She leaned her cheek against the cool stone. This was the oldest part of the castle, the part she loved as she could not love the baroque grandeur of the south facade. Yes, after all, it would be hard to leave: harder than she had dreamed it could be.
She was turning to go when she heard footsteps and saw a solitary man seeking the eastern ramparts as she had done, for the glory of the sunrise.
‘Good morning, Your Highness.’ The Lithuanian look, much commented on in Byker, was greatly in evidence, the voice still cold.
‘Why do you call me that?’ she said wretchedly. ‘When you know…’
‘Know what? That you are a staunch republican?’ Tessa, he noted, was looking pinched and plain, a fact that gave him an obscure satisfaction.
She caught her breath. ‘I don’t understand why you are like this. In Vienna you were so kind.’
‘I don’t mean to be unkind. But you must see that this masquerade of yours is apt to annoy people when it’s discovered. Dear God,’ he said, rage overtaking him again when he remembered her entry on the previous night, her upstaging of Nerine, ‘the way you came down that staircase!’
Tessa had turned her face to the horizon but as she spoke one small hand traced, with unconscious familiarity, the pattern of a lily carved deep into the stone. ‘Yes,’ she said tonelessly, ‘I know how to come down a staircase. They began to teach me when I was five. I had a book on my head — Plotinus, usually, bound in Spanish leather — and my skirt was too long on purpose. If I dropped the book, or stumbled, I was sent to bed without supper. There’s a marble staircase they use at Schönbrunn; it’s kept specially polished so as to be slippery. I used to think that if you looked at the little red flecks in the marble you’d find they were bits of dried blood shed by the children who have come down that staircase.’ She finished tracing a lily stem, laid her hand flat on the wall. ‘So you see, I know how to come down a staircase. This useful accomplishment I have.’
The bitterness in her voice held Guy silent for a while. ‘Were you often at Schönbrunn?’
She nodded. ‘My father was in the Emperor’s suite. Pfaffenstein was all right, one could always escape into the woods, but Schönbrunn… it was so lonely, like being in a prison. The long corridors and the rules. If your curtsy wasn’t quite deep enough, if you didn’t put your fork down the second the Emperor had finished, it was a scandal. My parents wanted a boy, of course. They went on hoping, but there weren’t any more children so I was always a disappointment. I used to go and talk to a little girl in a picture. She was pretty, not like me, but I knew she felt the same. The Infanta Margarita, she was called, by Velasquez — do you know her?’
The sun was fully up now, turning the pigeons wheeling below them into triangles of light. Guy nodded, calling to mind the little Infanta kept captive in the Escorial outside Madrid until she was ready to ship as a bride to the boring, pompous Leopold of Austria.
‘Sometimes my mother used to take me driving, sitting very stiff, you know, with footmen everywhere, and I’d see all those ordinary children belonging to each other… and to the world. Really belonging. Playing in the park or eating ices in a café… I remember, once, there was a pair of twins with bright red curls sitting on the rim of a fountain in the Volksgarten with their mother. She had an arm round each of them and they were splashing in the water and laughing. I started to beat on the window… I wanted the coach to stop and to get out and ask them to let me just be there… just to be there and belong.’
‘Go on.’
‘Then my parents died and Pfaffenstein belonged to me. But the money had gone too and I was always failing everyone. I’d ride round to visit my parishioners and I’d see an old lady with a hole in her roof and I’d send for the steward and say, why haven’t you mended Frau Keller’s roof? And he’d say I have only ten men, Highness, to do the work that two hundred did before, and he’d show me their time-sheets. We’d begun already on that hopeless business: selling off pictures, selling off forests… So then I knew that the only thing I could do for Pfaffenstein was to leave it, and I told my aunts to sell.’
‘Yes,’ said Guy, ‘I see.’ His anger had evaporated and he regretted its passing. It had been an effective armour against the troubles of this child. ‘And music? Has it always meant so much to you?’
She nodded. ‘Ever since I can remember. Once when I was at Schönbrunn — I was about six, I suppose — the Vienna Choir came to give a concert. I was standing by the window in my room when these voices came from the chapel. It was only a little Schubert song, ‘Auf dem Wasser zu Singen’, but it just stabbed me. It was an absolute coup de foudre. You know what music is like when you aren’t expecting it… when you overhear it? And I thought then that if I could just serve music… sort of help it to happen… I could bear it.’
‘Bear what?’ Guy wanted to say, but refrained, for after all he did know. Once, in London, he had spoken to one of Diaghilev’s ballerinas about her fabled grace and lightness, wondering to what extent these qualities were ‘natural’. He could remember her huge, Byzantine eyes turned on him, the slightly pitying shrug as she said, ‘Dancing hurts, my friend. It hurts all the time.’ Now, looking at Tessa’s fawn head turning to copper in the risen sun, he realized that she could say the same about being a princess.
Suddenly impatient, irked by the understanding she had forced on him, he began to make his way down the steps, impelling her to follow him. As they crossed the drawbridge he noticed another lily, spare and formalized, carved into the gatehouse arch. A strange emblem for the bloodthirsty Pfaffensteins, he thought, for he had noticed this flower also worked into the gaudy standard with its impaled golden griffin and scarlet glove.
‘What will you do with the money from Pfaffenstein?’ he asked abruptly.
‘Well, half will go to the aunts, of course.’
‘I doubt if they will countenance that. They intend it for your dowry.’
‘My dowry?’
‘For your marriage to Prince Maximilian of Spittau. The only man, they informed me, with enough quarterings to aspire to your hand.’
The harshness was back in his voice and hearing it Tessa closed her eyes in sudden weariness.
‘It’s no use being angry with them; they’re old, they cling to the old ways. But there’s no question—’
She broke off and Guy watched her face suddenly light up with a pure and shining joy. The next second Prince Maximilian, in lederhosen, a woodcock feather in his loden hat, came round the corner.
‘Oh, goodness, how lovely! Rinty, how you’ve grown! Down, Hector, down… Yes, yes, Samson, I know how you feel; you are the oldest.’ Talking tenderly in her own language, laughing, Tessa let herself be submerged in a sea of wagging, thumping, blissfully slobbering dogs. She stroked the black muzzle of the wise old labrador, fondled the ears of the pointer with her velvet mouth and loving eyes, fielded the quicksilver ecstacy of Maxi’s new, half-grown red setter — and was felled by the wolfhound bred for the prince’s rare hunting excursions on to dry land. ‘I’ve missed you all so much,’ she said. ‘It’s really awful not being able to have dogs in Vienna.’ Freeing an arm, she pulled in the Irish water spaniel, whose liver-coloured clown’s face had begun to quiver with impending rejection, and swivelled round to smile at Guy, wanting to share with him the happy innocent world of these working dogs.
But Lithuania had reclaimed the new owner of Pfaffenstein. He scowled, answered the prince’s, ‘Good morning’ curtly, and strode away across the courtyard.