by Jessica Mann
The peak was visible from far away, but Artemis thought at first that what she saw looming ahead was a natural feature of the landscape, not realising that its tip consisted of the castle. It dominated the surrounding district of forests and lower hills. A deep gorge separated the rock from the surrounding landscape, and a bridge over this rocky chasm was the only approach to the castle.
‘It has never fallen in any siege,’ Prince Joachim told his wife. ‘My family has reigned here for a thousand years.’
All the gothic tales she had ever read flickered through Artemis’s memory. Surely here, if anywhere, she would encounter the horrors that had evoked such delicious shivers when they were only the stuff of fiction? But adventure and her new relations could hardly be mentioned in the same sentence, so prosaic in behaviour and appearance were they. These stout ladies would not appeal to the least fastidious vampire and Joachim was different indeed from the saturnine villains of story. Artemis pulled her new furs about her and gazed steadily at what was, she told herself, no more than an inconvenient house. ‘How,’ she asked, ‘is the castle heated? It must be very damp.’
Artemis wrote to Clementine and Mrs Lambert that afternoon:
You would think it most beautiful, with ranges of snow clad hills visible from my windows, and everywhere the sound of the waterfall that drops over the mountainside. My apartments are in better repair than those I occupy at Horn, and the tapestries hanging over the stone walls keep at bay at least some of the damp, cold air. No ceremony is relaxed here. My lady still attends me all the time and in my dressing room I am always assisted by three maids. Footmen wait day and night outside my door, to escort me wherever I go, even into a neighbouring room, and no member of the family enters the apartments of another unannounced. However many times a day we meet, we shake hands with one another, over and over again. Outriders follow my carriage when I drive, servants walk behind me even in the pleasure grounds. None of these rules are changed here, I find, though I had expected that things might be different in this fortress. Well do I remember the liberty we enjoyed at home.
The wife of the reigning prince might have expected to be free. Artemis nearly died in one attempt at independence.
She had managed to give her warders the slip – she was, after all, as young as a modern schoolgirl, and she enjoyed mischief even without an accomplice. She wrote to Clementine:
I had noted that one of the chambers in the long passage leading to my own apartments was not in use. One of my husband’s great aunts had died there as a young girl, disappointed in love, I have been told. By allowing my ladies to suppose that I was with my maids, my maids to think that the footman was with me, and by telling the footman to announce me to this empty room in which I said I was to meet his highness, I found myself alone. I can hardly express to you, dear, distant sister, what that sensation was like after all these months. To be unattended in a room, without every move observed and criticised, relieved of the anxiety lest I do something that could be disapprovingly described to my husband or to my new mamma, was as liberty must feel to a captive newly released from gaol. For a while I simply sat and took my pleasure in solitude. The room was very cold, for I think that it had been unused for fifty years at least. The story I have heard only in whispers from my maids, but I believe it to be that the wretched occupant of the room took her own life when her lover was killed in the wars. I suppose that he was an officer in the army of Bonaparte, for there is still a miniature portrait on a table in the room framed in crumbling laurel leaves.
The relics of that distant love brought philosophical speculations into Artemis’s mind of which she wrote at length to Clementine. One can imagine her, like Hamlet with Yorick’s skull, soliloquising about mortality. She even quoted him: ‘If this had not been a gentlewoman, she should have been buried out of Christian burial.’
I do not believe, Artemis wrote, that crowner’s quest law, as the gravedigger has it, applies to my new family any more than other laws. They are all-powerful here. And had I perished that day, would any coroner have sat on me?
After a while, Artemis had begun to explore the room. She found the dead girl’s toilet articles both repulsive and pathetic. If this were indeed my house to command, this whole mausoleum should be emptied and refurbished. I deplore this morbid superstition.
The room was in the corner of the main tower of the castle, and doors on either side of the bed led into closets. The first contained what Artemis described as ‘a necessary article’. The other was the dressing room. Obsolete garments lay on the shelves where they had been put fifty years before. A slit window gave a little daylight, and Artemis was peering through it at the fearsome drop below when she heard the door behind her close.
Yet there was no draught, for I had not opened the window; and then I heard another door close more softly, as though somebody had gone out of the bedroom. But, Clementine, when I turned the handle of the closet door, it would not budge. I was imprisoned! Solitude indeed I had desired, but not solitary confinement. For confined I found myself to be. I called, but I knew as I did so that my voice could never be heard, for the closet had walls party to no other room, being those of a semicircular turret, and I was separated from the passage along which the family and servants might pass by two thick, closed doors. You may imagine my thoughts, dear sister. Was it an accident that had locked the door of the closet? Was it possible that the hand of an unknown enemy had turned the key? Would I die here, in cold and hunger? Indeed, I began to believe so, to believe it to be no joke, for my hands were bleeding and my voice hoarse, and still I was unheard and the door of my cage unmoved. Would my starved corpse be discovered, wrapped in the ancient cloak of that other girl who went untimely to her death? Much did I think in that time of my short life, and, dear sister, of my love for you, and the grief that the news of my demise must bring you. I thought too of eternity, and of those mysteries that we have so often pondered together. I thought but little of my new family. None, I believe, would truly regret me, and sitting in that darkening prison, I wondered whether it was one of them who had watched me entering the empty room, and taken the opportunity to rid the family of its English interloper. But I shall say no more of that. You will readily imagine what awful thoughts come to the mind when death seems imminent.
It must have been three, even four hours, before I was saved. I had fallen into an uneasy doze. The voices I heard seemed insubstantial at first, as though part of my dream, or conjured into being by the urgency of my desire. Soon, however, I did realise that two human beings of solid flesh and blood had crept into the bedroom outside my door. I understand but little of the dialect spoken by the peasants, but I heard enough to understand that this was not the first time this room had been used for their rendezvous by a footman and a chambermaid, and that the man said he had been keeping watch on the passage outside, and had seen nobody pass since His Highness hours before. At this point he heard my feeble tapping at the closet door which he flung open in terror, supposing me to be a ghost I truly believe, for his face was blanched, the lips grinning in fear and the eyes glazed. The girl had buried her face in the pillow. I was almost fainting, but the man made no move to help me even after he recognised me, muttering those familiar words, ‘The Englishwoman’. Had I the presence of mind the wife of a reigning prince should command, I would have made much of their improper and disrespectful behaviour. As it was I tottered past, under their hostile gaze, and returned to my own apartments. As a consequence of this adventure, I have been confined to my couch for two days, affected by cold and fear, and by a disorder of the digestion.
Artemis drew no parallel between her own unpleasant experience and those that regularly befell the heroines of those gothic novels that had come into her mind at the first sight of Drachenschloss. Yet a dispassionate reader must wonder whether it was mere chance or mischief that had led Artemis so close to death. If it had not been for two servants finding themselves a private bed (instead of the crowded hovels they were used to
) Artemis might well have died in that closet. She may herself have had more precise suspicions than she cared or dared to put in writing. She was always circumspect, although she made no attempt to pretend to a happiness that she could not feel, but the problems on which she most needed advice could not be put into writing by a girl of her time and her references to them are periphrastic in the extreme, though it was clearly about this time that she realised she was pregnant. She wrote more about the way her days were spent, a depressing chronicle of petty samenesses. Monotonous embroidery and gossip about the same small group of eligible people were unending. The doings of those below noble rank were of no interest to the ladies, and the peasants who worked the land and the mines were not regarded as human beings at all. When the ladies went out driving they ignored the servile salutes of the local inhabitants, and the outriders would whip children out of the coach’s way with the same indifference that they felt for stray dogs. When Artemis enquired about the kind of charitable and educational work that most English ladies thought their duty on their country estates, and that Mrs Lambert had tried to do in Lady Bessemer’s place, her suggestion was greeted with disgusted incomprehension. The ladies tell me that it is not princely to think of such things. They find my ideas distasteful. It is not for the nobility to sully itself with the workers’ concerns.
Drachenschloss was an extremely uncomfortable house to live in. The princely family ate cold food, washed in cold water, and shivered beside inadequate fires in the damp depths of the castle. Artemis’s request for a bath was ignored, and she was permitted to change nothing in her rooms, but once she was resigned to the permanent company of lackeys and ladies she began to explore this ancient seat of the family of Horn. She realised that it was the centre of immense industry. Her husband was said to give employment to more than seven thousand men on these estates, working the farms and the mines, and there were innumerable servants, most of whom seemed to live far within the rock itself in conditions of which Artemis shuddered to think. The most privileged employees were the huntsmen; there were hundreds, making up a semi-military corps. The internal arrangements of the castle had not been altered for centuries, but Joachim talked of modernising and building on. One detail, however, would never be permitted to change, and that Artemis was shown on Christmas Day.
A formal visitation was made by the Family, who walked down through passages and stairways they normally avoided, to a dungeon, barred from casual intruders by a huge, mediaeval oak door, studded with iron nails, and unlocked by a key nearly a foot long.
Down here, within the rock, water dripped eternally down the walls and daylight could never penetrate. Artemis felt as though she had been transported into another era, away from the rococo salons, the dining room with its renaissance decoration, the mediaeval chambers last modernised in the fifteenth century. Here was the heart of Drachenschloss, Artemis thought, and shook herself to dispel superstition to which she had been as much prey, for a moment, as all the Family.
The Chief Master of Ceremonies offered the key to the Prince on a golden salver. The Prince inserted it into the blackened whorls of lock. Within, candles had already been lighted in the wall sconces and there was less dust on the treasure chest than on the furniture in Artemis’s own room.
The chest consisted of an elaborately wrought coffer made of panels of rock crystal, with a dome shaped lid through which the treasure could be seen. Artemis had not known what to expect. Her ideas had ranged from a heap of gold coins to a carved statue.
Imagine my horror, dear sister, to see before me the preserved face of a man long since dead. Preserved, I say, but horribly altered, darkened and shrunk in upon itself, the teeth protruding, the skin wrinkled – but I shall write no more on so abhorrent a matter, but to mention that the awful head, and I suppose the body too, was encased in rusty armour; the hands were clasped on the chest, holding a bejewelled golden cup! That is the treasure, that, and a sword, broken and rusted like the armour, but with uncut stones set into its handle, and, the most macabre of all this dreadful sight, a coronet or crown encircling the helmet, made of dull, darkened metal through which no fugitive gleam of silver shone, and set with precious stones. The crown is said to contain a fragment of our Lord’s True Cross, and all the family signed themselves and bowed to this idolatrous relic although it is not the custom in their church, but, ‘it is the custom in our family’, my Mamma informed me, and I was forced to follow suit, though I need not tell you how reluctantly, for blind worship is not in my nature, after the free-thinking childhood and education that you and I, dear Clementine, enjoyed. The final item in the treasure was at the finger of one of those gauntlet gloves, covering heaven knows what horror, and I could scarcely bear to rest my eyes upon it – a huge purple stone on which a face is carved, bisected with a faint line like the mark of Cain. These eternal stones, precious in our terminology, and the transient flesh of their guardian, have turned my thoughts, dear sister . . . Here the narrative of Artemis’s letter is interrupted by a page of philosophical reflection on the brevity of human life and aspiration, but later she quotes the brief explanation she was given.
Joachim: Here lies a knight of the Teutonic Order.
Artemis: Unburied, I see.
Joachim: He is our ancestor, the founder of our House.
Artemis: And his treasure?
Joachim: It belonged to Charles the Great. It is now the symbol of our House of Horn. While it endures, we endure. It came with us, and we shall go with it.
Chapter Seven
‘The Horn Treasure!’ Tamara exclaimed.
Jeremy Ellice had come upstairs again, carrying a shopping basket. ‘Have you heard of it before?’
‘I should have recognised the name at once. It’s one of the famous European treasures. Had you heard of it before?’
‘I have read Margot’s draft. And it’s mentioned in the paper. It’s in the list of pieces the East Germans might send over for that exhibition.’
‘Oh yes, you read that when we were downstairs. Did they say it was coming here?’
‘They seemed to think . . .’
‘Or was it just one of the things the East Germans are known to have stashed away somewhere? It’s fabulous. Literally.’
A treasure all the more fabulous, in the modern sense of the word, for being only fabled. No modern scholar had been allowed to see it, and its continued existence was known only in rumour.
‘I should have recognised the name at once,’ Tamara said.
‘What is it? You obviously know.’
‘It’s part of the regalia of Charlemagne. Or the Carolingian kings, at any rate.’
‘What’s it doing in Eastern Europe?’
‘Treasures got scattered throughout the centuries. Years of anarchy when it was finders keepers and devil take the hindmost. Bandits grabbing things and keeping or hiding them. I expect the Teutonic knight who was the ancestor of the respectable Horn family came by his wealth in ways his heirs wouldn’t have been proud of.’
‘It’s a real treasure, is it?’ Jeremy asked, passing his tongue over his dry lips.
‘If it’s what I think, yes. Priceless – and unique too. It’s awful to think of the things there must have been and how little has survived. Lost, melted down, buried, hidden – tragic.’
‘But this one, the Horn Treasure, as you called it. What did it consist of?’
‘I should have to look it up. I can go to the library tomorrow.’
‘You don’t think there might be something here, upstairs?’
They looked, but the rows of archaeological books did not include the old volume published in Paris that Tamara believed to contain a drawing of the Horn Treasure.
‘Take Margot’s stuff with you, then,’ Jeremy said. ‘You can – I mean, I’m sure she would be grateful if you looked it up for her.’ He picked up the blue folder and handed it to Tamara, still holding on to the basket in the other hand.
Tamara said, ‘Are you going out?’
‘It’s difficult. There are some things I need, but . . .’
‘I can stay if you like. I’ll listen for Margot.’
‘It wouldn’t matter, you see, usually, but with Margot landing herself here . . .’
‘That’s all right. Really. It’s all right.’
‘I don’t suppose anyone will come. People usually telephone . . .’
‘Honestly, Jeremy, do go on out. I’m sure I can cope.’
He left after considerably more dithering, promising to be back very soon.
Tamara listened to the noises of the building. The windows rattled. Expanding or contracting floor boards made irregular cracks or pops. No sound from downstairs, where Margot was still asleep. Sitting on the canvas chair beside the hissing gas fire, Tamara’s eyes closed.
The bell woke her to disorientation. It took her a moment to realise where she was and that she must have heard Margot Ellice’s summons. She stumbled on the dark stairs, and fumbled for the light switch, first in the downstairs lobby, and then in the big room. But Margot Ellice was still asleep, her drawn, bony face withdrawn from awareness. Tamara started up the stairs again.
The front door was open. He was standing at the top of the stairs, a man about six feet tall, immense up there above her in the gloom.
Tamara ran up, so that he stepped back. A long, straight boned face, short hair, the eyes and mouth of a handsome man; he wore a good flannel suit, and a polo necked jersey.
‘Was it you who rang?’
‘Yes, but when I found the door was not closed, I came in. I suppose the shop is open? It’s only . . .’ He shook his watch forward to see the time. He had strapped it over a bandage that covered his palm and wrist. ‘It looks ridiculous, doesn’t it? I had a slight disagreement with a cat. But your health service is marvellous.’ He spoke the excessively faultless English of a bilingual foreigner; Dutch or Scandinavian, perhaps.