The Silver Castle (8 page)

“Sherbrooke?”

“Yes. I’m Benedict Sherbrooke’s daughter.”

His face was suddenly like rock, cold and hard and impervious. “Did you say my stepmother
invited
you to stay at the Schloss?”

“That’s right. It was very good of her, I thought.”

He said, in a chilling voice, “Perhaps, Miss Sherbrooke, you will tell me precisely what it is you are doing here.”

“It’s a long story,” I faltered. “To cut it short ... I’d always believed that my father had died when I was very young, and only recently did I learn that he was alive until February of this year. I discovered it when
The Times
reported that one of his paintings had changed hands at a London saleroom. I was able to find out that he’d been living all these years in this part of Switzerland, and ...”

I broke off, checked by the scorn in his eyes. I had remembered them as being a soft, warm grey, like wood smoke, but now they were like splintered slate.

“So you came hurrying out to find what pickings there might be for you,” he said viciously. “How gratified you must have been to find there was a whole roomful of paintings. If buyers can be found for those, too, your journey will have paid handsome dividends.”

Shaken, and furiously angry, I started to protest that he’d got it all wrong. But already he was striding away from me across the yard and in another moment he had vanished through the doorway to the offices. It was all I could do not to rush after him, to force him to listen to me, but I could hardly provoke a scene right here at the silk mill.

I was reaching into the car for my handbag when Raimund reappeared, hurrying out of the showroom with a swatch of fabric under his arm. Obviously he was still unaware that Anton had arrived and I felt tempted to say nothing, but just get in the car and let him drive to St. Gallen. But I was interested to see how he would react.

“I think I ought to mention that your half-brother has just turned up.”

He froze, the car door half open. “Anton is
here?’

“That’s right, he arrived a few minutes ago,” I said, nodding towards his blue Mercedes that was parked across the yard. “I gathered that he wants to talk to you.”

“You spoke to him?”

“Yes, briefly.”

“But ... but he couldn’t have known who you were. I mean, not unless you told him just now.”

“I did tell him. I saw no reason why I shouldn’t,” I added challengingly.

Raimund cursed under his breath in German. Then in a subdued voice, he asked, “How did he take it?”

“He was astonished, to say the least. He suggested rather unpleasantly that I was here looking for pickings.”

Raimund’s tone dismissed this as irrelevant. “What else did he have to say?”

“Nothing much. I just told him I was waiting for you, and he suggested that it would be best for me not to wait as he’d need you for some time. That was all.”

Raimund’s fingers drummed a nervous tattoo on the side of the car.

“The best thing is to leave him to Mama. She will talk him around. We might just as well enjoy ourselves today while we have the chance.” He glanced at me and managed a smile. “In you get, Gail.”

I made no move. “Wouldn’t it be better to see your brother now, and get it over with—whatever it is? I mean, if there’s trouble, it’ll catch up with you in the end.”

“But we’ve made plans, Gail. I can’t stand you up.”

“Yes, you can. I won’t mind.”

“I
would, though.” He tossed the swatch of samples onto the rear seat. “So jump in and let us get started.”

Raimund was hustling me. Having decided to cut and run, he couldn’t do it fast enough. Perhaps, like me, he had noticed the tall figure watching us from an upper window of the office block. In another moment, I guessed, the window would be thrust open and Anton Kreuder would be calling his half-brother over, a direct summons which Raimund wouldn’t dare ignore. Damn the man, I thought—damn his ill temper and his foul manners.

I jerked open the car door and laughed across at Raimund. “Okay, what are we waiting for?”

Now
he
was the one who hesitated. Then he slid in beside me, and we did a fancy fast turn out of the yard. I felt the rear wheels slide as we swung onto the road. He corrected the skid and we stormed away. Glancing at his profile, I saw that he was grinning defiantly.

“You don’t let anything worry you for long, do you?” I observed.

“Since when did worrying put anything right?”

I shrugged, not really caring. I was too involved with my own disturbing thoughts.

“When I was talking to your brother just now,” I said, “he was perfectly friendly at first, but as soon as I told him my name his manner changed completely. He was furious. I don’t understand. Why should he be so much against me because I’m Benedict Sherbrooke’s daughter?”

“Anton’s mind is a law unto itself,” he said.

“Oh, for pity’s sake,” I said irritably, “do you have to try and make a stupid joke out of everything?”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s completely pointless to make such a mystery out of it. Anton must have hated my father, and now he’s taking it out on me. It was very sweet of your mother to invite me to stay, but you can’t deny that both of you have been hinting that I’m not expected to hang around for too long. I didn’t need second sight to work out that it was Anton you were scared of. You didn’t want him to arrive home and find me there.”

“Everything would have been fine if he’d not taken it into his head to come back sooner than planned,” Raimund said. “It is very puzzling, too. Anton is not the type to cut short a business trip.”

I sighed on a long, impatient breath. ‘If you were
expecting
your brother to be difficult, you must also know
why
he feels this way. So tell me.”

“Don’t keep on about it, Gail. Mama and I do not have to ask Anton’s permission before inviting someone to stay. The Schloss is as much our home as his.”

With that, Raimund put his foot down hard and swerved out to pass a heavy truck on a long, sweeping bend. I closed my eyes, terrified of meeting something in a head-on collision. And when, after a minute or two, he dropped to a more sensible speed, I felt afraid to press him any more in this edgy, unpredictable mood.

Ahead of us, a pale thread of sunlight silvered the clouds and threw a spotlight onto some ancient ruin perched dramatically on a mountain crag. I sighed, wishing I could enjoy the beauty all around. Raimund could, if I let him. His philosophy was to put unpleasantness behind him, to face a problem when he had to, and not before. Perhaps, for a few hours, I would try to do the same.

* * * *

I visited the cathedral while Raimund attended to the business which had brought him to St. Gallen. It didn’t take him long. When he came back to join me again, I was gazing up at the tall twin towers, wishing we had more of this fabulous baroque architecture in England. The hands of the matching clocks indicated five past one.

“Time for lunch,” said Raimund. “And then we will move on somewhere else.”

“But there’s lots more to see here in St. Gallen,” I pointed out, holding the pamphlets I’d acquired.

“Very well, but I want to show you further afield than this, Gail.”

After a few miles we took a zigzag track which led up into a valley of secret Alpine pastures, guarded by a mountain peak that rose sheer and stark and awesome. When we stopped to get out there was only the soft sighing of wind through the pine trees to break the silence, and the hollow sound of a cowbell from somewhere far off. Raimund leant against the wall of a deserted cowherd’s hut, watching as I trod carefully among the wild spring flowers that were already blooming in sheltered hollows, stooping to cup each new find in my hand.

“I feel so ignorant,” I said. “I only recognise crocuses and gentians. What’s the name of this one?”

“Eine Primel?”
he suggested. “In English you say primrose.”

It’s nothing like a primrose.”

He shrugged. “All the yellow ones are primroses to me.”

I plucked a single flower of the creamy gold balls and slipped it into my pocket to identify later.

“You are so serious sometimes,” Raimund remarked, coming over to join me.

“And you’re not serious enough.”

“Better take care—to be serious is only a step away from being dull.”

“Who said that?” I asked. ‘It sounds like a quotation.”

“I expect it is. I am not clever enough to have made it up.” As I rose to my feet he caught my hand and said lightheartedly, “I think I’m going to kiss you, Gail.”

“No, Raimund, I don’t want you to.”

“Please.”

I shook my head and turned away. He grasped me by the shoulders and pulled me around to face him again. I thought he was still fooling, then realised suddenly that he wasn’t. Raimund, unsmiling, was even more like his half-brother, and I felt a wave of bitterness against Anton for intruding even here. If I had allowed Raimund to kiss me then, it would only have been from a feeling of defiance.

But I didn’t let it happen.

“Look, I mean nothing to you,” I protested. “I expect you’ve got at least a dozen girlfriends.”

He gave a wry, reluctant smile, not really amused. “That’s a gross exaggeration. And you are more beautiful than any of them.”

“Oh, come on,” I said tiredly. “Let’s drop the subject.”

Raimund took me to a hotel for dinner at a place called
The Golden Hind.
We ate in a plushy room adorned with stags’ heads, and I found it depressing to be surrounded by these gruesome trophies staring down at me from the walls with sad eyes.

Raimund seemed in a low mood, too. I doubted that it had any link with my refusing to flirt with him. More likely he was funking the inevitable confrontation with Anton, which couldn’t be put off for much longer.

The local red wine was potent stuff and after the first glass I was cautious of it. Raimund, though, quickly finished off the first bottle, and started on a second.

“Haven’t you had enough?” I asked uneasily. “Don’t forget that you have a long drive back. And in any case you’d better not arrive home half cut. You’ll only make matters worse with your brother.”

With a show of bravado he picked up his glass again, twirling it between his fingers. Some of the wine slopped over and a creeping stain marred the crisp whiteness of the tablecloth.

“Poor old Anton,” he muttered, his voice slurred. “You cannot really blame him.”

“Blame him for what?”

Raimund lifted an eyebrow at me. “Now that, Gail, would be telling.”

Quite suddenly I’d had enough. I was determined to make him talk.

“It’s high time you did tell me, Raimund, so out with it. What’s this mystery all about? Why did Anton become so hostile when he discovered who I was?”

“If you are so anxious to find out,” he said, forcing a weak smile, “you’d better ask him yourself.”

“I’m asking
you.”

He was silent, absently tracing with his finger the outline of the wine stain. At last he said in barely more than a whisper, “You’ll wish to God you didn’t know.”

My voice was firm as rock, but my heart was fluttering.

“Tell me.”

He raised his eyes and looked at me. They were not the gaily dancing eyes of Raimund any more, but the grave grey eyes of Anton. Eyes that found little in this world to laugh about.

“That woman your father was with, Gail ...”

I had to prompt him, even now. “What about her?”

‘It was Valencienne.”

“Valencienne? Who was she?”

His hand slid off the table and dropped inertly into his lap.

“She was Anton’s wife.”

Raimund was silent in the seat beside me, plunged deep in gloom. I drove his Mercedes gingerly, never having handled so powerful a car before. The unfamiliar roads, the darkness, the steadily falling rain all added up to a nearly intolerable strain. And every moment, howling in my brain, was this new knowledge ... the woman who had died with my father was Anton Kreuder’s wife.

Before we left the hotel I had pressed Raimund for more details, but after that one shocking revelation he had clammed up completely. He’d just sat there staring at me owlishly, half-scared, I believed, of what the effect would be on me, yet in a perverse sort of way enjoying the moment of drama.

Outside, he had walked so unsteadily that I’d protested, “You’re not fit to drive, Raimund. You’d better let me do it.”

“I’m all right.”

“It’s patently obvious that you’re not. And I don’t see why you should risk
my
life as well as your own. So stop arguing and give me your keys.”

We had been on the road now for over an hour. Sick at heart, I tried desperately to marshal what facts I knew into some kind of credible pattern. The biggest hurdle to my understanding was why Valencienne Kreuder should ever have started a love affair with an impoverished, middle-aged artist, when she was married to a wealthy and attractive man like Anton. It made no sense, no sort of sense at all.

I could only suppose that my father had possessed, as some men do, an almost hypnotic power to captivate women. Sigrid Kreuder had fallen under his spell, and remained so even now that he was dead ... though in her case it emerged as a passionate veneration of the artist, not a passionate love for the man. Had he, over Valencienne Kreuder, cast a spell so potent that he could even persuade her into the insanity of a double suicide? Yet if this were so, what insoluble problem could possibly have faced them which required such a despairing act? Or had it been, as Raimund had hinted, no more than the dramatic gesture of an embittered man? I refused to believe that.

Fortunately there was little traffic, but at one point a car came sweeping around a bend towards us in the centre of the road. Its headlights dazzled me and, in swerving, I caught the grass verge before I could get my bearings again.

“Bloody maniac.” Raimund jerked himself upright. “You should have flashed him. He could easily have put us over the edge.”

He seemed to have sobered up by now, but I didn’t feel in any mood to talk. Presently, he said, “What are you going to do, now that I have told you about Valencienne?”