by Laura London
“A pleasant surprise, Lady Melbrooke,” observed Crant, looking as though he found her presence beside his moat more surprising than pleasant. “And the lovely Miss…?” His voice raised questioningly.
“Downpatrick!” Lynden snapped, as Crant bowed over her sister’s hand. Then, since alienating Lord Crant was hardly the object of their visit, she hastily forced a smile and joined Lorraine in an awkward chorus of “nice to see you.”
Crant nodded his head, giving them a smile that managed at once to be cynical and lightly curious. “Permit me,” he said, “to introduce my cousin… and guest, Ottmar Wishke.”
Ottmar bowed stiffly from the waist and clicked his heels together with a loud smack that made Lorraine jump.
“Are you a—a military gentleman, Mr. Wishke?” ventured Lynden, repressing a nervous urge to snap her heels in response.
Ottmar bowed again, fixed Lynden with a stare that seemed to her unnervingly disapproving, and spoke with a rich Teutonic accent. “Indeed. Major Wishke. For His Imperial Majesty Frederick William Third’s Prussian Army, serving under General Friedrich Wilhelm von Bülow.”
Lynden considered, and then thought better of, asking him if he knew that the war was three years over. Instead she turned back toward Crant, attempting to achieve the mien of an ardent medievalist.
“I don’t recall if it was mentioned during your visit to Fern Court,” she said, “but my sister and I are great observers of antiquities!”
Crant appeared to be amused. “Are you? And which… er, antiquity did you come to observe today, myself or my castle?”
If he had meant to fluster her, he failed. Lynden opened wide her pansy-brown eyes. “How can you say so? You’ve barely entered what my dear Uncle Monroe was wont to call the Age of Reason! You cannot be a day above fif—” she hesitated, feeling Lorraine’s elbow shoving gently into her ribs. “That is to say, forty-… seven?”
“Forty-three, Lady Melbrooke,” corrected Crant, apparently not in the least annoyed by her misestimate. “Tell me, is your career as an… let me see, ah yes, an observer of antiquities a long-standing occupation?”
“Indeed, yes,” she assured him. “In fact Lorraine and I were delighted to be able to stop at the Jerneaux Abbey on our way to Westmorland. Have you had the pleasure of its view? No? What a pity! Lorraine and I found it a most enriching scene. How much we regret that time did not permit our stopping long enough to meditate at length upon its noble aspect.” She felt Lorraine’s elbow again, decided that she was probably laying it on a bit too thickly, and changed her tack. “My sister and I have been taking the liberty of… of making a few random watercolor sketches of the castle for later study. You have no objection, My Lord?”
“None whatsoever. Take what liberties you please,” said Crant in a tone Lynden privately characterized as odious. “Would you enrich me with a view of your work?”
“Of course, by all means,” said Lynden, waving her brush expansively, wondering if he would oust them from the property at first glance as slanderous caricaturists. “Lorraine, show him yours.”
Lorraine glanced nervously at Lynden, stared at her drawing pad, chewed her lip, and reluctantly turned her easel to Lord Crant.
Crant examined the painting. “You have a most unusual talent, Miss Downpatrick,” he said, lifting his eyebrows sardonically.
Lorraine tried to assume an expression of modest self-appreciation. “So I’ve been told. You see, Lynden and I have studied extensively under a master of the Flemish school of interpretative architectural representation. Are you familiar with it?” She could only hope devoutly that he was not.
“I’m afraid I can’t claim that erudition, but Ottmar happens to be an, er, great observer of that very school,” said Crant, to Lorraine’s horror. “Come, Ottmar, give Miss Downpatrick your opinion.”
Major Wishke clasped his hands behind his back, rocked back on his heels, clamped his jaws together, and looked more forbidding than ever. He glared at Lord Crant. “Percy is a great one for the jokes,” he informed the company. “I know nothing of pictures.”
“I understand perfectly,” said Lynden, encouraged by his confession. “I’m sure you had much more important things to do in the army, like polishing your sword and shining up your cannons.”
Major Wishke, a man unable to imagine himself as the victim of so youthful a satirist, appeared stolidly gratified. “A perceptive comment for an Englishwoman, if I may say so. Women don’t always understand such things.”
Only Lynden’s concern for the plight of the handsome young highwayman prevented her from giving the Prussian a strong shove backward into the dirty waters of the moat. Mentally she listed him in the same league as Uncle Monroe, but aloud said only, “You may find yourself very surprised someday by women, Major Wishke! But it’s wrong of us to keep you standing in the cold. Lorraine and I were just saying we should return to Fern Court. Our fingertips were turning numb.” She drew the cover over her sketch pad, put it in the wheelbarrow, then began to cover her paint pots.
“You’ll honor us with your presence inside for some refreshment first,” said Crant, his tone so filled with smug assurance that not only did Lynden feel no triumph in having so cleverly tricked him into an invitation, but found that it would have been more satisfying to be able to refuse. She did accept, however, in a manner that she hoped might pass for flirtatiousness, and allowed him to take her arm in his own. Crant took Lorraine on his other arm, leaving Ottmar to trundle the clumsy iron wheelbarrow behind him. The heavy timber of the drawbridge absorbed their footsteps as they passed into the shadow cast by the machicolation, where the stonework parapet projected from the curtain, its ancient floor slatted with holes from which twelfth-century Crants had poured boiling oil on their besiegers from the north. Ottmar left the barrow inside the ten-foot-thick walls, and they walked down a broad flagstone alley to the massive three-story octagon of the Great Tower. Entering the tower through an enormous pair of studded, lattice-molded doors brought them within a large chamber, bare except for a pair of decrepit fourteenth-century suits of armor standing on rotting wooden mounts. Small circular shafts of sunlight shot in through gun-loops in the walls’ masonry to streak across the dim interior. To the right a bold staircase spiraled upward, its width so generous that a cavalry might have charged up it twelve abreast.
The stairs were colored with a soft rainbow of colors, a dancing prism of gentle light falling slanted from somewhere above. The effect was arresting, and the girls, searching for the source of the light, gazed upward to see a beautiful stained-glass dome set in the center of the ceiling like a fantastic inverted cup twenty feet in diameter. Black leads held together a glowing jeweled mosaic of colored glass, which caught the natural light in decorative configurations of ruby, emerald, sapphire, and amethyst. A stem burdened with heart-shaped leaves coiled and twisted about the lip and branched inward in slithering patterns, where it blossomed in golden-yellow lozenges.
Lorraine was about to question Lord Crant about the design of the dome when Crant pointed out the chapel, situated through an arched doorway to their left. He then led the girls to the staircase. Climbing the stairs, they passed small landings and doors that opened into guest rooms, larders, storerooms, and the kitchen.
Crant’s private quarters were on a half floor between the second and third floors; it was another gloomy half story later that the stairs ended abruptly at the eastern end of a great banqueting hall. It was a huge room, long without being particularly narrow, the outside wall a bulging curve of herringbone masonry with deep oriel windows framed in trefoil tracery. Most of the hall stood naked, though at the west end a small artful clutter of furnishings huddled before a great medieval fireplace in which enormous oak logs were burning mightily behind an iron screen. Magically, servants appeared to take the twins’ winter coats and their orders for tea; Lord Crant must have summoned them, though Lynden had not noticed him doing so. He invited them to follow him to the fire. This they did gratefully, as
the frigid draft from the staircase made it seem nearly as cold as outside, especially with their coats removed. Ottmar, silent and stolid, marched stiff-legged behind them across the carpetless stone floor.
The furnishings proved to be a subtly bizarre hodgepodge of periods, styles, and national origins. There was a marble-topped console table that surely, thought Lorraine, must be French and date back more than a hundred years to the reign of Louis XIV. The pieces shared one distinct, unpleasant feature. Their legs were really legs: dragon legs and eagle claws with hideously sharpened talons. There was an odd little stool that terminated in what appeared to be scrawny peacock legs carved in ash; a teak kettle stand that was an exact replica of an elephant’s foot, the wood meticulously carved to resemble the baggy, loose texture of elephant skin, and unpolished and dulled to a morbid gray. A manx table with three legs ending in realistically rendered bare human feet supported an oversized terrestrial globe, which stood on lion forelegs with broad, flat paws.
The upholstery had been done in chintz block print, rich dark green and orange on a drab tan ground. Looking closely at the pattern, one discovered a mesh of thorn and thistles backing a large spread-winged bird of paradise landing on its nest, from which a weasel was running, carrying a broken eggshell in its mouth. Lynden caught her sister’s attention, discreetly indicated the pattern, and grimaced. Lorraine nodded, her lips set in distaste.
A wizened butler arrived to pour out tea. With studied casualness Lynden queried Lord Crant about Lady Silvia’s whereabouts: Would she not be joining them?
“No, she left early this morning to go South to Kendall. She will be devastated, of course,” he said, smiling at Lynden with undisguised awareness, “to have missed your visit.”
Lynden received this in the cynical spirit with which it was intended, but she was scarcely able to prevent a certain amount of consternation from showing in her face when she realized that Lady Silvia was absent on the same day as Lord Melbrooke.
Crant must have seen her expression of discomfiture; he studied her for a moment, sipped his brandy, and spoke. “She really did go to Kendall, you know. She’s decided, it seems, to honor those gentry hardy enough to attend the county in March with a small dinner ball on the fifteenth. So today she’s set about placing orders with a butcher, a confectioner, and the fishmonger. Hiring musicians and whatever else had better not be overlooked in advance to assure the evening’s success. Justin will have a card, of course. Will you come?”
“Oh, yes, it sounds delightful,” returned Lynden, thinking it might provide an opportunity to prowl the castle in greater privacy while Crant and Lady Silvia were occupied with their guests.
The talk became general as the twins asked polite questions about the ball: who would be there and what distances the guests would have to travel. Many would stay until the next day, and Lynden could only feel sorry for those unfortunate enough to sleep even one night in this chill, dismal castle. Lorraine, with her nice sense of politesse, attempted with only moderate results to include Major Wishke in their conversation and at last succeeded with a reference to His Grace the Duke of Wellington’s trip northward in which she skillfully managed to express her admiration for the notable general’s triumph at Waterloo. This led, in some mysterious manner, to a discussion of Major Wishke’s own movements on the day of that illustrious battle. Wishke displayed slight animation and a quite surprising verbosity as he described the courage of the line regiments and the supportive effect of the hidden artillery. Two Prussian corps had begun their approach and the fourth horse had been shot out from under Wishke when Lynden expressed a sudden and unbecomingly passionate desire to admire the view from the oriel windows.
Crant gallantly offered to accompany Lynden, leaving Lorraine to listen to Wishke’s announcement that they would stand “until the last man falls.”
“Is he really your cousin?” Lynden asked Crant suspiciously.
“I’m afraid so. My mother was Prussian. Ottmar has his uses, my dear.”
Lynden looked at him sharply. Had there been a note of warning in his voice? How easy it was to believe the story of Kyler’s stepmother when one looked at Crant’s bright, glittering bicolored eyes and his slanted smile. She turned from him and gazed out the window. Directly below them and inside the main walls was a triangular courtyard with paths of crushed whitish stone. Against the east wall ran a long, brick-shaped stable, and beside that a squat cylindrical tower with a fine turret top projected from the triangle’s apex.
“Isn’t that a door at the bottom?” asked Lynden, pointing to the tower’s splayed base. “Can one enter it?”
Crant shook his head. “It’s been locked since before my father’s death. It looks stable enough from the outside, but the masonry inside has been known to crumble on unwary visitors.”
“I see,” said Lynden, thinking how convenient it would be for Lord Crant to have a section of the castle permanently locked where he might hide his guilty secrets. “And beyond it there, on the hillside outside the wall, how green it is. Has it been planted?”
“Yes, years ago by my mother’s sister, my Aunt Irmingarde, whose one unquenchable lust was gardening. The hillside is spectacular when it blooms, but that won’t be for a week or so. There are almost three acres of March-flowering plants. Lesser celandine, wood anemone, sweet violets, and snowdrops. I have the list memorized—my aunt used to chant it incessantly. It’s almost the only thing that I ever heard her say.”
Lynden almost swooned with relief that Crant had mentioned Aunt Irmingarde; she herself had hit upon no unobtrusive way of bringing that lady’s name into discussion. “She must have been a most unusual lady… I don’t suppose she’s still alive?”
“Lord, no,” said Crant, sipping from the brandy glass he held in one hand. “Dead these twenty years, buried in the family vault.”
“Did she write?” asked Lynden with an air of impartial scientific interest. “Most avid gardeners seem to keep logs of their work. She must have left some interesting journals.”
Crant shrugged. “They may have been so. I never took an interest in them. My mother had Irmingarde’s papers burned some ten years ago during a housecleaning.”
“Burned?” cried Lynden with dismay. “Oh, no! I mean, what a pity. One… one should save things like that. We never know what will be of historical interest to our descendants.”
“Such heat, my dear. And for a pile of ancient rubbish! But then it’s nearly part and parcel of your historical fervor, is it not?”
“My historical…? Oh, yes, well, if everyone burned it all up, there wouldn’t be any history for us to study, would there? Tell me, is the garden to the right there in the courtyard a planting of your Aunt Irmingarde’s as well? Such clever topiary work! And how cheerful the pyracantha looks even in winter with its red berries.”
“Yes, that was Aunt Irmingarde’s, too. The gardener hasn’t the expertise to keep it well trimmed. It becomes a snarling jungle in the summer.”
“Mmmm. Is that, um, behind the willow, there, might it be by any chance a sundial?”
“Yes, but it hasn’t seen the sun for a generation.”
“I don’t care for that! I have a fondness, no! a passion for antique sundials,” Lynden said with convincing enthusiasm. “Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to study it.”
“Nothing?” repeated Crant, a mocking smile in his eyes. “Then you must allow me to pleasure you. Come with me to the garden.”
Though they met the idea with quite divergent degrees of enthusiasm, Lorraine and Ottmar were quickly conscripted to join Lord Crant and Lynden. When the small party reached the garden, the twins found the sundial covered with a hard, reptilian scale of gray lichen and veiled with a dry, brittle vein-work of muskrose and hop vines. Lynden parted the raspy growth from the plateau of the sundial face to reveal a half dozen dead beetles, a rusty style—and an illegible inscription.
Ottmar cleared his throat. “I think the sundial is too old to keep very good time,
” he said, laughing heavily.
Lynden gave him a rigid smile, pronounced him a wit, and announced that she must have charcoal and a piece of rice paper, adding generously that if rice paper was not available, she could use some other large sheet of a transparent nature.
“You want to make a rubbing! Lynden, how clever of you,” said Lorraine. “Then we can have a—a nice record of its design.” Within minutes a pair of yards-men were found to scrape away what scale they could from the sundial’s surface, and a footman appeared with rice paper and charcoal. No more than half an hour later, the completed rubbing was tucked securely in the wheelbarrow which the twins steered together down the hillside, having refused an offer to be returned to Fern Court in Crant’s carriage.
Crant and Ottmar watched their downhill progress from a parlor window in the Great Tower.
“A peculiar visit,” said Ottmar. “What do you think they wanted?”
Crant crossed his arms and leaned a shoulder against the window. “I honestly don’t know. But I believe we haven’t see the last of them.”
At Fern Court, an hour later, the twins reached Lorraine’s bedroom, wedged the door shut with a chair, and rushed to the window. Carefully, they unrolled the rice paper rubbing, each taking a side and pressing it against the glass. The afternoon sunlight pouring through the panes was slowed by the thin gray of the charcoal background, and then leaped through the lines of the engraving. The inscription on Aunt Irmingarde’s sundial was no longer illegible. Lynden read it aloud:
“ ‘Grave and secret mem’ries
Clasp’d quietly in my heart,
Eternally stay nigh me
And forgotten pasts impart.’ ”
Chapter Twelve
The following morning Lynden sat before her pretty mahogany writing table gazing thoughtfully at its polished surface, where a stork of fruitwood inlay curved its long neck to peck a slender beak quizzically at a sheet of pressed paper covered with scattered notations.