Schloss Marienburg
Flicka von Hannover
I’d never really looked at it all before.
Flickaand her father sat in Phillipp’s gilded sitting room inSchloss Marienburg, chatting quietly while Flicka composed herself. Her father gazed around the room like he was drinking it in, while Flicka glanced up at the furniture and then stared at her hands fidgeting in her lap.
SchlossMarienburgwas Flicka’s home, in that she had lived there as a young child when nannies cared for her and crashed there for at least a week or two of her summer vacations between school terms. It was the place she still returned to and the place she traveled from.
King George V of Hannover builtSchloss Marienburgfor his wife, Princess Marie of Saxe-Altenburg, as a summer palace for the Kingdomof Hannover. The rooms had been designed to show off the kingdom’s opulence, to display its furniture made of solid silver and provide a suitable backdrop for the court women and the king wearing the crown jewels. Delicate carvings, handmade almost two centuries before and preserved by the efforts of the servants during those centuries, ringed the tops of the walls. Ceilings loomed three storiesabove the furniture, and portraits of royals and noble people occupied the real estate of the walls.
Everything was gilded and embroidered and emblazoned and embellished to show off just how rich the kingdom was.
The Kingdom of Hannover had other palaces, of course.
George, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg built the palace calledLeineschlosson the banks of the Leine River in 1636, which was thecentral palace for the kingdom.Leineschlosslooked like a Greek temple, with the portico entry supported by six Corinthian columns.
Schloss Herrenhausen,or the Herrenhausen Palace, was originally a manor house built in 1640 just over a mile away fromLeineschloss.Sophia of Hannover enlarged it in the late 1600s to use as their summer house and built enormous gardens to rival the grounds ofVersailles.
Not that Hannover kings lived in Germany during those centuries, of course. From the early 1700s and continuing until 1901, Hannover kings ruled Great Britain and Ireland from London, in addition to the holdings in Germany. King George III renovatedSchloss Herrenhausen,costing the House and England millions of dollars, but never visited the palace.
The Royal Air Force bombed thehell out of bothLeineschlossandSchloss Herrenhausenduring World War Two.
Schloss Marienburg,where Flicka now sat, was far up in the mountains and away from civilians and wartime manufacturing, and thus it escaped destruction.
Plus, the Hannover family trust ownedKaiserhausin the city of Hannover, where her brother had exiled their father to, a small manor house that still exceeded whatninety-nine percent of families could afford. The house required a full-time staff of at least twenty to keep it running and clean.
The sitting room ofSchloss Marienburgitself, a space dedicated to drinking coffee and tea during the day and rare liquor at night, had a larger footprint than their entire townhouse in Las Vegas.
With her practiced eye for space management, Flicka could lay outthe floor plan of their cozy Vegas condominium right in this room, the living room area and kitchen occupying just a corner of the space, and their bedrooms tucked in another corner. Lots of space was left over: the area with the unused fireplace, and the few great cabinets off to the left that displayed crystal and porcelain bowls brought back from Paris, Moscow, and farther destinations. Somewere purchased for great sums during travel or had been commissioned from famous artists. Some had been seized as spoils of war.
This oversized room and its priceless contents were the history of her family. The art, precious metals, and fragile glassware were the fruits of their extraordinary wealth and political and military power.
The roof above them didn’t keep the rain off any better thanhad the roof of their cozy townhouse in Las Vegas. The palace walls covered in ornate plasterworks didn’t block the wintry wind any more thoroughly than did the walls of the cheap hotel in the red-light district ofPâquisin Geneva.
The thick Persian carpet under their feet—hand-crafted in Persia a century before the land became Iran—didn’t keep Flicka’s feet any warmer than the red braided-ragrug that Indrani had handed down to them in Las Vegas.
Yes, the art and objects were beautiful, but the lust for collecting and keeping them had turned into something evil. Awe of the beauty of art had mutated into avarice for more and more things, and respect for craftsmanship had fallen into an evil pride, believing that their ownership was evidence that the Hannover family was somehow moredeserving of its riches than other people.
The extraordinary uselessness of this room and the fifty or so other rooms alike in their uselessness, though they differed in the types of wealth locked away in glass cases, astonished her for the first time.
“Tea, or would you prefer sherry?” her father asked, holding a bell to call for servants.
“Tea, I think,” she said, still staring at the glitterand shine. It was all beautiful, yes, but the waste and miserliness of it repelled her.
So many clichés ran through her head.
A bowl was a bowl was a bowl. These porcelain and crystal dishes did not keep the meat from hitting the floor any better than an earthenware or hewn-wood platter, other than the crystal might contain lead that might leach and thus poison the food.
Her noble and royalancestors glared down from royal portraits that included elements symbolizing their wealth and power: representations of crowns and tiaras, priceless jewels, thrones, scepters, sumptuous and fashionable gowns and clothes, and the sashes, breast pins, and collars of royal orders of merit.
Those ancestors were all quite dead, now. Most of their bones lay in theWelfenmausoleumatHerrenhausenPalace,where Flicka would probably also be buried when she died someday. No one living had any memory of them. These portraits, a list of their names and received honors, and their writings were all that remained of them.
And their DNA, of course, DNA that ran through Phillipp’s cells and Flicka’s, and through the cells of the tiny clump that was growing in her womb.
The money invested in these itemsand the upkeep could have funded her charitable foundations for a thousand years, or it could have been used to make a significant change for many people all at once. If they liquidated all this wealth, they should divest themselves of the castle itself. That sort of money could change the world.
But it also meant that someone else would have to buy it, soaking up that wealth, and the overallnet wealth concentrated in the hands of people who hoarded it, trickling their diamonds and gold between their hands, would not change.
