The System of the World (47 page)

Leibniz was out of town. Caroline did not know why. Court-rumors from the East had it that the Tsar’s new fleet was massing in St. Petersburg, making ready to sally into the Baltic and ream it clear of troublous Scandinavians. Caroline and most of the other people who mattered in Hanover knew that Leibniz had something going on the side with Peter Romanov. Perhaps this accounted for the savant’s absence. Or perhaps he’d merely nipped down to Wolfenbüttel to sort his books, or journeyed to Berlin to settle some tussle at his Academy.

Hanover was a city, and a city was, above all else, an organism for repelling armed assaults. The Leine, which flanked Hanover on the south and east, had always had some part to play in keeping the place from being sacked and burned. This explained why the Schloß rose straight from the river’s bank. But the precise nature of the Leine’s military duties had changed from century to century as artillery had gotten better, and gunners had learnt math.

Just past Leibniz’s house, Princess Caroline turned left towards the river, and so began a sort of voyage through time. This began on a quaint, curving Hanover street, which looked essentially medieval, and concluded, a quarter of an hour later, on the outskirts of the city’s fortification complex: a sculpture in rammed and carved earth as
à la mode
, and as carefully tended, as any lady’s hairstyle in the Grand Salon of Versailles. The Leine threaded its way through this in whatever way was most advantageous to the engineers. In some places it had been compressed into a chute, like meat funneled into a wurst-casing, and in others it was given leave to spread out and inundate ground that was considered vulnerable.

Fort-makers and fort-breakers alike were playing a sort of chess-game with geometry. Light, which conveyed intelligence, moved in straight lines, and musket-balls, which killed over short distances, nearly did. Cannonballs, which broke down forts, moved in flattish parabolas, and mortars, which destroyed cities, in high ones. Fortifications were now made of dirt, which was cheap, abundant, and stopped projectiles. The dirt was mounded up and shaved into prisms—volumes bounded by intersecting planes. Each plane was an intention to control its edges. Lines of sight and flights of musket-balls were supposed to skim along these, seeing and killing whatever presented itself at the creases. It was hoped that cannonballs would come in perpendicularly and dig their own graves, as opposed to glancing off and bounding to and fro like murderous three-year-olds. Cavalry-stables, infantry-barracks, powder-houses, and gangways were etched into the dirt-piles in the places where cannonballs were least likely to reach. The human parts were utterly subordinated to the demands of geometry. It was a desert of ramps and planes.

All of which was actually somewhat interesting to a Princess who had learnt geometry sitting on the knee of Baron Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz. But artillery got better very gradually, and gunners now knew all the math they would ever know, and so none of this had changed much during the decade or so that Caroline had been passing through it almost every day. Riding among the fortifications was a time to brood or to day-dream. Her senses did not engage the world until she was crossing over the second of two causeways, strung across
an inundated waste, put there to keep Louis XIV’s guns at a decent remove. The extremity of the fortifications was a timber gatehouse at the place where the planking of the causeway turned into gravel.

From here Caroline could look down a straight riding-path to Sophie’s orangerie, at the corner of the gardens of Herrenhausen, a mile and a half away. The Allee was striped with four parallel queues of lime trees washed with pale jackets of green moss. These lines of trees staked out three ways that ran side-by-side to the royal house. The road in the center was broad, suitable for carriages, and open to the sky. The entire length of it was visible; there were no secrets here. But it was flanked on either hand by narrower paths, just right for two friends to stroll arm-in-arm. The branches of the trees met above these paths to cover each with a canopy. Gazing down the length of the Allee, Caroline saw the entire mile and a half foreshortened into a single compact view, interrupted here and there by a little straggling line of courtiers or gardeners cutting across.

Sophie was as much an imperialist with her gardens as Louis XIV was with his fortresses. If nothing were done to stop them, her hedges and floral borders would someday collide with his
barrière de fer
somewhere around Osnabrück and conclude a stalemate.

Caroline’s first stroll in the gardens of Herrenhausen had been ten years ago, when Sophie Charlotte had brought the orphan princess out from Berlin to be flirted with by George Augustus. Young Caroline had known Electress Sophie for a few years, but had never before been granted the honor of being Summoned to Go for a Walk.

Leibniz had walked with them on that occasion, for he and Sophie Charlotte shared a kind of Platonic infatuation with each other. As for Sophie, she did not mind having the Doctor tag along, as it was often useful to have an ambulatory library in which to look up obscure facts.

The plan had been of admirable simplicity and, as one would have thought, fool-proof. The garden, which measured five hundred by a thousand yards, was edged by a rectangular riding-path, which in turn was framed in a waterway. Sophie, Sophie Charlotte, and Caroline were to set out from Herrenhausen Palace, which rose up above the northern end, and execute a brisk lap around the path. Leibniz would do his best to keep up with them. The exercise would bring color to Caroline’s cheeks, which normally looked as if they had been sculpted out of library paste. Just before they completed the circuit, they would dodge in to the maze, where they would bump into young George Augustus. He and Caroline would “wander off” and “get lost” in the maze together—though of course Sophie and Sophie
Charlotte would never be more than two yards from them, hovering like wasps on the other side of a thin screen of hedge, jabbing away whenever they perceived an opening. At any rate, through some winsome union of George’s level-headedness and Caroline’s cleverness, they would escape from the maze together and part company on blushing terms.

The Electress, the Queen, the Princess, and the Savant had set out from the palace of Herrenhausen precisely on schedule, and Sophie had put the plan into execution with all the bloody-minded forcefulness of the Duke of Marlborough staving in the French lines at Tirlemont. Or so it had seemed until they got some two-thirds of the way round the garden, and entered into a stretch of the riding-path that was overhung with branches of large trees, seeming wild and isolated. There, they were ambushed by a sort of raiding-party led by Sophie’s son and heir, George Louis.

It happened near the wreck of the gondola.

As a fond memento of his young whoring days in Venice, Sophie’s late husband, Ernst August, had imported a gondola, and a gondolier to shove it round the perimeter of the garden, along the waterway that Sophie called a canal and that George Louis insisted on calling a moat. Maintaining a gondola in North German weather had proved difficult, maintaining gondoliers even more so.

At the time of this, Caroline’s first garden-walk, Ernst August had been dead for seven years. Sophie, who did not share her late husband’s infatuation with the fleshy pleasures of Venice, and who felt no affinity with his phant’sied Guelph relations, had suffered the gondola to run hard aground on a mud-bank. There, ice-storms and earwigs had had their way with it. By chance, or perhaps by some ponderous scheming of George Louis, the mother and her entourage encountered the son and his at a place on the riding-path very near the wrack of the gondola, which rested askew, occasionally shedding a dandruff of gold leaf into the canal, almost as if it had been planted there as a
memento mori
to make young princes reflect on the fleeting and fickle nature of their youthful passions. If so, George Louis had misread it. “Hullo, Mummy, and to you, Sissy,” he had said to the Electress of Hanover and the Queen of Prussia respectively. And then after a few pleasantries, “Is it not sad to come upon the dingy old ruin of Papa’s gondola here among all of these flowers?”

“Flowers are beauty that lives and dies,” Sophie had answered. “Does this mean that when the petals begin to fall, I should order my garden plowed under?”

There followed a complicated silence.

If this had been Versailles, and if George Louis had been the sort who cared, Sophie’s remark would have fallen into the category of “warning shot fired into the shoulder”: nonfatal, but enough to render the victim
hors de combat
. But in fact this was George Louis’s back yard, and he was not one who cared—supposing he even noticed. Sophie’s remark had taken the form of a similitude between wilted blossoms and the decaying gondola. George Louis had difficulty with such constructions, as some men could not see the color green. And further he had, for better or worse, the
vis inertiae
of an ammunition cart. It took more than warning shots to stop him, on those exceptional occasions when he got moving. Sophie, of all persons in the world, knew this. Why, then, did she bother? For by making the analogy to flowers she was in effect speaking in a secret language that her son could not decypher. Perhaps the Electress was thinking out loud; or perhaps the message was intended for others.

Years later Caroline was to understand that it had been intended for
her
. Sophie was trying to teach the little Princess how to be a Queen, or at least, how to be a Mother.

One of George Louis’s companions had worked at least some of this out, and now stepped forward. His motives could only be guessed at. Perhaps he wanted to receive Sophie’s next shot in the breastbone, to show his loyalty. Perhaps he hoped to deflect George Louis. Perhaps he wanted to be noticed by Caroline, who was not, as yet, betrothed. At any rate, he made a courtly bow, letting everyone get a load of his plumage. “If it please your royal highness,” he said in strangely distorted French, “a gardener might be instructed to pinch off the dead blossoms, to give the garden a more pleasing aspect.”

This was Harold Braithwaite, who had begun coming over from England round about then to escape prosecution in London and to curry favor in Hanover. He had done something reckless, and got lucky, at the Battle of Blenheim. Now he was an earl or something.

“My English is not good enough for me to understand your French,” Sophie had returned, “but I collect that you were setting in front of me some advice as to how I should manage my garden. Please know that I love my garden as it is: not only the living but also the dying parts of it. It is not meant to be some phantasm of eternal and perfect life. Such a garden did exist once, or so the Bible instructs us; but it was brought to an ill end by a
snake
who fell out of a
tree.
” This with a very dubious head-to-toe look at Braithwaite, who turned magenta and backed off.

George Louis had been a bit unnerved, not by the content of Sophie’s remarks (which seemed to have quite flown past him) but by their tone, which was that of a Queen at war rejecting a proffered
treaty. Another man would have sensed danger, recoiled, and made amends. But inertia was all for George Louis. “I don’t care about flowers,” he said. “But if we cleared the gondola out of the moat, there would be room for galleys at Carnival.”

It was an old family tradition to stage a Venetian-style Carnival in the spring.

“Galleys,” Sophie had repeated in a distant tone, “aren’t those the Ships of Force that are paddled around the Mediterranean by stinking, wretched slaves?”

“Such are too large to fit in our little moat, Mummy,” George Louis had returned helpfully, “I had in mind little ones.”

“Little ones? Does that mean, only a few oar-slaves?”

“No, no, Mummy. Just as Louis XIV at Versailles stages floating processions and mock sea-battles upon the Canal, for the entertainment of all the persons of consequence who dwell there, so might we enliven our next Carnival with—”

“If the next is any more lively than the last, it is likely to kill me!”

“Lively, yes, Mummy, our Carnivals have always been so. And fittingly for a sort of—”

“A sort of what?”

“Queer, peculiar family tradition. Delightful to
us
. Perhaps a bit impenetrable to outsiders.” A tiny glance towards Braithwaite.

“Perhaps I do not
wish
to be penetrated by outsiders.”

The War of the Spanish Succession was at its zenith. Marlborough, at the head of mighty Protestant legions, was storming round Europe at will. The Whig Juncto in England was trying to get Sophie to move to London to be a sort of Queen-in-waiting until Anne sputtered out. And so perhaps George Louis could be forgiven for seeming a bit preoccupied with his place in the world. If so, no forgiveness seemed to be coming from Sophie’s direction. George Louis kept at it nonetheless, a breakaway ammo cart plunging down a bank. “This house, these gardens, are soon to become, to Britain, what Versailles is to France. Our home, Mummy, is to be a place of great consequence. What was a place for the
femmes
to dally in the garden, is to become a site of important conversations.”

“Oh, but it already
is
, my little prince,” Sophie had returned, “or I should say it
was
, until
ours
was interrupted, and replaced by
this
one.”

This had seemed merely funny to Caroline, as in truth they had been discoursing of the tendency of a cousin of theirs to gain weight when her husband was away at the front. But she did not smile for long. It had become apparent to all that Sophie was very angry, and so her words lanced out into a febrile silence. “The blood of the
house of Plantagenet flows in these veins,” she said, exposing a milky wrist, “and in yours. The little Princes in the Tower died, the Houses of York and of Lancaster were united, and six perfectly delightful ladies sacrificed themselves on the bed of our ancestor, Henry VIII, to make it possible for us to exist. The Church of Rome was cast out of Britain because it was an impediment to the propagation of our line. For us, the Winter Queen roved across Christendom as a Vagabond through the Thirty Years’ War. All so that I could be born, and so that you could. Now my daughter rules Prussia and Brandenburg. Britain shall be yours. How did it all come about? Why do
my
children rule over the richest swath of Christendom, not his?” She pointed to a gardener shoving a wheelbarrow of manure, who rolled his eyes and shook his head.