by Eva Ibbotson
‘I thought you would like to know, Your Highness,’ said Maxi’s valet, easing the skin-tight trousers of the Hussar uniform over his master’s calves. ‘Eight-thirty in the village hall.’
Maxi, standing passive in his corset, turned mournful eyes on his servant. ‘Yes, you did quite right to tell me, Franz. All the same, it’s a devilish business. I have to go to this concert.’
Melancholy gripped him by the throat. If there was one thing that really got him down it was a lieder recital. Those awful, pigeon-chested women in purple satin or green silk with trailing scarves and an idiotic, wispy handkerchief dribbling from their clasped hands. The way they closed their eyes and felt the music . . . the arch way they translated the stuff if it was in a foreign language. And then, just when one thought it was over, the torture of those interminable encores.
Well, he would endure it for Putzerl’s sake. He would sit beside her until she was softened up and then they would slip away and let the dogs out for their evening run and he would propose. But did God really have to arrange things so that on the very same evening, down in the village, they were showing Broken Blossoms with Lilian Gish?
He stretched out his arm for the frogged tunic whose buttons had kept Franz busy for the best part of the afternoon. ‘You’re going, I suppose?’ he enquired of his valet. ‘Yes, Your Highness.’
Maxi’s brows drew together, indicating thought. There was a quotation that fitted here. Something Latin and classy which the gladiators had said when they were about to go in among the lions and wished to salute those who were going to have a nice time and stay alive. But he could not quite remember how it went, and anyway it was way above Franz’s head. Arranging a strand of his perfectly pomaded hair to frame his duelling scar, Maxi went down to dinner.
Two hours later he sat in the picture gallery, keeping a vacant place beside him for Putzerl. Though the room was crowded, no one attempted to commandeer the chair, for the romance between the Prince of Spittau and the Princess of Pfaffenstein was most dear to everybody’s heart.
‘Ah, keeping a chair for Putzerl, are you?’ said Monteforelli approvingly, hobbling past, and even the Archduchess Frederica deigned to smile at him.
But a hush had fallen and the concert was about to begin. Where on earth was Tessa? The Rumanian diva came in – dressed in purple satin as Maxi had foreseen – and behind her the Magyar, reasonably shaved for once. And then . . . good God, it was unbelievable! Tessa, carrying a pile of music and seating herself beside the Magyar at the piano. She was going to turn over for him! She was going to be there all evening, miles away, out of reach!
It was too much. There were sacrifices that one made and sacrifices that were just plain silly. The first notes of Strauss’s ‘Morgen’ were just floating over the audience when Maxi reached the door and fled.
Fifteen minutes later, having run down the Narrenweg – which, with its thirteen wayside shrines, wound round the pinnacle of rock on the far side of the drawbridge – and hurried along the road which skirted the lake, Maxi entered the Pfaffenstein village hall.
The place was packed but the white screen at the far end was still mercifully blank. Old women he had known since childhood called greetings, the men saluted – but without servility, for this was a meeting of acolytes in which rank, for a while, was set aside.
Maxi walked down the aisle looking for an empty seat. Near the middle of the hall, he stopped. Could it be? It was! In a rose-pink dirndl with a snowy apron and blouse, sat Heidi Schlumberger.
‘Will you permit me to sit with you, Fräulein?’
Heidi lifted a rapt countenance. The Prince was in his Hussar uniform, the whole image overwhelming.
‘Oh, yes, Your Highness. Please.’
Maxi slipped into his seat.
‘Have you seen it before?’ she enquired shyly. ‘Broken Blossoms, I mean?’
‘Five times,’ said Maxi, waving a careless hand.
Heidi nodded. It was right that a man of such magnificence should have beaten her. ‘I’ve only seen it four times,’ she said meekly. ‘I’ve brought an extra handkerchief. That part where she looks up and sees the Angel of Death . . .’
‘And where she puts her hand on her heart like this,’ said the Prince, suiting the action to the words.
‘Yes.’ They fell silent, in tribute to the miracle that was Lilian Gish. Then, ‘What about Intolerance, have you seen that, too?’ asked Heidi.
‘Seven times,’ said Maxi proudly. ‘At Spittau I made them show it every night.’
‘Oh! You can do that?’
Maxi nodded. ‘We had Less Than The Dust for two whole weeks,’ he boasted.
‘Ah, Mary Pickford!’ The Littlest Heidi sighed. ‘I’ve seen Pollyanna eight times. I went every afternoon in Vienna, sometimes twice.’
Should he tell her how much she resembled the famous heroine? No, not yet. ‘And The Little Princess?’ Maxi enquired.
‘I like that even better, I think.’
‘Yes, that’s the very best of all.’
Maxi cleared his throat. ‘You don’t . . . by any chance . . . like cowboy films?’
‘But I do! I absolutely adore Tom Mix. When he rises in his stirrups like this,’ said the Littlest Heidi, lifting her entrancing bottom marginally from the seat, ‘and then shades his eyes with his hand – so . . . And in Child of the Prairie, where that Indian crawls out from behind the rock and he doesn’t even look but just whips out his gun!’
Maxi stared at her. A twin soul! It was incredible. But now the lights were going out. The lady at the piano began a stirring march. Not only Broken Blossoms but a Chaplin two-reeler first! He glanced down at Heidi’s hand nestling like a plump, delicious fledgling in the folds of her apron. Could he? Dared he?
Diffidently, flutteringly, in the dusk of the hall, the small hand crept closer. With the questing tentative grace that distinguishes the born cocotte, it raised itself a soupçon. Maxi grasped it. Then the screen flashed to life. The little man in the baggy trousers came marching down the street – and in the village hall of Pfaffenstein they were no longer prince and ballet girl and peasant but only a rapt and adoring audience, welded by laughter into one whole.
Tessa rose very early on the following day. There was a visit she wished to pay before she left, and while the rest of the company still slept she was approaching a small wooden house in a clearing in the forest, a mile or so behind the castle.
She knocked and entered. The room was small but spotless: a stove with a bench round it, a limewood table, a spinning wheel – and in the carved bed in the corner an old lady, as old as time itself. Her filmed eyes seemed almost sightless but she knew her visitor at once.
‘Your Highness!’ The smile transformed the wrinkled face. ‘You’re back, then. It’s true what they said.’
‘Yes.’ Tessa sat down on the bed, took the brown, transparent hand into her own. ‘Yes, I’m back, Grossmutterle, and I’ve brought you some nice things to eat so don’t turn into a wolf and eat me up.’
The toothless smile came first, then the whole body shook with laughter. Laughter which turned suddenly into a grimace of grief.
‘You’re going then, Your Highness? The castle is really sold?’
‘Yes, but it is sold to such a nice man, Grossmutterle. You’ll like him very much.’
‘Foreign, they say?’
‘Yes, but he speaks German like a native. He’ll be a good master, you’ll see.’
The bent shoulders rose in a faint shrug. ‘Maybe. But without you . . . without Your Highness . . .’ She was crying now, the easy, utterly justified tears of old age. ‘Well, I’m glad to have seen you once again. Let me kiss your hand.’
But the old lady did not get a hand to kiss. Tessa’s arm came round her, she was hugging her. ‘Don’t cry, Grossmutterle! Ah, please don’t cry!’ begged Tessa.
When she came out, her own eyes too were wet and she did not for a moment recognize the figure on horseback coming along the bridle path. When she d
id, she drew back, but it was too late. Guy had seen her and turned his horse aside.
‘Good morning.’
She looked up at him, sitting easily but entirely without the sartorial trappings of horsemanship, astride the tall, black mare. It was the first time she had seen him since the incident of the bear and at the memory of the things she had called him – albeit in Serbo-Croat – a blush came to her cheek. Trying to conceal it, she said quickly, ‘I didn’t know you rode.’
The wrong remark again. His brows rose. ‘Oh yes, even bastards ride sometimes. I found it a useful way of getting about when I was abroad. And you? Have you been paying visits?’
‘Yes, I’ve been to see my father’s old nurse.’
‘To say goodbye?’ He was close enough now to see the tear stains on her face and, dismounting, he began to walk beside her.
She nodded. ‘There are a lot of people like that, Guy . . . people who’ve lived here all their lives.’
He looked up quickly. He had used her Christian name from the start, but this was the first time she had called him Guy.
Now she had begun to talk about Nerine, saying how glad she was that Nerine would be there to take over the visiting. ‘It’s the people who live in the isolated places: there’s an old woodcutter in the next valley who is completely paralyzed – a most marvellous man, so wise. The factor knows them all, of course; she has only to ask him.’ And as Guy was silent she flushed and said, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t mean to interfere.’
‘You’re not interfering.’ They walked on for a moment along the cone-strewn path. ‘Will you come back?’ he asked after a while.
‘No.’
She left the word bleak and unadorned and Guy was silent, accepting her decision. If Nerine was to take her rightful place as mistress of Pfaffenstein, Tessa had to stay away. Guy had not failed to notice that wherever Tessa appeared, engaged in however menial a task for Witzler, she was greeted not only by the salutes and curtsies due to her rank, but by smiles which lingered long after she had gone. It was not only the inmates of the castle, it was the whole village, all her people, that the Princess of Pfaffenstein held in the hollow of her hand.
‘Perhaps it’s as well,’ he said now. ‘Because I mean to make considerable changes.’
She turned her head enquiringly. ‘What sort of changes?’
‘I can’t stand toys,’ said Guy. His face had the taut, absorbed look that David and Thisbe Purse knew all too well. ‘This place must pay if we’re to live here even for part of the year; it must work.’
‘Yes,’ she said eagerly. ‘But how, the forests are not very productive and—’
He shook his head impatiently. ‘No, no! Forestry and agriculture will help, of course, but that’s not enough. But there’s tungsten in the rock, did you know? In the Stielbach valley. I had the geological report yesterday and I’ve just been over to look. I intend to mine for it.’ He waited for her protest, but apart from a quick intake of breath Tessa was silent. ‘The main deposits are on the far side of the spur so you won’t see it from the castle. But, yes, though I shall make tree-breaks and site the workings carefully, there will be a gash in the hill. Yes, I shall spoil the beauty of the countryside. I happen to think that it would be better for your people to have independent jobs instead of bowing and scraping to the owners of the castle, but I’d do it anyway because I can make it pay. So you see, it’s a good job you won’t be here.’
‘Yes,’ she said quietly. ‘It’s a good job I’ll be out of the way. But not because of that. I think you’re right: jobs must be made that are not to do with feudalism or the land. My father would never see it, but if I had known how to set about it, I would have done it too.’
They had reached a fork in the path. The wider track led back to the castle; the narrower, mossy and overgrown, plunged back into the woods. Tessa paused, hesitating, seeming to make up her mind.
‘Have you got a few moments more?’ she said shyly. ‘There’s a place I’d like to show you.’
Guy smiled. ‘Yes, indeed. Nerine gets up late and frankly I can wait to be reunited with some of my guests.’
‘We’ll leave her here, then,’ said Tessa, patting the mare, and they hitched the bridle to a tree and took the narrow path back into the heart of the woods. The forest was denser here; boulders covered with moss like green velvet seemed to swim in the darkness; sudden shafts of light turned the bright toadstools into exotic jewels and from a great, jagged pine, a cuckoo called.
‘You know what the Jesuits say,’ said Tessa, ‘that if you give them a child for the first seven years of its life, you can have it for the rest of the time because it will already be theirs?’ And as Guy nodded, ‘Well, I think it’s like that with landscape. What you know and love when you’re a small child is always the way a landscape should be. For me, it will be the woods if I live to be ninety. But my grandmother was always homesick for the sea. The proper sea, with tides and wind and rain. She didn’t count the Mediterranean or the Baltic – no tides, no waves.’
‘Who was she?’
‘Her father was the Duke of Bewick. She lived near the Scottish border on the coast.’
‘Yes, I know it.’ A great, gaunt, wind-lashed pile, Bewick Castle, the lair of king-makers and Mercian rogues. He had visited it from school once, as a child. ‘It’s the same with me. My first outings with Martha were all to the Northumbrian coast and you can keep the mimosa and the lemon trees.’
‘It’s where one would go back to die, I suppose,’ said Tessa.
The path had been growing ever narrower and more overgrown. Now they pushed through the last of the encroaching trees and with a sigh of satisfaction, Tessa stopped.
They had come out in a clearing of unsurpassed and Arcadian loveliness. The golden light of morning streamed over the emerald grass and lit the clusters of gentians and starry white anemones. Dragonflies skimmed over a stream that danced over iridescent stones and paused to make a still, deep pool on which the leaves of water-lilies quietly swung. A single, ancient crab-apple trailed a golden tangle of honeysuckle through the candelabra of its branches.
But Tessa was looking for something, searching the ground. Kneeling, now, to part a clump of tiny trifoliate leaves, so exquisitely wrought that the peers of England have taken them for their coronets.
‘Yes,’ she said happily. ‘It’s a bit early but some are ripe.’ And carefully, absorbed like a child, she picked the small, flecked barely scarlet berries and held them out to him. Wild strawberries – the most prized, most fragrant and heart-stirring fruit in the world.
‘In Sweden,’ she said, rising to stand beside him and speaking very seriously, ‘they have a word for a place like this. It’s called a “smultronställe”. A “wild strawberry place.” A place like that is special, it’s the most special place there is.’
Guy looked down at the berries she had tipped into his hand. Their scent, subtle yet piercing, seemed to overwhelm him with its sweetness.
‘Only it isn’t just literally a wild strawberry place,’ Tessa went on. ‘A smultronställe is any place that’s absolutely private and special and your own. A place where life is . . . an epiphany. Like that very quiet room in the Kunsthistorisches Museum where the Vermeers are. Or that marvellous bit where the flute plays that golden music at the beginning of L'Après-midi d’un faune.’
‘The nave of King’s College chapel at Evensong,’ said Guy.
‘The place in the Prater behind the hunting lodge where the first scillas come in spring.’
‘The garden act of Figaro.’
‘The Lippizzaners doing a capriole, in the winter, when there’s no one there.’
It was very quiet in the clearing, the murmuring of the stream the only sound.
‘You must bring your children here,’ said Tessa. ‘But never, never anyone you don’t love.’ Unaware of the implications of her words, she bent her head and touched one of the berries he still held cupped in his hand. ‘Eat!’ she admonished him.
&n
bsp; But Guy, suddenly, was in another smultronställe. Martha Hodge’s small, dark kitchen in Newcastle – the smell of gingerbread in the oven, the kettle on the hob. A place where the obstinate, confused boy he had been had tasted his first wisdom and goodness and certainty.
‘Oh, God!’ thought Guy, overcome by longing for that uncomplicated world – and ate.
11
Guy spent the morning, on the fifth day of his house party, performing a task he had meant to attend to days earlier: writing to tell Martha Hodge about his engagement and his great happiness.
‘. . . The wedding,’ wrote Guy in his large, looped hand, ‘will be here at Pfaffenstein at the end of October. I know how you feel about “abroad”, Martha dear, and about travel. However, I wish to make it absolutely clear that there is no question whatsoever of my getting married without you. I shall send Morgan or David to bring you here, or I shall come myself if I can get that wretched business with the Treasury wound up by then – but come you must . . .’
Nerine, too, was attending to her correspondence. She had written exultantly to Mama, to Uncle Edgar, to her father’s cousin Clarence Dimcaster, and most importantly, to the aunt who was an Honourable, Aunt Dorothy. But she had not yet written to Lord Frith.
Nerine’s anguish after her walk in the forest had been misplaced. Both her yellow satin and the dress she meant to wear for the opera comfortably cleared the mosquito bite, and Guy’s lovely surprise was safe and sound. Now, lifting her head momentarily to observe that the bow on her polka-dotted muslin blouse was still uncrumpled, she pondered. She ought, of course, to tell Frith about her coming marriage. It was not as though she still had the slightest doubts about Guy. On the other hand, poor Frith, sitting alone in his northern fortress while his pipers marched round his solitary table, was a sad case. Frith really adored her. Perhaps it would be rather unkind to say anything until the knot was tied between her and Guy. Fate could be so unexpectedly cruel. If anything should happen to Guy, with his habit of flying about in dangerous aeroplanes or driving very fast in high-powered cars, well, she could still possibly make poor Frith the happiest of men. Yes, a friendly note simply saying that she was extending her visit to Austria would be best. There was never any point in inflicting unnecessary pain.
