The Confusion

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 Joha

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 Joha

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 Joha

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 Joha

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.