No wonder, thought Martha; no wonder Guy had gone off his head when he lost her! No wonder he had waited ten years until he met up with her again!
‘Welcome to Pfaffenstein, Mrs Hodge,’ said Nerine. ‘I trust your journey was not too exhausting?’
She spoke clearly, articulating her words with care to make sure that the homely woman with the sandy hair understood what she said, and extended her hand. Martha, who had meant to kiss her, shook it.
‘Why, no, lass,’ she said comfortably, ‘the journey was nowt. And I’d a done it on me ’ands and knees to see Guy wed.’
Nerine replied suitably, but her eyes were anxious. The woman’s appearance was less dreadful than Nerine had expected. She was quietly dressed and her manner was neither obsequious nor impertinent. But the accent! A Scottish accent — especially a Highland one — could be passed off; an Irish one, too. But this… Here in Austria it might not matter much, but after all Pfaffenstein was a temporary measure. In the end, Guy must buy her a suitable place in England and if he then insisted on having Mrs Hodge around… And in less than a fortnight, her relatives were arriving. What would Mama think if she had to sit next to a woman whose speech made their lowest servants sound educated? And more important even than Mama, Aunt Dorothy!
But there was nothing to be done at the moment, with Guy standing there smiling that slightly mocking smile of his and watching her. They went in to dinner and she made no demur when Martha was seated at Guy’s left hand, nor was she surprised when young David Tremayne (though he had been at Eton) began at once to make a great fuss of the woman. Young Tremayne would do anything to get on the right side of Guy.
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.