A Night at the Theatre
In the summer of 1878, France writhed under the catastrophe of phylloxera, the blight laying waste to the entire country.
While the French shed tears of blood, Waldemar and John Connor industriously snapped up their bank stocks and vineyards.
John Connor’s people worked with such zeal that funds occasionally ran short, yet the explosive surge in Aspirin sales—and the newly added Phenacetin revenues—plugged every gap.
Waldemar checked his ever-lengthening list of assets and made no effort to hide his delight.
From next year Nobel will start pouring out dividends as well.
Nobel, too, was a company whose payouts rivaled those of Standard Oil. In 1879 it would astonish the world with roughly fifteen percent on capital; by 1880 the figure would climb to twenty. Add the gold-mine profits to what they would pay him, and money would not run dry for some time—unless, of course, he kept expanding his investments.
Waldemar set the asset list aside and opened the report that had arrived from the German physiologist Dr. Koch.
Medicine interested him almost as much as investment. Diphtheria, in particular, held his attention. Mindful that, with a stroke of bad luck, he might catch it even in London, he had handed scholars the funds Queen Victoria had given him and asked them to research the disease.
The investment had borne fruit. With Waldemar’s support, the German microbiologist Robert Koch had discovered the diphtheria bacillus more than six years earlier than in the original timeline. Waldemar was content simply that Koch had confirmed its existence. Once the German pathological establishment recognized the organism, vaccine development would not be especially difficult.
I can hand them the concept of a diphtheria vaccine myself.
A modern diphtheria vaccine was nothing more than toxin extracted from the bacillus, detoxified by formalin and heat so that only the immunogenicity remained. Waldemar wrote Koch a letter outlining his “idea” and urged him to try it without fail.
Whether the vaccine arrives in time is another question. If things look truly hopeless I can always bolt for Grandmother’s house.
He was still busily writing when something clung to his back. The familiar scent told him at once who it was.
“Sophie?”
“You guessed it.”
Princess Sophie grinned. The little girl was already beginning to put on the airs of a young lady.
“We came too, yet Baldi only notices Sophie.”
Victoria and Princess Margarete puffed out their cheeks.
“I wondered why my room suddenly smelled of flowers.”
The blatant flattery made Victoria flush.
“Don’t tease.”
While Waldemar soothed Victoria and Margarete, Sophie’s eyes flicked over the letter.
“I thought you were writing to our governess Emily, but it isn’t that.”
“Why on earth would I write to Miss Emily?”
“Whenever she walks in, your eyes light up.”
That, little sister, is the sad physiological response of a man who has just seen a beautiful woman.
“They light up when I look at you too.”
“They do not.”
Having grown up with Waldemar, Sophie was quick on the uptake. He changed the subject to escape the interrogation.
“Anyway—doesn’t living in the palace feel stifling?”
“A little?”
Waldemar decided to cheer his sisters up for once.
“Then how about an outing?”
“An outing?”
“Just a light tour of Berlin.”
His sisters answered at once.
“Then let’s go to the theatre.”
“The theatre?”
Come to think of it, since his reincarnation into this world Waldemar himself had almost never enjoyed any cultural life. He agreed to take them to a play. The trouble was that he knew next to nothing about the theatre of the age, so he tossed the choice to his sisters.
“Is there anything you’d particularly like to see?”
Victoria, Sophie and Margarete whispered among themselves, then offered a joint opinion.
“We want to see The Pillars of Society. We overheard Mother’s ladies-in-waiting and the English governesses talking about it for ages.”
“What’s it about? A classic?”
“No—it’s a new play from Norway.”
Victoria summarized the plot in a single line.
If it isn’t a classic Mother will probably hate it.
When Waldemar voiced the worry, all three princesses laughed.
“Brother, even Mother’s ladies-in-waiting have seen it. Why would she scold us for going?”
They had a point.
“All right. We’ll make time three days from now.”
Margarete, delighted by the answer, kissed his cheek.
“I love Baldi best in the whole world. Willy can’t even be compared to you.”
Waldemar felt a twinge of pity for Wilhelm, who had been casually disparaged by the youngest sister for no reason at all.
A few days later Waldemar dressed with some care and climbed into the carriage with his sisters. Before they left, Crown Princess Victoria gave him a solemn charge.
“Our princesses have been raised so gently they have no idea how harsh the outside world can be. If anything seems amiss, call a servant at once. Enjoying yourselves is well and good, but the most important thing is that nothing goes wrong.”
“I understand, Mother. I’ll keep a careful eye on them.”
The carriages carrying the royal party soon arrived at the Prussian Royal Theatre. The house had been thoroughly prepared in advance for the princesses and high nobility.
Seats completely empty. So this is bourgeois theatre-going.
Waldemar escorted his sisters to the royal box. The moment they sat down the princesses summoned attendants and ordered mountains of drinks and sweets. They claimed they had come to enjoy a performance, but to Waldemar’s eye they looked far more interested in eating.
“Want some, Brother?”
Sophie asked around a mouthful.
“No.”
Waldemar intended to watch the play seriously and limited himself to a light drink. To a brain pickled in the over-spiced entertainments of the twenty-first century, the drama itself felt rather dull.
Immorality and hypocrisy among the upper class, a hidden love triangle—standard morning-soap material.
Even the actors’ passionate performances left him bored; the girls, however, were another matter. From a certain point they became wholly absorbed in the heroine Lona, pitying her one moment and railing against the villain Bernick the next. Amused by their intensity, Waldemar returned his attention to the stage—and discovered a pleasure he had previously missed.
That actress is far prettier than Emily.
He called a servant and asked about the woman. Moments later the man returned with a detailed answer.
“The young lady playing Lona is Eugenie Ronau, an actress born in 1860—still quite young.”
Born in 1860… so she was eighteen?
Victoria, overhearing the exchange about the actress, jabbed him in the ribs with her elbow.
“Baldi, are you interested in that actress?”
“She just looked pretty, so I asked.”
When he tried to brush it off, Sophie cut in.
“Brother, if you’re that interested, send her some flowers.”
“Why would I send flowers to that girl?”
Waldemar asked, incredulous.
“I once overheard Willy and his aide-de-camp saying that if a man is interested in an actress he sends flowers.”
So Willy didn’t even know how to watch his tongue in front of his younger sisters. Waldemar did not suspect deliberate malice; Sophie had simply eavesdropped again. He felt a fresh wave of despair at how poorly he had raised his little sister.
“Ha. It’s not like that. If you want to give her flowers, you do it.”
“Shall we?”
Sophie looked tempted; so did Margarete. Waldemar summoned a servant and set the girls to the errand of flowers. He paid, of course—and the two sent such an enormous quantity that it nearly filled a carriage to the dressing rooms. The impact was so great that the actress herself came up to the royal box. Thanks to that, Waldemar was able to see the beautiful young performer at close range.
“Young Prince, thank you for the many flowers.”
The leading lady, Eugenie Ronau, offered a shy greeting. She seemed to have mistaken the princesses’ gift for his.
That’s a complete misunderstanding.
He wanted to say so, but spoiling the face of an actress who had climbed all the way up to thank them felt churlish, so he let it stand.
“Not at all. Please continue to give us fine performances.”
“I shall strive to meet Your Highness’s expectations.”
As he shook her hand, Waldemar once again marveled at her looks.
Even the actresses of this age are dazzling.
If a performer one could see in the cultural backwater of Germany looked like this, what must the actresses flocking to Britain, America or France be like? He recalled the beautiful women of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries he had once watched on YouTube—Lily Elsie, Evelyn Nesbit, Audrey Munson, Ethel Barrymore. The alluring images sparked a promising business idea.
What if I sold men’s magazines in this era?
For a discontented working class already muttering about socialism and the like, the most marketable product would be the three S’s that Chun Doo-hwan had once demonstrated so effectively: Screen, Sex, and Sports. Of the three, sex magazines were relatively cheap to produce and potentially explosive in impact. Waldemar decided to sell them.
Even if I sold them only to the German army, tens of thousands of copies would move without effort.
On the ride back to the palace he turned the plan over in his mind and chuckled quietly to himself.
“Baldi’s acting strange. He keeps smiling. He must be overjoyed that he got to shake that actress’s hand.”
“Just wait. He won’t even wash the hand that touched her.”
Waldemar paid no attention to his sisters’ jealous stares.
From now on, the right hands of men everywhere belong to me.
His eyes gleamed with the prospect of conquering an entirely new domain.