When the woman was gone, Caterina lowered her face into her hands and rubbed at it, ran her fingers through her hair to pull it back from her face. She was suddenly hungry, ravenously, desperately hungry. She opened her bag and dug to the bottom and found half of a dusty Toblerone, which she’d been eating on a train to—how long ago it seemed—Manchester. She looked around guiltily and saw the backs of two men seated at carrels at the other end of the room. She got to her feet and took two steps away from her carrel, and from the books and manuscripts. Holding the wrapper close in her hands to muffle the sound, she tore free a dusty triangle. She leaned forward and slipped it into her mouth and let it melt, then chewed at the nougat, enjoying the way it clung to her teeth to prolong the sensation of eating.
Seeing how close, still, she was to the desk and the volumes on them, she moved over to the window, where she stayed until the chocolate was gone. She folded up the wrapper, put it back in her bag, brushed at the front of her clothing, and wiped her hands on a cotton handkerchief before going back to sit at the carrel.
She looked at her notes. Königsmarck had disappeared on the night of 1 July 1694, when he was seen to enter the palace and make his way toward Sophie Dorothea’s apartment. It was generally accepted that he had been the victim of four courtiers, their names, at least according to the Danish ambassador to Hanover, well known and spoken of at the time. His corpse was said to have been wrapped in a sack, weighted with stones, and tossed into the river Leine, never to be found.
In less than a month, the English envoy to Hanover, George Stepney, relayed to one of his colleagues that in the House of Hanover a political murder had taken place. “Political murder,” Caterina muttered under her breath as she read over her notes. Hearing it like that urged Caterina to get to her feet and go over to study the facade of the Palazzo.
“Political murder,” she said again, and then only “political.” Not a murder for honor and not a murder for love, though the second type were always really the first. Political. The involvement of the Hanoverians in the murder would not only weaken but perhaps destroy their claim to the electorship. What then of their claim to the succession to the throne of England, which they so desperately coveted? Surely even the English would balk at inviting a murderer or the son of one to become king.
Although this was not her field, it was her century of study, and Caterina had a wealth of background information. Aristocrats were free to have lovers, so long as those women who did had already given their husband an heir and a spare and then were relatively discreet in their choice of lover. Don’t endanger the bloodline; don’t imperil the passing of the estate from father to son. Men could legitimize their bastards; women never.
Caterina remembered a conversation she had had with the Romanian, years ago, when she had first gone to Manchester. It was, in fact, the first time she had eaten dinner in the commons. Drunk, he had pulled out a chair beside her, asked if he could sit there, and sat down with only a glass and a bottle of red wine. He had said nothing while she ate her salad and then a piece of swordfish she remembered had been overcooked and covered with a sauce that added to the unpleasantness of the meal.
“We never know who our children are,” he said, then turned and asked, “Do we?”
“Who’s we?” she asked, making those the first words she ever spoke to him.
“Men.”
“You never know?”
“No,” the Romanian said sadly, shaking his head and taking a long drink from his glass. He refilled it, shook his head again, and said, “We think we know, we believe, but we never know. Do we?”
“If it looks like you?” she asked.
“Men have brothers. Men have uncles,” he said, this time sipping from the glass.
“But?” she asked, certain that this was a point he meant to lead somewhere.
“Women
know
,” he said with heavy emphasis. “They
know
.”
Caterina thought it incorrect to mention DNA tests to a man the first time she spoke to him; furthermore, he was a colleague and not a native speaker of English. Instead, she said, “More proof of our superiority,” and sipped from her own glass, though her wine was white.
The Romanian looked at her, smiled, took her hand, and kissed it, then he gathered up his bottle and glass, got to his feet, and started to walk away. When he had gone three steps, he turned back and said, “There’s no need of proof, my dear.”
Eighteen
T
HE MEMORY FADED;
C
ATERINA RETURNED TO THE BOOK SHE
had been reading. She dipped back into Steffani’s life at the time he was working as a diplomat, first in Hanover and then in Düsseldorf, where he moved in 1703. He worked to facilitate the making of treaties and to arrange princely marriages, though with little apparent success. He failed to prevent his former patron Maximilian Emanuel from getting mixed up in a war against England and Germany he had no chance of winning, and he failed to arrange a marriage between Maximilian Emanuel and Sophie Charlotte, who turned him down, got an upgrade, and ended as Queen of Prussia. Poor woman, she held the title for only a few years before dying at the age of thirty-six, though in the few years she was queen she won the friendship of Leibniz. Caterina recalled the frequent references to her in the letters found in the trunk, the queen who “had so honored” Steffani with her friendship. Did Andrea Moretti, she wondered, feel himself so honored by the friendship of Caterina Pellegrini?
She continued to read the account of the tangled history of the times in which Steffani had lived and worked, when Protestant and Catholic monarchs fought for the souls, and taxes, of whole nations. It seemed that Steffani was in the business of propaganda: she admitted this word was her choice. Politicians often used religious enthusiasm to disguise the lust for raw power, though it was possible that Steffani sincerely wanted to win souls back to the One True Church. So many One True Churches. Rather than preach to the masses, Steffani did almost no preaching nor, for that fact, did he administer the sacraments, whether to large or small groups. The abbé busied himself with the titled and powerful, attempting to return them to the embrace of Catholicism or to convert to it from their born religion of Protestantism. To the best of her understanding, all this missioneering had little to do with religion. These were political moves based on the possibility of alliance or marriage. If power shifted away from a king or emperor, an elector or a count, one way for a person to ensure survival was to bail out of the religion of the loser-to-be and sign up with the other side, then wait to see if reconversion would be necessary. She thought of a classmate of hers from Alto Adige. Though his family had lived in the same house for centuries, his grandfather had been born in Italy, his father in Austria, and he in Italy, nationality changing as the border shifted back and forth according to political whim or the spoils of war.
She wondered what belief, today, held the same force for the majority of Europeans. One way to determine that would be to try to think of the things people would die for. Transubstantiation? The Trinity? Surely not. To save their family or the life of a person they loved? Yes. But beyond that, and perhaps the attempt to save their property, Caterina could think of nothing. At dinner parties, she had heard people—mostly in England and mostly men—assert that they would give their lives for the freedom to say or write what they wanted, but Caterina didn’t believe that, just as she had never believed it for herself.
She thought of all those legends she had been taught in school, all those stories of heroic resistance and sacrifice: Giordano Bruno, Matteotti, Maria Goretti, the endless list of the martyr saints. How long ago that was, and how different we are from them.
She had no idea what danger Steffani or his fellow Catholics might have been in during the years he was attempting to change the course of history, but her sense of the times suggested it wasn’t great. He might not have had to die for what he believed, but the more she read, the closer she came to believing that he had truly been willing to live for it. He seemed to have been conscientious about his job; he traveled tens of thousands of kilometers in Germany and Austria, Belgium and the Netherlands, went back and forth to Rome a number of times. Here she thought of the accounts she had read of what it was to cross the Alps in the eighteenth century: carriage, horse, or foot, and the endless winding back and forth and up and down on impassable roads, through snow, avalanche, mud, never knowing when, or if, you would arrive.
That
was dedication.
If what she suspected was true, and he was a castrato, it had been done to prepare him to sing in a church choir. And yet, and yet, and yet he had remained faithful to the Church for his entire life, dedicated his energies to the propagation of that faith, had worked with full strength and conviction to convert or return rulers to that faith and thus bring into the flock the people they ruled and expand the power of that Church.
She found some contemporary opinions of Steffani and read them eagerly, curious to know what these people who had actually known him would have to say. “The metamorphosis of a mere entertainer into a bishop is as ludicrous as the scene in Lucian where a courtesan is changed into a philosopher.” Anger swept over her. He was far more than an entertainer, you supercilious bastard. She had heard the music and she knew. And then she read this other, commenting on Steffani’s acceptance of praise for one of his operas: “The haughty style seemed to me more to befit the theater than ecclesiastical humility.” Why shouldn’t he be proud of his music? And where’d this nonsense about “ecclesiastical humility” come from? When had anyone ever seen any of
that
?
She got up and went to the window, looked out, seeing nothing. Was that why Steffani so needed the Church, to give himself some sort of respectability and to protect himself against open affronts? These mean-spirited comments showed that he could never be free of them nor safe from them. They could criticize his vanity or make fun of his “short black hair that is slightly mixed with gray and a satin cap, a large cross with brilliant diamonds and a large sapphire on his finger,” but so long as the cross on his chest was a bishop’s cross, they could never make fun of his masculinity.
She thought for a moment of what she had read of the apparent profligacy of his life: earning and spending great amounts of money, collecting books and relics and paintings, eating and drinking well, traveling often and always in style. Was all this meant to prove that he was one of the anointed? She thought of that round, sad face, turned back to her desk, and picked up the French novel about the Königsmarck Affair. At least lust and adultery and jealousy made sense to her.
She opened the book, and her eye fell on an elaborate book plate showing a nearly naked woman lying on a sofa, a book held open in one hand while the other lay on her rather more naked breast. Caterina’s eye fell to the title of the book the woman was not reading:
La città morta.
Above the drawing appeared the name Gabriele d’Annunzio and below it “
Principe di Montenevoso
” and
“Presidente dell’Accademia Reale d’Italia.”
Left entirely without power to comment, even to herself, Caterina began to read.
“Little did the handsome and gallant Count Philip Königsmarck know what destiny held in store for him when, at the tender age of fifteen, he first set his gaze upon the beautiful Princess Sophie Dorothea. Destiny had chosen her to be his love, his joy, the star to the wandering bark of his passions, and, ultimately, the cause of the train wreck that was to carry him to death and her to a life of misery, pain, abandonment, and shame.”
The same destiny that had endowed the count with these things had endowed Caterina with a sensitivity to truth and accuracy, and so she looked up from the opening paragraph and said, “He was sixteen, and she wasn’t a princess.” She drew a veil of unknowing between her mind and the metaphor of the train wreck and returned her eyes to the page. The book was written in French, and although she could read in the language easily, she still didn’t have the immediate knee-jerk response that a native speaker would have. It therefore took a split second before the absurd vulgarity of the language would cause her to giggle.
Within ten pages Caterina was lost in a world of climactic intemperance, with “gusts of sighs,” “floods of tears,” “tempestuous passion,” and “lightning flashes of rage.” Sophie Dorothea, she learned, was “married to a brute,” “a loving mother,” “an injured wife,” “a delightful tease,” and “slow to anger.”
Königsmarck was “a clever rake,” “ambitious and hardworking,” “one of the most brilliant swordsmen of his time,” and “unfaithful to all women until his heart was given—for life and for death—to the beautiful Sophie Dorothea.”
After forty minutes, she pushed her arms away from her, hands still holding the book, and told herself to stop this, to stop reading. It might have been good enough for d’Annunzio but it was not good enough for her. She realized only now what the good sisters had meant when they warned the ten-year-old Caterina and her classmates that a book could be an “occasion of sin” though she was in some confusion as to the precise nature of the sin she was committing. What religion said it was a sin to waste other people’s time or to be unwittingly ridiculous?