The Treasure Chest
“Your royal Highness, Graf Leopold von Regensburg!”
The maître d’chambre stepped aside, and Leopold walked past him and the two guards flanking the entrance to the Great Hall of the Schloss Regensburg to kneel before his cousin, Prince Paulus.
“God keep you, your Highness. All your subjects from Regensburg greet you. We present to you the domain’s annual tribute, my Lord Prince.” He held out a hand, and two of his pages lugged forward the great chest that Leopold had brought with him from Kiefersheim—filled substantially with silver melted down from his mother’s candlesticks, as he had promised Bernard—and thunked it down at the bottom of the dais steps.
Paulus said nothing in reply to his cousin’s speech; nor did not get up from the great carven mahogany chair that was usually Leopold’s when he was in residence at his domain’s principal seat. Princes outranked grafs, and this was precisely what Paulus was reminding Leopold of by his visit to Regensburg. He just waved the chest aside and Leopold up to sit next to him on the dais.
For the next two hours, Leopold sat there getting increasingly stiff and bored as courtier after adviser after petitioner sought audiences with the prince. It was rare to see him down in this part of his domain, and the local authorities, and their hangers-on, were taking full advantage of the opportunity.
When the last petitioner was ushered out, Paulus finally turned to Leopold. “So,” he said, “what’s this I hear about you refusing to go to war for our king, cousin?”
Leopold wasn’t so surprised that he had a rat somewhere on his Council as he was that the rat had been able to scurry to Paulus so quickly; they had had that debate in Kiefersheim merely a day before the prince’s page had arrived…. He took a deep breath, let it out slowly, as he did on the battlefield when he saw a line of troops rushing toward his position. Likely, he reasoned, the invitation to Regensburg had nothing to do with this recent morsel of gossip; his cousin was just using it to knock him off balance before the real negotiation—whatever it was—started. So, Leopold arched a scarred eyebrow and said:
“I know the prince does not debase himself by trafficking in baseless rumor, and I know I have refused no command of the king. So, let us pass on to business more befitting men of our rank, dear cousin.”
Paulus grinned. He was a sallow, tall, thin man, clean-shaven as a monk. But those who assumed him weak because of his appearance did so at their peril: Leopold knew for a fact he was as decisive and brutal on the battlefield as he was in chambers. “Ah,” the prince said. “I see the Bohemian mud has failed to dull your edge, my dear Leopold. Very good. Very good indeed. Walk with me. My old wounds grow stiff sitting in state like this, by the Virgin!”
Leopold followed his cousin out of the great hall, down a drafty annex, and into the old cloister garden; the monastery on the other side was now defunct but had been taken over by the kitchens, and the garden glassed in so that all manner of fruit and vegetables could be grown even in the winter. It was heated by a chimney and was so warm that Leopold started to sweat in his ermine cape.
“As you know, I’m throwing a ball tonight before I return to Nuremberg for Christmas,” Paulus said, stopping to finger the leaf of an orange tree with two jeweled fingers. “My wife’s daughter, the princess Leonie, is here with me. I’d like you to meet her and, if you like her, to propose marriage.”
Leopold wasn’t entirely taken unawares by this speech. True, he hadn’t suspected it would involve the princess Leonie—she was a recent adoption into the royal family after Paulus had married his second wife, Constance. But others of Paulus’s relatives had been suggested to him in the past, at least one by Bernard. Leopold knew full well it was futile to argue with Paulus, so he bowed to dodge his lethally sharp eye. “I am honored by your solicitude on my behalf, your Highness.” Paulus laughed.
“Don’t bother being honored, cousin—just be there. You’re a good man, and I like you. Let’s just do things the easy way, shall we?” And twisting a flowering branch off the orange, he held it to his nose and walked away from Leopold down the graveled garden path.
The ball had four times the pomp of the evening at the von Neubeuerns’ and a quarter its charm. At dinner, Leopold was seated next to Leonie, a willowy, black-haired child of 16 so nervous she did not look up at the graf once, and she only toyed with the food on her plate. After dinner, when the dancing started, he asked her if she would like to take a turn at the carole—an easy dance, one most nursery-school children knew—and she turned him down with a silent head shake. Leopold glanced over at Paulus to find him glaring furiously at his stepdaughter. Leaning over, Leopold murmured to her, “I feel like getting some air, don’t you? The winter garden is beautiful—there are pineapples even. Have you ever seen a pineapple?”
For the first time, Leonie looked up at him, and there was a glint in her chestnut eyes. “Come,” he said with his gentlest smile, and held out a hand to her. She took it, her palm trembling and cold. He led her from the hall and retraced the steps he’d walked earlier in the day with her stepfather.
The garden was empty except for a couple in the corner whispering together on a bench. In the light of the torches, Leopold led Leonie to the pineapple shrubs. “See? Here they are.”
Leonie put out a finger and touched the point of one of the sharp leaves sprouting from the fruit’s crown. “It’s actually a flower,” she said; her voice was so low and strong it made Leopold jump a bit in surprise. “It grows only in tropical climates. It was brought back by the Spanish after the conquest of the West Indies and propagated across Europe from that stock.”
“Have you ever eaten one?” Leopold asked.
“No,” she said wistfully.
“Well,” Leopold reached over and twisted the pineapple off its stalk. “I’m quite sure the graf who owns this castle won’t mind if we borrow this one.”
Leonie put her hand over her mouth, and then she let out a rippling, joyous giggle as she got his joke. Leopold drew his jeweled dress knife, cut off the top of the pineapple, cut a thick slice of the fruit, peeled the thorns, and handed it to the princess. She took a bite, and her eyes bloomed wide and white as primroses in the dim light. “It’s so….” She took another bite. Leopold smiled, cut himself a slice, and for a few minutes they just stood eating pineapple in a garden in Germany a few days before Christmas with the snow falling on the glass roof overhead, and marveling at it all.
“You’re extremely well-educated,” Leopold observed at last, wiping his mustaches on his sleeve.
“My late father, God rest his soul,” Leonie crossed herself, “sent me to a convent in Muenchen at the age of seven. I was only brought out last year when my mother married the prince. I’d like…to continue my studies. I’d like to study plants and their breeding. There’s a monastery in Muenchen in the same order as our convent, and they have the most marvelous experimental garden. They bred a kind of pea with stripes, if you can believe it, and another that….” She glanced up at Leopold then and trailed off. “I’m sorry. I know a princess isn’t supposed to talk about those things.”
“And why not?”
“I’m not supposed to talk. I’m supposed to get married.” As Leopold watched, she started shrinking back into herself like a flower folding up at night. “I’m not any good at this. At courting.”
Leopold took her hand, kissed her fingers. “Neither am I, my Lady. Fear not: in me, you have found an ally. I will speak to your father and do my best to convince him that you will do much more good for his realm in your experimental garden than locked up in a tower somewhere stitching napkins or changing diapers.” He looked round; it was getting late. “Should we go back to the ball?”
“Do we have to?” Leonie pouted. Leopold laughed.
“I think we have time to finish this pineapple,” he said, and he cut Leonie another slice.
The Rookery 