‘This is Emilie Gottschalk. She was your great, great grandmother, the one to whom Prince August wrote the dedication in the notebook that your mother has.’
I remembered my father mentioning that his brother had a portrait of Emilie, but actually seeing this pretty little face peeking out at me suddenly revived all the curiosity I had felt as a young girl when he first told me the story.
‘What do we know about her?’ I asked, hypnotised by the sight of this young woman who was my direct ancestor and who had lived at the very heart of the Prussian Court at a time when it was central to European history.
‘All we know is that she was young when she met the Prince, only fifteen years old. He on the other hand was in his fifties by then and was already an enormously wealthy, powerful and famous man. Despite the age gap it was a great love match. They stayed together for eleven years until he died. We believe she was the daughter of a Jewish tailor and we know that she and the Prince had a daughter, Charlotte, who was my mother’s mother. Your father and I knew our grandmother Charlotte in our childhood, and she used to tell us things, dropping tiny hints that we never really understood. But that is all we know and it is just not possible to find out any more.’
It sounded like the perfect fairy tale, the simple young tailor’s daughter who captured the heart of a great prince, like a sort of Prussian Pygmalion, but I couldn’t understand why everyone in the family kept stressing that these few facts were all that was known about the story. Surely a real-life fairy tale like this would have been talked about and written about in court papers of the time, and in history books ever since.
‘Is that really all we know?’ I asked, still without taking my eyes off her young face.
‘We do have this,’ he went on, passing me an elderly sepia photograph of another woman, middle-aged and stately of build, dressed like Queen Victoria. ‘This is Charlotte, Emilie’s daughter, and Anna’s mother. She was my grandmother and your great grandmother.’
I felt a catch in my throat as I tried to speak, remembering my grandmother again, who I had last seen waving to me and my brother on that railway platform in Prague. The photograph seemed to revive all the nightmares and fears I was storing at the back of my mind.
Uncle Freddy was gazing at the picture with the same intensity that I was. ‘Charlotte once said to your father, when he was still quite small, “I am really a Duchess, you know, and I only ever travel anywhere first class.” And we both heard her talk about memories from when she was very little, when she told us she used to play wild games on the floor of a grand room somewhere in Berlin, with her father who was “a great prince”. She kept saying that “her whole life had changed completely” when she was five, but that was all she would ever tell us. If we tried to question her any further she would fall silent, almost as though, even as an older woman, she was still very reluctant to say more, or as if she didn’t really know herself what had happened between her parents when she was a small child.’
I went back to staring at the portrait, imagining the young girl sitting for the artist, trying to take in the fact that I was viewing the result of his handiwork more than 140 years after his brush strokes had dried. I was secretly hoping that if I stared hard enough at her face, Emilie’s spirit might reveal some clues as to what had happened to her and the other members of her family that could have led to Anna’s final predicament in Prague, whatever that might have been.
‘What about the rest of the Gottschalks?’ I asked, trying to piece the whole story together in my head and make sense of it. ‘Where is the family? What about their other descendants?’
‘They don’t exist,’ Uncle Freddy said. ‘When Charlotte married their name completely disappeared.’
‘Didn’t anyone think that was a bit strange?’
He shrugged. ‘There wasn’t much we could do about it. There are no records, no papers. There is just this picture and the pocket-book which my brother received. A lot of Jewish families have disappeared in Europe over the last century for one reason or another.’
I left Uncle Freddy’s house that day feeling inspired. Now I had a clear picture of Emilie in my head and I knew for certain that she had existed. I also knew that she and Prince August had been devoted to one another and lived together for eleven years until his death, but frustratingly that was all I knew. It was another unfinished family story, like the mystery of what might have happened to Granny Anna. Again I went back to my normal daily life, allowing the tale of August and Emilie to slip to the back of my mind. If my parents and my uncle were all in agreement that the story should be allowed to rest then who was I to argue with them? I certainly didn’t want to upset my mother by going against her wishes. From time to time I would remember the story, but over the coming years I was too busy being a wife and mother to give too much thought to an event that had taken place more than a century before.
MY MOTHER CONTINUED living on her own in the same flat for another fourteen years after my father died. She was a fighter. Like Anna she too had arthritis in her hip. Operations had only just started in those days and were not as easy or reliable as they are today, so she limped around slowly, sometimes in great pain. Despite this, she always managed to visit us in Highgate regularly and her passing left a great void in my life. Her 77th birthday celebration on 4 October 1969 was a wonderful family occasion, but sadly it would be her last. Soon a burst ulcer, followed by a stroke, meant a six-month stay in Hampstead’s New End Hospital, which was where she remained until she died on 24 April 1970. I visited her bedside virtually every day and I was 46 years old when she finally passed away. By now I was living in Highgate in my second family home since moving out of the Fitzjohn’s Avenue flat, which had been my mother’s home for the past 36 years since we had fled Berlin.
Before I even opened the front door I knew instinctively that the memories inside could easily swamp me if I let them. But my job that day was to sort out my mother’s possessions in preparation for selling the flat and I knew I must stick to it, however hard the task might be. I felt I somehow owed it to both my parents to uphold the family tradition of stoicism.
The moment I stepped over the threshold I found myself drawn straight to the front room, where we had breakfasted on that day 28 years earlier when my father had presented me with the revelations about my family’s past and where we gathered after my father’s funeral amidst the chaos of the burglary. I paused in silent memory and looked around, drinking in the many familiar details of my younger life.
Although I had often asked my mother about the pocket-book after my father’s death, she had always refused to hand it over. Now I prayed that it was still lying in the cupboard where I last saw her place it after my father’s funeral fourteen years before. My fear was that she might have thought better of it and hidden it somewhere else, hoping perhaps that it would lie undiscovered. Or, worst of all, was it possible that she had destroyed it? I pushed such negative thoughts aside, took a deep breath and headed for the bedroom.
The old oak dressing table was still there, in the same place near the window where it had always been. I felt like I was treading on hallowed ground. The urge to see the book again was suddenly overwhelming. I pulled out the first drawer and rummaged a little, but there was nothing. Then the next one. Oh my God! There it was, still in the same yellowing envelope, tied up with the same piece of green ribbon. Thirty years after my father first told me that I would be the next keeper of the family secret, it had finally reached my hands.
Opening the envelope with a slightly shaky hand I gingerly slid the pocket-book out, sitting down to read the inscription that the Prince had written with the very pencil that still remained attached to the book. At last it had come to me and the feeling was overpowering.