Her mother had complained about never having eaten so many apples in her life, but when Caterina ate one of them, cooked in red wine and covered with whipped cream, she would gladly have signed her mother up for another two months of apples. They talked of many things: her father’s work, her mother’s friends, her sisters’ marriages, her nieces and nephews. Caterina wondered, should it happen that she someday had an estate to leave, whether she would be happy to leave it—in the event of her not having husband or children—to her nieces and nephews? They were only children now but who knew what they would become as adults?
As her parents continued to talk and she continued to half listen to them, she thought about Steffani. He had passed most of his life in Germany, going back to Italy only occasionally and usually for fairly short periods. How much had he seen of his relatives or their children? Had he even seen them, known them, tossed them in the air and played with them and sung his songs to them? And the cousins, these men who descended from the children’s children of his cousins, with what right did they stake a claim on his papers and estate, and where had the idea of a “treasure” come from? No one had explained that to her. The only reference she’d found to his estate mentioned that, after his creditors had been paid, there remained “2,029 florins, some papers, some relics, medals, and music.” It was that “and music” that hit her with force. Exclude that and the man had lived seventy-four years: some papers, some money, some relics, and some medals. Treasure?
“Where did we all get the idea that your great-grandfather lost everything at the
casinò
?” she surprised her father by asking. Both her parents stared at her, but neither of them asked her if she had been paying attention to what they were saying, so obvious was it that she had not.
Her father ran both hands through his still thick hair, something he did when he wanted time to think. Her mother, as she always did when things didn’t go as she had planned, put more food on their plates. Everyone in the family except her mother and Cinzia ate like wolves and never changed weight by a gram. “All I have to do is look at a carrot and I weigh a kilo more the next day” was her mother’s mantra.
“I don’t know,” her father said, not about the carrot that played so frequent a role in his wife’s conversation, but about the question Caterina had just asked him. “It’s family legend. People used to talk about it when we were kids, and I talked about it with Giustino and Rinaldo.”
“Did anyone ever check to see if it was true?” she asked.
Her mother gave Caterina a startled glance, but her father smiled and said, “No, I suppose we never thought about doing that.”
“Why?” Caterina asked.
He considered her question for a while and smiled again. “Probably because it sounded so romantic and so Venetian—palazzo lost at cards, gambling away the family fortune.”
“What do you think really happened?”
He shrugged. “I suppose what usually happens. My great-grandfather wasn’t good with money, wouldn’t listen to his wife, and lost it all.”
Her mother broke in to say, “It’s how we like to think of ourselves.”
“We?” Caterina asked.
“Veneziani. Gran signori,
” she said, quoting the tag line of a common saying that defined Venetians.
“But instead?” she asked.
“Cati,” her mother said, “you haven’t been away so long you’ve forgotten. We love to make a deal and beat someone else out of something.”
“But you don’t and
Papà
doesn’t,” she said, knowing this was true.
Neither of her parents said anything for some time until she put her spoon down and admitted, “All right, all right. You don’t, but most of us do.”
“Do you?” her mother asked, as if she had just shown some sympathy for child prostitution or the MOSE project.
“No, I don’t think I do,” she answered.
Before things could grow more complicated, her mother said, “You’ve got twelve minutes to get the boat at San Marcuola, Cati.” She hadn’t looked at her watch, hadn’t asked the time, she simply
knew
.
Hurried kisses, promises to call the next day, and every day, her mother’s insistence that it made no sense for her to live all the way down in Castello when she had a perfectly good home to stay in, and then she was out of the house and on her way to the boat stop.
Her feet knew the way—out the door and right along the canal, then left over the bridge, and stop thinking about it and let your feet do it for you, then nine minutes later she walked out in front of the church of San Marcuola, where, she reminded herself, Hasse’s tomb was hard to find, and straight to the boat stop. She took out her
imob
and pressed it against the sensor, heard the blip of acceptance, then walked into the lighted
embarcadero
.
And there he was, the man who had followed her from the Foundation. He sat on the bench to the left-hand side, his legs stretched out in front of him, feet crossed at the ankles. His arms were crossed over his chest, and he looked like any person sitting and waiting for the vaporetto to arrive. He glanced up at her and, though he noticed her, there was no sign of recognition on his part, just as there had been none when he’d looked at her on the street some hours before.
She opened her bag and slipped her
imob
into the inside pocket, walked past him to the front of the dock, turned right, and looked up the Grand Canal. The boat was a hundred meters away, clearly visible in the brightly lit canal. Its headlight approached. What did she do if he got on the boat with her? Ignore him and get off at Arsenale and then walk home? There were sure to be people on the street, but perhaps not on the small
calle
where the apartment was. She could call the police, but what if he didn’t get off the boat when she did? The boat came and she got on, went into the cabin, and took an aisle seat on the left side, where she could see who got on after her. He did not.
As the sailor flipped the rope loose, she waited for the man to make a sudden move and jump on the departing boat at the last minute, but he didn’t. The boat started forward. She turned to the left and saw him still sitting there, legs comfortably stretched out in front of him, arms folded. As she moved past him, he continued to look at her, expression unchanged.
She looked forward. She felt something sting her eye, and when she placed her hand on it, she felt the perspiration that had run down her face and soaked her hair. It took almost a half hour to get to Arsenale, and Caterina was glad of it, for she had time to talk herself into a state of calm.
The boat pulled in, the sailor tossed the rope and wrapped it around the stanchion, and five or six people lined up to leave the boat. She put herself in the middle of them, matching her pace to theirs. Careful to stay behind an elderly couple who walked slowly ahead of her, she followed them off the boat and down to Via Garibaldi until she came to the street where she was living, Calle Schiavona. She paused, but only minimally, at the corner. The key to the front door had been in her hand since the boat had begun to slow for the stop.
The house was along on the left. She reached the door, put the key in the lock, and let herself into the entrance. She turned on the light and walked to the top floor, then let herself into the apartment. She walked through it, turning on all of the lights one after the other. When she was sure she was alone in the apartment—though she tried not to think of it in those terms—she went into the bathroom and was violently sick into the toilet. She washed her face and rinsed her mouth, went into the kitchen and made herself a cup of chamomile tea, and took it back to the living room.
Sleep, she knew, was impossible. She sat on the sofa and picked up the second of the books about Steffani she had taken from the library.
The story recounted so captivated her that she soon forgot about feeling sick, drank the tea, went and made more, and returned to the book. She read a few more pages, went into the kitchen and ate a few dry crackers, drank more tea, then returned to the book.
In 1694, the movie-star handsome—she liked this anachronistic description—Count Philip Christoph von Königsmarck disappeared overnight from the castle of Ernst August, the duke of Hanover and Steffani’s patron. He disappeared, she read, “into thin air.”
It was subsequently rumored that he had been killed on the orders of someone, and even though the official version always remained that he had simply gone missing, nothing could prevent it from becoming the greatest scandal of the time. There were a few candidates for the role of killer, or sender, first among whom was Duke Ernst August himself, who objected to the openness of Königsmarck’s affair with his daughter-in-law, the beauty of the century, Princess Sophie Dorothea.
With the entrance of a second double-barreled Sophie, Caterina was forced to flip back to the genealogical chart at the beginning of the book. The Sophie Charlotte whom Steffani corresponded with and of whose friendship he was so proud was the sister-in-law of this second Sophie. The betrayed husband was Georg Ludwig, the future king George I; his adulterous wife, Sophie Dorothea, was also his first cousin. She had been a desirable catch because of her beauty and charm and, not incidentally, because of the hundred thousand thalers a year that came with her.
The nausea had passed, and Caterina found she was hungry. She went into the kitchen and put some rice on to boil. On the way back to the sofa, she paused in front of the mirror next to the front door and asked herself out loud, “Have you been watching too much television?” Since Caterina had never owned or lived with a television and never watched it, the question was rhetorical; she asked it as a way of commenting on the melodrama of the story she was reading.
It was not, to say the very least, a love-filled marriage. Truth to tell, Georg Ludwig and Sophie hated each other. The book recounted an incident when an argument between them had so escalated that he literally had to be pulled off of her. Georg had a series of mistresses and, in fact, when he subsequently went to England to become king, he packed up two of them—whom the English looked at and quickly nicknamed the Maypole and the Elephant—and took them along. Sophie Dorothea seemed to have limited herself to only one, and everything Caterina could find suggested that her error was not the affair but her failure to keep it secret.
Steffani, she reminded herself—if simply to justify to herself continuing to read this lurid stuff, like something straight out of a scandal magazine—was involved inasmuch as the two lovers, Sophie Dorothea and Count Philip, who sent each other hundreds of love letters, many attempting to disguise their passion by quoting the lyrics from Steffani’s operas. In one letter, to show his eagerness, Königsmarck mentions the swift duet, “Volate momenti,” where the lover begs both time and the sun to quicken their pace to thus shorten the time of the lovers’ separation. If the things she had read in the Marciana were to be believed, these letters were being intercepted and read by Countess von Platen, believed to be the former lover of Königsmarck and certainly the former mistress of Ernst August, who was the father-in-law of Sophie Dorothea.
Caterina stared into space. “Let me see if I’ve got this straight,” she told herself aloud. “These two fools wrote love letters back and forth in opera lyrics, but a mistress Königsmarck had dumped, who just happened also to have been the mistress of the father-in-law of her ex-lover’s current mistress, was reading them, and she blew the whistle on the lovers.” She resisted the urge to go over to the mirror again and check to see if she had grown a second head.
She smelled the rice and went into the kitchen to turn off the flame. She took off the top and spooned some of it into a bowl, added more salt, and took it back into the living room with her.
Things became even more interesting. Almost immediately after Königsmarck’s disappearance, a certain Nicolò Montalbano, a Venetian who had been hanging around the court of Hanover for almost twenty years writing the occasional opera libretto, was reported to have been paid the astonishing sum of 150,000 thalers by persons unknown, whereupon he too promptly disappeared.
Poor Sophie Dorothea was divorced by her creep of a husband, Georg Ludwig, on a trumped-up charge that she had abandoned the marriage bed, and then old Georgie sent her off to rot away in a castle for thirty years and wouldn’t let her see her kids. The author quoted a lovely but unreliable legend that she delivered a deathbed curse on Georg, and sure enough, he dropped dead in less than a year. Even so, she was to have no satisfaction from her curse, for she died before Georg did and so never saw her son become King George II of England although, as Caterina remembered, he was little better than his father. Makes a person better understand the current royal family, she thought.
She sat back in her chair, then got up and went over and stretched out on the sofa, the bowl on her stomach. She stirred the rice, letting it cool. Ernst August had spent a fortune and worked diplomatic miracles to be chosen as an elector, some sort of big deal title that only a dozen or so aristocrats got to have, and they in turn elected the Holy Roman Emperor. Yes, a big deal. But he had to wait a couple of years before he could be crowned or anointed or whatever it was that happened to turn him into an elector. While he was waiting for this to happen, he’d have had to keep his nose clean, and he’d have had to see that his family didn’t disgrace him in any way and thus scotch his chance to become an elector in his full rights.