The House of War and Witness

by Mike Carey

  ‘Dear Hildebrand has already done so much for us,’ she said. ‘I could not continue standing on ceremony.’

  And Eckert smiled at me kindly. ‘I hope I may be allowed to address you as Dorothea,’ he said.

  He did so from that day; it seemed to me that he made a point of it. For my part I tried to avoid addressing him at all.

  My mother’s afternoon naps were becoming longer; often now she would not rise until nearly supper time. I noticed that on some of these occasions Eckert would entertain two guests in the drawing room or walk around the house with them: men of business in sober suits who took notes in books. He was concluding some affairs of my father’s, he explained when I asked him who they were: debts left unpaid at the time of his death. My father had had a horror of debt – it was a rule of his neither to lend nor borrow money – but I did not contradict Eckert; only asked him whether he had told my mother. He flushed a little, and begged me not to trouble her with the matter. I might not be aware, he said, how delicate her health was. The next day he asked me to marry him.

  It was not entirely unexpected, and I had my polite refusal already prepared. He received it with equal courtesy, saying only that he hoped, in time, my feelings towards him might change. It felt like the first incursion of a campaign.

  He had more guns on his side than I had imagined. That evening my mother took me aside and told me she knew what had passed between us. She said that she gave her consent to the match and begged me not to be cruel to poor Hildebrand. His lack of title did not matter at all. She spoke of my famous grandfather, who had risen from obscurity by his own excellence. She spoke of Hildebrand’s valour in battle, and of his kindness to us. She could not in honesty talk of his passion for me, and she scrupled to point out the obvious – that I was already twenty and plain, and unlikely to find a better suitor. But she feared that if I rejected him he would leave us, and she had come to think of him almost as a second son. I said I did not think he would leave so readily, that his attachment was to the house and grounds, not to me. I told her that he invited speculators to look around the house behind her back. She grew angry with me then, and said that she trusted Hildebrand to manage her affairs: how he went about it was his concern and not mine. She was in tears when I left her.

  I went to find Cilie. She was alone, for a wonder, mending the children’s clothes while they played elsewhere. She smiled to see me, but her greeting was polite rather than warm. I thought: we have drifted apart, and the thought made me cold.

  ‘Herr Eckert has proposed marriage to me,’ I told her.

  She was silent and still for a moment. ‘And what did you tell him?’ she said at last.

  ‘Tell him!’ I burst out. ‘Cilie, what do you think? How could I marry a man like that?’

  ‘Oh, thank God!’ Cilie cried, and dropped her sewing to jump up and embrace me.

  She had mistrusted Eckert from the start, as I had. He had given my mother laudanum, she said, and poked around the house while she slept. But my mother would not hear a word against him – and from their conversations Cilie had believed that he was courting me, and that I liked him.

  Now, at least, we could share our fears. But we were no closer to a solution: my mother loved Eckert and would not change her feelings for anything we could say.

  ‘Send for your cousin Gottfried,’ said Cilie suddenly.

  I stared at her. ‘Gottfried?’

  ‘He’s a von Schildauer, and a man. He’ll hate Herr Eckert, and Madame will have to listen to him.’

  God forgive me, I did it. I did not even need to summon Gottfried or ask for his help. I simply wrote to tell him that my father’s adjutant had come to stay with us and had offered us his protection. Gottfried arrived a bare week after I sent the letter.

  He was bigger and redder even than I remembered; but of course he was angry. His first act was to forbid me to marry Eckert, though I had said no word of any such thing. I tried to assure him that I had no intention of marrying anyone.

  ‘Of course you’ll marry!’ Gottfried roared. ‘It’s your duty. But it must be a man worthy of the name.’

  It seemed to me that our duty as a family had only ever been to fight as soldiers or to produce them. I wanted no part of that. But I only repeated, as mildly as I could, that I had met no man whom I wished to marry. At that he calmed himself a little and gave me an appraising look.

  ‘We’ll need to find you someone soon,’ he said, and added a little doubtfully, ‘Eugenie has a brother you might meet.’

  I escaped on the pretext of telling my mother he was here. I wondered if our solution might prove to be as bad as the problem.

  His interview with my mother went badly. She insisted that Hildebrand was her protector and friend; that he had deserved only well of us and she would never throw him off. Gottfried shouted that she needed no other protector now that he was here. Eckert, who had been with my mother when Gottfried arrived, gave me a sharp look at the start of the meeting, but after that he was all gentleness, sighing to hear Gottfried traduce his birth and character but refusing to retaliate. In the middle of it Cilie came to the door to summon me to some crisis in the kitchen. I was very glad to go.

  She took me, to my surprise, not to the kitchen but up the stairs, and stopped outside Eckert’s room. He had locked the door, but my mother had a set of master keys and Cilie knew where they were kept.

  ‘I’ve been doing my own poking around,’ she said, ‘since I knew you were worried about him too. Have a look: my reading’s not as good as yours.’

  She showed me the box in which Eckert kept his papers. There were his army documents, one certifying his enrolment as adjutant in the 6th, and beneath it a second in a different name, as a junior lieutenant in the 3rd. There were surveyors’ reports on our house and a lawyer’s letter with a valuation of the property. And at the bottom of the pile, new and freshly creased, was a will, drawn up in a fine clerk’s hand, making Hildebrand Eckert the executor of all my mother’s property and my legal guardian for as long as I lived.

  She had not signed it yet. She loved Hildebrand, but she had loved me longer.

  Cilie opened a cupboard to show me an apothecary’s jar of laudanum and measuring spoons of different sizes. By then I had seen enough. I put everything back as if it burned my fingers, and hurried downstairs to the drawing room, where I could hear my mother sobbing. As I put my hand to the door it opened violently and Eckert pushed past me, his face white as snow. A moment later Gottfried came out, redder than usual, if that were possible, and strode off in the other direction. My mother, when she could speak, told me that he had struck Hildebrand, and challenged him.

  I might have tried to stop them. But after what Cilie had shown me there seemed only one thing to do. I went in search of Eckert and asked for a few minutes’ speech with him. He was still very pale, but he had recovered himself enough to agree.

  ‘Herr Eckert,’ I said. ‘Hildebrand. I know we have not always agreed in the past. But my mother loves you dearly, and I would not have either one of you hurt. It grieves me more than I can say to hear of this challenge.’

  There was a flash of malice in his face, just for an instant. Then he smoothed it over. ‘The Christian thing to do, dear Dorothea, is to turn the other cheek,’ he said.

  I must admit, I was surprised. Though I knew what Eckert was, I hadn’t thought him a coward. I suppose, growing up in the family that I did, I had never encountered a man who was. But my mother would forgive, even praise, a decision to disregard Gottfried’s challenge, and he would be as welcome in our home as ever. I could not allow that to happen.

  ‘You’d do that? Bear the disgrace, to spare my mother? But then—’ I stopped, as if checked by a sudden fear.

  ‘Dorothea, what’s wrong?’

  ‘Oh, Hildebrand, my uncle is such a violent man! Though he is a von Schildauer, he has none of my father’s honour.’ I looked at the ground. ‘I do not wish to impugn my family’s good name, but—’

  H
e waved my scruples aside with a motion of his hand. ‘You have my word that I will not reveal a word of what you say to another soul. I beseech you, if you have information about your uncle that concerns my person, tell me.’ He added, after a pause, ‘I could not bear the thought of leaving you and your mother friendless and unprotected.’

  I put a tremor in my voice. ‘Gottfried is so vengeful, so easily angered. Even if you declined his challenge, I do not think that would assure your safety. He would attack you when you were unarmed, or worse, suborn some masterless man to – I can hardly speak it! – stifle you while you slept. No, you must face him. I cannot think of any other solution.’

  Eckert was good with words. He had surely used them to defraud and deceive many times before he met us, and he planned to acquire our house and my hand by the same means. But I saw him swallow my story the way a fish takes bait, and I knew that I was better at this game than he. It was a good feeling, but I did not have time to revel in it long. Quickly, before he could reply, I leaned in, as if imparting some great secret.

  ‘I can help you a little,’ I told him. ‘You know that my cousin is a descendant of Gebhard von Schildauer, and like him he is fearsome with a sword. He trained in the French style, as well as the Prussian, and did not stop until he could confound all his teachers. He has never been beaten. Please be on your guard: it would distress my mother so if you were harmed.’

  They fought the next morning. Eckert, as the challenged man, had the choice of weapons: he chose pistols, and Gottfried put a ball through his forehead at twenty paces. I knew nothing of my cousin’s swordsmanship, but I had seen him shoot the head off a grouse when it was almost too far away to see.

  There’s little else to tell. Duelling had long been against the law, and Gottfried had to leave quietly for Westphalia the next day – he had not even had time to unpack. We gave Eckert a decent funeral, making up a gun-cleaning accident as the cause of his death. He is buried in the village churchyard under a granite stone that my mother paid for. At first she grieved more deeply for him than she had for my father. When I finally persuaded her to look over the document box her grief was lessened, but the pain of his betrayal was nearly as great. It took her a long time to overcome the effects of the laudanum Eckert had given her, but longer still to forgive me for having revealed her dear Hildebrand as a deceiver.

  She lived seven more years, tended by Cilie and me. She rewrote her will to name me as her only heir, to make certain, she said, that Gottfried and Eugenie would never get hold of our house.

  After her death I contacted my father’s lawyers and did some travelling myself. I invited sober-suited men of my own to the house. And in a year we had built a glass foundry in the courtyard by the south wing, and turned the rooms behind it into painting and packing workshops. One of Bruno’s assistants had returned from Austria, and the two of them trained Henek as a helper, as he had lost a leg and could no longer farm. They made jugs and glasses first, which we sold to the daughters of my mother’s old dinner-party friends, and later, vases and fancy-ware with painted designs. There was work for the women whose sons and husbands had died: painting, gilding, making crates and packing our wares in them with straw, like eggs. Several learned to blow glass themselves; Cilie’s girl Katya was one of Bruno’s first apprentices.

  And after some years I followed Gottfried’s instruction and found myself a husband, though not one he would have chosen. I married Bruno, Cilie’s father. He was horrified when I first suggested it, but I persuaded him in time. We married in the village church, with two notaries present in case Gottfried tried to raise objections, and afterwards drew up our wills so that the workshop and the house would belong, at our deaths, to Cilie, Katya and Little Jens. Bruno found it hard at first to be the master of the great house, but he was respectful and kind to me, and our friendship grew with time. We had, after all, the most important thing in common: we both loved Cilie more than anything.

  Thea bowed her head, as if embarrassed to have spoken for so long. For the first time Drozde noticed the woman beside her, smaller and slighter, with dark eyes and still-black curls. The two of them were holding hands, and they smiled at each other before turning back into the crowd.

  There were many details in this account that puzzled Drozde, not least the fact that she had no idea where Puppendorf was; the nearest village to Pokoj was Narutsin. Perhaps, in the distant past, there had been another settlement closer to the great house.

  She didn’t ask. As she knew from the day before, there were rules in this house about challenging a storyteller. And in truth she was content for once to be the receiver rather than the maker of the tale. It gave her a curious sense of freedom.

  12

  Narutsin came to life on market day, more so than Drozde had expected. She had taken care to arrive early, as the stallholders began setting up: the best time to start an idle conversation was while they were waiting for the rush to begin. Not that she’d really thought there would be much of a rush. She was amazed to find the place so busy already.

  She had been hoping to garner some interesting stories for her next show while she bought the things she needed, but the stallholders she chatted to eyed her with suspicion and met her questions about the village and its people with sullen silence. Perhaps the housewives and daughters of Narutsin had an instinctive distrust of women who threw in their lot with soldiers. Or maybe they just didn’t like strangers.

  Eventually she stopped at the stand of a clothier who seemed more cheerful than the others she had encountered. Her stall held a few bales of heavy material and some promising-looking ribbons, and Drozde was pleased to see that the woman stocked needles and reels of thread too – the puppets’ garments were always in need of darning, and the curtain at the back of the theatre was growing decidedly ragged around the edges. Drozde introduced herself and showed the puppet she had brought with her. This often made it easier to start a conversation, she’d found, as well as helping to drum up business for her next performance. Today it was the newly made coquette. She held up a ribbon against the doll’s bodice and asked the stallholder if she had any lighter cloth, muslin perhaps.

  ‘Wrong time of year, dear,’ the woman said. ‘But come back in a couple of weeks and I’ll see what I can do.’

  ‘Two weeks!’ It seemed a long time to wait for a sale, Drozde thought. ‘Do you live hereabouts? Maybe I could buy from your house.’

  The woman laughed. ‘Not unless you have a boat. I’m from over the river. And I can’t come every week, the ferryman charges a fortune.’ She looked at Drozde curiously. ‘You’re not from this area yourself, I’m guessing.’

  Drozde gave her the edited version of her life: a village childhood in the north; an early marriage to a travelling puppet-master whose death left her with a livelihood but no home. She always wore a ring for these trips. Being a young widow got her more acceptance from most of the women and less unwelcome attention from some of the men. If necessary she could make his death be no more than a month ago. Tears were always a last resort for Drozde, but they were useful for getting rid of unwanted suitors. It was true, too, that her memories of the old puppet-master were fond ones for the most part, though there had never been anything so formal as a marriage contract between them. He had beaten her much less than her father and had fed her whenever he had food himself. And, of course, he had taught her. True, the puppets were better dressed now than they had been under his ownership, and certainly better voiced, but it was old Vanek who’d shown her how to carve, how to attach the strings and how to work them, and for that she would always be grateful.

  She told the tale well, and the stallholder was suitably impressed. In return, as Drozde had hoped, the woman told her own story. She was Hanna Kasturas, one of several traders who lived in the villages over the river and came here regularly. Narutsin had a good market and was prosperous by the region’s standards: some of her neighbours were here every week. For her part, on alternate Thursdays she lent her patch to h
er cousin, who had married a Narutsin man and sold his milk and cheese here. It was a useful arrangement which avoided leaving the spot empty. Hanna knew all the local people, and could point out who would give Drozde a good bargain, who sold two-day-old milk and who was known to put his finger on the scales.

  Drozde laughed at the woman’s jokes and thanked her for her advice. Before she left she asked the way to the local carpenter, and bought the ribbon and a couple of needles. They’d always be useful, and Hanna could prove a valuable contact, happy as she was to gossip about the lives and characters of her more tight-lipped neighbours. The carpenter, she learned, was Jorg Stefanu; Hanna thought him an honest man and a good craftsman, but somewhat above himself in his ambitions. His daughter was fully twenty, and instead of helping the girl towards a husband, someone with a trade to his name, he’d sent her to work as maid to the burgomaster, as if she might catch Meister Weichorek’s son, perhaps. Poor Dame Stefanu would turn in her grave at such foolishness, said Hanna. Drozde shook her head and laughed with her at the delusions of fathers. But the market was filling up; a girl with an outsize basket came up to ask for pins, and Hanna stopped laughing abruptly. Drozde took her leave, cordially promising to seek the stall out again in a fortnight.

  It was the carpenter she most needed to visit. The supplies she’d promised to find for Molebacher could wait till last: the less she had to carry around the better. But her puppets needed mending and she would not be easy in her mind till she had seen to them. Hanna had described the workshop as being only a little way off the main road, but Drozde had seen too many small towns to believe it would be close. In fact the side road went on for half a mile and petered out into a muddy track before it reached Stefanu’s workshop.