The Lightstep

by John Dickinson

Because it would have to be Anna. There was no 'man she could trust' in the house. Not in her mother's house, with Mother sitting over them all like a great spider, eight-eyed and casting web after web until nothing could move without bringing her scuttling down the threads to pounce on whatever was going on. None of the servants were safe. The only person she could trust, and who could have a reason to go, was Anna. And because the journey might be difficult, and possibly dangerous despite the peace, Maria herself would have to go too. She could not let Anna go alone.

  But how ridiculous of Mother to accuse her so! ('Simpering to the young men' indeed!)

  Yes, she had been looking for someone at Lady Jenz's levee. Yes, it had in fact been Major Wéry she had been looking for. Now that she had realized that she herself must go to the Rhine, she needed to hear much more about whom she was going to and what the difficulties might be. Distances, documents, what to take and what to leave behind – she needed to know these things. Was this not good reason – even if one she could never confess to Mother?

  And why should she not talk more with him about Alba and their adventures together? They had been close companions for four years – four years that had been lost to her when Alba had been away from home and which she could now never recover. All the things they had done, like the tale of the dancing bear – had there been anything more like that? What else could he have told her?

  Why had he not been there? Did he never attend levees or balls at all? If he did not, their meetings would be few indeed.

  She felt her heart sink at the thought.

  But then, all the more reason to make the most of what meetings there might be. And never mind what Mother said of it afterwards! She remembered his eyes on her, in that shabby barracks room where the light had fallen sideways upon his face and left half of it in darkness. She thought how he had glared when Anna had offered her bribe. He had dismissed it without hesitation. He had not even stopped to calculate what kind of bribe the meagre purses of Adelsheim could have afforded him. As an émigré and a revolutionary, probably he had no money at all.

  Handsome? No, he was not handsome, but who cared for that? So much the better for him. Good looks always seemed to make men idiots, just as money only made them feckless. Nor did he have 'quality' as mother reckoned it – four quarterings or more. But he had a quality of his own, strange and angry, like a black vulture that had alighted on a branch as she passed, and through some wild magic had spoken to her. She saw that very clearly.

  With a new firmness in her step now, she went in search of Anna.

  XIV

  Vulture

  Wéry was twenty leagues from Erzberg, in a land still devastated from the war. He sat on his horse in the ruins of a great half-timbered farmhouse. Barn and byre and house had all been one building, as imposing as a moderate church, rising for four storeys within the great pitched roof. But the roof had fallen in fire, leaving blackened stumps of rafters naked to the air. The byre had collapsed altogether, and most of the end-wall with it. Weeds and brambles grew among the wreckage.

  From this hiding-place Wéry looked out to a far hill-top, crowned with a wood. In the fields below the wood a group of peasants, tiny with the distance, 'were hand-pulling a plough through the soil. They would be hand-pulling it because there were no oxen left here, no mules or donkeys and certainly no horses. Anything so useful had been lost a year or more ago. Now, months after the peace, there was still not the money to replace them. So the peasants harnessed their wives and children to the plough, and scratched as best they could in the sparse greens of the fallow.

  Twice in the last few years French armies had advanced this way from the Rhine, and twice retreated. And as they had passed they had taken the beasts from the field, food and possessions from the villagers, even the timbers from the barns. Waters still ran here, birds sang and trees grew, but in all other senses it was desert, dotted with the skeletons of buildings and hamlets where half the huts were empty.

  Wéry was watching for news that they would come for a third time.

  There was a new regime in Paris. Directors had been expelled, royalist sympathizers purged. Was there a change of French plans for Erzberg? No one knew.

  And Hoche was dead, suddenly, of some sickness. There was to be another commander in Germany now. Again, what did it mean? Erzberg seethed with war rumours. Canons argued with the Prince in the cathedral chapter. Bergesrode fumed and demanded answers that Wéry could not give him. And away beyond that hill-top where the human plough-team laboured was the road to Wetzlar, headquarters of a French army tens of thousands strong.

  Wéry waited. He was not expecting to see the heads of enemy columns yet. Not yet, even though the French when they moved could move faster than many an opposing general thought possible. There would be some sign first – some news or rumour or fact that would warn him they were about to march. That was what he was waiting for.

  On the far side of the valley, a brightly-coloured cart was trundling slowly down the line of a track that dropped from the wood to the valley floor.

  It was a curious sight, on this grieving landscape. The sidepanels were painted a light blue, outlined in yellow, and covered (Wéry knew, although he could not see them from this distance) with lively figures of flowers and trumpeters and gypsy girls. It had a brash, unforced cheerfulness, which seemed to shout that from now on everything was going to get better and better, and soon there would be prosperity again.

  Curious, but Wéry had been expecting it. He knew that a certain pedlar, Tomas Kranz, worked along these roads, into and out of Giessen, into and out of Wetzlar. Kranz painted his cart in bright colours so that he could be seen from far off by anyone who had a little money, and who might drop what they were doing to come and pick over the goods that he carried. Wéry saw him now and waited for him. There was a purse at his waist for Tomas Kranz, and also a bottle of brandy in his saddlebags. Kranz liked brandy. And he should be carrying more than pans and leather straps today.

  He should be carrying news: facts, gossip, maybe columns of figures, written on scraps of paper and disguised as some random act of book-keeping. He should be carrying all the bits and pieces that he and others had managed to gather from their perilous associations with the French occupiers. It might be a mass of contradictory information, meaningless without other clues that Kranz and his fellows had been unable to hit upon. It might all point in one direction. Or, buried among it, in some drunken officer's tittle-tattle, there might be some gem that would make sense of all the hints and rumours that had reached Erzberg so far.

  Soon he would know.

  But as his eye followed the slow progress of the cart down the hill, Wéry felt a sense of detachment. Soon he would speak with Kranz, but not yet. In the meantime the French, Bergesrode and his demands, Kranz and his answers – there was nothing to be done about any of them. They were like a great, thick coat of thoughts, which he had worn for a long time and which, at the moment of seeing the cart, he had understood at last were not part of his skin. He could peel them off, if he chose, and lay them aside. He could put on other thoughts that lay waiting in the cupboards of his mind. Watching that blue-and-yellow cart as it lumped and rocked its way to the ford, he could actually wish that it were not after all a cart, carrying a brave, cross-grained, self-pleased, snuffling little man, but that instead it would be the carriage of a lady. And that it would draw up on the roadside by the barn where he waited and Maria von Adelsheim would lean from the window and call to him.

  And they could walk together by the stream down there, with the chaperon a good distance back, and talk together. They could talk for hours. (Heavens, what would he say? What could he say of himself that might interest her? But surely he would think of something.)

  It was a bittersweet thought, because he knew it was impossible. There was no chance that he might be permitted to meet her, except in some great ballroom where all officers were commanded to attend, and where a thousand eyes would be watching who met with wh
om, and for how long. And yet he preferred to play with it, as if it were a candle-flame – even to burn himself with it a little, rather than to consign it to nothingness. He wondered, if the idea about the packages worked, whether he might pass his own letters to her along with those that went and came from the Rhine. But the woman Poppenstahl would surely be alert for that (she might be simple, but she could not be that simple). And even if letters could reach the hand he intended them for, what could they say? And what would she think?

  Hopeless, of course. Quite hopeless. And if he did not shake off these thoughts soon they would simply torture him.

  Still, he was not sorry to be thinking them.

  The cart was moving slowly. It had come perhaps a third of the way down the slope. The plough-team was moving even more slowly. The increase of the patch of tilled earth, the diminishing of the fallow, was all but imperceptible.

  There was plenty of time to dream.

  Then another movement caught Wéry's eye.

  A party of horsemen had appeared where the road emerged from the far wood. He could not see how many there were. Nor could he see their uniforms, because in this cold, wet autumn all soldiers wore coats or cloaks, and all coats or cloaks swiftly became a muddy grey or brown.

  But he did not have to see their uniforms – not here, within a few leagues of Wetzlar. He leaned forward in his saddle, feeling a cold prickling at his wrists and throat. He swore softly.

  Enemy!

  The horsemen came on down the road. They seemed in no hurry but they made up ground easily on the slow-moving cart. The cart did not change its pace. Kranz might not know they were behind him. Or maybe he did know, but knew also that the very worst thing he could do would be to attempt flight. He could not out-distance them. He would be carrying papers, letters from French unit commanders, permitting him to do his trade in their lines. He would have to rely on those, and hope that the patrol had some other reason to be out here.

  Wéry watched, helpless. The horsemen closed up on the cart. From this distance, he could hear nothing. But all at once, and without fuss, the cart had stopped, a couple of hundred yards short of the stream. The horsemen surrounded it. There would be questions now. Kranz would be producing papers. He might even be starting his salesman's patter – belts and buckles, Captain. Belts and buckles and handkerchiefs, and there's no soldier alive who has too many of those. See for yourself. I only carry the best. Silks, Citizens? Presents for the girls? Take them to the house of Madame Herder in Giessen and say I sent you . . . Kranz was good. He'd delight in earning a coin or two from the French, under the very nose of his spymaster. He . . .

  A small puff of smoke sprouted among the men and horses. Wéry did not hear the shot.

  Nothing seemed to happen for a few moments.

  Then, lazily, the cart turned in its tracks. It began to make its way uphill, even more slowly than it had descended. The horsemen gathered behind it and followed. Maybe they were laughing to one another. Wéry thought there was now a man standing in the back of the cart, picking over Kranz's bales and stores as the little caravan went bump, bump, bump back up towards the ridge from which they had all emerged.

  In the field, the people at the plough had halted. Two of them stood, gazing down at the road. Two others sat in the furrows, glad of any chance for a rest. But the ploughman himself was running downhill, across the fallow, to the roadside where the cart had been halted. Screwing up his eyes, Wéry thought he could see something lying there. At this distance, it only looked like a small pile of rags.

  And that was all Kranz would be now.

  Wéry swore savagely.

  He swore because he had lost a man, a good and lucky man, who suddenly had not been good or lucky enough.

  He swore because he had lost the information – all that information! All the answers he had been hoping for! And he had had to watch it happen! (Damn it – he had been sitting here daydreaming while they came and stole his man's life from under his nose! If he had been alert, perhaps . . .)

  He swore because he did not know. He did not know whether what he had seen was a casual murder, for the sake of the purse and a cartload of goods, a score settled by men who thought they had been cheated, or an assassination of a man known by the French to be a spy.

  And if they had known he was a spy, what else did they know? What about the other agents – were they safe? Who had betrayed Kranz? What else had been betrayed?

  And what was he to do?

  You must not go into French-held territory, Bergesrode had said. Up here in Nassau, "French-held territory" was wherever the French went. And the French went where they liked. The danger grew the nearer he came to Wetzlar. And it would double if the French were breaking his ring as he sat here.

  The best thing to do – the wise thing to do – would be to lie low, wait nearby, and see who got out.

  But he could not sit still! However sensible it might be, it was not the way he was made. There were men over there who might be warned. They had information – possibly vital information – that he needed. Kranz might have been carrying something on his body. Had the soldiers searched it? Had they found something, and recognized it for what it was?

  There must be no dreaming now. No distractions. He had been dreaming a moment ago and the enemy had punished him for it. Now he must catch up.

  He watched the soldiers disappear into the distant trees. Then he urged his mount towards the doors of the barn that concealed him. Just before he emerged from hiding, he held the horse back for a moment. That cold pricking was running up and down his wrists again. He could feel his own pulse beginning to drum the beats of action.

  The soldiers could not have known he was here. If they had known, they would simply have delayed their pounce, to catch him as well.

  But they might suspect that Kranz had been due to meet someone. Eyes might well be watching now, from the cover of the far wood, to see if anyone else came to the body.

  He swallowed. He studied the line of trees carefully. Nothing showed. But of course, if they suspected something, nothing would be allowed to show.

  After a little thought, he turned his horse again, and made his way out to the back of the barn.

  He was still going to cross over. He was going to find his agents, if they were alive. And first, he would go to the body. But he would come at it the long way round, so that he might see any watchers before they saw him.

  He was going to circle.

  XV

  The Gathering

  On an evening in early October, Lady Adelsheim stood in black in the house in the Saint Emil quarter. 'So, sir,' she cried. 'His Highness now supposes that he might be a general himself. Is it true?'

  The gaunt Knight von Uhnen, a member of the War Commission and Colonel-Inspector of Militia, bowed and kissed her hand. 'It is true that he pays more attention to the army than is generally realized,' he said.

  'Then I declare I am mad,' said Lady Adelsheim. 'For one of us must be, and I am sure that it could not be His Highness.'

  'Ha, ha, my Lady,' said the Knight, and presented the young man beside him. 'You know my son, of course.'

  'Of course. Why, Karl, how handsome you look tonight. How very dashing.'

  Instead of his hussar uniform, Karl von Uhnen was wearing a suit of a modern French cut, in buff and blue. His hair was unpowdered and tied in a queue. It was a calculated, casual look, as if he were still in the country rather than on the fringes of the court. With his clothes and youth he stood out sharply among the small array of embroidered gentlemen in their wigs and silk breeches who posed for the attention of the ladies in the room.

  'Oh, this fashion is very well, very well,' the older Uhnen said. 'Not a creature under fifty will wear anything else, I hear. But for that reason I am exempt, you see.' With another bow he made his way past her into the high and gilded drawing room where the Knight August von Adelsheim, arrayed in his majestic velvet doublet and decked out in his great wig, had been placed on a settee near t
he fire.

  Maria sat beside her father. She kept her hand on his arm to remind him that she was there with him, and also that he was where he was supposed to be and should not start wandering around while the guests gathered. She saw the Knight von Uhnen approach. Beyond him yet more faces were appearing in the doorway – Baron von und zu Löhm, and a friend, she thought.

  'My dear August,' said the Knight von Uhnen. 'It is good to see you in health.'

  He bowed his head as he spoke. He had wealth, wit, influence – many things that Father had not. Like Father, Uhnen had 'immediacy': he had no lord but the Emperor himself. But Father had the sixteen quarterings on his coat of arms, and so the Knight's tone bestowed the respect that was due. Father mumbled something in reply. He gave the Knight his hand, but did not look up.

  The Knight peered down at his host, waiting to see if there would be some further acknowledgement. When there was not, he said, 'My dear,' to Maria, bending briefly over her hand, and passed on with the glassy smile of a man who had escaped without embarrassment from the company of the exalted but unfortunate Adelsheim.

  '. . . Now, cousin,' cried Lady Adelsheim at the door. 'You owe me your wig, sir. Where is it?'

  His Excellency the Canon Rother-Konisrat was a tall man, with the face and figure of a plump crane. He wore soft pinks and greys, and bowed low to his female cousin as if he were not, after all, one of the most important men in Erzberg.

  'Pardon me, dear Constanze,' he said mildly. 'But for the time being I believe I still have a use for it.'

  'No, sir, this I will not have! This man,' she said, addressing a wider group, 'having failed to obtain for me a passport for my Frenchman, staked his wig that I could do no better. And lo! With a flick of my fingers, it is done. Now I shall have his wig for my wall too.'

  'It has come, has it?'

  'It was in my hands at noon today. Your wig, sir, or you shall be a knave.'

  'If you will permit it to me to cover my embarrassment tonight,' said the Canon with another bow, 'I shall send it to you in the morning.'