The Lost Queen: The Tragedy of a Royal Marriage

by Norah Lofts

  The management of horses she had learned in a curious way, from an old man who had once been one of her father’s coachmen. He was actually the man who, years before Caroline’s birth, had driven the horses on that mad ride from Hampton Court to St. James’ Palace, the princess of Wales—Mamma—already in labor with Augusta and Papa determined that the child, whom he expected to be a boy, the heir, should be born at St. James’. There were trimmings to the story; there had been no sheets to put on the beds and Augusta had been born between two starched tablecloths; there were only six candles in the whole establishment, and so on. Of what must have been a hideous experience Mamma never spoke, but she certainly cherished old Edgar, though by the time Caroline became aware of him he was quite useless and often tipsy. He lived somewhere in the lofts over the stables and was fed from the kitchen once a day and when the weather was fine used to creep down and sit with his back to a sun-warmed wall and watch the comings and goings in the stable yard.

  One afternoon—it was just before George’s accession, and Caroline was nine—three or four of them had been riding together and were returning to the house, Caroline lagging, unwilling, as usual to exchange out-of-doors for indoors and the dancing lesson presently due. As she passed the old man, he reached out and took hold of a fold of her skirt, with, considering his dead-leaf frailty, a clutch of considerable force.

  “Wait a minute,” he said, “I got something to tell you and something to give you; but it’s a secret. It’s something money can’t buy.” She was, not frightened exactly, but disconcerted; old Edgar was tipsy again and talking nonsense, and indoors Signor Sarti would be waiting, and she must change her clothes.

  “Tell me tomorrow,” she said, pulling at her skirt.

  “That’ll be too late,” he said. “I’ve had my tomorrows and my boy being killed at Portobello, there’s nobody for me to pass the word to. So take this, and listen, listen hard.” He pushed into her hand a piece of bleached bone which could have been rather more than half of the wishbone of a very small fowl. “Keep that on you,” he said. “When you’re near enough, blow in their noses and talk to them as though they was people and any horse’ll do just what you say. Any horse. The savagest’ll eat out of your hand and a dying one’ll run five miles to please you.”

  It sounded like nonsense; but later in the day old Edgar was found dead, there where he sat, in the sun, so she kept the bone for sentiment’s sake. And then, one day, George came back from a visit to Euston in Suffolk with some peculiar tale about the secret eastern association of horsemen whose members had an uncanny power over horses; it smacked of witchcraft, said the practical George, and in earlier days would have led to trouble.

  Caroline had no idea whether the bit of bone held any virtue, but she had tucked it into the ribbon or the feathers that had decorated a succession of riding hats and no horse had ever given her any trouble. As for talking to them as though they were people, she had always done that, but as time went on the words had become stylized, a routine, rather as prayers did.

  She and the five young officers clattered away and presently young Schimmelmann, mounted on another black horse, joined them, harried and anxious still, until he realized that the evil horse was behaving impeccably.

  Caroline greatly enjoyed her ride; the young men seemed to shed some of their formality, there were fewer monosyllabic replies and apologetic prefaces to remarks; there were smiles, and even, now and again some laughter.

  She was their Queen, she was young and pretty and friendly, and she certainly could manage a horse; their talk afterward was tinged with inevitable exaggeration, and by evening Christian, in his sweatbox for an hour, knew that his bride was a horsewoman of superb quality. His own experience with horses had been unhappy; he’d been timid to start with and Juliana had said—with some truth—that for a King to be deficient in the management of horses was a great disadvantage. Her suggestions as to how this deficiency could be remedied and her talks on the subject with his tough old riding master, had all been prompted by the hope that the clumsy young fool might have a fall and break his neck. This had not happened, but he was still not entirely happy on horseback and his mounts were always carefully chosen.

  That one of his two heads which did not wish to be married and thought that life as he had led it for the last ten months was so good that any change could only detract from it, that head which had noticed at Roskilde that Caroline looked not only pretty, but proud, and at least three inches too tall, took temporary charge and knew a pang of jealousy. It also associated his present discomfort with the need to be well by a certain date. Nature cured, given time, and the number of noses lost in the process was small; look at sailors, they lacked legs, arms, eyes and ears, but he could not remember seeing one without a nose, and they had syphilis practically all the time. In fact the brutes carried and spread it; they came ashore, their pockets full of money, and they weren’t content to frequent places and drabs that any man with sense would take care to avoid; no, they must force their way into places like the Golden Crown. With this result.

  He said abruptly, “Knut; what happened to that coffee-colored little bitch?”

  “She is in a sack at the bottom of the Sound, anchored down with stones and old iron.”

  “Good. And Madam?”

  “She had a most unfortunate accident. The bannister gave way. As you may imagine she fell very heavily; she is unlikely to walk again. And almost as bad, from her point of view, while she lay downstairs—I understand that it was impossible to get her up to bed—somebody raided her rooms and found her hoard.”

  Christian wiped his streaming face on the end of a towel and looked at his one true friend with profound respect and admiration and gratitude.

  With what appeared to be a change of subject but what was actually a logical follow-on, he said, “One day I shall institute a new Order without any nonsense about two generations of noble birth as a qualification.”

  “Not yet,” Knut said. “That way it would look like a consolation to me; I should dislike that. It contents me to think that my grandson will qualify for the Danneborg.” He looked at his watch, changed the cloth on Christian’s head and said, “Another twenty minutes.”

  “There’s one thing,” Christian said. “I don’t intend to have any of this English nonsense about politics. Her mother, so they say, rules George, and her grandmother was a busybody. Juliana told me that this afternoon.”

  “She’s far too pretty to bother about such things.”

  With a pang of pain Christian’s other head took over.

  “Yes,” he said, “she’s very pretty; and...and well-disposed. She wanted to come and see me, but Frau von Plessen said she might catch this cold. She has sent a message though, every day, hasn’t she?”

  “And the family recipe for onion gruel.”

  “All the same I’m not sure about this riding—for a Queen. Who’s her Master of Horse?”

  “So far as I know he has not yet been appointed.”

  The other head, with a stab and a tremor set to work.

  “Baron von Bulow,” Christian said, and his two heads, coming together with an agonizing clang, knew once again that he was cleverest of all. For von Bulow had Hanoverian origins; Hanover and England were one. The Queen would never suspect De Bulow of wishing to thwart her...as thwart he would, obedient to his King’s order.

  “Here are your pills,” Knut said; proffering the flattened globes of mercury and bismuth.

  “They make me feel very sick you know. If I were allowed proper food, I doubt if I could get it down.”

  “They work,” Knut said, “and so does this...” He indicated the overheated little room. “Your lip has healed, the rash has almost disappeared...and the other symptoms.”

  He did not mention them. The limitations of his own squeamishness staggered him, and in any other person would have provoked derision. He could organize, perfectly and without a qualm, the death of the little half-caste girl whose embrace had infec
ted the King, and the ruin, physical and financial of the old woman who ran the Golden Crown and had not been careful enough, but there were things that he could not bring himself to mention.

  “Yes,” Christian said, gulping the pills. “I am better. All but my head. My head is sore. And there are two of them. Sometimes they work together and sometimes they pull away from one another. It is very painful. Because which am I?”

  Knut recognized the question, asked, on another occasion, in exactly these circumstances. It probably had something do with the heat.

  “Come along,” he said, unwadding the towels. “Ten minutes short, but you are better. Come to bed.”

  “There was just one thing,” Christian said, putting his hands to his head and pressing his two heads together. That doctor...The treatment was cruel...but it has worked. I shall be well for my wedding—thanks to you. But thanks him, also. Especially for the salt water. I think he should be rewarded.”

  “I paid him,” Knut said, remembering the big, easy-mannered, disbelieving man who had done what nobody else had ever done, looked through him as though he were a pane of glass, made him feel—if only for a moment—that he was non-existent. “I paid him well.”

  “I know,” said Christian, who prided himself on never forgetting a favor or an injury, “but I feel that something more...Knut, you know how to punish people...think of a reward for this man. What was his name?”

  “I don’t think I ever heard it. I was told that he was very clever and had studied in Germany where medical knowledge is the best in the world. I was told how to find his house. I addressed him as Doctor and to him I was a nameless man.”

  And he as good as called me a liar.

  Out of the bake house, into the cool bedroom and the smooth welcoming bed, Christian could say, “One day we must find him out and reward him. For except for my head, Knut, except for my head, I am cured. And I shall be well for my wedding...”

  PART THREE

  CHRISTIANSBORG; NOVEMBER 10, 1766

  The footfall of the sentry in the courtyard came up to her, muted by distance; an owl loosed its lonely, eerie cry; somewhere a clock struck and another answered it. Four o’clock in the morning. It had been the longest day of her life and here she was, still awake, two hours after Christian had rolled over and gone to sleep. Did all brides lie awake in the night, looking back on the events of the most splendid day of their lives as though through a thick mist, or across a wide moat. That was I—going cheerfully, even eagerly, to my proper wedding, and this is I—lying here in the dark; no connection between the two; there can never be any connection. Yet she had heard women speak, heard Mamma speak, and only this morning, yesterday morning, heard prim Frau von Plessen speak, sentimentally, with a fond backward look to the day of their wedding. Was something wrong with her?

  Mamma had always counseled her children to examine themselves, to ask, in any crisis, Am I myself to blame?

  Everything had gone so well; the ceremony, long and solemn and quite beautiful; music and the clear, pure voices of boys, fountains of sound, springing upward to the arched roof. White roses on the altar. Christian, all in white and gold, handsome and supremely dignified. There she had not failed. She had even mastered what responses were required of her in the Danish tongue, mispronounced perhaps, but clearly audible. And inside the rigid dress, with the heavy train dragging on her shoulders, she had borne herself upright, and moved with grace. No fault there.

  Then the feast—too late in the day to be called dinner, too early to be supper; a long table, everything on it, even the salt cellars, of gold and a hundred and fifty people sitting down, all the very highest of the Danish nobility and the ministers from other countries—the British minister’s name was Tetley...She and Christian seated midway along one of the long table’s sides; the two Queen Mothers opposite. There were other tables in the rooms to left, to right.

  After the feast—interminably prolonged—the creation, admission and robing of the twelve new Knights of the Order of Danneborg in honor of the occasion. In that she had no part to play, except, when it was over, to extend her hand to be kissed.

  And finally the ball. Before this Frau von Plessen, with a tiny pair of silver scissors, cut the stitches that held the dragging train and Caroline had felt like a bird let out of a cage.

  Despite her preference for outdoor exercise and her reluctance to go in and subject herself to Signor Sarti’s tuition, she danced well. With Christian she led the first minuet; there were gavottes, cotillions, passepieds. And then quite suddenly Christian clapped his hands and shouted to his brother-in-law, “Charles, lead the Kerhaus through all the apartments.”

  “Now?”

  “Now. Begin.”

  With that, suddenly, something happened; everybody seemed to go crazy; one moment so prim, touching fingertips, measuring steps, bowing, advancing, retreating, the next forming up into a long line, hands on the hips of whoever chanced to be in front and clutched by the one who followed, to the sound of music—no longer the known tunes of Purcell, Handel, Bach and Haydn, but something strange and wild, with a compulsive rhythm—the long column, like a snake made its way through room after room, upstairs, downstairs, through a cavernous kitchen with firelight twinkling on copper pans and pots, and at one point out for a few seconds on to a torchlit terrace and in again.

  It was a strange thing to see this staid company so completely abandoned, moving with something between a skip and a shuffle, the men reinforcing the music’s rhythm with shouts that sounded like hunting cries, the women’s headdresses and sometimes their hair, tumbling into disarray. It would have been understandable had more alcohol been consumed. Wine had flown freely at the beginning of the feast, but about halfway through, Count Holmstrupp had come out of one of the side rooms—the one known as the Rose because of the color of its windows and hangings, and leaned over Christian and said something in his ear. Christian looked displeased for a second, then smiled and touched the count on the arm and nodded. As Holmstrupp went away, Christian reached for his glass, but not to drink. He moved it about two inches nearer the center of the table and did not touch it again. Abstention had run like a whisper outward toward the ends of the table and soon no one was drinking. So the Kerhaus, whatever it was, was not a drunken dance; it was more as though long hours of over-controlled behavior must compensated for and strictly curbed spirits allowed some outlet.

  Then, except for the havoc that it had worked on hair and clothes, it might never have been. Formality closed in like ice upon the taking of leave. It was well after midnight; there was now nothing but the disrobing between her and her bridal bed, the “physical intimacies” of Mamma, the crude down-to-earth act described by Alice. Standing there beside Christian, so handsome in satin and gold lace, Caroline was grateful for the Kerhaus; hers was not the only flushed face, not the only heart beating too fast and too hard and too high above the edge of her bodice.

  The old Queen Mother, having made her painful curtsy, embraced them both. The same dry, dead smell emanated from her. She said to Caroline, “I wish you every happiness.” Whatever she said to Christian made him give a little yelping laugh. Juliana embraced neither of them, but she smiled as she wished them long years of happiness. She knew Christian very well; for years she had studied him through the magnifying glass of hatred and jealousy and although her view was distorted, minimizing the good or the potential good and emphasizing the follies and failings it was a penetrating view. Two days earlier she had made one of her visits; he was better and in his private sitting room, wearing a furred robe over his shirt and breeches. Into the casual talk about his health and the imminent wedding she inserted a sentence which any loving mother, on good terms with her son, might have said with the best intention. “You must remember Christian, that she is a Princess, not one of your hired women.” She knew her stepson very well.

  The King’s bedchamber and the Queen’s adjoined, with a communicating door. Caroline’s room was very fine, all white and gold
and rose. The walls were lined with the rose-colored silk and in every panel there was a white and gold framed looking glass in which reflections answered one another, so that when at last she was installed in the vast bed, and waiting, she could see to her left and to her right, an infinite number of candles and Carolines and rose-hung beds with white and gold posters, growing smaller with distance, finally diminished to nothing.

  She assured herself that she was not frightened. On the surface of it Mamma’s “intimacies” and Alice’s blunt statements hinted alike at something undignified; but every married woman in the world had borne it and emerged undamaged. And there was that term, “one flesh,” which she understood, the wishing to be part of, to be one with. She had experienced it once, with a spray of lilac on a May morning in Kew gardens; not enough to look at it, to smell it, something more was needed; she’d taken a great bite out of it, lilac a part of me, all one, the morning, the birds’ song, the dew and the sunshine, everything.

  It had tasted horrid, sharp and peppery, and she had spat it out and next day passed, with averted eyes, the bush where one spray hung maimed. But it had been an experience of a sort and she had thought of it...sometimes...

  She was prepared for the act that would make her one with Christian; and hoped that in its performance the love, the lightning that Edward had spoken of might strike. It hadn’t at Roskilde because everything had been so hurried and confused—but there she had felt kindly toward him; today, restored to health and definitely handsome, he had been impressive. And there had been all the kind messages and inquiries—sent from his sickbed—and the gifts...The lightning had not struck yet, but perhaps soon, in the next half hour it would, in the act of making two people into one.