Lamberg was still standing bent forward, one hand on the desk, the other on his back. He was doing so apparently so that he would not have to decide whether to sit down or remain standing: In the presence of a queen he would not be permitted to sit, but before a princess it would be a violation of etiquette for an imperial ambassador to stand when she was sitting. Since, as the Kaiser’s ambassador, he did not recognize Liz’s royal title, it would be consistent to sit down—but at the same time also a severe insult, which he avoided in this way, out of politeness and because he did not yet know what weapons and offers she had in her hands.
“With Your Highness’s kind permission, a question.”
All at once his manner of speaking was just as unpleasant to her as his Austrian intonation.
“As Your Highness knows very well, we are in the midst of a diplomatic congress. Since the beginning of the negotiations, no royal personage has set foot in Münster and Osnabrück. As delighted as Your Highness’s faithful servant is to have the privilege of welcoming Your Highness’s gracious visit to his poor domicile, he nonetheless fears just as much—” he sighed as if it caused him great sorrow to say so—“that it is not proper.”
“The count means we should have sent an ambassador too.”
He smiled again. She knew what he was thinking and she knew that he knew that she knew it: you are no one, you live in a small house, you’re buried in debt, you’re not sending any ambassadors to congresses.
“I’m not even here,” said Liz. “That way we can talk to each other, can’t we? The count can imagine he is talking to himself. He is speaking in his head, and in his head I reply to him.”
She felt something she had not expected. For so long she had been making preparations for this encounter, mulling it over, fearing it, and now that the day had arrived, something strange was happening: she was enjoying it! All those years in the small house, far from notable people and important events—all at once she was again sitting as if on a stage, surrounded by gold and silver and carpets, and speaking with a clever person before whom every word counted.
“We all know that the Palatinate is a perpetual point of contention,” she said. “As is the Palatine electoral dignity, which was held by my late husband.”
He chuckled.
This flustered her. But that was his aim, of course, and for that very reason she had to persevere.
“The electors of the Empire,” she said, “will not accept the Bavarian House of Wittelsbach keeping the electoral dignity of which the Kaiser wrongfully stripped my husband. If Caesar can dispossess one of us, they will say, then he can do it to all of us. And if we—”
“With Your Highness’s kind permission, they have long since accepted it. Your Highness’s husband was placed, along with Your Highness yourself, under the imperial ban, which, incidentally, anywhere else would obligate me to have Your Highness arrested.”
“Which is why we have come here and not anywhere else.”
“With Your Highness’s kind permission—”
“We grant it, but first we shall be heard. The Duke of Bavaria, who calls himself Elector, illegally bears our husband’s title. The Kaiser has no right to revoke an electoral dignity. The electors elect the Kaiser, the Kaiser does not elect the electors. But we understand the situation. The Kaiser owes the Bavarians money; the Bavarians, in turn, have the Catholic estates firmly in their hands. That is why we are making an offer. We are the crowned Queen of Bohemia, and the crown—”
“With Your Highness’s kind permission, for one winter thirty—”
“…will pass to our son.”
“Bohemia’s crown is not hereditary. If it were, the Bohemian estates would not have been able to offer the throne to the Palsgrave Friedrich, Your Highness’s husband. The fact that he accepted the crown means that he knew that Your Highness’s son could assert no claim.”
“One can see it that way, but must one? Perhaps England will not see it that way. If he asserts claims, England will support them.”
“There’s a civil war in England.”
“There is, and if our brother is deposed by the parliament, the English crown will be offered to our son.”
“That is unlikely at best.”
Outside, trombones blared: a tinny call, which rose, hung for a while in the air, and died away. Liz raised her eyebrows questioningly.
“Longueville, my French colleague,” said Lamberg. “He has them blow a fanfare when he sits down to eat. Every day. He is here with a retinue of six hundred men. Four portrait painters are entrusted with the sole task of painting him. Three woodcarvers are crafting busts of him. What he does with those remains a state secret.”
“Has the count asked him?”
“We are not authorized to speak to each other.”
“Is that not a hindrance to negotiation?”
“We are not here as friends, nor to become friends. The ambassador of the Vatican mediates between us, just as the ambassador of Venice mediates between me and the Protestants, for the ambassador of the Vatican is in turn not authorized to speak to Protestants. I must now take my leave, madame, the honor of this conversation is as great as it is undeserved, but pressing duties make demands on my time.”
“An eighth electoral dignity.”
He looked up. His eyes met hers for only a moment. Then he looked at the desk again.
“The Bavarian shall keep his electoral dignity,” said Liz. “We formally relinquish Bohemia. And if—”
“With Your Highness’s kind permission, Your Highness cannot relinquish something that does not belong to Your Highness.”
“The Swedish army is standing outside Prague. The city will soon be back in the hands of the Protestants.”
“Should Sweden take the city, Sweden will certainly not give it to you.”
“The war is nearly over. Then there will be an amnesty. Then the breach…the alleged breach of the imperial peace by our husband will be pardoned.”
“The amnesty has long since been negotiated. All acts of the war will be pardoned with the exception of one person’s.”
“I can guess whose.”
“This endless war began with Your Highness’s husband. With a palsgrave who set his sights too high. I’m not saying that Your Highness is to blame, but I can imagine that the daughter of the great James did not exactly try to urge her ambitious husband to be modest.” Lamberg slowly pushed his chair back and straightened up. “The war has been going on so long that most people alive today have never seen peace. That only the old can still remember peace. My colleagues and I—yes, even the idiot who has fanfares played when he sits down to eat—are the only ones who can end it. Everyone wants territories that the others would under no circumstances part with, everyone demands subsidies, everyone wants mutual-assistance pacts terminated that the others consider permanent, so that instead new pacts result that others find unacceptable. All this is beyond the abilities of any human being. And yet we must succeed. You and your husband began this war, madame. I shall end it.”
He pulled a silk cord over the desk. Liz heard the sound of a bell from the next room. Now he is summoning a secretary, she thought, some gray cipher who will usher me out. She felt dizzy. The room seemed to rise and sink as if she were on a ship. Never before had someone spoken to her that way.
A ray of light captivated her. It fell through a thin crack between the curtains, specks of dust whirling in it, a mirror on the opposite wall catching it and casting it to the other wall, where it made a spot on a picture frame gleam. The painting was by Rubens: a tall woman, a man with a lance, above them a bird in the azure. A hovering serenity emanated from it. She remembered Rubens well, a sad man, who audibly had difficulty breathing. She had wanted to buy one of his paintings, but it had been too expensive for her; nothing seemed to interest him except money. But how had he been able to paint like that?