by Mike Carey
Through Cilie’s stories I learned about the lives of her friends in Puppendorf: Sanne, who minded her little brother and sister while her mother was at our house doing the laundry; Jens the baker’s son, who rose at five every morning to help his father, and Irmal, who sewed clothes with her mother every day until the sun set. I had not realised before that other children, the same age as me, had to spend their days working. It troubled me. I had never before questioned the world or my place in it. But now it seemed wrong that Cilie, who was so clever, and so pretty with her black curls and dark eyes, had never been taught to read, and had only two dresses. She willingly learned her alphabet from me, but when I tried to give her a dress I had outgrown, which would have fitted her well, Cilie shook her head.
‘They’d laugh at me at home if I wore something so fine,’ she said. ‘Or else think I stole it, and have me whipped.’ That thought appalled me so much that I never suggested such a thing again.
My mother valued Cilie’s work and gave her more to do, until she became a part of the household. But all too soon I lost her as a playmate. My mother fell ill with a nervous complaint which confined her to bed; I was needed to sit and read to her every day when my lessons were over, and had no more leisure to wander around the house. Then my father left us to visit my brother, who was about to leave school and join the regiment. We had no one whom my father trusted to manage the house while my mother was sick, and after a struggle with himself he invited his cousin Gottfried and his wife from Westphalia to stay with us.
This Gottfried was my father’s nearest relative: a big, red-faced man and a soldier, like all the men in the family. His father had been a brother of our famous grandfather Gebhard. He had a great regard for family honour and tradition, and he looked around our house with awe, as if every wall and piece of furniture was a sacred relic. My father disliked him, considering him an upstart from an inferior branch of the family who had no right to affect the full name of von Schildauer. But his wife, Eugenie, was young and fashionable, and my father hoped she would be a welcome companion for my mother while he was away.
My mother, though, did not take to her. Eugenie had a view about everything, and began her stay in our house by taking my mother’s physician to task about her diet and medicine, and instructing her to exercise every day. When my mother pleaded exhaustion, she turned her attention to me. She put my hair into curl papers and tried to teach me French. I had sometimes been able to enjoy a few minutes’ talk with Cilie when she brought my mother her medicine, which she was trusted to mix herself. But cousin Eugenie, seeing us together, scolded me for time-wasting, and after that made a point of watching the preparation every day, whether because she doubted Cilie’s competence or to prevent us talking, I could not say. She had a sharp nose for any activity of which she disapproved, and sharp eyes which seemed able to seek me out wherever I was.
I had hoped that Gottfried might take up some of her attention, but while my father was away our cousin spent most of his time hunting or fishing in the woods around the house. He was an excellent shot, and the cook was kept perpetually busy preparing the grouse and hares he brought back. I was allowed to take my supper with my mother in her room, but one night, bringing our plates down early to save the maid the trouble, I overheard the two of them at the table.
‘… could live here very happily,’ Gottfried was saying.
‘But the child has been sorely neglected,’ Eugenie complained. ‘She has had hardly any education and is far too familiar with the servants. It would be a sad task to take her in hand as she requires.’
‘I’m sure you are equal to it, my dear,’ Gottfried replied with a laugh.
I must have learned discretion from Cilie, for I got by the doorway and into the kitchen without them noticing me. I used the back staircase to escape to my room, where I stayed awake until morning, praying that my mother might not die.
Perhaps God heard my prayer, for only a few days later we received news that Franz-Augustus was fairly settled with the regiment and my father was returning home. I greeted him with more joy than I ever remember feeling in his presence, and my mother gained heart enough to rise from her bed for the first time in weeks. Shortly afterwards our cousins returned to their home in Westphalia. But they had taught me a useful lesson: how quickly my home might become my prison. I began to look around for some means of escape, and the day after my cousins departed I went to my father and asked if I might be allowed to learn to ride.
I owed this idea to cousin Eugenie herself, who had proposed it as one of the measures needed for my improvement. Before she left she had said as much to my father, and now he agreed that I looked pale and had been too much indoors: a little healthy exercise would be good for me.
I did not enjoy the learning. It was hard to balance on a side-saddle, and the pony my father found for me was a stubborn little beast. But I persevered until I could canter around the park. In a few months I was allowed to ride through the woods or into the village, with Cilie behind me on a donkey as chaperone.
I had been to Puppendorf before, of course: we attended church there at harvest, Christmas and Easter. But then we always travelled by carriage, and apart from the responses in church and some how-do-ye-dos, I hardly needed to speak to anyone. Now I had to give an account of myself. Cilie’s friends, when I met them, were clearly as curious about me as I was about them. They were cautious at first: over-respectful to the young lady from the great house. I was shy and awkward, fearful with every word of revealing my ignorance. Their homes seemed dreadfully cramped to me. I did not know where to sit, or what to do if I was offered food. But as the weeks went on, we grew accustomed to each other. Sanne sold me cherries, and showed me how to pick the best ones. Casper, at the forge, gave me advice on how to manage my wilful pony.
And at last I saw Cilie’s home, and her father, whom I had never met. He was Bruno Mander, a wiry little man with a famously short temper, though I never once heard him shout at Cilie. Her mother had died when she was small, and she was his treasure. He was invariably mild-mannered with me as well, most likely out of respect for the great house. Maybe, too, he was flattered by the interest I took in his work, which seemed miraculous to me. The workshop behind their house had been set up by his great-grandfather and great-great-uncles, and he still kept some greenish jars and bowls from that time, which he called forest glass. At one time, he said, his family had employed as many as ten men from the village; now it was just two. When the furnace was stoked the heat in the workshop was overwhelming, but the three men, with their shirts open to the waist, walked through it unconcernedly, holding between their paddles, or on the ends of tubes, little globes of pure light. I never tired of watching them blow a shining bead into a balloon, twisting handles or stem with fine pincers until the shape was a recognisable object – but luminous, transformed.
These were years of contentment. I was growing up a sad disappointment to my mother: tall and gawky, with hair that would not curl and no aptitude for either embroidery or the pianoforte. But Cilie was as beautiful as ever, and as she grew more useful to my mother she came to the house more often. When I was thirteen, she became my maid, which meant that she had a new suit of clothes and two marks more each month from my mother, and I was able to see her every day. She was walking out with Jens the baker’s son by then, and putting away money for a wedding some time in the future, but we did not think much about the future in those days. I was newly released from my governess, and allowed more freedom than I had ever known. Every morning I would read with Cilie, and almost every afternoon, while my mother slept, we would ride to Puppendorf together. I was at peace, and had forgotten that peace does not last.
The next war was already growing in the north, and it sent its upheavals ahead of it. When my father was next at home I heard him telling my mother that his regiment would be moved before long: the Danes were once again laying claim to Schleswig and there must soon be fighting. Then a decree came that all single men below fort
y-five were to be conscripted. For once I heard this news before my mother did: the village was in a panic about it. And Cilie and Jens called the banns for their marriage the next Sunday.
Cilie wept to be parted from me, and I shed tears myself, but we both knew they had done wisely. When the recruiting men came round later that year, Cilie was already pregnant with their first child, and Jens was spared for a time for her sake as they had hoped he would be. But Casper, and Henek, and some thirty others, were marched away for three years of service.
Puppendorf became a different place. Without the young men’s labour, roofs went unmended and drainage ditches choked. It took frantic effort to cut, bind and safely store the crops before the rains set in. The following year the harvest was poor, and the year after that. People’s clothes began to get ragged. No-one turned down my old dresses now: they took them with thanks, and my mother’s too. One dress might make skirts for two children and a jacket for a third. I once saw a girl of no more than eight or nine dressed from an old morning gown of mine, leading a troupe of smaller children, two of them clothed in the same material. After little Katya was born, Cilie looked after the young children of neighbours who now had to do their husbands’ work. And Bruno, who had lost both his helpers, kept his workshop open only with Jens’s help, and had no customers but my mother and me.
So when the formal declaration finally came – it was in winter, more than a year after the men were taken – the war had already started for us in all but name. All that was added was a heavier burden of anxiety. Our family had more luck in one respect than the villagers: my father and brother were given a short leave of absence before the fighting. My father had been made colonel, and he was more animated than I had seen him for some time: proud of his new command and delighted that Franz-Augustus would be in his own regiment. I had not met my brother for two years, and saw him now almost as a stranger, trim and brave in his blue uniform, with a moustache and newly wide shoulders. He kissed me and declared I had not changed, but I thought he looked at me differently too.
I had a chance, after supper that night, to talk to my brother as I never had before. I asked him about his training and his friends, about the causes of the war (which it seemed he understood little better than I did) and about life in the army camp. I did not dare ask him how he felt about the killing that lay ahead of him. I remembered that he had liked sketching when he was younger, and turned the talk to that instead: might he have chosen to become an artist, I said, if he had not been a soldier?
Franz-Augustus seemed puzzled by the question. ‘This was always my duty,’ he said at last. ‘We don’t choose what we do.’
‘It’s not so bad,’ he continued, after a pause. ‘I have good comrades, and we’re well trained. We’ll stand together and fight for each other. In a battle, you know, that’s what keeps men strong.’
He had never been in a battle then. I don’t know who told him that piece of wisdom; I doubt it was my father. I hope it held true for him. A few days later they left together for Schleswig, my father as colonel of the regiment and Franz-Augustus as its newest ensign. And that spring we received a letter from the town of Sonderborg to say that my brother was dead. He had taken part in the storming of a fortress, the letter said, and had been hit by a musket ball. The assault had been a success, and the letter was full of words such as honour, triumph and heroism. It was not from my father.
My mother put the letter away in a drawer. I never saw her look at it again, though sometimes she would shut the door to her room and I heard her crying. She told me that she had begged my father to keep Franz-Augustus away from the worst of the fighting, and he had only said he would do what he could.
That war came to an end with the end of summer, and it was not till then that the wives and mothers in the village had their news. Eight of our men had died in the fighting or from wounds or disease afterwards. Five could no longer fight, and were brought back to us. The others had been sent to the barracks at Liegnitz to serve out the rest of their period of duty.
My father came home only once that autumn, to attend a memorial service in the village church for Franz-Augustus and the others who had died. He left us almost at once, saying that he was needed to oversee the training of the recently conscripted men. I suspected he could not face my mother and me. When he was gone again my mother seldom spoke of him, but left her room and came with me on my visits to Puppendorf, doing what she could to help the other bereaved women there.
The next war, two years later, was with the Austrians, who had been our allies against the Danish. The conscripting officers came round again to find the few men they could pick up: three boys who had been too young last time, and four married men. One of them was Jens. Cilie and I pleaded for him: he had two young children now. But Katya was a big girl of four, and Little Jens was nearly two and already running around. The officers said that Jens must go, that his country needed him. Cilie’s need seemed to weigh nothing in that balance. I wrote to my father, begging him to intervene, but he replied that there was nothing he could do, and that all of us must make sacrifices in times of war. I knew then that he was thinking of his own sacrifice, and that far from waking any fellow feeling in him, Franz-Augustus’s death had hardened him to the plight of others. In any case, by the time his letter arrived, Jens had been signed up and marched away.
He never came home, and nor did my father. The Austrian war was as short-lived as the one before, but it was enough to kill ten more of our men. Jens lost a leg to an artillery shell, we heard later. A surgeon cauterised the wound, but he died the same night. As for my father, we received a letter from the field marshal himself expressing his condolences for his death. His rank and age had made it impossible for him to fight in the front line – he was over seventy – but he had insisted on staying with his regiment and had died of cholera from an infection then raging in the camp. My mother, when she read the field marshal’s letter, turned very pale, but nodded her head, as if it were news she had long expected.
When the worst has happened, there is a kind of peace. Cilie became my maid again. Without his helpers her father had been forced to shut up his workshop, so she was supporting him now as well as herself. We found work for two other widows from the village in the kitchen and laundry, and all their children came to the house to play in the sculleries and the garden under the eye of Sanne’s eldest daughter.
We lived half a year like this, in calm if not contentment. And then, one summer morning, a young man presented himself at our gates and begged admission. He was a captain of the 6th named Hildebrand Eckert, handsome in a swaggering way, with great moustaches and a martial air. He said he had been my father’s adjutant, and had been with him at his death. He had letters from him to give us, and begged our pardon for his delay in bringing them.
He handed my mother a slim packet: my father had never been a great writer. Since Herr Eckert showed no inclination to go, she rang for Cilie to bring him a glass of wine, and retired to the parlour to read the letters, taking me with her. When she had finished she was whiter even than when the news arrived of my father’s death. She said only that she thought Herr Eckert might stay with us for a while, and gave me two of the letters to read.
In the first my father described Eckert as a very good fellow: of indifferent birth (as indeed, he said, his own father had been) but a fine soldier and devoted adjutant, who had been a support to him in difficult times. He went on to speak of the man’s exploits in battle. I turned to the second letter. The writing here was shaky, but the words had a fervency to them that I had never heard from him in life. He was ill, he said, and thought he might die. Eckert, whom he called Hildebrand now, nursed him with a son’s tenderness, and declared himself ready to do anything for him. He would ask Hildebrand to give his protection to us, his widow and orphan, should the worst happen. He commended us to God.
I looked up at this point. My mother was reading over my shoulder, her eyes full of tears. ‘Why should we need protection?
’ I demanded.
‘Dearest Dorothea!’ my mother said. It was a remonstration, and I fell silent.
So a guest room was made up, and Herr Eckert came to live with us. He behaved himself well. He was charming and attentive to my mother, and polite to me. At first his presence did not even constrain me much: I was managing most of the household by now, and had developed a routine that kept me out of his way. But I could not avoid seeing him as he wandered around the house. He looked at the walls and furnishings, I thought, rather as my cousin Gottfried had once looked: with admiration and longing; also with a sort of calculation. I never spoke with him except in the presence of my mother or Cilie, but sometimes I thought I saw the same calculation in his face when he looked at me. My mother, though, seemed happier and more at peace than she had been since my brother died, so I made no protest as weeks turned into months, and Herr Eckert remained with us.
I discussed most of my affairs with Cilie, but on the matter of Herr Eckert we said nothing to each other. I think loyalty to my mother kept us both silent, but I felt that Cilie did not like him any better than I did. I had been with her once when Katya and Little Jens, running in the garden, had nearly collided with Eckert as he took his constitutional. Nothing was said, but we both saw his recoil and the curl of his lip as he walked away.
He spent more and more time with my mother. He took over the handling of my father’s business affairs. He read to her and even mixed her medicine. And one afternoon I was startled to hear her call him by his Christian name.
