The Florian Signet

by John Burke

I thrust the ring at him. ‘If you will not believe me, take the signet yourself and pass it to Count Florian and tell him his wife is dead. Let me be rid of it.’

  ‘I can tell him nothing. I know only who the next man is.’

  ‘Then simply pass on the message, through the next man and the one after that, however many there may be, that the Countess is dead.’

  ‘If what you say is true, you must explain it only to the Count.’ Radek blew out a breath as gusty as his bellows. ‘If I am wrong to trust you, your friends will play unpleasant games with me – if they take me alive.’ But he had made up his mind, grudgingly. He turned full face towards me. ‘So. I find what we must do now. It is so long, we expected word before now and it will not be easy. You must wait.’

  ‘Not for too long?’

  ‘I will get word to you.’

  ‘It may not be possible for me to visit you at a definite time. Next time, I may not be so lucky.’

  He wiped his hands on his deerskin apron. ‘If you come here again, I do not know you. Understood? You wait until you hear. If anybody asks about you or accuses me, I do not know you. You wait to be spoken to.’

  ‘But who will get in touch?’

  ‘I can say nothing. You wait three days, maybe four days. There will be a way.’

  It seemed too indefinite. Before I could protest, he balanced his hammer where it stood, took up the bellows, and began ferociously blowing up the fire. Dry heat scorched my face. I backed away. When I had reached the doorway, with the glow still burning my cheeks while icy breeze ruffled the ribbons of my bonnet, he delivered a parting shot:

  ‘There will be a message for you. A message of some kind. Do not look for it. It will come when it is ready. In the meantime be a tourist. Go everywhere, so that when you need to go somewhere it will not be too apparent.’

  The shrewd eyes belied the slowness of his gait and speech.

  Leaving, I walked to the corner and looked up the slope. There was no sign of the Countess. I crossed the snow-flecked street, made a circuit of a back lane, and passed some squawking geese on my way back.

  Countess Lomnica was walking down towards me.

  ‘You find it a pleasant little place?’

  ‘Very quiet,’ I said.

  She inspected both sides of the street. ‘I fear there is no coffee here. No little pâtisserie, alas. You have seen all you wish to see?’

  ‘It did not take long.’

  On our way back, over the crown of the hill and past the church, down and onwards to the turn of the valley, she began to chat casually about Jan. Such a fine young man, such a credit to the family tradition. She was so glad we took to him in Ely, and so glad he had wanted to bring me back to Bohemia.

  ‘He is not a man to bring an attractive girl here on an idle whim.’

  ‘He has been most considerate.’

  ‘I must not speak behind his back, it would be indelicate. But he has confided in me, and I think you are not unaware that he would like you to remain here.’

  ‘I have given little thought to –’

  ‘Of course, of course. I will not meddle. But I trust you will take him seriously when the time comes. He is a man in whom you may have confidence. A man in whom you can confide.’ She gave me a strange, reluctant sidelong glance. ‘In whom you should confide. He thinks only of your happiness.’

  Once past the cliff on the bend of the valley, we had the castle always in view ahead, a jagged etching of uneven cornices and buttresses, gate tower and high watchtower, tilted roofs and church spire. The Countess said no more but walked with her head down, perhaps following up her prayers or meditations. For myself, I had plenty to occupy my mind.

  *

  The Kirchschlag library provided the maps which Jan had promised, together with some musty topographical books in musty German. There were fewer architectural volumes than I would have expected. The most recent additions to the shelves seemed all devoted to military engineering, and spread out on the broad top of a map chest was a sectional drawing of a needle-gun.

  ‘If the Prussians taught us one lesson above all others at Sadowa,’ said Jan, ‘it was that courage and patriotism are not enough. They must be reinforced by modern science and engineering.’

  It sounded cold and steely, unlike the exchanges we had shared in Ely Cathedral and the by-ways of the King’s School. I could not help asking: ‘What’s happened to all those other interests of yours, in the Renaissance and the old English abbeys and Christopher Wren?’

  He looked defensive for a moment, then snatched at my hand and kissed it.

  ‘How solemn I sound! The atmosphere here reminds me of too many things. Old things, and things which are best forgotten.’ He still held my hand. ‘I will be very English, as I was in England. Fresh air! We will go and drink it in, and since you want lectures on architecture again I shall take you to Prachatitz, and the ruins of the Eagle’s Tower. You can be ready in half an hour?’

  This was more like the Jan I had known. That day and the next he whirled me about the countryside, from a hilltop chapel to a tiny walled town, from crumbling fortresses whose bastions were still studded with cannonballs to a lonely sawmill from which loggers rode their precarious rafts downriver to the plains. Always two silent attendants rode some way behind us; and I noticed that cottagers and men at work in the forests eyed them with dour mistrust.

  On the longest trip, taking in two historic townships, we went by carriage. On two shorter trips in the immediate neighbourhood Jan supplied me with a gentle dappled mare, whose steady jog-trot I enjoyed after the first uncertain twenty minutes, during which I concentrated more on keeping my balance and finding the most comfortable position than on studying the scenery.

  Snow lay crisp where it had fallen, but there were no further showers yet. We crunched over roads and paths, shielding our eyes when we emerged from darkling forest trails on to the brightness of the higher slopes.

  Strolling around a village I stopped to examine a shop window while Jan walked unknowingly on. Perhaps here someone would take the opportunity to whisper a message or slip a note into my hand. But there was nobody. Riding along a shaded track I let myself fall behind Jan, checking that our two followers were still out of sight round a sharp bend. Still there was no word. I was still no closer to Florian.

  In the room I had been given, sheltering under the eaves at a gabled corner, I wrote a letter telling my father of the places I had explored and the buildings I had seen, knowing what would most interest him. So far there had been no musical experiences to report on. Like so much else in Kirchschlag, the minstrels’ gallery in the main hall did not appear to have been much used in recent years.

  I sat close to the log fire as I wrote. The high-ceilinged room soon diffused such warmth as there was. It was a tasteful but not what you would call homely corner. With my pen poised for a moment, I thought of living always in a place such as this, of being châtelaine of the castle; and it was not just the draught below the door curtain which made me shiver. Could it be restored to life? Could one imagine it as bustling and jolly and contentious as our little warren in Ely, with a master like my father mumbling and chuckling in one room, my mother singing from another and leaving innumerable things on the stairs for us to fall over? Or as warm and welcoming as the Warrington household had once been, before Mrs Warrington died – before a younger Mrs Warrington stepped over its threshold?

  I was tempted to conclude the letter by saying that I might come home sooner than had been anticipated. But that would only alarm them. They would think that Jan had been importunate, that we had quarrelled and I was alone and unhappy in a strange land; and my mother would fret and fuss and give no one any peace until I was home.

  Rather than ring for Betka, who had managed to convey by sign language that she would be in the laundry, I went down the marble stairs in the hope of finding a servant who would know how to speed the letter on its way.

  My footsteps struck an eerie echo from the spacious hall.


  Father had once told me of a visit he had reluctantly made to a large ducal estate in the Midlands. There it was a rule that servants should never be seen unless directly summoned. Gardeners must conceal themselves behind shrubs if any of the family looked out of a window. Maids encountered in a passage must at once turn and face the wall, remaining absolutely motionless until alone again. Here, as though by ancient custom, there was something of the same sequestered feeling: servants existed to keep things running, to be available when needed, and at all other times to be strictly shut away. They were military ciphers, I thought, rather than local folk assimilated into the family and its ways.

  Perhaps if there were truly a family here it would soften the austerity and create the warmth which had for too long been lacking.

  ‘A letter for the post?’

  Jan had appeared in the hall from a side door which plopped and sighed back into place.

  I reached the bottom of the flight and held out the envelope.

  ‘To my father.’

  He reached for a bell-pull, and within a matter of seconds the one-armed man who had presented him with a telegram on our arrival came scurrying through the smallest door, hidden under the rise of the stairs.

  Jan watched the envelope being carried away.

  ‘To your father,’ he said. ‘Telling him you are enjoying yourself, I trust?’

  ‘What else could I possibly say?’

  Instead of taking this as a passing pleasantry, he seemed to turn it over in his mind. Then his eyes became as sad as when he had sung that sentimental melody at our musical evening at home; yet his voice, as then, grew harder.

  ‘Leonora . . . I had felt – it was my dear wish – that we might draw closer when you reached Kirchschlag. I will not pretend I thought only of your welfare when I suggested you should come with me and Aunt Sophie. Certainly I thought it good for you to come away. But selfishly I thought it good for me, also. And I hoped that for both of us –’

  ‘Jan, please –’

  ‘You are holding something back. We talk, and I know you think of something different. Instead of drawing nearer, we are growing further apart. What have I done wrong?’

  I was stricken. The guilt I had been trying to suppress came seething up. What right had I to use him like this? If the atmosphere in Kirchschlag was not what I had foreseen, if Jan’s manner had undergone a change since we reached his own home, that was not his fault but mine.

  I stammered: ‘I’m sorry. So sorry. It’s not that I . . . no, I mean . . . no, you mustn’t think we’re growing apart. I don’t want that, truly I don’t. I want . . .’

  But it was impossible to tell him, or to be sure myself, what I wanted.

  Perhaps for him to make the decisions, as he had made the decision in Ely to cut through all objections and bring me here. Perhaps for him to override all my scruples, dig out what he so rightly guessed was there, and then continue as we had meant to do – both of us, hadn’t we? – from the start.

  ‘Leonora, will you forgive me?’ The two of us were lost in that stony, echoing hall. Even Jan seemed upset by the chill impersonality of it. ‘To be so thoughtless! I bring you to my country to forget the sadness of your own country. But how heartless of me to expect you to forget so quickly. Forgive me.’

  ‘I fear I’m dull company.’

  ‘You are all the company I ever desire. And I desire it for ever. But no, don’t answer, do not speak. Again I am selfish and clumsy.’ He made that flamboyant gesture across his heart which had so delighted my mother. ‘Shall we try the infallible English medicine once more? Fresh air! We shall drive to the monastery of St Cyril.’

  ‘That would be lovely.’

  I hoped I sounded convincing. Even after his justifiable reproaches my first ignoble thought was one involving further deception. We were to go out of doors once more, where a message might reach me. In any case I would be following the blacksmith’s instructions to go everywhere – and without arousing Jan’s suspicions, since he was my self-appointed escort.

  This time we set off in a quite different direction. The carriage was drawn painstakingly up the steep hill which protected the castle from the west wind, and then ran down a long slope towards a distant cluster of buildings. It took an age before the little group began to grow and to separate into individual walls and roofs and towers. Then it acquired the dimensions of a small town rather than a monastery, set within what might have been taken for a moat but showed itself, from the embankment along which we were driving, as a chain of fish-ponds.

  We turned a twisted corner and began the descent to the valley. In the loop of the road was a settlement of charred houses, open to the sky, the blackened timbers speckled with snow.

  ‘A fire?’ I thought of Jan’s remarks about forest fires and prayers to St Florian.

  ‘Brigands.’

  ‘Here – in this century?’

  ‘They call themselves liberators. Nationalists. Young Czechs. Anything but the true name – outlaws.’

  Slowly we circled the gutted ruins of ordinary, simple cottages.

  I said: ‘But why should an isolated little spot like this have suffered?’

  ‘You in England have your folk heroes, as we have. Your Robin Hood. So romantic, like the Bohemian rebel Jan Kozina. But at such sights’ – he gestured at the ragged skeletons of what had once been homesteads – ‘one loses sympathy with these romantic figures. Legends are inspiring in the chimney corner. When the chimney and the whole house are set on fire . . . do you still love Robin Hood, or the liberators, or the true believers, or whatever name they choose to bestow on themselves?’

  ‘But why should they ravage their own people?’

  ‘Because their own people do not want them. And if the people to whom they preach freedom do not want such freedom, then the ideologists burn down their homes about their ears. You do not have such problems in England, I think.’

  ‘Not for many a decade.’

  ‘Pray they do not return.’

  We jogged on our way.

  Not caring to meet his gaze, I stared out of my window. On a knoll to our left, overlooking the spread of the monastery, I thought I espied two horsemen on the edge of a clump of pine trees. A lurch of the carriage, and they had been swallowed up by the trees.

  They could be the emissaries I was waiting for. Or they could be a figment of my imagination, something I was willing into existence.

  We reached the level and clattered up to the gate in a long encircling wall. Before the coachman could climb down to open my door, the inevitable two outriders closed up behind, and one sprang from his mount to turn the handle and bow as I stepped out.

  From a high, turreted campanile a bell began to toll one repeated, silvery note. Jan flipped up the cover of his fob watch.

  ‘I think I will speak first with Brother Jerome, if he can be fetched. He has always proved most hospitable. I shall not keep you more than a few minutes.’

  Jan strode to the two heavy gates and stood to one side as his attendant tugged the heavy iron hoop of the bell-pull.

  I sauntered away a few yards, round the far side of the carriage and past a line of poplars above one of the ponds. The second horseman looked round and cautiously turned his mount; but the air was still, I was moving at a leisurely pace, there was nothing to be feared from the wide stretch of vale and embracing hills.

  Where the monastery wall swung almost at a right angle, I stopped and looked across the water at the knoll we had seen from above.

  At first I thought I was once again confusing the tree shapes with that of a man on horseback. Then I saw that a dark shape was indeed detaching itself from the background, racing down the brief slope, heading for a gap in the ponds. I glanced back; then strolled as languidly as possible out of sight of the gate, under the shadow of the wall.

  The drumming of hoofs became audible. If this was the messenger I expected, he was coming recklessly on as if to sweep me up across his saddle-bow and carry me
away to Count Florian.

  He leapt the narrow dam between one pond and another, and began to shout something at me. His pace did not slacken. Suddenly it seemed that he was intent on riding me down, and I flattened my shoulders back against the rough surface of the wall.

  He stood up in his stirrups, putting his head back like a man desperate for a gulp of air. Now I saw his face. It was impossible, yet could be no other.

  The rider thundering down upon me was Dominic.

  Chapter Eleven

  ‘Leonora!’ Two voices clashed on my name: Dominic’s as he raced closer, and Jan’s from the corner of the monastery wall.

  One of Jan’s outriders galloped round the corner past his master and swung to cut Dominic off. Dominic raised his arm as if in appeal to me – or to strike me down – but the other man was skilled in horsemanship and drove his mount against the flank of Dominic’s. There was a whinny, a scuffle of hoofs, and the two men were reeling away.

  The outrider drew a pistol from his belt.

  I think I screamed. I know Jan shouted something, but whether it was an order to fire or to hold fire I could not tell.

  Dominic reined in. His horse reared. He tried to turn towards me, but the horse tugged away, and the pistol was still threatening. The second of Jan’s men appeared, riding in at an angle to cut off his retreat. Dominic spurred away suddenly. The other two set off in hot pursuit. Now that it was on the move Dominic’s mount was fleet enough, and soon outdistanced them and made for the shelter of the trees.

  Jan came towards me.

  ‘Did you know he would be here?’

  I pushed myself unsteadily away from the wall. ‘How could I possibly? I can’t believe it. It was Dominic, wasn’t it – I’m not dreaming?’

  ‘It was Dominic Warrington, yes.’

  ‘Why should he come all this way? And follow us here?’

  ‘Follow you here,’ Jan corrected. ‘Plainly it was you he was after.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘You have no idea how he found his way here?’

  I shook my head helplessly. ‘I can’t imagine. It’s so incredible.’