by Andre Norton
Truda worked swiftly, with concentration upon what she did, as if to establish a wall between us. She had said very little during our journey, in spite of my attempts to break through the barrier of rank and gain some knowledge of the girl herself. I longed passionately at that moment for Letty with her constant flow of chatter and her dear friendliness.
Reluctantly I untied my bonnet ribbons and dropped that headwear on a small table, shook out the crumpled folds of my skirt. I would never be at home here, or, I was very sure, anywhere within Hesse-Dohna. At that moment I longed to stop Truda, tell her to repack, that we had no intention of remaining under this roof. It crossed my mind that I must learn soon just how much freedom of movement I really had.
First I must discover what was of most importance at the moment and caution made me approach that in a roundabout way.
“Truda, before we left—did you have time to say goodbye?”
How quick of wit was she? Would she recognize my need to know if my message had been passed along.
Though she never looked up from her work, she did answer promptly.
“Yes, gracious lady.” Brief but not quite to the point. However, I thought I could not expect more.
I sat down on one of the small chairs, a little surprised at my sudden sense of relief. For, even as she had said that, she had also nodded, and that double affirmation I took as assurance she had done all she could to let the Colonel know what had become of me.
That there was also a warning in her answer I guessed. I looked about, at those silk-covered walls with their gold-framed pictures of flowers, of young girls wearing the clothing of my grandmother’s day and frolicking in gardens, or conducting flirtations with bewigged and satin-coated gentlemen. Could such walls have—ears? They made me impatient, those carefree picture maidens—impatient and a little more uneasy at what they might just conceal. I shook my head, trying to lose those fantastical thoughts of peepholes—of spying. I must certainly calm my nerves and cease peopling my world with such dark imaginings.
With Truda’s aid I changed from my plain traveling dress into one suitable for the house. Then I resolutely decided that I must indeed put to the test what was my position here—that of an honored and carefree guest—or—that of a to-be-watched charge. I left my sun and light filled room for the comparative darkness of the paneled staircase.
As if she were one of the figures on that path of the cathedral clock, released not by the chiming of an hour but at the sound of my steps, Frau Werfel appeared at the foot of the stairs before I gained the horn-trimmed hall. She dipped a curtsy, her hands encased in black lace mits, clasped at waist level, her sour face impassive as she asked:
“The gracious lady desires?”
“This is a very old house, is it not, Frau Werfel?” I began my campaign obliquely. If the woman was as house proud as the evidence would make it seem, perhaps I could so open communication with her.
“Part of it is near five hundred years old, gracious lady. It has been added to, and his lordship’s father had some alterations made. Then his present lordship was pleased to make many more. Since the great forest is near gone and there has been little hunting since the war, the changes are marked.”
“You say that the forest is gone. But from my window I saw a number of trees—we drove through what appeared to be dense wood on our way here.”
“A wood, yes, gracious lady. But there is no longer enough such cover for true hunting. His lordship has ordered replanting, also that as many of the old trees as possible be preserved. But it will never again be as it once was.”
She had not moved from her position, nor had she suggested any tour of the house. I gathered my courage and said firmly: “I find so ancient a place most interesting, Frau Werfel. Would it be possible to see more of those older parts—?”
Her expression did not change. I could not guess whether or not she was pleased, or if she was being pushed into action against her will. Once more she made a stiff curtsy as she replied: “If the gracious lady will then but follow me—”
Gloom appeared to fill the older rooms. The hall with all its trophies was the largest of these. Those chambers opening off of it were also paneled in dark wood, the windows so narrow as to suggest they had been installed for a fortress. Perhaps in those wild early days every nobelman’s dwelling place must have been so secured against attack. From my listening during my school days to Madam Manzell’s store of often gruesome accounts I knew that open warfare between one baron and another had not only been the usual way of life, but had existed in these lands long after there had been a semblance of common law and order elsewhere.
There had been no attempt to widen these windows, but glass had been inserted into their stone frames. The light they admitted was very little, especially since it was now close to dusk. Frau Werfel produced from a sideboard a twin candlestick, but even those candles could not give me more than a shadow-filled impression of sparsely furnished, low-ceiling boxes of rooms which bore no relation to the modern chambers on the next floor.
Trophies, though not as thickly mounted as those in the great hall, continued to be the main decorations, though here and there was a fan of hunting knives and short swords, or a pair of crossbows, on the walls. There was a cold forbidding feeling which was more chilling than any draft from under an ill-fitting door. Outside summer might nod in flowers and sunlight, here was frost and winter’s blight.
Frau Werfel, contrary to what I expected, voiced little or no comments about the rooms or their history. Her attitude was one of strained patience and would have quickly withered anyone less determined than I. She made no attempt to show me into the servants’ area or the kitchen and I had no reason to request that, for by the rules of noble society I could have no possible interest in what went on there, beyond the fact that the service itself was not interrupted.
At length, having seen a fourth dull, dark chamber which was a duplicate of three before, I had to surrender. It was, Frau Werfel astutely informed me, the custom of the house now to use only those upper rooms which had been modified by the present Gräf, and that my dinner would be served above and not in one of these dreary lower chambers.
I reclimbed to my sitting room little wiser than I had been when I descended, and more than a little dismayed at what I had seen. The rooms themselves had a very dampening effect upon the spirits. Truda had completed her unpacking and was gone. As soon as the door closed behind me I sped across the room and pushed aside drapery and curtains to look out once again.
That balcony which ran immediately below the window must have some exit. At the moment I was a little reluctant to scramble through the window itself, but I thought that I could see a door at least two rooms farther on. So I went back to the outer hall and counted doorways. The room with the balcony door was so masculine in its furnishings that I half expected the Gräf himself to rise from behind the desk there and forbid my entrance. However it was empty, save for the rather more massive furniture, another trophy of antique pistols arranged fanwise on one wall, and a portrait of a hawk-nosed, grim-eyed man in the elaborately curled wig of another day. He wore a breastplate of gold-chased metal over a velvet doublet and one hand gripped the hilt of his scabbarded sword, while he stared malevolently down at me, his eyes so well painted that they appeared to both challenge and follow my actions.
The latch of the balcony door turned easily under my hand and I stepped out on that upper way. It ran, I discovered, around three sides of the Kesterhof, not present at the back of the house which faced a remnant of the original forest, as repelling in the quickly-falling dusk as a solid wall.
There was life about below. I saw and heard grooms at their business in the stable yard, and lights began to shine out from the back of the house. Still that life was not mine and I felt that I was like one at a play observing a scene but still waiting for the main characters to appear and the real action begin.
Though this was summer and the day had been warm, with the descent
of the sun behind one of the heights guarding the Kesterhof I was shivering. Seeing little below in that fast-fading light that was of any advantage to me, I went within, passing once again through the study. Though the room was now filled with gathering shadows, those angry eyes of the portrait were still alive and watching. I wondered whom it represented. The Gräf was stiff, somewhat grim of countenance, aloof—but he had very little in him of the power which seemed to radiate from this man of an earlier day—that aura of power which, by some magic, the artist had caught with paint and canvas.
I stood before it for a long moment, intrigued by the feeling that there was some resemblance in the painted face to someone. Not the Gräf—then who? The mouth—that stretch of plump lips almost too small to be in proportion to the rest of the face. The mouth— Under my eyes the lips seemed to purse the least bit and it flashed into my mind where I had seen that mouth. The Baron von Werthern! Except that the fleshy folds of his face had none of the strength pictured here.
What had the Gräfin claimed for him? She had, I was sure I remembered, spoken of him as a kinsman. Only I had thought that relationship to be on her side, not that of the Gräf’s line, though in the nobility of a country as small as this one, the marriage possibilities must be greatly limited, and there would have been doubtless many unions closer knit within the ranks than would exist elsewhere. It could well be that even the Gräf and the Gräfin were akin by more than the marriage tie.
I did not like what I read into that portrait. There was plainly arrogance there, the arrogance born in one who had never had his will questioned. With that arrogance were signs of its natural companion cruelty. Defiantly now I turned my back firmly upon those watching eyes and marched out of the room. Though curiosity tugged still at me. I wished even more that Frau Werfel was the very opposite of the character she had shown me, as open and talkative as Letty would have been about “the family.”
My dinner was served in still another room of the upper floor, one into which I was ushered by a footman, who then took his place behind my chair as I ate in formal loneliness, presenting one covered dish after another as a second servitor or two brought them into the room. That procession of dishes seemed without end, and, though I was hungry when I entered, I had learned to take no more than a token serving from any one dish and still was unable to do even that before we reached the final course of cheese and fruit.
There were three candelabra, all bearing lighted tapers, along the table, the flames reflected from crystal and high gloss finish of the china. Between them stood figurines in the form of fantastical beasts, each standing on its hind legs, its forepaws or hoofs supporting a shield quartered, and sometimes even further divided, to display greater number of armorial bearings. That they were meant to bring notice of the prestige of the family was plain. I found such a show illuminating in a way. It was as if those who demanded it were uncertain of their own importance and must thus make very sure that that was displayed on every possible occasion. Somehow—the fanciful idea came to me as I toyed with a cluster of cherries which had been my selection from the gilt basket of fruit—somehow my gentleman of the portrait would never have seen the necessity to so underline his status in rank. The family he had once dominated might be perilously close to moving downward in the world in this generation.
What did I know of the Gräfin—? That she was also the result of a morganatic union with the ruling house—but she had never mentioned the exact status of the female who had so introduced the very purple blood of royality into her line. There were, I began to understand now that I was removed from the Gräfin’s ever-present chatter, several facts which she had never touched upon. The Baron—by all the evidence I had seen and heard she certainly held him higher—and perhaps closer—than the Gräfin. Yet this morning she had suddenly been full of her husband’s new station, his importance in the matter of awaiting upon the new Elector with perhaps the very welcome news that he had at last succeeded to rule in a state from which he had been exiled.
In the old days messengers bringing ill news sometimes paid for it with their heads—their lives. Was the reverse also true now—were the first to wait upon a newly ascended ruler apt to get rich picking in honors and offices? I could accept that.
What followed then concerning the favorites of the dead ruler? “The king is dead, long live the king!” The old cry of the monarchists came to mind. There would be new faces at court, sudden ascents to glory, sudden descents into oblivion. The Colonel—
I was staring at the nearest of those armorial beasts, a griffin I thought. Its fanged mouth was displayed open, as if to attack, its brightly enameled tongue curled and pointed. The creature became only a haze of color, my mind saw another face. It came to me again that in all the time I had known him, I had never seen Colonel Fenwick smile, show simple pleasure in something, be anything but a man either on guard or a soldier doing his sworn duty.
What was he like when neither duty nor wariness held him? Could he laugh, jest, lose that stiffness of back, that set line of jaw? He could not be as old as the Gräf, yet it would seem that he cultivated the airs of one who was gray and seamed with age. Was it the exile of his family, or his training in the Elector’s service which had made him the man he now was?
I tried to imagine the Colonel relaxed, showing some warmth of heart and spirit, then shook my head at the impossibility of such a thing. Not even my imagination, were I to give it the fullest freedom, could change so much the face in my memory. Yet now that I had summoned that face into my thoughts I could not dismiss it—nor dismiss uneasy speculation concerning his future.
He had been the Elector’s man, close to him. By the side of that bed his very manner had held a gentleness which I would not have believed he was capable of showing—had I not seen it. So, being who and what he was, he must have enemies in plenty. The Gräfin’s spitefulness might be the lightest and least of the troubles he could now be facing. I dropped a cherry back on my small gold-edged plate. How many enemies did he have who would come now into the open?
I arose and the footman drew back, took a hurried stride to open the door for me. Why should the Colonel’s trouble matter to me? Except, of course, that he was in a measure responsible for my presence here.
He had shown me no real kindness, no softness of manner, nothing which would make him a matter of anxiety—save again how it might affect my own plight. Yet— I was so a-sea in a wave-tossed rise of emotions I could not understand that I fairly fled back to the small sitting room where I found candles alight, the draperies pulled, and all done to suggest comfort and repose.
Except that there was no comfort in my thoughts, or repose for my nerves. I sat on one of the chairs and relived, in spite of myself, every moment of the night before. The secrecy of my visit to the Elector’s deathbed—the perils that secrecy hinted at were now very plain. Though my grandfather had cowed his daughter, had still been able to enforce his will, dumb and dying as he was, did not mean that his wish would carry past the moment that the breath left his body.
I could no longer sit still. Instead I found myself up and pacing the room as a caged animal might pace, looking for freedom where there was no chance of it. Now I must pay for my folly—my blind plunge into a situation so unlike anything I knew that I was a blind woman lost in a maze.
Me—I— I must shut out everything else, bring my full mind to my own plight. The Colonel was a man, a man trained in court intrigues, or at least so used to them that he must have foreseen what would happen at the death of his master and made his own preparations before that event. He might well be over the first frontier already— A hireling who sold his sword—descendant of a Tory line—a man who was intelligent enough to look ahead— I summoned those thoughts to me. I was the one important to myself, and I was—
NO! I was not helpless! I had a good mind, and my grandmother had trained me to think logically. What if my grandfather had made some future provisions for me legally? I need only say I would have none of thos
e bequests, wanted nothing from Hesse-Dohna but to leave.
The difficulty now was that those tales of the courts with which Madam Manzell had favored those who learned German from her, and me the most of all, crowded into my mind in spite of everything I did to erase them. The utter and complete power of these petty princes and kings— What was a matter of astonishment at a distance became a source for fear if one was entrapped within it, as I was discovering now. Even the innocent might fear disaster—along with the guilty—as the Electress Ludovika had discovered. I wondered fleetingly if, in her fall, she had dragged down lesser members of the court, of whom no history now remained. That could be very possible.
But Kesterhof was not Wallenstein. I had yet to face any active threat against me. It was this sense of being alone which wore upon me. Where was the Colonel now?
My thoughts had made a circle, I was back once more concerned with that which I could in no way influence or perhaps even know. Unless Truda’s frail contact might hold—
I found myself by the wall, tugging at the bellrope, before I had even thought coherently of what I might accomplish by questioning the maid. She had been evasive with me all day. If I forced her too far, she could retreat into complete silence and defeat me entirely. Still I could not set aside any chance—no matter how small.
It seemed to take a very long time before I heard the welcome scratching at the door. At my call Truda came in. Though my first glance showed me no change from her usual cast down eyes, mute waiting for orders, I was—
I was what? What was happening to me that I read into the slightest of things some momentous message?