The Shrouded Walls (22 page)

“But we’re as foreign as Axel!” I reminded him crossly. “You always forget that half our inheritance comes from across the Channel. Besides, if Axel wanted to go to America, I would go with him. I would travel around the world with him, if he decided to go.”

Alexander looked at me wonderingly. “You’re so strange,” he said with a sigh. “I shall never be able to keep up with you. You’ll be telling me next that you’re in love with him
...”

Vere was grateful to Axel for granting Haraldsdyke to Stephen, but he remained numbed by his loss for a long time, and for at least ten years after Alice’s death our rare visits to Haraldsdyke were gloomy, depressing occasions indeed. However, he did eventually remarry when he was about thirty-five years old, and after that the atmosphere at Haraldsdyke became more normal and welcoming to the casual visitor. His second wife was a nice woman, a widow a few years his senior whose first husband had been a clerk in some legal firm in Winchelsea; Vere evidently preferred women of an inferior rank to himself, although his second wife was socially far superior to Alice. Of Vere’s three children, Stephen lived to marry and perpetuate the family name, but his younger brother died of
diphtheria
in childhood, and his sister, although living long enough to marry, died in childbirth a year after her wedding. On the whole I thought that branch of the family more inclined to misfortune than any of the others.

As for Ned, he went to America, became immensely rich, but never married. We heard news of him from Vere to whom he wrote regularly, and twice he came back to England for a visit, but of course we were in Vienna and never saw him.

Esther married that most eligible bachelor Charles Sherman and thereafter lived at Rye, which presumably suited her better than her life as Robert Brandson’s estranged wife at Haraldsdyke. But I suspect not much better. Esther was not the kind of woman born to be contented.

Rodric’s bones were exhumed from Dame Joan’s herb patch and given a proper Christian burial at Haraldsford church. Dame Joan herself denied all knowledge of Rodric’s death, but naturally no one believed her. I suppose it might have been possible to charge her with being an accessory after the fact of murder, but I was superstitiously reluctant to meddle with her and so, I discovered, was everyone else. The villagers of Haraldsford summoned the courage to mass before her door and threaten to burn down her cottage, but she dispersed them with a wave of her broomstick; they all turned tail and fled for fear of being cursed and irrevocably doomed. Shortly after that incident Vere sent but a warning that anyone who did not leave her well alone would have to answer to the justices of the peace for his conduct, and Dame Joan was abandoned with much relief to her customary solitude.

My one sorrow during the years that followed my arrival in Vienna was that although he wrote often enough Alexander never visited us; he had decided to pursue a political career, and as it did not pay in the English political arena to have foreign connections, my brother spent much time concealing his French blood and Austrian relatives. However, in the end this availed him little, for the English have no more love for bastards without respectable pedigrees than they have for foreigners, and Alexander’s background ultimately told against him. After that, much disillusioned, he went out to the colonies and settled in Jamaica where he managed to involve himself profitably in the spice trade. I thought of him sometimes, far away in a home I had never seen, but on the whole as the years passed I did not think of him too often. I was too absorbed in my own family, my own life.

After we had been in Vienna several years, Axel inherited both a title and more property there from a distant cousin, and the acquisition of the title opened for us all the doors into every section of Austrian society, even those saloons which had previously been beyond our reach. Vienna was ours; and what now can be written about the Vienna of today, the most glittering city in all Europe, which has not already been written? Vienna spiraled to a brilliant zenith of romantic grandeur, and I was there when those sweeping beautiful tunes with their hidden sadness and sensuous nostalgia first enchanted the world. For the waltzes more than anything else seemed to symbolize the new era unfolding in that ancient unique city, and the new era was my era and I was there when it began.

But still sometimes when I sleep I dream not of the brilliant ballrooms of Vienna but of another land of long ago, the land of the green Marsh and of the cobbled alleys of Rye, and suddenly I am on the road to Haraldsdyke again and dreading the moment when I must set foot once more within those oppressive walls. But even as I finally catch a glimpse of the house in my dreams, the mist creeps in across the Marsh with its long white fingers, and
I know then that I shall never again reach the Haraldsdyke of my memories, and that it has disappeared forever behind the shrouded walls of time.