Magic Flutes

by Eva Ibbotson

  But Lithuania had reclaimed the new owner of Pfaffenstein. He scowled, answered the prince’s, ‘Good morning’ curtly, and strode away across the courtyard.

  ‘What’s the matter with him?’ said the prince, somewhat offended, for he had been well-disposed towards the Englishman.

  Tessa shrugged. ‘He’s like that,’ she said. But it wasn’t true; to everyone else he was polite and friendly. It’s only me he doesn’t like, she thought, and buried her face in the labrador’s sturdy neck.

  ‘I wondered if you would like to come for a walk,’ said Maxi. There was going to be a pigeon shoot, followed by an English breakfast: kidneys were rumoured, and scrambled eggs and kedgeree. The English were swine of course, everyone knew that, but they did understand breakfast. But he was willing to forego all this in order to get things settled with Putzerl. His mother, recovered from her migraine, had already managed to make herself unpleasant about Maxi’s failure on the previous night. And now, in the freshness of the morning, with the dogs looking really very well indeed, it seemed to him he had an excellent chance.

  ‘Maxi, I can’t,’ said Tessa. ‘I have to work.’

  ‘Work?’ said Maxi, his long Bourbon jaw hanging open. ‘What do you mean?’

  It occurred to him that Putzerl was oddly dressed. Was she perhaps going to milk a cow? He looked anxiously behind him but the great courtyard was reassuringly devoid of cattle.

  ‘I work for the International Opera Company,’ said Tessa, rubbing the wolfhound’s stomach while returning the caresses of the setter caught in a frenzy of adolescent adoration. ‘We’re going to perform The Magic Flute in the theatre and there’s a terrible lot to do.’

  ‘You mean you’re directing this opera?’ said Maxi, puzzled. There had been artistic Pfaffensteins, he knew, and queer blood like that did sometimes turn up again.

  Tessa laughed. ‘No, Maxi. I work backstage.’ Turning her attention to the water spaniel, she explained her duties.

  ‘You’re joking?’ said Maxi nervously. ‘You don’t really let them order you about? Ordinary carpenters and people like that?’

  ‘Maxi, I’ve told you—’

  ‘Yes, yes.’ Hastily he averted the expected information that all men were created equal and that the Princess of Pfaffenstein herself was a devout republican. But really it was all a bit much. No wonder his mother worried about Putzerl and thought her fast. ‘Couldn’t you come out just for an hour?’

  Tessa shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, Maxi. There’s so much to do, and I promised to have coffee with the aunts.’

  Maxi’s face fell. He had spent five minutes arranging the feather in his hat at an angle which would give pleasure to his intended and though he tried not to be vain about his legs he would have been foolish not to know that few men could carry off lederhosen the way he could. But if Putzerl absolutely wouldn’t, he might as well go and fetch his gun – and try the English breakfast.

  ‘I shall never forget it, never in my life!’ said the Rhine-maiden, sitting astride an Act One rock and throwing out a spear-carrying arm at her audience. ‘There she was, in white satin and a tiara, with princes and cardinals absolutely grovelling to her. And then, when she picked up Bubi and the flunkeys ran forward to take him from her, she just shook her head once like this,’ continued Frau Witzler, moving her massive Silesian head from right to left and back again, ‘and they fell back and escorted her upstairs. Six of them in uniform, clearing a way for her!’

  The International Opera Company were assembled in the theatre at an unaccustomed early hour. Orchestral players who were rumoured not to have seen daylight in ten years were wandering round the pit, stage-hands stood about in clusters in the wings; on stage, Witzler and his principals sat about holding coffee-cups. The first rehearsal had been called for ten-thirty but no one was even pretending to begin. There were the usual difficulties in a new theatre: lost keys, dried-out dimmers . . . but that was not what was delaying them. It was the news conveyed by the Rhinemaiden at breakfast and repeated again and again as new members of the company turned up who had not yet heard it. Had anyone else informed them that their under wardrobe mistress was the Princess of Pfaffenstein, they might have been sceptical, but the Rhinemaiden’s Nordic truthfulness was notorious.

  ‘Well, that’s that,’ thought Boris. No more laughs in the wig room, no more milk for The Mother. Only Tessa had been able to wheedle a regular supply of milk out of the dairyman. I shall die young without yoghurt, thought the wig-master, giving in to trans-Danubian despair, and what does it matter?

  ‘I must have a replacement,’ said Frau Pollack. ‘It is quite impossible for me to do all that work alone.’ Boris shot her a look of loathing – who on earth could replace Tessa? He could see her now, sitting on an upturned crate, that pretty fawn hair of hers rippling to the ground, saying resolutely, ‘Cut, Boris. Go on, just do it. Cut.’

  Klasky, pencilling Hungarian insults into the woodwind scores, was scowling. When the revolution came Tessa would be rounded up with the rest of the aristocrats who had ground the faces of the poor and would be almost certainly imprisoned, but he found that the thought gave him amazingly little satisfaction.

  ‘I lent her a dress,’ thought the Littlest Heidi deliriously, leaning in the fourth position against a pillar. ‘She was my friend.’ Heidi’s grandmother had gone into black on the day that the Crown Prince Rudolf shot himself and had remained thus ever since, and Heidi was a passionate royalist.

  ‘Who will bring my footstool now?’ thought Pino morosely. The little tenor was a head shorter than Raisa and Tessa’s tactful way of inserting a footstool behind the tombstone, rock or sofa on which he found himself had earned his deepest gratitude.

  But it was Jacob who was most badly hit. Of course he could turn the whole thing to the company’s advantage. If he talked to the press, told them who Tessa was and released some poignant photographs of her performing some menial task, it would undoubtedly be excellent publicity and for a while improve their bookings. But only for a while. Against that, he had lost Tessa. No more glimpses of the small figure in her paint-stained smock grinning up at him as she trotted through the corridors; no one to catch his thoughts almost before he had thought them.

  ‘All right, everybody, that’s enough,’ he shouted now. ‘We’ll do a straight run-through of Act One. The Three Ladies on stage, please, and you, Pino – everyone else off and remember—’

  He broke off, aware that nobody was listening. A hush had fallen and all eyes were on the auditorium.

  Coming up the centre aisle, dressed exactly as usual and carrying in one hand a can of milk, in the other a straw-lined basket filled with brown eggs, came their under wardrobe mistress.

  ‘Good morning, Herr Witzler.’ Tessa’s eyes were anxious, for she was late. It had taken far longer than she had expected to explain her work in Vienna to the aunts. Not that she had lied to them exactly . . . not exactly.

  ‘Good morning, Your Highness.’

  Tessa reached the pit, vanished beneath the footlights and reappeared beside the Herr Direktor on the stage. Raisa had lowered her vast bulk into a curtsy, the Littlest Heidi had sunk completely to the ground.

  Tessa looked critically round the set. ‘The cleat for that batten is above the dimmer-board. Shall I fix it? And then shall I unpack the Papageno costumes, because the feathers will need curling again and—’

  Jacob had cleared his throat. ‘Your Highness, it is absolutely out of the question that you continue to work for us. Absolutely out of the question – you must see that.’

  Tessa had turned very pale. ‘No,’ she said quietly, ‘I don’t see it.’

  ‘Please.’ Jacob passed a plump hand over what had once been his hair. ‘The embarrassment. . . Your father was equerry to the Emperor.’ Only a man who had begged his way systematically through the ranks of the nobility, year after year, as Witzler had done, could gauge the extent of the lese majesty. ‘It would be impossible for the men to continue to give you orders
.’

  ‘Not to mention the bad language,’ put in the Rhine-maiden.

  Tessa looked round at the stage-hands, old friends now looking at her with the cowed respect she had so often encountered in the past. Not seeing her, seeing some shape, some label to be revered or hated according to their creed.

  Swallowing down the lump in her throat, she said, ‘Herr Witzler, I have lost my home. I have nothing left except my work. Must I lose that also?’

  Jacob shrugged wearily and flinched as his ulcer expressed its views on what was going on.

  ‘It is impossible, Your Highness. There are three hundred years of privilege which cannot be wiped out. The position of your family . . . your rank. I’m sorry, your work is excellent,’ said Jacob, ‘but you cannot remain with us.’

  ‘I see.’

  Tessa put down her can of milk, her basket of eggs. Instinctively she had moved upstage and now, turning, commanded them all. When she spoke it was quietly, but the children of Schönbrunn had been taught not only to walk down a staircase, but also to be heard at whatever distance and in whatever place they chose.

  ‘You make me ashamed,’ she said, and the quiet voice cut like a whip. ‘Deeply and bitterly ashamed. All of you.’

  They stared at her. Klasky put down his score. A stage-hand stepped backwards as though to escape the anger in her face. Was this the little waif, the ever-willing girl who would do anything for anyone?

  They were not to blame for their amazement. No one here had seen the Emperor of Germany hopping round the courtyard, nursing his bitten leg after he had shot the last auroch left in the forests of Pfaffenstein. No one had watched the procession of stretchers carried up from the straw barns of the outlying farms, bringing the wounded men to be nursed inside the castle, at the command of the thirteen-year-old princess.

  ‘I believed what you said,’ Tessa’s low implacable voice went on. ‘I believed what Herr Witzler said about music making everybody equal. I believed Herr Klasky when he rehearsed the prisoners’ chorus in Fidelio . . . when he made them sing that chorus for four hours because what Beethoven said in it about freedom and brotherhood was sacred. I actually believed him. And now . . . in this production. In The Magic Flute.’ She looked at Witzler, then at the old bass who sang the High Priest, Sarastro, who was staring at her with an open mouth. ‘Only two days ago, when Herr Berger gave up his lunch and his tea to make that recitative perfect; that part where he says that Tamino is more than a prince because he is a man . . . Dear God, when you said that that was the keynote of the opera, I believed you.’

  No one spoke. A door opened at the back of the hall as Farne slipped in to greet the company. No one heard him, no head turned. There was nobody in the theatre except that slight, pale, implacable figure accusing them.

  ‘I believed it. I believed it all,’ said Tessa. ‘That you served music, all of you, because it was above pettiness and rank. Because it makes everybody one: rich and poor, sick and well. Because it comes to us from God. I believed it – but not you. Not one of you.’

  She paused and momentarily passed a hand across her eyes.

  ‘The Princess Lichnovsky knelt to Beethoven; she knelt to beg him to give back the score of Fidelio which the Viennese had sneered at. She knelt, and she was right to kneel. Well, I won’t kneel for my right to work. I won’t kneel because I don’t kneel to hypocrites and time-servers and snobs!’

  Silence. Total, unbroken silence as Tessa bent to pick up her basket, her can of milk. Then, suddenly, it began. The stage-hands started it, clapping first; then stamping and shouting as if the theatre was packed to the roof, and the orchestra banging on their music stands and Boris, dabbing his eyes with the end of his muffler and leading the yells of ‘Bravo!’ and ‘Bis!’

  It was left to Raisa to bring some sense into the proceedings. Ovations were all very well but they belonged, in general, to her.

  ‘’er ’ighness is being perfectly correct,’ she stated. ‘In art all is being of equalness.’ She pushed aside the people now crowding round Tessa and said firmly, ‘In zis bodice ’ighness, I cannot zink. I cannot zink even an ’igh C, and an ’igh F you can forget absolutely it.’

  Tessa finished blowing her nose on Jacob’s handkerchief and turned a radiant countenance on the soprano. ‘Yes, Frau Romola. I quite understand, Frau Romola. If you will give me the bodice now, I can have it ready for this evening. It only needs a gusset . . .’

  9

  The forest that stretched away on the spur behind the castle might have been invented by the Brothers Grimm. Pines and ferns, larches, moss, little rills of crystal water, shafts of sunlight on silvered cones, the tang of resin . . .

  And in a clearing the feathers of pigeons drifting to the ground and the scent of gunpowder, as Guy provided for his guests such limited sport as the month of June offered. In felden green with silver buttons, in lederhosen or field uniforms, all those of his guests who could walk and had not preferred fishing or billiards were in the forest cheerfully pursuing birds whose lowly status did not prevent them from being amazingly difficult to hit.

  Guy, sharing a hide with Prince Maximilian and despatching with accuracy but relatively little enthusiasm such pigeons as fell to his lot, found himself an unwilling recipient for Maxi’s low-voiced confidences.

  ‘Jolly good party, this,’ said Maxi. ‘Everyone says what a good party this is. Everything laid on as it should be.’

  Temporarily exhausted by so much conversation, he aimed and brought down his bird. That he should have left the dogs behind merely because they were unnecessary for this type of sport was not to be expected. Now he sent off the pointer, directed the labrador to a runner in the bushes, whistled the water spaniel out of the stream and spoke a manly word of sympathy to the wolfhound rendered gloomy by the lack of serious booty.

  ‘I’m glad you’re enjoying it.’

  In the distance the Countess Waaltraut, who had been steering her mother’s Bath chair between the larches in relentless pursuit of Guy, was brought to a halt by the silver ribbon of a stream and stood, melancholy and baulked, staring at the trees which hid him from her sight.

  ‘Pity Putzerl couldn’t come. Tessa, I mean.’

  ‘Does she care for shooting?’

  ‘No, she doesn’t,’ said Maxi, frowning down at his half-grown setter bitch. ‘She’s a jolly good shot, though. Her father taught her. I taught her too, at Spittau. Had her out in a punt when she was six. You wouldn’t believe it,’ said Maxi earnestly, ‘but she can imitate a mallard like no one I’ve ever met. Got a perfect ear. You don’t need a call duck in the boat if you’ve got Putzerl. It’s uncanny. It’s all that music she goes in for, I suppose.’

  He sighed. His mother would not be at all pleased about this business with the opera company. ‘And the dogs,’ he continued, taking the bird out of the pointer’s mouth and looking with surprise at the dead squirrel brought in by the labrador. ‘You wouldn’t think it, because she’s so little and quiet, but they’d do anything for her.’

  ‘Really?’

  Guy’s cool and slightly contemptuous tone was lost on Maxi who patted the pointer, commended the labrador, told the spaniel to stay . . . and aimed once more and hit once more, sending the whole cavalcade in motion once again. ‘They’re trained for the water, of course,’ he commented. Then continued, ‘It’s all this art and music I worry about. She’ll grow out of it, I suppose?’

  ‘Do you want her to?’

  ‘Well. . . when we’re married . . . Spittau isn’t . . . Of course, she could play the piano. It’s a bit warped but I expect it could be put right. Spittau,’ he explained, ‘is very low-lying.’

  Guy did not answer. ‘When we are married’, the prince had said. Everyone was right, then, to take the engagement for granted. Well, it was none of his business. He too aimed; he, too, fired and hit – and in the lull that followed, turned to attend to the sprightly, skeletal Prince Monteforelli, fresh from his morning’s injection of monkey gland, and to parry with
courtesy and skill the old courtier’s questions about Guy’s business with the Chancellery.

  By the time Guy’s guests met at luncheon, a meal served informally at small tables in the yellow salon, there was no doubt that the house party was a resounding success. The buzz of talk, the laughter, the popping of champagne corks bespoke a total satisfaction with the hospitality of the Englishman. The members of the shooting party did not find themselves impeded, by the consumption of their English breakfast, from partaking of the staggering quantities of food fetched for them from the sideboard. The guests who had been fishing commented on the excellence of the catch, those who had played billiards on the beautifully renovated tables.

  The presence of an entire opera company was also noted with approval. This was a return to the great days of patronage to which they themselves had once been accustomed. A glimpse from his bedroom window of the Middle Heidi doing her pliés had affected the Uhlan captain with the wooden leg so powerfully that he had choked on his Odol mouthwash, and the Archduke Sava, sitting beside Monteforelli, was in a state of glazed fulfilment. On the way to visiting his bear in the stables, he had crossed the Fountain Courtyard and found Raisa Romola splayed on a rush mat, sunbathing. A music lover and a bosom man, finding his two passions thus united in a single body had proved almost too much for the Archduke who, with gestures, was trying to convey to the old prince just what the sight had meant to him.

  Only on the table containing the aunts, the Swan Princess and the Archduchess Frederica, was there a slightly less abandoned and roistering air. Not that the Archduchess was off her food: on the contrary, she was systematically concealing in a bag specially brought down for the purpose, all the more durable delicacies which the servants piled on her plate. But the revelation of Putzerl’s activities in Vienna had naturally come as something of a shock, and Tante Augustine and Tante Tilda could not help feeling that their niece, dearly as they loved her, had been a little bit inaccurate in her description of her work, for ‘studying music’ did not seem adequately to describe the moving of furniture, combing of wigs and stitching of hems.