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“What is it? What’s the matter?” said Julia.

Tally could not answer. What she had seen had both frightened and shocked her.

A figure dressed in black was pulling someone roughly away from a high barred window. She could not make out the person who was being dragged away; it was someone small, a child probably — and already out of sight — but the black-clad figure stood for a moment looking out through the bars. It was a woman — but a woman out of some cruel and ancient story: a witch, a jailer. Even so far away, one could see the anger that possessed her.

Tally was right about the anger. Inside the tower room, the Countess Frederica had lost her temper and lost it badly.

“What is the matter with you, Karil?” she shouted. “Why do you do this — stand and look out like an orphan waiting to be adopted instead of a prince of the blood? Have you no pride?”

It’s insufferable, she thought. She knew the boy to be physically brave: he rode fearlessly in spite of his mother’s accident; he was a skilled rock climber and a talented fencer… but this ridiculous need to belong to children who should be proud to black his boots was not to be endured.

Carlotta would not behave like this. Carlotta knew her worth.

She lingered for a moment, watching the children spill out of the buses and make their way toward the gates. Then she turned to speak to the prince again, but he had gone.

Tally’s mood had changed. It was such a strange image — the black-clad woman pulling someone away from a window as though looking out was a crime. Were there things she did not understand about Bergania? It had seemed to be a sort of paradise, but perhaps she was wrong. She remembered Matteo’s words in the park, his grimness.

They were led through the palace by a guide who spoke in three languages, and those children who understood English or German or French translated for the others. The staterooms were very grand, but the truth is that one ballroom is much like another, with mirrors on the walls, a dais for the musicians, and crystal chandeliers. The state dining room had what all state dining rooms have — a massive polished table, set with exotic place mats and gold-edged plates — and the library, like most royal libraries, was lined with bookcases that kept the leather-bound books firmly hidden behind a trellis of steel.

“They have put the books in prison,” said a little Finnish boy, and his friends nodded and translated what he had said.

“It’s absolutely ridiculous,” said Tod, “one family living in all this space. It ought to be given to the workers of the country.”

But Tally, thinking of the trim pretty houses they had passed in the town, wasn’t so sure that the workers would want to live in the palace. As they walked from one grand impersonal room to another, passing dark paintings of Berganian knights in armor and courtiers in ruffles, she found it difficult to keep her attention on the guide’s patter. What would be interesting would be to make one’s way down one of the corridors that was barred to visitors by a red satin rope and a notice saying: NO ADMITTANCE PAST THIS POINT. Tally longed to lift up the rope and slip under it and see where real people lived — where the king slept, where the prince did his lessons and ate his breakfast, and the servants cooked their meals. Once she even went across to one of the ropes and lifted it but immediately a guard came and spoke to her sharply and she put it down.

As they trooped out again Barney called to her. “Look,” he said. “This is the best bit.”

Barney was standing by a large window at the end of a corridor, and as Tally came to join him she saw what he meant.

The window faced the town below, and one could make out everything. The river with its sheltering lime trees and the people taking the air; the spires of the cathedral and the clock tower and — amazingly clear — the field with their tents and the practice dance floor… even the marble statue of the queen.

“If I lived here I’d spend most of the time looking out of the window,” he said.

Tally gave a little shudder.

“What’s the matter?”

Tally didn’t answer. She had remembered the woman in black and her gaunt arm as she pulled away someone who was probably doing just what she was doing — looking out.

He climbed steadily; there was no need to seek the way. The fifteen years he had spent away from his country had not blotted out any memories.

The sights were familiar: the way the clouds were massed above the high peaks, the exact shade of azure of the sky, the shape of the clump of pines that edged the meadow he was crossing. The flowers were the same: the vetches in their tangle of blue and yellow, the delicate harebells growing out of sparse pockets of earth between the rocks, and now, as he gained height, the edelweiss, which no one was supposed to pick then, as now, because it was so rare.

There had been a burrow by the side of the path made by a family of marmots — and the burrow was still there. A kestrel circled, lost height to show its chestnut plumage, and rose again. As a boy he had watched such birds a hundred times.

The sounds were the same, too: the soughing of the wind in the pines, the droning of the bees clustering in the clover. And the scents, too, were utterly familiar: pine needles warmed by the sun, the tang of resin…

His feet made their own way, recognizing now the roughness of stone, now the softness of the earth as he walked through a patch of woodland. His time in the Amazon, in the Mato Grosso, might never have been.

Now he could see the hut; not the kind of place a woman of such great age should be living all the year round — isolated, exposed to the weather, often snowed up in the winter — but no one had been able to persuade the king’s old nurse to come down off the mountain and settle in the town.

He left the path and followed the track to the hut. For a moment he was afraid. She had been old when he left Bergania — anything could have happened.

Then the door opened and she came out carrying a basket of washing. She had not seen him yet, and he watched as she began to hang up her aprons — checked aprons in red and white, hemmed with a row of cross-stitch. She had always worn them to work and suddenly he remembered the comfort of their clean and starchy smell.

But now he moved out of the shadow of the tree and she saw him. Would she remember, after so long?

She remembered. She looked at him in silence — she did not shout or exclaim or drop the pillowcase she was putting on the line. She just looked. Then as he came up to her, she opened her arms and called him by his name.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Treachery

The man who sat in the best bedroom of the Blue Ox could not be mistaken for anyone but a very high-ranking army officer — and a Nazi officer at that. Though he was still eating breakfast, Reichsgruppen Führer Anton Stiefelbreich was fully dressed in a khaki jacket so covered in medals that they dazzled and caught the eye, and afterward people who met him never quite remembered his face. His cap lay ready beside him, adorned with the swastika of the party he now served, and he wore jackboots even while buttering his roll.

As much as Karil detested his uniforms, with their scratchy collars and showy buttons and infuriating plumes, so did Colonel Stiefelbreich love his. Back in Berlin, where he now worked at the headquarters of the Gestapo, he had a whole cupboard of uniforms. That was one of the many things he valued in his new job — the job of stirring up trouble in those countries that did not understand how important it was to cooperate fully with Herr Hitler’s dreams for a united Europe. United, of course, under the German flag.