Eva Ibbotson - Magic Flutes

It was after dinner, when they were drinking coffee beside the great porcelain stove in the blue salon, that Martha found the opportunity she had been looking for.

‘I’ve had it in my mind ever since Guy wrote,’ she said, ‘to thank you for making ’im send me this. It’s the best present I ever ’ad in the whole of me life,’ said Martha, pulling out the locket. She undid the chain and pressed the catch, to reveal Guy’s photograph. ‘It’s good of him, isn’t it? Real canny.’

Nerine glanced incuriously at the portrait. ‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘But I didn’t make him give you this. I should have thought he could have got you something more valuable, actually,’ she said, dismissing the delicate filigree setting.

Martha said no more. But as she closed the locket, she was frowning. If not Nerine, then who? Had it not been a girl who had ‘advised’ him? Was she, perhaps, making the whole thing up?

No, thought Martha. It was a girl, all right. But what girl? And where?

During the days that followed, Martha’s disquiet increased. Guy spoke to his fiancée with perfect courtesy, but it seemed to her that he took considerable trouble not to be with her alone, and to welcome every opportunity that took him back to his papers in the library. Since Nerine, without actually drawing her skirt aside when Martha passed, continued to address her as if she were a deaf mute, Martha could find little to enjoy in the magnificent drawing-rooms of the castle.

But soon she found a world in which she was wholly at home. On the third day, she penetrated the kitchens and subsequently the bakery, the dairy and the farm. Here she could do nothing but marvel and approve. The people who worked there were skilled, frugal and friendly. They knew their job and the foster-mother of the English milord was a welcome guest.

‘The things they do with red cabbage, Guy,’ she marvelled. ‘You wouldn’t credit it! With apples and caraway seeds and heaven knows what! The cook’s going to give me the recipe. But mind, Guy, you ought to be sending a hamper down to the second forester’s house — ’im that’s next to the inn. He’s got his two eldest lads down with measles and his wife’s broken her wrist, poor soul, slipping downstairs. And would Nerine mind if I went to see old Mrs Keller — her that lives right in the forest — and took her some grapes or summat? They say she’s pining after the young princess — well, it stands to reason, don’t it?’

‘Nerine would be only too glad, I’m sure. She prefers not to go into the village herself,’ said Guy tonelessly. Then, his face creasing into a smile, ‘Martha, how do you know that the forester’s two children have measles? How do you know Frau Keller misses the princess? You can’t speak a word of German, can you? And it wouldn’t help much, anyway, with the dialect they use.’

‘No, you know I can’t. But… well, I divn’t know, love, but there’s no call to know German to know things like that. There’s all sorts o’ ways,’ said Martha, and she continued to spend busy days learning the ways of Pfaffenstein, culminating in an afternoon of triumph when she baked a gugelhupf. ‘Though whether they’d eat it back in Byker’s another matter,’ she confided to Guy. ‘You know, I thought you’d gone clean out of your mind when you bought this place, but I’m not so sure now. There’s some fine people working here, people as know their jobs,’ said Martha.

It was inevitable that Martha should hear a great deal about the Princess of Pfaffenstein, who was so universally missed, and she soon found in David Tremayne someone more than willing to answer her queries.

‘She sounds a real canny wee thing. Would she be pretty?’

‘No… I don’t know. Her eyes are beautiful. But she’s so little and thin and she moves so quietly that at first you don’t think… she’s so unadorned, you see…’ David shook his head, caught in the bewilderment of those who try to describe a personal enchantment. ‘All I know is, Martha, when she comes into a room, it’s as though a lamp’s been brought in… or flowers.’

Martha looked at him with kindness, but without pity, for he was exactly the right age for a romantic love.

‘But she’s a bit of a snob, maybe? Well, bound to be, with princes courtin’ ’er and all? A bit toffee-nosed?’

‘No! She’s the least snobbish person I’ve ever met. She’d marry a blacksmith if she loved him,’ said David hotly.

Martha, who was learning to knit in the continental manner as shown to her by grandmother Keller, bent absorbedly over her sock.

‘Guy will have got to know her, like, in Vienna?’ she enquired casually. ‘When ’e hired that opera company? Before ’e got up here?’

David frowned. ‘I believe so. But he never speaks of it. He never mentions her at all, if he can help it.’

‘Aye,’ said Martha quietly. ‘I’ve noticed that.’

Greatly to his surprise, for speed had not hitherto been a characteristic of Austrian legal life, Maxi heard almost at once from Herr Rattinger in the Borseplatz. The solicitor said he had been in touch with the Strasbourg office of the Land Compensation Board and put the prince’s claim, and though it was not possible as yet to be certain of the outcome, a cautious optimism would not be out of place. Herr Rattinger went on to recommend that the prince withdraw Spittau from the market, for the time being at any rate, since greater force would be given at the hearing if it could be shown that his last remaining dwelling could be made habitable only in the event of a successful outcome to his petition.

The news put Maxi into high good humour and even brought a wavering smile to the face of the Swan Princess, who had been in a vile mood since Tessa’s refusal and was given to stalking round Spittau’s nursery block like a prophet of doom bemoaning the death of the line.

The Wasserburg was at its best in autumn; the mosquitoes gone, the sunsets magnificent, the sky trailing skeins of geese, duck, snipe and pochard which it was once more possible to shoot, and it was with real emotion that Maxi surveyed his reprieved domain.

The day after receiving Herr Rattinger’s letter, he went to Vienna and withdrew Spittau from the market. Then he went round to the Klostern Theatre to give the good news to Tessa and ask her out to lunch.

The backstage world of the theatre had become familiar to Maxi, but nothing could reconcile him to Fricassée and it was with a grimace of distaste that he clambered over the railway platform, made his way round the bed shaped like a mouth — and found Tessa in the scene dock painting the signal from which Raisa, in Act Two, was supposed to hang herself.

She was pleased to see him and overjoyed about the reprieve of Spittau. ‘Oh, Maxi, I’m so terribly glad.’ To her surprise, she had continued to see quite a lot of Maxi, who had clearly taken his rejection in good part and often came to the theatre. ‘It makes me feel less guilty about things. At least it makes me feel less awful about us not being married,’ said Tessa, who felt that morning just about as awful about everything else as it was possible to feel. ‘But what a miracle it all is! How did you hear about this Strasbourg Commission?’

‘Herr Farne put me on to it.’

‘Guy!’ Tessa had spun round, her brush dribbling red paint on to the floor.

‘Yes. I met him outside the agent’s and he told me what to do. And I’m sure it’s only because of him that they pushed it through like that. He rang up Rattinger himself. Farne seems to be like God with all these people; you would think he’d saved Rattinger’s kid from drowning. Well, maybe he did, I wouldn’t put it past him. They answered in two weeks, believe it or not.’ He looked intently at Tessa. ‘Are you all right, Putzerl? You look a bit odd.’