“And not to be with my mother at the end. I cannot tell you how I suffered when the news came.” She shakes her head.
“I imagine, Your Royal Highness.”
“I try to believe that the queen and I were together so much and so often that it doesn’t matter that I was absent in the last days.”
“Yes.”
“My son boasts he cradled his dying grandmother.” The empress’s tone is ironical.
“He maneuvered himself into position by the bed and sat propping her up with his right arm, my mother recounts.”
“Determined to be foremost even at that bedside!” she exclaims.
Picturing the kaiser pushing in at a most inappropriate moment, they both laugh.
Maybe their merriment alarmed the nurse, for now she’s back. “You mustn’t stay long. She’s easily tired,” she tells Ponsonby sternly.
But the empress raises her hand slowly. “No, no. I need a few more minutes.”
The nurse scowls and departs. The empress closes her eyes and sits silent for a while. Gathering strength perhaps. When she opens them again she says, almost casually, “I need you to do something for me, Fritz dear. I need you to take charge of my letters and take them back to England.”
“Letters?”
“Letters I received, and those I sent to my father and my mother, during the years I’ve lived here. When I was last in England I retrieved from Windsor the ones I wrote. I thought to use them for a book. No time now.”
Ponsonby looks away. Too distressing to acknowledge that.
She pats his arm. “Dear Fritz. Listen now. Tonight, late, I will have them brought to your room.”
He nods.
“No one must know that they will be taken away. When I am dead my son will send men to search my papers, taking what he wants burned. Remember, after my husband . . .”
He nods again, recalling that dreadful episode at the Neues Palais, nearly thirteen years ago now.
“Keep them, and in future, well, I hardly know. May I give them to your care?”
“A pleasure, ma’am, I’m happy to do so.” He hears his voice quavering.
She responds with another light pat. “And if I don’t see you again, you will greet your mother,” she says.
“Yes.”
“And do not despair.”
“No.”
“The Catholics call that the unpardonable sin. As your godmother, I can instruct in such matters.” She smiles. It’s remarkable: she looks so dreadful and then her smile is from the soul, still aglow.
He’s on the edge of a sob but fights it back. He must answer her dignity with his own. “Yes, Your Royal Highness.”
“Goodbye, Fritz, God bless you.”
He rises to his feet and bows before leaving.
IT SHOULDN’T COME as a surprise, Ponsonby supposes, back at his desk, that the antipathy long extant between mother and son endures, even now that she’s on death’s doorstep. The two look at the world completely differently. Such a tragedy, all liberal Europe agrees, that the empress’s late husband, Kaiser Friedrich, enjoyed only the shortest of reigns. And since that noble man was replaced by his son, the continent’s most powerful nation has a volatile, attention-seeking man-boy at the helm, constantly flexing his muscles. Far from floating above politics, he shamelessly supports right-wing parties. Bismarck, whose wars forged the German Empire, afterward used his diplomatic wiles to keep the peace. No German minister today has his finesse, and all must contend with their erratic, irascible kaiser.
Outside his window, Ponsonby hears the rhythmic, leathery stomping sound of soldiers marching in parade, as they do here at all hours. The troops are not the local garrison, he understands, but members of the kaiser’s personal guard dispatched from Berlin now that the empress’s illness has entered its terminal stage. A half-dozen plain-clothed men called “pursers” have been installed inside the castle, in an office off the main hall, and they seem to do nothing all day but prowl the passageways and spy on the comings and goings of the empress’s guests. Ponsonby encounters them from time to time, traveling in pairs. The men smile, but malevolent purpose stews below their courtesy. It will be a delicate thing, removing the empress’s letters from the castle undetected.
DINNER IS SERVED as usual at eight, the king at the head of the table with Princess Sophie and Princess Moretta, two of the empress’s daughters, on either side of him. They dote on “dear Uncle Bertie,” laughing at his remarks, vying to refill his whiskey glass. The kaiser sits at the foot, holding forth on a new naval ship design. He has brought along scrap paper and between courses sketches out the vessels’ features for his dinner companions—General von Kessel and Rear Admiral von Müller—who appear to hang on every word, every drawing. Ponsonby understands that, in private, the German military leaders mock their blustering, intemperate kaiser, but tonight these men make a very convincing show of fealty.
After dinner, when the rest of the party heads to the library to smoke and play cards, Ponsonby returns upstairs. He attempts to focus on the documents and telegrams piled on his desk, but he’s distracted, watching the clock. Time crawls. The clock strikes midnight and then one. Maybe he misunderstood the empress.
A quiet knock. “Herein,” he says.
Four men come into the room, each pair carrying between them a large box, the size of a trunk but flatter and wider. The boxes are covered with black oilcloth and bound with heavy beige cord, obviously new. Affixed to the side of each box is a blank white label. The men are stablemen, dressed in open shirts, wool trousers, and tall boots. They lay the boxes down at the far end of the room and leave without a word to him. It’s like a strange, mute play of two minutes’ duration.
When the empress spoke of letters, Ponsonby imagined a half-dozen bulky packets that could be concealed in his personal luggage. These boxes will have to be explained.
Ponsonby finally rises from the chair and writes on the label of one “Books with care.” On the other “China with care.” Then he adds his address: Cell Farm, Old Windsor, England.
THE NEXT MORNING, when Ponsonby emerges from the bathroom, still drying his face with a towel, his valet is standing staring at the boxes. “What are these, sir?” Barlow asks.
He gives his cheeks a final rub, tosses the towel on a side chair, and says offhandedly: “Ah, Barlow, these are some things I bought as we passed through Bad Homburg. When we are departing put them in the back passage with the dispatch boxes and my portmanteaux.”
“Certainly,” he says, uncertainly.
A quarter of an hour later, Mr. Fehr knocks on his door. Fehr is the king’s courier, in charge of moving everything and everyone attached to the sovereign efficiently from one place to another. Barlow has obviously wasted no time passing on his concerns.
“I must say I am surprised, sir, that, as very clear instructions were given to all the servants that items that came into the castle had to be reviewed by me or by the chief purser, we now appear to have two boxes of goods that no one has previously inspected. How exactly did this happen?” Fehr asks.
Scanning his mind for a response, Ponsonby alights on indignation. “Isn’t it enough, Fehr, that every time I return to England I am grilled by Custom House officers who want a list of every single thing of value I have acquired abroad? And then they dispute the value I put on each? Now I am obligated to justify my purchases to you, standing in my bedroom? Is that what you are asking me to do? The whole song and dance right here?”