by David Elias
“But there is something worth preserving.”
“I have been sometime cruel to you.”
“You have been kind when it mattered most.”
We were face to face now, staring intently into each other’s eyes.
“I think it better we should see to some long period of silence between us,” I suggested. “Let something grow there, and perhaps we may reap the fruits of it.”
***
And so things were allowed to go on much as before. I continued to pursue every course of action available to see my family restored to the Palatinate and my son Charles Louis instated as Emperor. At long last the day came when the squabbling and quarrelling between the various factions of the Holy Roman Empire and the Protestant League grew tiresome. After all, it had been thirty years by then. Isn’t that long enough for a war? A treaty was signed at Westphalia that would see the Lower Palatinate restored to its rightful heirs, though the upper regions should remain in the hands of Duke Maximilian of Bavaria, and so were lost to us. Heidelberg and not Prague should be the seat of power for my eldest son, and in that same castle where he had his earliest childhood memories should he ascend the throne.
For his part Charles Louis had been languishing about my brother’s court in England, where each had succeeded in bringing out the worst in the other. Charles Louis had managed to talk my brother into an ill-advised course of action, one sure to meet with stiff opposition from Parliament. By that means did my brother succeed in alienating him entirely from that body, as well as from a healthy portion of the general populace, to the point where civil war broke out in the country. The conflict came to a head with the appointment of Oliver Cromwell as Lord Protector of the Realm, and my brother’s head in a bucket. Having never been paid the pension I was owed, I thought with Charles’s removal from office that perhaps some monies might now be forthcoming, but instead the indenture itself was rescinded by Parliament and I never got a penny. My son, rather than make straight for Heidelberg to be invested there, managed to stay in London long enough to witness my brother’s execution, and even went so far as to try and get an audience with him on the night before the axe came down, but Charles refused.
I suddenly found it highly appealing that I might be allowed to go and live in Heidelberg again. Charles Louis should be crowned there and rule the Lower Palatinate from that same fair and peaceful castle where I had spent my days as a young bride. How pleasant it would be to wander once more beneath the blossoms of the orange grove in the Hortus Palatinus, to sit again in that most favoured of places where the birds of the fountain sang my brother Henry’s memory. And what of Elizabethentor? Did that gate still adorn the entrance to the castle? Perhaps the place had fallen into neglect and ruin. All the more reason to go and restore it to its former glory.
I thought, having come through so many disappointments and tragedies, to see myself slipping into contented old age there. Gone should be the need to shake cockroaches from my tattered arrases, to grovel incessantly for favour, to tend to each fragile strand of Lord Craven’s unrequited affection. What thoughts flooded my mind! I might live a life of relative ease there compared to my present circumstances. I envisioned the castle nestled into the mountainside, the town below, the river, the trees and hills of Heidelberg.
Chapter Sixteen
I confess I was just as glad to be elsewhere and not in England after the news reached me of my brother’s fate. It gave me reason to harken back to my own narrow escape from Prague and brought home the realization that I might have been fortunate to come away with my head. If I had made my way back to London, who knows what might have become of me? Perhaps I should have been sentenced to a life of imprisonment in the Tower. I might have been left to languish in the very cell where Sir Raleigh and I once suppressed our passions so admirably. Or Lord Cromwell may well have seen fit to have me beheaded as well.
I imagined myself in my brother’s place, my own head brought down over a blackened and bloodied block of wood, the excruciating wait for the executioner’s blow to strike, the axe slicing through the muscles and veins and bones of my neck. Might I expect, even for the briefest instant of time, to have yet some conscious awareness of my head separating from my body, my eyes open and still able to see even as it fell into the sticky bottom of the waiting bucket? Where exactly would I, Elizabeth Stuart, be at that last moment? Still in my body or departed from it? Was there any part of my brother Charles left in his body, or did it all come away when his head came off? Surely such an experience would speak to those very arguments my daughter Elisabeth and Monsieur Descartes had so often engaged in. It seemed to me the question would be answered there and then.
Did I mourn for my brother? Suffice it to say any grief on my part was tempered by the sense that he had been the author of his own undoing. He was arrogant and self-serving, and his utter disregard for the sentiments of the people could no longer sustain his crown. I learned from subsequent accounts, which were numerous and detailed, that the execution had indeed amounted to rather a gory business. There had been a huge crowd on hand to witness the beheading, and a great deal of blood was said to have spewed forth from my brother’s neck even as the executioner’s assistant held up his head for all to see, while people jostled each other to get to the scaffolding that they might soak some of the blood up with their handkerchiefs.
What can my brother’s state of mind have been? What thoughts running through his consciousness but that he was moments away from the end of the world, for it might as well cease when he did? What is the world to us if we cannot be in it? Why should it be allowed to go on? How many among us, had we the power, should see fit at the moment of our departure to take the entirety of creation with us? Who could resist the temptation of such a final act? Can any living creature ever truly think of its own death as anything but wrongful? Who can hope to rise above that finality to some higher level, a brief moment of grace when we accept our fate and give ourselves over to something nobler? Even our Lord and Saviour failed to manage it entirely. Perhaps my brother saw, at the very last, the petty and spiteful nature of his menial life, welcomed the chance to have his soul transported elsewhere, to some higher plane of existence. It may turn out to be the same for me, but how can I hope to believe as much when even Jesus had his doubts? Who can go to his death willingly unless he suffer from some manner of delusion, whether self-inflicted or otherwise? The great allure of faith is the chance to put the lie to death, but life everlasting is not such a compelling idea. Be it Heaven or Hell, who can say which is more worthy of the human spirit?
Did not Jesus himself on the cross yet hope to be spared? Why is life so precious? Why are we so loath to give it up? We think even to the final minute that it belongs to us, but having glimpsed the abyss we are confronted by the truth that it was never ours to begin with. I wonder did my poor brother come to understand as much? What does it mean to believe something, to have faith, when we come to stand upon that final threshold and stare into black and eternal emptiness? There it lies before us, and in the next moment we must fall in. Perhaps my brother is falling yet.
Who is to say what comes after? Perhaps the moon and stars are fated to vanish when I do. The very heavens themselves may only have come into being when I did, and so are fated to depart along with me. It may be that my life is much more than merely a precious thing. It may be the only thing.
***
Sweet was my indulgence at the prospect of being back in Heidelberg once again, and my disappointment all the more bitter when I discovered I was not welcome there! I suppose I might have seen it coming. Having settled in Heidelberg, my son insisted on marrying Charlotte of Hesse even though he knew full well I did not approve of the match. As fetching a creature as she was in appearance she was equally wretched in disposition. Charles Louis had always been a terrible judge of character, easily swayed by looks, and Charlotte possessed the kind other women despised her for: tall and slender, shapel
y of limb, with lustrous flaxen hair and strikingly large breasts — all conspired to make them loathe the very sight of her. I might have seen fit to let it pass had she had been a better sort of person, but she was manipulative and devious, and used her voluptuousness to take advantage. My son Charles never stood a chance. He even tried to convince me that the decision to shun me was his, but I have no doubt Charlotte made sure that under no circumstances should her husband’s meddling mother be allowed to take up residence in the castle.
When I intimated as much to Charles Louis he insisted that it was because I had turned to Lord Craven for finance and consolation. “If he is so eager to take care of you then let him do it now.” Those were his exact words. He had seen all the concessions I made year after year, and claimed I had not remained true to the principles his father would have had me uphold in such matters, and so in effect was choosing to disown me.
And so life for me went on much as it had before, albeit with the financial burden somewhat eased after a number of the older children saw fit to leave the relative austerity extant under my roof and go to live in Heidelberg instead, where they were welcomed by their brother Charles Louis. Good riddance! Even Elisabeth went to live there for a time, though much to my delight I learned that she had soon found the conditions there unbearable and left. This gave me no end of satisfaction. There were stories of my son’s wife, Charlotte, flying into rages of one sort and another, of violent arguments, gambling debts, and turmoil throughout the castle.
At one point news reached me that Charles Louis had taken up with a young woman of the court named Marie Luise von Degenfeld, who began immediately to bear him one child after another though he was still married to Charlotte. He even managed to estrange himself from my son Rupert after he became convinced that Rupert was making advances at Marie, and so by degrees the others of his siblings found reason to have a falling out with him, so that they were soon scattered far and wide.
In all of this Lord Craven’s devotion to me continued unabated, notwithstanding that I continued to entertain young men of the court as I had always done. At one point I was told there were certain factions in England favourable to my return from Bohemia. Apparently there was a movement afoot that I be crowned queen in order to take my late brother’s place in the restored monarchy. I found it a tempting prospect, but I knew it should never amount to anything, which was just as well, for it brought me to mind of how eager I had been to see my husband, Frederick, take the throne when so many opposed it.
But there was something else going on. I had reached the limits of continually getting my hopes up only to see them dashed, longed for a life less fraught with disappointment. I must stop up the passion that left me always wanting more. Why should it be so hard to find contentment? How many of us are condemned to live out our days never gaining the thing we most long for? I heard of a woman once who wanted to be a poet. More than anything in the world she wanted to write a poem that would move the reader to tears of joy and sadness all in the same moment. Alas she was a bad poet, though she was careful to keep herself blissfully unaware of it. People began to avoid her lest she inflict upon them one of her dreadful verses. Whenever she managed to ambush someone they were made to suffer the worst kind of lyric. But to her, every word was precious! So, I thought, it is with my dreams. Better to keep them to myself and not inflict them on others. Perhaps the object of our desire continually eludes us precisely because we fail to grasp the true nature of that which we strive for.
All these elaborate fabrications we cobble together over the course of our meagre existence. Do they serve us in good stead, or only blind us to what we really need to discover? From the very first we all of us make up stories to tell ourselves. The little girl busy at seemingly innocent and unfettered play with her dolls is in fact about the very serious business of manufacturing a meticulous fiction for herself, that she may dwell within. And so we conjure ourselves up. By such means are we from our earliest imaginings the author of our own becoming. But that we grow up under the influence of adults who care for us, who expected us to think and act in particular ways and to believe certain things, we should surely become another sort of person. And yet that which makes us truly who we are originates from deep within our own singular and separate being. Of all that is best and worst in us we are the agent. So have I done, so do we all, imagine ourselves into existence even to the last breath.
I have these last few days been entertaining a fanciful notion, I know not wherefore, that long after I am gone someone not of this time shall write of me, that my departed spirit shall visit itself upon some distant shore and there cause the ebb and flow of a future heart to seek out the inner workings of my own. What shall I make of such a ghostly experience? I suppose they shall think themselves seduced by forces beyond their understanding, but is it really so strange? How often, over the course of this long life, do we deny ourselves to ourselves?
“Tell me, which do you think is worse,” I asked Lord Craven one evening, “to love someone though they be unworthy, or to love them not, though they be worthy?” We were having a quiet dinner, just the two of us, as we liked to do more and more after the last of my children had taken their leave. By then neither of us cared to bother much with the puerile antics of the court, having little need for it.
“I dare not answer, as I find myself in neither predicament.”
“I’m relieved to hear it. But for the sake of argument, if you had to choose.”
Lord Craven sat back in his chair. “I should have to give the matter some thought, though I don’t know that I care to.”
“Indulge me.”
He had just returned from Prague, where he had visited the Cathedral of St. Vitus at my urging, to see an enormous wooden relief I had heard about, a telling recreation rendered in exquisite detail and mounted near the altar, of Frederick’s and my humiliating retreat from Prague.
“It suppose it depends which side you find yourself on.”
“Then choose a side.”
The Archbishop had commissioned the work to hang there for all to see, the better to ensure that our disgrace should not be forgotten.
“I shouldn’t like to think of myself as unworthy of love.”
I put down my cutlery and dabbed at the corner of my mouth with my napkin. “I confess I have of late been given to such thoughts.”
“You think me unworthy?”
“No. I mean myself.”
“You must not. You know that I love you.”
The artist had been instructed to carve out the procession of our hastily loaded carriages making their way down from the castle and over the bridge into the Old Town.
“But what can be said for my children?”
“It isn’t as though they have been given a choice in the matter. There can be no discussion of blame.”
“And yet the thought persists.”
“You are worthy to be loved by each and every one of them.”
“I doubt they should say they have received as much from me. They say those unable to give love are not worthy to receive it.”
Lord Craven took up his goblet. “In any case I am of the conviction that the entire business is out of our hands, though some will say,” he turned to me wistfully, “it is possible a person may grow into love for another.” He brought the cup to his lips. “Do you think it may be so?”
I felt incapable of answering, thought it better to remain silent.
“I suppose the caveat,” he went on, “may be that true passion cannot be arrived at by such means. Do you think that’s too cynical?” He grew animated. “What is your dispassionate view on the subject? Will you say true love can only be fuelled by desire?”
“Some will argue just the opposite.” I stared back at him. “Either way it must fade in time, no matter how intense to begin with. Some things simply cannot be sustained.”
“How then of duty?”
Lord Craven asked.
“How does that follow?”
“Passion brings duty with it.”
“To what end?”
Lord Craven seemed surprised at my question. “Why, to be steadfast out of love for that person and so remain faithful.”
“And that would bring happiness?” I looked at him.
“I would see to your happiness.”
“What of your own?”
“One brings about the other.”
“And yet cruelty can be borne out of too much kindness.”
Lord Craven pushed himself back from the table and stood. “I think that I shall be going back to England.” He walked to the window. “My lands have been restored to me and I must go and see to my finances.” He turned back to look at me over his shoulder. “Will you come with me?”
“What, to London?”
“I should think you would welcome the chance to quit this place. I know you had thought to return to Heidelberg, and if your son had allowed it you would be there now, and no longer have need of me.”
“That sounds a harsh indictment.”
“I have some lands at Ashdown. Do you know it?”
“If I remember from my childhood, it is in Oxfordshire, is it not?”
“What if I told you I could build a place for you there, a manor nestled among the green and rolling wooded hills?”
“With little more to occupy my time than ambling along a wooded path, I suppose, or sitting by a warm fire in the evening.”
“It will make you happy, I think.”
“That is certain to prove elusive, as ever it has been. This place . . . it would be for both of us to live in?”
“For you, I should of course hope to come and stay as you saw fit, but the place would be yours.”