And Maria was glancing at Anna with a look that said You see? I told you that it would all be well. And Anna was pulling a rueful face as she understood that her last, late arguments had been swept away, and that they would indeed remain in the Rhineland for Christmas . . .
And that was when they heard the feet of many men approaching the door.
Crunch, crunch, coming closer, coming up the beaten driveway to the door of the house! Boots and the clink of metal: a file of men, and there was nowhere else they could be coming to! The track led only to the door, to the house, to the people inside it. The women stared at each other in mounting horror.
'Oh, dear Mother of God!' whispered Emilia.
A voice outside called. The noises stopped. One of the maids looked out of the window.
'Soldiers!' she wailed.
Maria cursed her silently. Of course it was soldiers! What else could it be? And why couldn't the stupid girl remain calm?
Then the banging started. Someone was hammering at the door from outside. Footsteps were running in the house. There were servants in the hall, voices raised in consternation. Still the banging went on and on, and then stopped all at once as the door was opened. One of the servants protested. A man spoke German at him rapidly. And over it all another voice shouted.
'Jürich! Come out, Jürich!'
'Dear Mother of God,' whispered Emilia again, and her face was white.
Boots – many boots, clumping on the bare boards of the hall. They were in the house.
'Jürich!'
From somewhere, muffled, Ludwig's voice answered. A door banged open. A voice began to shout in German – a long stream of abuse, punctuated by fierce thumps as of a hammer on wood.
'Dear God – have they come to arrest him?'
'What are they doing?'
Maria listened to the loud, ranting voice. She could pick out some of the words: Treacherous! Disloyal! Fanatic! And the thumping – was that someone slamming his hand on a table? Was it? Or were they . . .
She was standing, staring at the door to the hall. She heard a man laugh softly out there, as the litany of rage went on and on.
Dear heaven, what were they doing? Were they arresting him? Were they beating him? Why? Was he, after all, the man whom she had been sent to meet? But why had he given her nothing?
And was it now too late?
She heard Ludwig try to answer. She heard him shouted down. She heard one of the maids begin to whimper with terror. Her nerve broke.
'Enough of this,' she muttered. She stepped for the door.
'Lady Maria – no, you must not!' cried Emilia.
'My dear – please!' exclaimed Anna in the same moment.
She ignored both of them. She flung the door open, and with her eyes blazing she marched down the short corridor to the hall.
The hall was crowded with men in shabby blue uniforms, with white cross-belts and cockaded hats. In a glance she saw again how short many of them were: short, but the muskets they carried were very long in that confined space, with cruel and rusting bayonets fixed to the barrels. She drew breath. The men smelled foul.
Someone had come with her. It was Emilia, putting her hand on her arm.
'Please!' she begged. 'You should not show yourself!'
They were already turning to look at her. She lifted her chin.
'What is going on here?' she demanded.
Eyes, moustaches, crossbelts. Cheeks grizzled with unkempt whiskers. How old was the man who stood there, feet away, staring at her? Forty? A haggard twenty-five? She could see the little lines around his eyes, the black gaps in his mouth where so many teeth were missing. His boots were not boots, she saw, but strips of filthy linen wrapped tightly around his feet. And his musket – the long and horrible musket that he held, with its rusted ramrod slung beneath the barrel, the point of the bayonet a bare inch from scoring the wall where she had rested her hand!
All their eyes were on her.
'What is going on here?' she repeated loudly. 'Who is in charge?'
'Please – do not trouble yourself, Lady Maria.'
It was Ludwig's voice!
She could not see him through the soldiers, but he must have come out of his office at the same time as she arrived in the hall.
'Really, it is nothing,' he called to her.
'Nothing!' she cried, at her most imperious and incredulous, as she swept the soldiers with her eyes. 'What kind of nothing is this?'
Perhaps she should not have said that. She saw them glower at her. Any one of them could drag her screaming through the door. Someone said something, in a voice she did not quite catch.
Three men pushed their way through the crowd: a French officer, a green-coated clerk, and Ludwig in his shirtsleeves, mopping his brow.
He looked unhurt. Thank God! He was unhurt!
'Please do not trouble yourself. It – it is a small matter,' Ludwig said, glancing at the officer and clerk. 'I have undertaken to see to it.'
The officer nodded curtly. 'Let us go,' he said to his men. 'We are finished here.'
Without a word more to his host he stalked out of the front door. The German clerk and the soldiers followed him. Maria found she was holding her breath as they passed one by one through the doorway. She counted only nine of them. It had felt as though there had been fifty. When Ludwig closed the door softly after the last one, she let the air from her lungs in a long, shaking sigh.
'What was it?' cried Emilia, hugging Ludwig around the chest. 'Did they hit you? Oh my dear, I thought they would take you away!'
'They will not, while I am still useful to them,' murmured Ludwig. 'Do not distress yourself. I am not hurt – apart from some passing injury to my eardrums. I suspect our clerkly visitor will have done himself more damage simply by banging on my table. No, my dear. It is just that some fool has cut down the Liberty Tree in Knopsdorf. Our General is not pleased, it seems.'
'Not pleased!' Emilia was almost weeping. 'I thought the most terrible things!'
So did I, thought Maria, looking out of the hall window at the departing file of soldiers. So did I.
I thought they had come for me.
The Liberty Tree of Knopsdorf, the village nearest to the Jürich estate, had been a mere sapling, planted two years before to show the district's faith in equality, fraternity and the rights of man. But someone had come and cut it down in the night. No one seemed able to say who had done it, even though the sound of axe-blows in the small hours must have woken half-a-dozen households and everyone knew it had happened because Father Septe had been deported. French messengers and green-coated clerks stamped angrily into Ludwig Jürich's office again and again in the days after Christmas, and stamped angrily out again when he told them there was nothing he could do to find the culprit.
'They see it as their duty to liberate us,' he sighed at table. 'So if we cling to our princes they must necessarily liberate us by force. But I have told them we will plant it again tomorrow.'
'Yet it is meaningless!' cried Emilia. 'There is a treaty now. In a month or two the Elector will be restored, and the people will simply grub the tree up again.'
'Nothing is certain,' said Ludwig gently 'In the meantime, we must do what we must do. At least the weather is mild. I do not believe you ladies will need your cloaks tomorrow.'
In fact, the next day was grey and windy. Maria certainly thought her cloak would have been a comfort. But Cousin Ludwig looked at the heavens, and declared so firmly that it was mild that she felt compelled to leave it behind. They took an open carriage down to the village, which was less than a mile away, and dismounted at the edge of a grassy space. A file of twenty French soldiers with their officer was drawn up at one side of it. They almost outnumbered the small crowd of villagers, gathering silently on the other. There were two other carriages there. One contained Kaus and his wife. The other held Madame Hofmeister. No one remarked that her husband had not come.
In the middle of the lawn was a round circle of freshly dug earth. Presumably this
was the very spot where the liberty sapling had been murdered. Now it was gone, and its roots had been pulled from the ground, and on the grass beside the bare earth lay a new sapling, less than six feet long.
Cousin Ludwig nodded to a green-coated clerk who stood nearby. 'You may begin,' he said.
The French officer and the clerk came forward. The clerk took a paper from his pocket and, in a voice that barely carried to where Maria was standing, read an address that hailed the renewed advent of Liberty in Knopsdorf. The speech was in French. Looking at the dour faces of the crowd, Maria thought that less than half of them knew any French at all, and less than half of those would have been prepared to admit it.
Cousin Ludwig had been wrong, she thought, as she clutched her thin shawl around her shoulders. The day was proving very cold indeed.
The clerk finished. The French officer stepped forward and, speaking fairly and in rather good German, promised the friendship and support of the Republic to all who yearned to make themselves free. The Republic made war upon the castles, but would leave the cottages in peace. Silence greeted his words.
A peasant with a spade dug the soft earth away. Another lifted the sapling into the hole, and held it straight while the first firmed the earth back at its roots. The officer spoke a series of commands. The French soldiers lifted their muskets and fired them into the air. At another command the muskets returned to the salute. The officer waved his arm. Unaccompanied by music, voices straining in the open air, the soldiers sang.
Amour sacré de la Patrie, conduis, soutiens nos bras vengeurs.
iberie, liberté chérie, combats avec tes défenseurs; combats avec tes défenseurs.
Sous nos drapeaux, que la victoire accoure à tes mâles accents;
Que tes ennemis expirants voient ton triomphe et notre gloire!
Aux armes, citoyens! Formez vos battaillons!
Marchons, marchons, qu'un sang impur
Abreuve nos sillons!
Beside her, Ludwig Jürich began to applaud. Clap, clap, clap went his hands, sounding alone until at last the ripple of clapping spread among the villagers. Then the ceremony was over. The French soldiers grouped in a huddle by themselves, glancing now and then at the people as they dispersed. The Kauses and Madame Hofmeister clustered with the Jürichs for a few words, and then climbed into their carriages.
'My dear, I think Anna is cold,' said Ludwig suddenly to Emilia. 'Do take her back in the carriage. I shall walk, for I need the air. Perhaps Lady Maria will accompany me?'
He bowed to her.
'Oh – but is Maria not cold too?' said Emilia.
'I shall be delighted,' declared Maria boldly. 'I shall only be cold if I stand still.'
They bundled Anna and Emilia, still protesting, into the carriage. Then she took Ludwig's arm and, followed by his servant, began to walk back up to the house.
They went in silence for the first hundred yards. At the edge of the little wood above the village, Ludwig stopped.
'I have been unpardonably overconfident,' he said. 'It is certainly cold! Heinrich, run up to the house and return as quickly as you can with a cloak for Lady Maria.'
The servant grunted and strode ahead.
'Quickly!' cried Ludwig.
The man broke into a run, and disappeared around the corner of the wood. After a moment Ludwig returned his arm to Maria and they resumed their walk.
'I wonder if you are disappointed with my house,' Ludwig said suddenly.
'Oh, no! Indeed you must not think so! Your wife has striven so hard to make us comfortable that I own I am ashamed to have been the cause of so much trouble.'
'I am glad to hear you say it. But of course that is not what I meant.'
Maria paced beside him, looking down at the tussocks beneath her feet. She was alone with her host. No one could hear what they said. Only one man – the servant – even knew they were together.
'Sir,' she said. 'I imagine you are as much a patriot as I – which is to say that you never thought of patriotism until the world had forced it on you. I believe what you do to be for the good of the people of your district, and serves them better than any empty, prideful gesture that would surely bring the revenge of the French.'
'Thank you. In truth they love me very little for it, and less now that I have failed even to save poor Septe. Yet shall I abandon the path of Reason for the Romantic? Others have done so. But it seems to me only to be folly. Deliverance will come to us and to all Germany only through patience and faith. The summit of my ambition in this time is that I may yet prevent my brother-in-law Kaus from denouncing my brother-in-law Hofmeister. If I achieve this, I shall hold myself vindicated.'
'I believe you are too gloomy, sir!' she said, surprised that this aloof man should suddenly confide so much to her.
'About Kaus? It is, I think, almost inevitable. The occupiers and their acolytes suspect everyone who held positions for the princes. And Hofmeister is not a silent man. If Kaus does not speak against him, he may fall under suspicion in his turn.'
They walked on in silence for a few paces.
'My house is under suspicion, too,' he said. 'As you will have observed the other day.'
'I am – sorry for it, sir.'
'I do not doubt that you are sorry. But if I may say so, I do not think you are surprised. You spoke a name at my table on your first night here, and I do not believe it was by chance. I am aware that the man you mentioned has visited my house in secret. He did not speak to me. Yet I can guess what it was that he wanted.
'I remember Wéry well. We talked much during the siege. There was, after all, little else to do. I was in hiding and he, although still trusted by the republicans, was reflecting on his experiences in Paris. He had once had a house and a small estate in Brabant, which he loved, and people, including more than one woman. He had locked all that away to dedicate himself to his cause. I remember thinking even then that I was not capable of so great a sacrifice. Nor am I yet. More and more I have come to see that it is better to love a few – or even only one – than it is to loathe an empire. So I hold Hofmeister to be justified by his love and duty to my sister-in-law, and not by his opinions. As for Wéry . . .
'You have lost a brother, Lady Maria. But you may at least honour him in his grave. Now you have seen my nephew Maximilian. You have seen the price my house pays every day for having dabbled in affairs far greater than we could control. I wonder if you can guess what I think of Wéry's demand that we should renew our acquaintance with such things – and perhaps pay a price far greater.'
When Maria did not reply, he went on, 'I was expecting couriers – messengers in the night trying to tap at my windows. Indeed I have even wondered whether I might hand the next one over to the occupiers. But Wéry is a clever man, and also a subtle one.' He looked at Maria. 'He must know that I wish him to seek no more help from my house.'
'Sir,' she said, feeling her colour rising. 'I know Major Wéry, whom I believe to be a man of honour. As for the rest, insofar as I have understood it, I wish you to be assured I desire no harm to your house and will do whatever I can to avoid it.'
'I thank you, Lady Maria. And I do believe you have some affection for us. Therefore I believe that you will deliver the message I have given.'
He should not talk to her so! She was not a child or a witness in his court. Indeed, it was presumptuous of him. A man like him, even a judge, should show her father's daughter more respect!
But her instincts subsided. This was not a time to insist on her status. This was about life or death. She had come for a message, and finally it had been given to her. It was not what she had been expecting. It could hardly please Wéry. But . . .
'There is another matter,' said the green judge.
'Sir?'
'I am grateful to you for bringing my cousin to see us. But I now believe it would be very much better if you were to take her back to Erzberg as soon as possible.'
'Sir!'
Now she was astonished. A host did not �
� did not – tell his guests when they were to leave, unless some great offence had been caused. She struggled for words.
'Sir, I assure you! Anna most desired to come to see you. She has desired it for a long time. I – I am simply accompanying her. It was to satisfy my mother, that is all.'
'Of course I believe that Anna has desired to visit us. But if I believed Anna was the arbiter of your stay I would have addressed myself to her. I do not. Recollect that I have known her a long time, and that I have also had the opportunity of observing you. And I know that you are capable of leading her in this direction or that, as it may suit you. She knows it too, of course. Yet she allows it because she loves you, and because it is simpler if she does not think too much herself.'
'You are unkind, sir!'
'My Lady, I am desperate. I would not speak so if I were not. And understand me. I do not know if you yet have that which you came for. But whether you have it or not, for your own sakes you must be gone. In these past days you will have observed that I have had a number of unpleasant visitors. Most of it was indeed about that wretched sapling we have just replaced. But I have also learned something of the plans of the new commissioner for the Rhineland. Neither Hofmeister nor I, nor any other figure from the time of the princes, will hold our positions for much longer. That is little surprise. The occupied lands are to be divided into departments, such as they employ for administration in France. Plainly, whatever we hoped, the occupation will not be ended soon. The French will stay.
'Moreover, the soldiers who were present today will not return to their billets. They will rejoin their column, and bivouac under canvas tonight near Mainz. Commanders do not make their soldiers change roofs for canvas without need. Some movement of troops is underway, this side of the Rhine. I firmly believe that if you are not across the Rhine by the time those movements are complete, you may find it hard to cross the Rhine at all.'
'You think we should leave.'
'For your comfort, but above all for your safety.'
Footsteps sounded on the path ahead. The servant Heinrich came into view, carrying a long white cloak that she did not recognize, and that must have belonged to Emilia Jürich. Ludwig hailed him, and the secret talk was over. As the man Heinrich arranged the cloth gingerly around her neck and shoulders, she shuddered.
The Lightstep Page 26
