Ruthless Passion

by Penny Jordan

  Their parents shared a very distant family connection; in effect, Leo’s paternal grandfather had been a cousin many times removed of his maternal grandfather, and his parents had originally met when Heinrich von Hessler had come to the Schloss while tracing his family ancestry.

  That had been early on in the war, and Leo had always wondered a little at his father’s apparent freedom to travel at such a time, but, like so much else, he had quickly realised that it was yet another subject which must not be broached.

  As he explained to his secretary why he had to leave he put a call through to Wilhelm’s wife. Anna was an elegant, almost too frail woman, whom Leo privately pitied. She had been a model when Wilhelm first met her, but her youthful beauty had long since faded into gaunt despair as the reality of marriage to Wilhelm took its toll on her.

  Keeping his voice as neutral as he could, Leo explained the situation, asking if she would tell Wilhelm what had happened when he came home.

  ‘Don’t you mean if he comes home?’ she asked bitterly.

  There was nothing Leo could say. He put down the receiver just as his secretary walked into his office to announce that a company helicopter was being prepared for his flight to the Schloss. It was corporation money that kept the Schloss in the hands of the family, and Leo had always sensed how much his grandparents had felt the burden of their son-in-law’s ‘charity’. His grandfather was dead now. He had died when Leo was fifteen.

  Stopping off at home merely to collect a change of clothes, Leo headed for the private airstrip that housed the company’s two helicopters.

  The pilot was waiting for him. Leo acknowledged his greeting and followed him out to the waiting machine.

  His grandmother was still conscious, but growing very weak, the housekeeper had told him during her telephone call. What were her thoughts as she came to the end of her long life? Leo wondered. Were they of her past, or were they of what might lie ahead? She had lived through so much. Seen so much. He ached inside at the thought of her death, a part of him a small boy still afraid of being left alone, even while the majority of him accepted the inevitability of what had to be.

  From the air, the ravine of the River Neckar looked like a toyland, the river itself glinting in the early-evening sun, the steeply wooded escarpments dappled in various shades of green apart from where the sharp sheer sides of its medieval castles rose from the ground like jagged rough-edged teeth.

  Their own schloss was small by comparison, its original medieval structure overlayed by its later seventeenth-century façade. Leo could see it up ahead now. The family flag, the standard bearing the ancient arms bestowed on the family by Charlemagne, still flew at full mast, but ominously there was no breeze to stir the canvas, until the descent of the helicopter made it rattle wildly in the down-draught.

  Helga was waiting for him. She had been with the family for as long as Leo could remember. Her husband was in charge of the Schloss’s maintenance and had for many years been his grandmother’s chauffeur. He knew how fond they both were of his grandmother. There were those who did not know her well who considered her to be autocratic and withdrawn, but Leo knew the real warmth that lay behind her formal manner.

  ‘My grandmother,’ he began, his heart catching at the sight of Helga’s tears.

  ‘She still lives,’ Helga told him. ‘But the nurse feels that it cannot be long.’

  Silently Leo patted her hand, his eyes taking a few seconds to adjust to the dimness of the huge silent hall. This, the original great room of the medieval castle, always seemed to him to hold echoes of its origins, despite the panelling with which his eighteenth-century ancestors had cloaked it. Faded rugs, surely very like those that must have once been brought back from the Crusades, were dotted here and there, adding dull patches of colour to the vastness of the stone-flagged floor. A stone staircase rose grimly upwards, its harshness only slightly softened by the carved wooden banister.

  On the second floor was a huge window, the family’s arms and honours picked out on it in richly coloured stained glass. The window overlooked the Neckar. During the Second World War the commander of the SS regiment stationed locally had insisted that the window be destroyed to allow his troops to properly survey the river and the skies above it.

  The story went that his grandmother had announced that if the SS commander wished to employ his men in carefully removing the stained glass piece by piece in order to replace it with clear glass then he was perfectly at liberty to do so, but that she would not stand by and see her country’s heritage destroyed simply so that his men might obtain a view of the Neckar that might just as easily be obtained by stationing themselves in one of the Schloss’s many attic rooms.

  It had been Helga who had told Leo this story, and he had been far too overawed by this evidence of his grandmother’s puissance to even dare to think of questioning her about the event.

  Now the evening light shone through the glass, making a golden halo around the cherubic features of the small child who was said to represent the infant son of a medieval baron who had handed the child over to his enemy as a hostage for the safety of his overlord, only to receive the child’s body back in place of his living son.

  Yes, the Schloss had known its fair share of violence, both given and received. He could still remember the repugnance he had felt on being shown, by Wilhelm, of course, the site of the oubliette where once their family had imprisoned its hostages.

  And yet, for all the violence of its past, now the Schloss breathed tranquillity, as though somehow its great age had conferred on it an absolution for all that had happened within its walls. It was as though the Schloss, having known all the injustice and cruelty of which human nature was capable, had somehow weathered and endured man’s weaknesses and flaws and had emerged from the experience to offer its benign serenity and acceptance to all who came within its walls.

  He had always felt the atmosphere of the Schloss very strongly, unlike either his father or Wilhelm, who, while prone to boasting of its existence, were also somehow resentful of that existence, fearing perhaps that it overshadowed them and their achievements.

  He went upstairs alone, too familiar with the warren of corridors and blank wall endings to have to think where he was going.

  His grandmother’s bedroom in the west tower was the room she had come to as a new bride. Her only daughter had been born there, and her husband had died there in the vast bed, which had cradled the bodies of so many generations of his family in life as well as in death.

  He knocked briefly on the door before entering. His grandmother’s nurse, who had been sitting beside the bed, got up as he walked in. A tall, statuesque woman in her later thirties, she moved with that apparently effortless glide developed by professional nurses. Although she wasn’t wearing a uniform, Leo could almost hear the starched crackle of antiseptic clothing as she walked.

  He looked towards the bed. His grandmother lay there motionless, her eyes closed. His heart gave a tremendous bound of fear and pain, but the nurse quickly reassured him, telling him in a soft monotone, ‘She still lives, although I do not think it will be long. You will want to be alone with her.’

  She had a formal, distancing manner that could sound cold, but Leo knew she was deeply devoted to his grandmother. She had been with her for the last five years, and he made a mental note to make sure that, if his grandmother had not thought to do so, her devotion was properly rewarded.

  There was no money in his mother’s family, a fact which his father had never ceased to use as a means of taunting and deriding his in-laws. Once, when Leo had been foolish enough to leap to his grandparents’ defence and to announce hotly that money was not everything, the force of the blow his father had dealt him had knocked him to the floor and left him bruised for over a week afterwards.

  He took the chair vacated by the nurse. His grandmother lay still beneath the covers, her fragile body barely discernible. Her hands lay on the coverlet, the skin withered and puckered, the gold of her
rings worn thin. Instinctively Leo reached out, covering her hand with both of his.

  ‘Leo.’

  The shock of hearing her speak his name made him jump. She opened her eyes and smiled at him.

  ‘So, my time has finally come, has it?’

  She must have seen his distress because she smiled again.

  ‘No. It is all right. I am ready to go. More than ready. Is Wilhelm with you?’

  He could hear the exhaustion in her voice, but he had not expected that she would be so lucid … so much the woman he had always known. He had been afraid of coming here, he admitted. Afraid of what he might see, but she was just as she had always been.

  ‘No. He … There was a meeting. I have left a message. He will be here soon.’

  ‘You mean he is with one of his women.’ As Leo watched, her eyes hardened. ‘Who can ever know the tricks fate will play? That you should be so like Wilhelm’s father and that he should be so like yours.’

  Leo stared at her. His heart had started to pound with sick, heavy shock, his brain telling him that his ears were playing tricks on him. His body suddenly felt cold and heavy, clammy with fear and awareness.

  His grandmother had closed her eyes again. He leaned towards her.

  ‘Grandmother.’

  She opened her eyes and looked at him.

  ‘Tell me,’ he begged her urgently. ‘What do you mean? Wilhelm and I have the same father.’

  ‘You mean that you believe that I am a senile old woman who cannot separate truth from fiction. Oh, Leo, if only that were so. Perhaps I should have said nothing to you, but since your mother’s death it has lain so heavily on my conscience. I should never have allowed her to marry your father. It would have been easier to bear the disgrace of her illegitimate child than to suffer the pain of knowing how she suffered through her marriage, but things were different in those days and we were already under suspicion from the SS. Your grandfather had made his views on Hitler too clear. It was only our name that protected us, and for how much longer? Your father …’ She closed her eyes as though silencing herself, and then said slowly, ‘He had already approached your grandfather to ask for Elizabet’s hand, but she … there was someone else … a young man she had met at university. They were very much in love.

  ‘He was very gentle, a pacifist, I imagine you would call him now, but he was not a coward. He had great spirit, and he loved your mother as she did him.

  ‘Heinrich hated him, and I have often wondered if it was Heinrich who betrayed him to the SS, but perhaps it is best that there are some things that we never know. He was taken prisoner … executed. Your mother begged Heinrich to try to help him, but it was no good.

  ‘I didn’t know then that they had been lovers. Your mother was very young, barely eighteen.

  ‘When less than six weeks after his death she announced that she wished to marry your father I could not believe it. It was then that she told me that she had conceived her dead lover’s child. She must marry Heinrich, she told me, she must have a father for her child. She could not face the disgrace she would suffer if she did not. No one but I knew she was pregnant. She had already, she told me fiercely, given herself to Heinrich, and I saw then that there was no price she would not pay to protect her lover’s child.

  ‘They were married quickly and quietly, and when Wilhelm was born it was here at the Schloss. Fortunately it was an easy birth so that we were able to pretend that Wilhelm was a seven-month child, a child conceived on the night of his parents’ wedding, so to speak.

  ‘Your father never questioned that Wilhelm was his. I suspected, although I have no proof, that your mother took care to deceive him into believing that he was her first and only lover. They moved to Switzerland shortly after the birth.’

  Her voice had started to fade, and as Leo looked at her she closed her eyes. He hated to press her any further; to question her when she was so obviously close to death, but there was something he had to know, a suspicion as cold as the lack of love he knew his father had always had for him.

  He leaned over the bed, his voice low and tense, his hand enfolding that of his grandmother, stroking the aged fragile flesh.

  ‘Grandmother … my father … did he know, in the end?’

  At first he thought she could no longer hear him; that she was already slipping into a pre-death unconsciousness, but then she turned her head and opened her eyes.

  ‘Yes,’ she told him. ‘Your mother, before she died … He had been so cruel to her, Leo; so unkind. Many times I wanted to beg her to leave him, but I knew she would not. She was afraid, you see … afraid for you … afraid that your father would persuade the courts to give him custody … and afraid for us as well … afraid of your father’s vengeance, and so she stayed, but in the end she exacted her own payment from him for all the unhappiness he had caused her.

  ‘She knew she was going to die. She had insisted on the doctors’ telling her the truth. She told me what she intended to do. She could not die with the secret of Wilhelm’s true fathering on her conscience, she told me.’

  As Leo watched, his grandmother took a deep breath and then shuddered.

  ‘She was my daughter, my only child, and I had watched your father abuse and destroy her. I knew that it was not out of guilt that she wanted to tell him the truth but out of anger and hatred. He came to see me afterwards …’

  She closed her eyes and then opened them again, and Leo could see that they were bright with tears.

  ‘He asked me if what she had told him was true. I told him it was. I think he would have disinherited Wilhelm publicly then, had his pride permitted it.’

  ‘ “Wilhelm is your son,” I told him. “You have moulded him in your own image.”

  ‘ “He is not my son,” he told me, and I shall never forget the way he spoke, the way he looked. “I have no son. No true son. That bitch your daughter has seen to that.”

  ‘ “Leo is your child,” I told him.

  ‘ “Leo … the seed which gave him life was mine, but that is all he has of me. Your daughter took good care to make sure of that. She has cheated me … deceived me. May she rot in hell for eternity for it.” ‘

  Leo saw his grandmother shudder as she closed her eyes. ‘If anyone is to have that fate, if indeed such a place as hell actually exists, it will be my father,’ he said painfully. His own eyes ached and burned with the tears he could not shed. Suddenly like a child again, he yearned to be able to unburden himself of the fear and pain of his own thoughts, to tell this woman he had always been so close to of his own discoveries about his father’s past, but as he blinked fiercely the frightened child within him was subdued and the man took control. How could he add to what she had already suffered, the pain she had already known?

  ‘So that is why he left control of Hessler Chemie to me,’ he said instead.

  ‘Yes. Because you are his son.’

  His son. ‘My son … My son.’ Now he understood what his father had meant with those final bitter, hating words.

  There was still one question he had to ask.

  ‘Wilhelm … does he know the truth?’

  His grandmother shook her head.

  * * *

  The baroness died at two o’clock in the morning. Leo was with her, holding her hand as she slid from one last shallow breath into infinity. He knew immediately that she had gone, even though he continued to hold her hand within his for some time afterwards.

  Wilhelm arrived in the morning, heavy-jowled, his jaw nicked where he had shaved, his temper savagely on edge. He still smelled of sex, Leo recognised nauseously as he listened to him cursing the inconvenience of their grandmother’s death.

  Even now, knowing the truth, it was difficult to accept that Wilhelm was not Heinrich’s son. His attitude, his manner, his temper were all so much Heinrich’s, but then, he had been taught to model himself on the older man almost from the moment of his birth, and his mother had probably not even realised what was happening in her desire to protect her n
ew-born child—her lover’s child—from her husband’s wrath if he ever discovered the truth. How glad she must have been, how relieved to see the way Heinrich had totally accepted Wilhelm as his own. When had she started to realise what he was doing to the child … her child …?

  Leo remembered the way she had always kept him close to her. Because she had seen what Heinrich had done to Wilhelm?

  Sickened, he turned away from his brother, full of pity and compassion for him. What might he have been if Heinrich had not distorted and maimed his personality, fostering within him all the arrogance, the greed, the selfishness which made him the man he was?

  And how could he tell him the truth? Leo knew that he could not; that to do so would totally destroy him.

  ‘She’s gone, then, has she?’ Wilhelm demanded aggressively.

  ‘Yes,’ Leo acknowledged heavily. ‘She’s gone.’

  Later, reflecting on what he had discovered, Leo wondered how any man, even one like his father, could reject a child he had brought up as his own the way Heinrich had finally in his will rejected Wilhelm. To love a child was surely to love the child, and not the seed that had given him life?

  But then, his father had never actually loved either of them. Leo doubted if he had ever loved anyone, including himself. And Leo knew how all-important it was to love oneself, to accept one’s flaws and weaknesses, because without that capacity for self-compassion, how could one truly love or show compassion for anyone else?

  As a young man, disturbed by the pattern of Wilhelm’s marriage, so closely echoing that of his parents’ with its infidelity and disharmony, he had wondered if perhaps his genes were better not passed on to others. He had brooded over the question of marriage, the vulnerability of it, wondering if he too might somehow copy the relationships of his father and brother.