Eliza

APRIL AND MAY 1694

To suffer, as to doe,

Our strength is equal, nor the Law unjust

That so ordains.

—MILTON, Paradise Lost

LIKE A GUINEA WORM, Eleanor's story had to be drawn out of her inch by inch. Its telling extended over a week, and was broken into a dozen installments, each of which was preceded by exhausting maneuvers and manipulations from Eliza and brought to a premature end by Eleanor's changing the subject or breaking down in tears. But the tiredness that Eliza had felt on the last day of the river-journey had developed into an influenza that kept her in bed for some days with aches and chills. So there was nothing else to pass the hours, and time favored Eliza.

The telling began when Eliza, sick, sore, woozy from mildew-smell and irritable because damp plaster kept falling from the ceiling onto her bed, asked: "A dower-house is where a dowager goes to live out her days after her husband has passed on; but yours still lives. So why are you in a dower-house?"

The answer—when all of the bits were spliced together and the preliminaries and digressions trimmed—was: The Elector Johann Georg IV belonged to a sort of fraternity whose members were to be found in every country in the world, and among every class of society: Men Who Had Been Hit on the Head as Boys. As MWHBHHB went, Johann Georg was a beauty. For some, the insult to the brain led to defects of the body, viz. wasting, unsightly curling of the fingers, twitches, spasms, drooling, &c. Johann Georg was not one of those; now in his late twenties, he could easily have found employment in Versailles as a gigolo for male or female clients—or both at the same time, as he was a great strapping stallion of a man, and who knew the limits of his body?

But everyone knew the limits of his mind. Eleanor might have known better than to marry him; but she had wanted to do her bit for the Brandenburgs, and to find a home for Caroline. He was rich and handsome; and though everyone knew he was a MWHBHHB, she had been assured, by many who knew him (Ministers of the Saxon court who in retrospect might not have been the most reliable sources) that he had not been hit all that hard. They pointed to his physical perfection as evidence of this. And (again, so easy to see in retrospect) they'd presented him to her, during their first few encounters, in settings ingeniously devised so that those aspects of his character attributable to his having been hit on the head as a boy had not been obvious. The wedding had been set for a certain date in Leipzig, a city easily reached from either capital (Berlin or Dresden) and large enough to accommodate two Electoral courts and a wedding party of noble men and women from all parts of Protestant Europe. Eleanor had gone there in the train of the Brandenburgs, and they had paid a call on her betrothed. The Elector of Saxony had received his bride-to-be in the company of a ravishing, expensively dressed young woman, and introduced her as Magdalen Sybil von Röohlitz.

Eleanor had heard the name before, always in a context of tawdry gossip. This woman had been Johann Georg's mistress for some years. Indeed they were said to be admirably matched, for though there was no evidence, visible or anecdotal, of her having been hit on the head as a girl, she might as well have been; despite lengthy and expensive efforts of her noble family to educate her, she could not read or write. And yet she was as perfect, as desirable a specimen of female beauty as Johann Georg was of male. The union made sense, in its way. There was a notable lack of brain power, but (a) the Doctors of Saxony were as one in saying that the imbecility of the Elector and of Fraülein von Röohlitz were not of the sort that is passed down to children, i.e., their offspring might be of sound mind, provided he were not hit on the head as a boy, and (b) the Countess's mother was said to be a clever one. Too clever; for she was in the pay of the Court of Austria, and doing all that she could to make Saxony into a fiefdom of that Realm. The Fräulein von Röohlitz had been Johann Georg's wife in all but name for some years and he'd given her a fortune, a Schloß, and a Court to go with it. Yet she was not of a rank to wed an Elector, or so insisted the old wise heads of the Saxon court, who were anti-Austria and pro-Brandenburg to a man. What Eleanor had seen and heard of these Saxons, from her distant and imperfect vantage-point in Berlin, had been only the faint noises off of a titanic struggle that had been carried out, over several years, in Dresden, between the pro-Brandenburg ministers of Saxony and the pro-Austria von Röohlitz faction. That Johann Georg had come to Brandenburg to woo her was evidence only that those ministers had, for a few months, got the upper hand. That her fiancé had now chosen to receive her, on the eve of their wedding, with his mistress draped all over him, and her draped in jewels that ought to have been gifts to Eleanor, proved that the struggle had lately swung the other way. Another prince, in such a circumstance, would have kept the mistress hidden away in her Schloß. The reality would have been no different but the presentation would have been comelier. But Johann Georg was a MWHBHHB and did not do things as other men. As Frederick, Elector of Brandenburg, looked on incredulously, and von Röohlitz watched in obvious delight, Johann Georg openly spurned Eleanor. And yet he had come to Leipzig with every apparent intention of going through with the wedding!

Frederick by now was acting in much the same rôle as Father of the Bride—though it was combined with that of one head of state negotiating an alliance with another, as well as that of a Doctor ministering to a village idiot. The meeting broke off. Most of those on the Brandenburg side of it were too nonplussed to be angry.

She married him. Eleanor Erdmuthe Louisa married Johann Georg IV, Elector of Saxony, albeit a few days later than planned, as everything had to be re-jiggered at the last minute. They moved to Dresden. The Elector promoted Magdalen Sybil von Röohlitz to the rank of Countess and kept her around. Libels began to circulate in the streets of Dresden in which it was argued that bigamy was no bad thing, having been practiced by any number of Biblical kings, and ought to be revived in Saxony. At about the same time, the Elector openly promised to marry the Countess von Röohlitz—at the same time as he was still married to Eleanor. The good Lutherans of Saxony pushed back against the idea of making bigamy the new law of the land, and even Johann Georg's impaired mind came to understand that he would never be able to marry two women at once.

Attempts to poison Eleanor's food commenced not long after. She might have been an easy victim in some other courts—a court, let us say, in which she had more enemies, and in which the enemies were not all mental defectives. But poisoning was a difficult and exacting business even for persons who had never been hit on the head, and the attempts of Johann Georg and Magdalen Sybil von Röohlitz were obvious, and were failures. Eleanor took as many clothes as she could pack in a hurry, and as many servants (three) as Johann Georg would allow her, and departed without taking another meal. This was how she and Caroline had landed at the dower-house of Pretzsch. Her sojourn here had hardened into a sort of exile, or imprisonment. As she had no money of her own, there was little practical difference. She and Caroline slept in the same room and barricaded the door at night in case Johann Georg should conceive some hare-brained plan to send assassins. Caroline, despite being an abnormally acute young lady when it came to squirrels and logarithms, had no idea that any of this was happening.

AT THE END OF TELLING THIS TALE, Eleanor looked better, albeit puffy around the eyes. She looked more like the dogged young Princess that Eliza had known at the Hague five years ago.