The Dragonfly Pool (17 page)

They drove to the cathedral first. Tally and Julia remembered it from the newsreel—a solemn Gothic building with a tall spire. Inside, among the dark paintings of crucifixions, was a portrait of St. Aurelia, the saint whose birthday the Berganians had been celebrating in the film.

“She was so young when she died,” said Anneliese, the curly-haired German girl whose brother had helped them to light the Primus. “Only thirteen. I would not wish to die so young.”

After the cathedral they drove to the covered market, where they seemed to be selling everything in the world. There were cake stalls piled high with gingerbread hearts, and meat stalls where enormous pink sausages swayed like Zeppelins, and fruit such as the children from the Northern countries had never seen properly ripened: peaches and apricots, nectarines and great succulent bunches of purple grapes.

Then back into the buses for a drive to the town's main square, the Johannes Platz, named for the king.

It was very large and covered in cobbles. On the north side was the Palace of Justice, on the west side the town hall, with a famous clock tower from which carved figures of the Twelve Apostles came out one by one as the hours struck, and on the south the Blue Ox, with its beer garden and terrace.

But what the children from Delderton were staring at with dismay was the wooden platform in the center of the square that had been put up specially for the festival.

It looked as though the whole town meant to come and see them dance.

They had lunch in a café in a side road and then everybody got into the buses again for a tour of the royal palace. By now the children had all mixed. Borro was talking to a pretty French girl with long blonde hair. They sat with their heads close together, discussing milk yields and grazing acreages, because her parents kept a herd of Charolais cows on their farm in Burgundy. At the back of the bus the Danish girls were cutting up bunches of grapes with their nail scissors and handing them around. Verity was flirting with an Italian boy, who listened to her politely but seemed more interested in the mountains they could see out of the window.

Matteo was not on the bus. He had counted everybody in, exchanged a few words with Magda, and walked away.

“He's getting really good at not being here,” said Tally.

They drove through a sun-drenched valley covered in vineyards and orchards, and past little wooden houses with flower-filled balconies, and the people they passed all waved. It seemed to her that she had never been in a happier place.

The palace appeared and disappeared as the road snaked around the side of the hill. It was not a big palace, just as Bergania was not a big kingdom, but everything was there: turrets and towers, a moat, and a flagpole with the royal standard raised to show that the king was in residence. There were two sentry boxes, striped red, green, and gold in the Bergania colors, and a soldier stood guard on either side of the tall, gold-spiked gate.

As they drove into the forecourt an eagle soared up over the battlements and Tally, her head tilted to follow its flight, gave a sudden intake of breath.

“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.

T
he 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.