by Lucy Langton
At this thought, she, too, dropped her eyes to the biscuits and chewed softly on her lower lip. “Three days to say goodbye to Austria,” she whispered, marveling at the thought.
“Make sure you say ‘auf Wiedersehen’ to as many of these chubby-cheeked Austrians as you can,” her mother said coldly, utilizing a wretched Austrian accent.
**
When Marta arrived back in her bedroom, she found her maid, Laura, awaiting her. In German, she cried, “Darling Marta! Your mother has informed me of the adventure we’re to embark upon.”
Oh, how dreadful that her mother could be correct about so many things. Marta curved her own smile between her cheeks and nodded. “I suppose it’s the sort of thing I can’t get out of now. Not with my Aunt Margaret lying in wait for me, waiting endlessly to suit me up with some lacklustre Englishman.”
“Oh, but aren’t they endlessly attractive, the Englishmen?” Laura asked. She batted her eyelashes swiftly.
“Laura, I can’t imagine they’ll be anything too exciting. Aren’t they meant to be rather stuffy, rather boring?” Marta returned. She perched on the edge of her bed and gazed out again at the mountains, her heart surging with panic.
“I’m rather sick of Austrian men,” Laura returned. “Not that your mother has given me much time to myself for such matters.”
“I understand that,” Marta murmured, resolving herself to give Laura as much time as she required off to truly experience this strange “English” existence to its full potential.
“Oh, but I’m rather worried about my English,” Laura continued. “It’s entirely lacklustre, and I know it will get me into heaps of trouble.”
“Perhaps I can teach you a bit on the way,” Marta offered. “It’s a very long, very arduous journey. We’ll need something to keep our minds preoccupied.”
Laura chatted on for a long while about her suspicions of the way of life in England. Marta continued to gaze outside. Dread seemed to envelope her. When she finally cast her eyes back toward Laura, Laura placed her hand on her heart and swept toward Marta.
“Darling, I’ve known you for years and years, and I’ve never seen you looking so tremendously…”
“Oh, it’s just this heartache,” Marta stuttered. “Part of the reason my mother wishes to send me away. I feel as though everything I’ve ever known and loved, everything I’ve ever dreamed of, is about to be taken away from me.”
“You’ve looked so stricken over the past weeks,” Laura admitted. “I haven’t drudged up the courage to ask.”
“You must have heard the gossip about the market,” Marta said, her voice heavy. “I’m widely known as the loser in a love triangle; the woman left behind. I know my mother wishes to shield me from such wretched labelling. But in truth, I believe that heartache is so powerful that it will follow me across the continent, all the way to that tiny island she loves so dearly. I cannot understand it, Laura. If she loves England so much, why doesn’t she return? Her love for my father seems lacklustre in comparison.”
“Your mother, leave your father? She would never operate so outside the bounds of societal expectation,” Laura returned.
“I suppose. But why would she remain so miserable throughout the rest of her life?” Marta considered. “She looks at these beautiful mountains—these incredible gifts from God himself—and doesn’t feel a thing. I know it because I can see the coldness in her eyes. She sees this next step in my life, this journey to England, to be a necessary and mathematical one. She cannot fathom the depths of my soul.”
“But didn’t she come to Austria in the first place because of some sort of wild belief that your father was her dearest and only love?” Laura asked. She said it sneakily, as though she wanted to remind Marta of just how similar she and her mother truthfully were.
Of course, Marta yearned to reject this concept. She sniffed and said, “I really don’t need anything else from you today, lovely Laura. Please, take the rest of the time for yourself. I can begin to pack myself. I know it’s nothing an English girl would do, but it’s what I feel I must do to prepare myself.”
After Laura left, Marta lay back on her bed and felt her heart drum up a reckless beat in her chest. She felt her best-laid plans shrivel up and die, right before her eyes. All the while, the man she’d fallen for, the man she’d given her heart to, was assuredly off with this other, beautiful, entirely-Austrian woman, a woman who’d beaten Marta in every single manner, in heart and soul and beauty.
Marta clutched the fabric of her bed’s blanket hard so that her fingers lost their colour. She sighed, recognising the severity of her anger, and slowly unclenched.
England. It was to be a fresh life. The sort of one that would allow her to make up her story as she pleased. Just then, her story in Austria had been cut short.
But there would be other things. Other events. She was Marta Schnitzler, and she lived only within the bounds of her own adventurous reality. Regardless of her mother’s “sentence,” she would embark on this journey with her eyes open to the possibility of it.
Perhaps that was how she could best her mother: to prove to her that she didn’t need anything but the wild imagination of her own mind.
Chapter 2
Three days later, Marta and Laura sat together in the coach en route to England. Laura seemed skittish as the coach embarked from the station in Vienna. She nearly glued her nose to the window to peer out and wave manically at her brother, who’d arrived with her to see her off. Marta had already bid adieu to her mother and father at their estate, which had left her little to do while Laura and her brother Max had carried on before the coach’s arrival.
It devastated her to admit that she wished for the sort of love Max and Laura had between them. Her mother hadn’t been able to have other children after her; there had been something wrong during the birth. Sometimes, Marta wondered if this was another reason that her mother demonised her. She wasn’t only her Austrian baby; she was further the only one she’d been allowed to have.
Throughout the journey to England, the train passed through Germany, with its rolling green hills and beautiful lakes and The Black Forest. As they cut through the border, Laura looked, aghast, and said, “There’s another country between Germany and England?”
At this, Marta laughed and said, “Of course! This is Belgium.”
“Belgium,” Laura murmured, rolling the name around on her tongue. “I can’t imagine a more beautiful word.”
“Nothing is more beautiful than the word Austria. We must remember that forever,” Marta affirmed.
But Laura didn’t seem as keen on keeping her roots close to her heart. Rather, throughout the coach ride, she threw herself completely into her English lessons: reciting various terms by heart as they ripped through Belgium and laughing at some of the other phrases Marta taught her, such as, “By the by,” and, “Wouldn’t you like to?” which, she said, sounded terribly ridiculous from a purely rhythmic perspective.
“You’ll take to England in no time at all,” Marta said, genuinely pleased at her ability to teach. It kept her mind off the love she left behind, off the mother who seemed to despise her, and off the future that stretched before her, one she felt she needed to carve out for herself.
Here on the coach, it was just her and Laura and various verbs and phrases and nouns, along with mounds of whatever coach food items they purchased, including various sweets and biscuits and little packets of cheese.
When they neared England itself, the clouds that had lived in Marta’s memory of England brewed up overhead, thick and formidable. On instinct, Laura reached for her jacket and flung it around her shoulders. Enormous raindrops splattered across the window, and Laura again lurched toward it to peer at the bright green flatlands, the fields that seemed almost moss-like, the trees that told a far different story than the ones back in Austria. They seemed oddly sinister.
“What was it like when you came here years ago?” Laura asked. Her voice was a bit strained, as though she
suddenly wished to collect as much information about her surroundings as possible before the coach gave birth to them in this strange land.
“It was a family visit, mostly,” Marta said, her brow furrowed. “I met with my cousin Ewan, who is a few years older than I. I suppose now he’d be about twenty-four? So a good five years older than I. The previous time, I was twelve, and he was seventeen. I tried to keep up with him and his dear friend—oh, what was his name?—in the surrounding woods. But it was clear that I was an outsider. My Aunt Margaret scolded me and then scolded my mother. I remember distinctly she asked my mother if she really let me run about so wildly back in Austria. My mother looked stricken. Yet again, I’d disappointed her.”
“You mustn’t think of it like that,” Laura said. Her eyes glowed with innocence. “She really loves you. She must just imagine the sort of life she might have had if she’d remained in England and feel a bit regretful of it…”
“Regretful of me, her only daughter,” Marta said. Her lower lip bobbed around a bit. “Well, in any case. I won’t see her for quite some time, will I? Perhaps the next time she sees me, she’ll know me as a proper English lady. The sort of woman she’d be glad to call her daughter.”
**
At the coach station, Aunt Margaret, Uncle Everett, and Ewan greeted them. It took a long moment, truthfully, for Marta to recognise their faces. After all, it had been seven years since her last visit.
“Darling!” Aunt Margaret called, the moment she reached the trio. She was much shorter than Marta remembered, with stooped shoulders and several chins and wild, greying hair. Of course, as she was quite wealthy, she’d dressed excellently for this trek to the coach station. “You look every bit the Austrian girl your mother said she’d raised.”
Marta wasn’t entirely sure what sort of compliment that was, or if it could even be deemed as one. “Hello, Auntie,” she said, surprising herself with how thick her English accent was in this sort of company. “Uncle Everett. And you must be Ewan.” She flashed a large smile at her handsome, broad-shouldered cousin. “I suppose you don’t remember me.”
Ewan’s grin widened. There was a big gap between his two front teeth, one Marta didn’t remember from their youth. “Of course I remember you. Not everyone has a cousin from Austria. It’s made me quite the talk of the county.”
Aunt Margaret rolled her eyes. Her wrinkled hand clutched Marta’s wrist as she said, “He’s really wretched, Marta, I do hope you won’t be overwhelmed with annoyance. You’ll grow accustomed to him as the season goes on; I promise you.” She then gave a funny wink, which warmed Marta through her belly and up through her heart.
The good-natured greeting gave Marta a small morsel of hope. Her smile stretched wider. Suddenly, she remembered herself.
“Oh, of course. Allow me to introduce my dear friend and handmaid, Laura Arbinger. She’s been a marvellous help throughout the journey already.”
“Good afternoon!” Aunt Margaret said, her voice falling into a bit of a screech.
There was a strange pause. A look of emptiness folded over Laura’s face.
“I’m terribly sorry. She doesn’t speak much English yet,” Marta said.
“Oh! Good afternoon!” Laura said suddenly, in English. Then, she turned swiftly back towards Marta and muttered in quick German, “I’m terribly sorry. I thought I would recognise English much quicker, but their accents are bizarre, aren’t they? Much different than yours.”
“That’s so pleasant to hear! I haven’t heard the German language in many years,” Uncle Everett said. It was difficult to tell if his words were layered with sarcasm.
Laura gave Marta another confused look. Marta forced her smile and said, “It’s been a terribly long journey. Do you think we could…”
“Of course,” Aunt Margaret blurted. “Silly us. Here. We’ve brought one of our stable hands to collect your suitcases. Jeffrey!”
A muscular man in his mid-30s leapt out from behind them and grabbed several suitcases, which one of the coach hands had set in a line behind Laura and Marta. Laura nearly leapt from her stance. This was surely the first time someone had actually waited on her, rather than the other way around.
**
Aunt Margaret, Uncle Everett, and cousin Ewan lived on a grand estate approximately a half-hour outside Central London, a county that allowed for the snooty response that one was “from” London, without any of the inner-city chaos.
As they rode, Aunt Margaret explained what had befallen her eldest daughter, Tatiana. The memory of Tatiana was brief in Marta’s mind. She was perhaps twenty or twenty-one at the time of Marta’s most previous visit, which meant that she was now twenty-seven or twenty-eight.
“She married when she was twenty-three, which was altogether appropriate,” Aunt Margaret recited, speaking as though some people had suggested Tatiana had married a bit too late for their or society’s liking.
“Who did she marry?” Marta asked. This was the sort of thing her mother would have liked her to ask.
“She married an earl, in fact!” Aunt Margaret said, altogether pleased with the question. “It was one of the more beautiful weddings I’ve ever attended. She’s a petite little thing, our Tatiana, and her earl towered over her throughout the ceremony. Their courting was quite swift. I remember I matched them in May, and by August, the engagement was set.” She beamed at Marta.
“So you’re a bit of a matchmaker,” Marta said, remembering what her mother had said about the upcoming courting season.
“Oh, it’s just precisely what I dream to be,” Aunt Margaret said. She seemed to glow with excitement. “I already have such a strategy for you, my darling niece. The niece from Austria! With all the beauty of the east and the Alps, and all the culture of England. You’ll do very nicely, I believe.”
Marta didn’t exactly enjoy this seeming comparison to things that were oft-traded, like cattle. But she forced her smile wider, reminding herself that this was her first day in a long string of days. She couldn’t very well draw herself obstinately out of the gate.
Obstinate cattle, out of the gate. The thought of it made her chuckle.
“What’s that, darling?” Aunt Margaret asked. Her eyebrow shot high on her forehead.
“Oh, nothing, Aunt Margaret. I’m simply pleased to be back in England. It’s been far too long.”
**
The carriage clucked along, through the picturesque village with its gorgeous old-world church, its steeple a bit crooked toward the sky, over cobblestones and mud roads and then all the way to the Thompson Estate, a place that rippled with Marta’s memories. As she stepped from the carriage, she felt as though she floated through a dream she’d had continually over the years.
Perhaps on cue, due to some sort of act by God himself, the clouds parted over the large stone mansion and cast sunlight across it. The golden light reflected off the windows and across Laura’s gorgeous face. Laura looked as though she’d never seen anything more beautiful in her life.
“It’s entirely different to the mansions in Austria,” she said, her eyes like saucers. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“What did she say?” Aunt Margaret asked.
“She really loves your mansion,” Marta said. “It’s quite different from back home in Austria.”
Aunt Margaret lifted her eyebrows. “My! I cannot imagine what it’s like. I’ve seen the occasional painting before, of course, but lately, the way your mother has described it in letters…” She shook her head, seemingly disinterested.
The stablehand carried their suitcases into the mansion ahead of them. At the door, a bald-headed butler pulled open the door and bowed low.
“Good afternoon,” he said. “Welcome to the Thompson Estate.”
