The Ludwig Conspiracy (26 page)

Soon after that, Maria seemed to have forgiven me, and she would talk to me again, although usually about matters of no importance. It was to be some time yet before we were back on such a familiar footing as before our quarrel outside the grotto.

The month of September passed by, with unusually warm and pleasant weather, which in no way reflected the political storms sweeping through Bavaria at that time. On three more occasions, I tried speaking to Ludwig about Dr. Gudden’s psychiatric report, and a potential coup by the ministers, but whenever I broached the subject, I came up against a wall of silence on his part. At least the KING seemed to have forgiven the affront that he felt I had offered him on the platform in the linden tree. I read aloud to him at night from Edgar Allan Poe and Homer’s
Odyssey,
kept him company at supper, and went with him on an expedition of several days by coach to Schachen, as well as accompanying him on a walking tour up to his lodge of Brunnenkopfhäuser. On this excursion, he told me that the building of his new castle at HERRENCHIEMSEE was progressing well, and he looked forward to showing me the construction work going on there in the near future. I also indulged him in his new passion for photography. The result was some charming pictures of the two of us that I will always carry close to my heart, for despite his moments of absurdity, which have been interpreted in retrospect as derangement, I loved him as I loved Maria, if in a different way.

G, IDT

How great was my joy when I heard that Maria was to accompany the retinue to Berg as a kitchen maid. We set off at last on the evening of 27 September in the direction of the Würmsee, that truly majestic lake south of Munich, known to more and more of the local inhabitants these days as Lake Starnberg. It was a long procession of people and horse-drawn carriages, led by the king’s coach. Ludwig sat in silence in a vehicle like something out of a fairy tale, adorned all over with gilded figures and curlicues, and drawn by four white horses. As usual, we traveled by night, and I was reminded of the ballads in which elves and fairies go through the forests by night, casting their magic spells over all who set eyes on them. One thing seemed certain: the few people who saw us that night would still be telling their grandchildren, years later, that they had met a real fairy-tale king.

Early in the morning, we reached Berg Castle at last, a small residence of the Wittelsbachs where Ludwig had spent perhaps the happiest days of his youth, and which still served as his home in summer. The building itself was rather plain, a small castle with oriels, merlons, and a tower of sinister appearance. As on my earlier visits, I marveled yet again at the rural atmosphere of the place. The corridors and garden were thronged with all manner of domestic servants, as well as chambermaids and kitchen boys. There were mingled smells of homely dishes cooking, horse dung, and the caustic ingredients used in photography. Only the upper two floors, where Ludwig and his mother resided, were furnished with a little more grandeur, although they were not in the least like the rooms at Linderhof.

Maria immediately felt at ease here. She helped the servants carry the king’s personal belongings into the house, and then ran with Leopold along an arbored pathway through the garden and down to the lake. I was about to follow her, when I saw Count Dürckheim, in his officer’s uniform, standing beside the small fountain in the forecourt of the castle. He was looking very grave, and in silence beckoned me over to him.

“My respects to you,” I hastily greeted him. “I hope you received my . . .”

Dürckheim put a finger to his lips and told me to be quiet. “Not here,” he said, low-voiced. “We’ll go over to the cavaliers’ building, where you will meet a carefully selected company of gentlemen. Follow me, but do not attract any attention.”

Passing the colored glass globes that servants had put up on stakes all over the garden, we reached the small, secluded building, designed for the king’s visitors, by way of an arbored path. In the corridor inside we were received by my mentor Dr. Schleiss von Loewenfeld, who used to spend a great deal of time here. In silence, and leaning on a walking stick, he led us to a modest conference room, and then carefully closed the door.

When I looked around the room, I saw, as well as the royal physician and Count Dürckheim, two other men standing smoking by the fireplace. One was Richard Hornig, Ludwig’s equerry and loyal friend for many long years; he served the king as a riding companion and coachman. The other, a pale, thin man in his late thirties, wearing a light summer suit, holding a straw hat, and smoking a cigarette, I recognized only at second glance. He was the Munich painter Hermann von Kaulbach, who had already done several model drawings for the king, and who was also unconditionally loyal to him. When Loewenfeld saw my surprise at this strange meeting, he raised his hands in a conciliatory gesture.

“Never fear, my dear young colleague,” he reassured me, leaning on his stick. “We are among friends here.” He smiled wearily. “Perhaps the last friends the king still has.”

Dr. Loewenfeld, then almost eighty years old, seemed to have aged by years over the last few months. He still sported old-fashioned side-whiskers, like the late American president Lincoln, murdered twenty years ago. But now his hair was white as snow, and deep lines had formed around his eyes. Loewenfeld had been personal physician to Ludwig’s father, Maximilian II, and was a true friend to the Wittelsbach family. Now he had to stand by and watch as the kingdom of Bavaria went to the dogs.

“Well?” Count Dürckheim spoke to me in an urgent voice. “Have you succeeded in convincing the king that he must act?”

I shook my head in silence, whereupon the count nodded understandingly. “As I had expected. But at least we now know what’s at stake. An intrigue, supported by the Prussian Secret Service, with the intention of having the king certified insane. That is nothing but high treason.” He put his hand to his officer’s cap. “I owe you my thanks, Marot. You have done the country an inestimable service.”

“A service that, I am afraid, does us no good,” replied Dr. Loewenfeld, sighing as he let himself drop into one of the chairs beside the fireplace. “As long as Ludwig lives solely in his dreams, he will be playing into his enemies’ hands. Lutz, president of the ministerial council, has already been in touch with Prince Luitpold. Ludwig’s uncle has agreed to take over as regent.”

“It’s in the king’s own hands,” interrupted Kaulbach the painter, drawing on the thin mouthpiece of his cigarette holder. “If he goes to Munich and shows himself to the people, no one will dare to certify him insane. But as matters stand . . .” He paused, and it was a pause pregnant with meaning. “If he goes on driving through the mountains in his coach by night, and building his fairy-tale castles, he is indeed playing into the ministers’ hands. Lutz is having rumors circulated in the newspapers, they are already singing satirical songs in the taverns, and no one does anything to avert it.”

Hornig, the royal equerry, nodded bitterly. “The lackeys at court are full of malicious gossip. I’ve heard that they steal torn documents from the king’s wastebaskets, hoping to find incriminating material. Then they pass it on to that bastard Lutz.”

“Who can still be trusted?” I asked hesitantly, looking around at the company.

“Apart from the five of us?” Count Dürckheim laughed despairingly. “I wouldn’t vouch for anyone else. Count von Holnstein is inciting the last of the loyalists against the king.”

“Another bastard!” Richard Hornig spat in the empty fireplace. “And when, thanks to Ludwig, he had a handsome sum from Bismarck.”

I could understand Hornig’s anger with his immediate superior. The Master of the Royal Stables, Max Count Holnstein, had once been the young king’s playmate. But Holnstein was hungry for both power and money, a bull-necked, choleric man who liked to browbeat his subordinates. He had been paid ten percent commission on the millions of the Guelph Fund, money with which Bismarck had bribed the king of Bavaria, after the war in the seventies, to get a Hohenzollern on the throne of the German emperor. Holnstein had been scheming against the king for years.

“How about Dr. Gudden?” I asked. “If he could be convinced that this opinion of his serves only to prepare for a coup, he might be amenable to reason.”

“I know Bernhard von Gudden,” replied Dr. Loewenfeld, wearily rubbing his temples. “A highly intelligent, ambitious man, and above all a vain one. His expert opinion damning the king will be the pinnacle of his career. He’s making himself the talk of all Europe with it. He’s not about to give that up.”

“I think that Marot is right,” Hermann Kaulbach said, turning to the others. “We ought to get in touch with Dr. Gudden. It’s always worth making an attempt. Maybe he could be bribed.”

“Oh, and what would we bribe him with?” Count Dürckheim snorted angrily and lit himself a second cigar. “The king is no longer solvent. All the same, he goes on building and building. This very night he plans to travel on to Herrenchiemsee, to supervise work on the castle there. This is a never-ending nightmare. Can’t you finally grasp that fact?”

“Gentlemen, gentlemen! A little civilized conduct, if you please!” Old Dr. Loewenfeld had risen from his chair. Clutching his walking stick, he looked sharply at all of us. Once again his eyes blazed with the authority for which I had always admired him.

“There is no point in our shouting at one another,” he said at last. “That is not the way for us to save our king. I therefore suggest the following: Kaulbach and I will try to get in touch with Dr. von Gudden. Perhaps all is not yet lost. Meanwhile you, Count Dürckheim, and the king’s equerry, Hornig, should go on trying to reason with Ludwig and persuade him to appeal to the public.”

“You can forget that idea,” growled Dürckheim. “His Majesty has just ordered me to travel to England and beg the Duke of Westminster for ten million marks. So I’m obliged to leave Ludwig with the intriguers and lickspittles.”

“And you?” Dr. Loewenfeld hopefully asked the equerry.

Richard Hornig hesitated before he answered. “I must disappoint you. The king recently dismissed me from his service. I’m here because I love him, but that love is no longer returned.”

“Good God, Hornig!” cried Dürckheim. “In heaven’s name, what has happened?”

“Well, he gave me an order that I was absolutely unable to carry out.”

“Refusing to obey orders?” The officer frowned. “What kind of order was it, then?”

“I . . . I was to mount a bank robbery in Frankfurt.”

A leaden silence fell.

“Someone pinch me, please, to wake me up,” said Kaulbach at last. “You were asked to rob a bank for the king of Bavaria?”

The equerry nodded. “Those were His Majesty’s orders. If he can’t come by money in any other way, he wants to go on building however he can.”

“A king as bank robber.” Dr. Loewenfeld sighed deeply. “Maybe Ludwig is deranged after all, and the ministers are right.”

“He has his whims and fancies, but he is not deranged,” I said firmly. “Let
me
try convincing him to go to Munich. He’s already indicated that he’ll be taking me to Herrenchiemsee with him. Once there, I’ll do all I can to bring him to change his mind.”

For a moment I felt all eyes in the room turn to me. It was so quiet that you could hear the maidservants laughing in the garden outside.

“Very well.” Dr. Loewenfeld tapped the floor with his stick. It sounded like fate knocking at the door. “Then it’s decided. Marot goes to Herrenchiemsee with the king; Kaulbach and I will talk to Gudden. And not a word outside this room about today’s conversation. Swear by God and the king.”

We all raised our hands as we swore the oath. The royal physician looked gravely at us all before, at last, he went on. “One thing must be clear to you all, gentlemen: if Ludwig falls, it means the end of the Bavarian monarchy. And then we’ll be ruled by unfeeling bureaucrats. We stand at a turning point in history.”

With these words he opened the door, and the five of us went our separate ways. Had I guessed under what terrible circumstances I would see my fellow conspirators again, I would probably have run as far as I could go, screaming. Or emigrated to America at once. As it was, however, I walked down to the lake, feeling queasy, in the hope of meeting Maria there.

I would very much have liked to talk to her about the king and the ministers’ terrible plans for him, but I didn’t want to put her in such great danger. Anyone who knew about the plot against Ludwig, and our own plans, would be considered a tiresome troublemaker to be eliminated.

And as the oath sealed my lips anyway, I decided to hold my peace.

S
TEVEN HAD BEEN READING
Marot’s diary for more than two hours, as if in a trance, when he suddenly heard a sound behind him. He straightened up. Twigs cracked underfoot on the secluded, shady path through the trees. Could some tourists have lost their way and strayed to this remote spot on the island? Or were the Cowled Men after him again? Maybe by now the police had tracked him down? Steven shuddered at the thought of the green Bentley that had followed them to Prien on the Chiemsee.

Who in God’s name are all these people taking such a keen interest in the book?

Cautiously, the bookseller put the diary down and scanned his surroundings from his place on the bench behind the mighty tree trunk. He almost expected to meet the magician, or the one-eyed knight, in this dark fairy-tale wood. But it was only Sara who came toward him, waving.

“So here you are,” she cried cheerfully. “I see you found an idyllic place to sit and work on the diary.”

“Most of all it’s a timeless place.” Steven closed his notebook. “I’d say this spot looks just the way it did more than a hundred years ago, except that the beech trees have grown a bit.”

“Well? Find anything out?” Sara’s voice had a serious note in it now. “Any clue to help us work out what Marot could have meant by writing KING in capital letters?”

Steven shook his head. “No clue at all. Right now Marot is still in Berg, meeting the last few men still loyal to the king. It’s an exciting political thriller, but there’s nothing to give us the next keyword.” Briefly, he told her about the pages of the diary that he had just read. Sara listened in silence, then leaned back and let a stray sunbeam fall on her face.