Chapter 32
Paris
May 1637
Mademoiselle Anne remained focused on her most important task. The widow of the marquis de Boësse proved recalcitrant. Undeterred, she persisted.
Rohan’s letter arrived. She read it, read it again, then re-read it.
Yes, it said what it seemed to say. She was no longer limited to searching within the Huguenot aristocracy for a bride for Soubise. The woman must fit the requirements Rohan had stated in regard to rank and religion, of course, but . . .
The consent of the head of House Rohan to any suitable marriage she arranged was implied in that casually worded letter, she decided. No more consultation would be necessary. Who might be a suitable possibility within these wider parameters? Suitable from her own political perspective. Suitable on the basis of the advantages it would bring to Benjamin.
She could safely ignore Rohan’s suggestion that she look to the Netherlands. Even if it was not Frederik Hendrik himself, he must have conspired with the king and queen’s harboring of that pestilent shrew Anne of Austria, that devious Italian cardinal Mazarin, and the demon-possessed infant who would someday in the future revoke the Edict of Nantes, exiling and destroying the Huguenot nobility of France. Along with the rest of the Huguenots of France, of course.
Unless they converted to Catholicism. Which, the up-time encyclopedia informed her, Turenne had done. She spared only one bitter thought for Turenne, his brother, and the entire ruling family of Sedan. Complicit with the king in the Netherlands. Who had been a cardinal himself not too long ago. What else could anyone have expected? And the infanta. Who had married an ex-cardinal. For a few minutes, her thoughts revolved around nests of Spanish vipers.
Then she went into a flurry of activity, largely focused on the past year’s collection of obituary notices for members of the German Protestant Hochadel. And smiled.
The unfortunate Albert Otto, count of Solms-Laubach, had toppled off his horse while hunting in February, leaving a widow. She, the newly widowed Katharina Juliana, née Gräfin von Hanau-Münzenberg, was in almost all ways the ideal bride for a man of Soubise’s age.
She was thirty-three, so young enough to bear more children but not so young as to make him look like a fool.
She had already borne three children, two of them boys, healthy and surviving, so she was proven fertile.
She was Calvinist.
No reasonable person could complain about her rank. Katharina Juliana was a half-niece of Frederik Hendrik, the “second gentleman” in the Low Countries. That would even cover the “Netherlands” suggestion in Rohan’s letter, if a person looked at it from the correct perspective.
And, she was a sister of Amalie Elisabeth, landgravine-regent of Hesse-Kassel and governor of the USE Province of Hesse. There was a wheel into which Mademoiselle Anne would be quite content to throw a spoke.
If there were need for some indication that God himself looked with favor upon this, she was, like her better-known sister in Hesse-Kassel, as fully fluent in French as she was in German.
Mademoiselle Anne had never heard of the Grinch, but if anyone who knew him had seen her at this moment, the smile would have been familiar.
Katharina Juliana had not completed her mourning year yet, but . . . an inquiry could not hurt.
Soubise couldn’t go courting. Things were quiet at the moment, the king having more pressing concerns, but still the odds were high that if he left France, Gaston would not let him return.
Mademoiselle Anne pounced.
Laubach, Solms-Laubach
June 1637
Käthe picked up what was bound to be another, if rather belated, letter of condolence upon the death of Albert Otto. She pulled up her list. This would be number two hundred and seventy-two, and she was up to date with her responses. Not a lot for someone of Albert Otto’s rank, but he had not been well-known outside of the immediate region. She reached for her letter opener.
Mademoiselle de Rohan? She was not even an acquaintance. Why would she . . . ?
This was not a letter of condolence. Mademoiselle de Rohan did not even pretend to be sorry that Albert Otto was dead. Praise and thanks be to the Lord our God, Käthe thought, that Albert Otto’s meddling secretary, who is now the meddling secretary serving my sons’ guardians, didn’t open this. Much less my companion. Much, much less any of the lawyers who are scurrying around Laubach, arranging how the county is to be administered until Gustav Wilhelm and Karl Otto come of age. Which, considering that Tavi will turn five this week, is going to be a while. Sixteen years of “while,” stuck in Laubach. Sixteen years of “while” during which I, who am neither regent nor guardian, watch the others cosset and coddle and hover over the boys, sixteen years of “while” during which I inexorably grow old.
Somewhat less cosseting, coddling, and hovering would probably be the lot of Albertine Elisabeth, who wasn’t an heir.
When would the men who complained about the uselessness of daughters notice that it wasn’t women who had made the laws that excluded daughters from inheritance? When would they realize that they placed themselves in this dilemma and therefore had only themselves to blame? But that was a useless line of thought. It was unlikely to cross their minds until Princess Kristina grew up and pointed it out to them, hopefully having inherited a lot of her father’s ability to slash right through traditional legal tangles.
She looked down at the letter that she had wrinkled up in her hand. Albert Otto’s will didn’t give her much room for independent action—probably because it had been drawn up by lawyers, irritating bourgeois academics that they were, immediately after their marriage. Lawyers, like preachers and professors, had a reprehensible tendency to think that women were useless because they didn’t have academic credentials.
Which women could have if those same lawyers and preachers and professors had not, with some very few exceptions, prohibited women from attending the universities that issued them. Universities like Marburg.
Until the up-timers came to shake them out of it.
Too late for her.
She unwrinkled the paper and smoothed the letter out.
She added a number for it to her list, wrote one polite reply, worded as if it had indeed been a conventional letter expressing sympathies, thoughts, and prayers, and placed it, as usual, upon the desk of the meddling secretary for sealing and posting.
Then she wrote another one, got up, and went to her chamber. Three years ago, Albert Otto had bought her a sheet of the new “stamps” as a curiosity. Not a stamp, as she knew the word, but a sheet of perforated paper, a kind of pre-paid postage. She kept it in a little frame. It was not likely that anybody, not even the maid who dusted them along with all her other trinkets and keepsakes, would notice if the bottom row went missing. Most people did not take as much notice of such little irregularities as she herself did.
She folded the second letter, wrote the address in a hand as little like her own as she could manage, sealed it with a bit of plain candle wax without her signet ring, affixed one of the stamps—then, in case foreign postage was more expensive, a second one—and put it in the middle of the pile of finished outgoing mail on the secretary’s desk.
She might come to regret this.
But it was bloody unlikely.
Mademoiselle Anne appeared to be a quite interesting person. Also, decisive. Not one who spent her nights wearing gloves so she would not to chew her own fingers off while her mind spent its days in an unending circle dance of guilt and regret about might-haves and should-haves and if-I-only-hads. Although it was said that French Huguenot artisans produced the finest gloves in the world, the best-fitted, with the thinnest, most flexible kidskin leather.
Whatever else one might think about Gustavus Adolphus, his new postal system was efficient.
Mademoiselle Anne expressed her delight that Katharina Juliana was willing to consider the possibility. She didn’t define the apparently innocuous possibility she was writing about. It could have been a ladies’ literary circle as far as her words went, now that she had been warned about secretaries, companions, and lawyers who had no compunctions at all about opening other people’s mail.
“I am persuaded,” Käthe wrote in her reply, “that your suggestion is the best option.” And there went another of the precious stamps. If she had to use another row of them, someone might notice that there was no longer a full sheet in the frame.
Three exchanges, and all but one stamp, later, it seemed to Mademoiselle Anne that it had not taken a great deal of persuasion. Basically, Katharina Juliana agreed to come to Paris on a “sight unseen” basis. Beyond that . . . well, the young woman was right. Neither the guardians of the Solms-Laubach children nor her natal House of Hanau-Münzenberg nor the emperor of the USE was likely to approve the rapid remarriage of a recent widow to a foreign nobleman. It wasn’t as if Katharina Juliana could easily obtain a rapid reversion of her dowry . . . or purchase a suitable trousseau for a Rohan bride while she was still in mourning . . . or . . .
“You will have to arrange everything, Mademoiselle,” Käthe wrote, “if you still want the match for your brother under these circumstances. But if you provide a carriage that will be in a specific location in Laubach on a specific date and at a specific time, with a suitable driver upon the bench and a suitable chaperone in it, she being in possession of papers that will make it possible for me to cross the borders, I swear to you upon my sacred honor that I will, without looking back, step my foot on the little ladder, enter it and come to France, bringing nothing but myself and the clothing that I am wearing that day.”
A few days later, as her buttocks landed on the bench cushion with a little plop, she thought, “Nobody in my family is going to like this at all. I’m fairly sure, though, that they will finally remember that I exist.”
France
June 1637
Within two weeks of obtaining the bride’s consent, the scant two weeks that Anne needed to send the carriage to collect the bride and wait for Katharina Juliana’s trip to Paris to be completed, a triumphant Anne sent out formal announcements of the duc de Soubise’s betrothal.
Magdeburg
June 1637
“No!” the landgravine-regent of Hesse-Kassel shrieked when she saw the betrothal announcement that her secretary had opened and placed neatly in the pile of incoming correspondence to the left of her desk. “No, no, no, how could she? How could Käthe do this? What is it going to do to every plan I have been working on for years?”
Yes, Katharina Juliana was a perfect bride for Soubise in almost all ways.
The way in which she was not a perfect bride for him, at least in the opinion of Amalie Elisabeth, was that the potential complications of this match for the internal politics of the USE were massive.
Especially now that Soubise and Anne de Rohan had publicly swung their support to Gaston. Whereas Grand Duke Bernhard, and with him Henri de Rohan, had made clear that they that they had every intention of backing Anne of Austria and the infant Louis XIV.
* * *
“She didn’t tell our brothers, either,” the landgravine lamented. “At least she left the children in Laubach, or whoever Albert Otto named as their guardians would be totally freaked out! Who did he name? Friedrich of Baden-Durlach, I suppose, though he is usually in Basel with that up-timer woman, General Jackson’s wife, who is ambassador there. And a couple of his other brothers-in-law, I suppose. Oh, dear Lord, she’s just like Uncle Albrecht.”
Uncle Albrecht, the recently deceased head of the cadet line of the counts of Hanau-Münzenberg had been in a major struggle with the senior line (hers) over inheritance rights for years.
“Greedy! That’s the only possible explanation for why she’s done this. Sheer greed and ambition, with Albert Otto only four months dead! The next time I have a chance to talk to that Litsa . . . ” Litsa, the reprehensible Uncle Albrecht’s daughter and a burgeoning journalist, had the byline on the story in the Magdeburg paper.
“If there’s anything which I frantically need you for” arrived via radio from Bernhard, who was still in Nancy. It was waiting in Magdeburg when Raudegen arrived. The instant he and Marc dropped Susanna off at the landgravine’s townhouse, they headed for France.
The landgravine was still busy, plotting to contain the damage that her sister’s marriage to Soubise would do to the Crown Royalists. Effectively, she took five minutes to welcome Susanna formally and then tucked her into a corner.
Besançon
June 1637
Henri de Rohan had his secretary pull the file copy of the letter he had sent to Anne, re-read it, and concluded that he had no one but himself to blame. There were occasions when vague was not your friend. There were reasons why you asked a lawyer to review a contract before you signed it. There were occasions when sloppy syntax came back to bite you in the nose.
Nancy, Lorraine
June 1637
Grand Duke Bernhard guffawed. It had probably been years since anything had made him laugh like this, probably not since the ex-cardinal de Lorraine had eloped with his cousin Claude, dispensing himself from his ecclesiastical vows in the process. It was a welcome relief from the tedium of Nicole, Aldringen, and fretting about Gaston.