But in this year of 1689 not everyone had thrown his cares from his shoulders. On November 5th of the previous year William of Orange had landed at Brixham. In December James II had fled from England to the Court of France. In January Louis XIV was preparing with the help of his one ally, the Sultan of Turkey, to restore him to his throne; Louis had invaded the Palatinate, destroyed the Elector’s Castle at Heidelberg and burned the fair town of Mannheim to the ground; and the Grand Alliance against him was being slowly hammered into shape. William of Orange was its moving spirit, the Emperor Leopold its battering ram and little Hanover the spanner which might tighten up the nuts of the machine or be flung into the works and dislocate it altogether. There were many preoccupied minds in Hanover during this winter Carnival.
Balati, the French Ambassador, was using all his persuasions to secure the eighteen thousand trained soldiers of Celle and Hanover for Louis.
Duke Ernst Augustus was demanding his Electoral Hat from the Emperor Leopold as the price of his joining the Confederation.
Madame von Platen was concerned lest Duke George William of Celle should refuse to throw in his lot with the Alliance and so halve the influence of Hanover. Her couriers could have ridden blindfold between Monplaisir and the house in the Schuhstrasse where Bernstorff sat fixing his price, the estate of Gartow.
Catherine Busche, now erased from George Louis’ good books on the ground of age, and a widow, was wondering whether it would restore her credit if she married General Weyke.
Duchess Sophia was in a state of doubt where not Leibnitz nor Descartes nor Spinoza, nor any of the Ministers of religion whom she loved to set by the ears could help her. If James II remained a dethroned exile, she was by a long stride nearer to the English sceptre. But if Louis XIV put him back, he would have Parliament under his thumb; and if she had meanwhile taken the field against him, she might find herself barred from the Succession altogether. So she spent that Carnival composing carefully cordial letters to William at the Hague and James at St. Germain.
Prince George Louis was torn between his delight in his big new beautiful cowlike mistress, Ermengarde Melusina von Schulenberg and his desire to lead his troops into Flanders and show those fiddle-faddle queasy-stomached Frenchmen what lusty soldiers properly fed on sauerkraut and sausages were capable of.
The English Ambassador, Sir William Dutton Colt, was watching with a feeling of despair the handsome presents which were flowing in a golden stream from the coffers of Monsieur Balati into the pockets of Ernst Augustus, the Platens and von Bernstorff in the far-away Schuhstrasse; and deploring the niggardliness of his own country.
The Princess Sophia Dorothea in the loneliness of her own apartments was seeking in the education of her two children, George Augustus and Sophia Dorothea, an anodyne for the aching humiliation of her position and not caring twopence whether Ernst Augustus was raised to the rank of Elector; or whether James II remained at St. Germain or returned to Whitehall, so long as she could go home with her children to the quiet place where she was loved. Her heart yearned for Celle, the company of her mother and the clean seemliness of her former life against cherished and familiar things.
And in the midst of all these griefs and preoccupations and ambitions, an apparently trivial thing happened of which only an unimportant second Secretary in the English Embassy took note; and he rather from jealousy than from any foresight in the inevitable development of events.
Anthony Craston had been sitting for the last three months at Celle in a subordinate office of the Hanover Chancery with his nose between the leaves of the code-books. He had drafted and redrafted and ciphered and deciphered and done all the clerkly work which fell to him. It was the kind of work which none could do better, for he was exact to a figure and literal to a word. But even so, during much of it, his mind was free and often whilst Sophia Dorothea in her imagination was travelling with her children in a coach along the road to Celle, he, in his, was crossing her on horseback on his way to Hanover. He was actually there now on the first night of Redoute, with ten days of liberty in front of him. He sat in the Ambassador’s box above the dancing floor dreaming of the hour next day when he would give to Sophia Dorothea the messages which her mother had entrusted to him, and listen to her eager questions and see her eyes grow kind. A chatter of voices in the box at his elbow waked him from his reverie, and he turned his head towards it. A woman, glittering with diamonds, in a dress of pale blue silk over white flowered satin with her hair piled high above her head in a Fontange, sat in the front of the box, paying no more attention to the gossip behind her than he had been doing himself. In spite of her mask Anthony had no doubt who she was. Anthony recognised the growing thickness of Clara von Platen’s neck and shoulders and the outstanding majesty of her bust. He would have withdrawn his gaze, having no mind at the moment for her civilities, but for something violent in the very stillness of her attitude. She was leaning forward over the ledge of the box, staring down upon one corner of the floor, with all her rapacious soul in the stare. Her eyes moved as one couple danced, but nothing else of her moved, not a finger, not a foot. Craston had the notion that she was willing someone to look up.
Craston followed the direction of her eyes. That young tall milk-white creature with the hair like pale gold could only be Ermengarde von Schulenberg, but the stripling who danced with her? Anthony could put no name to him. He was dressed in a suit of pink satin embroidered with silver lace and cut close enough to give value to the slenderness of his shape, and he moved through the stately figures of a minuet with the casual elegance of France.
Anthony looked away dispassionately.
“Clara von Platen is forty years old if she’s a day,” he reflected, “and she likes her lovers young and tender and daintily garnished. That poor youth will be wooed and won before the night’s out and what money he has got he’ll leave behind him at Monplaisir.”
Indeed it seemed as if his conjecture was right. For when he looked down upon the floor again, the minuet was at an end and Ermengarde von Schulenberg was presenting the stranger to Clara von Platen. Anthony watched the scene with amusement. For Clara was beginning her wooing there and then — so close she stood to him, with so much admiration she spoke, with such evident desire her fingers caressed the sleeve of his coat.
Anthony left her to it. He went out into the corridor and was welcomed back by his friends and exchanged the gossip of the season. But the memory of the scene upon the ballroom floor remained at the bottom of his mind and a vague uneasiness began to invade him through all the talk and laughter. He traced it to its cause. Clara von Platen was not in question. The advances of that middle-aged light-o’-love increased in number and effrontery as her attractions diminished. This was one of them.
“Had she been directing her darts at some grave Minister from Vienna or Cologne,” he reflected “I might have been troubled by her eagerness. But Carnival is her hunting season and like other beasts with ageing teeth she likes her quarry tender.”
Nor did the Schulenberg disturb him. She had neither the brains nor the inclination to meddle in politics.
“That large and dimpled carcass contains only one rapacity,” he said to himself, “a passion for money.”
It was the young stranger of the graceful movements and tempered richness of dress who was bothering him; and a fear which, ever since his first presentation to the Princess in the Alte Palace, had made itself felt within him like some dull uncomprehended ache, suddenly became clear, was suddenly formulated in his thoughts. He was standing outside the box of the Princess of East Frisia, one of the reigning beauties of the Court of Hanover; and acting upon the impulse of a panic, he opened the door and asked her permission to pay his respects to her.
The Princess was whole-heartedly for William of Orange and the English party. She received him graciously and offered him a chair.
“You shall tell me to what side Duke George William leans at Celle,” she said. “The Duchess Eleonore,” and the Princess
shrugged her shoulders. “We need not linger over her. She has so many French officers at her table that I wonder the Fleur de Lys does not float from her flagstaff. But the Duke must side with us.”
Anthony Craston hitched his chair forward towards the ledge of the box. His one desire was to watch the floor of the ballroom and make sure. But he was caught. His own panic had betrayed him. Out of the corner of his eye he could see that a quadrille was being danced, and that the pink satin suit advanced and retired and set to partners in company with the blue and flowered white of Clara von Platen. But he must keep his face politely turned to the Princess of East Frisia and his expression interested.
“His Highness had difficult neighbours,” he explained. “Denmark and—” somehow this other name stuck in his throat. It was too apposite to the real subject of his thoughts. “And—”
“Sweden.”
The Princess supplied the name.
“Yes, Sweden. Neither of those countries has as yet shown its hand. It is natural that the Duke of Celle should hesitate,” and to his dismay he saw that the quadrille had ended and those who had danced in it were streaming out of the door.
But the Princess of East Frisia was deeply concerned in this matter of Denmark and Sweden.
“They must not ally themselves with France,” she declared. “Has Bernstorff no influence at Stockholm or Copenhagen?”
The unhappy Anthony Craston cursed himself for a fool. If he had thought for a moment, he must have realised that this was the last box which he should have entered. Admission was easy, departure as difficult as from a prison. He had to sit where he was and answer; whilst the ballroom emptied and filled again. He noticed with an increase of consternation that neither Clara von Platen nor her new acquisition made a reappearance; and he began to babble. He remembered the next morning the indiscretions which a second Secretary could commit when talking politics with a distracted mind, and his heart sank. But tonight he didn’t care. Bernstorff, as all the world knew, would go where his bread was buttered. No doubt Charles XI of Sweden would like to plunder a few more churches. Denmark would like the fortifications of Ratzeburg on its frontier destroyed. Well, why not — as long as it brought about an end to the great lady’s questions and set him free. Political women were an abomination and an offence.
I do hope, Monsieur, that your prophecies are wrong,” said the Princess in some distress as at last she dismissed him. “I shall not sleep a wink all night. But I expect that you have been working with too close an assiduity and humours come from such applications which tinge our thought with an excessive melancholy.”
“She’s telling me I’m bilious,” said Anthony to himself in a cold rage as he bent over her careless hand.
“Madame,” he said aloud, “I am a second Secretary, the merest register and compendium. I take plain words and make them nonsensical. I take nonsense and make plain words of it; and between the two I become myself a hieroglyph with meaning. I examine ciphers all day and I know no cipher so round and complete as the second Secretary himself.”
With that apology he got himself out of the box. He ran down the stairs and hurried to the card-room. The Bassette tables were full and where the play was high, they were surrounded by people standing and wagering. Anthony pushed himself in among the groups. But not one of the three whom he sought was to be seen. He went on to the supper-room. They were neither standing at the buffet nor seated at one of the tables. He looked at his watch. It was a little after midnight.
“They have gone to Monplaisir,” he said.
On any other night he would have gone home to his bed. But fear now had him in its grip. He understood now that he had always been afraid, that a foreboding had drawn his thoughts continually to Hanover ever since his first visit to the town, that his imagination, slow and pale though it was, had been picturing dimly behind the glitter and ostentation of this Court, dark places of savage crime and silent vengeances. He was torturing himself with fancies? Very likely. But he must make sure!
He had a hired carriage waiting for him, and he bade the coachman drive out towards Monplaisir. Fifty yards on this side of it he stopped and dismissed the man; and then, slinking behind the trunks of the lime-trees, he walked on. Monplaisir was keeping open house. Its big iron gates stood wide; so many carriages with smoking horses and gilt lanterns waited, so many grooms and footmen loitered about them, that it seemed there was not space left for a handcart. Yet more coaches swaying on leather springs, with painted panels and embroidered hammercloths, and lackeys standing behind, clattered up and lined the kerb. The windows were ablaze from the ground floor to the attic, and a little crowd of people were assembled in the road, with their faces upturned as though they expected that the walls of brick and stone would crumble away and amaze their eyes with the splendour of the rooms within.
Anthony’s thoughts went back suddenly to a night when a crowd was gathered beneath Monsieur Faubert’s windows in the Haymarket and then leaped in a swift contrast to another Palace a mile away where the blinds were drawn and no courtiers sought admission and a young woman, still hardly older than a girl, lay in the dark alone. He muffled his face in his cloak and joined the little crowd in the road. That he would recognise anyone in that hurly- burly, whether he entered the house or came from it, he could not believe. And he was not pliable enough to invent for himself some unimportant role and gossip with the grooms. Common sense, in a phrase, told him that the night was cold and his vigil useless, but common sense and he had parted company hours before.
The crowd began to melt away. No more carriages came, and the carriages which were there one after another took the road to Hanover. A clock struck three. There was no one left now of those who watched the house, but Anthony. He fell back behind the trees. The windows of Monplaisir darkened one by one like so many bright eyes closed in sleep. One only remained on the first floor above the porch, shining softly and veiled by blue curtains. One carriage alone waited a few yards along the road. Anthony leaned against a tree trunk. With small hours of the morning the cold had sharpened and there was a presage of snow in the air. Anthony, whilst holding his cloak about him, could thrust now one and now the other of his hands in between his waistcoat and his shirt, but he was dressed for a ball and his legs and feet in his silk stockings and shoes hurt him intolerably. He dared not stamp some trifle of life and warmth into them, lest some servant of the house should be attracted by the noise. But he was obstinate. He was determined to see this last, this specially favoured visitor depart. A turn of luck might help him, a draught of wind might blow a cloak aside, a voice might speak aloud.
It was after the church clock had struck four when a couple of footmen came running from the courtyard and turning to the right stopped by the one remaining carriage. Anthony could hear them waking the coachman on his box. He could see them removing the rugs from the horses’ backs; and then he recognised with a flare of indignation at his folly, the futility of his vigil. A coach! Footmen in livery to stand behind. Why, the stranger whom he feared to see lived upon his brother’s bounty, lived well no doubt, was generously treated, but not so generously that he could set up, for the space of a visit to a strange town at a time of Carnival, his own coach and his liveried grooms. Anthony had actually turned raging at himself for his wasted night when he heard in the distance a horse galloping along the road.
Anthony stopped and looked back. The sound grew louder. No creak of wheels, no thud of a carriage lumbering after it kept it company. Someone was riding and riding to Hanover through the night on urgent business. Anthony saw the horseman flit like a shadow past the lights of the waiting coach, and then a movement in the courtyard opposite caught his attention. The gates still stood wide. Anthony Craston saw the door of the house, which was raised by a few steps above the cobbles of the yard, open. A lantern hung over the door. By the light of it Craston looked into the hall. He saw a woman with a fur coat wrapped about her, very small but very clear — Clara von Platen. Behind her a man was wrappi
ng a cloak about his shoulders, but he was in the shadows. Clara von Platen turned and flung her arms about his shoulders and drew his head down to her in a last embrace. Then the man pressed his hat down upon his forehead and ran lightly down the steps. Whether he wore a peruke or his own hair, the curls so clustered about his face and his cloak was hitched so high over his mouth that nothing of his face was visible. He walked quickly to the gateway and the swing of his cloak gave Anthony a glimpse of a pink suit beneath and a gleam of silver embroidery. Not for nothing had Clara von Platen leaned forward with so concentrated a longing over the edge of her box! She had made her kill and could point the night upon her calendar with a red mark.
Meanwhile the horseman was drawing near; and Craston learned that the end of his journey was not Hanover but Monplaisir. For the gallop had become a trot, and as he reached the gateway he stopped and flung himself from his horse. Craston remembered the morning of his first journey to Hanover six years before and the rider whom he had carried to this house on the step of his chaise. He was wondering whether this was the same messenger on another and more fortunate errand.
“He came from Celle,” he recollected. Cresset told me of him — gave me his name — Heinrich — yes, Heinrich Muller,” and at this moment an incident which he did not understand drove everything from his mind except the scene in front of him.
The rider, with the reins in his hand, came suddenly face to face with Clara von Platen’s lingering guest, and the guest flinched suddenly. He sprang back, the cloak slipped down from his face and from his lips broke a cry of fear. Then with a curse he flung the fold of his cloak across his shoulder and strode down the road.
But Anthony Craston had seen. All his forebodings were justified. Philip Königsmark had come to Hanover.
XIX. TWO OLD FRIENDS MEET AGAIN
ANTHONY CRASTON TRAMPED home and went to bed with his thoughts in a jumble. When he awoke they were still in a jumble. He was a young man who liked his thoughts to be tidy. So he sent his servant for one of the two hacks which he kept, hoping that a ride in the sharp air would so quicken blood and brain that his difficulties would have sorted themselves out by the time he returned and given him a point of departure. He rode out past Monplaisir to Herrenhausen, made a sweep through the woods to the south and returned by way of the great Parade ground. It was his favourite circuit, for from the Parade ground he could look across the narrow Leine River to the windows of the wing of the Leine Place which, since the birth of her first child George Augustus, Sophia Dorothea had occupied.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 711