“Thank you,” I managed. Civility seemed to require it.
He waved one dismissive hand. “You are my wife’s sister and in my care. Of course I’ll do all in my power.”
The Leopold I remembered would not have said any such thing. My gaze flickered to Barbara, who sat a little apart from us, sewing something, giving us the illusion of privacy. And yet I knew she was listening. I wanted her to listen. I wanted to gauge her involvement in all this too.
Leopold sat forward a little. “I hear that your anxieties centre around my late nephew.”
I nodded. Astonishment seemed to have deprived me of speech. I’d never meant to let him control this interview as he was. But this caring, open duke was not the man I remembered, and the knowledge threw me, for if he was so different from my memory, how faulty was my memory of other people, other events?
I thrust my doubt aside, holding on to my main purpose. Kasimir, Kasimir…
“My nephew Kasimir died eight years ago,” he said gently. “He died of pneumonia in the asylum his father had placed him in for his own safety, with doctors who cared for him up to the end. I know this because I was with him when he died. I felt all the tragedy of his young life, and his loss.”
I licked my stiff lips. “There is no death certificate.”
His frown flickered. “Yes, there is,” he said gently. He reached inside his coat and took a folded paper from his inside pocket. “I brought this to help reassure you.”
I took it from him, unfolded it, and tried to concentrate on the German words dancing in front of my eyes. Translated, they said: Prince Kasimir of Silberwald…died this twenty-first day of February, 1842…pneumonia.
It was signed by two doctors, one of them a Dr. Fierstein. I was sure I knew that name. He’d replaced Dr. Alcuin.
“Why was Dr. Alcuin replaced?” I asked, refolding the certificate.
“I’m afraid I don’t know any Dr. Alcuin. He certainly never treated Kasimir or any of my family.”
I dropped my eyes. “Kasimir was in your way. You’d never have been duke if he’d lived.”
“Actually, I would,” Leopold said ruefully. “Duke Edward, my brother, was drafting a law to exclude him from the succession.”
I raised my eyes in challenge. “On what grounds?”
“Incapacity,” Leopold said at once. “These were not the times to insist on the God-given right of succession, to place a lunatic in even nominal control over a country of an angry and suffering people.”
Again, he threw me. I could have sworn he never noticed the anger and suffering of the people except insofar as whether or not he’d have to put them down or increase their tax burden.
Leopold sat back, pinching the end of his nose as if what he had to say was difficult for him. “Guin, please try to understand. I loved my nephew. In between his bouts of raving, he was a charming and bright child. But when I say raving, that’s exactly what I mean. Impossible, unmanageable, animalistic rages, during which no one was safe around him even as a young child. With adolescence, those rages grew worse and more frequent. And more difficult to control—he was a large boy and still growing. By the time he was sixteen, my brother had no choice but to have him cared for in a safe institution. It sounds harsh and cruel to say so, but it was a blessing when he died, for his sake and for the country’s.”
“And for yours,” I flung in, but it felt like a last gasp of defiance. Leopold’s calm, no-nonsense attitude, overlaid with a hint of personal tragedy he was trying to play down, had their effect on me, more even than his words.
He didn’t answer me, merely inclined his head and waited for my next onslaught. I began to feel like the villain. This was so far from the way I’d imagined our interview proceeding.
I rubbed my temple where my head ached.
“I don’t understand,” I said, almost angrily. “If I was so ill, if I dreamed such wild, crazy dreams in such minute detail, why did I pick on your dead nephew whom I’d never even met or heard of until I came to Silberwald, as the centre of my dream?”
Leopold smiled a little sadly. “I don’t think one chooses one’s dreams. I know you are a young lady of extraordinary imagination. I’ve heard all about your stories and your taste in reading. Something in Kasimir’s tragic life, something you read of, perhaps, or discussed or overheard, must have inspired you to romanticize it in your mind.”
Like inventing a masquerade ball? Where I could be rescued by a masked stranger who would admire me and dance with me, and kiss me… Oh God…
“It all made such sense,” I whispered, pressing my temple, trying to bring back that certainty, that image of him moving above me in passion, making me feel as I never had and never would again. Remember me…
I squeezed my eyes shut and opened them again. “I was in the library. There was an unpleasant picture of Kasimir as a child. And I borrowed a copy of Jane Eyre.”
“From the castle library? I doubt it. Augusta found you poring over books about Rundberg and the cathedral.”
“You mean that’s why I can describe the ceremony so clearly? Because I saw pictures of the cathedral?”
He gave a small shrug. “It’s the only reason I can think of. I wish you had been there. We both do.”
“Then you are happy about me being here in Silberwald with Augusta?”
“I was until you became so ill. It is hard for her alone in a strange country. She’s strong and carries it well, but I see her moments of panic and vulnerability. That is what she needed you for.”
“Only I was ill and let her down,” I said flatly.
“She has coped admirably. But she has worried about you.” He rose. “You should rest some more. If anything else still troubles you, please just come to me, don’t let it eat away at you. When you’re fully well, we’ll talk about your future, whether that is here or home in England.”
If he’d tried, he couldn’t have swiped my feet from under me any better. The whole basis for my belief that he didn’t want me here lay in tatters.
When he’d left, Barbara came and sat opposite me instead. “What do you think?” she asked without emphasis.
“I don’t remember him being so kind,” I whispered. “I don’t want him to be kind. I want—” I want Kasimir back.
But I couldn’t and wouldn’t say it. It was pathetic, but with the loss of my fevered dreams, I seemed to be in mourning for a lost love.
Chapter Twelve
Another masquerade ball, another sea of masked faces and bright, dramatic domino cloaks. But no, this was the first one, for the one I remembered had only been a dream. I flitted between masked strangers, searching for a particular pair of intense blue eyes, for the torn clothes he wore under his cloak. Though in my heart, I knew there was no point.
Kasimir, my strange love affair, had not been real, mere products of my fevered and lonely imagination. Maybe I should just marry like my sisters, I thought, gazing up at the stranger in whose arms I waltzed. He was young; he had kind eyes and a mischievous mouth… I smiled at him a little shyly, and he drew me closer.
Over his shoulder, my eye was drawn to a solitary figure by the terrace door, not talking to anyone, not drinking or dancing, just watching. My heart leapt. I knew.
“Excuse me,” I gasped to my partner, and tried to slip my way through the throng of dancers. They kept getting in my way, blocking my view of the tall man in the burgundy cloak who waited for me by the terrace door. It was like another of those dreams where you try and try to reach somewhere, and you can’t quite get there. I’d had a dream like that, recently—or had that been real? Trying to get out of Kasimir’s empty cell while an unseen hand held me back. I banished the memory, uncaring now if it had actually happened or not, and dodged past the last couple to find myself face-to-face with my quarry.
The lips that had kissed me so wonderfully curved into a smile. He held out h
is hand, and I stumbled into his arms. Before everyone, he ripped the mask from my face and kissed my mouth with thorough, sensual passion.
“It wasn’t a dream,” I sobbed into his mouth, aching with gladness, with sheer joy. “It was all real, all true.”
“Of course it was,” he replied. “I told you to remember. Come, I’m desperate to make love to you.”
“Here?” I asked faintly, my whole body flooding with the heat of desire.
We were outside in the shadows, and his hand slid up from my waist over my breast, softly caressing. “Anywhere is good for loving you. Close your eyes.”
I obeyed eagerly, felt myself lifted in his arms, rocking, swaying, almost flying through the rushing air. I clung around his neck, blissful, trustful, my eyes tightly closed until I felt crisp sheets on my back and a hot, sweeping caress down my front from throat to the juncture of my thighs.
I gasped, opening my eyes to find him naked above me. “I want you so badly,” he said huskily. “I’ve missed you.”
“Where did you go?” My question got lost in his groan as he slid inside me and immediately began to move. He twisted down, latching his mouth to my breast and sucked, softly at first and then with increasing strength until I cried out and caught at his hand, pressing it over my other breast while I pushed my hips up off the bed to get closer to him, to take him deeper inside me. We plunged and writhed, straining together in bliss until the ecstasy burst over me.
I reached up to kiss him—and couldn’t find him.
My eyes flew open. I was in my own room—my new, luxurious room—alone in the darkness. No one shared my large bed, and yet my virginal loins burned still with sweet, intense pleasure. As if he’d really been there with me, making love to me.
But there had been no masquerade ball. Since I’d been ill, I hadn’t even left my room for more than a gentle walk through the corridors yesterday. I sat up, trying to dispel the ghosts, the physical as well as the emotional. On impulse, I lit the bedside candle and slid out of bed, carrying it to the window, where I pulled back the curtains.
I don’t know what I expected to see, but it wasn’t the man who stood alone in a beam of moonlight looking up at my window from the lawn below. With a sob of agony, I clawed at the glass. Even awake, I saw him now, blurring before my eyes as the tears gathered and trickled down my cheeks.
“Guin. Guin, what is it?” Barbara Darke hurried from my dressing room where she seemed to have been sleeping, crossing the floor to the window.
“My mind is disordered,” I gasped. “My fever is back. I see him in my dreams. I see him when I wake up.”
She put her arm around me, peering out the window with me. My blurry figure moved quickly across the lawn, away from me.
“He looks like a soldier,” Barbara said. “Certainly he’s heading towards the barracks, but he’s too far away to make out his features. Whoever he is, he’s no ghost.”
I swallowed. “He looked like Kasimir. My mind made him look like Kasimir.”
She drew me down onto the window seat, took both of my hands between hers. “You’re not yourself, are you? This, whatever this is, has weakened you.”
“The fever.”
“Perhaps.” She dipped her head so that her gaze could hold mine. “Guin, you asked me here for a reason.”
“In an incomprehensible, babbling note to my sister.”
“It was a little hurried,” Barbara allowed. “A trifle illegible, perhaps but not so incomprehensible to me. Caroline let me read it.”
I frowned at her, wondering where she was leading.
“Many people think I’m insane,” she observed, “or a charlatan. Or both. But in truth, spirits have always been part of my life. If you want to look for your Kasimir, I can help you.”
My lips fell apart. “You think that’s what he is? A spirit? A ghost?”
“I don’t know. There are ghosts here in the castle. Quiet spirits and unquiet ones. In your letter, you said you thought you’d spoken to one, a dead person. Was that Kasimir?”
I nodded.
“Then when did you become convinced he was real?”
“When I spoke to him again, when I anointed the sores on his wrists. He was real, solid.” I stared at her. “Can ghosts feel that way?”
“I never came across one who did,” she said doubtfully. “Although one thing I’ve learned over the years is that one never knows everything.”
“There was another time,” I said eagerly now, “the following night, when he came to me, and this time he looked like I imagine a ghost might—transparent, not quite solid or touchable. I saw two others like that before he came, and they vanished.”
She gazed at me with interest, even approval in her heavy-lidded eyes. “Then you could be susceptible.”
“I blamed it on the tea,” I said.
“You may not need me, except to show you the way.”
I licked my lips. “Are you humouring me, Mrs. Darke, or believing me?”
“I never disbelieved you. Everyone perceives things differently. You and your family could both be right.”
“We could?” I said doubtfully.
“You could. But to know the truth, we need knowledge, evidence. I can find you ghosts, but they don’t really count as evidence to most people.”
“Jane Eyre,” I said, springing to my feet. “I must still have the book!”
“Was it stamped in any way to show it came from here?”
I sat down again. “No.”
“People, then. Who do you remember speaking to after you arrived?”
“Goodness, lots of people. Baroness von Gratz, Hilde, the other lady-in-waiting. Colonel Friedrich. Bernard von Gerritzen and Angelika von Jurgensdorf—Augusta said they were trying to use me to gain court positions.”
“Most of the court isn’t here,” Barbara said. “We can’t ask them right now.”
“But they will come, won’t they? Or we’ll see them in Rundberg. That’s what convinces me my mind is raving. The duke is happy for me to stay, to come in contact again with the people who could prove me right and him wrong. If I was right!”
“There is that.”
“He could be relying on my going home, of course, but even so, I could meet people there. I met—I dreamed I met—the British ambassador, Sir Aubrey Bennett and his daughter Helena.”
“Sir Aubrey is certainly the British ambassador to Silberwald,” Barbara allowed. “But you would know that.”
“True. But I remember his daughter quite vividly. She was beautiful and quite struck by Patrick Haggard.”
Barbara’s shawl, which she’d been clutching closer around her, fell unheeded to the floor as she stared at me. Her face seemed to have whitened in the candle light.
“You met him?” she exclaimed. “In Rundberg?”
“Several times. Do you know him? The editor of the Voice. I found him in a tavern— the Blue Lamp tavern!—with some radical students, and he helped me find Dr. Alcuin. He even introduced us at the Museum of Antiquities.”
Colour now suffused Barbara’s cheeks. “None of this surprises me, except that you could have done this in secret. Oh dear, was it in secret?”
“You needn’t fear for my reputation! Mr. Haggard is a friend of Caroline’s—and I do mean friend, whatever the scandal sheets I wasn’t supposed to read said about them recently.”
“I know,” Barbara muttered.
“Oh. Then you do know Mr. Haggard too?” I said with a little thrill of hope.
“Yes. Yes, I do. You should know that I am, in fact, engaged to marry him. Or at least I was.”
“Really?” Distracted, I had many questions about that, and about her peculiar wording, but she obviously wished to keep to my troubles.
“Oh yes, quite real. Did you know Patrick before you came out here?”
I
shook my head. “No, we’d never met. I read the Voice, though.”
“Did you know what he looked like?”
“No, there are no pictures of him in the journal.”
“So describe him to me. When you met him in Rundberg, how did he look?”
I searched my memory. “He was big, tall, bony. His face seemed harsh—black, dramatic eyebrows, hard, unforgiving eyes. Just a little scary, if you’re inclined to timidity. Or even if you’re not, actually. But he was very kind to me, even though I was in that tavern. He said Caroline would scold him if he left me there alone.”
“She wouldn’t have been the only one. Was he well dressed?”
“Adequately,” I allowed. “He looked comfortable rather than fashionable.”
“It does sound awfully like Patrick,” Barbara mused. “I wonder if we can bring him here…”
“As my proof?” My heart was beating fast once more. I pressed my hand over it to slow it down.
“Maybe.”
“Then I didn’t dream the last two weeks?” I dug my fingers into the seat on either side of me as if that could contain my emotion. “They’re lying to me still? Even Augusta?”
“I don’t know, Guin, but I think we need to. You need to. If they’re lying, then it’s a huge and complicated lie that must have vital purpose to them. We’d show our hand by writing to Patrick or the Bennetts or anyone else you may have met… Let’s leave that for now and concentrate on convincing ourselves of the truth one way or another.”
She scooped up her fallen shawl and rose to her feet. “How would you feel about a little ghost hunting?”
In spite of everything I’d acknowledged, hope began to soar in me again. I didn’t want him to be dead, even as a ghost, but somehow it was better than my time with him never having happened, even if that meant Augusta and everyone else had lied to me. Although…
Common sense brought me up short. “If he’s only a ghost, why would they bother with this charade?” I wondered.
The Prisoner of Silverwood Castle Page 14