The Forgotten Book

by Mechthild Gläser

  The curtains were billowing in a rather ghostly way, and it took a certain amount of willpower to leave my warm bed. I scurried quickly over to the window and closed it, turned up the dial on the little radiator, and finally fished a pair of thick socks and a woolen blanket out of the wardrobe before crawling back into bed. It was a very cold night for the end of August. It was odd how the temperature had plummeted over the last few days.

  I carried on shivering for a little while, but eventually I started to warm up under my multiple blankets. My eyelids began to droop. I felt around for the switch to turn off my bedside lamp. My fingertips brushed paper and frayed cloth and … hang on. Had the wind really been that strong? I turned my head and blinked.

  Suddenly I was wide awake again.

  The book was open.

  It was still lying where I’d left it, on top of the little bedside table by my pillow. But now it was open, to a page fairly near the end. I picked the book up and looked at it more closely.

  The diary entry that filled these pages was one of the more recent ones, written in modern handwriting in what looked like felt-tip pen. It was dated to an evening in August four years earlier. In fact, it seemed to be talking about that year’s First Lesson. I skimmed a few lines and sighed. The text gave a detailed description of people, dresses, drinks, and music, none of which I had a burning desire to read about at four o’clock in the morning. I let the pages slip through my fingers, and as I did so I caught a glimpse of something about smoked salmon canapés, mmm …

  Now I came to think of it, I realized I was quite peckish. There hadn’t been any snacks at the party this year, and it was several hours since we’d had dinner. And I really liked smoked salmon. And canapés. And my stomach had now started to rumble. Damn it!

  With a great deal of effort I managed to haul myself out of bed once more, this time with the intention of creeping downstairs to the kitchens and making myself a cheese sandwich. I pulled on a sweatshirt over my pajamas, picked up the book and my flashlight, and set off down the dark hallway. The thick carpets swallowed up my footsteps and made me feel as if I was gliding soundlessly along the castle corridors. The building itself, however, was far from silent—it was never that. There was always a creaking from somewhere in the woodwork, a rustling in some dark corner. Shadows danced across the paintings and suits of armor. I was used to it by now, after four years at the school, and it didn’t scare me at all. Stolzenburg wasn’t reputed to be a haunted castle, and even if it had been, it wouldn’t have bothered me: I didn’t believe in all that crap. Stolzenburg was my home.

  I carried on flicking through the diary as I walked, the beam of my flashlight revealing entry after entry penned in felt-tip. Whoever had last written in this book had certainly been prolific.

  Downstairs, in the main kitchen, there was a fridge that had been the target of nighttime raids by Stolzenburg students for generations. It was not my first foray to the fridge, and I soon found what I was looking for and more. Ten minutes later, armed with a cheese sandwich, a carton of chocolate milk, and a banana, I headed back to my bedroom. But when I got there and pushed open the door, a chill ran down my spine.

  Hannah was lying in the same position as when I’d left. She was still snoring lightly, wrapped up in her duvet, sound asleep. And everything else in the room looked exactly the same as before.

  Except the window.

  The window was open again.

  In the year of our Lord, blah blah

  August 2013

  The venerable students of Stolzenburg celebrated the beginning of the school year again as usual this summer. The smoked salmon canapés donated by Mr. Bäuerle were delicious, but unfortunately they ran out very quickly. I should have grabbed myself a handful right at the start.

  Frederick Larbach was the hero of the hour: He managed to repair the speakers after they got knocked off their stand by Darcy de Winter and Helena von Stein, who were getting a little too energetic on the dance floor.

  Yes, it was great fun.

  For most people.

  3

  Straight after breakfast we asked Mr. Schade, the caretaker, to have a look at the lock on our bedroom window. Then I gave Hannah a long-overdue tour of the school. Yesterday I’d been too busy with the First Lesson to show her around. But today I intended to devote myself completely to helping Hannah settle in.

  First I showed her the classrooms, the chemistry lab, the biology department, the music room (which was on the top floor of the north wing of the castle, right under the roof), the art studio, and, of course, the computer room, which had been renovated over the holidays, complete with brand-new computers. Then we paid a visit to the staff room, empty and silent on this Sunday morning.

  Next on the agenda were the kitchens, where I introduced Hannah to the Berkenbecks (mother and daughter, both getting on in years and sporting identical poodle-style perms), who may have looked as though they were on a permanent diet but were in fact very talented chefs. They were busy peeling and chopping a huge heap of carrots as we walked in, and broke into enthusiastic chatter the moment they saw me.

  “Emma, love, good to see you back again! How’ve you been? Did you have a nice time with your mom?” clucked Berkenbeck the younger, but before I’d even opened my mouth to reply she had embarked on a lengthy account of the three emails she’d received over the holidays from her niece Marie. “She’s teaching herself to knit, and last week she cooked a meatloaf, all by herself, using the recipe we sent her. Do you remember, Mom? Must have been two or three months ago. She followed all our instructions to the letter, bless her.…”

  I listened politely, as I always did, although I had never met this Marie and I was not particularly interested (to say the least) in what she cooked or knitted, or in the fact that she was, as we now learned, suffering from another bout of athlete’s foot.

  Despite their foibles (treating every email from their long-distance niece as a small miracle, reading every celebrity gossip magazine from cover to cover the minute it came out, and always taking rather a long time to get to the point) the two chefs were kind-hearted women, and were always ready with a bowl of chicken soup when I was ill. On my last birthday they’d even baked me an impressive cake with marzipan decorations in the shape of roses. I liked them both very much—but they did get on my nerves sometimes.

  “Oh, and we still haven’t told you our biggest news,” piped up Berkenbeck the elder, leaning closer to us with a solemn expression. “It’s about Cheyenne. We read a blog recently that gave us an idea we’d never even thought of. And then we had another look at the photos in this week’s In Touch.” Her voice had dropped to a whisper. “Two words: Lady Gaga.”

  “Um…,” I said, “isn’t she a bit young to have a daughter that age?”

  The Berkenbecks exchanged a triumphant glance. “True. But what about a younger sister? Well? Are we close?”

  “Um…,” I said again, shrugging my shoulders. Cheyenne, a twelve-year-old girl with short brown hair, had started at Stolzenburg last year and the Berkenbecks had been pleading with me ever since to tell them which celebrity she was related to. It was common knowledge that Cheyenne was here incognito—my dad was the only person who knew who her parents were. The Berkenbecks, however, were convinced that he must have let me in on the secret. (He hadn’t, but the Berkenbecks staunchly refused to believe that.)

  “So we’re wrong again?” asked Mrs. Berkenbeck with disappointment.

  “No idea,” I said. “But can I introduce you to Hannah Neuler? She’s a new student. She’s also lactose intolerant.”

  “Oh, I do beg your pardon—how rude of us!” exclaimed Miss Berkenbeck, beaming at Hannah. “Can you have soy milk? Tofu? Marie had a terrible reaction to dairy, too, a couple of years ago—do you remember, Mom? She ordered that omelet in a café and—”

  “Soy is fine,” said Hannah, and I decided she’d heard enough Berkenbeck anecdotes for one day.

  “Oh, yes!” cried Mrs. Berkenbeck. “T
hat was at Easter-time, when she’d just got the new magazine subscription from that sales rep who came to the door the day after the cycling trip.…”

  “We have to go now,” I muttered, dragging Hannah with me by the sleeve. We slipped discreetly out of the kitchen, leaving the Berkenbecks to their gossip and their mountain of carrots.

  The student common room, where tea, hot chocolate, and cookies were served in the afternoons and where the students met to chat or do their homework, was situated in a long conservatory that opened onto the castle grounds. Hannah marveled at the tasteful wicker furniture and the breathtaking view of the terraced parkland dotted with fountains (as well as several new benches that the school council had successfully lobbied for the previous year).

  She was also delighted to see three sheep grazing in a small meadow at the far end of the park. Dolly, Dolly II, and Miss Velvetnose belonged to Miss Whitfield, who taught deportment, etiquette, and English and lived in a small cottage on the edge of the meadow. After we’d inspected the tennis courts and the brand-new sports hall, which housed a swimming pool with competition lanes and spectator seating, we couldn’t resist paying a visit to Stolzenburg’s woolliest residents.

  Hannah tickled Dolly II under the chin while Dolly and Miss Velvetnose grazed a little way from the gate, occasionally lifting their heads and fixing us with a skeptical glare. Miss Whitfield had shorn her three darlings just before the holidays, and their fleeces were still short and smooth.

  “You’ve got the same haircut as my grandma,” Hannah told Dolly II, then lowered her voice to a whisper. “But it suits you better.”

  It was a while before I could pry Hannah away from the sheep. But I was keen to show her the woods and the ruins before lunch.

  Stolzenburg, like many castles in the Rhine Valley, had been built on top of a hill so the inhabitants could see their enemies coming for miles around. But the woodland surrounding the castle was so dense that I wasn’t sure how well this concept could have worked in practice. You had to fight your way through almost impenetrable undergrowth for about five minutes to get to the ruins of the old monastery, which was only a stone’s throw from the park as the crow flies. And you couldn’t even see the ruins until you were right on top of them. It was the same with the Rhine. Directly behind the ruined monastery, the rocky ground fell away steeply and the river rushed past so close to the old stone walls that it always surprised me how quiet it was. The approach to Stolzenburg was so thickly wooded nowadays that no knight worth his salt would have had any trouble sneaking up to the castle walls and taking everybody by surprise. I didn’t know whether or how often Stolzenburg had been attacked in the past, but I thought it must have been a pretty easy target.

  * * *

  The ruins were one of my favorite places at Stolzenburg. Only a handful of the abbey walls were still standing, and a few Gothic arches that had once formed part of the nave. They were overgrown now with moss and lichens. Between them stood a few broken pillars and solitary buttresses. There was an acrid smell of wet leaves and soil, and the wind sighed in the treetops. There was something peaceful about this place—something magical.

  The other students didn’t often come here. The Year 7s were scared of the gravestones in the floor of the old crypt, which for the most part lay hidden under a layer of rotting leaves. The older students weren’t particularly interested in the remnants of the old church, and it was true that there were a lot more famous, more impressive ruins in the world. But despite, or maybe even because of this, I liked our ruins. I liked the fact that they weren’t perfect. I liked sitting on a weathered old piece of wall and looking through the glassless vaulted windows into the woods and listening to the wind. I liked tipping my head back and seeing the sky above me instead of a buttressed ceiling.

  Hannah, however (like Charlotte), did not share my fascination with the old monastery. She gave a cursory glance to the crumbling walls and the Rhine beyond, without even seeming to take in the earthy tang of the woodland. Then she pointed to a clump of ferns at the foot of a headless statue. “Do you think Dolly II would like those?”

  “No idea,” I replied, but Hannah had already started pulling up handfuls of fern.

  A moment later, two things happened that made me jump: The first was that now, with the ferns gone, I could see the low pedestal and the feet of the statue for the first time. It was carved from soft sandstone and stood in an alcove of what had once been the nave, and I’d always assumed it was an angel or a saint—Saint George, for example, after whom the monastery had been named. But now I could see it had stone hooves, and its ankles and legs, however much their contours had been eroded by centuries of wind and rain, looked distinctly nonhuman. As I went closer there was a rustling sound beneath my sneakers and an eddy of little silver leaves swirled around my feet. For a fleeting moment I remembered the paper dragonfly wings.…

  The other thing that made me jump was the warm voice that sounded suddenly from behind me as I bent to take a closer look at the statue—a voice I’d missed over the past few weeks, more than I cared to admit. “That’s bracken. I wouldn’t give that to the sheep, unless you’re trying to kill them.”

  I spun around.

  “It’s poisonous.” Frederick had tied back his dark blond hair in a ponytail and was wearing his usual green work trousers and heavy boots. He was still limping slightly from a cycling accident he’d been in. He must have been on his way to the compost heap, because he was pushing a wheelbarrow full of garden waste. He gave me a lopsided smile. “Hello, Emma.”

  “Hi,” I said, as nonchalantly as I could manage. “This is Hannah. She’s fallen in love with Dolly II.”

  “Then I definitely wouldn’t recommend feeding her that stuff.” He held out a hand to Hannah. “Frederick.”

  “Thanks for the tip.” Hannah tossed the ferns into his wheelbarrow and shook Frederick’s hand. “Are you the gardener here?”

  “Only part-time. I’m actually studying biology in Cologne: This is my weekend job.”

  “But Frederick was a student at Stolzenburg, too, till last year,” I explained. “He’s like us.” Frederick had never boarded at the castle (his parents lived in the nearby village) but other than that we had a lot in common. There weren’t many students at Stolzenburg like him, Hannah, and me. Students who didn’t come from ridiculously wealthy families—students who’d gotten a place at the school because they’d been awarded a scholarship, or because they lived nearby, or because their father happened to be the headmaster.

  “Huh?” said Hannah, not sure what I was getting at.

  “Not rich,” I explained.

  “Thanks,” said Frederick.

  “I mean that in a good way, of course.”

  His pale blue eyes sparkled, and only now did I spot a little smudge of dirt on his left cheek, which gave him a slightly bohemian look. “Well, that’s all right then. I’m pleased to meet you, Hannah, and I can confirm that I am indeed as poor as a church mouse and forced to slave away on the estate here for a few euros an hour. I don’t like to boast, but every holiday while most of the other Stolzenburgers are off sailing their yachts, I’m here pulling up weeds, clipping hedges, and tending to the compost heap. And to top it all off, my car broke down last week, which means I have to walk everywhere and I’m not entirely sure how I’m going to make it back to Cologne once term starts again. Cool, huh?”

  “Er…,” said Hannah.

  “Can’t your car be repaired?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “It’s a total loss—nothing they can do. So for the moment I’m stuck here, looking forward to many a fun evening in front of the TV with my beloved parents.”

  I looked at him. “Well,” I began, and I felt my heart start to beat faster. I’d just had a brilliant idea, and I was going to have to pluck up all my courage in order to see it through. “You could always come and spend the evening with us. We’ve set up a literature club—we’re meeting at eight o’clock tonight in the west wing library. You
could join us if you like?”

  “A literature club?” He smiled his lopsided smile again—a specialty of his. “And … what do you do at this literature club?” he asked.

  Oh wow, he was actually considering it! Unfortunately, since I’d only come up with the idea a few seconds earlier, I didn’t really have an answer to his question. “We, um … well, obviously it’s all secret and, er, only members are allowed to know. So—do you want to join?” I improvised, forcing myself not to chew my lower lip.

  Frederick looked at me for a moment, then nodded slowly. “It all sounds a bit crazy, Emma, but yes. Yes, I think I will come along. See you later, then!” He picked up the wheelbarrow and continued on his way to the compost heap, whistling softly as he went. I hoped he hadn’t seen the stunned look on my face as I stared after him. I couldn’t believe it!

  I sent Charlotte a text on our way back to the castle to tell her what we were doing that evening and why, and when we entered the dining hall twenty minutes later she beckoned us over happily. She and Toby had spent the morning together and were already sitting in our usual spot, at one of the best tables by the window.

  “There’s spaghetti Bolognese today,” she said, beaming. Usually it took more than a pasta dish to send Charlotte into such raptures. I shot a glance at Toby. Was it the sauce that had made his lips so red?

  Hannah and I went to get our plates and joined the line at the serving hatch. Berkenbeck the younger was dishing up her special mincemeat-and-carrot Bolognese sauce, and I noticed that she was particularly generous to Dr. Meier, our history teacher, who was in front of us in the line. She tipped three whole ladlefuls onto his plate and launched into an anecdote in which the words “athlete’s foot” featured far too many times for my liking. Oh, please—not when we were about to eat!