudanum, faithfully administered because it eased the pains, Caroline’s mind was blurred most of the time, but she had sharp sudden intervals of clarity. It seemed to her that whenever she woke Mantel was there. “Mantel, you must go to bed,” she said, and “Mantel you must rest.” But she had lost all count of time and had no idea of how long his vigil lasted. “Mantel, this is no job for you. Where are the women?”
“I happen to be here, Your Majesty. Don’t fret about such things.”
On the first day he had sent a message to the Sand Krug demanding of his grandmother some anti-fever draught, and something to combat weakness. They came and were administered alongside the laudanum, but they were useless, too.
“Mantel, I am going to die.”
“No,” he said stoutly. “Your Majesty must not say that. It is now the fourth day. Doctor Leyfer was wrong.”
She could not bother to ask what the doctor had said.
“I shall never see my children again. But Mantel you must not grieve.”
He would grieve for her and mourn for her as long as he lived.
“You must not lose heart. Would you drink some tea?”
“Did you say four days? Have you slept at all?”
“Oh yes. In the chair.”
“I shall never be able to reward you properly; but it will be all right, in the end.”
She had drifted away again before the tea could be made and brought; Mantel could no longer spare the time, nor was he welcome in the kitchen. Of the page who brought the tea he asked his invariable question, “Has anyone else sickened?” Nobody had. Sometimes between sleeping and waking, Mantel entertained fantastic suspicions. Those incautious words in an open corridor with many doors. Poisoned? But how? The only thing she took that was not shared by others was the tea; and he, having developed a taste
for it, more often than not drank what was left in the pot.
Then she woke, and seemed better, well enough to write. Her conscience was uneasy about George; she knew that to love was not a crime, but George was still firmly in this world; an assertion of innocence from her death bed would comfort him.
Red-eyed and half stupefied from lack of sleep, but greatly cheered by the demand for writing materials, Mantel collected them and she forced herself to the final effort. “I die innocent...I did not deserve any of the frightful accusations by which the calumnies of my enemies stained my character. In the most solemn hour of my life, I turn to you, my royal brother, to express my heart’s thanks for all the kindness you have shown me during my whole life, and especially in my misfortune. I die willingly; for the unhappy bless the tomb.”
She wondered whether to mention Mantel and commend him to George’s attention, ask some reward for this faithful servant. But that might be misconstrued. Once one’s good name was lost, every action was suspect; and even she admitted that for a Queen to die, attended only by her valet de chambre, was quite extraordinary. Also, even if George refuted so vile a suspicion, his idea of properly rewarding Mantel would be to give him some job on the farm at Windsor—poor George’s idea of earthly happiness. The boy would be better here.
She signed the letter, leaving it for Mantel to fold and seal. Then she pulled from her finger the ring that had never been removed since Mamma placed it there. Ten years’ wear had not blunted the clarity of the inscription. Read against the background of what had happened to her, the wish might seem ironic, and yet...she had known happiness of a kind denied to most people.
“Give me your hand,” she said. The ring was just large enough for the little finger of his left hand. “May it work for you, too. I thank you for all you have done for me, Mantel; and I tell you again not to grieve.” If she could she would have revealed to him the secret, but it was one that could not be told. All she could say was, “Nothing ends, dear Mantel. There is no end. All is one.”
This assurance did not prevent him from weeping when he realized that she was dead.
She was dead, there was nothing more that he could do here. He went down, saying brusquely, “Her Majesty is dead,” and pushing his way through all these finely dressed, high-officed people who had eaten and slept and played cards, and feared for their lives. He went to the Sand Krug where the old woman said, “So! You have come home.”
Mr. Wraxall walked with his brisk, light step back to his lodging in Jermyn Street. Everything was going superbly. He had just learned that His Majesty had written directly to his sister and sent the letter by special Hanoverian courier. Nobody could know what the letter said, but everyone knew. Even Baron Lichtenstein, a cautious man, said that His Majesty had convinced himself, at last, that his sister’s restoration was the best thing that could happen to Denmark. “His Majesty’s letter will inform and prepare the Queen; and to you, Mr. Wraxall, because of your singular service to Her Majesty, will fall the honor of conducting Her Majesty from exile to the country waiting to welcome her.”
Could any man ask more?
His servant took his hat and the silver-knobbed stick and said, “Sir, have you heard? The Queen is dead!”
The world was full of Queens and it was typical of a serving man to be so inexplicit.
“What Queen?”
“The Queen of Denmark, sir.”
That troublesome old woman in Denmark. It couldn’t have happened more fortunately! Quite astonishing how once luck turned it ran full spate. It was from Juliana, not from the Regent, that opposition was expected.
“The Queen Mother, Tomkin,” Wraxall said, anxious to get things straight; otherwise Tomkin, communicating with his ilk, would spread the most misleading rumors.
“The Queen, sir. The one put away. Zell was it?”
“Great God Almighty,” said Wraxall, usually sparing of expletives. “My hat!” However much perturbed a gentleman could not appear in the street without a hat. Hatted, he rushed out in search of a refutation of this rumor.
But it was true. She was dead.
The King of England, reading her letter and knowing that she had never read his, blamed himself for dilatoriness and took another little step along the road at the end of which melancholia waited.
In Copenhagen the Queen Mother and the Regent jostled for power and quarreled incessantly: the Crown Prince grew more handsome and more headstrong day by day; the King, sometimes emerging from his cave, enjoyed paper cutting; fold here and here, cut there and there, and pleasant patterns emerged.
The conspirators, who in the very week of Caroline’s death had decided to wait for George no longer, but to move, even without his support, went their ways; some to compound with authority, some to live, self-exiled, in Germany.
Caroline lay in a vault in the church at Zell, close to her great-grandmother whose story had been so similar to her own, and yet so different.
PART EIGHT
ZELL; JUNE 1775
Nicolas Wraxall, though he had now no errand, decided spend the summer in Europe; his father was beginning to show signs of age and when he succeeded to the baronetcy and had responsibility for the estate his free-footed days would end. On his way to Berlin he would visit Zell, seek out Mantel who was said to have been with her in her last hours and who might have some light to throw upon the mystery of her death.
The Sand Krug, where, for sentimental reasons, he chose to lodge, had changed; Mantel who had been about the world and lived in places knew what sophisticated travelers looked for. The old woman and the unfriendly dog had retired into the background; the floor was no longer sanded in curious patterns and the large scrubbed table had been replaced by separate, smaller ones, with stiff white cloths.
“I am not hungry, Mantel,” Wraxall said, after they had greeted one another. He had not dined, and a pleasant odor came from the kitchen, but he had no appetite.
“Perhaps, sir, you would take a glass of wine with me?”
“That would be very agreeable. Thank you.”
Mantel brought the wine, a good Rhenish, cool from the cellar, poured it and sat down.
“You wish to hear about...the end?” Mantel asked.
“I admit to a certain curiosity. Some strange and conflicting rumors are going the rounds. There is even talk of poison; and it is a fact that for some the death was most opportune.”
“In Zell,” Mantel said, “they are as sure that she was poisoned as though they had seen the poison administered; but they blame an Italian cook who was dismissed more than a year ago. I have considered the matter myself; I was there...” He described how near he had been. “It was not putrid fever, nobody else sickened and so far as I could see there was no evidence of poison. I think her course was run.”
“That is one way of looking at it,” Wraxall said. But so young, so eager, so much alive, calling to him from the stairtop. He’d hoped to see the crown back on that pretty head.
“The castle,” Mantel said, “is deserted again; her rooms just as she left them. The keys were entrusted to me; if you would care to see...”
“I think not,” Wraxall said, remembering the drawing room where she had greeted him so warmly, the great table where she had read the letter under his horrified eyes, the library and the stairs. “What I wish to do, Mantel, is to go to her grave.” The word rang hollow; the grave, end of all youth, of beauty, of hope. Now that it had come to the point he was not sure that he could bear it. But company would help, would force composure upon him. “Would you care, Mantel, to accompany me?”
“No,” Mantel said, twisting the ring upon his little finger. “I have never...I never shall. I cannot think of her as being there.”
So alone, with no observer to brace or to criticize, Wraxall, thinking of the girl in the shabby red dress, shed some English tears over the place where the exile lay.