The House of War and Witness

by Mike Carey

  A slovenly and aged servant, without livery, answered to Klaes’s knock and admitted him into the meister’s presence, announcing him as ‘a soldier from them at the big house’. Then he withdrew, without taking Klaes’s greatcoat.

  The situation was somewhat ridiculous from the first. The mayor was awaiting Klaes’s arrival in an infinitesimal drawing room whose walls were a vile green decorated with flowers painted directly (and without skill) onto the plaster. With the mayor were his wife and son, and all three of them were dressed as if for church, coats included. They stood as Klaes entered, and though the officer gave a precisely executed bow it was not mirrored by the mayor, who seemed to expect a handshake or shoulder-clasp of some kind instead. They manoeuvred around each other inconclusively. Then Klaes had to request to be presented to the lady.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ the mayor said, making a show of slapping his own head with both hands. ‘My manners! Forgive me. This is my wife, Kethe. And Jakusch, my oldest son.’

  Klaes ignored the son as he paid proper compliment to the mother, taking her hand and bowing low. She curtsied reasonably well. Perhaps she had passed some of her youth in more civilised parts. To the son, he nodded perfunctorily. Then he addressed the meister again. ‘I am pleased to meet you all,’ he lied. ‘And I’d like to thank you for this kind invitation. It’s good of you to open your doors to us so hospitably.’

  He put a subtle but definite stress on the ‘us’, making the point that he was there not as a private citizen but as an officer and representative of Colonel August’s detachment.

  ‘The pleasure is all ours,’ Dame Weichorek assured him.

  Klaes almost asked her what pleasure she meant, since this enforced socialising was as far removed from pleasure as anything he could imagine. But he stopped himself in time. If a man set down among boors gave himself permission to be boorish, civilisation would not last long.

  A serving girl entered the room just then. She was a mousy creature of perhaps twenty years, in a linen bodice and skirts the colour of a rain-washed potato sack. A woollen waistcoat, dyed blue, provided the only leavening of colour. All the same, in this unassuming peasant garb she was considerably better dressed than her mistress. At least she didn’t look as though she was aping her betters.

  While the maid hovered, waiting to catch her master’s eye, Klaes took off his greatcoat and handed it to her. She seemed startled, but bobbed and retreated with the coat, returning a moment later without it. Out of the corner of his eye Klaes had seen her hastily toss it over the newel post at the bottom of the stairs. Presumably she had been coached but recently in how to receive formal company, and he’d thrown her off her stride.

  ‘Shall I serve the brandy now, Meister Weichorek?’ she asked.

  ‘Thank you, Bosilka,’ the mayor said. ‘Please do.’

  Brandy? Before the meal? And the lady of the house drinking with the gentlemen? Curious. But this wasn’t Vienna. It wasn’t even Wroclaw. Klaes was not so impolite as to let his surprise show in his face. He accepted a glass of brandy from the girl – she brought them in one at a time, so presumably the useful item known as a tray had somehow not won favour yet in these parts – and offered a toast to the archduchess.

  It was dutifully echoed all round. Then the mayor downed his brandy in one gulp, as though it were schnapps.

  When Klaes took a sip of the liquor himself, he received his first pleasant surprise of the evening (or perhaps his second, for the serving girl had a tolerably pretty face). It was not schnapps. It was a truly fine distillation, and burned on his palate with an agreeable heat.

  They drank standing up because the lady had not taken her seat again and that meant that Klaes couldn’t either. The mayor asked where the company had last served, and Klaes was able to phrase his answer – Beograd, which he called Belgrad after the manner of the French – without revealing that he had not even joined August’s muster until eight months after the end of the Turkish debacle. That sat ill with him, still. He had been cooling his heels at Ledziny, waiting for his transfer from the engineer corps, while that crucial action played out a day’s ride away.

  They talked about the rout of the Turks and the glory of the late emperor, stretching the facts of that wretched campaign as far as could be done by men and women of Christian conscience. Then the topic somehow shifted to the impressive achievements of the Weichoreks’ many children (Ingela could ride a horse, though she was not yet seven, Huls knew all his catechism by the German rote, and so on) until the serving maid came in again to tell them that dinner was served, saving Klaes from incipient despair.

  The dining room, at least, was of a reasonable size. After the cupboard they’d just left, it seemed cavernous. All the same, it was not quite big enough for the dining table, which abutted the far wall and so turned the room into a passageway with two elbows in it. They took their seats to either side of the great barricade, the meister and Klaes facing the wife and son. More brandy was served with the soup, and was a welcome distraction from it.

  Above their heads while they ate, a wooden chandelier as big as a cartwheel creaked and shifted frequently. It was suspended, Klaes noticed, from a single rope of no great girth. As it moved, dust and occasional flakes of encrusted wax were dislodged from it. He was genuinely afraid that the wheel itself would at some point follow them down.

  As yet Klaes had seen no sign of the suspicious behaviour that August had told him to watch for. But that came in due course, as soon as the conversation turned to the reason for the company’s arrival. ‘Surely,’ the mayor said, ‘a commander such as yours, who gravelled Sultan Selim on his own ground, should not be spared from the front lines to come down to a quiet place like Narutsin.’

  ‘Well,’ Klaes replied, happy enough to lay down his spoon, ‘the front lines must change when the enemy changes, Meister Weichorek. The Turks have had a taste of Austrian mettle and they’ll remember it. King Frederick is another matter.’

  The three faces presented to Klaes shared a single look of blank incomprehension.

  ‘Frederick II,’ Klaes expanded. ‘The king of Prussia.’

  ‘The duke of Prussia,’ Dame Weichorek hazarded.

  Klaes laughed and nodded, thinking for a moment that this was a patriotic sideswipe at the house of Hohenzollern’s outrageous ambitions. But then he saw that it wasn’t. Astonishing as it seemed, these people had somehow failed to notice Prussia becoming a kingdom, even though this had happened practically outside their gates (outside their gateposts, rather, since gates were a commodity they seemed to lack).

  ‘No, I mean the king,’ he said. ‘King Frederick. Your neighbour across the river, whose kingdom now consolidates western Prussia and Brandenburg, along with Cleves and the county of Mark. Doubtless the list runs even longer now, for the Hohenzollerns have the charming habit of snatching up any small fiefdom that’s left unattended. And now he conspires against your archduchess.’

  Klaes paused to allow his hearers to voice their outrage at the presumption of the Prussian ruler, but the three faces remained serene and mildly questioning. ‘Frederick of Prussia has declared that he will not honour the Pragmatic Sanction,’ he said bluntly.

  ‘Will not honour it?’ the mayor echoed. ‘Really? That’s troubling, to be sure.’ After which silence descended.

  ‘You … do know what the Sanction is?’ Klaes demanded.

  The mayor waved his hand in a circular motion. ‘Not in … all of its details and ramifications. The broad outline, yes.’

  ‘The broad …?’ Klaes’s reserves of diplomacy suddenly petered out. ‘By God, sir, it forms the basis of your allegiance to your archduchess! Surely your priest, if nobody else, will have explained to you …’ Klaes stumbled into silence. Of course, that was the nub of the matter. Maria Theresa’s succession to the thrones of her father had a direct and critical bearing on who would become the next Holy Roman Emperor, and in Catholic Austria, where Klaes had been raised, the clergy had been preaching nothing but the Pragmatic
Sanction throughout Charles’s last sickness. But these Silesians belonged to the Protestant communion, like Klaes’s own family. If they went to church at all, (a doubtful enough proposition in a place of this stamp), they’d hear no sermons about the Sanction. Its importance to the Holy Roman Empire was a hundred leagues outside their experience and as far again outside their interests.

  Klaes breathed hard. He was tempted, albeit briefly, to conclude that the mayor and his family, and by extension this whole benighted village, deserved the ignorance in which they wallowed, that in this instance sin and punishment came all wrapped together in one package. But he was a man who revered learning – more, if truth be told, than he loved either God or country. He could not allow himself, even for a moment, to be on ignorance’s side.

  He tried to explain.

  ‘You surely know that the marriage between His Imperial and Royal Highness Emperor Charles, and Elizabeth of Brunswick, produced no sons. Under Salic law a daughter cannot inherit the crown, so our late emperor issued an edict, the Pragmatic Sanction, which suspended the rules of succession and provided our beloved archduchess with a means of obtaining the throne.

  ‘Charles VI devoted his last years to securing agreement to the terms of this edict. Why did you think he entered the Turkish campaign with Russia in the first place, if not to guarantee Russian support for his daughter’s claim? The majority of the European powers signed it in the end, but since his death there are some who seem all too ready to break their word.

  ‘This was two months ago,’ Klaes concluded, unable to hide his impatience. ‘In October. You didn’t hear of this?’

  ‘Obviously we heard of the emperor’s death!’ the mayor exclaimed. ‘God rest him. Eorlfrit Schander – he’s the town clerk over in Stollenbet – read the funeral orations out to us in church, just as they were declaimed in Vienna, and only two weeks later. He rode to Wroclaw and back to collect the pamphlet, along with an urn containing some of the emperor’s ashes, for which we paid by public subscription.’

  The emperor had been buried, not cremated, so heaven alone knew what was in the urn these yokels had bought. Ashes raked from a fire, no doubt. Klaes was trying to think of some tactful response when the serving girl, Bosilka, came in with the main course, a side of pork from which she carved at the table. It smelled good and proved to be excellent, with crisp crackling and very tender flesh. Bosilka leaned over Klaes to serve him potatoes, then again to serve him shallots and a third time to spoon gravy over his meat. He was conscious of her proximity, and very conscious of her scent, which was compounded both of strong cooking smells and of lily of the valley. She smelled like a banquet in a meadow. Tallow candles were in the mix too, however, and Klaes’s imagination rebelled against the image of a meadow with a candelabrum in it.

  ‘Frederick’s father,’ he persisted, ‘then king of Prussia, signed the Sanction along with everyone else. Yet now the son, this new Frederick, claims that it’s illegal, and that his father’s pledge is annulled de ipso facto. He declares that Maria Theresa can stand as neither queen nor archduchess. He has encouraged France and Britain to forswear their own oaths and go to war to restore the true line of succession – which reveals his motives more clearly than anything.’

  ‘Why?’ Bosilka asked.

  Klaes was nonplussed. He turned his gaze on the serving girl, who blushed deeply. ‘What?’ he demanded.

  ‘I meant …’ the girl faltered, ‘why does he want other kings to go to war too? Will that help him?’

  Klaes glanced sidelong at his host. The spectacle of a servant venturing to speak while waiting at her master’s table was somewhat astonishing, but it was for the master rather than the guest to take her to task. The burgomaster, however, seemed to be waiting for him to answer.

  ‘Well … it provides a diversion,’ Klaes said. ‘If Her Highness’s armies are engaged with a major power to the west, they’ll have fewer resources to spare if there’s a simultaneous incursion here in the east.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Bosilka said, curtsying to him. ‘I’m answered.’ She took up the bowl of potatoes hastily and retreated to the other side of the table, keeping her eyes lowered as she served Dame Weichorek and her son. Klaes could not forbear from staring at her, and she was clearly aware of his gaze. He was outfacing her, without meaning to. With a conscious effort, he looked away.

  Bizarre beyond words, he thought. As though distinctions of social status and degree meant nothing here, and the limits of the empire were the limits of the civilised world. And yet the question the girl had asked had been a pertinent one, and she wasn’t pretending, as the meister and his wife were, to be already fully conversant with matters that had only just been brought to their attention.

  ‘So you think that there’ll be war?’ the son, Jakusch, asked now. ‘That Prussia and Austria will fight?’

  Another pertinent question. ‘No, I think they won’t,’ Klaes said, gratified to come at last to the crux of the matter. ‘Because France and England will ignore King Frederick’s exhortations and stand firm to their oaths. They would be shamed to do anything else. And Prussia will not provoke us without that cover, because without that cover she would be crushed.’

  Klaes downed the last of his brandy, and waved the empty glass at the serving girl to get it filled. It took a moment or two to get her attention, but once he did she curtsied and left the room at a rapid trot.

  ‘Nonetheless,’ Klaes said, turning a solemn frown on the mayor, ‘Her Highness is not complacent, nor is she unaware of what is at stake for the most vulnerable of her subjects. She has sent us here – and other units like us, up and down the frontier – precisely in order to ensure that Prussia makes no hasty move against Silesia. A show of strength, if you will. To remind King Frederick that the imperial lion has both teeth and a temper. You must see us as a ward, or a prophylactic. Our presence precludes war.’

  Which was exactly one half of the truth. The other half was that the archduchess knew very well how negotiable loyalties became at the borders of the empire. Austria adhered to the Catholic communion; both Prussia and Silesia were Protestant powers. A few soldiers on their doorsteps would remind these people who they belonged to, in case they should be misled by the accidents of geography or religious conscience. But it would do no good at all for Klaes to rehearse such matters unless his host raised them first.

  Tactfully, he changed the subject. ‘Certainly none of us are complaining about our posting,’ he observed with false cheer.

  ‘Pokoj,’ Dame Weichorek said, misunderstanding him. ‘Yes, it’s a lovely house. Such a shame that it’s fallen into neglect these past years. When I was a child, the family was constantly in residence. There were thirty servants then, all coming in either from our village or from Stollenbet. And it was all we could do to keep them supplied with meat. Do you remember, my love?’

  She touched her husband on the arm, smiling. He grimaced slightly and looked away. As well he might, if Klaes had understood this exchange correctly.

  ‘To keep them supplied?’ he queried. ‘Why did this task fall to you, Dame Weichorek?’

  The woman shrugged her shoulders. ‘Why, who else would it fall to? My Berthold was the butcher. The best in all these parts for pig and calf meat, and an expert slaughterer besides. He used to do the markets in Stollenbet and Grünberg, didn’t you, my love? Until the old mayor died and we decided to go into politics.’

  The meister blushed deeply. Klaes almost laughed at his discomfiture. The great tree of his pretensions was planted in no more than an inch of earth. No wonder he let his servants talk back to him!

  The girl, Bosilka, was at Klaes’s elbow again, with a decanter. He nodded his thanks as she poured for him, wanting to show her that he was sorry he’d embarrassed her earlier.

  ‘It’s a shame,’ he said blandly. ‘Where is the family now?’

  ‘Oh, in Pozdam,’ Dame Weichorek said, rolling her eyes. ‘This is their country seat, but Baron Oppenberg’s wife – his seco
nd wife, I mean – is Posener born and bred, and can’t live without her Polish friends and her Polish fashions and her Polish theatre. When Ilsa was alive, she loved Narutsin and wanted nothing better than to spend all her time here. But now …’ She sighed mournfully. ‘I think it’s more than ten years since they came back even for so much as a weekend in the hunting season.’

  It must be far longer than that, Klaes thought, judging by the decay and disorder at the house. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘the colonel and his wife will probably need another maid to shop and cook for them. And we’ve three married lieutenants, whose wives will quite likely take on help for their toilet now that we’re in quarters for the winter. It’s a good opportunity for …’

  He faltered into silence. Bosilka’s shoulders were heaving, and tears were running down her face. She’d moved on to refresh the mayor’s glass but now stood frozen, the decanter at half-mast like the flags at Schönbrunn on the day when the public was finally admitted to the royal family’s grief. Damning us to that fucking woman, Klaes’s father had cursed. And wept as Bosilka was weeping now.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Klaes said, speaking to the mayor though his words were meant for the girl. ‘If I’ve said anything to cause hurt or offence, it was unintended.’

  ‘It’s nothing,’ Dame Weichorek said. ‘Silly girl. Go on, Bosilka. You’re excused.’

  And the talk passed to generalities. From whence did Klaes’s family hail, and how did he come to be a lieutenant in the army? Was August his first commander? Had he left a sweetheart at home?