Great Catherine (3 page)

Reluctantly at first, Johanna began to see that Sophie might be a commodity in this bride-market—a marginal commodity, to be sure, yet not entirely without value. As Sophie grew older she became slightly less ugly, and much more impressive in her ability to learn and to discuss ideas. Many people admired her original turn of mind, and complimented her mother on Sophie's pleasing personality. Johanna remained skeptical about Sophie's prospects, but saw to it that her daughter made the right friends and remained within the circle of familiars around the Prussian royal family—-just in case.

Johanna loved Berlin, and was at her happiest when in residence there. A small, picturesque city with wide streets and many fine houses—a number of them built by the king himself, who had a penchant for knocking down small and inferior structures and ordering better ones erected at his own expense—Berlin was dominated by its military population. Some twenty thousand soldiers were quartered in the homes of the inhabitants; every fourth or fifth person one met in the street was a soldier. Between campaigns, especially during the winter, these men were largely

idle, and free to attend masquerades and fetes. Johanna, pretty and unencumbered by her husband, was an attractive ornament at these gatherings.

When the balls were over, however, Johanna had to return to her responsibilities. Her chief concern, as always, was the ill health of her eldest son Wilhelm. His leg hung uselessly, he had to be carried everywhere. His temper, if Sophie's account in her memoirs is to be trusted, was irritable if not savage. Johanna hovered over him, calling in every physician she knew of, accompanying her son to bathe in the health-giving waters of mineral spas. She began to worry over her younger son Frederick as well, looking on him as more and more precious as Wilhelm declined.

Sophie's vibrant good health must have seemed almost an affront to her more delicate brothers. She was big for her age, and strong. She amused herself by seeing how fast she could run up and down steep staircases and by playing boys' games. At night she was put to bed quite early; wakeful and full of energy, she feigned sleep and then, when her women left her alone, jumped up and arranged her pillows like a saddle and galloped astride them until she was exhausted.

In the course of taking Wilhelm to consult physicians and bathe in mineral springs, Johanna stopped to visit various relatives and in-laws. Her aunt Marie Elizabeth was abbess of the Protestant convent of Quedlinburg, where her own older sister Hedwig was provost. The two women, aunt and niece, quarreled incessantly, sometimes contriving not to see one another for years at a time, though they occupied the same set of buildings and walked the same grounds. Johanna did her best to make peace between them, and sometimes succeeded, but the reconciliations were invariably brief; clearly the enmity that bound Marie Elizabeth and Hedwig gave a focus to their lives, and neither was about to give that up.

Hedwig was short and grossly fat, and passionately fond of animals. Though her room at the convent was small she kept there sixteen pug dogs. Many of them had puppies, and all of the

dogs, adults and puppies, slept, ate, and relieved themselves in the one small room. Hedwig employed a young servant girl to do nothing but clean up after the dogs. She was kept busy from dawn to dusk doing nothing else, but despite her efforts the room stank like a kennel and to add to the odor Hedwig kept a good many parrots that flew from rafter to rafter, twittering and screeching and driving visitors mad. Whenever Hedwig went riding in her carriage, at least one of the parrots and half a dozen dogs rode along with her; the dogs went with her even to church.

Another maiden aunt of Sophie's, her father's sister Sophie Christine, also loved animals but had a somewhat more balanced life. She was past fifty when little Sophie knew her, very tall and painfully thin yet inordinately proud of her spare figure— probably in compensation for her unsightly face. As a girl, she told her niece, she had been beautiful, but a tragic accident had marred her beauty permanently when a little cape she was wearing caught fire and the lower part of her face was burned. The scarring was quite hideous, and put an end to her hopes of marrying well.

A poor deformed thing herself, Aunt Sophie Christine took in crippled and injured birds, and looked after them until they healed. Young Sophie described her aunt's winged menagerie as she remembered it: a one-legged thrush, a lark with a broken wing, a one-eyed goldfinch, a chicken attacked by a cock, its head halfway bitten off, a nightingale paralyzed on one side, a legless parrot that lay on its belly, and many other such creatures, all of which roamed free about the room. Sophie Christine's compassion made less of an impression on her niece than her anger when young Sophie left one of the windows open and half the birds escaped.

It must have seemed to Sophie that spinsters inevitably fell prey to eccentricity. Without a husband to obey, children to worry over or in-laws to placate, they devoted themselves to animals or to nurturing petty quarrels. Or to superstition.

One of Johanna's attendants was Fraulein Kayn, a woman of

mature years who believed in ghosts and claimed to see them often. ("I was a Sunday child," she told Sophie. "I have the second sight.") When Sophie was eleven years old, she shared a bedroom with Fraulein Kayn one night while she and her mother were on a journey to Brunswick. The room had two beds. Sophie went to sleep in hers but was awakened in the middle of the night when she felt someone crawl into bed beside her. She opened her eyes and saw, by the dim light of a candle, that Fraulein Kayn had joined her. She asked her why.

Speaking with difficulty, for she was trembling with fright and could hardly utter a sound, the older woman whispered, "For God's sake leave me alone and go to sleep quietly!"

Sophie was persistent, and pressed her to explain why she had left her own bed.

"Don't you see what is going on in the room and what is there on the table?" Fraulein Kayn said—and drew the covers up over her face.

Sophie looked around the room, but could neither hear nor see anything odd, only two beds and a small table with a candle, pitcher and basin. She told Fraulein Kayn what she saw, and succeeded in calming her somewhat. But neither of them could sleep, and shortly afterwards the fearful Fraulein crawled out of bed and over to the door, checking to see that it was locked. Sophie managed to go to sleep again but her companion was wakeful; the following morning she looked as if she hadn't slept a wink and her anxiety was evident. Again Sophie questioned her, but Fraulein Kayn was tightlipped.

"I cannot say," she murmured portentously and refused to be pressed further. But it seemed clear to Sophie that she thought she had had a brush with the occult.

Fraulein Kayn often frightened Johanna with her talk of apparitions, "white ladies," and other appearances from the beyond, and Sophie could not help but be affected by these stories and by the folk tales about witches, goblins and spirits repeated within her hearing. But counteracting the general climate of superstition was

the bastion of reason, manned by Babette Cardel. Babette held every belief up to the light and scrutinized it.

'That is not common sense," Babette said whenever she heard something farfetched. Sophie too came to revere common sense, and she listened with interest when Babette's friend Monsieur de Mauclerc came to call and the two of them discussed the com-monsensical English approach to law, religion and government. Monsieur de Mauclerc was engaged in editing a history of England written by his father-in-law, and through listening to him talk with Babette Sophie encountered concepts of social equality, popular representation and political reform—while learning to scorn credulity and prize rigorous debate.

At the age of eleven Sophie was taken to Eutin in the ducal state of Holstein to meet her second cousin Karl Ulrich, the promising boy who was heir to two thrones and who had just become the object of a great deal of excitement in the family. Karl Ulrich's father, Johanna's cousin Karl Frederick, had just died, and his son had inherited his ducal title and his claim to the throne of Sweden. And since through his late mother the boy was also the grandson of Peter the Great, he had a strong claim to the sovereignty of Russia as well—a sovereignty tenuously held by his aging childless relative Empress Anna Ivanovna, his mother's cousin.

Karl Ulrich was a year older than Sophie, a pale, thin, delicate-looking boy who could put on pleasant manners when he chose. Sophie's uncle Adolf, Johanna's brother, was in charge of looking after him and guiding his education, and a number of family members gathered to witness the boy's investiture with his ducal honors and to try to benefit from his prospects. The matriarch of the Holstein family, Johanna's mother Albertine, was present along with Sophie's Aunt Anna and her Uncle Augustus.

Sophie had been brought to Eutin for the express purpose of matchmaking. Given the role Karl Ulrich seemed destined to play on the world stage, a wife would have to be chosen for him soon, and a wife from among his near relations, one whom he had met and with whom he felt familiar, would be a safe choice. Sophie

was not told directly that she should try to please her cousin, but her uncles and aunts, along with Karl Ulrich's chamberlain, a Swede named Brummer, let fall a great many hints that a betrothal between them would be gratifying to the family.

Sophie's first impression of Karl Ulrich was that he was good-looking and courteous. She liked the idea that, if they married, she would be Queen of Sweden, and although he paid much more attention to her mother than to her, his inattention did not bother her. Possibly she remembered the prediction of the soothsaying monk and thought that marriage to this pale boy would fulfill it. As for Karl Ulrich's response to Sophie, it was limited to one overwhelming reaction: he envied her her liberty.

The young duke was clearly miserable. Surrounded by flatterers, he was smothered by handlers and pedagogues who watched him day and night. He chafed under their restraints and it soon became evident to his visiting relatives that beneath his polished manners lurked an irritable temper.

He had had an unnatural upbringing. His mother died when he was two months old, and his father, a rather feeble, sickly man, passed on to his son little besides his title and his attachment to Holstein. From infancy the boy had been the center of a grand and numerous household; though constrained by a thousand restrictions he had been at the same time indulged and spoiled, with the result that his recalcitrance and fiery temper had never been curbed. He did what he liked and said what he thought. He was not unintelligent, but his behavior was so incorrigible that his teachers could not teach him anything. He hated most of the men in charge of him, especially when they tried to prevent him from enjoying his wine at meals. All too often, he drank too much, and could hardly get up from the table. It seemed to Sophie that he showed affection to only two people, of all those around him. They were his valets de chambre, a Livonian named Cramer and a loutish Swede, Roumberg, an ex-soldier with whom he could play military games.

Sophie came away from her meeting with Karl Ulrich con-

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vinced that everyone expected her to marry him. Yet other eligible princes also came forward, among them King Frederick's intelligent and promising brother Prince Henry, to indicate an interest in Sophie. At twelve and thirteen she was physically mature—"larger and more developed than one is ordinarily at that age," as she expressed it in her memoirs—and already ripe for marriage.

Another distant cousin, Wilhelm of Saxe-Gotha, sidled into her life. He was lame, but attentive; he sat beside her in church, pestered her with his conversation and ultimately declared himself intent on marrying her. But Christian August put him off and suggested that he marry Johanna's sister Anne instead. Apparently Wilhelm was not too particular. He gladly married the thirty-six-year-old Anne and the two disappeared into obscurity together.

In the year that Sophie turned thirteen, Christian August had a stroke that left him temporarily paralyzed on his left side. He recovered, and was able to return to his work of soldiering and governing, but the stroke was a reminder of mortality and a worry to Johanna, who was pregnant once again and also more concerned than usual about her eldest son.

Wilhelm was growing weaker. All the doctors, remedies and mineral baths were of no avail now. He lay in his bed, limp and feverish, with his distraught mother keeping vigil beside him. Wilhelm had been her dearest treasure since his birth, and everyone in the family knew it. Now he was slipping away. When he died she was inconsolable. All her relatives, even the aged Alber-tine, came to stand by her in her grief, but her son's death left a void in her heart that nothing and no one could ever fill.

The ruling prince of Anhalt-Zerbst now died and Christian August and his brother Ludwig inherited joint rulership of the little principality. Frederick (or Fritz), Christian August and Johanna's second son, became the designated heir. Even Sophie inherited an estate of her own, at Jever on the North Sea coast.

Christian August resigned his military duties and moved with

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his family to the medieval town of Zerbst, a quaint walled community with dark winding streets, ancient narrow houses and a charming palace. Johanna still grieved for her son, but she had some consolation in her grief. She had attained her ambition, she and Christian August now had their own miniature domain, with a tiny royal household, a modest royal income, a troupe of guardsmen and subjects who bowed in reverence when the carriage of the prince and princess passed by. Never mind that Anhalt-Zerbst was so small that a swift horseman could ride across it in a single day; it was, in a very unassuming way, a sovereign power, and within its boundaries Johanna was the highest lady in the land.

When Sophie was fourteen, the family traveled to the estate at Jever, and there Sophie encountered a woman she was to remember all her life.

The Countess of Bentinck was thirty years old when Sophie met her, a strapping, mannish woman with an ugly face, a hearty manner and an exuberant physicality. She was intelligent, she knew a good deal and she seemed to have an utter and joyous disregard for respectability. Married to the Count of Bentinck, who was nowhere in evidence, she lived on her mother's estate, in the company of another woman who was most likely her lover. She also had a three-year-old son whose father, Sophie discovered, was one of her mother's footmen.