Airs Above the Ground (22 page)

The private wing of the castle was in its own way rather like the stables – no dust or cobwebs or clutter, but with the same general air of having stepped back about half a century. The same dim lighting was also still in evidence, for, though the castle’s electricity did extend as far as this, it seemed to have been put in by someone with a dislike of modern innovations. The bulbs were small, faint, few and far between. The old Count, walking briskly ahead, led me up a gracefully curved staircase to a wide landing lit by a forty-watt bulb, and stopped in front of a canvas on the wall, so big that – though we could have done with the stable lantern – I could see it fairly well. It seemed to be painted mostly in shades of brown varnish, but, properly cleaned and with better lighting would turn out to be a portrait, a good deal larger than life, of a lady in the frilled and ruffled satins of the era of the Empress Maria Theresa.

‘You see,’ said the old man, pointing.

And indeed I did. Perhaps originally the brooch had been painted more brightly than the rest, or perhaps some freak of time had left the varnish a little more transparent on this piece of the canvas, but in the dim painting it stood out remarkably clearly; a big brooch pinning the lace at the lady’s bosom. And as far as one could make out, almost exactly like the one I was wearing. There was the gold filigree work, the central blue stone, the mass of small brilliants, and the same five dangling ‘tremblers’. The only real difference was that about the painted lady’s jewellery there could be no possible doubt; no one with that pale hard eye and
Hapsburg jaw would have worn anything off a circus saddle.

‘Goodness, it is like, isn’t it?’ I exclaimed. ‘Who is she?’

‘She was my great-grandmother. This same jewel appears in two of the other portraits, but alas, they are not here, or I could show them to you. They are both in the
Alte Pinakothek
in Munich.’

‘And the jewel itself?’

Any wild thoughts I may have had of stolen treasure turning up as circus jewellery and ending up on my shoulder came to a speedy end at his reply. ‘Also, alas, in Munich. Most of my family’s jewels are there. You may see them some day, perhaps.’ He smiled. ‘But meantime I hope it will give you pleasure to wear the most famous of them. It was a gift from the Czar, and there are romantic stories about it which are almost certainly not true . . . But romance persists, and the jewel has been much copied.’

‘I’ll make a special trip some day to Munich to look at it,’ I promised, as we turned away. ‘Well, that’s really rather exciting! Thank you very much for showing me the portrait: I’ll treasure my present all the more now because it’ll remind me of Zechstein.’

‘That’s very charming of you, my dear. Now, I won’t keep you; you will perhaps want to see your man. But perhaps some time you will give me the pleasure of showing you the rest of the castle? We still have quite a few treasures here and you may find it interesting.’

‘I shall be delighted. Thank you.’

With the same air of slightly abstracted gentleness he saw me down the stairs and back into the hall. There was a woman there now, behind the big refectory table which did duty as a hotel desk. She had been writing, and was leafing through a stack of papers which were clipped together with a big metal clip. She was middle-aged, with a squat, dumpy figure and greying hair drawn tightly back. She had pendulous cheeks, and a little beak-mouth pursed between them like an octopus between two stones. I took her to be the receptionist, or perhaps the housekeeper, and wondered why, when she looked up and saw me preceding the Count from the south wing, her face, far from expressing the conventional welcome due to a hotel guest, showed what looked like cold surprise.

The Count’s gentle voice spoke from behind me.

‘Ah, there you are, my dear.’

‘I’ve been to the kitchens. Were you looking for me?’ This, then, must be the Countess. Perhaps the white blouse and flowered dirndl which she wore, suitable perhaps for someone of Annalisa’s age, were her concession to her new status as owner of a hotel. She spoke, as her husband had spoken, in English. Her voice in contrast to his was rapid and a little sharp, seeming to hold a perpetual undertone of exasperation.

She turned the exasperation, perhaps tempered a little, on to me. ‘Nowadays, it seems, one has to see to everything oneself. How do you do? I hope you’ll be comfortable here. I am afraid, just at present, the service is not what it should be. But in these country places things become more and more difficult every
day, even with the modern improvements. It’s very difficult indeed now to get local help, and we find that the servants we get from the town don’t wish to stay in any spot quite so isolated as this . . .’

I listened politely as she went on to tell me of her domestic troubles, murmuring something sympathetic from time to time. I had heard this kind of thing before many times from hotel-keepers in my own country, but never delivered with quite this air of grievance. I began to wonder at what point I should be made to feel that I must offer to make my own bed. When she paused at last, I said soothingly: ‘But it’s charming, it really is. My room is lovely. And the whole place is so beautiful and really seems admirably kept. I find it so exciting to be able to visit a real castle like this. It must have been wonderful in the old days.’

The tight lines of her face seemed to slacken a little. ‘Ah, yes, the old days. I am afraid that now they seem a very long time ago.’

The Count said: ‘I was showing Mrs March the portrait of Gräfin Maria.’

‘Ah, yes. I am afraid the best of the portraits are no longer here. We have to live as best we can, in ways which we would once have considered impossible.’ She lifted her shoulders, solid under the frilly blouse. ‘The best of everything is gone, Mrs March.’

I murmured something, uncomfortable and even irritated as one always is in face of a determined grievance. This, it seemed, was one of those angry natures that feeds on grievance; nothing would madden her more than to know that what she complained
of had been put right. There are such people, unfortunates who have to be angry before they can feel alive. I had sometimes wondered if it were some old relic of pagan superstition, the fear of risking the jealousy and anger of the gods, that made such people afraid of even small happinesses. Or perhaps it was only that tragedy is more self-important than laughter. It is more impressive to be a Lear than a Rosalind.

I said: ‘Have you had any word yet from my husband, Countess? He hoped he might get here tonight.’

‘From Mr March? Yes . . .’ She began again to riffle through the papers in front of her. ‘One moment . . . He sent a telegram to us. Ah, here it is.’ She handed a telegraph form across to me. It was, of course, in German.

‘I wonder if you’d please translate it for me?’

‘It only says: “Regret must cancel tonight’s reservation”,’ said the Countess, ‘but there is another for you, if I can find it . . . ah, yes, here.’

I took it. This one was in English, and it ran: ‘Very sorry unable join you yet will get in touch love Lewis.’

I let it drop to the table. I saw the Countess’s hard little grey eyes watching me curiously, and realised that my face must be showing a disappointment quite startlingly intense. I pulled myself together.

‘What a pity. He just says he can’t join me yet, but that he’ll get in touch. I suppose he may telephone me tomorrow, or perhaps even tonight. Thank you very much . . . I think I’ll go outside now, and see if my young friend is on his way up with the horse.’ I smiled at the Count. ‘Thank you again.’

I turned quickly to go. I was in no mood to stay and explain all over again to the Countess about the horse. But if she had been going to query my last statement she got no chance, because her husband was already speaking to her. ‘Did you say you were expecting another guest tonight after all, my dear? Who is this?’

‘Another Englishman. A Mr Elliott.’

By the mercy of heaven I had my back to them, and was already hurrying across the hall, for nothing could have hidden from them the surprise that must have showed unguarded on my face. In counting the hours to seeing Lewis, I had quite forgotten his alias, and that he had implied he might still have to use it.

The name had brought me up short for a moment, but I managed to pretend I had stumbled over the edge of a rug, and then simply kept going to the door without looking round. But I didn’t hurry now. As I reached it, I heard her add:

‘He has just telephoned. He can have Room (some number I didn’t catch); it is ready. We must tell Josef when he comes back.’ She had dropped into German now, but I thought I understood the next bit as well. ‘He will not be here for dinner. He couldn’t say what time he would get here. He thought it might be late.’

It didn’t take as long as I had expected to cut the jewels off the saddle. I carried the lantern into the stable, where I sat down on the bale of straw to do the job, with a small pair of very sharp scissors that I usually carry in my handbag. I’d have taken it upstairs to my room, where the light was better, but it was heavy, and Josef
was at the circus, and I hadn’t seen anyone else to ask; and besides, it smelled rather too strongly of horse.

So I sat in the lantern light picking at the jewels, while the tiny noises of the stable rustled round me.

The stones were loosely sewn, and came off easily enough. The tinselled braiding at the edge had been half stitched, half glued, and left a mark when at last I managed to pull it away; but nothing, I thought, to matter. The saddle, of soft pale leather with a rolled pommel, had obviously been a good one originally, but it was now very shabby, and both lining and leather showed signs of much mending.

All the same, when I had finished, and dropped the glittering handful of glass into my pocket, I looked round for a peg to hang the old saddle on, safely out of reach of marauders. The rustling in the recesses of that elaborately baroque stable hadn’t been imagination; nor had it just been mice. Shabby or no, I wasn’t going to leave the
Spanische Reitschule
’s saddle to the mercy of the Zechstein rats.

The only peg that was big enough was broken. It was no use perching the thing astride a partition, and I didn’t believe in the old Count’s saddleroom – at least, not in working order. In any case I didn’t want to wait for Josef, or go looking for it myself in the dark. But the metal corn bin was rat-proof and roomy, and Piebald would not need corn tonight. I lifted the lid and put the saddle carefully down on the corn, then hung the lantern where I had found it, and went out to meet Timothy.

* * *

I went out through the archway on to the bridge, and stopped there, leaning over the parapet.

Above me, shadowy, soared the walls and spires and turrets of the castle, pricked here and there with windows full of yellow light. Beyond the bridge, shadow after shadow soared the pinewoods, sharp with their evening scent, and away down below in the dim valley clusters of lights marked the outlying farms. Apart from these the only sources of light in the veiled landscape were the river which still showed as a faintly luminous ribbon sliding along the valley floor, and just below me the pale juts of rock on which the bridge was built. From somewhere beneath came the trickling, splashing sound of the falling stream, but the big river at the foot of the cliff was silent.

The night was so still that if Piebald were already on his way I thought I should have heard the clip-clop of his hoofs, but there was silence, not broken this time by distant music from the circus. Even the faintest echo of this was cut off, I supposed, by the bluff that hid the village from view.

The distant sound of a motor engine broke the silence first, and I saw the lights coming along the valley road from the direction of the village. Then it had passed the road junction at the river bridge, and the lights curled along up the valley, and were lost to sight. Not Mr Lee Elliott. Not yet.

In any case – I had been trying to think it out – he would come from the north. Approaching from Vienna he would not have to pass through the village, but would turn off at the bridge for the castle. If he arrived
while the performance was still going on he was unlikely to meet any of the circus people, and if he came after eleven the wagons would be moving south. It was extremely unlikely that anyone who had known Mr Lee Elliott would see the man in the closed car driving rapidly up to the Schloss Zechstein; and indeed, in hoping to arrive as ‘Lewis March’ he must have reckoned on this.

His use of the disguise, then, could only mean that he planned to make another contact with the circus. And in twelve hours from now, the circus would be out of the country.

At that moment, faint and far away, I heard the sound of hoofs, the slow clip-clop, clip-clop, of a walking horse. They must have started up the steep road. The hoof-beats were steady and quite regular; it seemed that old Piebald was no longer ‘going short’. I straightened up and strolled off the bridge and on down the road between the pines to wait for them.

Someone had put a stout wooden seat at the edge of the road, in a gap between the trees, facing outwards over the valley. I felt it cautiously; the wood was still dry, the damps of night had not yet reached it. I sat down to wait. The clip-clopping hoofs grew momentarily fainter as Timothy and the horse rounded some curve of the road, and trees crowded between to deaden the sound. Then, a few minutes later, they emerged nearer and louder.

It was all the scene needed, I thought, looking up where, on my left, the turrets rose dark and faintly lit against the stars . . . the silence, the stars pricking out,
the charmed hush of the trees, and now the slow sound of the approaching horse. One almost expected De la Mare’s Traveller or some wandering knight in armour to emerge from the pine woods into the starlight.

The last stretch of the road must have had its verges heavily felted with pine needles, for when Timothy and the horse at last appeared rounding the bend in the road below me, they seemed to be moving as silently as any story-book apparition. It occurred to me then that this – this mundane appearance of mortal boy and horse, treading cautiously up the soft verge to save the lame leg – was every bit as dramatic as any romantic legend . . . the old stallion, deposed, menial, debased by his ugly coat, a sort of Frog Prince who might soon be back in his own royal place. He came now, plodding beside the boy through the moon-thrown shadows, the steely light that slithered across his pied coat making of him just another barred silver shadow. But the black would soon be gone; I had noticed tonight that it was growing out already. As I called out and moved I saw his head jerk up and his ears prick forward sharply, so that for a moment he looked a young horse again. He actually quickened his pace, and then I heard him give that lovely soft whickering through his nostrils. I remembered what Herr Wagner had said: ‘His name will still be on his stall, and fresh straw waiting.’ I hoped he was right, and, more even than that, I hoped that Timothy and I were right. There would be certain difficulties if the Frog Prince turned out just to be a frog after all.