by Eva Ibbotson
Passing through an arch he found himself in an even larger courtyard; at the sight of the vast, dark expanse which faced him, and the looming statue of someone on a horse, he did for a moment hesitate. But it was from the long building opposite, with the light streaming from the windows, that music came, and with a last resolute hitch of his pyjama trousers Bubi set off staunchly in the direction of the open double doors.
‘Oh, Guy, isn’t it wonderful!’ breathed Nerine, circling the brilliantly lit ballroom in Guy’s arms.
‘You’re happy, then?’ he asked, looking down at her tenderly.
‘Happy! My dearest, you can’t imagine . . .’ she gazed reverently at the vast, brocaded backside of the Archduchess Frederica undulating two feet away in the heroic clasp of the Prince of Spittau. ‘All these people here – and as your guests!’
‘Our guests, Nerine. All this is for you.’
She looked up at him under her lashes, smiling – that long, slow, curving smile which had entranced him all those years ago. ‘You spoil me, darling.’
It was all worthwhile, he told himself again. He would have endured for eternity the company of these relics of the Almanach de Gotha (now proposing to eat him out of house and home) to see her look like that.
The Pfaffenstein Serenaders, engaged for the first night so as not to offend the susceptibilities of the locals, paused for an instant to wipe their perspiring faces before thundering into the ‘Gold and Silver Waltz’. Guy, steering Nerine between the couples, resolutely ignoring the spectacle of the Princess of Pfaffenstein supporting, without seeming to, the creaking form of the aged Prince Monteforelli while that disgusting old creature whispered his gallantries into her small, pricked ear, pulled his fiancée closer and said:
‘Do you remember, darling? This is the first waltz we ever danced to? At the Academy . . .’
The high, bare room, the young girls in their pale dresses, the Hungarian killed on the Eastern Front who had been his friend and loved the freckle-faced American . . . that incredible moment when the music allowed him to do what would otherwise have been unthinkable: to take Nerine into his arms . . .
‘Do you remember?’ he asked again.
Panic flickered for a moment in Nerine’s eyes. Guy had been asking her if she remembered things ever since they had come to Vienna, and the long and the short of it was that she did not.
‘What was I wearing?’ she prompted.
Guy frowned in concentration. ‘Something pink . . . soft . . . floating.’
Relief spread across Nerine’s face. Of course: the rose georgette, high-waisted, with puffed sleeves. The maid at the Academy had made an appalling mess of ironing the flounces and she had had to be very sharp with her.
‘Yes, yes, my dear,’ she said happily. ‘I do indeed remember.’
The Unconscious, lately discovered by Professor Freud and used by others to store their joys, fears and frustrations, was for Nerine a gigantic subterranean wardrobe.
Nerine’s brother was hardly less ecstatic than his sister. True, the oil-stained lady with whom he was dancing resembled nothing so much as a stranded sea cow patiently awaiting a gift of fish; true, her moist round eyes seemed unable to tear themselves from Farne – but what did it matter? She was the Countess Waaltraut von Waneck and could trace her descent back to Bohemian kings. Of course, to dance with the Princess of Pfaffenstein would really be something, but there was not much hope there. They were queueing up for her in order of rank, as was proper. Incredible, the catch Farne had turned out to be! What must all this be costing him, thought Arthur, and began happily to calculate again.
‘Jolly good show, this,’ said a captain of the Uhlans who was stranded, on account of a wooden leg, beside the Bath chair of Waaltraut’s mother. ‘Everything being done just as it should be. And the fellow seems to know how to behave too.’
The gouty old countess nodded. ‘If he hadn’t been engaged,’ she said, ‘I might almost have let Waaltraut demean herself.’
‘Oh, I say, no!’ said the Uhlan, shocked.
David Tremayne, standing unobtrusively by the great double doors, keeping an eye on everything, was satisfied. There had been numerous problems, and even this afternoon the director of the opera company had pursued him with some complaint about a missing wardrobe mistress – a complaint which David found hard to take seriously. Surely massive Viennese sewing ladies did not vanish into thin air? But now everything felt right. Farne’s guests were clearly having the time of their lives and Farne himself, waltzing with the lovely widow, must surely tonight be the happiest of men? How beautiful she was – staggeringly so, thought David – and turned to look yet again at the Princess of Pfaffenstein.
Already it seemed incredible to him that when she had first appeared in the aunts’ Tower Room just before the reception, sleepy and bewildered, he had been disappointed. From the talk which had preceded her, he had imagined someone sweetly pretty with curls and dimples, and the grave, narrow little face and shorn head had come as a shock. Then she had hugged the aunts and smiled at them and it was as though a flame had been lit inside her. Long before her old nurse had come and led her away, protesting, to dress, he had not imagined how she could look otherwise.
Since then he had admired, increasingly, her determination to stay out of the limelight. She had refused to let the band serenade her for her birthday, and had left the ballroom on some pretext before the first dance so that Mrs Hurlingham and Guy could open the ball alone. Not that it helped, thought David. Those dotty aristocrats, one and all, seemed to adore her.
Now he watched as she deposited her ancient, creaking kinsman in a gold-backed chair beside her aunts – and was immediately claimed by the man everyone said she was going to marry, the Prince of Spittau.
‘Nice tune, isn’t it?’ said Maxi happily, as the band broke into yet another waltz.
‘Yes,’ said Tessa. ‘Though I must say, Maxi, I would simply love to Charleston.’
‘To Charleston! Can you?’ Maxi was shocked. No wonder his mother worried about Putzerl!
‘A bit. Some friends took me to a jazz club and they taught me.’
But Maxi was bent on business. The music was heady and he would have been foolish not to know that in his sky-blue tunic and white trousers piped in red, he was looking his best. If he could propose and be accepted now, even without the dogs, he could really settle down and enjoy the house party.
‘They should make a very suitable couple, shouldn’t they?’ said Nerine as Maxi and Tessa drew level. Her rage at Tessa’s entry had been soothed by Arthur, who had informed her that the Princess was soon to be removed, and permanently, to the Prince of Spittau’s Wasserburg. ‘The prince so handsome and she – thanks to you – so rich.’
‘She won’t have all that much,’ said Guy. ‘Her father left a pile of debts.’ Though not naturally an ostentatious dancer, he now performed a chain of double reverse-turns which took them rapidly to the other end of the ballroom.
‘Putzerl, you know how fond I’ve always been of you,’ Maxi began.
‘And I of you, Maxi.’
Oh, please, not tonight, thought Tessa. My head aches so much and I just can’t face hurting him again. It seemed to her that the ball had been going on for ever and Guy had not spoken a single word to her all evening, had not once glanced her way.
But it looked as though there was no way of avoiding it. Maxi had tightened his arm and his duelling scar was pulsating, always a sign of deep emotion. There was no doubt about it, he was going to propose.
‘Putzerl, don’t you think you could—’
The prince was halted by a scuffle and the sound of laughter. Then, eluding two flunkeys in crimson and green, a tiny boy in awesomely striped pyjamas tottered barefoot into the ballroom and stopped, blinking in the light of the chandeliers.
Bubi, having gained his objective, now took stock. The people were there, and the music, but where were the men with the hammers, where the rows of seats? And where was she?
Had he made a mistake? Bubi’s lower lip jutted out, began to tremble . . .
‘Bubi!’
In an instant the little boy’s face was transformed. Joy and relief shone in the coal-black eyes. It was her voice. She was here! And then she was bending over him and as she picked him up and he put his arms round her, he heard the words he longed above all others to hear.
‘You’ve got pyjamas, Bubi,’ said Tessa, her voice full of awe. ‘Real, proper, grown-up, striped pyjamas!’
Thus the Rhinemaiden, alerted by some sixth sense to her son’s disappearance and making a Wagnerian entrance, a shawl over her nightdress, put aside the images of Bubi impaled on iron spikes or drowned in a dark well, and saw him safe in the arms of a slim girl in white satin, light dancing from the tiara on her lovingly bent head . . .
And saw, too, that the search for their under wardrobe mistress had ended.
Tessa slept badly the night after the ball and not because Bubi, refusing to be parted from her, shared her bed in the turret in the West Tower.
Shortly before daybreak she rose, carried the still-sleeping child to her nurse next door and extracted the working smock which the old woman, clucking with disapproval, had washed, dried and ironed the previous day. Then slipping it on, she crept downstairs.
In the castle no one was stirring yet, but carrying up from the village she heard the familiar sounds of a country dawn: a cockerel crowing, the clank of a bucket, the creak of bolts pulled back on a stable door.
She passed the chapel, hesitated and went on. God, she felt, would not be very pleased with her this morning, and crossing the main courtyard she passed through the gatehouse arch, crossed the drawbridge and climbed the worn, stone steps which led to the eastern ramparts. The sunrise place, she had always called it, as she now stood looking out to where, from the rim of the plain whose inhabitants had once brought devastation and sorrow to her house, a silver disc of brightness had begun to lift itself above the haze.
It was not sensible, after all, thought Tessa, feeling the first rays of warmth touch her face, to feel so hurt, so finished, because a man had been rude to her. It was natural, after all, that he did not want to dance with her, that he had no use for her in the presence of a woman so beautiful that he could only resent anyone who seemed to intrude.
Only, I didn’t want to intrude, thought Tessa bleakly; I just wanted to be friends. Surely he could have spared me a few words when he has everything: Pfaffenstein, the woman he loves, untold wealth and this power that makes everyone, even poor silly Waaltraut in a single evening, want to be where he is? Could he not be generous, having so much?
She leaned her cheek against the cool stone. This was the oldest part of the castle, the part she loved as she could not love the baroque grandeur of the south facade. Yes, after all, it would be hard to leave: harder than she had dreamed it could be.
She was turning to go when she heard footsteps and saw a solitary man seeking the eastern ramparts as she had done, for the glory of the sunrise.
‘Good morning, Your Highness.’ The Lithuanian look, much commented on in Byker, was greatly in evidence, the voice still cold.
‘Why do you call me that?’ she said wretchedly. ‘When you know . . .’
‘Know what? That you are a staunch republican?’ Tessa, he noted, was looking pinched and plain, a fact that gave him an obscure satisfaction.
She caught her breath. ‘I don’t understand why you are like this. In Vienna you were so kind.’
‘I don’t mean to be unkind. But you must see that this masquerade of yours is apt to annoy people when it’s discovered. Dear God,’ he said, rage overtaking him again when he remembered her entry on the previous night, her upstaging of Nerine, ‘the way you came down that staircase!’
Tessa had turned her face to the horizon but as she spoke one small hand traced, with unconscious familiarity, the pattern of a lily carved deep into the stone. ‘Yes,’ she said tonelessly, ‘I know how to come down a staircase. They began to teach me when I was five. I had a book on my head – Plotinus, usually, bound in Spanish leather – and my skirt was too long on purpose. If I dropped the book, or stumbled, I was sent to bed without supper. There’s a marble staircase they use at Schönbrunn; it’s kept specially polished so as to be slippery. I used to think that if you looked at the little red flecks in the marble you’d find they were bits of dried blood shed by the children who have come down that staircase.’ She finished tracing a lily stem, laid her hand flat on the wall. ‘So you see, I know how to come down a staircase. This useful accomplishment I have.’
The bitterness in her voice held Guy silent for a while. ‘Were you often at Schönbrunn?’
She nodded. ‘My father was in the Emperor’s suite. Pfaffenstein was all right, one could always escape into the woods, but Schönbrunn . . . it was so lonely, like being in a prison. The long corridors and the rules. If your curtsy wasn’t quite deep enough, if you didn’t put your fork down the second the Emperor had finished, it was a scandal. My parents wanted a boy, of course. They went on hoping, but there weren’t any more children so I was always a disappointment. I used to go and talk to a little girl in a picture. She was pretty, not like me, but I knew she felt the same. The Infanta Margarita, she was called, by Velasquez – do you know her?’
The sun was fully up now, turning the pigeons wheeling below them into triangles of light. Guy nodded, calling to mind the little Infanta kept captive in the Escorial outside Madrid until she was ready to ship as a bride to the boring, pompous Leopold of Austria.
‘Sometimes my mother used to take me driving, sitting very stiff, you know, with footmen everywhere, and I’d see all those ordinary children belonging to each other . . . and to the world. Really belonging. Playing in the park or eating ices in a café . . . I remember, once, there was a pair of twins with bright red curls sitting on the rim of a fountain in the Volksgarten with their mother. She had an arm round each of them and they were splashing in the water and laughing. I started to beat on the window . . . I wanted the coach to stop and to get out and ask them to let me just be there . . . just to be there and belong.’
‘Go on.’
‘Then my parents died and Pfaffenstein belonged to me. But the money had gone too and I was always failing everyone. I’d ride round to visit my parishioners and I’d see an old lady with a hole in her roof and I’d send for the steward and say, why haven’t you mended Frau Keller’s roof? And he’d say I have only ten men, Highness, to do the work that two hundred did before, and he’d show me their time-sheets. We’d begun already on that hopeless business: selling off pictures, selling off forests . . . So then I knew that the only thing I could do for Pfaffenstein was to leave it, and I told my aunts to sell.’
‘Yes,’ said Guy, ‘I see.’ His anger had evaporated and he regretted its passing. It had been an effective armour against the troubles of this child. ‘And music? Has it always meant so much to you?’
She nodded. ‘Ever since I can remember. Once when I was at Schönbrunn – I was about six, I suppose – the Vienna Choir came to give a concert. I was standing by the window in my room when these voices came from the chapel. It was only a little Schubert song, ‘Auf dem Wasser zu Singen’, but it just stabbed me. It was an absolute coup de foudre. You know what music is like when you aren’t expecting it . . . when you overhear it? And I thought then that if I could just serve music . . . sort of help it to happen . . . I could bear it.’
‘Bear what?’ Guy wanted to say, but refrained, for after all he did know. Once, in London, he had spoken to one of Diaghilev’s ballerinas about her fabled grace and lightness, wondering to what extent these qualities were ‘natural’. He could remember her huge, Byzantine eyes turned on him, the slightly pitying shrug as she said, ‘Dancing hur
ts, my friend. It hurts all the time.’ Now, looking at Tessa’s fawn head turning to copper in the risen sun, he realized that she could say the same about being a princess.
Suddenly impatient, irked by the understanding she had forced on him, he began to make his way down the steps, impelling her to follow him. As they crossed the drawbridge he noticed another lily, spare and formalized, carved into the gatehouse arch. A strange emblem for the bloodthirsty Pfaffensteins, he thought, for he had noticed this flower also worked into the gaudy standard with its impaled golden griffin and scarlet glove.
‘What will you do with the money from Pfaffenstein?’ he asked abruptly.
‘Well, half will go to the aunts, of course.’
‘I doubt if they will countenance that. They intend it for your dowry.’
‘My dowry?’
‘For your marriage to Prince Maximilian of Spittau. The only man, they informed me, with enough quarterings to aspire to your hand.’
The harshness was back in his voice and hearing it Tessa closed her eyes in sudden weariness.
‘It’s no use being angry with them; they’re old, they cling to the old ways. But there’s no question—’
She broke off and Guy watched her face suddenly light up with a pure and shining joy. The next second Prince Maximilian, in lederhosen, a woodcock feather in his loden hat, came round the corner.
‘Oh, goodness, how lovely! Rinty, how you’ve grown! Down, Hector, down . . . Yes, yes, Samson, I know how you feel; you are the oldest.’ Talking tenderly in her own language, laughing, Tessa let herself be submerged in a sea of wagging, thumping, blissfully slobbering dogs. She stroked the black muzzle of the wise old labrador, fondled the ears of the pointer with her velvet mouth and loving eyes, fielded the quicksilver ecstacy of Maxi’s new, half-grown red setter – and was felled by the wolfhound bred for the prince’s rare hunting excursions on to dry land. ‘I’ve missed you all so much,’ she said. ‘It’s really awful not being able to have dogs in Vienna.’ Freeing an arm, she pulled in the Irish water spaniel, whose liver-coloured clown’s face had begun to quiver with impending rejection, and swivelled round to smile at Guy, wanting to share with him the happy innocent world of these working dogs.