THE RINGSTETTEN SAGA XIV: LIFE GOES ON AND ON AND ON

Previously on the Ringstetten Saga:

The independent and self-reliant tomboy queen (traumatized by her mother's fate, she declines to marry not to feel sorrow or have her wings clipped by love and/or obedience: "Free was I born, free I live, and free I shall die") feels the weight of the crown heavy upon her head. She came to visit the La Gardies as an excuse to inform them of her upcoming abdication, having already appointed the successor who will rule in her stead as she seeks adventure and thrills across Europe.

So, the next day, it's time to say farewell to the Queen, who has to inform her mother and courtiers of such a relevant decision. Later on, in mid-December, Liselotte and her children have been preparing the welcoming of another Eleonora: Alois's and Hedwig's daughter, who arrives three days later from Dalecarlia to marry her childhood friend Hermann and live with her in-laws. The betrothal is celebrated on New Year's Day.

However, Gerhard acts coldly towards his daughter-in-law and prefers to keep on writing his memoirs, having consecrated a room in the estate to his weapons and to the medal that Her Majesty gave him. The young lieutenant who fought so gallantly for the Protestant cause revives in the prose that graces his library, upon reaching the part of his life when he met the Swedish royals. Thus, Gerhard keeps on writing more and more passionately for each day... and even more upon realising that Liselotte, just like the Queen, has always looked and acted like Gustavus Adolphus… since, unknown to her, the Hero King of Lützen is her birth father, making her a legitimized royal bastard. At their next family Christmas, the memoirs writer finally discloses this under the influence, yet, surprisingly, no one is upset, and Liselotte herself remarks that she looked and acted like the late king more than like Colonel von Tarlenheim, while also realising why she was made a ward of the Crown after her apparent father’s death. Which means the Ringstettens have got true royal blood running through their veins!

While his daughter-in-law is with child, girls from nearby farms and villages come to the estate as servants, and the French garden becomes more beautiful for every day in springtime. Annika, the favourite among all these maids, is the orphaned granddaughter of the local wise woman, Svarta Maja (Black Maya), who tends to the Ringstettens as well as any qualified physician. The Walloons (Protestant Walloons in Sweden!) from a nearby iron foundry also become their friends and partners: the nobles come to the foundry where they live for Christmas, and the Walloons come to visit the estate in midsummer.

As Eleonora finds out, by midsummer, that she is with child (she was not sure until then), Gerhard reaches the part of his memoirs when he comes to Sweden and has a conversation with the Queen, commenting on the impression that she made. In early winter, the next generation of Ringstettens is kickstarted with Hermann's and Eleonora's eldest child: a premature little girl, that is christened Christina in the parish church. Sadly, such a joyful event is to be associated with a dramatic one: as the first snowdrops of spring appear in the French garden, the veteran officer is found unconscious in the library, before his desk, as he reached the account of his eldest grandchild's birth in the memoirs. Gerhard is strangely pale and cold, unable to breathe. He reacts upon being given water and brandy to drink, but his heartbeat has weakened to a flutter. The bullet in his chest, after being lodged in his left lung for decades, causes the searing pain and weakness that he is experiencing.
At dusk, the same evening, the flutter of his heart is finally silenced. It is up to Liselotte to finish his memoirs with the account of her beloved spouse's death and obsequies.
The next day, Gerhard receives his eternal rest in between the nearby church and the French garden, in a baroque shrine where Ringstettens of upcoming generations will follow him. On a wall of the shrine, Liselotte has the poem that her husband wrote at the start of his memoirs written (here is a translation of the full inscription, the original being in German and Swedish):

HERE LIETH

COUNT GERHARD WILHELM VON RINGSTETTEN

BORN IN 1615 - DIED IN 1654

LIEUTENANT IN THE FRENCH ARMY

LIEUTENANT IN THE SWEDISH ARMY

LORD OF THE RINGSTETTEN ESTATE

KÜSTRIN HAD THE HONOUR OF BEING HIS BIRTHPLACE.

HE CAME OF AGE IN CAMPS, TO SERVE A GREAT LEADER

IN THE GREATEST WAR OF HIS DAY

FOR THE HIGHEST CAUSE OF HIS DAY.

HE FREQUENTED MANY LANDS AND NATIONS.

SUCCEEDED WHEN TRIED,

SUCCEEDED IN LOVE,

SUCCEEDED IN LIFE.

"NO CHALLENGE WAS TOO HARD: I STROVE TOWARDS THE LIGHT.

YET I CAN'T COMPREHEND THAT I'LL BE OUT OF SIGHT"

The whole Ringstetten shire is in mourning, and the Tarlenheims come over from Dalecarlia. The Walloons and Black Maya are consternated as well. Yet even more misfortunes await the Ringstetten clan: it'll take a decade for an exhausted Eleonora to conceive another child, much to her mother-in-law's chagrin, and Queen Christina's successor dies in 1660, to be succeeded by his only son, Charles XI. 
One only cloud looms above them: the current master Hermann, Liselotte's and Gerhard's eldest son, is not able to leave for any war due to his brittle state of health, leaving his younger brother Konrad, the spare, in charge of the foreign campaigns.
Life has gone on in the shire without any trouble except that. Christina von Ringstetten has become a lonely and thoughtful child, with the maids and Etienne van der Heide, the steel mill owner's ten year older only son, for playmates. Though the green-eyed and strawberry blond little girl, educated by the local Reverend, also likes reading books, especially myths and war chronicles.
In the 1670s, catastrophes pile upon each other: royal officials scour the estate to give three quarters of the clan's lands to the Crown, and the King himself is coming to Värmland for a moose hunt (Charles XI having started an absolutist regime); Etienne has left for Uppsala University, leaving Christina on her own with her books; large patches of heartsease that cover the plains predict that it will be an unusually dry summer for that part of Sweden; and Eleonora, who happens to be expecting her third child and hopes that it will be a blond male (after her red-haired daughters, Christina and Ilse) to appease her stern mother-in-law... develops an unexpected craving for wild strawberries. 
An agreement with the Sidhe, the spirit of the woods, will solve all those issues... or not?

THE RINGSTETTEN SAGA XIII: A ROYAL RENDEZVOUS

Previously on the Ringstetten Saga:

Amidst dark firwood, glittering lakes and scattered wooden cottages, two whitewashed chateaux have found their rightful owners by royal decree.
The Ringstetten patriarch employs his spare time in making lace and writing his memoirs. In hindsight, the battles and other confrontations he has taken part in appear like massacres. One late autumn day in 1653, when riding in the woods, Gerhard meets the Queen herself, who is currently staying at Läckö, on the southern shore of the lake. He is invited by Her Majesty to visit her at the La Gardie residence on Läckö before she returns to court.
Leaving Liselotte and local peasant Annika, one of their favourite servants, in charge of the children, he goes forth to hunt deer and have supper with the Queen and the La Gardies in their hall. Christina has an interesting conversation with the old veteran who knew her late father so well (the Queen, being a child upon her absent father's death, has rather vague recollections of him). And Gerhard sees in his tomboyish and slightly aggressive liege the living image of her sire, who shared her appearance and her extraverted personality.
Upon Gerhard's question of what happened to Eleanor, Christina tells him the story of what happened to the two of them, mother and daughter: In the springtime of 1633, while taking a walk in the woods near her childhood home of Stegeborg, Christina was drugged and whisked away to Nyköping by Queen Eleanor's servants. Her mother's chateau was draped in mourning black, and a heartbroken Eleanor kept her late consort's body in a glass case and his heart in a golden reliquary on her night table. The Queen Dowager slept with her daughter (whose resemblance to her late father was one of the reasons for her abduction) and forced her to mourn against her will. Christina, dressed in a black gown like her mother's, was forbidden to run, to play, to skip, even to speak and whisper! Reading books was the only distraction that the little princess could enjoy. However, this didn't mean that she always played by the rules! Instead of drinking the Cognac or Riesling that was served to her at the dinner table, and even forced down her throat, she quenched her thirst with Eleanor's priceful rose water, made from Southern French pompom roses (a cosmetic!)... When caught red-handed, Christina was whipped with a hazel rod by Frau Ebba or Frau Agnetha, one of the Queen's ladies, but sometimes it was Eleanor herself who wielded the torture instrument!
In the springtime of 1636, the Regent, Chancellor Axel Oxenstierna (Gustavus's right-hand man), having returned from the war front, decided to separate the royal mother and daughter for their future welfare. Christina returned to Stegeborg, while Eleanor was imprisoned at Gripsholm, in a tower so full of luxuries and beautiful things in Eleanor's taste that the Queen Dowager would soon forget that she was locked in a fortress prison for high treason (she exchanged letters with the Danish court, and even planned to have her only daughter married to Frederick, heir to the Danish throne), only allowed parole to visit Stegeborg on Christina's birthday, for Christmas, and if the Crown Princess fell ill. If Eleanor broke the conditions of said parole, she would be put to death. 
In mid-summer the same year, Eleanor disappeared. Dressed as a well-to-do peasant woman, she boarded a Danish gallion. The Regent tried his best to conceal his consternation, while Christina understood that her mother did actually love her. But Denmark being on the Habsburg side (like France being on the Protestant side: here we have nations that joined the war due to power play rather than religious dissentions), that wold be a hard task. The young princess was also made aware of the devastation caused by the war, and thus, she decided to seek peace with Austria. In 1648, finally crowned queen, she showed the militaristic Oxenstiernas which path led to the restoration of Europe. The same year, she found out that Eleanor lived under Gerhard's and Hedwig's parents' umbrella, maintained like a demi-mondaine by the Küstrin garrison (the veteran is surprised upon hearing that the exiled queen lived in the guardhouse where he was born and raised!). Thus, Christina sent an invitation to her mother... who is living at Gripsholm again, though as the mistress rather than as a prisoner, and shares an intimate bond with her daughter.
Yet the independent and self-reliant tomboy queen (traumatized by her mother's fate, she declines to marry not to feel sorrow or have her wings clipped by love and/or obedience: "Free was I born, free I live, and free I shall die!") feels the weight of the crown heavy upon her head. She came to visit the La Gardies as an excuse to inform them of her upcoming abdication, having already appointed the successor who will rule in her stead as she seeks adventure and thrills across Europe.

So, the next day, it's time to say farewell to the Queen, who has to inform her mother and courtiers of such a relevant decision. Later on, in mid-December, Liselotte and her children have been preparing the welcoming of another Eleonora: Alois's and Hedwig's daughter, who arrives three days later from Dalecarlia to marry her childhood friend Hermann and live with her in-laws. The betrothal is celebrated on New Year's Day.

However, Gerhard acts coldly towards his daughter-in-law and prefers to keep on writing his memoirs, having consecrated a room in the estate to his weapons and to the medal that Her Majesty gave him. The young lieutenant who fought so gallantly for the Protestant cause revives in the prose that graces his library, upon reaching the part of his life when he met the Swedish royals. Thus, Gerhard keeps on writing more and more passionately for each day... and even more upon realising that Liselotte, just like the Queen, has always looked and acted like Gustavus Adolphus… since, unknown to her, the Hero King of Lützen is her birth father, making her a legitimized royal bastard. At their next family Christmas, the memoirs writer finally discloses this under the influence, yet, surprisingly, no one is upset, and Liselotte herself remarks that she looked and acted like the late king more than like Colonel von Tarlenheim, while also realising why she was made a ward of the Crown after her apparent father’s death. Which means the Ringstettens have got true royal blood running through their veins!