Prologue
Kronberg im Taunus, February 1901
Fritz Ponsonby shifts uncomfortably in the corner of the carriage, trying to find an easeful place to rest his head, and pulls his overcoat tighter. Even with the luxuries provided the royal party—a large private yacht for the channel crossing and plush sleeping compartments on the train to Frankfurt—the trip overnight from London has been taxing, and he feels queasy and his temples throb. Private secretary to the new king, he’ll have a full day’s work to do when they arrive. Beside him, softly snoring, is Francis Laking, a Harley Street physician, whom the king enlisted for this visit to his ailing sister, the dowager empress of Germany. The morning sun shines brightly but the air is very cold. He listens to the jingle of harnesses and the clopping of horses’ hooves as they pull five carriages up the hill. Finally, his eyes close.
A sharp turn to the left, and Ponsonby is jostled awake. Laking, too. The carriage judders to a stop at a high iron gate and soldiers approach on both sides, peering in the windows. After the vehicle lurches forward again, Ponsonby can see helmeted men marching four abreast in a courtyard on the left. Ahead, under an ornate stone entrance portico, he spies a cluster of officers. As the first carriage—the king’s—trundles up to the door, the whole file halts. Ponsonby cranes his neck and watches two footmen dart forward to help out the honored guest. A small band somewhere out of sight strikes up a hearty, unrecognizable oompah-pah tune.
“No ‘God Save the King’?” asks Laking.
“Not Wilhelm’s style,” Ponsonby answers. “Only he is lord and master in Germany.”
A stocky figure Ponsonby recognizes instantly as the German kaiser steps forward to embrace his uncle. In brown tweeds and soft homburg hat, the English king looks strangely incongruous, mousy, a mere civilian surrounded by military brass.
“We have come to an armed camp,” the doctor observes.
“Apparently so,” Ponsonby replies.
THE KING PLANS to stay at Schloss Friedrichshof, his sister’s castle near the village of Kronberg, for only six days. He won’t absent himself from England any longer, during these, the first weeks of his reign, when so many in London watch to see how he will be different from his mother, Queen Victoria, who occupied the throne for sixty-three years.
Ponsonby can’t suppress a smile as he’s escorted across the baronial, wood-beamed entrance hall and up a set of wide red carpeted stairs. What a contrast this royal residence is with the king’s own home in Norfolk—poky, stuffy Sandringham, reminiscent of an undistinguished Scottish golf hotel. From the outside the Schloss looks like an amalgam of an Italian Renaissance palazzo and a medieval castle, with a Gothic roof and tower, and Tudor-style timber framing on the side wings. But inside it’s modern country house deluxe: light oak paneling; vaulted ceilings painted cream; well-proportioned, airy rooms furnished handsomely with elegant Biedermeier pieces and velvet-upholstered chairs. Entering his third-floor room, he notices the white-tiled bathroom off to the left, and ahead a broad, curtained bed that he longs to crawl into; beside that a plush roll-arm sofa, two tall windows overlooking the Taunus mountains, and a desk set in front of a large stone fireplace. Someone, thoughtfully, has lit a fire.
His valet, Barlow, is hanging three suits and his dinner jacket in the wardrobe on the far side of the bed. Ponsonby sits down in the desk chair and sighs. No possibility of a nap. He feels oppressed already by the voluminous paperwork that will arrive daily from London, need careful reading, and require answers dispatched back to the capital, and to British legations abroad. He inquired about bringing along an equerry, or at least a shorthand clerk, but the king refused—pronouncing, “Fritz, this is a purely personal visit.” The new sovereign hasn’t yet grasped that he is never off duty and traveling with a small staff is no longer practical.
Still, Ponsonby didn’t insist, so now he’s stuck.
ONCE DR. LAKING examines the dowager empress, he confirms that her cancer has advanced beyond cure, to the bones. He has turned his efforts to easing her constant, agonizing pain, since the German doctors seem to have little relief to offer. Because she is too weak to leave her suite, the king spends an hour there with her each morning, and another in the afternoon. Ponsonby pictures the diminutive empress instructing and advising, even shaking an admonitory finger at her brother from time to time, while he smokes and listens with an affectionate smile.
On the afternoon of the third day, Ponsonby is deciphering a telegram from Whitehall at his desk when a footman knocks and enters to say the empress wishes to speak with him. Getting up to follow the man, his stomach twists anxiously—not the worries of a nervous courtier but the dread of a fond acquaintance, for the empress is his godmother, and he’s known her most of his life. Mortal illness will have changed her, and indeed, ushered into a sunny, apricot-colored lounge a few minutes later, he encounters a shrunken figure, clad in a simple gray smock, a black crocheted shawl over her shoulders, sitting supported by cushions on a chintz sofa, head bobbling slightly. Her face is yellow and swollen, her eyes closed, and her mouth fixed in an ugly grimace.
“Warten Sie mal,” says a nurse, standing next to the sofa. “She’s just had an injection. It requires some short time to take effect.”
Ponsonby’s throat tightens and his nose starts to run. Twenty years previously on a spring afternoon the empress, then a mere crown princess, came on a visit to his mother’s workroom in the Norman Tower at Windsor and he saw her for the first time. He recalls her light rose scent, the red woolen dress and dainty hat she wore, her kindness to him, an ungainly and self-conscious youth. Ever after—they’ve met on two dozen or so occasions—he felt that somehow she’d taken his measure and concluded he was capable, worthy of notice. Terrible to see her skeletal, barely upright, and confined to the faintly sour fug of this sickroom.
She opens her eyes and looks up. “Fritz, dear,” the empress whispers, “forgive me. I have been slow to properly welcome you to Friedrichshof.” She closes her eyes again.
“Your home is beautiful,” Ponsonby says.
“Please sit,” she says, reaching a trembling, wasted arm over the cushion tower to indicate a place on the right. “I will speak to my godson now, Fräulein, thank you,” she says to the nurse.
He’s settled beside her, and the empress lays a hand on his forearm. Her sweet smile evokes her former self.
“I watched my father build two splendid houses. I was so fortunate to have the chance to build one of my own,” she said.
“You were more inspired by Balmoral here, I would say, than Osborne.”
“Yes, although nowhere is lovelier than Osborne.”
“You were not tempted to build at the German seaside?”
“With Bad Homburg so close, I could count on a stream of English guests, my brother most constant.” She smiles again. The famous casino at the Rhineland spa town of Bad Homburg—five miles distant—was frequented for years by the erstwhile Prince of Wales.
“It’s a great pleasure for all of us to be here,” Ponsonby says.
“My brother and I have had excellent talks. But I don’t quite take in that he is king now.”
“His Royal Highness is himself still adjusting, I believe.”