by Eva Ibbotson
That night he left a meeting of his defense committee early and made his way to Karil’s room.
“Is it true?” was the first thing his son said. “We’re going to open the Folk Dance Festival together?”
“Yes, Karil. We’ll give them something to remember! I’m calling out the Mounted Guard. And I shall see that the children are presented to you.”
The prince was silent for a moment. Then: “Couldn’t I actually meet them? Not just have them presented—meet them properly?”
It was the king now who was silent. “Karil, it never works, trying to make friends with people from outside our world. Believe me—I know what I’m talking about.” His face was somber as he looked out at the mountains. “You will only get hurt.” He put his hand on his son’s shoulder. “Perhaps we shouldn’t put it off any longer, going to the dragonfly pool. I can’t promise, but there are no meetings tomorrow. I’ll see what I can do.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Sightseeing
The Berganians had done their best to make the campsite comfortable for the visiting teams, but camping is camping—there is nothing to be done about that.
Kit found a toad on the slatted floor of the shower and came back to tell Tally that he did not like it. He did not like it at all. Then there was breakfast. Matteo had gone off early, no one knew where, and Julia and Tally tried to light the Primus while Magda was still in the shower, but it was an ancient, temperamental contraption with a will of its own and, however much they pumped, it wouldn’t get going.
“I can perhaps help?” said a boy from the German tent. He had a mass of brown curls and a friendly smile, and with him came his sister, whose hair was even curlier and whose smile was as broad.
And he did help, without any fuss, so that in a few minutes the stove was roaring like a furnace.
At this point Magda appeared and decided that she would make the porridge, and she began well, stirring the pot with a big ladle—only then she had an important thought about Schopenhauer—you could tell when this happened because her eyes glazed over—and the ladle moved more and more slowly, and though Barney rushed to take it from her, it was too late.
“It’s funny—you can eat burned toast and it isn’t too bad at all,” said Borro, “but burned porridge!”
After breakfast they started on their chores. Augusta Carrington must have swallowed something which disagreed with her—perhaps a piece of meat that had got stuck to her plate of rice—and had come out in lumps on her back, and Verity needless to say did nothing to help but wandered past the tents of the other children, showing them how beautiful she was, but the rest of them worked with a will.
The Deldertonians were in their ordinary clothes, but most of the children wore their national costumes and the campsite was a blaze of color—the orange and yellow of the Spaniards and the Italians, the cool blue and white of the Scandinavians . . . the fierce black-and-red embroidered shirts of the Hungarians . . .
The buses that were to take them on a tour of the town were not due till eleven, and while they waited some of the teams took turns rehearsing on the wooden platform. The Germans had gone through their dance early. It was beautiful and didn’t involve anybody hitting themselves on their own behinds, though there was a certain amount of yodeling.
“But yodeling is a good thing really because it’s how people call each other in the mountains,” said Barney.
After the Germans came the Yugoslavs, whose dance was very ferocious with a lot of stamping, and music from a very strange instrument which was covered in fur and had a horn sticking out of each end.
“Do you think we should be stamping more? ” asked Julia anxiously but Tally said no, she didn’t think the British did much in the way of stamping.
“It’s no good worrying about the poor Flurry Dance—it may be odd but it got us here,” said Tally. “And the people are pleased to see us; they really are.”
This was true. The assistants in the shops, the waiters in the Blue Ox, mothers strolling through the park pushing prams—all greeted them and said how good it was to see children from other countries.
“You really like it here, don’t you?” said Borro. “I mean, really.”
“Yes,” said Tally, “I really do.”
The Swedes were on the platform, their blue skirts swirling gracefully as they waltzed, when the two buses drew up on the other side of the bridge.
They drove to the cathedral first. Tally and Julia remembered it from the newsreel—a solemn Gothic building with a tall spire. Inside, among the dark paintings of crucifixions, was a portrait of St. Aurelia, the saint whose birthday the Berganians had been celebrating in the film.
“She was so young when she died,” said Anneliese, the curly-haired German girl whose brother had helped them to light the Primus. “Only thirteen. I would not wish to die so young.”
After the cathedral they drove to the covered market, where they seemed to be selling everything in the world. There were cake stalls piled high with gingerbread hearts, and meat stalls where enormous pink sausages swayed like Zeppelins, and fruit such as the children from the Northern countries had never seen properly ripened: peaches and apricots, nectarines and great succulent bunches of purple grapes.
Then back into the buses for a drive to the town’s main square, the Johannes Platz, named for the king.
It was very large and covered in cobbles. On the north side was the Palace of Justice, on the west side the town hall, with a famous clock tower from which carved figures of the Twelve Apostles came out one by one as the hours struck, and on the south the Blue Ox, with its beer garden and terrace.
But what the children from Delderton were staring at with dismay was the wooden platform in the center of the square that had been put up specially for the festival.
It looked as though the whole town meant to come and see them dance.
They had lunch in a café in a side road and then everybody got into the buses again for a tour of the royal palace. By now the children had all mixed. Borro was talking to a pretty French girl with long blonde hair. They sat with their heads close together, discussing milk yields and grazing acreages, because her parents kept a herd of Charolais cows on their farm in Burgundy. At the back of the bus the Danish girls were cutting up bunches of grapes with their nail scissors and handing them around. Verity was flirting with an Italian boy, who listened to her politely but seemed more interested in the mountains they could see out of the window.
Matteo was not on the bus. He had counted everybody in, exchanged a few words with Magda, and walked away.
“He’s getting really good at not being here,” said Tally.
They drove through a sun-drenched valley covered in vineyards and orchards, and past little wooden houses with flower-filled balconies, and the people they passed all waved. It seemed to her that she had never been in a happier place.
The palace appeared and disappeared as the road snaked around the side of the hill. It was not a big palace, just as Bergania was not a big kingdom, but everything was there: turrets and towers, a moat, and a flagpole with the royal standard raised to show that the king was in residence. There were two sentry boxes, striped red, green, and gold in the Bergania colors, and a soldier stood guard on either side of the tall, gold-spiked gate.
As they drove into the forecourt an eagle soared up over the battlements and Tally, her head tilted to follow its flight, gave a sudden intake of breath.
“What is it? What’s the matter?” said Julia.
Tally could not answer. What she had seen had both frightened and shocked her.
A figure dressed in black was pulling someone roughly away from a high barred window. She could not make out the person who was being dragged away; it was someone small, a child probably—and already out of sight—but the black-clad figure stood for a moment looking out through the bars. It was a woman—but a woman out of some cruel and ancient story: a witch, a jailer. Even so far away, one could see the anger that posse
ssed her.
Tally was right about the anger. Inside the tower room, the Countess Frederica had lost her temper and lost it badly.
“What is the matter with you, Karil?” she shouted. “Why do you do this—stand and look out like an orphan waiting to be adopted instead of a prince of the blood? Have you no pride?”
It’s insufferable, she thought. She knew the boy to be physically brave: he rode fearlessly in spite of his mother’s accident; he was a skilled rock climber and a talented fencer . . . but this ridiculous need to belong to children who should be proud to black his boots was not to be endured.
Carlotta would not behave like this. Carlotta knew her worth.
She lingered for a moment, watching the children spill out of the buses and make their way toward the gates. Then she turned to speak to the prince again, but he had gone.
Tally’s mood had changed. It was such a strange image—the black-clad woman pulling someone away from a window as though looking out was a crime. Were there things she did not understand about Bergania? It had seemed to be a sort of paradise, but perhaps she was wrong. She remembered Matteo’s words in the park, his grimness.
They were led through the palace by a guide who spoke in three languages, and those children who understood English or German or French translated for the others. The staterooms were very grand, but the truth is that one ballroom is much like another, with mirrors on the walls, a dais for the musicians, and crystal chandeliers. The state dining room had what all state dining rooms have—a massive polished table, set with exotic place mats and gold-edged plates—and the library, like most royal libraries, was lined with bookcases that kept the leather-bound books firmly hidden behind a trellis of steel.
“They have put the books in prison,” said a little Finnish boy, and his friends nodded and translated what he had said.
“It’s absolutely ridiculous,” said Tod, “one family living in all this space. It ought to be given to the workers of the country.”
But Tally, thinking of the trim pretty houses they had passed in the town, wasn’t so sure that the workers would want to live in the palace. As they walked from one grand impersonal room to another, passing dark paintings of Berganian knights in armor and courtiers in ruffles, she found it difficult to keep her attention on the guide’s patter. What would be interesting would be to make one’s way down one of the corridors that was barred to visitors by a red satin rope and a notice saying: NO ADMITTANCE PAST THIS POINT. Tally longed to lift up the rope and slip under it and see where real people lived—where the king slept, where the prince did his lessons and ate his breakfast, and the servants cooked their meals. Once she even went across to one of the ropes and lifted it but immediately a guard came and spoke to her sharply and she put it down.
As they trooped out again Barney called to her. “Look,” he said. “This is the best bit.”
Barney was standing by a large window at the end of a corridor, and as Tally came to join him she saw what he meant.
The window faced the town below, and one could make out everything. The river with its sheltering lime trees and the people taking the air; the spires of the cathedral and the clock tower and—amazingly clear—the field with their tents and the practice dance floor . . . even the marble statue of the queen.
“If I lived here I’d spend most of the time looking out of the window,” he said.
Tally gave a little shudder.
“What’s the matter?”
Tally didn’t answer. She had remembered the woman in black and her gaunt arm as she pulled away someone who was probably doing just what she was doing—looking out.
He climbed steadily; there was no need to seek the way. The fifteen years he had spent away from his country had not blotted out any memories.
The sights were familiar: the way the clouds were massed above the high peaks, the exact shade of azure of the sky, the shape of the clump of pines that edged the meadow he was crossing. The flowers were the same: the vetches in their tangle of blue and yellow, the delicate harebells growing out of sparse pockets of earth between the rocks, and now, as he gained height, the edelweiss, which no one was supposed to pick then, as now, because it was so rare.
There had been a burrow by the side of the path made by a family of marmots—and the burrow was still there. A kestrel circled, lost height to show its chestnut plumage, and rose again. As a boy he had watched such birds a hundred times.
The sounds were the same, too: the soughing of the wind in the pines, the droning of the bees clustering in the clover. And the scents, too, were utterly familiar: pine needles warmed by the sun, the tang of resin . . .
His feet made their own way, recognizing now the roughness of stone, now the softness of the earth as he walked through a patch of woodland. His time in the Amazon, in the Mato Grosso, might never have been.
Now he could see the hut; not the kind of place a woman of such great age should be living all the year round—isolated, exposed to the weather, often snowed up in the winter—but no one had been able to persuade the king’s old nurse to come down off the mountain and settle in the town.
He left the path and followed the track to the hut. For a moment he was afraid. She had been old when he left Bergania—anything could have happened.
Then the door opened and she came out carrying a basket of washing. She had not seen him yet, and he watched as she began to hang up her aprons—checked aprons in red and white, hemmed with a row of cross-stitch. She had always worn them to work and suddenly he remembered the comfort of their clean and starchy smell.
But now he moved out of the shadow of the tree and she saw him. Would she remember, after so long?
She remembered. She looked at him in silence—she did not shout or exclaim or drop the pillowcase she was putting on the line. She just looked. Then as he came up to her, she opened her arms and called him by his name.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Treachery
The man who sat in the best bedroom of the Blue Ox could not be mistaken for anyone but a very high-ranking army officer—and a Nazi officer at that. Though he was still eating breakfast, Reichsgruppen Führer Anton Stiefelbreich was fully dressed in a khaki jacket so covered in medals that they dazzled and caught the eye, and afterward people who met him never quite remembered his face. His cap lay ready beside him, adorned with the swastika of the party he now served, and he wore jackboots even while buttering his roll.
As much as Karil detested his uniforms, with their scratchy collars and showy buttons and infuriating plumes, so did Colonel Stiefelbreich love his. Back in Berlin, where he now worked at the headquarters of the Gestapo, he had a whole cupboard of uniforms. That was one of the many things he valued in his new job—the job of stirring up trouble in those countries that did not understand how important it was to cooperate fully with Herr Hitler’s dreams for a united Europe. United, of course, under the German flag.
And to impress foreigners one had to be properly dressed. The colonel was waiting for Gambetti, the Berganian foreign minister, who was coming to see him on a private visit here in his room. Meanwhile, to make certain that his bodyguards were in place, he walked silently to the door and opened it.
The two men who had been sitting in chairs in the corridor got to their feet.
“Got any jobs for us to do, Colonel?”
“Not at the moment. But stay in position—I’m expecting the foreign minister. Make sure no one follows him upstairs.”
The two men Colonel Stiefelbreich had recruited as his bodyguards could not have been more different, nor were they simply bodyguards. They were more by way of being spies and sleuths and he used them for all the work that he wanted to be kept secret.
One of them was good at his job simply because of his enormous size and strength. He was one of those people who seemed to be made of something inorganic like iron or stone—in fact his huge, stupid face might well have been carved from granite, except that granite, when it catches the light, sometimes spark
les, and the thug’s face had never sparkled in its life. He was known as Earless, because he had lost his left ear in a fight. He had lost a lot of other things, too—the tip of one finger, part of a nostril, and more teeth than he could count—but it was his ear he worried about because his wife, Belinda, had been fond of it. She was a tiny blonde woman and Earless, who would throttle someone with his bare hands without thinking twice about it, was completely soppy about Belinda.
The other man was called Theophilus Fallaise, and he had been brought up in a library where his father was Keeper of the Books. One can read about all sorts of wonderful things in a library but the things that the young Theophilus had chosen to read about were not wonderful. He read about the tortures they had used in the olden days: the rack and the iron maiden and thumbscrews—and about the punishments they had used in foreign countries like China, where people were driven mad by having water dripped on to their skull.
The library was in a castle belonging to an eccentric nobleman in a country about which Theophilus never spoke, and because the boy had hardly ever gone outdoors, but only deeper and deeper into the basements in search of more and more horrible books about inflicting pain, he had grown up very unhealthy. His skin was pale and clammy, he blinked in the light and his upper lip was lifted by a wrinkled scar that parted to show a filled gold tooth.
But as a sleuth and a spy he was second to none. He could see in the dark, because of the years he had spent underground, and wriggle through the narrowest spaces—and there was nothing he didn’t know about the more silent and sinister ways of getting rid of someone.
