“He said he was odd. Different.” I couldn’t resist reaching out to touch the handsome, boyish cheek. “Maybe he was never cut out to be a ruling duke… But that’s no excuse for imprisoning him, chaining him like a beast. Oh, Barbara.”
“What?” she said, beginning to insert the canvas back into the frame behind the other.
“Have you ever heard of or come across a person who can turn into an animal, to a wolf?”
She paused, blinking at me. “No. No, I haven’t. Why?”
I told her about the beastlike noises I heard one afternoon before I’d run back to safety. “Maybe it would explain why they chained him up and why they won’t talk about him. Who would believe such an outrageous story?”
Barbara stood on the chair again and I supported the bottom of the painting while she hooked it back on the wall. “I’m not sure I do. I’m open to any possibility, of course, but so far, that theory is lowest on my list of the likely.”
“Mine too,” I confessed. “Barbara, how did you know there was another painting in there?”
“I didn’t. It just struck me it could be something someone did in a hurry, without really knowing what to do with the original. Some underling of the old duke’s, perhaps. Or the present duke’s. It doesn’t really matter, because it’s still not proof that your Kasimir wasn’t mad, let alone that he’s still alive. Or was up until a week ago. I think the best—”
She broke off, freezing with one foot on the ground. Then her head whipped around towards the window. The library overlooked the courtyard, and the clip-clop of horses’ hooves mingled with the rumbling of carriage wheels on the cobbles below.
“Patrick,” she breathed. She all but fell off the chair in her hurry to bolt across to the window. I followed more slowly, more curious about her reaction than about the arrival. Tension seemed to have wound around her. Intense excitement stood out in her eyes, in her fingers gripping the window sill so tightly. Her breath came quickly, erratically.
And she was right. With our noses pressed to the glass, we could see who dismounted from the coach. A middle aged man I recognized as one of Leopold’s aides—a minister, perhaps, or a secretary—got out first, slowly and sedately. Then Patrick Haggard sprang down with quick impatience. He cast his gaze upwards, turning his head to take in, presumably, the magnificence of the castle.
Barbara leapt backwards with alacrity.
“You’ve quarrelled,” I said astutely. “He doesn’t know you’re here, does he?”
She shook her head. “There’s no reason he should.” And yet her whole being radiated a new, restless excitement. Her suddenly tense shoulders dropped as though she’d forced herself to relax. “More interestingly, we’ll soon discover if he knows you.”
I frowned, my heart sinking because I still didn’t want to believe in my two weeks of sickness. “The duke wouldn’t have him here if my suspicions were correct,” I said glumly.
“That may be true. On the other hand, Patrick doesn’t always wait to be invited. And on the bright side, he’s unlikely to betray that you’ve met before. If he met you in a low tavern and connived at your mad flight to the castle, he wouldn’t give you away.”
“Do you think he’ll be at lunch?” I said with interest, dusting off the chair Barbara had stood on and dragging it back under the desk. “That might be fun.”
“It might,” Barbara said hollowly.
“You really did quarrel, didn’t you?” I said, threading my arm through hers as we walked. “Don’t you want to see him again?”
“Patrick—” She broke off, her fingers working on the door handle without turning it. “Patrick turns my world upside down and doesn’t even know he’s doing it.” She gave an impatient shrug and a half-embarrassed laugh as she tugged open the door. “Come on, you’d better change for our lunch engagement.”
I wasn’t willing to leave it there. Once in the privacy of my own room, I asked blatantly, “What did you quarrel about?”
Her eyes met mine in the mirror. For a moment, I thought she wouldn’t answer. It certainly hung in the balance, and her eyes gleamed with something very like temper. Then she said, “I’m incurably independent, and to be so, I must work for my living. Since we are to be married, he didn’t want me even to enquire about the post in France. I knew he was right. We couldn’t live comfortably in different countries. Only then, without feeling the need to consult me, he went charging over here to research his piece on the German states since the revolution. I said I would take the job in France, and here I am.”
She glanced back at me with a hint of rueful humour. “I think that’s why Caroline came with me. To make it look like an expedition of pleasure and nothing that needed to come between him and me. Until I accepted the job, of course.”
“And will you?”
She spun away from me. “If I’m not to be married, it would be an ideal situation for me. Are you ready?”
* * * * *
As was the custom I remembered, we gathered in Augusta’s sitting room before luncheon. When Barbara and I entered, Hilde was handing an embroidery frame to my sister. The baroness sat beside her on the sofa, although she stood up as I entered and stood quietly aside as though worried about upsetting me.
For every moment of certainty in my own memory, I had several of doubt. The baroness was not as I remembered either. I couldn’t even imagine this dignified, considerate lady deliberately pouring her mistress and me drugged tea, let alone commanding men to hold me while she poured it down my unwilling throat. Which made it easy to play the part Barbara advised.
“There,” Augusta said triumphantly. “Doesn’t she look completely well again?”
“Much more the thing,” the baroness murmured.
I caught her gaze and held it. “I know I have you to thank, baroness. I’m most grateful for your care of me during my illness, and ashamed of the outburst I recall from the other day. I hate to imagine what you had to put up with earlier.”
The baroness smiled graciously. “Very little, Lady Guin. My reward is see you up and about.”
“Yes, I am well on the mend now. We even went for a walk this morning.”
“Lady Guin was all set to go as far as the village,” Barbara said humorously. “I had to drag her back inside before she exhausted herself.”
“Quite right, Mrs. Darke,” Augusta said. “I’m glad to see you so able to manage my wayward sister.”
“I’m a schoolteacher,” Barbara reminded her.
I rose to the bait. “Barbara Darke!”I expostulated. “Are you comparing me to your snotty-nosed pupils?”
“I assure you none of my pupils were ever allowed to have snotty noses.”
On her last few words, the connecting door to the duke’s apartments opened and Augusta’s husband entered, followed by two other men. I glimpsed his brother and Patrick Haggard.
Even blocked by the other two, Patrick’s stillness seemed unnatural to me. He’d caught sight of Barbara, who gave no sign of even noticing him, apart from the compulsive curling and uncurling of her fingers which she seemed to deliberately stop when she became aware of it.
The duke greeted his wife formally, adding in his stiff yet amiable way, “My dear, I’ve brought an extra guest to lunch. Mr. Haggard is the editor of the British journal the Voice, but when I discovered he was a friend of your family’s, I knew you would be glad to see him.”
The duke clearly didn’t know his wife at all. Augusta barely acknowledged Caroline since she was of little use to the socially ambitious. The new duchess of Silberwald was most unlikely to welcome a man who worked for his living and was, besides, more than a little disreputable. Scandal had followed Patrick Haggard since his youth, when his wife had died under mysterious circumstances and he was suspected either of driving her to suicide or of murdering her directly. His journal, constantly critical of the government, was only
just on the right sight of toleration by the law. And of course, there had been the recent false scandal involving Caroline herself.
But when I glanced surreptitiously—and just a little maliciously—at Augusta to see how she coped with this affront, the expression behind her distant smile was not outrage but panic. Even fear, as her eyes tried to catch her husband’s gaze.
Barbara’s hand touched mine, warningly, and I understood. Augusta knew I’d met Patrick before, in Rundberg. Her husband, less involved with the social aspect of the duchess’s reception, had no idea.
They were lying to me.
Sudden dizziness made me grasp the back of the chair beside me.
Of course, it didn’t mean yet that I was right. In fact, Augusta’s reaction could well be to do with something private in her own marriage or her husband’s life, something that didn’t involve me at all. It was Patrick himself who held the evidence, the truth of my situation.
“Of course, Mr. Haggard is most welcome,” Augusta said freezingly.
Patrick stepped forward to bow over her hand, and I had my first clear look at him. At first glance, he was just as I remembered him: big, saturnine, hard-eyed. But as he straightened, I saw no sign of the basic kindness that had lurked behind the tough exterior I remembered. Behind the polite facade, emotion boiled in his eyes. At least some of it was fury. The rest, I hadn’t a hope of reading, although it struck me he was wound as tightly as Barbara.
He didn’t so much as glance at his fiancée as he was presented to me. His eyes met mine with polite but total disinterest and absolutely no recognition.
It’s true, I thought helplessly, while making sure for Augusta’s observations that I gave away no recognition of my own. I have been ill. I never went to Rundberg, never met Patrick Haggard. Kasimir is a ghost of my imagination, and I have to stop thinking of everything as a conspiracy against him and against me.
“Mrs. Darke,” Augusta finished her introductions without further explanation, and the couple bowed distantly to each other. I thought something flickered in Patrick’s eyes then, a flash of appreciation or amusement, quickly vanished.
I said, “Mrs. Darke has been looking after me since my recent illness. Caroline sent her.”
“I don’t blame Caroline in the least,” Patrick said obscurely.
“Indeed, how could you?” Barbara returned at her sweetest. “Have you come to interview His Highness the duke for your ra—journal?” Clearly, she’d only just stopped herself calling his publication a rag, and just as clearly she meant him to know it.
Mr. Haggard’s eyes gleamed with appreciation. “Yes, indeed, the duke has been kind enough to agree. My ra—journal readers will be most interested in his views.”
“I don’t have time to spare today,” the duke said, “but we can converse during luncheon if that is acceptable to you?”
“Most acceptable,” Mr. Haggard replied.
If I had still felt ill, luncheon would have caused a severe relapse through the strain on my nerves. For most of it, one could have cut the tension with a knife—and I confess I did contribute to that tension by gazing too often at Patrick as if I was trying to work out where I’d seen him before. I wanted to see how this would affect Augusta, and it did indeed appear to make her extremely uneasy.
Maybe I’d never been ill after all. Barbara had said that Patrick wouldn’t give away our acquaintance. I began to think I’d never find out the truth, or that by the time I did my mind would be too disordered to care.
Patrick himself made things worse by asking the duke questions about his government that the duke plainly found insolent or too difficult for other reasons. They didn’t quarrel precisely, but Patrick did appear to be deliberately niggling him, perhaps to get at the truth of his views beyond the lip service he paid to liberalism. Meanwhile, Barbara chattered to Hilde, the baroness and myself as if she hadn’t a care in the world, throwing out the odd barbed comment about political journals without lowering her voice.
It would have been funny if it hadn’t been so excruciating. If I hadn’t been so desperate to know the truth. I positively itched to drag Patrick away into a private room in order to ask him outright if we had ever met and what he knew of Dr. Alcuin and his wife, for whose safety—if they were real—I greatly feared.
It didn’t help that after luncheon, coffee and tea were served in the sitting room. I couldn’t stop looking at the teapot and the baroness’s capable, slender hand as she poured. “Don’t drink the tea.” Idiocy.
And yet I remembered the words as clearly as I remembered their speaker. And I remembered the pure panic as several men wrestled me into compliance to let the baroness pour her evil potion down my choking throat. I’d thought I was dying…
Abruptly, I stood, pacing away from the circle of strained, only just polite conversation, towards the window which looked down on the courtyard to the right and gardens to the left. To my surprise mounted soldiers were pouring into the courtyard from the arch, others on foot from the direction of the barracks. And when I glanced to the right, they had spread around the garden too, all facing towards the castle.
Unease twisted at my stomach. Some kind of exercise perhaps?
An officer rode through the arch to the front of the troops facing the main entrance to the castle. I heard his voice issuing terse, calm instructions. I recognized him.
“Colonel Friedrich,” I said aloud.
“What?” Unexpectedly, Patrick leapt from his chair and across the room to me. I thought he swore beneath his breath.
“There are soldier surrounding the castle,” I blurted, and the duke and his brother, Barbara and the baroness were suddenly all crowding into the window too.
“It’s a coup d’état,” Heribert said hoarsely. “Leo, it’s another bloody coup.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Leopold snapped.
Through the frightened hubbub, Patrick Haggard turned directly to his fiancée. “Barbara, fetch your things,” he said quietly.
But she was staring at him with loathing. “You knew! You knew this would happen! That’s why you came—”
“Pack, or I’ll take you as you are,” Patrick said flatly.
“I’m going nowhere without Caroline’s sisters!”
“Neither am I. Look, Friedrich’s a decent bloke. He’ll let you through, but we need to hurry. You need to hurry.”
“Oh God,” Augusta whispered behind me as Barbara stormed away without a word, Patrick at her heels. “What’s happening?”
I tried to be calm. “I think we have to leave for a little. Tell Button to throw a few necessities in a bag. I’ll meet you back here in five minutes. Don’t dare have hysterics on me, Augusta.”
“Mann! Get Hohenstaufen,” the duke was barking through the doorway connecting these rooms with his own. Something else clicked into place in my distracted mind. Mann was the name of his valet, a balding, silent man whom I’d noticed on our journey, but rarely since. I just couldn’t work out right now why that was important. “Round up the guard,” Leopold commanded.
Heribert pointed out of the window. “That is our guard,” he replied in a hollow voice.
I hurried away to my room. From all over the castle, I could hear frightened cries and whispers, and scurrying footsteps. More rhythmic marching feet below told me soldiers had already entered the castle, sweeping through the ground floor. So far, at least, it was no rampaging sack, but in a situation like this, I knew that could change. Surely all the troops could not have turned on the duke, and if they fought…
I hurtled into my bedroom to discover it was already occupied by Barbara, magnificently and beautifully outraged in the dressing room doorway, and Patrick looking too large and male for the feminine surroundings. Neither of them noticed my less than discreet entrance.
“Yes, I suspected it was coming,” Patrick admitted in a harassed kind of way. “And
yes, I wanted to witness it myself. But I never imagined it would be this quick. I thought I could have got you all out before—”
“And leave the man whose food you just ate to be shot by his own mutinous soldiers?”
“I hadn’t decided that,” Patrick said. “If I mentioned it, I betrayed somebody.”
“Well, you don’t have to worry now. Good-bye, Patrick, you’re in my way.”
“Barbara, stop it! Why are you so angry that I knew? Did you think I’d come just for you?”
She swung away from him in fury, and I could tell that he was right. Sheer hurt that he hadn’t come for her but for work was the root of her problem.
“I did,” he said, low. “I did come for you.” Without warning, he reached out and snatched her into his arms, crushing her against his big body. “This, the coup, the interview, it was all a bloody excuse to come for you. Barbara—” The rest, whatever it had been, got lost as she reached up and fastened her mouth to his.
He grasped her head, tangling his fingers in her hair, as he kissed her voraciously. “I’ve missed you so,” he muttered against her lips.
Shamefully, I felt a stirring between my legs, a reminder of what I’d known—thought I’d known—with Kasimir, whoever and whatever he was. I looked away, and deciding I didn’t really need anything other than the shawl draped over the nearest chair. I fled back to Augusta’s apartments.
Escape now seemed a lost cause. A few servants had sought refuge with the duke and duchess, huddled near the far wall of the sitting room, apparently unnoticed. But no soldiers had appeared to protect their duke. Leopold strode through them from the direction of his own apartments, a naked sword in one hand, a pistol in the other. Grimly, he threw the pistol to his brother.
“Oh God,” Augusta whispered. “What are you going to do?”
The Prisoner of Silverwood Castle Page 16