Herr Farne, beside his lovely widow, seemed as everyone noted to be in particularly high spirits. Presently he rose to make a speech: witty, brilliant, of exactly the right length. He announced the date of his own wedding, at the end of October, thanked all those present for the pleasure of their company and with a gallant bow raised his glass to the health and happiness of ‘Absent Friends’.
‘Absent Friends!’ cried the guests, following suit, raising their glasses with meaningful glances and nudges at the two empty places on the long centre table with its priceless epergne, fluted napery and bowls of roses. For both the Prince of Spittau and the Princess of Pfaffenstein were absent from their usual places, a circumstance which the guests found both delightful and amusing.
‘Do you remember,’ whispered the Count of Winterthur to his portly wife, ‘how we crept away after we were engaged? Your Papa tried to find us but we were hiding away in the orangery?’
‘They’ll be in the woods somewhere, hand in hand,’ cooed the Archduchess Frederica, in a good mood for once.
Here she was partly correct. Maxi was in the woods, but not with Tessa. It was the Littlest Heidi who was cradled in his arms, the Littlest Heidi who soothed his hurt and promised to keep secret the news of his rejection until the guests had left and everyone was home again.
‘It’s the fuss,’ said the weary prince. ‘I just can’t face the fuss.’
‘I understand, Your Highness,’ said Heidi and did indeed keep her promise. And when she had comforted him in the only way she knew (and there is certainly no better) they spoke not of the future but of Tom Mix and Buck Jones and the incomparable Pearl White in The Perils of Pauline and Maxi, stroking the golden curls, was comforted and soothed.
For Tessa the way was harder. She had waited until everybody was at dinner before slipping into the deserted chapel, and now knelt at the altar rail with her head in her hands. In the light of the candles, the church sang with gold: gold on the haloes of the saints, gold on the ceiling, on the chalices and goblets on the altar. Gold soaring and swirling on the pillars, on the family crests decorating the pew ends, on the Virgin’s mantle, as though in the darkness someone was giving a great party for God.
‘Help me to bear it,’ prayed Tessa. With her shorn head, her smock, she might have been a lone shepherd boy come down from the hills. ‘Help me not to make a fuss. Help me not to let anyone see how I feel. Help me just to work hard — to work and to work and not to ask anything else. And please, God, keep them safe here, all of them.’
She rose and fetched three votive candles from the box. Carefully, she lit them and placed them in their holders. One for the aunts she was leaving and whom she loved. One for the people she had cared for here. And one other, the tallest, which she did not offer up even in her mind, knowing that God would understand.
There was nothing left to do now except pack a small bag, leave a note in her room and make her way to the station. There was a last train which stopped at Pfaffenstein Halt before crawling on to Neustadt. She would catch that and wait there for the milk train to Vienna. Nothing mattered now except to get away.
Thus Guy, waking next morning with a heavy head, looked out of the window at the gatehouse tower and frowned. What was it that was different? Of course — the bright flag, with its griffin, its lily, its crimson glove, was gone.
14
Guy’s guests departed with considerable reluctance. The Uhlan captain left his spare leg, in striped socks and regimental boots, leaning against the Bühl commode in his room until the last moment, as though in hope of a reprieve from banishment to his leaking hunting lodge in Styria. The Countess Waaltraut snuffled her way, with many a backwards glance, towards the embossed automobile into which her mother’s Bath chair was being lifted. The Archduke Sava thanked Guy, with tears in his eyes, for saving his bear, and promised him the best wolf-hunting in Archangelskaya as soon as the Bolsheviks had been deposed.
But at last they left; the castle fell silent, for the opera company too had gone and the aunts kept to the West Tower.
To Guy, the departure of his guests was nothing but a relief and he made no secret of it to David as he thanked his young secretary for what he had done.
‘You were a Trojan, David. Everything went off splendidly. Even the Archduchess Frederica was kind enough to tell me that she had enjoyed herself.’
David smiled. ‘Yes, it seems to have gone off all right. And—’ he looked sideways at his employer, ‘Mrs Hurlingham was happy? It all worked out, didn’t it?’
‘Yes. It worked out exactly as I had anticipated,’ said Guy, looking with total absorption at a buzzard wheeling above the chapel roof. ‘I’m off to Vienna on Monday; I’ve managed to persuade those lazy brutes from the Treasury to cut short their holiday and do some work, and I want to have the documents ready for the League by the end of September. I shall want you to come with me — there are enough people here to look after things and I’m not wasting you on any more of this domestic stuff. I’ve a few ideas about the Metallic Mining Consortium in Bayern, but we shall have to move fast if we’re to get ahead of those Armenian twisters…’
He put his arm round the young man’s shoulders and led him away, his voice carrying the familiar adventuring note as he anticipated the battles to come and David listened, immensely relieved. He had not relished the idea of staying behind to see to the wedding.
‘It’s good to be alone, isn’t it?’ said Guy to his fiancée that evening. ‘I hardly had a chance to talk to you while all those people were around.’
‘Yes. Yes, it’s lovely. Only, Guy, if you’re really off to Vienna next week, what am I going to do? I shall be awfully bored without you.’
She smiled caressingly at him, but Guy’s face as he looked at her expressed only amazement. That one could be bored in a three-hundred-room castle, surrounded by forests and mountains, beside a lake full of boats, with a stable full of horses and a vast library, had simply not occurred to him.
‘I thought you might like to get to know the tenants and learn the ropes generally. Visit the local people, perhaps? There’s a list in the factor’s office. And I imagined you’d want to make some arrangements for the wedding.’
‘Yes, I’ll do that, certainly. But visiting… I don’t know, Guy, I don’t think they really expect it any more. And it would be a bit silly to go into one of those stuffy little houses and risk picking up an infection. No, what I thought was, why don’t I come with you to Vienna? Mummy and Aunt Dorothy and the others won’t be coming for a while. I could stay at the Grand again with Arthur, it would be perfectly correct.’
‘Well, of course, I would be delighted. But what will you do while I’m working? I’m liable to put in a twelve-hour day.’
‘Shop!’ she said.
The following week, therefore, saw Nerine installed in the Grand Hotel and shopping for her trousseau. ‘I won’t waste your money, Guy,’ she had assured him. ‘You’ll see. You’ll be so proud of me!’ And Guy had smiled and said he was proud of her already and, more importantly, had opened accounts for her in all the better shops.
To the pursuit of her favourite activity, Nerine brought a dedication that was truly impressive. As Ithaca to the wandering Ulysses or Mecca to the Faithful, so were the fitting-rooms of couture houses — with their marvellously reliable supply of full-length mirrors — to Nerine. While shopping she was patient, dedicated, devout. Standing in lace cami-knickers did not chill her, nor did she become overheated when swathed in furs. The distractions that troubled lesser ladies as they stood captive in cubicles — the thought that outside the birds were singing, the glorious summer day passing unseen — never troubled Nerine nor forced her into a hasty choice.