‘I saw little of the town itself as we passed through – though bones weary with travelling made it known to me soon enough that most of the streets are cobbled. There were a few lights twinkling in little windows, though at one point the doors of the big inn in what appeared to be a sizeable market square opened, revealing inside a handsome interior and many well-clad, cheerful drinkers. The country is prosperous, of course, its position enabling it to trade with its powerful neighbours – Germany to the west, Russia to the east – and its command of a Baltic port giving it an advantage over both somewhat landlocked countries. As we went up to the castle through steep, wooded areas I could see the lights of the great palace twinkling ahead. By day it is a fairy-tale. Set on the side of a wooded mountain, it is all towers and crenellations, the roof tiles in red. The palace looks south over the town of Norvius while from the west battlements one has a view of the thriving port, full of craft of all kinds. As we ascended towards the castle I began to smell the salty tang of the sea. The palace of Norvius has of course been much expanded over the hundreds of years during which it has stood on the same site. Fayinn’s simple wooden fortress no longer exists and would be useless if it did, for Kravonia’s enemies are now more powerful than the small, dark original inhabitants of Kravonia. They are the King of Germany and the Tsar of Russia. Kravonia has been at war since its beginnings. It seems a miracle that the nation still exists, even more miraculous that the same ruling family, the Osteires, is still in power after almost a thousand years.
‘In the castle gate stood my old friend Prince Rudolph, carrying a lighted torch in his hand. He greeted me cheerfully as I descended from the carriage and we walked together across a courtyard, deserted but for guards on patrol. We went through the huge doorway of the castle, across a hall the size of seven railway stations, lit by torches revealing walls covered with pictures and with the heads and horns of various animals hunted in the land. Then came a dizzying set of corridors and finally I was led to a small room where, I was happy to see, there was a bright fire and a meal set ready for two people – the Prince and myself. It was late, he said, far too late to be introduced to anyone, particularly my little charges, the Princesses Cunegonde and Ulrica, who are the pretext for my being here at all. They, I assumed, would have been asleep for hours – though when I met them next day I could see they might well at that hour have been anywhere, doing anything. So, after a meal I was almost too weary to eat, I said good-night to Rudolph and was led to a large room with a good fire in the grate, where I went straight to bed and slept before my head met the pillow.
‘Next morning dawned clear and I was able from my bedroom window to see the town of Norvius spread out below the castle. An illustration from a fairy-tale! There were large, gabled buildings, cobbled streets, a market square full of busy shops and stalls from which cheerful women in white aprons were selling their produce. In the bright sunshine I saw gaily uniformed hussars on their prancing horses, and laden carts coming into the town from the fields and orchards beyond. Suddenly, as I watched, the streets filled with children all going in one direction, towards a big red-tiled building where it was possible even to see the clapper of a bell going to and fro. It was at that moment that my bedroom door opened and in came a sturdy girl wearing the local costume, a big, embroidered skirt, with a pinafore, white stockings and black shoes. She carried a tray on which lay my breakfast, and told me that Chancellor Ristorin would come and collect me from my room shortly, so that I could go to the schoolroom to meet the young Princesses.
‘You will, I am sure, know of Ristorin by repute, Sherlock. A Russian by birth, he is the most trusted of the small court surrounding King Weland, Rudolph’s father. The courtiers, chiefly members of Kravonia’s small, sophisticated aristocracy, have in the past mistrusted this man, a Russian and therefore an enemy, the son of a Moscow lawyer, and therefore no aristocrat, but it is generally held in the councils of Europe that it is the vigour of Ristorin and the guidance of his master, the King, which have brought Kravonia forward and modernised, to some extent, the state. It is still an absolute monarchy, but King Weland and Ristorin together have amended many of its laws and practices. Nevertheless, Kravonia is still something of a phenomenon, a prosperous state with a well-educated middle class, yet ruled on medieval lines. And now to my meeting with the little princesses.’
It was at this point that Dr Watson lowered the pages from which he was reading and said, ‘My dear, I must have a whisky. Will you go on reading?’
‘Gladly,’ said Mary and stood to take the pages from him. As John sat drinking his whisky she began to read aloud Mycroft’s transcription of Charlotte’s letter.
Mary read: ‘Chancellor Ristorin, a man only in his thirties, I guessed, knocked on my door and with him I took the network of corridors, chambers, ante-rooms and staircases to the schoolroom where I was to meet my pupils. The Castle Norvius is built to no known plan. One minute you are going down a corridor in which classical statues stand in niches, next you are crossing a vaulted hall with a huge fireplace, totally unfurnished and giving the appearance of being the kind of room in which roistering Viking feasts might take place. Then you are in a room full of soldiers playing cards – then another corridor, small and narrow, will take you through a sitting-room in eighteenth-century style – another staircase leads, through a flagstoned room full of caged birds, to another staircase. Rooms, staircases, corridors – more rooms, more stairs, more corridors. En route I demanded of Ristorin a plan of the building. He laughed, calling me “bluestocking” and “English miss”. I responded by telling him firmly that if I was here on a sensible mission to help the Kravonian royal house out of a difficulty I had no wish to waste valuable time wandering the castle aimlessly trying to find where I wanted to go. This sobered him and he told me where the map room was, adding that no one had entered it for years so I might find it dusty and mice-ridden. Defensively, he then added that one man could not do everything. I agreed this was indeed true, but felt privately that a nation attempting to govern itself without once consulting its own maps might not be acting very efficiently. As we walked, though, from room to room, from staircase to staircase and corridor to corridor, I sensed Ristorin’s mind was on other matters. Since we already had a plan to meet at lunch to discuss the real reasons for my being in Kravonia, there was evidently another matter concerning him. We climbed a staircase into the turret room used as a schoolroom, and when we opened the heavy door to meet the little Princesses I realised what his anxiety had been.
‘A most horrible sight met our eyes. I know that you, Sherlock, are no lover of children, while you know that I, though perhaps a little more tolerant than you, am no rival to the Madonna in that respect. But the Princesses Ulrica and Cunegonde, aged ten and eleven, are certainly remarkable examples of the species “child”. When we entered the room a black cat of extreme size and emaciation stood spitting on the schoolroom table, while on the hearthrug in front of the schoolroom fire, in the bright light coming in from windows on three sides of the turret, the little Princesses, all rosy cheeks and blonde plaits, were torturing a dirty boy, evidently some palace servant. They had tied this barefoot lad, who wore only ragged trousers and a shirt, by his ankles and wrists and were now advancing a poker, which they had evidently heated in the fire, towards his bare, dirty feet. The boy, needless to say, was howling and writhing and pleading with them. Ristorin gave me one look of despair from his dark, intelligent eyes, then advanced into the room saying in a commanding voice, “Your Highnesses – your Highnesses. Here is your new governess, Miss Holmes. Please release your victim. Miss Holmes is English and you will shock and upset her and give a false impression of what you are like.”
‘Sulking somewhat, and not glancing once at me, the little Princesses undid the ropes securing their victim, who jumped up and took to his heels straight away. Cunegonde, the elder, then straightened the rug before the fire, put the poker back in its proper place and turned to look at me, shamelessly. Meanwhile R
istorin also shot me a glance as if to say, “There you are. This is what you have to deal with,” and speedily took his leave. I did not blame him. I entered the room, sat down at the table and contemplated my little pupils.
‘As I’ve said, Sherlock, we both know ourselves to be without sentimentality as far as children are concerned. As children ourselves I doubt if we were much like other children. I recall, for example, being taken to hear Mycroft addressing a crowd of eminent men at the Royal Society on the subject of Natural Selection when I was three years old, Mycroft himself being then, I suppose, ten or eleven. That he was capable of this was remarkable, but perhaps it’s extraordinary, too, that anyone thought it worth taking a three-year-old child to hear him. I understand that you, Sherlock, at the age of five invented gunpowder single-handed and blew up the summer-house. We all, I believe, were expected to read in two languages by five or six years old. Even so, as I looked into the eyes of Cunegonde and Ulrica Osteire I knew these were no usual children. The torturing of the unfortunate boy had not been a childish prank gone too far on one occasion – it was part of the pattern of their lives.
‘What looked back at me from the Princesses’ four wide, blue eyes was – I can think of no other term – evil. In their gaze was no sensibility at all. You will reproach me, Sherlock, for using that unscientific word “evil”. You will say, how would I define the word “sensibility”? Is it not merely a matter of habits and customs, the conventions by which we live? Can it be quantified, measured, weighed? I cannot answer you except to say that it is an awesome thing to look into the eyes of a fellow human being, old or young, and find no emotion, neither sympathy nor the opposite, nor any recognition of a common humanity, nor any possibility of a future relationship – nothing. Imagine staring into the eyes of a wild creature, such as a fox or a rat. Imagine that meeting of eyes where the only consideration on the part of the animal is whether one will attack it, or not, and whether it should react by fighting, or fleeing. That was the sense I had during my first contact with the Princesses Cunegonde and Ulrica of Kravonia. No wonder Chancellor Ristorin had been preoccupied on the way to the schoolroom. No wonder he had fled so hastily! He dreaded the moment when I discovered the shocking nature of my new pupils.
‘There was no help for it anyway – I had to begin my imposture and begin to act towards them as might a governess. The schedule dictated that history would be our topic for half an hour. The schoolroom containing, on shelves, a number of outdated textbooks and inaccurate globes, I set them to read aloud from a book of Kravonian history for children. They read fairly fluently from the first few pages, a eulogy of Kravonia and its beginnings all couched in most extravagant and vague terms. They then began to stumble and halt over the words. I concluded they had never got any further than the first pages, those they knew by heart, and became hopelessly confused when they struck the pages they did not know. To put it bluntly, they were almost illiterate. As we reached this point, the ragged black cat, as if on cue, sprang from its position on the table straight at my face. Only by leaping back as I saw it come at me, toppling my chair to the floor, did I evade it, and I suspect a woman less suspicious of her pupils than I was, and perhaps older and less nimble, might well have been so badly injured by the beast that history lessons would have ended well and truly that day. However, as the animal, missing me by a hair’s breadth, landed askew on the floor, I scooped it up and flung it from the door, which I slammed.
‘“He is our little pet. We have had him from a kitten,” sobbed Ulrica.
‘I merely remarked, “I think he had better stay outside the room until lessons are over,” and, as the enraged animal howled and clawed outside the door, I set my ignorant pupils to copying letters into a book and reading simple words from a child’s primer. They did this reasonably well, though sulkily. At one point I asked Cunegonde, who had flung down her pen and was staring gloomily at a blotchy page, “Do you not wish to grow up to be an intelligent and well-informed woman?” She responded by bursting into giggles and saying, “No – I want to marry the Tsar’s son and be the Tsarina.”
‘“The Tsar has no son,” said her sister.
‘“There will be one when I want him,” Conegonde told Ulrica.
‘If I had not already made some gloomy guesses about what I was up against with these girls I might have dismissed this as childish fantasy. Alas, I could not do that.
‘Three further hours of dealing with the abysmal ignorance of the daughters of the House of Osteire – and with their delight in their own stupidity – convinced me of what I already suspected. I am not cut out for a governess. I was more than relieved at midday to set them a little task for the afternoon and discharge them.
‘A servant came and took me to the small but magnificent room in which I was to take lunch with Prince Rudolph and Chancellor Ristorin. There was one arched window in the wall – the rest of the room was lined with elaborately carved amber, baroque and extraordinary and bathing the entire room in a beautiful yellow light. There were four places set at the table in the middle of the room, and as Prince Rudolph, the Chancellor and I assembled King Weland himself entered. He is a tall man, like his son, with fair-grey hair and a neatly cut beard and moustache. His eyes are blue, but even as he greeted me I saw in them a blankness and a kind of weariness which was quite upsetting. His politeness was exquisite, but mechanical. I assumed that the death of a dearly loved wife following the birth of his last child, Princess Ulrica, had damaged his life irreparably.
‘We had almost begun our meal when the door burst open and a woman dressed in a beautiful blue velvet gown, diamonds at her throat, came in at speed, apologising for her lateness. She is a tall woman with a great deal of golden hair heaped on her head with artful artlessness and a face of amazing beauty. She is about thirty years old and her best feature is two blue eyes, dark-fringed, not unlike those of the young Princesses – and, I was surprised to note, just as distant and empty!
‘It appeared that, in spite of the courteous way in which Prince Rudolph smoothly arranged a fresh place to be laid for the lady, she had not in fact been invited to the luncheon. The King introduced me. She is the Countess Seraphine, sister of the late queen and the person in charge of the rearing of little Cunegonde and Ulrica, her nieces, of course. This provided a reason for the empty eyes of my young pupils, but I did not believe it was a mere family characteristic, something inherited, like the shape of a foot or nose. No – that was not the reason, as I’m sure you, dear Sherlock, will agree.
‘She apologised for her lateness, though, as I say, I am not sure whether she was really expected. “I was with my little nieces,” she explained disarmingly, “and their praise of their new governess detained me.” I was not deceived – I’m sure those girls dislike me – and I wasn’t sure if she was in the plot to pass me off as a governess, so I said nothing except that I had enjoyed our first lesson. “The pleasure was on both sides,” she responded, while we scrutinised each other and tried not to let it show. I felt she suspected my disguise and was trying to work out if my dull clothes and spectacles were truly those of an English governess. I, meanwhile, was studying her to see if she were the person I sought. I think I satisfied her, more or less, that I was who I purported to be. In turn she satisfied me that she was the individual I sought; though much mystery remains. (Sherlock! This affair is much more complicated than I thought it would be – your impressions and conclusions, please!)
‘We were served by footmen who were in scarlet breeches, white stockings and black shoes. Everything was in the best of style, as it might have been in one of our own noble houses. But it became plainer and plainer the Countess Seraphine was an uninvited guest for the conversation between us did not touch at all on the cause of my visit to Norvius. From this I inferred that the Countess was unaware of the real reason for my visit. We spoke of similarities and differences between Kravonia and Great Britain, of Kravonian trade, of the education of young women in Britain and of the delights I could exp
ect when the great Christmas celebrations at the Castle Norvius took place. A famous singer was expected from Denmark to sing the carols in the cathedral. There would be music, dancing and feasting. I did not say I both hoped and expected to be back in England by then. Were the Christmas customs the same in all parts of Kravonia, I asked? (You will understand why, Sherlock.) No, King Weland told me, for in the forest of Western Kravonia, the more backward part of the country, the peasants celebrated Christmas on 21st December, with many curious, unusual rites, and no sermons from the pulpit or other persuasion would make them do otherwise. At that point the Countess Seraphine turned the conversation to the prospects of the young Princesses entering Oxford University (most unlikely unless things improve, I’d say).
‘Later the King excused himself, saying he had matters of state to attend to, and after a dessert of strawberries from the palace hothouse, with the strong sweet yellow wine of the country, I, too, stood up, saying that I proposed to follow the custom of my country by going for a short walk. Chancellor Ristorin gallantly offered to accompany me to show me the town. The Countess stared but, as I’d guessed, did not suggest coming with us, for it would have been beneath her dignity to be seen strolling the town with Ristorin and the English governess. Not that my afternoon walk was in reality a walk – as soon as we had left the dining-room to its yellow light and Prince Rudolph and the Countess to the yellow wine, Ristorin took my arm and, urging me through rooms and corridors, took me out into the courtyard to the stables. Within moments we were in a carriage and going uphill from the castle on a narrow road with pine trees on either side. “The palace is full of spies,” he said to me in an undertone as we drove. “We can talk privately among the trees without being overheard.”
The Strange Adventures of Charlotte Holmes Page 4
