Fragile Blossoms (37 page)

‘Thank you, Misha.’

The maid fusses, a good girl, Misha, if a little stupid. Concious of fulfilling obligations he has left her and the gardener a decent pension. They have done their best. It is not their fault their mistress must die.

‘Madam looks beautiful today.’

Indeed she does, so beautiful Stefan wonders if he is doing right. Wrapped in silver fox furs, mittens on her hands and a fur cap on her head, she sits high in the sleigh, Snedronningen, the Milk White Snow Queen.

Last night before leaving for church he talked to her. ‘In the past you have begged me to help you die and I have always refused. The time has come to grant your wish. This world is not particularly kind. I am not well,
schatze
. My heart is failing. I must help you while I can. Much longer and it will be too late.’

He then told then her of the sleigh ride. It was so quiet in room, the tick of the ormolu clock on the console table. It was mother’s clock. Mutti gave it to him as a present on their wedding day. Stefan had it in his room as a boy. A Winterhalder it has an odd tick. It used to make him laugh. ‘I hear a mouse cough when I hear this,’ he once said to Karoline. ‘Yes,’ she’d replied, ‘and hurrying home with bread and cheese for his tea.’

It’s how they used to be, imagination overflowing. It is how Anselm would have been had he lived.

‘You’ll be with Anselm again soon,’ he told her. ‘He will be there waiting.’

Stefan has seen many people die. There have been those who screaming in pain he has helped crossover. If such pain can be eased surely the Lord God would not want His children to suffer. Karoline is as precious to the Lord as is a sparrow. It says so in the bible. She will be welcomed into heaven and find Anselm waiting. If a soul must be cast into the Flames of Hell for this act of mercy then it must be Stefan.

He feels so very much alone. To take another’s life, whatever the reason, is a mortal sin. There is no one he can talk to. He can’t ask a priest to pray for him not without telling the plan. There is one he might have told, Lady Carrington. If anybody knows about suffering it is Eve. As her physician he has nursed her through more than one brush with death.

Oh to tell someone! Just to talk and to say goodbye! He resisted the urge to call her. It is his burden and too heavy to place upon another’s back.

Stefan parked the sleigh overlooking the lake. He can’t handle the horse as he used to, the reins pull on his arms and make the ache in his chest worse.

‘We shall rest here, Karoline. It is a good spot. You can see our house and the roof where the shingles are loose. I did mean to fix those.’

Now that they are here he doesn’t know what to do or why he brought the strudel and champagne. These days Karoline is fed via a nasogastric tube through her nose. It was the only way to be sure she took in nourishment. He could have removed it this morning but was afraid of hurting her.

He took her hand. It was cold and so very thin, a child’s hand.

‘Thank you,’ he said, ‘for being with me all these years. I know I haven’t been the best husband but I do love you and I would hope a part of you loves me. Be brave, my darling, and wait for me. I know I shall be joining you very soon.’

Her hand hung limp. She didn’t tighten her grip or show any acknowledgment of his words. If she does understand what’s happening here today she doesn’t show it. Maybe she thinks they’re out for a drive and will eventually return to the house and the prison that is her room.

With nothing else to do he prepared the syringe, drew up twice the lethal dose. There mustn’t be a mistake. He did think of strychnine but with that she would suffer. With morphine hopefully she’ll only find peace.

Dear Lord, he can barely breathe! He’d like to rest but it’s snowing again and Gustave sensing wrongness snorts and treads the ground. Better unhook him.

Stefan climbed down from the sleigh. It was not easy to detach the sleigh, the reins are tangled and screws holding the hooks rusty. He struggles, the pain in his arm and chest so bad he wants to vomit. Finally the horse is free. It skitters sideways and tossing its head canters away toward a knot of trees.

‘Cheerio old boy!’ Stefan panted. ‘Bye-bye, Gustave, pip-pip and all that, as the English would say. I’ll see you in Paradise.’

Stefan staggered round the side of the sleigh. He dragged the cello out of the back and set it and the stool into the ground. Gloves removed he blew on his hands trying to get them warm and then his back braced swiped at the strings playing the introductory chords.

Karoline observes all with an expression of mild interest or maybe even amusement on her face. In this light it is hard to tell. And who could blame her from thinking him ridiculous? It is ridiculous! What the hell is he doing? His hands are so cold and he so ill he can barely grasp the bow. And look at this sealskin coat, so thick it’s a hedge between him and the instrument.

It is so ridiculous he wept as he played his tears turning to ice.

‘Ah!’ The pain grabbed him, wrenched him, and tossed him sideways. He vomited the turbot they’d for lunch into the snow. Turbot, he thought, whoever in this modern age eats it, the name is off-putting if not the smell.

This isn’t going to plan. In the back of his mind it’s likely he’d seen their parting as a thing of dignity, a one act opera similar to Madama Butterfly, and he the suffering hero. It is in fact a farce, and he a foolish old man lying face down in his own vomit.

When the pain hit him again he screamed, the sound rising higher and thinner like a kettle whistling. It cut through the music that is still playing in his head, Shubert’s
Die Forelle
, the Trout Quintet, her favourite piece.

Oh, he thought, I am dying and I haven’t done what I came to do. She is here alone in the snow. Once again I have abandoned her.

‘Karoline,’ he whispered ‘Forgive me. I have let you down.’

She watched him die. She wanted to be with him to offer comfort but couldn’t. She has very little strength and what she does have she is harnessing for one thing and one thing only, the syringe.

It’s there. She can see it poking out of that leather bag. Karoline loves that syringe and the magic it holds. If she can get to it, if she can crawl across the seat, she’ll put an end to this horror for once and all. She knows how to do it. She has seen it enough times, watched nurses do it, the gentle hands and the coarse, the good natured and the casual. If she can get that needle there’ll be no more nurses however good and kind, no wakeful nights, no more madness and no unhappy men who sit by her bed and feed her strudel and lies.

Karoline doesn’t like apple strudel. She never has. And she doesn’t like lies.

That man there on the ground, poor fellow, face buried in the snow, he tells lies all the time. He says that one day she’ll get better. She will never get better. She doesn’t want to. What she wants is to die and the liquid in that syringe will help her to that.

Carefully and slowly she inches across the seat. A Lighthouse or a Siren luring her onto to jagged rocks who cares, the syringe is all she sees. Now she has it in her hands but finds it’s harder to use than she thought.

Jab! Jab! It’s hard making contact, needle to vein, all she does is rip her skin.

‘Oh no!’ She almost dropped it!

This won’t work.

Feverishly she scrapes at her clothes sorting through layers of fur and silk, trying to pull her skirt up and her drawers down, but the maid, Misha, who likes things to be correct has pinned Karoline’s drawers to the bodice.

Nothing for it but to stab through cloth, and quickly before a passerby sees the abandoned sleigh, and the body, and raises the alarm.

‘Help me,’ she whispers. ‘Dear God, please help me!

Tendons quivering she pulled back her arm, paused, took a deep breath and then brought her fist stabbing down into her thigh.

She bore down with such force the needle pierced through the cloth into muscle. The nerves reacted. He leg jerked and she was thrown backward over the sleigh and onto the ground. She didn’t let go. She hung on, both hands clamped about the syringe and the glass was intact.

Panting she depressed the plunger.

It’s done! It is in, every last drop.

Exhausted, eyes closed and heart thrashing she lay still. Peace will come, she knows it will. Already she feels the slow burn beneath her skin.

Patience! Wait! Freedom will come and with it the Blue Angel.

Now she is sure of what is to happen and is no longer afraid the man on the ground barely a hand’s clasp away is of concern.

Oh look at poor Stefan! Body twisted and head turned away life has been hard for him. Such a burden, and so little solace along the way, he must’ve been the loneliest man on earth. A wife in an asylum, it’s not easy living with that, especially for a professional man. Madness carries a stigma. People ask questions, why is she there, poor woman? Was it something he did? Is it true she tries to kill herself? And he a doctor too!

He had few friends. There were those along the way who offered comfort. There was a fat house-frau he saw now and then who wore cheap face powder and lived in a hovel and didn’t always wash. They fucked occasionally. Yes fuck! Leaning against a wall half clothed, you can’t call what they did love. It was more about scratching an itch, mutual consolation, sex and rice pudding enjoyed by the fire, and then he is cast out in the cold again.

Women! Stefan and his women! They were always there. He was with a woman the day Karoline lost the greatest treasure of her life.

Anger burns! Even here dying anger keeps the motors running, no other fuel, not love or forgiveness, bitter, bitter anger. She’s weary of it. It wounds her soul. She wants to be free. This needle has made it so.

The magic is working and anger abates.

Gustave, the horse, poor beast, is afraid. He stands on the edge of the trees trembling. Animals are sensitive to death as they are to life. Karoline seems to think she used to have a horse of her own a hunter, a
Schwarzwalder Katblut
called White Fire. She used to have many things, a house in a city where church bells rang and where pigeons fouled the windows. There were lofty rooms and fine furniture, an eighteenth century Italian mirror with the prettiest gold lacquered edge, and Mutti’s china glittering in cabinets. There were gardens filled with apple trees and redcurrant bushes, the fruit so heavy it broke the branches. Books, paintings and music, she played cello, and then the viola to Stefan’s cello. Now she has madness and shit under her fingernails.

The cello lies in the snow like the prow of a sunken ship. To remember
Die Forelle
as they used to play was a nice thought and typical of the man. The great romantic he was never comfortable in this modern world. He preferred to walk with Siegfried through the Halls of Valhalla, a stethoscope for a sword and the Hippocratic Oath for a shield

The horse is a little closer now but still afraid. Perhaps he is curious to know why his master and mistress lie together in the snow. Karoline is curious, she thinks it an odd way to end a life that has never really been lived. Maybe, she thinks, God will help us live again, give Stefan and me a Second Chance to get it right. ‘Come, Gustave,’ she whispers. ‘Let me rub your nose one more time.’

Gustave is the gardener’s horse. They use him to pull the cart and in the spring to plough the far meadow. He is a good horse. He comes every day to the sitting room window. Misha gives him a carrot. She shouldn’t, the cook doesn’t like it, but Misha is young and cares less about rules.

‘Gustave, come and I will give you apple strudel.’

This miraculous drug is working well, the part of the brain that determines real from unreal is detaching, her body is detaching and she, the unhappy, angry Karoline, feels lighter with every breath.

In a while the Angel will come. Wings unfurled he will settle beside her in the snow. Such a beautiful angel Karoline would like to ask his name but never dared. It would be sacrilege as though asking God His name. The Angel comes when she is overwhelmed with sorrow, when she totters between worlds and snakes hiss at her heel.

He is gentle. ‘Come with me and I will keep you safe,’ he says.

In early years fearing she might not return to her body she was reluctant to go with him. Now when he comes despairing of life she leaps to take his hand. He is different every time but recognisable. First he came as a child. Time moved on and he was a youth, handsome and bold. Now she is old and he is a man with mighty wings the colour of sapphires.

He shows her this world, the wonderful and the terrible, when all she longs for is the next. Sometimes she asks of Stefan. ‘What is he doing?’ The Angel will look at her. ‘Are you sure you want to know?’ To spite her soul she says yes and learns of the smelly house-frau and sex and rice pudding.

‘Hello Gustave!’ The horse is here. He breathes on her cheek, a tiny breath, anxious. She strokes his nose and he jumps away. Then he finds pieces of strudel scattered about and lips them up.

Snow falls and the light dims. The magic is almost complete. A sweet lassitude seeps through her veins not unlike the afterglow of making love. The Angel is coming, she knows it. She feels movement within and without, and a sound like thunder a might staircase sweeping down from the skies.

Suddenly she remembers it is Christmas and sings, or tries to. ‘
Away in a manger, a crib for a bed, the Little Lord Jesus lays down His Sweet head
.’

She stops. No, no thoughts of children! She mustn’t think of children, her mind will not let her. A door made of iron and spiked with baby’s skulls stands between her and a scream. It has always been so. What baby? She doesn’t remember a baby. Cannot think of his name! Does not want to know his name!

‘Do Not Tell Me His Name!’

All she wants is the Blue Angel. In the latter years Stefan found an angel of his own, a human angel beautiful and kind. She visits Karoline, or used to. Breath scented with roses she kisses her cheek, a real kiss not flinching away. They dream together Karoline and this beauty. In such dreams, brief though they are, a door creaks open, and Karoline glimpses another life where Mutti’s china sparkles on unknown shelves. Through this woman’s eyes she sees a cottage in the country and white roses that grow at the hand of a gardener who whistles through his teeth. Blessing after blessing she sees a boy with dark hair and laughing eyes who races up and down stairs, and who teases the maids, and who sleeps with a dog on his bed, a vigilant dog that knows of secret watchers and wags his tail, guardedly.