The Lost Prince (33 page)

With a great sense of ceremony she had completed the preparation of the meal—the beef bourguignon and baked new potatoes she knew to be among her guest’s favorites—and had set the table and arranged each room, each decorated with flowers, with special care.

At dinner, she carried each dish to the table herself and laid each carefully in its place with the ceremonial attention of sacred ritual. “This meal is special, Arnauld,” she said, “the anointed sustenance for a proper send-off.”

“I am only going for two months,” he said.

“Still, I wish you to remember this moment.”

As much as they tried to avoid it, they seemed to fill the time talking about the situation in Europe, how alliances seemed to be forming in the most peculiar places, former bitter enemies evolving into allies, and former allies evolving into bitter enemies. Eleanor seemed to have a better-than-expected understanding of the specifics of the situation, how the powder keg might be set off by any one small action, with all parties joining sides in all-out war.

“Let us hope that the saber rattling remains just that, saber rattling,” Arnauld said.

“But it rarely does,” she said, with obvious skepticism in her voice.

“We need not sound so grim,” he said.

“Perhaps you have a greater acceptance of the posturing,” she said, “having been raised within it.”

“Perhaps I do. The Prussian military temperament seems to contain a good deal of that which you call
posturing
. Lots of military peacocks strutting around. And, yes, we are accustomed to it.”

“I am particularly worried about your country and the Serbs,” she said at one point, surprising Arnauld with her directness.

“That too is merely bravado,” Arnauld said, repeating what he often said. “Nothing will come of it.”

“I wish I believed that,” she said with surprising coldness. Later, he remembered a fatefulness in her voice, as if she knew what was in store for him and the world. Then she paused and looked deeply into his eyes. “We must not waste this precious time.” She held out her hand across the table where they dined alone, and, laying her hand on his, she said, “Dear Arnauld, you must promise me that you will take care of yourself, and that you will return to me.”

He felt uncomfortable in her gaze and was about to say something reassuring. “You do not know how important that is to me,” she continued, and squeezed his hand with a fierceness that surprised him. “You do not know how important you are to me.”

He could think of nothing near equal in weight to say. Then he looked down, and she allowed the moment to pass. “Well,” she said, withdrawing her hand, “that being said, I think we shall move on to dessert.”

It was after dessert when they had moved into the living room and she guided him to the couch. “Sit here,” she said, pointing to the exact spot she wished him to occupy, as if it were part of a divine plan, “and I shall sit beside you. And no more talk of Europe,” she said with authority.

They sat beside each other, enjoying the ritual of demitasse that reminded them both of Vienna, their knees nearly touching. She spoke softly and with an added warmth that dissolved any of his discomfort at the sudden closeness. “I shall miss you immeasurably,” she said, “and I do worry about the political tensions you are taking yourself into.”

“I thought there was to be no more talk of Europe,” he said lightly, but stopped when he saw the look of deep concern on her face.

“Arnauld. There is more,” she said, and slowly she leaned even closer. Her hand reached out and touched his face ever so gently.

“But—” he began, inching away until her hand dropped to his shoulder, stopping him with the lightest touch and pulling him back toward her, she understanding completely his instinct for reserve.

“This is as it should be, Arnauld,” she whispered, and then she leaned forward and returned the soft touch to his cheek. “Just this once, dear Arnauld,” she whispered softly, in a way that would stay with him vividly for the next four years during the horror that was coming. He never told anyone, but those words and those that followed in this evening on Acorn
Street were the most beautiful, the most unexpected, and the most welcome ever spoken to him by anyone, ever.

“Now, come with me,” she said, and she took him by the hand and led him wordlessly to the guest room, where he watched transfixed as she, now fully in her Isis role, lit candles.

“Just this once,” she repeated.

How could he ever come close to describing it all?

A YEARNING FOR THE FIGHT

A
s she stood with Arnauld on the platform of Back Bay Station the following morning, she felt in her heart a sinking heaviness she could not fully account for. Like so much of her future, Eleanor knew that this trip of Arnauld’s would not end well, although she knew few particulars.

“Take care of yourself, dear Arnauld,” she had said, touching his cheek, “and come back to me.”

“You must not worry,” he had said as they parted, hearing the concern in her voice.

“It is in my nature to worry,” she said. But that part of her nature he had never seen before, and he had no way of knowing its derivation or depth, although he sensed from just her present demeanor that things had changed between them forever.

“I am gone only for two months,” he said with a reassuring smile, not entirely comfortable in his new role, failing entirely to notice the depth of the change in Eleanor. “You will see me again in September, right here.”

“Nonetheless,” she said simply, “remember that you are loved here.”

“You must not worry,” he repeated, again trying to shake her from this apprehension he felt from her but had no way of understanding.

“I shall write,” he said, as he pulled away from her embrace and climbed onto the steps of the train car.

“I shall expect you to,” she said, regaining the outer show of strength she knew he expected and depended upon.

From his seat by the window, he watched her as long as he could as the train pulled away. She stood all that time in place until well after the two could no longer see each other, each heart aching, beyond words, each for its own separate reasons.

He passed by train to New York and then Hoboken, New Jersey, to board the steamship
George Washington,
confident that the tensions he was heading for in Europe would lead to nothing more than belligerent diplomacy and the arming of borders. “You will be sailing on the same ship that brought Herr Freud and Herr Jung to this country five years ago,” Eleanor had said as they were leaving Acorn Street, trying to lighten the inevitable farewell.

And while on shipboard, in his daily entries to the long letter he would mail to her as soon as the ship docked—more descriptive of his thoughts than chatty—he gave no indication of things being any different in his mind from the confidence he struggled to express on that station platform. It was the heartache of parting amplified by what had transpired on that magical last evening that he wished to express, not any uncertainty about European peace.

But while he was at sea, still two days out of Bremen, Germany, news came in on the Marconi wireless that threw the ship into an ecstasy of anxious buzzing. The archduke Franz Ferdinand, aged emperor Franz Joseph’s arrogant nephew and—because of the tragedy of the crown prince Rudolf at Mayerling—heir to the throne of the Hapsburg Empire, had been assassinated along with his wife, Sophie, in Sarajevo, the tension-filled capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina. “Serbian anarchists suspected,” the wireless report said.

The long concluding entry he added to his letter to Eleanor the following day, on the eve of his arrival in Germany, reveals a sense of foreboding he had been feeling all along perhaps but now, given the dramatic occurrence in the Balkan states, he felt free to express.

Even in Germany, after he had mailed the letter, as Arnauld made his way to the train station, the newspapers were full of the outrage, and from street corners people were shouting for revenge. “How long has this been going on?” he asked his cab driver.

“Two days now,” the driver said. “It is all anyone wants to talk about. The French and the Belgians are behind the anarchists on this. They will pay.” And Arnauld noted in his next letter the absurdity of bringing in the French and the Belgians, especially the Belgians, who had offended no one but had the sad geographical position of lying between Germany and France.

On the train and along the route to Vienna, he could see signs of the news everywhere and could see that the egregious assassination was on everyone’s mind. By the time, after Dresden, he crossed the border into Czechoslovakia, outrage filled the air, and when, after Brno, he crossed into Austria, a positive mania had grabbed hold of the populace. “I fear that no one knows or remembers the horrors of war. This unfortunate incident in Sarajevo may be the cause of a great outbreak,” he wrote to Eleanor, by now abandoning all attempts to sound as if he was reassuring her of peace. “Nobody admired the archduke, and yet all are outraged, as if he had been a beloved family member.”

It was then that he wrote with detail both to Eleanor and to his parents of the wild jubilation that swept Vienna. “Staid academics at the university are saying that even they are feeling for the first time pride for their country. The whole city feels like an American one on the eve of one of the great football games of the fall. There is a yearning for the fight.”

When Arnauld had left New York for home in late June 1914, war seemed a far-off possibility. When he arrived in Germany ten days later, it seemed inevitable. The assassination had changed everything. “I fear that a great imbalance has been thrown into the precariously balanced works,” he wrote.

Arnauld’s acceptance of the idea of war began gradually and innocently,
until even he became susceptible to the patriotic fervor. Eleanor wondered how he could be swept up in the war mania and worried in the depth of her consciousness that her necessary but aggressive overtures on the night before his departure had been somehow the cause. They had said their good-byes on that fateful day at Back Bay Station, and then, in the following months, after war had begun to rage, his letters, sent through neutral Switzerland, began to arrive. From the first, he explained that he had access to the diplomatic channels that allowed uncensored mail. His letters were filled with the specifics that were from the very start the cause of both a great comfort and a great anxiety. At first, they told of the absolute exuberance and desire for war that had swept Vienna and all of Austria. His fears and sensitivities always rendered him an astute observer, but now his powers of observation were being severely taxed.