Lady of Fortune

by Graham Masterton

Effie watched a neatly-sliced haxe being served on to her plate, with red cabbage and roasted potatoes. She said, gently, ‘I think, Count von Ahlberg, that convincing you of Watson’s sincerity is the whole purpose of my visit, although I may not even have realised that myself.’

  After dinner, they sat by the fire in the huge ancestral hall, with its high arched ceiling and its regimental banners hanging from gilded poles. The 2nd Silesian Uhlans, the 6th Neumark Regiment, the 1st West Prussians, the Landwehr Infantry. Karl served them German brandy, and they talked of England, and America, and of music and dancing and art.

  At eleven o’clock, Mr Niblets pleaded exhaustion and indigestion, and said that he had to retire. Karl courteously shook his hand, and hoped that he would sleep ‘like a swine.’ Mr Niblets awkwardly kissed Effie on the cheek, but she forgave him because of the amount of wine and brandy he had been drinking. He noisly climbed the stairs, and waved to them from the galleried landing. ‘I wish you – sweet dreams!’ he cried.

  When Mr Niblets had gone, Karl sat down in his chair again and stared at the fire. ‘I’m sorry I was so dry during dinner,’ he said.

  ‘You weren’t dry at all. You were startling, if anything. I hadn’t realised how important this loan actually is.’

  ‘I should have been amusing,’ said Karl, shaking his head. ‘Your first night in Germany, and I talk to you like a professor of geography and politics. And look at you – you are so pretty.’

  Effie looked away. ‘You don’t have to compliment me,’ she said. ‘You will have your assurance of Watson’s commitment without flattery. You don’t flatter Henry Baeklander, do you, on the quality of his moustaches? Or the chancellor of the German Reserve Bank, on the wonderful size of his potbelly?’

  ‘No,’ smiled Karl, ‘you’re quite right. But, I suppose I have inherited my father’s personality. Too much seriousness, followed by too much frivolity.’

  ‘When did your father die?’ asked Effie.

  ‘Six years ago. A hunting accident. His horse put a foot in a pothole, and threw him off. He was dead by the time I reached him. I didn’t even have time to kiss him farewell.’

  ‘And your mother?’

  ‘I have a picture of her somewhere,’ said Karl, quietly. ‘I never knew her. She – died in childbed, bearing me. She gave up her life, so that I could live. I sometimes wonder why they didn’t kill me instead. That would have saved her, apparently, killing her baby. But she screamed at them, No! You must save my baby. She is buried here, in the grounds of the Schloss. My father is buried in Pomerania.’

  Effie said, ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.’

  Karl looked up at her. ‘You didn’t upset me. I feel wistful for my parents, if you understand what I mean. But not upset. The whole of Europe is boiling; and thousands of people are in risk of being swept away. The future is more important than the past.’

  They sat in silence for a minute or two, and then Karl suddenly said, ‘Can you dance?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Effie.

  ‘Would you like to dance?’

  ‘Of course!’

  Karl got up, and went over to the corner of the hall. ‘Look here! The very latest talking-machine! All the new purple-label Columbia records, which I shipped back from America! Here it is – Over The Waves waltz, by the Vienna Orchestra, still with the price on it – twenty-one cents!’

  Effie laughed. Karl furiously wound up the graphophone, and then placed the needle on the record. The hall was filled with the crackly, muffled sounds of an Austrian orchestra, lilting and dipping their way through one of the year’s most popular dances.

  Karl took Effie’s hand, and led her away from the fireside rug to the open floor. He bowed, and then he began to dance with her around the room, easily and fluidly, holding her at arm’s length, but leading her through the dance as if she knew every step precisely. And the miracle was that, even though she had never danced one of these Viennese waltzes before, his timing and his guidance were so immaculate that she danced as if she did.

  She said. ‘You dance marvellously!’

  ‘I was trained by the very best,’ he said. ‘My father used to insist that everything a von Ahlbeck did, had to be done supremely. I was taught by fencing masters from Prussia, riding masters from Brunswick, English tutors from Oxford. I can sing, swim, play the accordion, and speak five languages.

  ‘And you’ve never married?’

  ‘Married? No. Nearly, very nearly. I was engaged to be married when I was twenty-four to Baroness Auguste of Prenzlau. A beautiful girl, with an unquestionable pedigree, but, ultimately, a heart of ice. She betrayed me. That’s all I can safely tell you, without anger.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘There isn’t any need for you to be.’

  The record finished, and Karl put on The Blue Danube waltz. This time, as they danced, he held her closer, and they scarcely talked. Effie felt the wine she had drunk during dinner swimming in her head, and the hall around her seemed to revolve like the mechanism of a carousel. The sparkling fire danced past her eyes, then the military flags, then the staircase, then the door, then the fire again, around and around, until she leaned her head against Karl’s shoulder, against the black silk of his lapel, and smelled the mingled arousing scents of a gentleman, cologne, and tobacco and warm fresh perspiration.

  The graphophone, in need of winding, began to slow. The waltz slowed and drooped. Effie raised her head, and looked into Karl’s face. He was staring back at her as if he recognised her from some long-ago dream. They danced slower and slower as the record slowed, until it blurred to a standstill, and they were holding each other close in the centre of the hall, not moving, not speaking, both of them sure as lovers are always sure that the events which brought them together were deliberately arranged by fate.

  Karl lowered his head and kissed Effie on the lips, very slowly and with such educated passion that she felt the blood drain away from her face. She whispered, ‘I’ve found you,’ more to herself than to Karl; because she knew with the utmost certainty that after twenty-seven years of virginity she had at last discovered the man for whom she had been meant. There was silence, in the hall of the Schloss von Ahlbeck, but for Effie there could just as well have been the thunder of a mighty organ, and the clash of cymbals, and the beating of orchestral drums.

  Karl said, with great care, ‘Go to your room now. Have your maid prepare you for bed. I shall walk the dogs, and have a last glass of brandy. Then I shall come to you.’

  She nodded. She didn’t want to say anything. Karl touched the side of her face, as if he were reassuring himself that she wasn’t some kind of magical illusion. Then he said, ‘Effie,’ the first time he had ever spoken her name.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  She bathed again, and dressed in a lemon-yellow silk nightdress by Archimedes of Paris. She sprayed herself with La Turque, and then lay on the tapestry bed and waited for him. She felt breathless, as if she had been pearl-diving, and was short of air. The fire was too hot and the room was too stuffy; yet when she asked Tessie to open one of the windows, she quickly had to ask her to close it again, because the draught that blew in from outside was uncompromisingly icy.

  She waited, and tried to read the poems of Theodor Storm, and wondered whether she had committed herself foolishly.

  At eleven o’clock, there was a discreet knock at her door. It was the whiskery old servant who had attended them at dinner, with a silver champagne-cooler, in which bobbed a bottle of Dom Perignon ‘87. He bowed, and said, ‘Goodnight, Fräulein,’ and then retreated.

  Karl came to her at five minutes to midnight. She was already sleepy, and dizzy with the evening’s wine. But he opened the bedroom door without knocking, and stood, half stern and half embarrassed, in a floor-length dressing-gown of quilted blue silk, at the foot of her bed. She said, ‘You’ve walked the dogs?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, closing the door behind him, and his accent sounded particularly clipped and German. ‘Yes,
I walked the dogs. We went down to the river-bank, to the Use. The snow has stopped, did you know? We left our footprints everywhere. It’s a strange night. So cold that you feel you might lie down and die.’

  Effie said, ‘I wondered if you’d come.’

  Karl went over to the silver wine-cooler, and unwrapped the foil from the top of the bottle of Dom Perignon. ‘You’re too modest,’ he said. ‘I’ve been pacing around the house wondering if you’d let me into your bedroom or not.’

  She told him, ‘I don’t want any more to drink. Please. I just want you to come here, and to be with me.’

  Karl twisted off the cork of the champagne bottle, and carefully poured out two glasses. ‘We should celebrate,’ he said, bringing them over to the bed. ‘We should celebrate the meeting of two people who were always meant to meet. How often does this happen, in nature? Scarcely ever. But today, on this snowy night, it has. I knew before you came here that you were the woman of my dearest dream.’

  He set the champagne glasses down on the carved oak chest beside the bed, and produced from his pocket a photograph in a silver frame. Effie peered at it, and recognised herself, in a picture taken a year ago in the Royal Botanic Gardens. Smiling, pretty, holding a spray of chrysanthemums she had just bought. ‘Ever since I knew you were coming, I have looked at this picture night after night,’ admitted Karl. ‘And when you came today, you were no disappointment. That is why I appeared with such Prahlerei, such bravado, when you arrived there this afternoon. I must make an entrance, I thought! I must impress her!’

  ‘Where did you get this picture?’ asked Effie.

  ‘Your brother gave it to me, Robert,’ said Karl. ‘He said he had a pretty sister, and I asked to see a picture of her. When I saw it, I asked him if I might keep it, and he said that I might. You’re not offended?’

  ‘Should I be?’ asked Effie. She just wished that she didn’t feel so short of breath. Air! she thought, I need air! The fire is so hot, and the wine has flooded my head, and it seems as if the bed is tilting over backwards.

  Karl came closer, and held her shoulder with his hand. His face was very close, so close that she could see the mushroom-wrinkled patterns in the irises of his eyes. He said, ‘I am rich. I am free. I am the young debonair president of the Deutsche Kreditbank. I have the ear of the Kaiser, I have influence in the Chancellery. I have houses, land, motor-cars, paintings, even a menagerie. But, I have never fallen in love like this before. Love like this has nothing to do with free will. I am powerless, Effie, to do anything but love you. I might struggle! I might deny you! But, it is impossible. You have been brought to me by what we call Schicksal, by fate. Our future now is not in our own hands, but in the hands of the gods.’

  Effie kissed his cheek, then the side of his mouth, then his lips. Then, there was no need for them to speak. They kissed long and deeply, tasting each other, as deeply as they could, as if by thrusting their tongues down each other’s throats they could touch, like a bee touches, the secret nectar of their personalities.

  Karl, at last, stood up. With the firelight behind him, he looked like a tall Prussian hero, or like Wagner’s Wolfe, ‘warlike and strong and never wanting for foes.’ He untied the sash of his dressing-gown, and let it fall back from his naked body. He was slim and very muscular, with a crucifix of dark brown hair on his chest, and a flat stomach across which a white scar ran from his lower ribs to his hip. His penis rose from his pubic hair like a crimson stallion rearing through a cloud of dark smoke. Effie had never seen a man aroused before, not like this, not in the flesh and she couldn’t keep her eyes away from it. It was both alluring and frightening, both grotesque and beautiful, with its helmeted head and its swollen veins, and its fruit-like cleft where the clearest of fluids already sparkled.

  Karl unbuttoned the lemon satin buttons of her nightdress. She panted, quickly, and kissed his naked shoulder and his hairy nipple. Then he had bared her breasts, and was caressing and squeezing them in his hands, using his thumbs to stir up her nipples. She said, ‘Karl …’ but the voice didn’t even sound like hers. He kissed the parting in her hair, kissed her ears, kissed her face and her neck. Then, in a curious and tender gesture, he knelt up on the bed so that the head of his penis touched her nipples, and anointed each of them with the slippery liquid which confessed his passion for her.

  His fingers ran down her bare spine like electrified spiders. They touched the sensitive nerves in her hips. They caressed the outsides of her thighs, until she rubbed her legs together in murmuring desire. At last, he stroked between her legs, and curled her hair around his fingertips, parting the pale pink lips, glistening and swollen like some luscious and convoluted mollusc.

  ‘Effie,’ he whispered in her ear, and his voice was a moth drumming against cartridge paper. Then he lowered his head, kissing her collarbone, kissing her breasts, taking her nipples in between his teeth like rare after-dinner delicacies, and biting them until they were fiery and sore. He licked her navel, followed the line of her stomach-folds with the tip of his tongue, until he penetrated her hair, and found the liquid line of her vulva, and closed his mouth around her sex as if he were a thirsty castaway sucking on an oyster.

  Effie went through dreams and feelings she had never imagined possible. She felt as if whole months had passed her by in split-seconds, as if the sun had risen and disappeared again, time after time, as if clocks had frantically chattered away a half of her lifetime. She felt as if her vagina had opened out to Karl completely, as if he had probed her very last secret down to the innermost crevice. No matter where she tried to hide her modesty, he discovered it, and touched it with his tongue. The tiny opening of her urethra, the slippery opening of her sex, the tight-clenched muscles of her anus.

  For a girl brought up with Victorian strictness in upper-class Edinburgh, a girl who had remained a virgin for so many years because of circumstance and fear, the experience of being taken by Karl von Ahlberg that night was moving beyond her comprehension, a sudden journey from reserved girlhood to openhearted womanhood in fifty hurtling minutes. She was not reserved with him: he was very strong, very passionate, and she let him take control of her. He mounted her, with his erection in his fist, and pushed himself into her powerfully but carefully, letting her feel his urgency and his strength without hurting her. Then he pushed and pushed again, until the bed seemed to rise beneath her, and the room expanded like a hot-air balloon, and she shuddered in the grip of something that was not quite an orgasm, not quite, but as much as she could reach.

  The night passed as slowly as a year, as quickly as a glimpse. They drank champagne, and hardly talked at all. The second time, he lay beside her, and took her from beneath her upraised thigh, so that his hand could idly caress her while they made love. Later, when the bottle of Dom Perignon was almost empty, she rested her cheek against his thigh, and then turned her head to take his soft penis between her lips, and circle around it with her tongue, until it began to stiffen again, and fill her whole mouth.

  There was nothing she wouldn’t have done for him that night. She was completely and intimately his. When he made love to her again towards dawn, when a fresh snowstorm was silently falling on the balcony outside their room, he inserted one finger into her bottom, turning it and thrusting it until it was right inside her up to his knuckle, and then she felt completely possessed, completely taken, and ready to give up to him everything in her that was sensitive and sensual. Ready to give herself up, Effie, to surrender her body and her mind, and the rest of the years of her life.

  She also thought, as wickedly innocent as an adolescent, ‘I’ve done it. I’ve done it at last! I’m a woman. A woman of passion and experience. I’m not a virgin any more. My virginity has flown. I can never wear the silken snood again.’

  Karl kissed her as the glowering Gothic sun began to rise behind the snow, then rose, and wrapped himself in his robe, and let himself out of her bedroom. The fire had long since collapsed into ashes. Effie lay back on her pillows, with a sigh,
and held one hand between her legs. She didn’t know whether to stay silent, or to sing, but in the end, her joy and her relief got the better of her, and she warbled, ‘Alfredo, Alfredo, di questio cuore …’

  There was a fevered hammering at the door. ‘Miss Watson!’ called Tessie. ‘Is everything all right, Miss Watson?’

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  She stayed at the Schloss von Ahlbeck for almost three weeks. They went riding across miles of snow; and Karl showed her the haunts of the winter swans and the hides of the Lauenburgische foxes. Wrapped in furs, they walked to the perimeters of Karl’s forests, and stood in silence while the snow began to fall again, and the sun faded from amber to sullen red. They kissed, their cold mouths tasting of brandy.

  Three or four times, Karl took her into Hamburg in the Pierce-Arrow, sometimes driving the monstrous motor-car himself. He introduced her to his fellow directors at the Deutsche Kreditbank, who bowed their shiny bald heads to her in quick succession, and clicked their heels like the beads of an abacus; and then, with great affability, offered Karl their congratulations on such an attractive coup.

  ‘If only business were always such a pleasure!’ one of them said, winking at Effie so widely that his monocle dropped out.

  There were evenings of unashamed romance: of dining at the Gala and the Zulpich, while orchestras played sentimental German songs, and the waiters arrived at their table bearing tureens of turtle soup, dishes of marinated goose, sides of roasted boar. There were motor-car journeys along the valley of the Elbe, and out on to Liineburg Heath, with the gramophone playing Wagner and Haydn, and a picnic hamper stowed in the trunk full of smoked herring and stuffed lobster and bottles of vintage champagne.

  The evening came at last when Effie knew that she would have to return to Scotland. They dined simply and quietly at the Schloss, and then sat by the fire as they had sat on their very first night. Mr Niblets, red-faced, professed that he felt ‘knackered’ from an afternoon’s duck-shooting with Franzi (the five ducks he had shot were to be potted for him, so that he could take them back to Scotland as a souvenir) and he retired to his room early with half a bottle of German brandy and a ribald German book which he had found in the Count von Ahlbeck’s library, Der Insel der Jungfrau.