The Lightstep (7 page)

'It is you who are good, Captain,' said the sister. 'It is indeed a
terrible day.'

'If there is anything more I can do, please name it.'

'I believe . . . I do not know if I ask in the right quarter. But
I believe that my mother might expect a letter from His
Highness.'

His Highness? The Prince-Bishop?

She must have seen his surprise.

'He is godfather to all of us,' she explained.

No doubt he was – and to the sons and daughters of half the
gentle houses within twenty leagues of Erzberg! And that was the
problem.

'I fear so many families have suffered in this last action that the
Prince may not yet have been able to write to them all.'

He saw her face change. 'We had not heard,' she said.

'It was kept secret to begin with.'

'Then – our loss has been greater than I understood.'

'Indeed, Lady Maria.'

Indeed.

'Nevertheless,' he said, 'I will see that the Prince's secretaries
are reminded. And if there is ever any other way in which I may
be of service, I beg that you will ask it.'

They walked the few paces to the door together. And with
each step he took Wéry felt that their talk was incomplete.
Something more could or should be said to make the silence
between them a little more whole. He racked his brains for it.
Nothing came. Death was unanswerable. The man should not
have died, and he had done.

On the steps he turned to her, and tried again.

'If I may say one thing more to you, it is that it was an honour
and a privilege to be acquainted with your brother. I know he
loved this house, and he loved his family. And also he loved his
friends. These were the things he died for. And if you have
nothing to die for, you have no reason to live. I truly believe this.'

She hesitated. Perhaps she tried to smile. But all she could say
was: 'You must look after your hand.'

'I will. Indeed,' he lied, 'it has stopped hurting already.'

Then he was gone, the messenger of Death. Maria watched
him as he rode down the track towards the village. She
could see him, huddled in his greatcoat under the rain showers,
but she could demand no more of him – not one word more of
explanation, apology, compassion, nor any of the million things
she needed and that would never be enough. She was left in the
confines of the world she knew, which was now so horribly
changed.

She turned and entered the house.

Once, years ago, Albrecht had taken her to an ants' nest he had
found. He had lifted the great stone that had covered it. She had
watched curiously as the little creatures scurried to and fro in
their tunnels, some with eggs in their jaws, some apparently aimless,
and all frantic with the catastrophe that had suddenly laid
them bare.

Albrecht had been going to stir them up with a stick for her,
but out of pity for the ants she had stopped him. 'I suppose you
are right,' he had sighed. 'It is a city, for them. One would have to
have a horribly important reason to destroy a city.'

Carefully he had put the stone back in its place.

Now the memory of all that hurrying and scurrying flooded
back to her. The house echoed with unusual noises. People
bustled 'when they should have walked in calm. Servants came to
her for orders, which they had never done before while Mother
was at home. She told them to prepare supper at the usual hour,
not because she felt any appetite, but to give them something to
do. Icht, who had been banished by Mother in a fit of weeping,
came to take his leave of her instead. Franz wanted to tell her that
Dominus had known him and liked him and would she please
tell Mother so? And everyone was anxious that, when things
righted themselves, they should not be blamed for whatever their
part had been in what had happened.

'. . . It was not – really, Lady Maria, it was not my fault that he
went to the library! I gave him my lady's message
most
distinctly.
I told him – I told him very firmly, Lady Maria – that she was not
to be disturbed. But he tricked me, Lady Maria. He sent me for
his hat and gloves. So it was not my fault that he did not withdraw
as he should have done . . .'

'It is no matter, Tieschen,' she had said to him, as he followed
her all the way along the corridor, pleading at her elbow. 'I will
see that Mother knows.'

And then she was sucked upstairs to where the great queen ant
herself lay, curled on her side on the canopied bed. Mother's face
was grey and her arms were clutched tightly around herself. Her
shoulders were hard as wood, unyielding to Maria's reluctant
embrace. Between bouts of weeping she was blaming all the
world.

'. . . That
insufferable
man! Why did he come here? Why did he
think he could speak to me so?'

'He was a friend of Albrecht's, Mother. He thought we should
know what had happened.'

'It should not have happened! He was always too selfish!'

'There, there,' Father mumbled, looking gloomily at the floor
as if the cause of all this trouble lay somewhere at his feet.

'We must not blame him, Mother. It was the French. They did
it. He was leading his men . . .'

'Monkeys!
That wretched d'Erles! We have all been ruined for
the sake of one lazy, brainless godson!'

'I meant the French army, Mother . . .'

'But was not Albrecht
also
his godson?' Mother cried. 'It is a
crime! He should have made peace years ago. Others did!'

'He' now was no longer Albrecht, nor his friend Captain
Wéry. Nor was it the famously dissolute Comte d'Erles, the
French émigré who had taken shelter under the wing of his
godfather the Prince-Bishop of Erzberg. 'He' was now the
Prince-Bishop himself! And who would she blame next?
The Pope, perhaps? Maria gripped the back of a chair, and her
knuckles were white.

'We must be strong,' she said desperately 'He would want us
to be.'

'That's all very well,' Mother muttered. 'But you did not love
him as I did.'

That evening she sat at her mother's desk, alone at last. She was
alone, with the grey tides of grief that had been pulling at her
heart for hours.

The desktop was covered with the letters Mother had been
writing when the news came. Here was the one to the bailiff
Holz, on the Niederwald estate. Here was another, addressed to
the cantonal court: the body that the local Imperial Knights had
elected to oversee their dealings with each other, since no one
else below the Emperor and the Imperial courts had the right.
Mother had been telling them imperiously, and yet again, that
whatever else Grandfather's creditors might have a claim to, they
had no right to her own personal incomes, which had been
settled on her by the Rother family at her marriage.

And this one was to the Canon Rother-Konisrat himself, listing
at great length – and some imagination – all of Franz's
virtues; for Mother had lately decided that Franz could not after
all be the one to carry on the Adelsheim line, and must be found
some position in the church, even perhaps a canonry, so that he
might have an income to maintain him when Albrecht came
home to be the heir.

All these letters should have been completed, copied, sealed
and directed by now. On a normal evening they would have been
stacked in a neat pile on the desk waiting for dispatch. Instead
they lay scattered across the board like fallen leaves, and their
words spoke only to the air. Across the room the long-case clock
ticked, marching on and on into the night like a soldier obeying
his last command. Everything else had stopped, as if a sudden
curse had put all the affairs of Adelsheim into an enchanted sleep.

And if ever Adelsheim woke again, everything would have
changed. Certainly Franz could not enter the priesthood now.
Somehow he must marry and have sons after all, or the last estates
of Adelsheim would pass out of the line altogether. Because Alba
would never come home.

And Mother lay upstairs, wrecked on her bed, with Father still
sitting beside her, mumbling aimless comforts now and again. She
would not come down tonight. Perhaps she would lie there, greyfaced
and weeping intermittently, for the rest of her life.

She deserved to!

Had she thought she could will Albrecht into coming home
safe? She had made them all so sure that he would! And now she
would blame everybody, everybody and everything, because he
would not. She would even blame Maria, perhaps, sensing that
her daughter had not believed strongly enough that he would
return. As if it had been through some flaw in the wall of will that
the enemy had come to rob him of his life!

You did not love him as I did.

Furious, Maria swept her mother's letters aside. The leather
desktop, shiny, with all its familiar stains, looked up at her. For
a moment she stared at it, unseeing. Then her fingers found
more paper. They picked up the pen. She dipped it, and began
to write:

Sirs,

Today I have heard the news of my brother's death at the
hands of French soldiers near Hersheim.

I well remember how, when we first heard the news of your
Revolution, my brother and I rejoiced together. It seemed to
us a wonderful thing that a state should order itself according
to the principles of reason and equality, rather than of privilege.
Although we ourselves were privileged, we swore to each
other that we would gladly exchange . . .

Already her fingers had begun to tremble. She put the pen
carefully into its stand. There was a lump in her throat, and the
emptiness in her chest seemed to weigh within her. Breathing
was difficult. No, not difficult, but it had become a task that the
body was no longer doing by itself. Now her mind was aware of
it, and she must think about it to make it happen. Now, even
living was an effort of will.

She drew breath, and heard the sob in it. She wondered if she
was about to weep. And she thought that she would. Just for these
few moments, at last, she would close her eyes to the world and
weep, and cling to the thought of her brother, as if his ghost had
come to be with her one last time.

She had been dancing, here in the library, eighteen months
ago. There had been no partner but the lighted candle that she
held in both hands, no music but her own low humming, and no
audience except Alba, lying on the settee by the window with the
heels of his boots propped up on the arm.

He had lost much of his plumpness in the campaigns. His uniform
no longer fitted well. His neck had been scrawny, his nose
no longer just fine but sharp, and pointed straight up at the ceiling.
But he had still been alive, still Alba, just as if he always would
be. And she had danced before him.

She had danced, feeling both very grown up and rather
mystical, because she had felt the world was changing and that the
changes might yet sweep everything she had known away. One-two-
three, one-two-three, she had been thinking, and turn and
back and one-two-three . . .

'I have been waiting for you to explain what you are doing
with that candle,' he had said (speaking German as he always
did with her, in defiance of Mother's rules). 'Will you not oblige
me?'

'I'm dancing with it.'

'I can see that. Nero fiddled while Rome burned, and now
you dance while the Empire totters. But it is more usual to dance
with a gentleman, if one is present. And if the gentleman is not
present, or does not please you, it is usual to dance with a chair.
I believe you are about to set your dress on fire.'

'Then the Empire shall totter while I burn,' Maria had said, as
she turned in a figure, counted and turned again. 'But I may not
dance this dance with a man, nor with a chair. It must be with a
lamp or a candle. The candle should have a hood and this one
does not. Do not bleat, brother. I am being careful.'

'What dance is this, if men may not dance it?'

'It is the Lightstep. And it's your fault we dance it, because you
and all your friends are away, and there are too few gentlemen to go
around. So the Countess said that if we could not dance with the
gentlemen, we should dance with each other. And she had some of
the May-dances adapted for the ballroom. This is one of them.'

'I imagine the Countess was not sorry to surround herself
with beautiful young girls.'

'Of course. But for the most part we do not mind her. And we
prefer to dance with her than not to dance at all. In the Lightstep,
the candle is the man. And the dance is a charm to bring him
back to us.'

After a turn and another figure, because he did not ask, she had
said: 'I'm dancing for you.'

She should not have told him. Of course it ruined the charm, if
you let them know who it was for. And so his enemies had taken
him, on the last day of the war, and they had left Adelsheim a
shell.

She sat looking at her half-written page, fighting the thought
that there might have been something she could have done, some
prayer she might have said, that would have brought him back.
Somehow she had failed.

You did not love him as I did.
Perhaps, if she had loved him even
more . . .

'You must bear with Mother, if you can,' said the ghost from
the settee.

'I do not believe she wishes me to bear with her,' said the
ghost of the younger Maria, still turning in her dance with
the candle held before her.

'Fate has dealt her a hard hand, to have a mind like hers and
yet be married to Father.'

'Father has a good heart. Even she admits that. I am sure a
good heart is more in the eyes of God than any quickness
of wit. She will marry
me
to Cousin Julius, Alba. I cannot
think Father would have permitted it if his mind had been
whole.'

'Can you not? A marriage to any Rother, even Julius, would
assure you of wealth and position.'

'Julius is too young, and sickly. I shall spend a long engagement,
year in and year out. And I shall spend it waiting to hear if
my husband-to-be has in fact died. And listening to Mother in
the meanwhile. I declare I am as oppressed as any poor peasant,
and I long for my own revolution.'

. . . endless sequence of bloody acts and murders that you have
committed, in your own country and in ours, horrified us, as
it has horrified all the world. And now you have continued
your murderous attacks even as your plenipotentiaries
discussed peace, and indeed it has been represented to me that
the action in which my brother died took place on the very
day that news of the armistice reached the camps. Thus it
seems that it was unnecessary, wasteful, an act of barbarity and
nothing more. I do not know how to describe to you
the virtues of the man that has been lost. I believe it no
exaggeration to say that his gentleness and compassion
approached that of our Saviour himself . . .

Was it too much to compare him with the Lord? Would they
sneer when they read it, these men who knew no respect for
priest or altar? But surely it was the truth. Everyone had thought
the same about him. Even Michel Wéry seemed to have loved
him (or why would he have come all the way here, a stranger,
knowing that everyone else in Erzberg was too bemused by their
losses to think of poor Adelsheim?). Even a man who had once
been an enemy.

'You should meet my friend Michel,' said Albrecht from the
settee. 'You would find him intriguing.'

'Michel?' repeated the younger Maria with a laugh. 'You write
so much about him! Michel this, Michel that. What has become
of him now?'

'He is still going off from time to time, trying to get himself
killed. And thankfully the Lord keeps sparing him. Did I tell you
the Prince has made him a hussar?'

'My Goodness!'

'My Goodness indeed. The hussars were pink with fury. I
think His Highness must have wanted to spite them. But in truth
he is attached not to the regiment but to Balcke-Horneswerden's
staff. He spends half his time carrying messages for us, and the
other half off seeing all sorts of strange people who have no love
for Privilege, but who have come to have even less for the Liberty
and Equality that France has brought them. He has become a sort
of spy. I wonder if he feels the irony of it.'