Well, that would be outside of our fic, but: if FW dies (in whichever way) in the spring of 1732, MT's Dad is alive and well for eight more years. However, August the Strong is about to kick the bucket in 1733, thereby triggering the War of Polish Succession. My guess would be Fritz is going to use that chance for a land grab then, though whether through Silesia or Jülich and Berg, or by declaring his own candidacy for the Polish throne as a third candidate (hey, why not? He's harmless recent victim Crown Prince Fritz! Vote for him, he's no threat, and he has some nice soldiers to protect your borders! He has money, too, maybe enough to outbid Brühl!), who knows.
Mind you, in one respect I can see this whole AU as being bad for Fritz: no Rheinsberg years where he can relax and be happy and live how he likes (minus being married). He has to go to work as a monarch right away.
Back to the story. I went and looked up the Christie original's wiki entry to refresh my memory, and was v. v. amused the entry even has a map showing whose room was where vis a vis the victim. But this reminded me: as Morgenstern's "Day in the life" narration shows, FW didn't sleep alone, especially not in the 1730s when he was sick so often. He didn't just have servants and pages in the next room, which Fritz (and every other monarch) also did, he had at least one in the same room.(Which many, though not all of them did.) And this Leibjäger would presumably be a young man, so he can't be replaced by one of the older crowd, but we can decide that this is a representative forcibly drafted Potsdam Giant.
But if the engagement party is the occasion, it's a good excuse as to why everyone is in the same palace. Poirot got the cabin next to the victim by coincidence, but FS might get a room near FW because as the Emperor's not so secret future son-in-law, he's a guest of honor.
BTW: another consequence of the much stabbed dead royal body: maybe Team Brunswick rethinks the engagement? (If not, Fritz could still dissolve it, as in rl he and EC wouldn't get married until a year later, which was the normal engagement time.)
Well, I phrased it badly, but what I was thinking was that part of the conclusion has to be: "We have a royal body with umpteen stab wounds, who takes the fall?" I assume everyone shrugging publicly and the conclusion being "We have no idea, moving on," is not a good idea. If only because it keeps people wondering and investigating and pointing fingers!
So who takes the fall?
Mind you, I'm reminded of this one line from Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys:
Major F.E. Garrett...took over the government...and ruled the country with a rod of iron until his unfortunate death from falling out of bed several years later. He fell out of bed hard enough to break a number of bones, despite the presence in his bedroom of an entire squad of soldiers, who testified that they had all tried, but failed, to break Major Garrett's fall, and despite their best efforts he was dead by the time that he arrived in the island's sole hospital.
FW's death could be like that if we leaned toward crackier and less political.
I always thought of the Gaiman passage as surrealist humor until I read Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and ever since then I've been like, "Oh, yeah, the Praetorian Guard would totally have done that." (I realize that Gibbon's scholarship is out of date and not all things attributed by him to the Praetorian Guard are still attributed to them, but still. I could see this happening to a Roman emperor.)
cahn, Gibbon is an 18th century scholar who did groundbreaking work in terms of extensive footnotes citing his sources. He's also snarky and eminently readable, as long as you can handle several volumes of 18th century English (which I can now, but could not when I first tried to read him as a teenager).
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timeasmymeasure
Re: FW Whodunit
Date: 2021-03-23 06:38 am (UTC)Mind you, in one respect I can see this whole AU as being bad for Fritz: no Rheinsberg years where he can relax and be happy and live how he likes (minus being married). He has to go to work as a monarch right away.
Back to the story. I went and looked up the Christie original's wiki entry to refresh my memory, and was v. v. amused the entry even has a map showing whose room was where vis a vis the victim. But this reminded me: as Morgenstern's "Day in the life" narration shows, FW didn't sleep alone, especially not in the 1730s when he was sick so often. He didn't just have servants and pages in the next room, which Fritz (and every other monarch) also did, he had at least one in the same room.(Which many, though not all of them did.) And this Leibjäger would presumably be a young man, so he can't be replaced by one of the older crowd, but we can decide that this is a representative forcibly drafted Potsdam Giant.
But if the engagement party is the occasion, it's a good excuse as to why everyone is in the same palace. Poirot got the cabin next to the victim by coincidence, but FS might get a room near FW because as the Emperor's not so secret future son-in-law, he's a guest of honor.
BTW: another consequence of the much stabbed dead royal body: maybe Team Brunswick rethinks the engagement? (If not, Fritz could still dissolve it, as in rl he and EC wouldn't get married until a year later, which was the normal engagement time.)
Re: FW Whodunit
Date: 2021-03-24 01:22 pm (UTC)Well, I phrased it badly, but what I was thinking was that part of the conclusion has to be: "We have a royal body with umpteen stab wounds, who takes the fall?" I assume everyone shrugging publicly and the conclusion being "We have no idea, moving on," is not a good idea. If only because it keeps people wondering and investigating and pointing fingers!
So who takes the fall?
Mind you, I'm reminded of this one line from Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys:
Major F.E. Garrett...took over the government...and ruled the country with a rod of iron until his unfortunate death from falling out of bed several years later. He fell out of bed hard enough to break a number of bones, despite the presence in his bedroom of an entire squad of soldiers, who testified that they had all tried, but failed, to break Major Garrett's fall, and despite their best efforts he was dead by the time that he arrived in the island's sole hospital.
FW's death could be like that if we leaned toward crackier and less political.
I always thought of the Gaiman passage as surrealist humor until I read Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and ever since then I've been like, "Oh, yeah, the Praetorian Guard would totally have done that." (I realize that Gibbon's scholarship is out of date and not all things attributed by him to the Praetorian Guard are still attributed to them, but still. I could see this happening to a Roman emperor.)