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“It is all a great farce,” was Princess Caroline’s verdict. In the darkness she could not see Joha
“On the contrary. La belle dame sans merci is a role that becomes you-’twill serve you well when you are Queen, and Greenwich is one of your country houses.”
“I am being without mercy to myself,” Caroline said, “not just to you. It was stupid for me to have come to England.”
“On the contrary-you were not safe, in Hanover, from that assassin.”
“That assassin, who followed me to London without the least difficulty,” Caroline said, “and might be preying on Eliza at this very moment.”
“She is my mother, you do not need to remind me,” Joha
“But I am entitled to form my own views. I say that I stayed too long.”
“Naturally it will seem so, when we are departing in such haste-it would be better if you had left a week ago, in leisurely fashion. But we could not have anticipated any of this then.”
“How long has it been since Sophie’s funeral? Six weeks. By the time we are back in Hanover, make it seven or eight weeks.”
“That is not such a terribly long time for a grief-stricken Princess to be absent from Court.”
“From Court and from Husband.”
“Husband has other ways of sating himself.”
“I wonder about that,” said. “After what happened that night, can he have kept Henrietta Braithwaite as maitresse-en-titre? Or will he have sent her packing, and acquired a new one? Or-?”
“Or what?”
“Or will he be looking forward to the return of his long-absent wife? His letters, lately, have been more interesting.”
“More interesting than what? Or than who? Stay, you need not answer, we have gone into a place where angels fear to tread.”
“It is a place where you went, knowingly and willingly, when you wooed a married Princess.”
Joha
“There, you see? Now again I am la belle dame sans merci. I hope you fancy her.”
“That I do,” Joha
“Brave magnificent shining knight,” Caroline said, “who needs to keep his visor closed, when he is whingeing.”
That was the end of conversation for a while. The row down the Thames was long. Caroline struggled against drowsiness, and fought the urge to nestle up against Joha
The transfer to the sloop went quickly, as Joha
Sophia, Mouth of the Thames
MORNING OF THURSDAY, 29 JULY 1714
HANOVER WAS LANDLOCKED. Its greatest body of water was a three-mile-wide puddle. The rich might invest in, the rash might sail on, proper ships; but they had to travel abroad to Bremerhaven first. For most Hanoverians, the preferred way of getting to the other side of a body of water was to wait for it to freeze, then sprint across. Sophia, the sloop that Caroline and Joha
Left to form her own opinions, Caroline might have judged that they were now out in the sea, and well on their way to Antwerp. The fog made it impossible to see more than a stone’s throw in any direction, but Sophia was being shouldered from one brawny roller to the next like a child being passed around by a crowd at a hanging. The temperature had dropped (which, as the Natural Philosopher in her knew, must account for the fog), and the air smelled different. But that this was pure landlubberly foolishness could be known by watching Ursel, who was no happier, here and now, than a Hanoverian, half-way across the Steinhuder Meer, when the ice he is treading on begins to crack and tilt. “This is why no one does this,” he said to Joha
The second this, taken in the context of all that had happened in the last several hours, probably meant “to sneak out of the Pool in the middle of the night so that the Customs officials at Gravesend shall not board the vessel, inspect her cargo, and receive their customary gratuity, and then to run down the Hope, navigating by sounding-lead, in hopes of squirting past the fort at Sheerness before dawn so as not to be blown out of the water by the coastal artillery situated there for that purpose or overhauled by naval vessels sent out to run down smugglers.” All of which looked to have been accomplished, to landlubberly eyes. A huge bell had bonged nine times, not long ago, and one of the mates, who knew the Thames, had identified it as the Cathedral in Canterbury. To Caroline, who had studied maps, this suggested they were well clear of the river’s cha
It was less clear what Ursel had meant by the first this. It was something so bad as to render self-evident the folly of having attempted the second this. Caroline looked at Joha