Count Karlstein, Page 3

  I hushed her, and helped wide-eyed Charlotte to do up her topmost coat.

  “Now, we must be absolutely silent, d’you hear? The count’s still awake and Herr Snivelwurst is bound to be creeping about somewhere. We’ll leave the castle through the stables and slide down that rocky slope beyond the wall until it meets the road lower down. But not a word!”

  It wasn’t until we were outside in the biting cold, with the wind searching out all the gaps in my threadbare old cloak and lashing my hair across my eyes, that I thought: what am I going to do? Am I going to run away with them, or am I going to go back and pretend that I know nothing about it?

  After some time we rounded a corner in the road and came to a fork. One branch led down to the village and over the bridge to the square—half an hour’s easy walk, with lighted windows at the end of it, singing from the tavern, and the church snoozing dimly under a snowy quilt. The other branch of the road led along the side of the valley, to a pass where, at this time of year, the snow was too deep for travelers. I hesitated for a second or two as we stood at the fork, for the village looked so welcoming; and then the moon came out from behind a shark-shaped cloud and lit up the rocky wildness of the landscape. And I turned away from the village, for the moonlight showed me a glimpse of the place we were heading for.

  High up on the slope to our right, in among the trees, a little frozen waterfall glinted brilliantly. A short way beyond it, as I knew very well, was a cave—the hermit’s cave, we used to call it, because many years ago there’d lived a poor old man in there, a gentle mad soul who used to talk to himself all day long, believing himself to be a dancing bear who for the love of the Virgin Mary had given up entertaining folks and taken to praying for them instead; but who still needed commanding, like a bear, so he’d say, “Good boy, Bruno, on your knees now, pray, that’s a good bear—fold your paws—shut your eyes—there’s a good bear—up you get, then….” We used to take him honey-cakes once in a while, which he’d feed to himself as a reward for praying well, and then in his old bear’s shuffle he’d lumber forward and slump to his knees beside us and lick our hands gently, telling himself to pray for us….The sweetest souls in the world are those that aren’t fully in it. I thought: old Bruno’ll look after us. I meant his spirit, of course, since he’d died when I was seven.

  “This way,” I said, and we took the upper road.

  Where it crossed the stream we left the road itself and followed the bouncing waterway through the tangled brambles, the rocks and bushes and hollows full of wet snow, climbing all the time, until we were nearly at the waterfall. Then we took off our shoes (soaked through now, anyway) and stockings, and stepped gingerly into the dark water. It wasn’t deeper anywhere than our knees, and even Charlotte could have lain with her head on one bank and her feet on the other; but the stones at the bottom were sharp and painful and the water was worse than cold: it was deadly. We stumbled across, holding our shoes and stockings in numb, shaking hands, until our feet could bear it no longer, and we hopped out, crying with the pain of it. We slapped each other’s feet and ankles until the blood unfroze and we could move them again, then put our wet shoes and stockings back on.

  “That should throw the hounds off the scent, anyway,” said Lucy in satisfaction—at least, that’s what she meant to say, but her teeth were chattering so much she might have been speaking in Turkish.

  We came to the waterfall, and gasped, not with cold—for we were beyond gasping with that—but with astonishment. A thick crust of spiky, sugary, bristly spears glinted and shone in the moonlight, all set about with a million tiny diamond-sharp stars of frost; and under it somewhere, the little stream tinkled in a subdued sort of way, like a child put grumbling to bed too early for its liking. The world by moonlight could be lovely as well as threatening; the sky was clear, now, of those lean and wolfish clouds and seemed almost serene.

  “Only a little way further,” I said, to cheer them on.

  The path to Bruno’s cave was a little overgrown and I couldn’t find it at first. But soon I had it, and five minutes later we were nearly in the clearing, talking cheerfully about getting warm again. When—

  “Shhh!” Lucy held her hand up.

  We stopped.

  “What is it?” whispered Charlotte.

  I turned my head so as to hear it more clearly, for I’d heard something, too. From the cave.

  The unmistakable sound of a snore…a full, deep one. A man’s snore. We’d arrived too late: the cave was already tenanted. Lucy looked at me, her eyes full of fear.

  “What shall we do?” she whispered.

  But I didn’t have to answer, because as she spoke the snorer gave a sudden grunt and the snoring stopped.

  And a voice from the cave said: “Who’s there?”

  We were too frightened even to shiver. Charlotte’s hand was clutching mine as if it had frozen there and was stuck for good; and through my mind went galloping a dozen or more brigands, robbers, outlaws, and cutthroats, all with blazing eyes and armed with knives and guns. We stood like stone.

  After a moment there came the sound of something stirring in the cave—dry leaves, perhaps, rustling; and another voice spoke.

  “What is it, you booby?” came calmly out of the darkness, in a clear, rich voice of the sort that actors have: an expressive voice, with a hint of the mountebank about it. “The fleas disturbing you? To deal with fleas, my dear Max, you have only to crack them between your fingernails. They expire in silence. You do not have to make speeches to them and challenge them like a sentry.”

  “No, I heard a voice, Doctor,” said the first man. “There’s someone outside, creeping about.”

  “Fiddlesticks. I have been lying awake here for hours, meditating on my destiny, and I heard nothing at all but your melodious and trombone-like snorings. You were dreaming of the applause, the roars of acclaim, the demands for an encore, that will follow our performance tomorrow. Go back to sleep, Max; resume your snores.”

  “Well, you may be right, Doctor; but I did hear something….”

  Silence; then presently, indeed, the snores began again. We relaxed, and tiptoed out of the clearing and back down the path to the waterfall. There we sat on a convenient (if icy) rock and whispered.

  “What do we do now?” said Lucy.

  “Who were they?” said Charlotte.

  “How does Hildi know who they were, stupid?” said Lucy. “They’re robbers, obviously.”

  “That other man said something about a performance,” said Charlotte. “They might be actors! They wouldn’t hurt us—they might even let us stay in their cave!”

  I thought so, too—but you could never tell. Actors or performing players or traveling showmen are slippery folk, all charm and greasepaint. We’d played host to them often enough at the Jolly Huntsman, and sometimes been paid in coins whose gold wore off as soon as the players’ coach had trundled out of reach; or found that our good linen sheets had changed, by some artistic process, into tom, drab cotton in the course of a single night. No: these two in the cave sounded harmless enough—but I didn’t trust them, all the same.

  “It’ll have to be the mountain guide’s hut, Miss Lucy,” I said. “Another hour’s walk…but it’s that much safer, being further up, like….”

  “Another hour?” said Charlotte; and indeed she was nearly dropping with fatigue. All the excitement had drained away, and I think she’d have taken the chance of facing the Demon Huntsman himself for the sake of a soft, warm bed just then.

  “You’ve got to,” I said, a little roughly. “Miss Lucy, too. And don’t forget—I’ll have to be back at the castle tomorrow and pretend I don’t know anything about you being missing. You can just lie low in the hut and snooze all day long if you want to. Come on, it’s getting late.”

  I pulled Charlotte to her feet, and the three of us began to trudge up the slope again, through the bushes and the tangled undergrowth beside the stream, until we came out onto the bare hillside higher up. We didn’t
speak; not so much because we needed to be silent up here as because we didn’t have enough breath left to make words out of.

  We found the mountain guide’s hut, unlocked as it always was and with a pile of dry firewood (no use to us, though, without a tinderbox), the straw mattresses and the wooden beds all ready for any poor traveler who found himself snowbound up here. Lucy exclaimed with delight at the neatness of it, but Charlotte could say nothing, being worn out; so I laid her on one of the beds, took off her shoes and stockings (which were still wet from the icy stream), rubbed her legs dry, and put dry stockings on her before covering her with another of the mattresses, so that she looked like a little mountain of softly rustling straw. But she didn’t know what she looked like: she was asleep. Within a minute, so was Lucy; and sometime later, so was I—wondering ruefully as my eyes closed how many precious minutes would fly past before the dawn came and woke me.

  It felt like no more than five. It was dark still, but the air had the stirring, impatient feel it gets just before daybreak, and there was some self-important bird chirruping bossily outside. I lay still for a moment. Then the running stream and the sound of the girls’ breathing woke me—jerked me fully awake, as a handclap might have done. I sat up: what was the time? Would I manage to get back to the castle before everyone woke up?

  I got up and put on my shoes, gathering my thin old cloak tightly around myself to keep out as much of the chill air as possible, and shook Lucy’s shoulder gently.

  “Miss Lucy! Miss Lucy! I’ve got to go now! I’ve got to get back to the castle. But I’ll be back later—if I can!”

  “Oh, you must, Hildi….” She was awake now, but not so much as I was; yawning and rubbing her eyes, her face pale with anxiety. “You must come back—we wouldn’t know what to do otherwise—”

  “I’ll try!” I whispered, not to awaken Charlotte, who stirred and pulled the straw mountain further over herself. “I’ll really try my very hardest, I promise! But with Frau Muller bossing me about, it’s going to be hard to get away—I tell you what, though,” I said, as an idea came to me: “If I can’t come, I’ll get someone else to come up here with some food and a tinderbox—how’s that?”

  “How will we know who they are? It might be a trick,” she said, struggling to sit up. “We’ll need a password!”

  “Yes, all right—but I’ll have to go in a second—”

  “Let me think—oh, what shall it be?” She fluttered her hands, and put them to her mouth, as her sleepy eyes opened wide with the effort of thinking; and then she said, “Cheltenham!”

  It wasn’t a word I knew, and I tried to say it so as not to forget it. “What’s it mean?” I said.

  She told me it was the name of a place in England, where she and Charlotte had attended a ladies’ school. I promised her I wouldn’t forget; and said that someone—either me or someone else (though I couldn’t imagine who, unless I persuaded my brother, Peter, to leave the cellar)—would come up to the hut later on, with food and drink and something to light a fire with. She nodded, and curled up again under the straw, asleep in a moment.

  The sky was lightening rapidly. I’d have to hurry if I wanted to be back at the castle before anyone found out I’d been missing. I ran down the side of the mountain, shoved my way through the forest, and scampered up the road as fast as if Zamiel himself was after me, and arrived (entering through the stables, the way we’d left, with the warm horses shifting restlessly as a wet, shivery, breathless figure tiptoed through the midst of them and peered cautiously into the courtyard) just as the bell in the tower tolled six. It couldn’t be better; that was the time I normally awoke.

  Five minutes or so to get up to my bedroom under the drafty tiles of the roof, change my clothes, and dash downstairs into the kitchen to begin my chores. Sticks for the fire, water from the well, pump away with the bellows till the fire blazed good and hot, take a shovelful of red embers into Frau Muller’s parlor and light her fire with them, do the same for the fire in the great hall, put a pan of water on the kitchen fire to boil for Frau Muller’s coffee (which she had before all the rest of the household), prepare a tray for the count’s coffee, set out the cutlery for the servants’ breakfast (not much needed; it was porridge all round, and thin stuff too, since Frau Muller had her breakfast with us and kept a miser’s eye on the cream and sugar), and finally lay the table for the family’s breakfast.

  By this time, the other servants were up and about. Frau Wenzel was stirring the porridge in the kitchen; Frau Muller was sipping her coffee and studying the day’s menus and the list of jobs to be done around the place. And now I had to learn to be an actress; for the next thing I had to do, on a normal morning, was to go and wake the girls.

  I shook the empty beds, and drew back the curtains. “Miss Lucy! Miss Charlotte!” I called, but not too loudly, yet.

  No reply, of course. I waited a moment, then called again, louder; looked under the beds, in the wardrobe, in the bathroom, in the corridor, in the empty rooms that stood dustily nearby; called again, and let (with great artistry) a note of fright into my voice.

  “Miss Lucy! Miss Charlotte! Where are you?”

  Now for the audience, I thought; and ran downstairs.

  “Frau Muller! Miss Lucy and Miss Charlotte—they’re not there!”

  “Where? What do you mean, girl?”

  “They’re not upstairs, in their beds—I can’t find them anywhere—”

  And so on. Within ten minutes, every servant in the castle had been pressed into the search, and Herr Snivelwurst scuttled up to tell the count. I didn’t relish the idea of what he’d have to say. Together with all the other servants, I bustled through the rooms upstairs, the attics, the cellars, the stables—calling their names down every corridor and up every staircase, and acting furiously all the time. The longer we spent on this, of course, the safer they’d be; it was when the search spread out beyond the grounds that they’d be in danger. But I might still distract it a little.

  “Your grace,” I said to the count, as he gnawed the fingers of his right hand, while his left held a great beaker of coffee laced with brandy; he was standing in the hall, shouting orders at every servant who came in sight, his face growing more thunderous by the minute. “Your grace, I think I know where they might have gone.”

  “What? Where? Speak up, hussy!”

  I curtsied nervously and said, “Through the village, sir, and into the Schelkhorn Valley, if you please.”

  “What for? How do you know? Are you involved in this?”

  “Oh, no, sir! But they were talking about the river, sir, and how they’d like to follow it to the lake, if you please. They might have gone out for a game and lost their way down there. There were some gypsies going that way yesterday….”

  Gypsies! They got the blame for everything, from the disappearance of the little heir twenty years before, to this. There weren’t any gypsies there at all, of course, but it might throw him off the scent for a little while.

  The count glared at me, and I thought for a moment that he was going to strike me; his fists were clenched, and the mug of coffee shook and spilled some of its bitter contents with a hiss into the ashes of the fire he stood by; but he turned abruptly and called: “Lentz! Schaffner!”

  These were Johann the footman and Adolphus the groom. They came running, and he ordered them to set off with guns down through the village toward the Schelkhorn Valley. “This girl will come with you,” he said. “If she’s too slow for you, leave her behind. I want those girls back today, you understand?” And he turned swiftly and went off to call up all the other servants: the huntsmen, the one old gardener, the kennel-master, the coachman—everyone he could find, while I flung on my old threadbare cloak, still wet from the night’s exertions, and ran off down the road after Johann and Adolphus.

  It was a fine sunny morning, and they were full of the glee of the hunt. They were quite willing to accept my suggestions as to where they should search and equally willing to let me stay beh
ind in the village. So I left them at the bridge; they went off whistling, and I ran on into the parlor of the Jolly Huntsman. But before I even entered the building, I heard a rare old commotion. I paused inside the door and rubbed my eyes in surprise.

  A line of strangers, arguing, jostling, gesturing, with three or four different languages on the go at once, was queuing up in front of Sergeant Snitsch, who sat at our biggest table, looking very stem, more flustered than stem, and more pompous than flustered.

  “Next!” he shouted, and the man at the head of the queue stepped forward and showed him some papers. I didn’t know what it could be about, so I went into the kitchen and asked Ma.

  “Search me,” she said. “The sergeant’s got some silly idea that there’s a famous criminal about, so he’s got everyone in the tavern to come and show him their papers. What a fuss! And I dread to think what Peter must be doing down there—he’ll be listening to all the noise, and he’ll be dying to come up and have a look, and I daren’t go down and tell him what’s going on in case the sergeant takes it into his head to come into the kitchen. Oh, I could throttle that boy, I could honestly! The trouble he’s caused! And what are you doing down here, anyway? That lady sent you down here for her bags, has she?”

  “What lady?” I said; I was trying to get a word in edgewise and tell her about the girls, in the hope that she might be able to help—but now she was peering through the kitchen door again. “Ma!” I called her. “What lady d’you mean?”

  “Hasn’t she come up to the castle, then? I thought you’d have met her on the way down. The sergeant sent her off with Constable Winkelburg, because she didn’t have the right papers, and she told him what to do with himself—powerful way with words, she had—and she said to one and all that she was going to escape from the constable and that no one was going to prevent her from going up to the castle to pay her respects to Count Karlstein and visit her girls.”

  “Her girls? For goodness’ sake, who is she?”