Chapter 7
The Low Countries
March-April 1636
Any given Channel crossing from England to the Netherlands was likely to be better in March than in February. Not much, but some. On the average, so to speak. Marc Cavriani said that everyone involved in Henri de Rohan’s rescue mission for his brother should be grateful for that. Moreover, Soubise was out from under an admittedly rather comfortable but prolonged house arrest in London.
Soubise failed to support that cheerful perspective, but did heave a dramatic sigh of relief at being on solid ground again after the Channel crossing. Raudegen looked at him speculatively. Their charge had not shown the slightest sign of seasickness. Indeed, he had moved around the deck with considerable agility for a man of his publicly proclaimed decrepitude.
The newspapers in The Hague were still celebrating the February birth of Ernst Wilhelm, infant grand duke of the Free County of Burgundy, first child of Bernhard and Claudia. While it might seem premature to a rational man that the columnists were discussing the possibility that someday this infant might marry the Netherlands’ own baby archduchess (a cutie if ever there was one!), that didn’t stop the reporters.
Marc gathered up the various passports and letters of passage. He would find someone his father knew in the Dutch diplomatic service to have them returned to Huygens in England by way of a diplomatic pouch.
Soubise inquired where the Stadhouder was to be found, made a courtesy call, and was invited to remain for a private supper and some informal conversation, his companions included.
Over wine, Fredrik Hendrik, who of course knew the elder Cavriani, fingered the wispy blond moustache that matched his wispy blond hair and wispy blond goatee and asked Marc about his Wanderjahr.
“I don’t have many entertaining tales to tell of my travels,” Marc answered with a grin. “Alas, I am a prudent young man. Prudent to the point of stupendous dullness. It’s difficult to make much of the thugs who did not beat me up in Marseilles because I didn’t stay around long enough for them to locate me.
“I did mention to that bargemaster on the Rhône that there was a place in the hull that looked perilously thin, but when he ignored me, I left the boat at the last stopping point before they would have needed to pull it out to do the portage over the rapids. That particular pool was deep and tended to swirl, I had heard. It was too bad they lost the wine, though, for it was a good vintage and would have made a nice profit for the seller. I hope the shipment was insured.
“In the matter of those people in Lyon who might or might not have been Spanish spies . . . all I can say is that the aggressive pseudo-barmaid did not seduce me, because I went up to bed early and put a bar across my door.” He pushed back the curl that constantly fell down into the middle of his forehead and shrugged, both palms pointing upwards. “Some of us were born to have exciting adventures and some were not. Odysseus will never need to envy me.”
He paused. “If I may inquire . . . ”
“Permission granted.”
“I need to contact Froken Susanna Allegretti. Per my father’s arrangement, she was to be transferred from Brussels to your wife’s staff some months ago. She is a skilled dressmaker. She would be with your lady wife.”
But she wasn’t. Not to the best of the Stadhouder’s knowledge. Nor, for that matter to that of his wife Amelia, her ladies-in-waiting, the steward, or anyone else. Nobody had even heard of her, much less of any proposed assumption of her into the household. There were no letters in the files. There was no notation in regard to compensation in the ledgers. The Hague had no knowledge of her existence.
“Which means,” Marc said, “that I am going to Brussels. Raudegen, you can escort Soubise directly to France if you wish, but I’m going to Brussels. Anything could have happened to Susanna since the last time Papa heard from her. Anything!”
Raudegen was more inclined to the view that one should never attribute to malice those things that could be explained by stupidity and suggested that M. Cavriani’s request for her transfer might have been lost in the mail or misplaced on someone’s desk, so the girl was still snug and comfortable where she had been the preceding autumn.
Marc was junior to everyone else involved in the rescue mission, both in age and rank. Nonetheless, the party proceeded toward Brussels—with ample funds, for a change, Marc having first produced the brilliant idea of drawing money on the Netherlands branch of the Cavriani Frères firm that his Aunt Alis managed and then having located a banker in The Hague who was willing to produce a substantial advance upon the Stadhouder’s secretary’s assistant’s clerk’s assurances that Marc was who he claimed to be. Faced with the options of either traveling from The Hague to Paris by way of Brussels furnished with sturdy horses, comfortable inns, and good food, or going directly from The Hague to Paris under conditions of utmost discomfort and frugality . . .
Not to mention that Raudegen, having developed a sneaking fondness for the little dressmaker when he escorted her from Basel to the Netherlands eighteen months or so earlier, agreed to the Brussels option . . . The whole party was going to Brussels. Soubise would have to endure it with what little good grace he could manage.
Soubise’s valet, secretary, coachman, and cook took the news with even less grace.
* * *
Soubise hadn’t enjoyed their stop in The Hague any more than he had enjoyed the Channel crossing. Nevertheless, he grumbled all the way to Brussels about having to leave it in such abominable weather.
“Yes, it remains true,” Raudegen commented, eyeing the dripping sky with an expression of piety. “Money cannot buy happiness.”
The roads from The Hague to Brussels were mostly mud, which was natural when the calendar was turning from late March into April. If wishes had been horses, they could have cut east from The Hague and caught a new railroad line that was well under construction. When it was complete, it would go from Amsterdam to Brussels, a strange one-rail construction with a few light cars. “By June,” the Stadhouder’s secretary said. “The contractors promise that in spite of all the difficulties, delays, cost overruns, equipment failures, unexpected engineering challenges, insufficient bridges, and the like, they will have it open by June.” Marc was not prepared to spend two or three months in The Hague waiting upon an uncertain technological future when Susanna was, presumably, in Brussels.
Soubise continued to utter profound complaints in regard to the detour.
“The direct road to Paris would be just as boggy,” Marc pointed out.
Boggy. Boggy with running rivulets of water. Soggy. Soggy and sticky with an astounding capacity for removing horseshoes. Squishy, creeping over the tops of their boots. Squishy mixed with manure as it crept over the tops of and into their boots, turning their socks into slimy, sliding serpents. Rutted from carts and wagons, the rivulets filling up the ruts, so it was almost impossible to detect where the deep spots were.
When Aunt Alis saw Marc standing on her front steps—her recently scrubbed front steps, washed by the maid whose duty it was, among other things, to keep front steps immaculate—she gave him a look that made him reach up and twirl the curl that fell into the middle of his forehead as if he were still six years old. Then she made them go around, come in through the back of the house, and strip down to their drawers before she allowed them out of the mud room. She had the servants bring a copper tub and fill it, ordering them to take baths and put on clean clothes before they set foot on the meticulously scrubbed black and white tile floor of her entryway, much less the hardwood floors, and most certainly not yet any room with a carpet.
Soubise, too. Duke or no duke. For that matter, Calvinist or not. It was possible that she might have shown more respect to him if the Rohan family had been more solvent, but Marc rather doubted it. The only ducal privilege that Aunt Alis granted was that of the First Bath. The valet got the second bath because the duke declaimed at length, with gestures, that his sitting around in the nude for hours in this weather, with no clothes and no valet and no manservant to assist him in donning the clothes, would probably be the death of him, old man that he was. Impossible! Marc laughed and deferred to the valet, but maintained precedence over the duke’s other servants.
Aunt Alis also sent the scullery maid out to scrub the front steps again, which earned the guests a sour-faced glare as the woman walked around the pile of dripping, filthy, clothes they had left on the mud room floor.
Soubise’s valet rummaged through the luggage and managed to find a dress suit that he deemed presentable, so the duke remained to take the noon meal with his hostess, his unhappiness much ameliorated by an excellent leg of lamb accompanied by young peas, grown in Mme. Cavriani’s own little hothouse on the roof of her stables, and some outstanding wine. They agreed that Wilhelm Wettin had been a fool to let himself be drawn into Oxenstierna’s manipulations and that the Crown Loyalists would suffer for it in the forthcoming USE elections. They mulled over Monsieur Gaston’s possible responses to no longer being heir to the French throne should Anne of Austria produce a son for Louis XIII next summer. They meditated on possible outcomes for the forthcoming theological conclave to which Pope Urban had summoned the continent’s theologians, this made more titillating by the presence of Soubise’s brother in Besançon, where it was to be held.
Having paid due obeisance to demonstrating that they both fulfilled their obligations to remain au courant with European politics, they got down to the matter of the financial status of the House of Rohan, which tided the conversation over until the servants started giving them pointed looks that reminded Alis that certain someones should be permitted to clear the table and get the dishes washed before the unexpected houseguests for whom the cook was not prepared came back in their large numbers, because they would expect to be fed. Mme. Cavriani’s domestic staff was feeling much put out.
* * *
Susanna was, as Raudegen had predicted, where she had arrived in November of 1634 and where she had been the last time Leopold Cavriani heard from her—at the Coudenberg Palace, in the service of Queen Maria Anna. She was not, however, happy to be there and voiced a litany of indignant discontent. Much of it was focused on the obnoxious Lorrainer colonel, subject of numerous annoyed letters she had sent to Marc and his father, a man who made a practice of “dropping by” the atelier and, “although I make every effort to ensure that I am never alone there, still it seems like the mistress of the dressmakers is always sending the other women away on this or that kind of errand or they say that it is time for them to leave for the day and . . . ”
To Marc’s great disappointment, his beloved was not in a mood for displays of public affection. Or of private affection. He felt that this situation should be remedied as soon as possible.
“When does he ‘drop by?’ At any particular time?” Raudegen asked. He looked benevolently at his former charge.
“Usually just as we are finishing our work. For a few months last year, he was blessedly absent, but he survived Duke Charles’ campaigns. Unfortunately. The quality of work we need to do requires daylight, so at this time of the year, he comes about the time of vespers.”
“Every day?” Raudegen asked.
“No, but too often.”
After giving her a chance to put on one of her good dresses, they hired a sedan chair so she could keep the hemline clean and returned to Aunt Alis, Marc being of the opinion that she would be able to think of something. Oh, she could. Her eyes sparkled, she waved her hands as she talked, and she began to choreograph a response. Even Raudegen got caught up in the project.
The unwelcome suitor did not reappear at the palace either of the next two days, which occasioned some waiting around. Soubise was more than happy to be in a comfortable house which served outstanding meals.
On the third day, the colonel arrived somewhat earlier than customary and found that there was no obstacle to his entering the atelier. Except for Susanna, it was abandoned.
After he had waited for a few minutes, Marc stuck his head around the jamb of the storage room door and saw the sun glistening on Susanna’s red-gold hair. It was a sun that should have given up the futile struggle against the thin clouds and dirty window panes, but it had wrought mightily and triumphed in order to provide a personal halo for the loveliest girl in the world. He blinked.
What he heard when he stuck his head around the doorjamb was a series of venomous and vicious threats being directed at the same loveliest girl in the world.
“M. le Colonel, you are overly persistent. If you may recall, we have conducted this discussion on previous occasions.” Susanna gestured toward the cast on his foot.
“I do have contacts. You are alone. Entirely alone. If you continue to refuse me, continue to try to refuse me . . . ”
Marc looked over his shoulder at Raudegen and grinned. Then he tiptoed out of the storage area, ran into the corridor, and rushed through the main door of the atelier, his arms open, crying out, “Darling! Have you found a beautiful velvet in all the shades of autumn leaves to make your wedding dress yet?”
The Lorrainer turned around. Even on crutches, he could take care of this upstart boy. Wait! Wedding dress? There was a fiancé in the picture? A fiancé might signify squadrons of interested relatives. Perhaps the little dressmaker was not as isolated and without resources in the middle of a foreign country as he had assumed. He hesitated.
There’s a proverb. “He who hesitates is lost.” The moment of the colonel’s hesitation was the moment when Raudegen sauntered out from the storage room.
When Raudegen left, he had the Lorrainer by the back of his collar. As soon as they were out of sight, Susanna kissed Marc. Their second kiss was even better than the first had been, Marc thought. The third was delightful and the fourth verged on spectacular. It was a beautiful afternoon in Brussels.
Brussels was no more mud-free than the surrounding countryside. Leaving the happy young couple to their mutual admiration and appreciation, Raudegen located a fine, damp, well-fertilized lane behind the royal stables and left the Lorrainer to contemplate his future from a supine position. Face down.
* * *
“You’re going to Vienna with us, to visit your sick mother,” Raudegen said that evening. Aunt Alis’ servants had cleared off the table and they were dawdling over their wine.
“Why?”
“It’s the best we can do with the documentation I can scratch up here,” Marc said.
Susanna leaned back against his shoulder. “But Mama isn’t in Vienna. She wasn’t ever in Vienna. I was working there, for Archduchess Maria Anna, and then went to Munich with her, but Mama was working at the court of Tyrol, for one of the ladies-in-waiting to the regent. I’m not supposed to go haring off to Vienna or anyplace else with you. I’m supposed to go to The Hague to work in Frederik Hendrik’s court and learn to live among Calvinists.”
“We’re going to France, not Vienna,” Raudegen said. “Nor to Tyrol, for that matter.”
“Then I’m not supposed to be going to France with you. Brussels turned out to be no help at all for learning to live among Calvinists, at least not in the couture shop at the palace. We know that the alliance exists, of course, but for all practical purposes, this is a Catholic court and I might as well have gone back to Vienna from Basel. I’m working for the same person.”
“We can’t leave you here.” Marc fingered the stem of his glass. “Even after Raudegen finished with the colonel this afternoon, the guy’s likely to heal and come back, bringing associates.”
“He isn’t even seriously injured,” Raudegen said, “although he seemed to believe that I was, to use your words, overly persistent about pulling his crutches out from under him every time he tried to walk away from my voice of rational persuasion. Overly persistent from his perspective, at least. Also, there are Calvinists in France. We will be stopping at a Huguenot household.”
Marc focused back on Susanna. “I can’t send you up to The Hague by yourself. There’s no trace of the transfer documents anywhere. We suspect the mail is being interfered with.”
“The mail here was interfered with at the level of the head dressmaker,” Raudegen said. “I got it out of the colonel that he bribed her to destroy the letter and not say anything to anyone. As for the mail to The Hague, I’m in no position to say. This backstairs section of the Brussels court looks to me like a nest of pro-Spanish vipers. We need to get you out of it. Our first obligation, though is to deliver our packages to France, so that’s where you have to go.”
“But . . . ” Susanna protested. “They aren’t all vipers.” She grinned. “Joseph the cobbler is a sweet old man. He fixed my shoe heels to have narrow tips with metal ends, so I could break the colonel’s instep when I stomped.”
“Sorry,” Marc said. “It’s the best we can do with the documentation I’ve been able to procure.”
He wasn’t really sorry.
Susanna blinked. “Mama isn’t sick, is she?”
“Not as far as we know, but it’s a good excuse, especially since you’re an only surviving child.”
“I haven’t heard from her for ages and I’m not even sure that she’s still in Tyrol. When the regent remarried to Grand Duke Bernhard, she didn’t take most of the ladies-in-waiting she had in Tyrol with her. Mama’s mistress had come from Tuscany when the regent married her second husband. She may have gone back or taken service in some other court. But if Mama isn’t sick, then that’s all right.” She snuggled her head against his collarbone and looked up flirtatiously. “Am I your fiancée?”
“You’re more than welcome to be.”
“Then I need to go to The Hague and learn to live among Calvinists,” she said stubbornly.
“Magdeburg,” Marc suggested.
“Magdeburg is Lutheran, not Calvinist. The emperor isn’t even married and when he was, he left his wife behind in Sweden for . . . how many years? . . . while he rattled around in the Germanies. She only visited him once. I’m sure he buys a few court clothes for Princess Kristina for ceremonial functions, but she’s still a child and her governess-companion is an up-timer who wears simple clothing. I’ve seen pictures. What good would Magdeburg do me? Tell me why it would be preferable to France.”
“This is not the end of the world.” Raudegen was getting impatient. “We’re not staying in France, even with Huguenots, after Soubise is settled in. We deliver the packages to Paris and go on. I’ll stop in Burgundy and send the two of you from Besançon to Geneva. Once you get there, Marc’s parents will have the pick of all the world’s Calvinists for you to learn to live among.”
“Oh. So that’s so, I guess. Just sort of so. Without recourse.” She looked at Marc. “Your letters were diplomatic and didn’t tell me anything. Of course, with half the world reading the other half’s mail, that was sensible of you, but did you learn if you could live among Catholics? Was your time in Naples as enlightening as your father predicted it would be?”
“In a lot of ways. It wasn’t always comfortable, particularly after certain representatives of the inquisition became aware of my presence in the city. I spent one difficult day and most of the following night holding still in the middle of a nativity scene made up of life-sized papier-mâché figures. All of them wearing cloth costumes. I was one of the magi—the one who had his head bent down with his hood falling over his face while he made his offering to the Christ Child. It was strange, not to mention hard on my knees.”
“Oh.”
“I did learn, though, that not all Catholics, not even all Spanish Catholics resident in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, agree with the inquisition’s aims, not even when they earn a living making statues of saints and such. It was my landlord, Bartolo, who sent his son to sneak me out of there through the staging area. I barely had time to get the kinks out of my legs, eat a slice of bread, and squirrel away a bottle of wine for future emergencies before I turned into a bale of denim.”
“The inquisition has no interest in denim?”
“Not when the seals on the bale assured the investigators that I was being imported rather than exported. Nor was I heavy enough to be a container of forbidden books.”
“Seals?”
“Well, yes. That’s the whole trick, you see—or at least most of it. Be as authentic as you can be. The denim had come down the coast from Genoa. The bale happened to find itself removed to the staging area for the nativity scenes, where it was tucked into a shed, eviscerated, reinforced, filled up with me, and deposited back in its original place on the wharf before anybody noticed its side trip. I stayed on the wharf until a wheelbarrow came by and the barrow man knocked on the frame of the bale. Out I came, in he went, I pushed the wheelbarrow down the pier and across the gangplank, and the barrow’s load took ship for Marseilles, which was where it was on the lading list as headed. Along with me, since I had a ticket. Under someone else’s name, of course. I’d reimbursed Bartolo for the barrow in advance. The bale left the wharf again and went on its way inland, stopping in the staging area long enough to disgorge the barrow man, that was Bartolo’s son again, and retrieve its original contents. Then it set out for some village in Calabria, none the worse for wear. Denim is pretty tough stuff.”
Susanna nodded. “That reminds me. Before we leave, I need to pay for my new shoes. Old Joseph has ten pairs ready for me, but I’ll have to borrow money from you. We had worked out an installment plan, but if I’m not coming back . . . ”
Raudegen winced on behalf of the pack horse. Ten pair of shoes? Who needed ten pair of shoes all at once?
The next day they headed for Paris, assorted Huguenots in tow. Because Susanna begged, they detoured by way of the airfield. A plane was scheduled to come in. She wanted to see it. She had been in Brussels for a long time and had never seen an airplane land, because they came during the daylight, almost always, and during the daylight, she was at work. She gasped in awe. Soubise shuddered and proclaimed that nobody would ever get him into one of those things.
They had not expected that Louis XIII would be killed, nor that the crown would be seized by Monsieur Gaston. These events, news of which reached them after they had spent three more days mucking their way through mud, meant that the question “Are we there yet?” acquired some dire undertones. Gaston’s people were said to be on high alert when it came to potential subversives.
They stopped at an inn—a nice one, courtesy of Aunt Alis’ parting bank draft—to spend an evening considering their options. The status of Soubise was interesting. He had been exiled by Louis XIII. Was it safe to interpret that the king’s death rendered the proclamation of exile invalid? Or not? If it was no longer valid, would it occur to Gaston to renew it?
“More practically,” Susanna said, “has it occurred to the new king to renew it? We don’t have any way of knowing. With everything else that’s going on, sorry M. de Soubise, your status isn’t front page news.”
“We’re miles from a radio,” Marc complained. “I’m not going to get anything from Geneva. This probably explains why there weren’t any letters from Papa waiting for me in The Hague or Brussels. If nothing else, Gaston has messed up the postal system for bags coming through France. We’re winging it from here on.”
“Don’t do anything that will cause me to flee like a thief in the night,” Soubise grumbled. “At my age, I’m not as nimble as I used to be.”
The next day, they sank back into the mud. It appeared that the flight path to the Brussels airfield followed, more or less, the route of the road. They had seen a couple of planes going over as they mucked their way south. When the second of the craft passed over their heads, Soubise looked up at the sky, down at the brown slime caked on his horse’s legs and hooves, and then muttered, “Maybe they could get me into one of those things, if conditions on the ground were bad enough.”
The likelihood that anyone would successfully flee the border crossing was nil. It was an approximately rectangular acre of mudhole bounded by customs booths.
The traffic, human, animal, and inanimate, was covered with mud. The border guards, mostly human as far as the eye could tell, were covered with shit-colored splatters. It never crossed their minds that someone who was in a status of “might have to flee” would even try to pass through the border that day. The best that anyone could hope to achieve was “manage to pick his feet up” out of the gluey mess.
They hit the Paris road and slogged, finally reaching the city and going to ground. Not in the Rohan household, where it would have been impossible to conceal Soubise’s presence. Rather, even though it was essentially next door to the Palais-Royal, recently renamed by Marie de’ Medici from being the Palais-Cardinal, they slipped into the residence of Soubise’s unmarried sister Anne at the Hôtel de Mélusine, where she fluttered around her brother with hot poultices, soft pillows, and current gossip.