The Lightstep

by John Dickinson

  Beyond the thick clouds, the sun must be low. It was more than a league, by narrow and twisting paths, to the nearest inn in Erzberg territory. His presence here was already an embarrassment. If he remained another hour, they might even feel obliged to invite him to stay the night. And what would Lady Adelsheim sly in the morning, when she discovered that such an unwelcome visitor had sheltered under her roof?

  He had done enough harm here.

  'You are good,' he said bowing. 'But time does not permit me to stay. If word could be passed to the stables for my horse, I will make no further demands of you.'

  'It is you who are good, Captain,' said the sister. 'It is indeed a terrible day.'

  'If there is anything more I can do, please name it.'

  'I believe . . . I do not know if I ask in the right quarter. But I believe that my mother might expect a letter from His Highness.'

  His Highness? The Prince-Bishop?

  She must have seen his surprise.

  'He is godfather to all of us,' she explained.

  No doubt he was – and to the sons and daughters of half the gentle houses within twenty leagues of Erzberg! And that was the problem.

  'I fear so many families have suffered in this last action that the Prince may not yet have been able to write to them all.'

  He saw her face change. 'We had not heard,' she said.

  'It was kept secret to begin with.'

  'Then – our loss has been greater than I understood.'

  'Indeed, Lady Maria.'

  Indeed.

  'Nevertheless,' he said, 'I will see that the Prince's secretaries are reminded. And if there is ever any other way in which I may be of service, I beg that you will ask it.'

  They walked the few paces to the door together. And with each step he took Wéry felt that their talk was incomplete. Something more could or should be said to make the silence between them a little more whole. He racked his brains for it. Nothing came. Death was unanswerable. The man should not have died, and he had done.

  On the steps he turned to her, and tried again.

  'If I may say one thing more to you, it is that it was an honour and a privilege to be acquainted with your brother. I know he loved this house, and he loved his family. And also he loved his friends. These were the things he died for. And if you have nothing to die for, you have no reason to live. I truly believe this.'

  She hesitated. Perhaps she tried to smile. But all she could say was: 'You must look after your hand.'

  'I will. Indeed,' he lied, 'it has stopped hurting already.'

  V

  Written in Grief

  Then he was gone, the messenger of Death. Maria watched him as he rode down the track towards the village. She could see him, huddled in his greatcoat under the rain showers, but she could demand no more of him – not one word more of explanation, apology, compassion, nor any of the million things she needed and that would never be enough. She was left in the confines of the world she knew, which was now so horribly changed.

  She turned and entered the house.

  Once, years ago, Albrecht had taken her to an ants' nest he had found. He had lifted the great stone that had covered it. She had watched curiously as the little creatures scurried to and fro in their tunnels, some with eggs in their jaws, some apparently aimless, and all frantic with the catastrophe that had suddenly laid them bare.

  Albrecht had been going to stir them up with a stick for her, but out of pity for the ants she had stopped him. 'I suppose you are right,' he had sighed. 'It is a city, for them. One would have to have a horribly important reason to destroy a city.'

  Carefully he had put the stone back in its place.

  Now the memory of all that hurrying and scurrying flooded back to her. The house echoed with unusual noises. People bustled 'when they should have walked in calm. Servants came to her for orders, which they had never done before while Mother was at home. She told them to prepare supper at the usual hour, not because she felt any appetite, but to give them something to do. Icht, who had been banished by Mother in a fit of weeping, came to take his leave of her instead. Franz wanted to tell her that Dominus had known him and liked him and would she please tell Mother so? And everyone was anxious that, when things righted themselves, they should not be blamed for whatever their part had been in what had happened.

  '. . . It was not – really, Lady Maria, it was not my fault that he went to the library! I gave him my lady's message most distinctly. I told him – I told him very firmly, Lady Maria – that she was not to be disturbed. But he tricked me, Lady Maria. He sent me for his hat and gloves. So it was not my fault that he did not withdraw as he should have done . . .'

  'It is no matter, Tieschen,' she had said to him, as he followed her all the way along the corridor, pleading at her elbow. 'I will see that Mother knows.'

  And then she was sucked upstairs to where the great queen ant herself lay, curled on her side on the canopied bed. Mother's face was grey and her arms were clutched tightly around herself. Her shoulders were hard as wood, unyielding to Maria's reluctant embrace. Between bouts of weeping she was blaming all the world.

  '. . . That insufferable man! Why did he come here? Why did he think he could speak to me so?'

  'He was a friend of Albrecht's, Mother. He thought we should know what had happened.'

  'It should not have happened! He was always too selfish!'

  'There, there,' Father mumbled, looking gloomily at the floor as if the cause of all this trouble lay somewhere at his feet.

  'We must not blame him, Mother. It was the French. They did it. He was leading his men . . .'

  'Monkeys! That wretched d'Erles! We have all been ruined for the sake of one lazy, brainless godson!'

  'I meant the French army, Mother . . .'

  'But was not Albrecht also his godson?' Mother cried. 'It is a crime! He should have made peace years ago. Others did!'

  'He' now was no longer Albrecht, nor his friend Captain Wéry. Nor was it the famously dissolute Comte d'Erles, the French émigré who had taken shelter under the wing of his godfather the Prince-Bishop of Erzberg. 'He' was now the Prince-Bishop himself! And who would she blame next? The Pope, perhaps? Maria gripped the back of a chair, and her knuckles were white.

  'We must be strong,' she said desperately 'He would want us to be.'

  'That's all very well,' Mother muttered. 'But you did not love him as I did.'

  That evening she sat at her mother's desk, alone at last. She was alone, with the grey tides of grief that had been pulling at her heart for hours.

  The desktop was covered with the letters Mother had been writing when the news came. Here was the one to the bailiff Holz, on the Niederwald estate. Here was another, addressed to the cantonal court: the body that the local Imperial Knights had elected to oversee their dealings with each other, since no one else below the Emperor and the Imperial courts had the right. Mother had been telling them imperiously, and yet again, that whatever else Grandfather's creditors might have a claim to, they had no right to her own personal incomes, which had been settled on her by the Rother family at her marriage.

  And this one was to the Canon Rother-Konisrat himself, listing at great length – and some imagination – all of Franz's virtues; for Mother had lately decided that Franz could not after all be the one to carry on the Adelsheim line, and must be found some position in the church, even perhaps a canonry, so that he might have an income to maintain him when Albrecht came home to be the heir.

  All these letters should have been completed, copied, sealed and directed by now. On a normal evening they would have been stacked in a neat pile on the desk waiting for dispatch. Instead they lay scattered across the board like fallen leaves, and their words spoke only to the air. Across the room the long-case clock ticked, marching on and on into the night like a soldier obeying his last command. Everything else had stopped, as if a sudden curse had put all the affairs of Adelsheim into an enchanted sleep.

  And if ever Adelsheim
woke again, everything would have changed. Certainly Franz could not enter the priesthood now. Somehow he must marry and have sons after all, or the last estates of Adelsheim would pass out of the line altogether. Because Alba would never come home.

  And Mother lay upstairs, wrecked on her bed, with Father still sitting beside her, mumbling aimless comforts now and again. She would not come down tonight. Perhaps she would lie there, greyfaced and weeping intermittently, for the rest of her life.

  She deserved to!

  Had she thought she could will Albrecht into coming home safe? She had made them all so sure that he would! And now she would blame everybody, everybody and everything, because he would not. She would even blame Maria, perhaps, sensing that her daughter had not believed strongly enough that he would return. As if it had been through some flaw in the wall of will that the enemy had come to rob him of his life!

  You did not love him as I did.

  Furious, Maria swept her mother's letters aside. The leather desktop, shiny, with all its familiar stains, looked up at her. For a moment she stared at it, unseeing. Then her fingers found more paper. They picked up the pen. She dipped it, and began to write:

  Sirs,

  Today I have heard the news of my brother's death at the hands of French soldiers near Hersheim.

  I well remember how, when we first heard the news of your Revolution, my brother and I rejoiced together. It seemed to us a wonderful thing that a state should order itself according to the principles of reason and equality, rather than of privilege. Although we ourselves were privileged, we swore to each other that we would gladly exchange . . .

  Already her fingers had begun to tremble. She put the pen carefully into its stand. There was a lump in her throat, and the emptiness in her chest seemed to weigh within her. Breathing was difficult. No, not difficult, but it had become a task that the body was no longer doing by itself. Now her mind was aware of it, and she must think about it to make it happen. Now, even living was an effort of will.

  She drew breath, and heard the sob in it. She wondered if she was about to weep. And she thought that she would. Just for these few moments, at last, she would close her eyes to the world and weep, and cling to the thought of her brother, as if his ghost had come to be with her one last time.

  She had been dancing, here in the library, eighteen months ago. There had been no partner but the lighted candle that she held in both hands, no music but her own low humming, and no audience except Alba, lying on the settee by the window with the heels of his boots propped up on the arm.

  He had lost much of his plumpness in the campaigns. His uniform no longer fitted well. His neck had been scrawny, his nose no longer just fine but sharp, and pointed straight up at the ceiling. But he had still been alive, still Alba, just as if he always would be. And she had danced before him.

  She had danced, feeling both very grown up and rather mystical, because she had felt the world was changing and that the changes might yet sweep everything she had known away. One-two- three, one-two-three, she had been thinking, and turn and back and one-two-three . . .

  'I have been waiting for you to explain what you are doing with that candle,' he had said (speaking German as he always did with her, in defiance of Mother's rules). 'Will you not oblige me?'

  'I'm dancing with it.'

  'I can see that. Nero fiddled while Rome burned, and now you dance while the Empire totters. But it is more usual to dance with a gentleman, if one is present. And if the gentleman is not present, or does not please you, it is usual to dance with a chair. I believe you are about to set your dress on fire.'

  'Then the Empire shall totter while I burn,' Maria had said, as she turned in a figure, counted and turned again. 'But I may not dance this dance with a man, nor with a chair. It must be with a lamp or a candle. The candle should have a hood and this one does not. Do not bleat, brother. I am being careful.'

  'What dance is this, if men may not dance it?'

  'It is the Lightstep. And it's your fault we dance it, because you and all your friends are away, and there are too few gentlemen to go around. So the Countess said that if we could not dance with the gentlemen, we should dance with each other. And she had some of the May-dances adapted for the ballroom. This is one of them.'

  'I imagine the Countess was not sorry to surround herself with beautiful young girls.'

  'Of course. But for the most part we do not mind her. And we prefer to dance with her than not to dance at all. In the Lightstep, the candle is the man. And the dance is a charm to bring him back to us.'

  After a turn and another figure, because he did not ask, she had said: 'I'm dancing for you.'

  She should not have told him. Of course it ruined the charm, if you let them know who it was for. And so his enemies had taken him, on the last day of the war, and they had left Adelsheim a shell.

  She sat looking at her half-written page, fighting the thought that there might have been something she could have done, some prayer she might have said, that would have brought him back. Somehow she had failed.

  You did not love him as I did. Perhaps, if she had loved him even more . . .

  'You must bear with Mother, if you can,' said the ghost from the settee.

  'I do not believe she wishes me to bear with her,' said the ghost of the younger Maria, still turning in her dance with the candle held before her.

  'Fate has dealt her a hard hand, to have a mind like hers and yet be married to Father.'

  'Father has a good heart. Even she admits that. I am sure a good heart is more in the eyes of God than any quickness of wit. She will marry me to Cousin Julius, Alba. I cannot think Father would have permitted it if his mind had been whole.'

  'Can you not? A marriage to any Rother, even Julius, would assure you of wealth and position.'

  'Julius is too young, and sickly. I shall spend a long engagement, year in and year out. And I shall spend it waiting to hear if my husband-to-be has in fact died. And listening to Mother in the meanwhile. I declare I am as oppressed as any poor peasant, and I long for my own revolution.'

  . . . endless sequence of bloody acts and murders that you have committed, in your own country and in ours, horrified us, as it has horrified all the world. And now you have continued your murderous attacks even as your plenipotentiaries discussed peace, and indeed it has been represented to me that the action in which my brother died took place on the very day that news of the armistice reached the camps. Thus it seems that it was unnecessary, wasteful, an act of barbarity and nothing more. I do not know how to describe to you the virtues of the man that has been lost. I believe it no exaggeration to say that his gentleness and compassion approached that of our Saviour himself . . .

  Was it too much to compare him with the Lord? Would they sneer when they read it, these men who knew no respect for priest or altar? But surely it was the truth. Everyone had thought the same about him. Even Michel Wéry seemed to have loved him (or why would he have come all the way here, a stranger, knowing that everyone else in Erzberg was too bemused by their losses to think of poor Adelsheim?). Even a man who had once been an enemy.

  'You should meet my friend Michel,' said Albrecht from the settee. 'You would find him intriguing.'

  'Michel?' repeated the younger Maria with a laugh. 'You write so much about him! Michel this, Michel that. What has become of him now?'

  'He is still going off from time to time, trying to get himself killed. And thankfully the Lord keeps sparing him. Did I tell you the Prince has made him a hussar?'

  'My Goodness!'

  'My Goodness indeed. The hussars were pink with fury. I think His Highness must have wanted to spite them. But in truth he is attached not to the regiment but to Balcke-Horneswerden's staff. He spends half his time carrying messages for us, and the other half off seeing all sorts of strange people who have no love for Privilege, but who have come to have even less for the Liberty and Equality that France has brought them. He has become a sort of spy. I wonder if he feels the
irony of it.'

  An enemy and a spy, thought Maria. A fanatic, too. You never told me about his hands. Yet still you could make him your friend. Truly we are wretched, yet in our wretchedness we are only one case among a legion who cry out because of what you have done. Therefore, sirs, I bring before you the loss of my brother, and of all those other innocent and worthy men, on both sides, who became victims of this act, though it be the least of all the acts you have committed. They are the innocent that you have condemned. And I beg you to pray to Our Lady for pardon, if indeed you pray at all; and I shall pray for pardon that I cannot pardon you.

  Written in grief,

  Maria Constanze Elisabeth von Adelsheim

  Blot her mother's ink dry. Envelope it, and seal it with her mother's wax. Do not think on scruples. For now, and for however long it might be, she was the mistress in Adelsheim. While Mother wept and heaped her blame aimlessly around Christendom, she would speak with Adelsheim's voice. She would bring the guilt home.

  Then, as her pen hovered over the envelope, she hesitated.

  For with whom, exactly, did the guilt lie?

  She knew very well whom she was addressing – those faceless men of France whose insanities had brought all this to pass. But she needed to point her finger at just one, or at most a few, of all that nation. She wanted to pin him, or them, with her words, as a duellist who had backed his opponent to the wall now skewered him with one fast thrust. And whom exactly did she mean? The soldiers, accused, would turn and point to their officers, the officers to their general, their general to his masters in Paris. And the masters would say, 'Yes, we did have a part, but it was also because of . . .' and they would point in other directions. And so it would go on, and on. The guilt – the one black guilt – would be broken into little pieces, like a Host at Mass, and passed out to a thousand, ten thousand, mouths that would swallow it in little black crumbs, and then it would be gone. To whom should she speak?