The Lightstep (8 page)

An enemy and a spy, thought Maria. A fanatic, too. You never
told me about his hands. Yet still you could make him your friend.
Truly we are wretched, yet in our wretchedness we are only
one case among a legion who cry out because of what you
have done. Therefore, sirs, I bring before you the loss of my
brother, and of all those other innocent and worthy men, on
both sides, who became victims of this act, though it be the
least of all the acts you have committed. They are the
innocent that you have condemned. And I beg you to pray to
Our Lady for pardon, if indeed you pray at all; and I shall pray
for pardon that I cannot pardon you.

Written in grief,

Maria Constanze Elisabeth von Adelsheim

Blot her mother's ink dry. Envelope it, and seal it with her
mother's wax. Do not think on scruples. For now, and for however
long it might be,
she
was the mistress in Adelsheim. While
Mother wept and heaped her blame aimlessly around
Christendom, she would speak with Adelsheim's voice. She
would bring the guilt home.

Then, as her pen hovered over the envelope, she hesitated.

For with whom, exactly, did the guilt lie?

She knew very well whom she was addressing – those faceless
men of France whose insanities had brought all this to pass.
But she needed to point her finger at just one, or at most a
few, of all that nation. She wanted to pin him, or them, with
her words, as a duellist who had backed his opponent to the
wall now skewered him with one fast thrust. And whom exactly
did she mean? The soldiers, accused, would turn and point
to their officers, the officers to their general, their general
to his masters in Paris. And the masters would say, 'Yes, we
did have a part, but it was also because of . . .' and they
would point in other directions. And so it would go on, and
on. The guilt – the one black guilt – would be broken into
little pieces, like a Host at Mass, and passed out to a thousand,
ten thousand, mouths that would swallow it in little black
crumbs, and then it would be gone. To whom should she
speak?

Her pen wavered, and she put it down. Then she picked it up
again, frowning. There would be someone. Someone stood concealed,
in the heart of that great diffuse conspiracy that had killed
him. She needed only to think a little.

Perhaps it should go to Paris. She should address the so-called
'Directory' who were the masters of France at least in name. But
how, if so, was she to reach them? There would be no post yet,
working across the Rhine. And she could hardly dispatch one of
the servants to ride all the way to Paris – even if she was the only
one in the house left in their right mind.

In the end she wrote a single line upon the envelope. 'To M.
the General Hoche, Commander of the French Army at Wetzlar.'

Let their creature in Germany receive her blame, for France
and all its works. It was enough. And Wetzlar was only twenty
leagues away, in Nassau, this side of the Rhine. It was much more
likely to get there safely. She did not know the proper form for
addressing a general of a republic that neither the Emperor nor
her father recognized. However, she thought, the man himself
probably did not know it either.

'You must introduce me to your Michel,' said the younger Maria,
as she lifted her candle in the final, graceful movement of the
dance.

On the settee the ghost stirred.

'Introduce you?' it murmured. 'Perhaps. But will you love him
or hate him? I cannot predict.'

A man walked down the main Saint Simeon Street in the
walled city of Erzberg. His name was Karl von Uhnen, and
he was the son of an Imperial Knight.

The first and most important truth about the Uhnens, known
to all those who were aware of such things, was that the Knight's
grandfather had entered into a misalliance. Moved by nothing
more than love, he had married a woman of no pedigree. And he
had bequeathed the consequences to his house. Now the Uhnen
family shield bore only twelve quarterings, rather than a full
sixteen. And although the Knight had wealth and wit and
influence, although he had secured posts for himself at the
Prince-Bishop's court and a commission in the Prince-Bishop's
hussars for his son, nevertheless certain doors in Erzberg and the
Empire – canonries, and positions in exclusive church foundations,
would remain closed to him and his family for at least
another generation.

For that reason, the Knight had said to his son, it was all the
more necessary that one should conduct oneself at all times in a
manner fitting to the blood. And Karl von Uhnen did, to the best
of his ability.

He was a handsome young man, with liquid brown eyes. His
usual expression was thoughtful and almost melancholy, as if he
were trying to compose a poem and had got stuck half-way
through. He had looked exactly like this the day he had had to
sit at the head of his troop under French cannon fire, and had
seen twenty of his men and horses killed in a quarter of an hour.
He had looked the same, only perhaps a little more melancholy,
as the ravages of campaigning had put holes in his boots, lice in
his hair, and had ripped his immaculately-tailored uniforms to
rags. At each return to Erzberg he had righted all deficiencies as
swiftly as he could. Now, a month after the peace, he was again
dressed in crisp white uniform and an extravagantly braided
tunic, with his green jacket, lined with black fur, slung just
so
from his shoulder. He had even managed to grow his hair back
long enough to tie it into a queue at the neck and into the
elaborate braids that hung before each ear, which were a mark of
the hussars in peace and which every hussar had cut off while in
the field to help keep themselves free of vermin.

He was acting against orders. He was showing his uniform in
town on a day 'when every man in the Prince's little army was
supposed to be keeping indoors. The mob was out – a paid mob,
hired by the Canon Rother-Konisrat, the head of the peace party
in Erzberg. Yesterday they had chased and stoned two infantry
officers who had tried to approach the Saint Christopher Chapel.
They had pursued a baron of the war party across the New
Bridge, and pulled two of his footmen off his coach, beaten them
and thrown them into the river. And in the night a man had been
mistaken for someone else by drunken vigilantes, and had
been knifed to death in a gutter.

The mood in the town had swung heavily against the army as
the scale of the losses at Hersheim had filtered through. Citizens
who might have shrugged their shoulders at the death of a few
mercenaries or sad émigrés had also lost sons. Apprentices who
had once gaped at smart white uniforms had lost all respect. Now
jeers and mocking songs sounded outside barrack walls. The
army, fuming, stayed behind barred doors. And Captain Karl von
Uhnen of the hussars walked in the streets, with his plumed cap
on his head and his uniform plain to see.

He was not a stupid man. He knew there might be trouble. He
had even left his valet behind, preferring to run an extra risk himself
rather than bring his servant into danger. But his motives felt
compelling, and he thought that he could handle it.

Mob or no mob, he calculated, his best chance of reaching the
Saint Christopher Chapel was to make his approach as boldly as
possible. He would march quickly (but not too quickly) down the
Saint Simeon street, confident under the eyes that fell on him, and
be past them before they could wonder what exactly he had to be
confident about. His hand rested lightly on the hilt of his sword. His
boots clumped purposefully on the cobbles, accompanied by the
jingle of his brightly polished spurs. So far, it was going well.

He had reckoned without the crowds. It was a feast day – of
which there were many in Erzberg's calendar. The guilds had
closed their workshops. Journeymen who had followed their holy
relics in procession that morning now swarmed around tables set
out in the streets. They had tuned their fiddles, knocked the
bungs off kegs and were beginning their celebrations. Even
the broad Saint Simeon was thronged and difficult to pass. Von
Uhnen came to a halt in a little square outside a guild chapel. The
far exit was completely blocked by gangs of festive Ironworkers.
Short of shouldering his way through (which he supposed would
be unwise as well as undignified), there was no way forward. He
hesitated, uncertain what to do.

Men were already looking his way. In a moment they would
start to think about him. Haughtily, he lifted his eyes to the
rooftops as if none of it was any of his business. At that moment
a step sounded behind him. A hand caught his arm.

'Take your hat off,' a voice hissed.

'What?'

Beside him on the cobbles stood Wéry – bare-headed, and
swathed in a greatcoat on this mild day. He was glaring at Uhnen.

'Take the thing off!' he said urgently. 'Hide that damned
plume!'

He was too late. In a doorway a man, a fat, well-to-do shopkeeper
of some sort, broke off from speaking with his neighbour.
For a moment he glared at the hussars. Then he hissed.

More heads turned.

'This way,' Wéry grunted, jerking his head at the nearest alley.
'Don't run.'

'What?'

Von Uhnen stood scowling in the open, and everyone was
looking at them.

'This way!'
Wéry turned on his heel to lead the stranded aristocrat off
down a narrow, foul-smelling street. Von Uhnen hurried after
him, with the awkward strut of one who must make more haste
than dignity should allow.

Wéry checked his shoulder. They had not been followed. Not
yet. Round a corner . . . He caught Uhnen by the sleeve again.

'Now
run!'

His urgency seized the other man and drove them along
together. Encumbered with their swords and uniforms, they
stumbled along in the tight maze of medieval streets and filthy
little courtyards where the river men and journeymen and
apprentices of the city lived. The alleys were so narrow that their
boots splashed in the open sewers that ran down the middle of
them. The mean buildings of the Riverside Quarter stooped
over them like huge old widows in shabby clothes. They passed
the dark doorways and windows.
Don't look in!
Wéry thought.
They were no safer here than they had been in the crowds. Stray
cats stared at them and flitted from their path. The walls rang with
unseen voices, calling and singing and already the worse for
drink. There were shouts behind them. Was that a mob forming?

Run!

A mob could whip itself up in minutes. Wéry had seen it in
Paris. There had been days, then, when sewers like this had run
with blood.

(God, yes! An evening of September mist, with a chill in the
air that brought out the smells; the lanterns and braziers around a
big-walled prison, and a rumour of a crowd inside; and women
laughing on the street corner while at their feet the sewer had
flowed red-brown in the yellow lamplight with the blood of
hundreds of murdered men and women, mingled with the filth
of the city!)

He had seen it. And what they
did
to the corpses!
They broke out into a cobbled square of tall, stepped-gable
buildings, all painted in bright colours and decorated with friezes.
There was a fountain here, raised on steps, and an air of quiet and
prosperity, as fragile as a bubble. Just a score of paces away, down
another narrow street, they could glimpse the teeming Saint
Simeon again. There was no sound of pursuit.

The two men struggled to catch their breath, glaring at one
another.

'What are you doing here?' said Uhnen, panting.

'The same as you,' said Wéry curtly. 'But
I
know how to do it.'

'Do you? Then you may oblige me by doing it somewhere
else.'

Von Uhnen was not one of Wéry's regular persecutors in the
regiment. Normally he would just have ignored the upstart
foreigner who had been so bafflingly favoured by the Prince. If
the hussars, and all the rest of the world, were going to ruin, that
only made it the more important to conduct oneself according to
the standards of one's station.

But now he had been accosted by this same upstart and manhandled
in the streets. He had been dragged off through the alleys
without a shred of poise or dignity. And he was not ready to
admit that it had been necessary to get his beautifully-polished
boots covered with sewer-filth. He glanced disdainfully down
Wéry's coat and uniform, showing with his eyes that he knew
they had come from a tailor more accustomed to fitting infantrymen
than hussars, that they had been purchased on Albrecht von
Adelsheim's credit, and that neither Adelsheim nor Wéry had yet
managed to repay the full amount. And, what was more, there was
a patch on one elbow, yet Wéry had no other uniform more
presentable than this.

In Uhnen's eyes, of course, this final offence was far the most
heinous.

Wéry, for his part, had been planning to make his way
carefully and unobtrusively down from the hussar barracks
to the waterside, with his plumed hussar's cap under his
arm and his coat around him. Now he had put himself
into harm's way for a dandified, ungrateful aristocrat who
would have deserved the beating or lynching that would have
been his in a minute if he had not been rescued there and then.

And
why
was Uhnen out? Couldn't the brainless son of a horse
have stayed indoors as he had been told?

They looked at each other, wordless and furious.

Von Uhnen was about to turn away when something else
occurred to him.

'It was you who went to the Adelsheim house, wasn't it?'

'Yes,' said Wéry. And thought:
What's it to you?

'I heard about that. It was not proper.'

'You mean I should have waited until somebody else remembered?'

'I'd have done it.'

'Then why didn't you?'

Von Uhnen looked at him, coldly. 'It's none of your concern.'

'I suppose not. And I suppose how – or whether – you get to
the Saint Christopher Chapel is none of my concern either?'

'No, it's not.'

Von Uhnen turned his head and peered down the short alley
to the Saint Simeon street. People were moving up and down
over there, clattering, calling, cheerfully carrying on with their
festivities. No mob was after
them
today.

'I'll tell you, all the same,' said Wéry, as the gallant hesitated.
'You won't get to the Saint Christopher at all. No one in uniform
will.'

No one in uniform would reach the Saint Christopher chapel.
For in the chapel, in a lead-lined coffin that was surrounded by
candles and heavy incense, lay the month-old remains of Albrecht
von Adelsheim. At the plea of Lady Adelsheim, the Canon
Rother-Konisrat had sent his men to gather his young cousin
from the battlefield and bring him up the Vater to his home. And
before the dead man reached his last resting-place, they had laid
him in the Saint Christopher Chapel near the city waterside, so
that the great and good of Erzberg might come to acknowledge
the price of war. But no army officer, or any of the war party less
than the Prince himself, was being permitted to approach the
coffin. For it was in the Canon's script that they should be
ashamed to show their faces while the coffin lay in their town.
And his cudgels were out for any that did.

Von Uhnen watched the crowds passing in the Saint Simeon.
A man's voice was singing, loudly and laden with drink. The song
was a bawdy one. There was no threat in the words (to a man, at
least). All the same . . .

'What were you going to do then?' he said at last.

'Come with me,' said Wéry, with a certain grim satisfaction,
'and I'll show you.'