Quicksilver (128 page)

AUGUST
1689

Dear Doctor,

“Dynamics” makes me think not only of force, but of Dynasties, which use forces, frequently concealed, to maintain themselves—as the Sun uses forces of a mysterious nature to make the planets pay court to him. So I think that the name has a good ring to it, especially since you are becoming such an expert on Dynasties new and old, and are so adept at balancing great forces against each other. And insofar as words are names for things, and naming gives a kind of power to the namer, then you are very clever to make your objections to Newton’s work a part of the very name of your new discipline. I would only warn you that the frontier between “ingenious” (which is held to be a good quality) and “clever” (which is looked at askance) is as ill-defined as most of the boundaries in Christendom are today. Englishmen are particularly distrustful of cleverness, which is odd, because they are so clever, and they are wont to draw the boundary in such a way as to encompass all the works of Newton (or any other Englishman) in the country called “ingenious” while leaving you exiled to “clever.” And the English must be attended to because they seem to be drawing all the maps. Huygens went to be among the Royal Society because he felt
it was the only place in the world (outside of whatever room
you
happen to be in) where he could have a conversation that would not bore him to death. And despite the never-ending abuse from Mr. Hooke, he never wants to leave.

I have been slow to write about myself. This is partly because the very existence of this letter proves, well enough, that I live. But it is also because I can hardly bring myself to write about the baby—may God have mercy on his little soul. For by now, he is with the angels in Heaven.

After several false starts my labor began in the evening of the 27th of June, which I think was extremely late—certainly I felt as if I had been pregnant for two years! It was early the next morning that my bag of waters broke and poured out like a flood from a broken dam.
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Now things became very busy at the Binnenhof as the apparatus of labor and delivery swung into action. Doctors, nurses, midwives, and clergy were summoned, and every gossip within a radius of five miles went to the highest state of alert.

As you have guessed, the incredibly tedious descriptions of labors and deliveries that follow are nothing but the vessel for this encrypted message. But you should read them anyway because it took me several drafts and a gallon of ink to put into words one one-hundredth of the agony, the endless rioting in my viscera as my body tried to rip itself open. Imagine swallowing a melon-seed, feeling it grow in your belly to full size, and then trying to vomit it up through the same small orifice. Thank God the baby is finally out. But pray for God to help me, for I love him.

Yes, I say “love,” not “loved.” Contrary to what is written in the unencrypted text, the baby lives. But I get ahead of myself.

For reasons that will shortly become obvious, you must destroy this letter.

That is, if I don’t destroy it first by dissolving the words with my tears. Sorry about the unsightly blotching.

To the Dutch and the English, I am the Duchess of Qwghlm. To the French, I am the Countess de la Zeur. But neither a Protestant Duchess nor a French Countess can get away with bearing and rearing a child out of wedlock.

My pregnancy I was able to conceal from all but a few, for once I began to show, I ventured out in public only rarely. For the most part I confined myself to the upper storys of the house of Huygens. So it
has been a tedious spring and summer. The Princesses of Ansbach, Eleanor and Caroline, have been staying as honored guests of the Prince of Orange at the Binnenhof, which as you know is separated from the Huygens house by only a short distance. Almost every day they strolled across the square to pay a call on me. Or rather Eleanor strolled, and Caroline sprinted ahead. To give a curious six-year-old the run of such a place, cluttered as it is with Huygens’s clocks, pendulums, lenses, prisms, and other apparatus, is a joy for the little one and a deadly trial for all adults within the sound of her voice. For she can ask a hundred questions about even the least interesting relic that she digs up from some corner. Eleanor, who knows practically nothing of Natural Philosophy, quickly wearied of saying “I don’t know” over and over again, and became reluctant to visit the place. But I had nothing better to do with my time as the baby grew, and was hungry for their company, and so attended closely to Caroline and tried as best I could to give some answer to every one of her questions. Perceiving this, Eleanor got in the habit of withdrawing to a sunny corner to do embroidery or write a letter. Sometimes she would leave Caroline with me and go out riding or attend a soiree. So the arrangement worked out well for all three of us. You mentioned to me, Doctor, that the late Margrave John Frederick, Caroline’s father, had a passion for Natural Philosophy and Technologickal Arts. I can now assure you that Caroline has inherited this trait; or perhaps she has dim memories of her father showing off his fossil collection or his latest pendulum-clock, and so feels some communion with his departed soul when I show her the wonders of Huygens’s house. If so it is a tale that will seem familiar to you, who knew your father only by exploring his library.

Thus Eliza and Caroline. But too Eliza and Eleanor have been talking, late at night, when Caroline is asleep in her bedchamber in the Binnenhof. We have been talking about Dynamics. Not the dynamics of rolling balls on inclined planes, but the dynamics of royal and noble families. She and I are both a little bit like mice scurrying around on a bowling-green, trying not to be crushed by the rolling and colliding balls. We must understand dynamics in order to survive.

Only a few months before I became pregnant, I visited London. I was at Whitehall Palace with Daniel Waterhouse when the son of James II—now Pretender to the throne—was supposedly born. Was Mary of Modena really pregnant, or only stuffing pillows under her dress? If she was pregnant, was it really by the syphilitic King James II, or was a healthy stud brought in to the royal apartments to father a robust heir? Supposing she was really pregnant, did the baby survive childbirth? Or was the babe brought forth from that
room really an orphan, smuggled into Whitehall in a warming-pan, and triumphantly brought forth so that the Stuart line could continue to reign over England? In one sense it does not matter, since that king is deposed, and that baby is being reared in Paris. But in another sense it matters very much, for the latest news from across the sea is that the father has taken Derry, and is on the march elsewhere in Ireland, trying to win his kingdom back for his son. All because of what did or did not happen in a certain birthing-room at Whitehall.

But I insult your intelligence by belaboring this point. Have you found any changelings or bastards in Sophie’s line? Probably. Have you made these facts known? Of course not. But burn this anyway, and sift the ashes into that canal you are always writing about, making sure beforehand that there are no ill-tempered gondoliers beneath your window.

As a Christian noblewoman, never married, I could not be pregnant, and could not have a child. Eleanor knew this as well as I. We talked about it for hours and hours as my belly grew larger and larger.

My pregnancy was hardly a secret—various servants and women of the household knew—but I could deny it later. Gossips would know I was lying, but in the end, they are of no account. If, God forbid, the baby was stillborn, or died in infancy, then it would be as if it had never happened. But if the baby throve, then matters would be complicated.

Those complications did not really daunt me. If there was one thing I learned at Versailles, it was that Persons of Quality have as many ways of lying about their affairs, perversions, pregnancies, miscarriages, births, and bastards as sailors have of tying knots. As the months of my pregnancy clunked past, ponderous but inexorable, like one of Huygens’s pendulums, I had some time to consider which lie I would choose to tell when my baby was born.

Early, when my belly was just a bit swollen, I considered giving the baby away. As you know, there are plenty of well-funded “orphanages” where illegitimate children of the Quality are raised. Or if I searched long enough I might find some decent mother and father who were barren, and would be more than happy to welcome a healthy infant into their house.

But on the first day that the baby began to kick inside of me, the idea of giving him away faded to an abstraction, and shortly vanished from my mind.

When I reached my seventh month, Eleanor sent to Eisenach for a certain Frau Heppner. Frau Heppner arrived some weeks later, claiming to be a nurse who would look after Princess Caroline and
teach her the German language. And this she did; but in truth, Frau Heppner is a midwife. She delivered Eleanor, and has delivered many other noble and common babies since then. Eleanor said that she was loyal and that her discretion could be relied on.

The Binnenhof, though far from luxurious by the standards of French palaces, contains several suites of apartments, each appointed in such a way that a royal house guest can dwell there in the company of her ladies-in-waiting, Lady of the Bedchamber, &c. As you will understand from my earlier letters, Princess Eleanor did not have enough of a household to occupy a suite fully; she had a couple of servants who had come out from Eisenach, and two Dutch girls who’d been assigned to her, by William’s household staff, as an act of charity. And now she had Frau Heppner. This still left an empty room in her suite. And so, when Frau Heppner was not giving Caroline lessons, she began organizing the bedsheets and other necessaries of the midwife’s art, making that extra room into a birthing-chamber.

The plan was that when I went into labor I would be carried across the square into the Binnenhof in a sedan-chair, and taken direct to Eleanor’s suite. We practiced this, if you can believe such a thing: I hired a pair of brawny Dutchmen to serve as porters, and once a day, during the final weeks of my pregnancy, had them carry me from Huygens’s house to the Binnenhof, not stopping or slowing until they had set the sedan chair down inside Eleanor’s bedchamber.

These dress rehearsals seemed a good idea at the time, because I did not know the strength of my enemy, and the number of his spies in the Binnenhof. In retrospect, I was telling him everything about my plan, and giving him all he needed to lay a perfect ambush.

But again I get ahead of myself. The plan was that Frau Heppner would preside over the delivery. If the baby died and I lived, no word of it need ever leave that chamber. If I died and the infant lived, it would become a ward of Eleanor, and inherit my wealth. If both I and the baby survived, then I would recuperate for a few weeks and then move to London as soon as the obvious symptoms of childbirth were gone from my body. I would bring the infant along with me, and pass it off as an orphaned niece or nephew, the sole survivor of some massacre in the Palatinate. There is no shortage of massacres to choose from, and no want of Englishmen who would be eager to credit such a tale be it never so patchy—particularly if the tale came from a Duchess who had been of great service to their new King.

Yes, it all sounds absurd. I never would have dreamed such things went on if I had not gone to Whitehall and seen (from a distance) the retinue of high and mighty persons gathered there for no
reason other than to stand in the Queen’s bedchamber and stare fixedly at her vagina all day, like villagers at a magic-show, determined to catch the magician out in some sleight-of-hand.

I supposed that my own vagina, so humble and common, would never draw such a large and distinguished audience. So by making some simple arrangements ahead of time, I should be able to adjust matters to my satisfaction after it was over.

You may refer to the plaintext now, doctor, to become acquainted with all of the delightful sensations that preoccupied me during my first several hours of labor (I assume it was several hours; at first ’twas dark outside and then light). When my bag of waters broke, and I knew that the time had come, I sent word for the porters. Between contractions, I made my way carefully downstairs and climbed into the sedan chair, which was kept waiting in a room at the side of the house, at street-level. Once I was inside the box, I closed the door, and drew the curtains across the little windows, so that curious eyes should not look in on me as I was taken across the square. The darkness and confinement did not really trouble me, considering that the baby inside my womb had been living with far worse for many weeks, and had suffered it patiently, aside from a few kicks.

Presently I heard the familiar voices of the porters outside, and felt the sedan being lifted into the air, and rotated around in the street for the short journey to the Binnenhof. This passed without incident. I believe that I may have dozed a little bit. Certainly I lost track of the twists and turns, after a while, as they carried me down the long galleries of the Binnehof. But soon enough I felt the sedan being set down on a stone floor, and heard the porters walking away.

I reached up, flipped the door-latch, and pushed it open, expecting to see the faces of Frau Heppner, Eleanor, and Caroline.

Instead I was looking at the face of Dr. Alkmaar, the court physician, a man I had seen once or twice, but never spoken to.

I was not in Eleanor’s apartment. It was an unfamiliar bedchamber, somewhere else in the Binnenhof. A bed was ready—ready for me!—and a steaming vat of water rested on the floor, and piles of torn sheets had been put in position. There were some women in the room, whom I knew a little, and a young man I’d never seen at all.

It was a trap; but so shocking that I did not know what to do. Would that I could tell you, Doctor, that I kept my wits about me, and perceived all that was going on, and jumped out of the sedan chair and ran down the gallery to freedom. But in truth, I was perfectly dumbfounded. And at the moment that I found myself in this unfamiliar room, I was taken by a strong contraction, which made me helpless.