The Silver Castle

by Nancy Buckingham

  Raimund seemed in a low mood, too. I doubted that it had any link with my refusing to flirt with him. More likely he was funking the inevitable confrontation with Anton, which couldn’t be put off for much longer.

  The local red wine was potent stuff and after the first glass I was cautious of it. Raimund, though, quickly finished off the first bottle, and started on a second.

  “Haven’t you had enough?” I asked uneasily. “Don’t forget that you have a long drive back. And in any case you’d better not arrive home half cut. You’ll only make matters worse with your brother.”

  With a show of bravado he picked up his glass again, twirling it between his fingers. Some of the wine slopped over and a creeping stain marred the crisp whiteness of the tablecloth.

  “Poor old Anton,” he muttered, his voice slurred. “You cannot really blame him.”

  “Blame him for what?”

  Raimund lifted an eyebrow at me. “Now that, Gail, would be telling.”

  Quite suddenly I’d had enough. I was determined to make him talk.

  “It’s high time you did tell me, Raimund, so out with it. What’s this mystery all about? Why did Anton become so hostile when he discovered who I was?”

  “If you are so anxious to find out,” he said, forcing a weak smile, “you’d better ask him yourself.”

  “I’m asking you.”

  He was silent, absently tracing with his finger the outline of the wine stain. At last he said in barely more than a whisper, “You’ll wish to God you didn’t know.”

  My voice was firm as rock, but my heart was fluttering.

  “Tell me.”

  He raised his eyes and looked at me. They were not the gaily dancing eyes of Raimund any more, but the grave grey eyes of Anton. Eyes that found little in this world to laugh about.

  “That woman your father was with, Gail ...”

  I had to prompt him, even now. “What about her?”

  ‘It was Valencienne.”

  “Valencienne? Who was she?”

  His hand slid off the table and dropped inertly into his lap.

  “She was Anton’s wife.”

  Chapter Six

  Raimund was silent in the seat beside me, plunged deep in gloom. I drove his Mercedes gingerly, never having handled so powerful a car before. The unfamiliar roads, the darkness, the steadily falling rain all added up to a nearly intolerable strain. And every moment, howling in my brain, was this new knowledge ... the woman who had died with my father was Anton Kreuder’s wife.

  Before we left the hotel I had pressed Raimund for more details, but after that one shocking revelation he had clammed up completely. He’d just sat there staring at me owlishly, half-scared, I believed, of what the effect would be on me, yet in a perverse sort of way enjoying the moment of drama.

  Outside, he had walked so unsteadily that I’d protested, “You’re not fit to drive, Raimund. You’d better let me do it.”

  “I’m all right.”

  “It’s patently obvious that you’re not. And I don’t see why you should risk my life as well as your own. So stop arguing and give me your keys.”

  We had been on the road now for over an hour. Sick at heart, I tried desperately to marshal what facts I knew into some kind of credible pattern. The biggest hurdle to my understanding was why Valencienne Kreuder should ever have started a love affair with an impoverished, middle-aged artist, when she was married to a wealthy and attractive man like Anton. It made no sense, no sort of sense at all.

  I could only suppose that my father had possessed, as some men do, an almost hypnotic power to captivate women. Sigrid Kreuder had fallen under his spell, and remained so even now that he was dead ... though in her case it emerged as a passionate veneration of the artist, not a passionate love for the man. Had he, over Valencienne Kreuder, cast a spell so potent that he could even persuade her into the insanity of a double suicide? Yet if this were so, what insoluble problem could possibly have faced them which required such a despairing act? Or had it been, as Raimund had hinted, no more than the dramatic gesture of an embittered man? I refused to believe that.

  Fortunately there was little traffic, but at one point a car came sweeping around a bend towards us in the centre of the road. Its headlights dazzled me and, in swerving, I caught the grass verge before I could get my bearings again.

  “Bloody maniac.” Raimund jerked himself upright. “You should have flashed him. He could easily have put us over the edge.”

  He seemed to have sobered up by now, but I didn’t feel in any mood to talk. Presently, he said, “What are you going to do, now that I have told you about Valencienne?”

  “How can I say what I’m going to do? I feel a bit desperate ... only knowing half the story like this. Everybody has been ganging up to stop me discovering the truth. But I’m determined to know all there is to know, and somebody has got to tell me.”

  “I’d have thought you knew enough now ... everything that matters.”

  “But why does it all have to be shrouded in mystery? There’s no point trying to shield me. From the little I’ve been told it could have been a pure accident, but if the verdict was suicide there must have been some evidence for it.”

  Raimund expelled a long breath. “If only you would leave things alone. It’s no use torturing yourself about something that is over and done with.”

  I shook my head, shook away the tears that were filling my eyes.

  “It’s pointless saying that, Raimund, because I know too much now to leave things alone. I’ve got to know the rest—the whole truth—however painful it is. However ugly.”

  He was silent for so long that I thought he’d withdrawn into his own brooding thoughts once more. Then quite suddenly he said, “Just ahead there is a place where you can pull off the road. If you’re so determined to know everything, then for your sake I think it had better come from me.”

  Taken by surprise at his sudden capitulation, I braked too hard and skidded on the wet road. I corrected the skid but parked badly, and had to manoeuvre back and forth to get the car’s tail safely off the highway. Raimund didn’t comment on my clumsiness, and when I cut the engine and switched off the headlights, he still didn’t speak.

  “You can’t draw back now,” I said.

  “I was wondering where to begin. You see, Gail, nobody had the slightest suspicion that there was anything going on between your father and Valencienne. Not that it was altogether surprising. Neither of them was a saint.”

  “But she was married,” I protested. “How could she have an affair? I mean, why should she want to?”

  “Aren’t you being just a bit naive?” Raimund’s shrug was in his voice. “Anyway, it wasn’t much of a marriage. Anton was wedded to his work, and Valencienne had too much time on her hands and enjoyed playing around.”

  Gripped by a sudden feeling of nausea I wound the window down for some fresh air. A car went by in a rush of sound, and I watched its taillights diminish to red pinpoints which flickered and finally vanished.

  “Did Anton realise that his wife was that sort of woman?” I asked. “Didn’t he object?”

  “My brother was never one to confide in me ... or anyone else for that matter. But I suppose he must have minded. Even if a man doesn’t love his wife any more, he is bound to feel humiliated when she has casual affairs.”

  “It couldn’t have been a casual affair with my father. If she agreed to suicide, she must have been in love with him.”

  “Valencienne didn’t love anyone ... except herself. That’s why we find it so difficult to accept the idea of a suicide pact.”

  “You’re saying that my father must have murdered her—that is what it amounts to,” I said faintly. “But there was no evidence for believing that, was there?”

  My hands lay in my lap, the fingers twisting and untwisting nervously. Raimund reached out suddenly and covered them with one of his.

  “All I can do,” he said, “is to give you the facts as far as they are known.
Then you will have to make your own judgement. It happened in a boat, Gail, our motor launch. It seems that Benedict and Valencienne took it out on the lake that evening, around about eight o’clock as near as can be calculated. And then he put a spike through the hull, and the boat gradually sank.”

  “But... but you said my father killed her first, and then himself.”

  “No, you said that. What I’m saying is that he made sure she died with him.”

  I stared at Raimund’s dark profile. “You mean he held her down until they drowned?”

  “They were lovers, Gail.”

  I was slow to grasp his meaning, fleeing from it because the man concerned had been my father. Raimund added gently, “Their two bodies were found in the cabin when the boat was raised from the bottom. Their clothes were strewn about, and they were both naked. The authorities concluded that they had taken their lives by mutual consent. But we in the family, who knew Valencienne better than outsiders, are convinced that no man could have meant that much to her. Your father decided to kill himself, Gail, and he couldn’t bear to leave Valencienne behind. Believe me, that’s the truth.”

  My breath came harshly, as if a hand was pressed against my throat. After a little pause, Raimund added, “I said that I would let you make your own judgement, Gail, but now I have made it for you.”

  “Was there no note left? No message?” I asked huskily.

  “Yes, there was a message. Your father telephoned Anton about half-past seven that evening. He called him on his private line at the office—Anton was staying late as he often does. He said that Benedict seemed in a terribly excited state and he couldn’t really make out what he was talking about ... things like wanting to end it all, that he couldn’t bear any more. Apparently he would not listen to reason and just raved on. After he rang off, Anton decided he’d better try and see him and find out what it was all about. First of all he telephoned the Schloss to check if Benedict was there, then he asked around in the village. But without success. Anton drove up to the chalet and waited there for a while before finally giving up and going home. Valencienne had gone out before dinner and when she didn’t arrive home that night nobody thought much of it ... it wasn’t the first time she had stayed out. But next morning a fishing boat spotted the launch ... it was lying in fairly shallow water which barely covered the top of the mast. And in the cabin they found the two bodies.”

  I had been sitting very still and tense, but now I began to shake uncontrollably. Raimund slid his arm around my shoulders and held me against him.

  “Please don’t take it so hard, Gail. I only told you all this because you insisted on knowing. And it is still possible that we’ve got it wrong somewhere.”

  “It’s what everyone believes, isn’t it? You and your mother, Anton ... everybody. I realise now why people look at me the way they do, and why they won’t even talk to me if they can help it.”

  “You can’t say that about Mama and me,” he said reproachfully.

  “I know, and that’s what I can’t understand—why you’re so kind to me. How can your mother still speak so highly of my father, believing what she does of him?”

  “It would be unfair of us to hold anything against you, Gail....”

  “Anton does,” I said bleakly.

  “But he’s so close to it, isn’t he? He’ll come around, though, you will see. Naturally it came as a shock to him to find that you were Benedict Sherbrooke’s daughter.”

  “Yes,” I said, “it must have been a ghastly moment. I don’t blame him for hating me, for feeling so bitter.”

  But to understand didn’t soften the hurt. I still felt a surge of pain, remembering how his face had suddenly changed, becoming granite hard, remembering the chill of scorn in his voice.

  Raimund was saying, “For Mama, it was almost as if the sun went out of her life when your father ... died. As I told you, after the accident left her crippled, Benedict became enormously important to her. She built him up into a sort of god, convinced that one day his name would be numbered among the great artists of this century.”

  “I can understand that his death meant a great loss to her,” I said. “But the way it happened ... involving your family like that, her own stepson’s wife. Why isn’t she completely shattered and disillusioned?”

  Raimund said, after a lengthy pause, “That’s a difficult question. I suppose it’s just that to her Benedict Sherbrooke was a man of genius, which meant that ordinary standards of behaviour did not apply. So whatever the man may have done in his personal life, his paintings will remain forever as a monument to his greatness, and she is proud to be the one person who always had faith in him.”

  “And what about you, Raimund?” I asked. “You don’t seem to be particularly upset about it all.”

  “What I think doesn’t matter.”

  “No, please tell me.”

  He sat back and stared ahead through the windscreen.

  “I never did like Valencienne. She was certainly very beautiful, but she was utterly selfish. A real bitch—that is the word, I think. I doubt if she ever had a generous thought for anyone.”

  “And yet Anton married her, so he must have been in love with her.”

  “The gloss soon wore off, though. They had been sleeping in separate rooms for years.”

  From somewhere in the rain-swept darkness a small animal screamed out in fear of a predator. A thin, lost sound.

  “The fact that you didn’t like Valencienne,” I said, “isn’t reason enough for not caring that she was killed.”

  “It wouldn’t be honest if I tried to suggest that I was unduly grieved.”

  And Anton, what were his feelings? Was there any grief, or only bitterness and anger?

  Presently, I said, “Your mother keeps on about my father being a genius. But she’s wrong, you know. I’ve seen his paintings and, much as I’d like to believe it, I can’t deceive myself.”

  Raimund seemed astonished. “Are you sure about that? I don’t pretend to know much about art myself, but Mama has always been convinced that Benedict was exceptionally gifted.”

  “He had great talent, great command of his medium. But when you talk of genius, that’s something else.”

  Raimund thought this over for a few minutes.

  “Forgive me, Gail, but isn’t that just your opinion?”

  “No, it explains why he never achieved the recognition he always craved.”

  “But I mean ... what about the painting of his that was sold in London the other week? Someone must have thought very highly of it.”

  “Not as a masterpiece, though—at that modest price.”

  Raimund clearly remained unconvinced. “Look, please don’t ever say anything to Mama. It would only upset her.”

  “The situation won’t arise because I shan’t be staying on here, Raimund, not now. I’ll leave in the morning and get out of everyone’s way.”

  “You don’t have to do that, Gail, honestly.”

  “It would be an impossible situation if I stayed.”

  “It need not be.”

  “Yes it would. You know it would.”

  “Don’t forget those paintings in the attic. You can’t go until you have decided what to do about them.”

  “Oh, damn the paintings.”

  “Gail, you don’t mean that, surely?”

  I closed my eyes, squeezing the lids together to hold back my brimming tears.

  “I do ... I really think I do. I wish they’d never existed.”

  It was the same thing as saying, I realised with a stab of self-disgust, that I wished my father had not been alive all these years. That he’d died, as I’d always believed, when I was just a small child. I tried to escape the guilty thought by becoming practical.

  “I can always leave them here for the time being. Something can be arranged later on.”

  “If that’s the way you want it.”

  Idly, Raimund fiddled with the knob of the car radio and there was a sudden blast of music,
cut off again just as suddenly.

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean to do that.” I felt him glance at me. He said impulsively, “Don’t leave us yet, Gail. If for no other reason, stay a little while longer for Mama’s sake.”

  “Your mother’s sake? But she’s made it plain from the start that I wasn’t expected to be here when Anton returned.”

  “Don’t you see, it’s different now—now that Anton is home. The damage is done, so there is no reason for you to rush away.”

  “But having me around would be a constant reminder to your brother. Naturally it would upset him.”

  “He’d get over it,” said Raimund complacently. “Think of Mama instead. She has really taken to you. She misses your father a lot, and having his daughter here has meant a great deal to her.”

  I found it hard to believe that whether I stayed or whether I went would make that much difference to Sigrid, but Raimund certainly seemed eager for me not to leave. Was I being oversensitive, I wondered, in worrying about Anton Kreuder’s feelings and ignoring my own wishes? Although he wouldn’t like having me at the Schloss Rietswil, he couldn’t hold me to blame for what had happened—and I needed to stay on. I couldn’t be sure if Raimund had now told me everything he knew about my father’s death, but I sensed that there was still more to discover. Whatever the final truth, however shocking, however sordid, I had to know it.

  I was Benedict Sherbrooke’s daughter, his blood was in my veins. Please God, I prayed, let something finer emerge than this shabby picture so far revealed to me. If I couldn’t feel pride in my father, at least let me be spared from feeling shame.

  “I’d like to stay a few more days,” I told Raimund. “But that will depend on Anton’s attitude. If he makes things too uncomfortable for me, then I shall leave at once.”

  “Forget about Anton,” he said again. “Shall I drive now?”

  Without waiting for me to answer he got out and walked around to the driver’s door. I didn’t attempt to argue with him, but just slid across the seat. He’d sobered up completely, and I was in no condition for any more driving, not tonight.