Come into my Parlour (16 page)

Standing out against the night sky, with the moonlight glinting on the slates of its tall conical tower, the long roof of the chapel and its many pepper-pot turrets, it looked immense and faintly sinister. It had stood there night after night like that for hundreds of years, since the days when the von Osterbergs, like most of the German nobility, had been robber barons. It had its own grim legends and might well have been the original Castle Dracula. Knights in armour had many a time come clanking down the track accompanied by a hundred or more rough retainers on their way to join the Schwabian bands; and through the centuries all the lords and ladies of Württemberg had gathered there in their silks and satins, to celebrate the births, the marriages, and the deaths of the von Osterbergs in the great banqueting hall where, beneath the hanging banners of long-forgotten victories, refectory tables had groaned beneath countless dishes of rich food and big flagons of Rhenish wines.

If Kurt von Osterberg died tonight, she reflected, he would get no stately funeral, and there would be no splendid assembly of his peers to drink a health to the new lord of Niederfels. Some black-uniformed S.S. man would merely stand by smoking a cigarette, while a few of Kurt's old servants were made to throw their master's body, uncoffined, into a hole in the ground.

A slight shudder ran through her. She was sorry for Kurt, he
looked so tired and ill. She wondered that he had had the guts to court the vengeance of the Nazis by throwing up his job, and admired him more than she had ever done for doing so. She wondered if his old dragon of a mother was still living in the castle or if out of cruel spite against him some of Himmler's bullies had carried her off to a concentration camp. Knowing how devoted he was to the old lady it crossed her mind that it was strange that he could have brought himself to expose her to such a risk. She was surprised that she had not thought of that before, but she had had so little opportunity to talk to Kurt about himself. At their brief interviews Einholtz had always been with them and Kurt's poor state of health had seemed to make him particularly moody and non-communicative.

The time of waiting there seemed interminable. Every now and then Erika glanced at her watch; she could just make out the figures by the moonlight and the hands seemed to crawl. With quick nervous gestures she lit cigarette after cigarette, only to throw them away half smoked. At last, after what seeemed an age, she heard two faint shrill blasts from a whistle, and sighed with relief.

Hurrying to the car, she got it going, turned it round and drove up the steep winding track. At its top the way flattened out a little. The castle was now a huge black mass in front of her but the towers flanking its great gateway stood out in the moonlight, and the big arched nail-studded gates were open.

She drove into the courtyard and turned the car round so that it should be ready for them to leave at once in case of an alarm. Then she got out and, crossing the court, went up the few steps to the central door. It was ajar, and a chink of light came through, so she pushed it open and went in. The light came from along the passage where she knew the great banqueting hall lay. Instinctively she tiptoed towards it.

As she reached the door she saw that the curtains were drawn across the tall windows that, set deep in the thick walls, lined both sides of the big room. At its far end, near the great open fireplace, a table was laid and it looked as if one person had dined there. Kurt's mother, the old
Gräfin
was still there then, and how like the old woman, she thought, to continue to dine in solitary state in this great barrack of a place, instead of in one of the smaller rooms. On the table stood two multi-branched silver candlesticks, and it was the soft glow of the candles in them that made an oasis of light in the lofty chamber. The August night was quite warm but a wood fire had been burning on the hearth and Kurt was putting more twigs and logs on to its smouldering embers to get it going again. Einholtz was nowhere to be seen.

At the sound of Erika's footsteps von Osterberg looked up, and said, “You've been very quick.”

“The second I heard the whistle I drove straight up the hill,” she replied. “Where has Einholtz got to?”

The Count glanced nervously over his shoulder at a curtained door that led to his own sitting-room. “He—he's telephoning.”

Erika's eyes widened with surprise. “Telephoning!” she echoed. “But why? Who to?”

Von Osterberg held out his hands in a little helpless gesture, then let them fall limply to his sides. For a moment he seemed to struggle for words. Suddenly they came with a rush:

“Erika, I couldn't help it! I swear I couldn't! I tried to warn you! I begged you not to concern yourself with this secret weapon. I flatly refused your offer of money for it. I even tried to persuade you to put off coming here, hoping that if I had a fortnight I might be able to find some way to let you know the truth. But that devil headed me off every time. He never allowed me to get a moment with you alone, or to leave the Villa. I've spent whole days handcuffed to my bed.”

During his outburst every muscle in her body seemed to stiffen with apprehension. As he paused for breath, she gasped: “You—you mean that they used you to lure me into a trap? That Einholtz is a Gestapo man?”

He nodded dumbly, then burst out again. “I wish I'd killed myself, but I hadn't the courage. I think I would have if it hadn't been for my Lady Mother. That's how they got me down. They threatened to send her to a concentration camp. You know what that would have meant? I couldn't bear it. I gave in.”

Erika was no longer listening to him, but thinking desperately: “I'm trapped! I'm trapped! Any second he'll have finished telephoning and be back here. What shall I do? Oh, God, what shall I do?”

She suddenly felt very cold and small and helpless, and, as the horror of the things that the Gestapo did to their prisoners flooded back into her mind, fear gripped her heart so fiercely that she felt as though she was paralysed and incapable of moving from the rug on which she stood. The blood had drained from her face leaving it chalk-white, except under her high cheekbones where the slight dusting of powdered rouge now stood out unnaturally. Her hands had gone faintly clammy, and as she stared unseeing at her husband her eyes were distended by terror.

The hanging of the door behind which Einholtz had been telephoning swayed and the brass curtain rings from which it hung rattled.

As though galvanised by an electric shock Erika let out a piercing scream, stepped back, then darted forward to run past it.

Even as she moved, she knew that she was too late. The door swung open and Einholtz stood there, tall and grim, with a sardonic smile playing about his thin mouth.

At a glance, he had taken in the situation. He had underestimated the time it would take her to get up the hill by a trifle, and in those few minutes von Osterberg had given him away. That was rather a pity, as he had had quite a lot of fun acting his part that evening and he had wanted to play his little comedy out to the end. He had planned for them to sup together of the fresh trout they had caught and a few bottles of the best wine from the cellar of his unwilling host. During their drive he had been conjuring up an amusing picture of that supper in the great hall, with Erika, beautiful in the candlelight and her miserable husband wriggling like a fish on a hook as he wondered when the blow of her arrest would come, yet knew himself incapable of doing anything to stop it. Still, that he had been deprived of that culminating scene was of no great moment, and it was Erika who would suffer most, since he would now send her supperless to bed in the chilly dungeon that he had already earmarked as her prison while she remained at the castle.

As the door swung open Erika pulled up with a jerk. She was cursing herself frantically now for having stood staring at Kurt like a gaping fool when she should have taken advantage of those few precious moments. If she had fled at once she could have got past the door where Einholtz now stood and down the passage, perhaps even halfway across the courtyard, before he appeared. The engine of the car was still warm, those few seconds' lead would have given her time to jump in and start it up. By now she might be half-way down to the village, and at least still at liberty with a chance to make a bid for her freedom.

But now it was too late. If she attempted to reach the passage Einholtz had only to step out and grab her as she passed.

In jerking herself back one of her high heels twisted under her and she toppled sideways against the table. Swinging round, she grasped its edge to keep herself from falling. As she hung balanced there for a second she found herself staring into the flames of the candles. Recovering her balance, she stretched out her hand and grabbed one of the silver candelabra. Heaving it up above her shoulder she flung it with all her force at Einholtz.

He threw up his arm to cover his face but the heavy missile hit him on the chest. As he recoiled the candelabra crashed to the floor, its lighted candles scattering in all directions. Most of them went out, but one rolled across the polished parquet and came to rest against the fringe of the heavy damask door curtain. It was dry as tinder and
Erika had scarcely turned again before it suddenly flared into a great sheet of flame.

Slipping round the table she darted towards the row of windows at the other side of the room.

“Stop her!” Einholtz shouted to von Osterberg. “Stop her, or I'll flay the hide off you.”

The Count made a half-hearted move to bar her path, but she struck him violently in the face with her clenched fist.

As he reeled away from her she saw that one of the window-curtains was billowing slightly from a gentle breeze. Confident that the window behind it must be open she ran towards it, wrenched the curtain aside and sprang on to the alcove seat, which brought her to within two feet of the broad sill.

Einholtz had pulled a gun from his pocket. Ignoring the flames that now lit the lofty chamber and the smoke that eddied about him, he levelled it at her back and bellowed:

“Halt, damn you! Halt, or I fire!”

It was at that instant, staring out through the open, lower half of the tall window, Erika realised that her unpreparedness and fear had once again betrayed her. In her desperate panic she had momentarily lost her sense of direction. Instead of the window facing on the courtyard, as she had thought, it was one of those on the opposite side of lie room. It looked out above the tree-tops of the forest-clad gorge.

Einholtz's shout to halt was still echoing among the rafters as Erika, carried forward by the impetus of her own movement, lurched from the window-seat on to the broad stone sill. Appalled at the outlook which had so suddenly loomed up before her, she stood there swaying for a moment.

The window was tall and narrow, twelve feet in height and worked on pulleys, so she was able to stand upright in the opening below its two now overlapping halves. Straight ahead of her there was nothing for a mile or more, until the starlit sky was broken by the wooded crests of a line of hills on the far side of the valley. Below her lay a seemingly unbroken sea of tree-tops shelving steeply to the valley bottom, then rising again in the distance. The upper branches of the nearest trees were not far below her but about twelve feet away. Between them and the wall of the castle there yawned a dark fifty-foot gulf, at the bottom of which the great stones with which the wall was built merged into the rock of the mountain top. Moonlight silvered the whole scene, making it a vista of still, unearthly grandeur that a landscape painter would have travelled many miles to see; but for Erika it now held no beauty, only stark menace and the terror of a leap to death.

“Come down from there!” Einholtz shouted. “If you jump you'll break your neck.”

His voice recalled her instantly to the peril that lay in her rear. She knew too much of the Gestapo's dreadful work to have any illusions that they might treat her well. If she surrendered it meant a concentration camp, starvation only fended off by scouring the dustbins for potato peelings and scraps of offal; lice, dirt and disease, beatings and unbearable humiliations; being thrown naked into an ice cold bath then having paraffin rubbed into the tenderest parts of one's body. Such things were not propaganda stories invented by Germany's enemies. She had lived for six years in Germany under Hitler and she knew the vile unvarnished truth.

Yet, she still hesitated. The tree-tops seemed so far away. Their
upper branches were too slender for there to be any hope that if she leapt and caught at one of them it would bear her weight.

Suddenly she caught the sound of heavy footsteps behind her. Einholtz was running across the room to grab at her skirt and pull her down. She swayed again with terrible uncertainty, trying to nerve herself for the jump, but funking it at the last moment.

“Come down!” he bellowed as he ran. “Come down, or I'll shoot you as you jump.”

She swayed once more. Her knees seemed to be giving under her. She let them go, slipping down to a crouch instinctively to avoid his threatened shot. Then, thrusting herself forward with every ounce of her strength, she launched herself out of the window.

As she hurtled through space she heard a sharp report and the tinkle of glass behind her. Einholtz had fired too late and too high; his bullet had shattered two of the overlapping panes that a moment before had been just above her head.

Next second the nearest tree-top brushed her arm; another instant and pine-needles pricked and stung her face. Then she was falling … falling … falling. On every side of her branches rustled, bent and snapped, as she plunged downward among them. Frantically she tried to grab at them as they flew past, but only succeeded in tearing away a few handfuls of foliage. A bigger branch hit her behind the neck, jerking her upright, another caught her under the legs, and for a moment she hung there suspended from it, upside down. Then her feet flew up and she slipped from it to continue her terrifying descent head down. A moment later a blow on the shoulder knocked her half unconscious, her body was twisted as it fell and a frightful jolt in the ribs drove the breath out of it. For a count of twenty she gasped agonisingly as she strove to get her breath back, no longer realising where she was or what had happened; then her mind cleared and she found that she was doubled up with her head and arms dangling over one side of a big branch and her feet and legs on the other.