Ibbotson, Eva - Magic Flutes

But Tessa was no longer by his side. She had picked up her skirts, was running towards the jetty, had reached it and now slowed down, moving quietly along the planking, holding out her hand. ‘It’s all right, Mishka: don’t be frightened. It’s all right—’

The next moment her arms were seized from behind, she was viciously jerked backwards and a furious voice said, ‘Are you mad? Come back at once!’

Guy. Only it couldn’t be Guy. She had just seen him standing on the far side of the beach. No one could have run as fast as that.

‘Let me go!’ Desperately she tried to wriggle free, bracing herself against him, kicking out with her satin slippers.

The attempt of this freshly bathed and bird-boned infant to get the better of him might have amused Guy at some other time, but it did not amuse him now. His hold tightened. ‘You will move slowly round behind me and get back to the shore.’ Keeping his eye steadily on the bear, taking care to make no further sudden movements, the anger that possessed him was concentrated wholly in his voice.

‘No, I will not.’ A strand of her hair had caught in the stud of his dress shirt. Savagely, she wrenched it free. ‘He knows me, he won’t hurt me! It’s you he’ll go for – you’re a stranger.’

‘A terrified animal knows no one.’

As if in echo to his words, there came a fresh shower of rockets from the lake and the bear, roaring in renewed terror, reared up on his hind legs.

For a moment, confronted by the animal’s appalling height and his vicious canines, hearing the screams from the shore, Tessa went limp and Guy appeared to loosen his hold. At once she rallied and seeing her chance, began to move forward again.

This was a mistake. Guy had merely been adjusting his grasp. Now he gripped her elbows as if in a vice, lifted her up into the air and threw her, without the slightest sign of effort, far out into the lake.

The shock of the icy water, the struggle to surface in her voluminous dress, gave Tessa a few moments of immunity. Then she kicked off her shoes, trod water and opened her eyes to see . . . Maxi wading with idiotic chivalry into the lake towards her . . . some men approaching with a muzzle and chains . . . and then – because in the end she had to look – the bear on all fours and Guy, holding the rope, leading it quietly back towards the shore.

At which point, the Princess of Pfaffenstein drew breath, gave vent to a volley of Serbo-Croatian oaths learned from her father’s groom, swallowed a large quantity of water – and sank.

As might be expected, the incident was wholly to the liking of the villagers, few of whom went sober to their beds. In throwing their beloved princess fully clothed into the waters of the lake and calming (in English) a savage bear, Herr Farne had shown himself a fitting successor to the seventh prince who had decapitated a card-sharp in the Turkish bath at Vilna, and the fifth prince who had been inseparable from his camel.

That the Swan Princess, the following morning, should view the matter in the same light was not to be expected.

‘You realize that there are only four days left?’ she said, whacking at the wolfhound who was dribbling on her shoe. Though seated most pleasantly between a fig tree and a statue of Aphrodite and facing, from the terrace, one of the loveliest views in Austria, her expression as always was grim. ‘It really is quite amazing, Maxi, how inept and ineffectual you can be.’

She was growing desperate. It was not just the money or Putzerl’s lineage, it was the succession. She had been old when she had Maxi, and Maxi was the only son. There had to be babies, there had to be! It was unthinkable that the seed of Barbarossa should run into the ground. At the thought of the nursery block full of tumbling babies, the beady eye of the Swan Princess softened for a moment. Whether Maxi’s mother did or did not have a single redeeming feature was a point which had been much argued among the nobility of the Holy Roman Empire. If she did, it was probably her genuine and deep-seated love of babies. Even those who looked like uncooked buns or emerged from lace shawls like hirsute marmosets peering through balls of oakum, could bring a smile to that testy and cantankerous old face.

‘I went over this morning,’ said Maxi, conscious of deep injustice, for Casanova himself could not have proposed to Putzerl as she emerged shivering and spitting like a kitten from the lake. ‘As soon as I’d let out the dogs, but the theatre was shut with notices all over it saying ‘Silence’ and ‘Keep Out’ and what-have-you. Anyway, it wouldn’t have been any good digging her out; she’s absolutely besotted about this opera.’

The Swan Princess scowled. ‘I don’t know what Tilda and Augustine are doing, letting her carry on like that. Associating with those people! Running errands.’

Maxi shrugged. ‘I don’t suppose they could stop her. You know what Putzerl’s like. Say a sharp word to her or show her a bird that’s fallen out of a nest and she just shrivels. But when she’s decided to do something she thinks is right . . .’

‘All the Pfaffensteins are pig-headed,’ said the Swan Princess gloomily. ‘It’s the blood of Charlemagne.’

‘I’ll try again tonight,’ promised Maxi. ‘There’s a lieder recital after dinner,’ he added, a look of misery passing over his kind, long face. ‘I’ll go to that.’ It was the ultimate sacrifice, but he would make it.

‘Well, make sure you do, Maximilian. Just make sure you do,’ said the Swan Princess, and she stabbed her cane at the fig tree, which unaccountably continued to be covered in fruit.

‘Ah, the nature, how she is beautiful!’ cried Raisa, crashing barefoot across a flower-studded alm behind the castle. Attired in a Central European sack massively embroidered in cross-stitch, her piggy eyes glowed with well-being and her vast, freckled arms, thrown out in Rumanian ecstacy, narrowly missed Pino Mastrini’s butterfly-net as the little tenor, his thighs bulging like delicious Parma hams beneath his linen shorts, pursued a Camberwell Beauty.

Never had Witzler’s troupe been so happy, so cared-for and so well-fed, as in these last few days at Pfaffenstein. The beauty of the castle, the sunshine, the endless supply of delicious food brought forth a steady chorus of praise. Some of the lower-paid members of the company still experienced, in Vienna, real poverty and hardship. Now there was a surfeit and release. With The Mother growing sleek and fat on a window-sill in the dairy, Boris, his longevity assured, was taking yodelling lessons from one of the grooms. Bubi, who now slept in the room next to Tessa with her old nurse, paid monseigneurial visits to his parents and could be seen, his blond curls just clearing the feathered grass-heads, being taught the names of the flowers by the country-bred Rhinemaiden. And on the battlements, leaning against the railings on which thirty of his countrymen had been impaled, Klasky composed his opera.

It was as well that the company was in such a state of contentment because Jacob, in rehearsals, was really going a little mad. The discovery that Tessa was safe, her dramatic return, had seemed to Witzler yet another sign from heaven. There was nothing now to prevent this from being the performance of a lifetime. Again and again he hounded the principals back into the theatre to go over parts they believed note perfect; again and again he repeated scene changes, altered little bits of business; again and again he demanded another ounce, another effort.

‘You want to eat?’ he could be heard yelling at the unfortunate coloratura, the sheep-like hausfrau he had kidnapped from Dresden. ‘Sleep? What do you want to sleep for?’ he demanded, at two in the morning, of the venerable bass who sang Sarastro. And in a voice of outrage to a member of the chorus, ‘The lavatory! In the middle of Isis and Osiris you want to go to the lavatory!’