by Eva Ibbotson
An hour later Tessa crept out of the shop. The biscuit tin was still clutched under her arm but there was a bewildered look in her eyes. ‘The simplicity which costs no less than everything’ is a phrase much beloved of saints and mystics who use it to describe the pursuit of a spiritual life. This simplicity Anita had brought to Tessa’s hair. The minutely calculated sweep of the silken fringe above the eyes, the curving fronds lapping the pointed ears, the soft strands nestling into the hollow at the back of the neck suggested now a very different kind of urchin: a winged messenger, the young Mercury perhaps, or Ariel.
‘You look charming.’
It had not been Guy’s intention to pursue his acquaintance with Witzler’s under wardrobe mistress. But leaving the Treasury on a personal errand he had recalled his instructions to Thisbe and, on an impulse, crossed the road to Anita’s. Now he too was startled. Tessa had been not so much transformed as revealed. The vulnerable little face, the delicate bones, the strange air of puzzlement as she tried to comprehend what the mirror had shown her moved Guy strangely. He had the absurd feeling that as one can see in young babies the throbbing of their pulse beneath the fontanelle, so he could put his hand on the bronze and shining head and feel the beating of her soul.
‘She is not ready,’ thought Guy. ‘Poor child, what have I done?’ And lightly he said, ‘May I relieve you of your burden?’ For the tin she was carrying, adorned with a painting of the former Empress Elizabeth in a tiara, was large.
‘Oh no, thank you. I’m just going to the Stadtpark to release the mice.’
‘The mice?’ said Guy, nevertheless taking the tin.
Tessa nodded. ‘You see, when I first came to work in the theatre they had those traps that break their backs, only sometimes . . . they . . . didn’t. So I borrowed some of those where the mice go in through those bristle tunnels that point backwards, you know, and then they can’t get out. Only then, of course, you have the mice.’
Guy, steering her across the road with a light hand under her elbow, said he saw this.
‘So I let them out in the Stadtpark,’ she said, ‘when I can get away. But please . . . I’m sure I’m delaying you?’
‘Not at all. I was only going to buy a birthday present for my foster-mother in England.’
They had entered the park where lilacs mingled their heavy, fragrant clusters with the golden tresses of the laburnums, little girls bowled their hoops and a troop of firemen in Ruritanian uniforms were marching towards the bandstand.
‘Are they musical mice?’ Guy enquired. ‘I mean, are we making for the Johann Strauss statue? Or the Schubert Memorial?’
Tessa smiled and shook her head. ‘I usually try to get down to the banks of the river – it’s steep there, a sort of cutting and not many people go. It’s the river Wien, did you know? Mostly it flows underground but here it comes to the surface for a little.’
‘Yes.’ Guy did know. He had come here with his poems to Nerine and floated them down the sluggish, sleepy little river which was nevertheless more truly Vienna’s own than the Danube, for the city had been named for it.
‘Here?’ he asked.
Tessa nodded and Guy opened the box.
‘I don’t want you to think I’m sentimental,’ she said as six damp and not noticeably grateful mice lurched away over the gravel. ‘If it were possible to eat them, I wouldn’t mind killing them. But I don’t think it is?’
‘No,’ said Guy gravely, as the last of the thumb-sized rodents vanished behind the stones. ‘I don’t see them as a really useful source of meat.’ But he wondered, suddenly, if the girl was ever actually hungry. Well, at least for a week at Pfaffenstein he would see that she was decently housed and fed.
As they scrambled up the bank, the band began to play. A waltz, of course . . . And drawn by the music, smiling at the firemen perspiring in their uniforms, they came to a halt before the bandstand at which Strauss himself had played.
‘I know the words in English,’ said Tessa proudly. And in a small, true voice she sang the self-congratulatory, foolish refrain.
‘Oh, what a piece of Heaven is this!
Vienna is bliss, Vienna is bliss!’
She smiled up at him. ‘Not very poetical, is it?’
No . . . all the same.’ He looked down at the small, sleek head striking fire from the sun. ‘Is it like that for you? A piece of heaven, this city?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Sometimes it is like that for me. Heaven in springtime. Heaven in C major. Yes, sometimes it is like that for me.’
The next moment her dreamy pensive look had gone. An ex-serviceman on crutches had come up to beg and as he saw the note Guy put in his hand he exploded into fulsome gratitude.
‘Thank you, Herr Baron. God bless the Herr Baron. May the Herr Baron know nothing but happiness.’
‘Oh!’ said Tessa, her eyes kindling, when the man had hobbled away. ‘You shouldn’t let him do that!’
‘Do what?’
‘Grovel like that! Call you Herr Baron. This is a republic. Titles were abolished officially two years ago.’
‘I don’t think you will change human nature with political decrees,’ said Guy, who had always been rather amused by the Viennese habit of conferring titles on anyone they wished to flatter. ‘People will always be snobs.’
‘No, they won’t! They can be educated. When I am the first woman director of the Burg Theatre I’m going to put on plays which—’ she broke off. ‘I’m sorry, that was rude. Only, I am a very deep republican. You were on your way to buy a present?’
Guy accepted the change of topic. He nodded and they began to stroll towards the gate. ‘For my foster-mother. The woman who brought me up.’ He frowned. Guy had sent sables and mink and diamonds in a spate to the little house in Byker to which Martha stuck with quiet obstinacy. She received these with every protestation of delight, but he knew full well that they went into a cupboard in the back room until some friend or neighbour needed them for a wedding or a funeral. ‘I’ve sent her all the usual things: fur coats, jewels, but she just puts everything away.’
‘What is she like?’
Guy hesitated. ‘Sandy hair. Grey eyes. Plump. Talks broad Tyneside, smells of green soap . . .’ His voice grew warmer as he began to describe the woman who was Martha Hodge.
Tessa was silent when he had finished. ‘And she brought you up?’ she said at last. ‘You were really and truly an orphan?’
Guy laughed at the palpable longing in her voice.
‘Really and truly.’ He described his origins. ‘And I feel bound to tell you that it is most unlikely that I shall turn out to be a nobleman in disguise. Lost princes are extremely thin on the ground in Tyneside.’
But Tessa’s sense of humour had temporarily deserted her. ‘You’re so fortunate! To make your own life . . . always to have been free.’ Her dark eyes were shadowed with longing. ‘As for your Mrs Hodge, I know exactly what she would like. But you must think only about pleasing her.’
‘What?’
Tessa told him.
‘Good God,’ said Guy, outraged. ‘I couldn’t do that.’
Tessa shrugged. ‘Very well. Get her another mink.’
The little packet arrived at 12 Front Street, Byker, a fortnight later. ‘I am advised,’ said the covering note in Guy’s looped hand, ‘that you would like this, so have endeavoured to overcome my scruples.’
Martha, removing the layers of tissue, found a delicate filigree locket containing what she had begged for vainly every time he came: his photograph.
‘I am advised.’ Only a girl could thus have advised him. He had found her, then: the girl in Vienna who had sent him off to South America looking the way he had looked when she first saw him in the orphanage – closed and defensive and hurt beyond belief. Guy had never spoken of her, but Martha had guessed and been wicked enough to hate her for what she had done to him.
Well, she had been wrong. Guy had gone back and found her and she was the right one; she understood.
> With hands that trembled a little, she fastened the locket around her neck. She was to wear it until the day she died.
At Burg Pfaffenstein, David Tremayne was achieving the miracles that Guy expected and for which he paid him. The rooms in the arcaded Fountain Courtyard were refurbished, the stonework cleaned, new lighting and new stoves were installed. Girls with their dirndl aprons hitched over their knees scrubbed and chattered their way through the great rooms. The one hundred and thirty-seven clocks were wound, the three hundred and eighteen mirrors polished. The leaking boats which belonged to the castle were repaired and repainted for the pleasure of the expected guests. Chefs were summoned, horses hired.
The Duchess and the Margravine viewed these preparations with benevolence. Though minutely concerned with the seating precedence of the hundred or so expected visitors, they would appear suddenly on an upturned crate sharing a sandwich with one of the stonemasons or be found bandaging a labourer’s cut hand. As for David, he was soon a favourite with them and bidden to call them Tante Augustine and Tante Tilda.
Since Guy, determined to completely surprise Nerine, still kept his identity a secret, it was inevitable that quite a mythology sprang up round Pfaffenstein’s new owner, glimpsed only as a Mephistophelean figure in a chariot of tulip wood. That he was foreign was regrettable but the villagers, seeing the castle brought back to its former glory, were very willing to don their green and crimson liveries and show him how things should be done.
‘Though they’re all very sad that it will mean saying goodbye to the Princess,’ said David, reporting to his employer as he did once a week at Sachers.
Guy leaned back on the red plush sofa, his fingers laced behind his head.
‘Ah, yes, the ubiquitous Putzerl. Is she to honour us with her presence then?’
The Princess of Pfaffenstein had promptly signed the documents she had been sent but had shown no further sign of life.
‘I don’t know. I imagine so, surely? Her aunts certainly hope that she will come. It’s her birthday on the eighteenth – the day of the ball.’
Guy’s eyebrows rose in faint surprise. Martha celebrated the nineteenth as his birthday, but that was the day he had been found.
David sighed. He was a susceptible and romantic young man who had been much moved by the way the people of Pfaffenstein spoke of the princess. ‘She sounds a most taking little thing. It isn’t just her aunts – everyone seems to tell me of some good thing she has done. Not taking soup to the poor and all that stuff, but real things.’
He broke off, recalling the vignettes that the villagers had conjured up for him in the dialect he was just beginning to understand. The tiny, six-year-old princess, in a white frilled nightdress, eluding her nurse to walk barefoot at night down the crazy, tortuous footpath which wound round the crag on the far side of the drawbridge, in order to bring the innkeeper’s daughter – ill with scarlet fever – one of her own dolls. The suddenly halted carriage, containing a screeching archduchess and a prostrate governess, from which the child had leapt in order to wade into the lake and rescue a kitten some boys were trying to drown. And a later, graver image: the princess at thirteen, walking through the great hall of the castle where the wounded officers lay, cared for by coiffed and nobly born nurses, ceaselessly asking, ‘But where are the men? Who’s nursing the men?
‘She sounds as though there’s not an ounce of snootiness in her. And full of pluck!’
‘Come, David. You’re not trying to cut out the vacuous prince, surely?’
David flushed. ‘No. Though that’s one of the things they most regret, that they won’t see her wedding.’
With five weeks to go, the invitations to the house party began to home like gold-limned doves into the homes of Austria’s high nobility and were everywhere received with pleasure and excitement. If Pfaffenstein could be sold to a millionaire reputed, varyingly, to be an American shipping magnate, an Armenian oil tycoon and a banker from Basle, why not Schloss Landsberg whose marble hall of mirrors was fast sinking on to the terrace below, or Malk, along whose famous topiary allée an ever-diminishing posse of gardeners clipped their way from dawn to dusk. The Countess of Wittenfurt, known as the meanest woman in Europe, bought a new dress; the ninety-two-year-old Prince Monteforelli had himself injected with fresh monkey gland. Even the appalling Archduchess Frederica, tottering through her ruined palace on Spanish heels and demanding that the bailiffs leave her presence backwards, pronounced herself willing to attend – and the Archduke Sava, exiled to Graz, asked if he could bring his bear.
‘Putzerl will be pleased.’ The comment first uttered by her intended husband, Maxi, was repeated continually as octogenarians examined their emblazoned carriages, landgravines looked out their lace and the nobility everywhere prepared to converge on Pfaffenstein for a week of good living at someone else’s expense.
It says much for the esprit de corps which made up the old Empire’s crème de la crème that not one of them grudged the young Princess of Pfaffenstein her good fortune; nor did even one of the mothers of marginally eligible sons so much as consider trying to secure the newly rich princess for their own offspring. For the fact that Putzerl was destined – and soon now – for Maxi and his moated Wasserburg had been known to every one of them since the day she had been carried, screaming and empurpled, to the christening font in Schönbrunn Palace and the Emperor had smiled and said he hoped she would not grow too hot to handle.
‘You must simply assume that Putzerl is going to marry you,’ said the Princess of Spittau, on the day the invitation reached her. ‘It mustn’t be a question of whether but simply of when.’
‘Yes, Mother,’ said Prince Maximilian.
Late spring was always a trying time at the Wasserburg. The ice cracked and more people than usual fell into the water. Frost-damaged tiles slid off the roof. The longer days gave strength to the germs which had been frozen during the winter months: people who had mere colds developed influenza; those who had been suffering from influenza got bronchitis or pneumonia. The Prince’s housemaids became pregnant, also his bitches. Frogspawn covered the moat.
The old princess looked at her son. How to make him take a more manly role, that was the question. Because he had to marry Putzerl. With the money she brought from Pfaffenstein they could keep going for a while. There would be children, too, the line would be preserved, thought the Swan Princess, making a note that something would have to be done about the nursery block, a kind of fortress in an inner courtyard in which the Spittau babies were immured till old enough to swim.
‘Which uniforms are you going to take to Pfaffenstein?’ she asked her son.
Maxi brightened. ‘I thought the Tyrolean Rifles for the banquet and the Hussars for the opera. And for the reception and the opening ball, the Artillery. That’s Putzerl’s favourite.’
‘An infantry regiment for the banquet?’ said his mother, shocked. ‘Still, that’s not until the last day. If you haven’t got hold of Putzerl by then, God help us all. Let’s go and have a look.’
But when the arthritic old princess, leaning heavily on her son, reached the huge, painted cupboard in which Maxi’s uniforms were kept, disaster awaited them. Mildew had mottled the splendid silver green of the Tyrolean Rifles; some biologically interesting but unsavoury fungi had colonized the pink breeches of the Hussars . . .
Furiously, the princess tugged at the bell-rope and the prince’s valet appeared.
‘The prince’s uniforms must be taken to the drying room at once,’ she ordered. ‘How dare you let them get into such a state!’
The valet pointed to the walls, running with moisture, and shrugged. ‘What can you do, Highness?’ he said, and gathered up the offending garments, forebearing to point out that the drying room was now unheated.
‘The Artillery’s all right,’ said Maxi, relieved, fingering the sumptuous, braided uniform with its beguiling slender lines in the style of the Crown Prince Rudolf, which had won first prize at the Paris World Fair as the
most beautiful uniform on earth. Yes, he would propose to Putzerl in that. It was not as though she was the sort of girl who would expect him to go down on his knees, something which the tightness of the trousers rendered quite impossible.
Or would it after all be better done in mufti? In some private spot in the forest? With, of course, the dogs . . . ?
‘As for me,’ declared the princess, ‘it doesn’t matter what I wear, because I still have my pearls.’
But almost immediately she frowned. For if Maxi did not get hold of Putzerl, the pearls would have to go.
‘I always stab the air with my left hand,’ said Pino Mastrini, greatly offended at being asked to extend his acting range. ‘Always. I stab – so – and then I drop down on my left knee, so. Always.’
‘That’s exactly what I’m complaining about,’ said Jacob, wiping the perspiration from his forehead.
‘In zis bodice I cannot zink! I cannot zink even ’igh C, and ’igh F you can forget absolutely it,’ complained Raisa, erupting from the wings, followed by an infuriated Frau Pollack with her mouth full of pins.
‘The starcloth will have to be cut down, Herr Witzler. It’s half a metre too long.’
The International Opera Company was preparing for its mysterious assignment in June. Jacob had kept Farne’s secret, and no one knew who their patron was or whither they were bound. But underlying the speculation and the rumours was a growing sense of excitement, as though this was the chance that they had all been waiting for.
And so they worked. The Magic Flute had been in the repertory for years, but now they prepared to study Mozart’s immortal singspiel as though it had at that moment just been composed.
Jacob himself was in a white heat of expectation. He had seen pictures of Pfaffenstein rearing romantically on its crag above the lake, heard descriptions of the enchanting theatre. Now he dreamed of the Perfect Performance in the Perfect Setting in the presence of the Perfect Patron who would lead the company from financial darkness into light. In the cafés, among his acquaintances, Jacob showed off and swaggered; he ran up new bills and defaulted on his creditors, but over his opera he dreamed true. And because of this, though they might complain and argue, nobody failed him.