The Florian Signet

by John Burke

  ‘The coward’s way out?’

  Jan stiffened. He stood erect, his right foot splayed outwards.

  ‘An officer and gentleman who chooses such an end is not regarded as a coward. The dishonour is wiped out. As it was wiped out here, some years ago. In this very room, a captain of horse who had been guilty of misusing a fellow officer’s lady –’

  ‘If you set such store on being an officer and a gentleman’ – I accentuated the words as scathingly as I could – ‘you will at once set me on my homeward journey.’

  He was so still, and for such a long moment wrapped in thought, that I half believed he might be seriously considering this. Then he said:

  ‘Two days ago I offered you my hand.’

  ‘Because you wanted to wheedle information out of me.’

  ‘If you have none, what should I have coaxed from you? And if you have some, should it not be spoken honestly between us?’

  ‘You have no wish to marry me. You have tried to impose on what you hoped would be a gullible, easily led girl who –’

  ‘That is an insult. I am a man of my word. I asked you to marry me because I dearly wished you to marry me. And you shall.’ Again his sincerity was unmistakable; and more frightening than if his advances had been those of a coldblooded schemer. ‘You will marry me.’ It was a statement which brooked no argument. ‘Since meeting you I have discovered for the first time what a woman can mean to me. There has never been one like you before.’

  ‘I will believe none of this.’

  ‘You shall have all the proof. All the proof you need . . . when you understand that a wife must have no secrets from her husband.’

  ‘Jan, I have not agreed to marry you. And now I am sure it is out of the question.’

  ‘“Sure”? You speak always of being sure. If you are so very sure of everything, tell me: where is Anton Florian?’

  ‘Now you’re talking in riddles.’

  ‘Liar.’ He said it almost respectfully. ‘Leonora, you have been faithful to a very bad dream. I admire your constancy, but I must make you see how misapplied it has been. If it were your own country, how would you regard rebels who roamed the land preaching the overthrow of your Queen and government, demanding so-called rights which have been forgotten for hundreds of years?’

  ‘Not forgotten,’ I said, ‘or there would not be so many people so determined to win them back now.’

  ‘You speak of a petty minor aristocracy, using simple folk for their own ends. What do you think they really care for the Czech language and all this racial nonsense? They will allow fools to fight and die, if it comes to it, purely and simply so that they may be restored to their old estates and dignities.’

  ‘We shall never speak the same language. But you understand mine well enough. I ask you to let me go.’

  ‘So that en route you may make a sly visit to Count Florian?’ He kept his voice steady but stubbed his boot against a leg of the table. ‘Hand over the signet ring. I know you have it.’

  I lowered myself into the armchair and folded my arms. It had all gone beyond fear and beyond argument. Let him blandish or let him rant: I held the truth, and if he stole it from me it would cease to be true.

  ‘It must be a woman to go and find him,’ he was saying. ‘That I understand. So I find a woman to take your place. You have been tried too far, you have been too loyal. Give me the signet and you need know nothing further about it. It is none of your concern. When you are my wife I shall shield you from such intrusions.’

  I said: ‘You shall have no promises from me. I ask only that you let me go – and forget me.’

  ‘Forget? I have no intention of forgetting you. I shall keep you here so that there is no danger of that.’

  ‘My parents will be asking –’

  ‘Not yet. It will take a week or two before they wonder why they receive no letters from you, my dear. And longer before they go through the tedious process of making enquiries.’

  ‘They already know I am in danger.’

  Breath whistled faintly through his teeth. ‘That is so?’

  I had been on the brink of making a mistake. Attack was the best form of defence. I said:

  ‘Why did you murder Caroline?’

  He did not blench. ‘You have some irrational notions in your beautiful head.’

  ‘You murdered Caroline. I can guess most of what led up to it. But why did you have to kill her?’

  ‘If I were such a killer, are you not afraid to be here with me?’

  ‘No.’

  In his smile there was no doubt of his admiration; and, behind it, a mounting desire. ‘Leonora, my dearest, I have broken down the resistance of many men for military reasons – patriotic reasons. It could be much more rewarding to break down a woman’s resistance for reasons of love.’

  ‘You know no distinction between love and ravishment?’

  The answer was in his eyes. It was in the tremor of his fingers, the tremor of his whole body, eager for rape. But I saw also what an efficient, implacable torturer he must have been in the depths of those Imperial prisons where he had undoubtedly worked. At the height of his lust he could still persuade himself to wait. His threats were quiet and insidious, leaving everything to the imagination of his captive.

  He said: ‘Alliances are more commendable than conquests, I grant you. But where an alliance is rejected, one must assert oneself. I shall enjoy the campaign.’

  ‘You’ll win nothing worth the having.’

  ‘There I disagree. I shall enjoy it. And I think you, too, Leonora, you will enjoy it also. I will prove it. I will teach you pleasures you have not suspected. And,’ he said with an obscene fervour which sickened me to the depths of my being, ‘when your body has surrendered, you will surrender your mind to me – and will be at peace when it is done.’

  He was ready to leave. At the door, feeling for the heavy key in the lock outside, he paused and looked back at me with what could only be, odiously, affection.

  ‘Michael was not your cousin,’ I said, ‘and he was not mad. And I am not your slave. You are the mad one.’

  His gaze this time was calculatedly offensive, his eyes stripping every shred from me.

  ‘I can have your room searched for the signet,’ he said. ‘Your room and your luggage. And if it is not found, I shall ask you for it again.’

  ‘With no result.’

  ‘In which case I shall have you searched. In my presence. Unless you hand over the Florian signet, or tell me where its owner is to be found, no secret of your body will remain inviolate. The choice is yours, Leonora. Think about it, and decide which you prefer.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  Thin sunlight cast phantom shadows of the bars on the floor. In the distance the hoarse whistle of a train echoed down some remote valley. It was impossible that there should be such modern, matter-of-fact things as railways in the same world as this oppressive, feudal castle.

  I slumped in the armchair. It creaked, and a floorboard grated in reply. I was alone. I had nothing to read, no embroidery, nothing but my thoughts.

  They were not reassuring ones. Dominic and Michael must have been searching for me and Michael had walked into a trap. Dominic might still be trying to get closer, and the jaws would close on him, too.

  I was about to get up and, for want of anything better to do, pace to and fro in the confines of the room, when there was a louder creak. At first I thought it was a settling in the woodwork due to the cold. It was repeated, a scraping within the wall, behind the panelling. Rats in the walls: not the sort of company I craved.

  Just as repellent was the thought that there might be a spyhole in the panelling. That inner passage might skirt this room, so that one of Jan’s minions could have been set to watch my every movement. This time I did get up, going to the window, turning my back on the room and any inquisitive gaze.

  The signet ring was a hard lump in the tight stitching below my breast.

  There was the scrape of a panel
opening. I took a deep breath, and turned.

  In an opening in the wall stood the Countess Lomnica. Already she had arrayed herself in such black as she had brought with her, and her face was unfathomable behind a dark veil.

  I said: ‘I am sorry. So deeply sorry about Michael.’

  ‘You never met,’ she said vaguely. ‘After all, you never met.’

  ‘No.’

  She took a step into the room as if sleep-walking. ‘It is my fault. Now I pay for it. Even without knowing the full story, Michael was unhappy that I should traffic with such people. If he had known all, he would have been so ashamed. As I am.’

  I kept my tongue. If she had known that in the end he had known, or surmised, all, she would have blamed herself even more bitterly.

  ‘You have been initiated, then, into the secrets of those passages,’ I said.

  ‘By one who was here before this creature was even born.’ She was less vague, more forthright. ‘But we must keep our voices down. No one must know I am here with you.’

  I could see only the sombreness of her eye sockets through the veil. For all I knew she was still under Jan’s thumb. In her grief she could still be forced to carry out his further instructions.

  I said: ‘Why are you here?’

  ‘To undo the harm I have done you.’ She reached the table, and I slowly approached it from the other side, so that we stood facing each other. ‘He knows you carry Count Florian’s signet ring,’ she said, ‘and why you carry it.’

  ‘I know he thinks so. Why? What grounds has he for supposing such a thing? And why,’ I shot at her, ‘did he murder my cousin?’

  I had thought this might bring her to a halt; that she might fumble a few excuses, and give her purpose away. But very straight and unfaltering she said:

  ‘He did not let me into every detail of his plots and connivances, but he had to tell me enough to explain what I must do for him. I gathered that when Caroline Talbot was married, announcements in the London papers were reported to Vienna by our Embassy. The authorities had learnt some while before that a Caroline Talbot had married Count Anton Florian, who was now dead. Was this the same young woman? When it was confirmed that she was, Schendler was sent to England to approach her and find the names of her late husband’s associates. The tone of the seditious pamphlets now being circulated again, the methods of their distributors and the way demonstrations took place over a wide area: all showed the Florian touch. The authorities thought his group must have been reconstituted. I was pressed into supplying Schendler with references and introductions as my nephew, Jan Sieghart, who died eighteen months ago. And so he came, through you and your parents, to the woman he was seeking. He wanted only the names of this reconstructed group: she had lived secretly under their protection, must have known many of them, especially his main accomplices. But somehow he learned that the touch was that of Florian himself. The leader was not dead. It must have come as a shock.’

  It had indeed. I remembered Jan’s face that day of his return to Ely from places he had pretended to visit – for now I had no idea which places he had in fact visited, which ones he had used only as an excuse or to fill in time, and how often and furtively he had returned to harass Caroline and wear her down. That particular day must have marked his discovery that the Count was still alive. I had brought the news secretly from Bohemia to her, and in some perverse fit of pique or defiance she had passed it on.

  But she did not have the signet; and even if she had been prepared to assist in the pursuit and removal of her inconveniently resurrected husband, she could hardly ask me for the ring, having so strenuously denied all knowledge of him to me.

  Perhaps that was why she had sent for me that fatal evening: to confess to her earlier marriage and to plead now for the ring.

  But if so, if she had been prepared to collaborate with Jan . . .

  I asked the insistent question again. ‘Why did he kill Caroline?’

  ‘Of that I know nothing. But he will not hesitate to bring about a death, or a humiliation – torture or terror of any kind – to serve his cause.’

  ‘You told me,’ I reminded her ironically, ‘that he was a man of great strength and integrity.’

  ‘Unhappily that is so. He is true to his own beliefs. Dedicated to them. Such men can be admirable – or fearsome. He is one of the hated ones. Hated by his captives, and hated by the local folk because with him there is no discussion, nothing but impersonal subservience, no mutual affection as there was within the old family.’

  ‘The old family?’

  ‘The Florians.’

  ‘Here too?’

  My voice rose in amazement. She touched a warning finger to her veil and pressed it back against her lips.

  ‘After the dispersal of the Florian estates, my husband received Fasanenburg as a bounty for his financial services to the Archduke; and Kirchschlag went to the Schendlers.’

  ‘Of course.’ What had briefly startled me as a coincidence was no coincidence at all. ‘I see. That’s another reason for your working together.’ I kept it down to an undertone. ‘Neither of you wants the Florian group to achieve any of its ends. Florian himself must not live to be reinstated one day.’

  She shook her head. The quavery dignity she had always managed to preserve was now fatalistically steady. ‘That was true. It is no longer true. I allowed myself to be bullied into luring you here from the safety of your home so that my son should be restored to me – his youthful follies would be overlooked, and he would inherit Fasanenburg after me. Now he is dead and there is nothing. It is a judgement on me.’

  ‘You ought not to be here. If you are suspected of turning against –’

  ‘The man may do as he wishes with me. I will go no further. Watching you, since you returned to my country, I have come to hate myself. I despise the part I have played in this foul charade. But your courage, your determination . . . you put me to shame. You will never be broken.’ Before I could find an answer, if there was one, she turned away towards the dark gap in the panelling. ‘All that remains for me is to see you safely out of here.’

  I thought, incongruously, of my luggage packed and ready. But Jan had locked the door from the outside as he left, and the thought of finding a way undetected to my room through this narrow passage and then bumping the cases down it again was even more absurd.

  We pulled the stiff panel shut, and with a lantern held high the Countess led the way. I must have come this way with Jan, but could not remember the particular flight of steps.

  How many rooms did the passage link: what chance was there of some servant, or one of Jan’s men returning, hearing the scuffle of our footsteps? It was best not to dwell on it.

  We emerged into the family pew above the chapel. I peered down. It seemed a long drop to the heavy flagstones.

  Countess Lomnica touched my arm. At one side of the pew was a small stairway, no larger than a set of library steps. We went down backwards, holding on to the flimsy rail. She led me across the nave. From the gloom the dusty figure of St Florian leaned out, quenching flames which the dust had turned into tongues of smoke rather than fire.

  There was a door in the wall. The iron handle groaned as the Countess turned it. Through the opening we looked out on a small strip of churchyard enclosed within a low wall. Beyond was the steep plunge of the dry moat.

  ‘It will be safer not to use the path under the wall,’ said Countess Lomnica. ‘It leads too close to the main gate. You are young. You can go down into the moat, and climb up the far side.’ She glanced along the face of the castle wall. ‘Here it is not overlooked.’

  She slipped the black cloak from her shoulders, and draped it around mine.

  A cold breeze leaped like invisible spray from the moat.

  ‘You must come with me,’ I protested. ‘You can’t stay here.’

  ‘I shall stay.’

  ‘When he finds I have fled –’

  ‘He can do nothing worse to me. Nothing. I will stay with my son.
’

  The Countess lifted her veil and kissed me. I clung to her for a moment and then she pushed me gently towards the wall. I clambered over and poised myself above that dizzying drop.

  The descent was easier than it looked. Tufts of grass and jutting rock provided good hand- and foot-holds. I scrabbled a cautious way down, glad that there were no longer any bears kept in the moat.

  Although there were no windows in the scarp of wall above, I expected at any second to hear a shout from somewhere, and to see men tumbling down from both sides. But I reached the bottom; and floundered almost up to my knees in an unflowing river of snow; and began the ascent of the other slope.

  At the top I took one look back at the little church on its ledge, the high blank wall, and the little turrets and crenellations I could now see over it, on the inner rampart. Then I walked away.

  I wondered how far I could hope to get in this fashion. The snow was chill underfoot, striking up through my boots, which were not those I would have chosen if I had been expecting to set out on a long tramp.

  There was a wide swathe of open country which I hastened to cover, longing for the concealment of the woods ahead. It did, however, give me a chance to seek a few landmarks. The rise of hillside to my left was surely the one leading, after a dip and another climb, to the hut where I had left Dominic? I had to have something to aim at. And from such a vantage point, from the edge of the slope falling away below the glacial lake, I ought to be able to find some indication of a railway. There must be something closer than the main station at Budweis: a branch line, a halt, a small town, something.

  I trudged into the dark wood. If I struck upwards to my left I could perhaps cut a corner. And men on horseback would not be riding on such tricky inclines, or scraping their way through such closely packed trees. I would see Jan’s patrols before they saw me.

  After ten minutes I could not be sure that I was still heading in the same direction. I stopped, trying to get my bearings in a shadowy glade.