Castle of the Wolf (4 page)

“This is surely the
loveliest
part of our journey!” Mrs. Chisholm exclaimed—as she had kept doing ever since they had left the docks in London. “
Precisely
like the first time my George and I took this route some forty years ago, newly married and
so
in love. Of course, we first had to go to the Michaelmas fair in Frankfurt, but afterwards, my George wished to show me the balls in Baden-Baden. We had the
loveliest
weather that year, only sunshine, sunshine, sunshine, and the balls and amusements in Baden-Baden were still in full swing. At the time, I was still a stupid young chit who had never seen anything of the world, and the glitter of Baden-Baden seemed
so
glamorous to me. I wish I could take you to the balls in Baden-Baden, too, dearie.”

Cissy nodded and smiled and looked on as a flag appeared on top of the Mouse Tower, indicating their ship could proceed into the narrow curve of the Binger Loch. Mrs. Chisholm had wanted to take her to the balls in Baden-Baden ever since they had left the docks in London.

“A few years later,” Mrs. Chisholm went on, wiping the water from her nose with the sleeve of her glistening coat, “everybody flocked to Italy. But who needs Italy when you can have the grandeur of German forests, the picturesque towns, the sweetness of Rhinelandish wine and, above all, the majestic Rhine itself!” She threw her arms wide as if she wanted to hug the river. “Oh magnificent, glorious Father Rhine…”

Cissy suppressed a smile. Mrs. Chisholm had enthused while the waves of the Channel had tossed their ship about until all passengers had acquired a greenish tinge; and she had enthused all the way from Rotterdam to Cologne when high dykes on each side of the river had intercepted all view, except for a few church steeples which had shyly peered over them. But in Cologne, where the old cathedral, still unfinished even after almost six hundred years, greeted travelers, Cissy had felt it, too—the tingle of excitement, the reverent shudder, the
awareness
of history. Now she felt it again, with each castle, each abbey, each ruin they passed along the way.

Here kaisers of old had erected their residences; Roland, the great hero and nephew of Charlemagne, had built a castle, and Siegfried had fought against the ghastly dragon; here her father’s stories took shape and her childhood heroes stepped out of the pages of musty books.

Their ship glided on, and Cissy admired the hills where the fires of Celtic altars had once illuminated the night, where the Romans had erected the Limes and made these hills the rim of the civilized world. They had brought the knowledge of cultivating wine, and still the grapes ripened along the banks of this river. Countless armies had marched through this land, peoples had come and mingled and disappeared, and still their legacy lived on, strong and insistent, and Cissy admired it all, the din of the steamship in her ears.

In Mayence, grown from a Roman garrison town and bearing the Celtic sun wheel in its coat of arms, the two women left the Rhine and traveled on by post chaise on the Bergstrasse to Baden-Baden. While they passed by more ruins and castles, Mrs. Chisholm regaled her with stories about them all, stories of brotherly hate and brotherly love, of star-crossed lovers, of witches and white women.

A little way out of the small town of Heppenheim they finally crossed the border into the Grand Duchy of Baden. From then on, Mrs. Chisholm became quieter and quieter until the stories totally ceased to flow. Now, she only clucked her tongue from time to time and threw Cissy worried glances, which Cissy herself did not know how to interpret.

So, even though she had come to be very fond of the widow, Cissy felt relieved when on their third day on the road Baden-Baden lay before them, nestling between the hills that formed an offset of the Black Forest. “
Civitas Aurelia Aquensis
,” Mrs. Chisholm murmured absent-mindedly, a deep frown marring her forehead. “Already the Romans appreciated the mineral springs, and you can find altars to their gods all over town. Just like our Bath, really. Only the people are speaking German, of course. Quite curious, isn’t it?”

They took up residence in the only real hotel in town, the Badenscher Hof, and Mrs. Chisholm insisted a bath should be brought to Cissy’s room just as to her own. “No, dearie, you mustn’t protest. I only wish you could stay longer and I could show you the balls. You would like them, I’m sure, just as any young girl would. But instead…” The widow pressed her lips tightly together, and the line between her brows deepened. Abruptly, she threw her arms around Cissy and enveloped her in a lavender-scented embrace. “My poor girl. My poor, sweet girl.” As abruptly as before, the widow released her and, blinking rapidly, waved her away. “Shoo, now. Go and freshen up.”

The next day, Mrs. Chisholm would not hear of putting Cissy onto the post chaise on her own. Instead, she hired a carriage for her, and after giving the coachman a long lecture, they said a tearful good-bye. “My dear child. My dear child,” the woman choked out, and pressed Cissy to her heaving bosom. “You
must
promise to write me and send me many letters. Most uncivilized this, to send a young girl off all by herself and let her fare alone in a foreign country. My poor child.” She patted Cissy’s back. “Do promise to write to me, and if there is
anything
I can do, don’t hesitate to ask for my help.”

Finally, Cissy sat in the carriage and waved good-bye while the coach jerked into motion and rumbled over the cobblestones. Soon, Baden-Baden lay behind her, and Cissy was on the road once more. At first the silence and loneliness seemed oppressive, weighing down on her. She tried a bit of reading, but soon returned to looking out the window at the country, which became wilder with each mile they passed. And the farther they went and the more towns, great and small, with narrow streets overhung by medieval houses they passed through, the stronger grew Cissy’s feeling of slipping back in time and into the stories her father had loved so much.

But on the second day, when they had almost reached their destination, the country changed its pleasant face. Shortly after they had stopped at an inn along the way to change horses and to take a small midday luncheon, dark clouds gathered on the horizon. Cissy watched how they built up layer after layer of bulging gray, before they sprang up and raced toward the carriage on the lonely road. As if touched by ghostly fingers, the bare branches of the trees to the left and right started to move and wave at the travelers. Dead leaves swirled up, some still colored in bright hues, others already gray with decay and gossamer like spiderwebs, mere skeletons of once green leaves, which crumbled into dust in the breeze. Twilight fell when the clouds overhead reached the carriage. The wind picked up, whistled in the cracks of the coach and made the trees groan under its onslaught. And then the snow descended upon them, first in a thin drizzle, curiously gray in the dimness; but soon thick, fat flakes fell all around. The wind was ominously howling outside, like a large beast on the prowl, out to hunt, and they the prey…

Cissy huddled in a corner of the carriage, wrapped in a blanket she had found under the seat. She remembered all the awful stories of coaches lost in the snow, swallowed by snow storms, not only in the north of Britain; most horrid of all the stories of the great frost of 1814, when nature had held travelers prisoners in wayside inns and farmhouses for days on end. Indeed, it was said that even the Thames had been frozen that year, and an ox had been roasted whole on the thick layer of ice.

If this carriage should disappear, none would be the wiser—nobody expected her arrival, and George would probably not register the absence of mail. He would believe her to be sulking as if she were still a little girl.

Cissy shivered under her blanket.

Should the snow swallow this carriage, nobody would search for it, and they would be found only by chance when the snow thawed. Blue, frozen corpses, the horses caught in midstride, nostrils still flared. And their pale ghosts would haunt this forest forevermore, inspiring fear in the unwary traveler who would venture out at night.

Cissy closed her eyes and shuddered. Perhaps George had been right after all; she did indeed tend to lose herself in stories, believed that fairy tales could become reality. Perhaps this whole venture had not been a good idea. Perhaps she should have stayed at home.

Under one roof with Dorinda?

Her eyes snapped open.

On second thought, she preferred haunting this forest as a pale ghost.

She shook her head and looked outside. The dim light of the coach lanterns did not reach far, yet the snow brightened up the darkness, so they traveled through a world of dim gray. The trees flitted by as dark shadows in the whirling snow.

Later—it might have been hours or minutes, Cissy was never quite sure afterward—it seemed to her she could spot a golden glow in the dimness ahead. With trembling fingers, she opened the window and thrust her head outside, blinking against the sting of snowflakes in her eyes. They were still surrounded by forest, and in the near distance black hills rose up, hovering to their right and left like enormous beasts. But before them, nestled between the hills, a golden halo of light could be seen even through the snow. And Cissy watched, as snowflakes gathered on her hair, how the halo changed form and finally transformed into the blinking lights of a small town.

“Coachman!” she shouted.

“Ho there,” came the cheerful answer. “We’ve nearly made it,
gnädiges Fräulein
.”

A short time later, the wheels of the coach crunched through the snow that covered the streets of the picturesque little town, just about to settle for the night. Oil lamps, quaintly strung across the streets, defied the whirling snow and cast their soft light about to show the wary traveler the way to the grand pension beside the church. The coach rattled to a halt in front of a great door, brightly illuminated by two lanterns. It opened to emit a flurry of servants. The carriage door opened, and Cissy was handed down under the shelter of an enormous black umbrella.

She turned and stared in wonder at the church, so unlike the ancient gray village church at home, which huddled against the ground as if to seek shelter from the cold winds which blew from the moor. This church rose proudly from the ground, with the bell tower pointing to the night sky like a slender finger. And even amidst the falling snow, the building seemed to shine, all done in white and red, with elegant, sweeping curves and the hint of gold on the tops of the roofs. And in dark niches along the front, saints of stone stood guard over the entrance.

“
Gnädiges Fräulein
…”

Cissy turned back.

“
Hier entlang
.” The young footman made a small movement with his umbrella, pointing it toward the waiting door of the inn.

“Yes, of course.” Cissy smiled at him and stepped toward the warm yellow light spilling through the open door. As she saw the elegant curves and the red and white repeated in the building before her, her eyes opened wide. “It’s like the church,” she said in wonder.

“
Fräulein
?”

And she remembered to speak German. “This building,” she repeated excitedly, this time in the correct language. “It looks like the church!”

“And no wonder.” The middle-aged woman in a starched white apron who was waiting for her at the door smiled at Cissy. “This used to be a convent, and St. Margaretha’s its church. Good evening,
gnädiges Fräulein
. I’m Frau Henschel, the innkeeper’s wife. Welcome to our small town.”

The coachman came up to them, carrying Cissy’s old, threadbare travel bag. “I thought it best to stop here for the night,
gnädiges Fräulein
,” he explained. “In the morning we can then venture to search for the castle.”

“The castle?” Frau Henschel started. “Not the Castle of Wolfenbach?”

Instantly the tiredness of the journey was forgotten, and Cissy’s heart lifted with excitement. “Yes, the Castle of Wolfenbach, exactly. Do you know it?” she asked.

Frau Henschel’s face had lost all color, and she raised her hands as if to ward off evil. “Oh,
gnädiges Fräulein
, you cannot possibly mean to go to that cursed place! He’ll get so angry!” She wrung her hands. “He’ll rip you apart and tear you to pieces, he surely will!”

Taken aback, Cissy frowned.
Cursed? Why cursed? And…
“Who will rip me apart?” she asked.

Owl-like, the innkeeper’s wife stared at her. “Who? Who else but the son of our dear Graf?” She lowered her voice to a mere whisper, as if afraid he might, like the devil, hear her even when miles away. “He’s been roaming that castle some thirteen years, and nobody in their right mind would dare to venture near it. Like a wild beast, he is. Dangerous. And deadly.”

Cissy blinked.

Dangerous, deadly, and, it would seem, her betrothed.

~*~

When she woke the next morning, the pitch-blackness of night just gave way to a dreary gray morning. From outside came the crunching sounds of snow shovels against cobblestones as the small town got ready to dig itself out of the suffocating layers of white. Dark gray clouds hovered ominously over the surrounding hills, shielding them from view.

Wearily, Cissy stared out of the window. As beginnings to a new life went, this one was not the most auspicious. As she put her hand against the windowsill, she could feel the cold seeping in from outside, as if warding her off.

And when she lightly touched her fingers to the glass, the bite of the ice flowers seared her skin.
Life is not a fairy tale
, they taunted her.
This is no place for you! Go home!

“No!” In a burst of anger, Cissy slapped her hands against the window. “I will
not
go back to that house where Dorinda is now mistress! I will
not
be the poor relative who just watches life flow by! I will
not
be Auntie Cis and nursemaid to my brother’s children forevermore!” Tiny rivulets of water trickled through her fingers as the ice melted away under the warmth of her palm.

Cissy took a deep breath. “This is going to be my new life and I’m going to enjoy every minute of it.” She rubbed her wet fingers against her nightdress, turned her back to the clouds and the snow, and started to get ready for the new day.