Coronets and Steel

by Sherwood Smith

  TWENTY-THREE

  IT WAS SO LATE, and I was so tired (and relieved) that at first I didn’t think anything of her mistaking my voice for my grandmother’s, though more than half a century had passed since they had spoken last.

  Tante Mina—she insisted I call her that—spoke German and French, though she had not used them for many years.

  Despite the lateness of the hour she insisted on tucking me up into a hand-carved chair as old as the cottage, with a bright folk-patterned quilt around me, while my clothes boiled in a pot on the hearth. In my hands I held a cup of a fiercely strong liquor that smelled like the drink at Aunt Sisi’s party, only harsher—unblended with more civilized liquids. Mina perched on a small bench nearby, wrapped in a shawl. She wept quietly from time to time as I told her everything.

  We’d both intended to sleep, but she asked a question, then another, and tired as I was, I got a second wind as I launched into the story of my life, right down to Gran’s long wordless concerts.

  And the fairy tales, which she stopped telling me.

  “Ah, Fyadar,” Tante Mina murmured, and wiped her eyes. “Yes I understand. All had changed for her.”

  “What had changed? I keep feeling that there’s something secret,” I exclaimed.

  “I will tell you everything you wish,” Mina promised. “But please. What brought you here to us, after all this time?”

  I told her about my trip, and about Alec and Aunt Sisi and Tony. She clucked once or twice when I got to my meeting with Alec but did not interrupt, and she smiled and shook her head and mopped at silent tears when I described my afternoon with Tony. Her reaction to my B-movie escapes was a shake of the head and a humorous crinkling of old, dark eyes that said good for you even as her mouth pursed up expressing not ladylike.

  “And so,” I ended, taking another sip of that eye-watering distilled liquor, “I heard somebody playing a flute. Or a panpipe. Or something. But I couldn’t find whoever it was. But I did find that road sign, and so I walked here, hoping there wouldn’t be any search. From Tony, I mean. I might get you into trouble if I’m seen here.”

  “Then we shall make certain you are not seen,” she replied with a tranquil dignity. “Yes, you are right in understanding that here in Dorike your rumpled cousin Tony is Count Karl-Anton Danilov von Mecklundburg, the duke’s heir, and on this mountain he has at least the authority that the Stadthalter has. Therefore we must be like mice for a time, and think, but this problem is not insurmountable. And first you must sleep.”

  “But he’s got his sister a prisoner up in that castle! I must get into town and tell Aunt Sisi! And Alec.”

  “Yes, yes, but we want to do it quietly, without notice, yes? I already know a way, when my son goes to Friday market. So you lie in this bed, and sleep, and when you waken you will eat a good hot meal and we will talk more. I will tell you stories about my darling Princess Lily. So good she was, and you, her granddaughter, and so like! Ah, God is good, truly.” She smiled.

  “I can’t take your bed.”

  “You must,” she said firmly, pushing me to the narrow bed with the fresh-bleached white sheets and bolster. “A night’s sleep missed is nothing. To know about my Lily, to meet her daughter’s daughter, ah, my life is worth much to me. Perhaps we can redress terrible wrongs. You lie down and sleep, and I will clean this pretty frock, and in the morning I will walk to the bakery and gossip.” She buffed her fingers against her thumb. “I will hear if the count searches for the missing sister—or for a new cousin—with noise and to-do, or quietly.”

  “Oh, thank you, Tante Mina.” I sighed as I lay down. Then I popped up again like a jack-in-the-box. “Please, tell me one thing first. She did marry him, didn’t she?”

  “But yes.” Mina smiled tenderly. “You knew her well, how could she do else? She married him in secret. I know, for I was there. I shall tell you all when you waken again.”

  “Oh, Mama,” I breathed as I sank back into the bed. But it was not her face I saw as I drifted into sleep, it was Alec’s. What a pleasure it would be confront him with Gran’s vindication, and my mother’s. And mine . . .

  In Los Angeles, an eleven kilometer hike in good shoes, on flat ground, takes maybe four or five hours of easy rambling. Up in the mountains with those steep hairpin turns, on rotten roads, in high-heeled sandals, it had taken me at least twice that long.

  I slept through most of the next day, then woke to find my clothes freshly ironed and waiting. The air was savory with a good rich stew that must have cost Mina a week’s grocery money. I knew better than to protest. Instead, I ate until I thought I would not be hungry for a week, and then went back to sleep after Mina told me she would stay at her son’s for the night.

  The day after, I woke at noon feeling fine. Mina was not around. I didn’t dare go outside until I knew I wouldn’t get her into trouble, so I sat there reluctant to even stretch, the one room cottage was so small.

  Her kitchen was tucked in a corner, organized around an iron stove that looked like it might have been new in 1890. It was the most modern item in the place.

  There were a few fine Sevres pieces in a corner cupboard. Against that wall was Mina’s narrow, curtained bed. Next to that, both in range of the hearth, sat the one big, upholstered chair with an exquisite hand-crocheted antimacassar on its back.

  Her things were stored in a couple of ancient carved trunks, and in a golden oak drop-fronted Biedermeier desk that might have been homely in 1820, but was a museum piece now, smelling of beeswax polish. On it, between statues of a nymph and another folkloric figure, was a small collection of leather-bound books, printed no later than the French Revolution. Those books and the crystal prisms on the lamps were the only decorative things in the place; the ceiling was low, age-darkened beams, the walls rough-plastered, with a crucifix and a couple of old Scherrenschnitte, or silhouette-pictures, in oval frames.

  I read an old book of poetry until Mina returned, and then we had another splendid meal of steamed and buttered cabbage picked right out of her garden, poached freshwater fish, and slices of the rolled sweet bread of the sort I’d tasted at the Waleskas’.

  By the time she took the scraps out to the pigs, evening had fallen. Conversation was easy until then—the village, the roses, the weather—but at last she brought a serving tray and set it down on the table next to the hearth.

  With a solemn air, she poured us each a glass of heavy cinnamon-spiced coffee lightened by thick cream, with a dollop of that strong distilled liquor in it, and said, “They have been searching. My grand-niece Katrina, whose house is at the crossroads, reported that twice yesterday and once today she saw automobiles carrying men from the castle. They stopped and asked people if they have seen a young blond lady wearing a brown-patterned frock. They have not given a name, but rumor is flying about that the Lady Ruli is lost in the mountains.” She smiled. “No one is certain. They all preface the gossip with ‘they say.’”

  I laughed. “Not so different from home.”

  “Not so different from wherever people live,” she responded, smiling. “My son Pavel drives the village lorry. He will take you into the city early when he goes to market,” she continued. “From there, I do not know—”

  “From there, I’ll take care of myself,” I said. “Easy enough. It’s getting there that would be a trifle difficult. I hope you’ll tell Pavel how grateful I am.”

  “Pavel knows my love for Lily. He is happy to help her granddaughter. As for the count, Pavel thinks he would do better to resolve his great affairs without the imprisoning of Lily’s granddaughter.”

  I laughed. “I second that motion! Tante Mina, I insist you sit in your comfy chair, and I am going to toast myself on this hearth here while I tackle the mess I made of my hair.” I picked up the carved comb she’d given me, and sat cross-legged on the hearth as Mina sank into her chair and sighed.

  “I promised to tell you about the marriage of my dear Princess Lily, and so I shall, but you must forgive me if I wee
p. No one but my good Vasilo, and he has been dead many years, has ever heard what I know and saw.” She squared herself in the chair and took a fortifying sip of coffee.

  “First I must go back. Lily was fourteen when I first came to her. I was twenty, and fresh from training. I was to teach her, but she already had the grace of a lady twice her age, and oh, she could play so beautifully on her piano. Even the king, who rarely praised his daughters publicly, said once after she played for us at Christmas that she could have gone into any concert hall in Europe and held up her head. And knowledge! Oh, she read, and rode the trails behind the castle, usually with the young Marius. They all called him Young Milo. Their duets on the piano gave us all much pleasure.”

  Mina stared into the fire burning beside me and talked for a long time. Her voice was low and steady, and she rocked back and forth in her chair as she talked. I listened to anecdotes about the lives of the twin princesses Lily and Rose as I combed out my hair and then fixed it in two long braids.

  “. . . Rose was silly and vain but not cruel. I think she flirted only to show that she had the power to attract Count Armandros. He was so handsome, and skilled at flirtation. But I saw him with Lily, for in those days young ladies were seldom alone. He was quieter with her. Not serious. Never that! But they talked, they did not merely flirt. With other ladies, including Princess Rose, it was always the flirtation, the wicked count.”

  She paused to wipe her eyes with a faded, much-washed hankie. “There was a night, directly after Christmas. The snow was deep. She came in dancing in joy, from a late night at someone’s villa. A masked ball for Epiphany, I think it was. She and Count Armandros had managed to get time to talk alone. He asked her to marry him. She made a vow to do so. She warned me the storm would soon break, and it did. That was a terrible year, the beginning of our troubles.”

  “But why?” I burst out. “Why should it matter so much whom she married?”

  “Because of the Blessing,” Tante Mina said simply.

  “I saw a reference to it in a Fyadar story, but Theresa Waleska wouldn’t tell me what it was. Why not?”

  “Our greatest secret.” She glanced upward. “Long ago, Saint Xanpia was saved in our valley from the hordes out of the east. She and the orphans she hid in the Roman temple on the mountain. She settled here, and many are the stories of her miracles of healing, and her aid to the young, to the helpless. She was friend to all—not only the young, but to the spirits of forest and water and air.”

  “Spirits?” I repeated.

  Tante Mina leaned forward. “Princess Lily did not tell you?”

  “No—” I was about to add of course not, but changed it to, “She told me stories about Fyadar when I was small, but then she said I should leave babyish stories behind and read books. I was eight. She never told me stories again, though we always read together.”

  Tante Mina wiped her eyes again. “Oh, she must have been so unhappy. So alone. Except for your dear mother. I am glad she had her music.”

  I didn’t want to say how dreary she had found it to take the bus from house to house to teach the basics to kids for years and years—most of whom didn’t want lessons, or lost interest long before they were permitted to quit by their parents. Back then, the teacher went to the students, not like now, when the students go to the teacher. Not that Gran ever complained, but my mother had said once, “I didn’t inherit Maman’s ear for performing, so I figured out when I was little the best thing I could do for her was to show no interest in piano. That’s when I got into opera.”

  Mina had paused, staring at the fire in reverie. Then she broke through my own memories by saying, “I must resume. It is said that Saint Xanpia never died, but walked through the gate to the . . . the Nasdrafus, we do not have that word in French, perhaps pays de fée?”

  Fairyland?

  “Do you believe that?” I asked,

  “But yes,” she said, so calmly I found it disturbing, like when someone you’d always regarded as sane comes out with something totally crazy.

  “Before she left us, the saint made a promise that when our kingdom was under threat, if our people all came together in peace on her day, September 2, then Dobrenica would be protected from the world by a borderland of the Nasdrafus. If there was division, the protection would vanish and those causing trouble in our world would be able to enter freely again.”

  “Protected by what? What does Nasdrafus mean? Is it something like purgatory?”

  She touched the rosary on the wall. “The Church teaches us that purgatory is where souls go after death. The Jews also teach about a purgatory in Gehenna, though I am told that they have differing beliefs about such things. But we all are told that in the Nasdrafus, the living walk among many beings, some of those being those we think of as dead.”

  “So does that place, whatever it is, have anything to do with this other word, Vrajhus?”

  “That is the word for the old powers.” She smiled. “You find it hard to believe, when you were shown the way to Schönbrunn by your own ancestor?”

  “I what?”

  She gazed at me with her eyes wide. “You told me. I remember. You saw the spirit of Queen Maria Sofia at the Hofburg, where once she visited, the year after she married the crown prince. In those days they always made their visit to the emperor or empress. You described her exactly! Maria Sofia was a friend to the great Maria Theresia, who understood both worlds. Later, after the great empress died, our queen tried to convince Emperor Joseph not to reject all the old ways at once, but he was so fierce, it was said.”

  “So . . . you’re saying she was a ghost.”

  She studied me, then sighed. “I can see you are polite, but you do not believe this, or about the Blessing. The count did not either . . . and at the end,” she whispered, “I fear that Princess Lily gave up her belief.”

  If she ever had any such belief, I thought. My childhood was proof of that.

  “If you check the oldest records elsewhere around us, you will discover times when Dobrenica vanished from mention. Whisht! Alas, someone always began a feud, or a skirmish, and then enemies found their way over the border again.”

  Okay. Maybe she wasn’t crazy—it was unfair to think that way. Tante Mina was simply old, and old folks tend to stick to old forms, even when outmoded. Especially when outmoded. And I could see Theresa Waleska falling for romantic notions of magic and ghosts and the like.

  But did Alec believe in that?

  I remembered what Tony reported about Alec and that stone portal at Sedania. I wanted to clock Tony with his own picnic basket the next time I saw him (which I hoped would be never), but I didn’t think he’d lied.

  “The ritual when we wished to invoke the Blessing was a royal marriage solemnified on Xanpia’s Day—September 2, celebrated in church and temple,” Salfmatta Mina went on.

  “So they were holding this superstition over my grandmother’s head when they wanted her to marry Milo, is that it?”

  Mina looked at me sadly. “How can you judge so easily?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. After all, it’s one thing to be modern and rational, but I didn’t need to be smug and superior right in her own home. “I can’t get used to the idea of ghosts. I mean, it makes no sense that anyone could see something without material form. Sometimes. And the person next to them can’t.”

  “It is always easier to close the mind to what we do not wish to understand,” Mina said.

  “I’m closed-minded?” I said, surprised.

  She set her cup on the tray. “Some do not like the responsibility that comes with such knowledge.”

  “Okay, I have to think about that,” I said.

  “Good. As for denying the existence of the Blessing, and the Nasdrafus, many, such as Count Armandros, felt the same. They said that the old ways of seeing this world, and others, are outmoded. Or are mere legend. In these modern times, how can miracles exist? Count Armandros did his best to convince my dear Lily that this was a way the old folk used
to force the young to marry where told.”

  Then I got it: Mina had thought I was Gran’s ghost when I first showed up on her doorstep.

  “Have you seen ghosts?” I asked.

  “Yes. Rarely, but yes.”

  “Did my grandmother ever see them?” I asked.

  Mina made a negative motion with her gnarled hands. “Rose said she did, but it turned out to be a pretence. To gain attention, which she had for a while. Lily was as shamed as Rose when the truth was known. More shamed than Rose.” Her lined face creased with a wistful smile. “The count chided my Lily for setting aside their love for superstitious nonsense. He did not believe the Germans would bother with our kingdom—and if they did, we would throw them right out again.”

  “So those who believed, like the king, expected her to marry Milo on that special day? Then the entire kingdom would . . . vanish?” Shades of Brigadoon.

  “She wavered. The king took her alone to Sedania for Easter Week. We stayed behind in the palace, on the king’s orders. He included Lily in the secret councils. Duke Milo also. He was seen riding and talking with her, and even playing duets with her as they had when she was small. Not in coercion, you must understand. He said, in my hearing, that the choice must lie with her. When she came down Easter morning the whispers said that she would go ahead with the marriage to Duke Milo.”

  Mina straightened herself in her chair. Her eyes stayed distant as she said softly, “It was Rose who brought about what happened, I have always suspected. Never a word was spoken by Lily against her sister at any time, even as children. Lily shared the blame for infractions because she thought it hard that Rose had a mischievous nature and was always being chastised for it. Lily felt bad to always to be held up as an example, which was so unfortunate for Rose! Ah well. She never told me, but after, in the few days left, she did not again mention her sister’s name. I sometimes think Rose listened to a sprite of jealousy and taunted Lily with the fact that she, at least, was free to marry Armandros. Lily went to see her father and gave him a paper she had written. I never saw that either. She had me lock the door while she wrote some letters, and she told me, calm as the sky on a summer’s day, that she was leaving that night. Leaving Riev, I thought, but never the kingdom. ‘You must call me Mademoiselle, Mina, for I have no title,’ she said.