The Florian Signet

by John Burke

  I hurried through my toilet and was about to hurry down when there was a tap at my door: the door which opened into a diminutive sitting-room between our two bedrooms.

  Mother opened it, and motioned me to come through.

  Father was again seated, and again the letter lay before him.

  I waited.

  He cleared his throat. Mother made a fussy clicking noise with her tongue as if to goad him into speech.

  ‘Leonora,’ he said. At last he raised his eyes and looked at me, and I had never seen him look so hurt, or so much at a loss.

  ‘Papa, what’s happened? They haven’t found that the treatment . . . you’re not . . .’

  ‘Your father’s furious,’ said my mother. ‘May God protect him from a congestion of the head.’

  He folded the letter, and unfolded it again, and stared at it. I felt that he wished to deny its very existence.

  He said: ‘We have had a communication from Mr Warrington.’

  No, I thought. Please, God, no: let there not have been an accident, don’t let anything happen, not to Dominic.

  ‘He writes to tell me,’ said my father, ‘that banns are being called for the marriage of his son Dominic to your cousin Caroline.’

  Chapter Three

  A week later the invitations arrived. There was also a letter from Aunt Aurelia to ask her dear brother-in-law if he would be kind enough to officiate at the ceremony: it would mean so much to all of them.

  ‘The impertinence!’ raged my mother. ‘In our cathedral!’

  I tried to laugh, because there was nothing else to do.

  For me there was a personal letter from Caroline, gloating. Or was it simply that I read this into it, maliciously wanting to find it there? She so much hoped I would be happy for her. It had all come to pass so romantically, so wonderfully, and was so much finer than any of those disgustingly formal marriages contrived by parents, which we had both said we hated, hadn’t we? Would I please, please hurry home and be her bridesmaid? She and Dominic were so anxious to have me there.

  I had never seen my father so angry; indeed, had never believed him capable of outright, uncontrolled anger. Colour had come back to his cheeks but his lips were even paler than before, bleached almost out of existence.

  ‘The impertinence!’ he echoed my mother. ‘The sheer impertinence – of both of them!’

  Mother put her arm round me. It felt awkward and unaccustomed. She was often demonstrative with my father. With me, gestures came rarely and unspontaneously. ‘If he is so unreliable, you are so much better off without him.’

  I said: ‘There was never any question of my being with him.’

  ‘Oh, now, Leonora, we’ve all known . . . we have all more or less expected –’

  ‘Then you had no right!’

  I had to shout at somebody. My parents were nearest. Mother bridled, ready to be sympathetic but not to cope with tantrums. Father put out a hand towards me, then let it fall back on his lap. He looked as if he were about to have a seizure.

  So they had known all along about my feelings and expectations. I had been foolish to suppose otherwise. It had been taken for granted that sooner or later Dominic would propose to me: they might well have nodded and murmured to Mr Warrington about it, and received a benign nod. On both sides there had been smug confidence that it would all work out, without Dominic and me being consulted.

  Caroline had been right to deride such complacency.

  For a few moments I was incensed with them for taking so much for granted; then incensed with them for not succeeding.

  It was my father who suggested I might care to go out for a walk on my own. He did it so gracefully, first offering his company and then pretending to be even weaker than he was, begging off so that I might have my thoughts to myself.

  Early the following morning I heard him arguing with my mother. Or, rather, accompanying her in a tirade against Caroline and ‘that young Warrington’. For once she had got up early to accompany him to his appointed spring, telling me to stay in the hotel and sit back and put my feet up – and a lot more well-meaning things, as if putting my feet up would stop the blood rushing to my head or somehow slow the terrible rhythmic pulse of my thoughts.

  In fact I left the hotel room soon after they had done, and turned away from the colonnade and springs where the invalids queued with their beakers, and paced along the lonelier stretches of the river. Routine and ritual were everything. By four o’clock this afternoon the avenue would be crowded, but at this hour of the day there were only myself and a solitary figure in the distance. Wasn’t it the same at home as here? You did the correct thing at the correct time, and got by without trouble and with little pain.

  It was up to me to accept Caroline’s invitation to be her bridesmaid and go through with it bravely, smiling and waiting for a blossom from her bouquet.

  The idea turned my stomach over.

  Yet how peevish it would look if I rejected the invitation.

  Perhaps if we went home at once there would not even be a wedding. I would confront them, tell Caroline what I thought of her, show her up as what she was, tell Dominic . . .

  Tell him what? Jokes about Little Leonora did not amount to a betrothal; not even to what was known as an understanding.

  Now there were further tormenting visions to add to those I had already suffered. Dominic’s arms about Caroline, Dominic kissing her, imploring her to marry him. What words had he used: how had he led up to it, in what romantic setting, at what hour of the afternoon or evening? I wondered if it was somewhere I knew. I tried to hear the familiar sound of his voice; and then tried desperately not to hear it.

  There was nothing to be done. Or if there was, I was in no position to do it.

  I must forget Dominic. If a few dreams had been shattered they were, after all, no more than dreams. Any sensible girl would dismiss the whole matter.

  It was easier vowed than done.

  When I got back to the hotel it was to find my father collapsed in a chair, with my mother hovering beside him.

  ‘He was so furious. He went to his mud bath in a temper –’

  ‘But you’re not supposed to take the hot baths if you’re at all upset or excited.’

  ‘The physician was very cross. Told him it could accelerate the circulation, produce heart palpitations, congestion of the brain.’

  He recovered by the end of the day, but we decided it was best not to mention Dominic and Caroline in front of him. Mother confided that while I was out he had been fretting over the kind of letter he ought to write to Aurelia. She had not yet made up her own mind about offering congratulations to Caroline; and for myself, the thought of taking up pen to do such a thing was more than I could face.

  While we were still trying to summon up courage to do the correct thing, a man with a rubicund face and a shiny dark suit came the following day to call on my father. At first glance he looked like a medical man, perhaps called in for a second consultation.

  In fact he had come on behalf of the Anglican community in Carlsbad. There were plans to build an English church on a pleasant site below the Hirschensprung, but in the meantime daily services were held by an amicable arrangement with the German church. The present chaplain, one of a number who visited Carlsbad regularly for the cure, had been taken ill and was hurrying home to England. Was there any chance of my father taking his place for two or three weeks until a substitute could be brought out for the rest of the season? I thought it a bit funny – a sort of import and export trade in illness, with one cleric coming to Carlsbad for treatment, another fleeing back to England for it.

  ‘An admirable excuse for not returning immediately,’ said my mother.

  Father said: ‘We should not need excuses. We should stand by our principles, and simply do what is right.’

  ‘Yes. Still it will make things more comfortable.’

  Father hedged. ‘I would have to write to the Bishop. The authorities here are prepared to approach him also
, but it will depend on the way I put it.’

  ‘He’ll understand. He’ll know how we all feel.’

  ‘His Lordship is a sensitive soul,’ my father agreed. ‘Perhaps you’re right, my dear. Like you, he’ll regard this as a happy solution. We can refuse the Warrington ceremony without seeming hostile.’

  ‘Refuse it, yes. But why should we not seem hostile?’ I had never expected to hear such an uncharitable explosion from my mother, of all people. ‘I hope they will all understand that it is just an excuse.’

  I said: ‘I’m sure Caroline would love to have me as a bridesmaid.’

  Mother was startled. ‘You mean you really wish to attend?’

  ‘No. I meant only that Caroline would love to have me as a bridesmaid. It would make her day complete.’

  ‘An ungenerous remark, Leonora,’ said my father.

  ‘But true,’ said my mother.

  In one perverse way I wanted to return home soon to confront Dominic and Caroline, to make their wedding as miserable for them as it would be for me. Then I was disgusted with myself and acknowledged that it was much better to stay here, far from the scene.

  But to stay on another few weeks, knowing Dominic and Caroline would marry, would go away on honeymoon and be happy while I trudged to the Sprudel with my father, watched him sipping from his beaker, walked with him, saw him to the Kurhaus and collected him . . . and now must attend daily service to give family support to his devotions . . .

  The decision was out of my hands. We were to stay on.

  One afternoon, coming down from the Dreikreuzberg to meet my mother at the open-air café in the Stadtpark, I found she had somebody with her. I was making my way round the bandstand towards the tables and chairs under the trees when I saw them across a crescent of flower-beds, and heard my mother’s animated tones. She was speaking German. When I was half-way along the arc of the path she saw me, and cried out:

  ‘Leonora! There you are!’

  Then at once she reverted to German and I caught snatches of explanation about her Leonora, this was Leonora, here she was, now you will see . . .

  Her companion was a tall, slender lady who carried herself regally and tapped a thin black stick along the path as she walked. When she stopped a few feet away from me she stood quite still, not turning her head a fraction of an inch to either side. I realized I had seen her before. Once a week she appeared on the Alte Wiese to study one shop window and pâtisserie after another, while her coachman stood in line with a silver beaker at one of the springs. She had the air of a weekly visitor from the country combining self-indulgence in the cake shops with a precautionary digestive dose.

  My mother introduced her as the Countess Lomnica and, without waiting for us to exchange more than the briefest formalities, rushed on in her most hectic manner, scattering English in my direction and shreds of confirmatory German at the Countess, to tell me that we had such a treat in store, such a wonderful surprise.

  ‘It is so kind, really. It comes right out of the blue. Such a holiday, such a wonderful idea. A romantic castle, what do you make of that?’

  As I had not yet assembled the fragments, I was not sure what to make of it.

  The Countess put out a hand and touched my arm. She appeared a strong, fine-boned woman with firm autocratic features and a fine upstanding carriage which made her silver-topped cane a symbol of authority rather than a prop. Yet the fingers which dabbed at my sleeve were like those of a diffident old woman, and now that I was close I saw that the eyes behind the dove-grey mesh of her veil were uncertain and elusive, and the impression of stillness was misleading. She could not have been much more than fifty, but seemed less brisk and sure of herself than my mother.

  ‘I wish you to come and stay with me for a little while.’ Her voice was dry but gentle, and she spoke very deliberately so that I had no difficulty following the language. ‘My little Schloss is but a few miles away, and it will give me such pleasure to have company. I hope it will be happy for you also.’

  So that was it. Mother, indiscreet as ever, had come out with the whole story of my cousin and Dominic, painting no doubt a lurid picture of me as a betrayed, languishing maiden. I could imagine all her cronies pitying me. If there had been just the two of us, if she had brought the Countess’s invitation at second hand, or told me in advance that it was likely to be made, I would have found some way of rejecting it and insisting on being left alone. But on the spur of the moment I could think of no polite evasion. I heard myself saying:

  ‘It’s most kind of you. But to go to so much trouble –’

  ‘There is no trouble. I am too much on my own.’ There was a brief hesitation, and her voice trembled slightly as she added: ‘My son . . . is away.’

  Mother plunged in again. It would be so good for us, and it would be good for my father as well. He would stay in Carlsbad, continuing the cure – ‘It will probably work faster without me there to chatter at him all the time,’ she laughed delightedly – and enjoying his light duties as chaplain in locum-tenency.

  It appeared that yet another decision had been made without my having a chance to protest. I was drifting out of touch. Dominic marrying Caroline, fate decreeing that we should stay on in Carlsbad a few extra weeks; and now a hitherto unknown lady offering to spirit me away to some Bohemian fastness.

  There must come a time when I’d be given the opportunity of choosing my own course of action. No: it would never come as a gift – I must seize it for myself, take events and force them to dance to my tune for a change.

  It was an ingenuous conceit. Mother would have laughed and then reproached me for such unladylike ambitions. Father would smile tolerantly.

  When we were on our way back to the hotel I said: ‘You’ve never mentioned Countess Lomnica before.’

  ‘I have not? Oh, she joins our little circle when she is in town. Only minor aristocracy, of course.’

  ‘Indeed?’ I could not repress a laugh.

  ‘The widow of a Finanz Baron, no more. No quarterings to speak of,’ said my mother airily, as if she possessed a coat of arms and blue blood of the noblest vintage. ‘She could not hope to be received at the Imperial Court.’ Then she, too, laughed at her own absurdity. ‘But we shall have an enjoyable time, you will see. She is a sad woman, I think; but a good one.’

  *

  Fasanenburg was most impressive seen from the road approaching it along a dry volcanic valley. After a mile or more there came an acute turn northwards, and without warning a great crag shouldered out of the cliff face, bearing a stockade of jagged walls and a squat, half-ruined keep. The road began to climb, twisting and looping in and out of the forest, heading away from the castle in order to gain a few more feet of altitude and then turning back on itself. Tantalizing glimpses through the trees showed a wall of rock from which the battlements seemed to have grown of their own accord rather than been hewed out by men’s hands.

  The carriage which Countess Lomnica had sent for us slowed on one last incline until I feared it would run backwards and carry us all over a precipice. Then we emerged on a straight road leading through a stone arch into the main courtyard of Fasanenburg.

  At this close range the old fortress was less imposing. The outer bastions were in poor shape, and the keep was no more than a husk. Dust and grit blew across the courtyard, churned up by the wheels of the coach, and the masonry of the entrance was flaking away as if attacked by some grey, scaly, lichenous disease. Heraldic emblems carved in the stone had been eroded until little remained but a pockmarked hand here, a headless bird there, and something which might have been a torch or a spray of flowers.

  Once upon a time this craggy stronghold must have been the home of some robber baron, preying on the surrounding countryside, or guarding the frontier ranges of Bohemia. At some stage in its later history a manor house with pepperpot turrets had been incorporated with the western fortifications, its tile and plaster making a warm smudge against the grey stone. It was in the doorway of this that
Countess Lomnica awaited us.

  ‘You are welcome. Most welcome. It is so kind of you to come.’

  This was not just an empty courtesy. She really did seem to think it was kind of us to give up our time to her. I remembered my mother’s judgement that she was a sad woman, and found much in that haggard face to confirm this. Up here in her eyrie she was lonely. There was a village far below, huddled against the base of the crag and hidden from us as we approached: its inhabitants served the castle and estate, but did not provide the lady of the castle with friends of her own standing. Not that my mother and I could claim to be that, either, but somehow the fact that we were foreign visitors added a few points to our stature. However gladly my mother might lapse back into German, with some colloquial Czech phrases thrown in from time to time to add piquancy, the Countess regarded her as English; and as an Englishwoman and the wife of a pastor who was now overseeing the spiritual needs of other visitors to the spa, she was different – and commendable.

  My room was set into the outer wall, with a dizzying view down into the cleft of a natural dry moat. It had not been used for a long time and smelt stale, but with the windows open the spicy breath from the pine forests would soon clear that.

  Countess Lomnica, nervously hoping that everything was to my taste and that I had everything I needed, stood beside me and pointed out a dark blob which was a hunting lodge, the barely distinguishable curve of the road over the hillside, and the onion dome of a little woodland chapel. There was a beautiful ride through the woods, along the flank of the hill. Her son had been especially fond of it.

  ‘I regret so much that Michael is not here. You two would find so much to talk of. I think you would be amused together.’

  ‘He’s in some other part of the country?’

  ‘Some other part,’ she said wryly, as if the phrase were not quite to her liking.

  ‘He’ll not be back while we are still here?’

  Serve them right, I thought, if I were to return to England with a dashing young Bohemian blade as my slave. Inspired by the loftiness of the castle and its command of the countryside – of the whole world, one could believe in this rarefied atmosphere – I had raced in a matter of seconds through a romantic fantasy in which the son of the house came striding through the gateway and across the courtyard, fell in love with me at first sight, and proved to be ten times more handsome and considerably more intelligent and appreciative than Dominic Warrington.