Chapter 39
Magdeburg
July 1637
The governor who was also, according to Mary Simpson, a prince didn’t haunt the rehearsal room. He . . . wandered past the doorway every now and then.
It was getting close to the first performance. Iona noticed that he was eyeing Annalise again, motioned to the performers to carry on, and slipped out into the hallway.
“Governor,” she asked rather abruptly, “can you sing?”
“No better than the average man. Hymns and such.”
“I have an idea. An absolute surprise for the audience. And for the kids, if you’re willing. You were at Quedlinburg in December, weren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Do you remember the German songs?”
“Indeed.” Did he? Oh, yes, he most certainly did.
“Could you make time in your schedule to talk to me tomorrow? I don’t have the book I need here”—here being landgravine Amalie Elizabeth of Hesse-Kassel’s largest back parlor—“but I’m sure I brought it to Magdeburg with me. I’m staying with Veronica Dreeson, if you know her.”
“Not,” Frederick said, “personally.”
“Well, I’m sure she’ll love to meet you. Do you have time? Tomorrow or soon?”
“Tomorrow would be excellent.”
“Then let me scribble a note, so the maid will let you in. Before lunch, or I’ll already be over here rehearsing.”
* * *
“Look,” she said the next day. They were having lunch. Ronnie Dreeson, Iona, Annalise, Nicholas and Thea, and a prince. Some of the results of the Ring of Fire were strange, and today was one of them.
“Technically,” Frederik was saying, “I’m not a prince. Neither is Ulrik.”
“Er,” Iona said. “Why? You’re the king’s son. And, um . . . ”
“Legitimate. Yes. But in Denmark, there is only one prince, and that is the Elected Prince, the Chosen Prince, or Prince-Heir, ratified by the Council. My older brother. Ulrik and I are dukes of Holstein as members of House Oldenburg, but not princes.”
“Oh.” Iona thought about that for a bit. “But you are who you are. I’m fairly sure that ninety-nine out of every hundred people in Grantville will not give up their belief that the son of a king is a prince. Especially not the son of a Danish king, because almost all of us have to read Hamlet in high school. Let’s go with ‘Governor’; you definitely are that. Now, what I wanted to talk to you about. Look here. Somewhere in Germany, this song is being written this year!”
She showed him “Ännchen von Tharau.”69 “It’s a nineteenth-century melody, according to the notes at the bottom of the page, by Silcher. Whoever is writing it this year must be using a different tune, but I certainly have no idea what it might be and no way of finding out.70 A lot of opera singers recorded this, but to be honest it doesn’t take an operatic voice, especially if we lower the key. I’m sure that boy could do it.”
She paused. “Annalise, what is the name of the boy with the banjo? I can’t ever remember it.”
“Heinrich, I think. The guys call him Heinz. Um. Ja. Heinrich Sasse. Little Gisela Scharpff in the beginning class is his half-sister, I’m pretty sure. Or maybe his step-sister. He and Osanna Merkur are making googly eyes at one another, even though he’s three years younger than she is. The reason he’s so dramatically depressed this summer is that she went to visit her parents in Suhl and won’t be back for two months, if she comes back at all, because she’s finished at Quedlinburg now. And his father is sending him to Weimar next year, to the new academy for church musicians there, so he might be gone already even if she does come back. He’s undergoing ‘gloom, doom, and agony on me.’71 Or is that despair? Maybe?”
“Thanks. We can get Heinrich Sasse to copy out the score for you, Governor, and key it down. And practice with you, using his lute, I think. It calls for a down-time instrument. It would be fun to put you into the program as a surprise element. Annalise will be onstage when she finishes ‘Blue Moon.’ You and Heinz can come in from . . . stage right will do . . . and that will make a second solo to calm troubled souls after the cheerleaders.”
“It’s a love song,” he pointed out.
“That’s fine.” Iona laughed and pointed to Ronnie Dreeson. “She’s been making fun of me for having trouble finding love songs in which someone isn’t dead. In this one, it’s to celebrate a wedding. The young man and woman are getting married, all bright and happy for the future. Du bist mein Leben, mein Gut, und mein Geld. ‘You are my life, my estate, and my fortune.’ The program can use some more bright and happy.”
* * *
Sensation was a mild word for political and diplomatic reaction to Frederik’s appearance. Partly (very small-partly, Heather Rush said impertinently) because he wasn’t one of those nobles who were inclined to appear in masques, plays, and similar court entertainments. Nobody could remember an occasion when he had ever done so, at least not since he got out of secondary school and could no longer be coerced by his tutors.
Large-partly, according to Heather, all the excitement was because when he did appear, he sang a love song, if one with a drastically reduced vocal range compared with Iona’s sheet music,72 to Annalise Richter. And repeated it at the three subsequent performances. Including the one open to the public.
O the shock, o the scandal, o the . . .
“Annalise is a good girl, a nice girl,” Iona said to Ed Piazza’s secretary, who had wandered over just to . . . ask? “She has spent most of the time while her surroundings were in chaos either in high school in Grantville while also working as assistant manager of St. Veronica’s preschools or, since then, at Quedlinburg assisting me and being mentored by the abbess. What if he does fall in love with her? I don’t think anyone in the world could do better. No, not even some prince!”
Maybe no one could do better, but the secretary was a religious man and had mental images of temple columns crashing down around Samson after Delilah got finished with the poor man.
The Danish attaché eyed the eyeing, panicked at the memory of how Christian IV had reacted to his oldest son Christian’s infatuation with Anne Lykke a decade earlier (it involved prisons), and panicked again.
First, he tried to throw some distraction into the pot in the form of introducing one Christoffer Gabel from Frederik’s permanent staff, more Annalise’s age, reasonably good looking, and fun, insofar as an accountant could be said to be fun, to several of the up-time young men involved in the music program, where he could likely meet the infamous Annalise and unloose his charms on her.
Annalise blithely ignored the temptation placed in her path. Not that she disliked Christoffer or deliberately ignored him. She was perfectly polite, but didn’t particularly notice him.
Of course, it didn’t help the attaché’s plans that Gabel heard Bethany Leek play the flute and Bethany’s father and grandfather realized that Gabel was an accountant with close ties to the governor of the Province of Westphalia, who might possibly have a budget item for the purchase of a large amount of office equipment. The president and CEO of IBM invited Gabel over for dinner and an extended discussion of typewriters and carbon paper.
The attaché panicked even more and got hold of his monarch by radio.
And identified to Christian IV who the girl was.
* * *
“It is true,” Ronnie Dreeson agreed. “As the Bible says, ‘A good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and an evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of.’ Luke, 6:45. But this man doesn’t say anything. At all.” She pointed at Iona. “His mouth hasn’t spoken anything, as far as I know. Except for singing when you prompt him.”
Mary Simpson agreed. “He’s taciturn, to say the least.”
“Annalise certainly is not in love with him,” Ronnie continued. “She’s never been ‘in love’ with anyone. She had a passing crush on a young man named Heinrich Schmidt when she was about fourteen, back in Grantville, but he never even noticed it and went off to make a career in the army. A successful one, so far, I’ve heard. She hasn’t see him since. That scarcely qualifies as an outside emotional commitment.”
The abbess of Quedlinburg frowned. She had strong views about betrothals and marriages, even though she had successfully evaded both. She had prohibited her clergy from denying absolution to a person who made a genuine and contrite confession. However, if the same parishioner repeated the same sin, there was an escalating series of punishments, which ended with a referral to the consistory.
There were reasons why she and Dowager-Electress Hedwig were such good friends. On the important things in life, they were usually in full accord and agreement. Consistently sinning subjects should not be allowed to serve as Lutheran godparents; nor be buried in consecrated ground.
She also came down like death in regard to secret engagements and clandestine betrothals. Betrothals should be entered into publicly—with a minimum of three witnesses present.
Fornication and adultery should not be entered into at all by those claiming to be Christian men and women! However frequent they might be in practice.
Her answer was, “Frederik is a reserved man. Enigmatic, almost; it’s hard to get any idea of what he’s thinking. Though I believe he has become sincerely interested in the puzzle presented by our founding documents.”
“Come down to the undertone of all the speculation,” Mary Simpson said. “Do you believe that he’s thinking of making her his mistress?”
“Like Duke Eberhard and Tata?” Amalie Elizabeth emphasized her statement with both hands. “No, not at all. For one thing, not all commoners are created equal.” She brushed one hand over the other in a gesture of mild frustration. “Or, if they are, they don’t stay that way. At least not since the Ring of Fire. Annalise is in a quite different social position than Tata was. Now. If this war hadn’t come along, if there had been no Ring of Fire, if you, Frau Dreeson, were still married to a provincial printer in the remoter reaches of the Upper Palatinate, well, Annalise would have been a bit farther up on the middle class ladder than Tata, but not much. Not significantly enough to matter when it came to a relationship. Today, she is the sister of the Lady Protector of Silesia who reports directly to the emperor. Plus, Eberhard was under twenty and an orphaned exile when he plunged into that affair. Frederik is coming up on thirty and holds an important position under Gustav Adolf as well having a very-much-still-alive father.”
“He can’t be thinking of a morganatic marriage! Surely not! Given the way he is thought to feel about his father’s.”
Dorothea Sophia of Saxe-Altenburg, abbess of the free worldly imperial Stift of Quedlinburg, found that idea to be, ultimately, far more scandalous than a simple affair. Hedwig was right. There had been a disquieting number of unebenbürtig marriages lately among the nobility of the German principalities. Even discounting Brunswick, where it was rampant because the family had adopted it deliberately as a strategy to limit fragmentation of the duchy long before the Ring of Fire. Former principalities. As in the case of Georg Aribert von Anhalt-Dessau. Not to mention Georg Aribert’s sister Eva and that man Harry Lefferts.
Veronica went back to her original point. “Prince Frederik, Duke Frederik, the governor, whatever his title is, hasn’t actually said anything at all.”
Mary Simpson agreed. It was not easy to get a read on what the man was thinking.
Amalie Elizabeth wondered, What puzzle about their founding documents?
* * *
Frederick was trying to figure out what to do. There would be no Kirsten Munk in his life; no halfway-royal children. If he was to marry, then “morganatic” had to be factored out of the equation. One way or the other.
He held serious talks with Heinrich Jung; more with Peder Winstrup, the recently appointed chaplain to his father’s court, and one of the few people there whom he trusted.
He talked considerably more openly with Christian Ulrik and Bente. Summoned Kerstin Brahe and Erik Stenbock to Magdeburg. Asked Joachim Lütkemann to come over from Schwerin.
* * *
“And I met—well, I guess she’s his sister-in-law—Frederik makes no secret of his relationship with Christian Ulrik. She’s a Danish woman, from Helsingør.”
Mary Simpson’s mind started to churn, her eyebrows went up as far as they could go, and she exclaimed, “Helsingør? Elsinore? Hamlet?”
The abbess nodded. “Yes. Helsingør.”
“I want to meet her.”
The abbess arranged it, although the astonishing preoccupation of so many otherwise apparently rational up-timers with that obscure English play was completely beyond her comprehension.
* * *
The landgravine held an evening gathering, an informal group of friends and acquaintances, with amateur performances. Annalise was supposed to reprise the Löns piece from the December program, but Iona suggested that she do something, new, the other song, the one she hadn’t managed to fit in at Christmas. Goethe, Schubert, “Heideröslein.”73 Frederik made it a duet.
Which led to a lot more speculation, public and private. Nimm dich in ach.
“Be careful.” Heather Rush said. “That’s what it means.”
“Or it could be, ‘Look out!’” Ben Roberts added.
“Another translation that would work would be, ‘Watch yourself!’ That’s actually closer,” his sister Lisa protested.
“Be afraid, be very afraid,” Joe Staley summed it up.
69. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1MCzmDGfec Ännchen von Tharau - mit Text zum Mitsingen.
70. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%C3%84nnchen_von_Tharau_Heinrich_Albert.JPG
71. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkzE23pyME4 Gloom Despair And Agony On Me (marriage, money). Hee Haw.
72. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAS0gEgk-iU Hannes Wader - Ännchen von Tharau. VÖ auf dem Album “Hannes Wader singt Volkslieder” 1990. Text: Simon Dach / Johann Gottfried Herder. Musik: Friedrich Silcher.
73. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ham4GIbdjS0 Maite Itoiz & John Kelly - Röslein auf der Heiden 2009.