43

Villa von Düchtel

1906

Taking the stack of papers with us, Colin and I headed back toward the study, detouring first to telephone the police. The snow had stopped overnight and the sun had been shining all morning. The roads were bound to be passable soon, if they weren’t already.

“You two look rather serious,” Ursula said when we entered the room. “We’re having quite a laugh over the Furies. I think I may keep them after all.”

“You admitted to me that you have some skill as a sculptor, didn’t you?” I asked.

“Yes, when Cécile told you I’d studied at the academy in Munich.”

“Yet the talent didn’t pass on to your daughter,” I said.

“My daughter? Good heavens, no, but then Sigrid never had any interest in art. I hired a drawing master for her when she was twelve, but he told me she was hopeless before the end of the first day and refused to return to the house.”

“I didn’t mean Sigrid,” I said, “rather your other daughter, Liesel.”

“Liesel?” She balked, but her face turned a dark shade of red. “You’re very confused, Emily, if you think that—”

Liesel shot toward the door, but Colin stepped in front of her, took her by the shoulders, and brought her back to us. “Don’t try it again,” he said. “I’ll physically restrain you if necessary.”

“It’s not necessary,” Liesel said, taking a seat. She clasped her hands in her lap and focused her eyes on the floor in front of her feet.

“Do you remember this document?” I asked, passing Ursula the first of the papers I’d found behind the painting.

“Good heavens.” She was trembling. “I never thought I’d see this again. I—” She looked at Liesel. “Are you really her?”

“The child you abandoned? I always have been, since the day of my birth in Paris.”

“I’m overwhelmed.” Ursula dropped onto a chair. “Not a day has gone by that I haven’t wondered what happened to you. I knew your father would take care of you, but to have had no details, for all these decades, was a tremendous source of … well, it would’ve been worse for you than me. Is Hugo…” Her voice trailed and she swallowed, hard.

“My father?” Liesel asked. “He’s dead.”

Ursula closed her eyes. “It was too much to hope.”

“Too much to hope? Too much to hope?” Liesel’s voice reached a painful pitch. “What did you think? That he was still in love with you? Carrying a flame for you all these years? That he was waiting for you in Paris?”

“Arrêtez, both of you,” Cécile said. “Start at the beginning. You cannot open the book of someone’s life in the middle and expect it to make sense.”

“She’s the only one who can tell it from the start.” Liesel spat the words.

“That’s correct.” Ursula sighed and looked at Cécile, rather than her daughter, as she spoke. “You know I was unhappy as a young woman.”

“Oui, the story is infamous. Your mother took you to Paris, where your senses were lit on fire, but your father insisted you return to Munich and forced you to marry a man you did not know.”

“That’s all true, but it’s not complete. After I started collecting art, I met a sculptor from Mainz called Hugo Kratzl. He’d come to Munich to exhibit some of his work in a gallery I knew well. His talent was—”

“Mediocre at best,” Liesel said.

“Yes, that is true,” Ursula said, “but everything else about him was magnificent. He was intelligent and curious and handsome and I fell in love with him before I’d known him for five minutes. Most of my friends were passionate about the idea of a bohemian lifestyle, but I was the only one of us daring enough to adopt it. Hugo and I became lovers and before long, I found myself with child.”

“Hardly surprising,” Liesel said.

“No, it shouldn’t have been, but in those days, such things weren’t discussed. I had a vague notion of how it all worked, but no knowledge of the specifics. I knew I was doing something I shouldn’t, but it never occurred to me what might come next. My naïveté was painful. Hugo wanted to marry me, and I was prepared to run away with him. I would’ve given anything up for him.”

“Yet you chose not to,” Liesel said. There was anger in her voice, but an equal measure of pain.

“We made plans to elope. He needed to go back to Mainz and I was to accompany him. We’d be married there and raise our family. When the night came that we were to go, I slipped out of my bedroom with only a small valise containing some clothes and the few pieces of jewelry I owned. It was nothing valuable, all that belonged to the family and was in my mother’s possession, but it would bring us some money. By then, I was so enamored with Hugo, I was convinced we could live on the proceeds of his art.”

“The stupidity is astonishing,” Liesel said.

“Yes, it is, but it’s also beautiful to love someone so much you have infinite faith in him,” Ursula said.

“You never got to Mainz,” Cécile said.

“No, I didn’t. My father was waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs. My maid, whom I’d foolishly believed to be my confidante, had told him of my plans. He ordered Hugo away, making it clear he would never see me again. I was desperate, furious, and terrified, but Hugo had the presence of mind to remain calm. He agreed to leave and to make no fuss, but only if my father would let him have the baby after it was born. My mother came down when she heard the commotion—my father hadn’t bothered to tell her what was happening—and when she heard the whole story, agreed that Hugo should raise the child. It would be immoral, she argued, to keep an infant from his father. Neither of them had the slightest concern for its mother.

“They concocted a plan,” she continued. “My mother would notify Hugo when the child was born and tell him where to come to collect it. My father wanted me to spend my confinement in the French countryside, where his sister lived, but my mother objected. She didn’t want anyone else to know what I’d done. My reputation—and that of the family—would be destroyed. So instead, she insisted on Paris. It’s far easier to be anonymous in a large city. Once we arrived there, I wasn’t permitted to leave the rooms we’d rented. I was being punished, after all.

“When my labor started, a midwife tended to me, and took the baby away as soon as she was born.” She looked at Liesel. “I wasn’t even allowed to see you.”

“Why should you have been? I was obviously of no value to you.”

“I understand why you feel like that, but at the time, I had no power over my own life. Had the elopement succeeded, things would’ve been different; but because it didn’t, there was nothing I could do. I’d already taken the only action I could to try to protect you.”

“This letter,” I said, holding it up.

“Yes.” Ursula’s eyes swam with tears. “Hugo agreed to my parents’ stipulations that he would raise the child without me and never tell her who I was. She’d never know my name and I would never know hers. I wanted him to have some sort of insurance, something to guarantee that if he died before she was grown, she wouldn’t be left a penniless orphan.”

“So by then you’d abandoned your faith in him and decided he’d never be able to support himself through the sales of his art?” Liesel asked.

“By then, I only cared about providing for you should it become necessary.”

“Necessary. How generous of you. How magnanimous. My sister grew up in luxury while I shivered in an attic apartment; but because I wasn’t a penniless orphan, that was all right.”

“I wish I’d had a way to do more,” Ursula said. “A few days before you were born, when my mother had gone out for the afternoon, I wrote that letter, explicitly stating that I was your mother and that you were being remanded into the care of your father. I convinced the maid who worked for us to summon a notary so that the document would be official. If you ever needed to prove your identity, it would be possible.”

“But you didn’t know the baby’s name,” I said.

“The notary assured me that the detail I provided, along with a birth certificate, which her father would have, would be enough.”

“That’s here as well.” I pulled it out from the papers. “Liesel Kratzl was born at 4:32 p.m. at her grandmother’s residence … Hugo Kratzl and Ursula von Düchtel are listed as the parents. It’s signed by Hugo and the mayor of the arrondissement. I thought von Düchtel was your married name?”

“A friend—a sculptor—who refused to take her husband’s name inspired me to return to the identity I was born with,” Ursula said. “I made the switch before Sigrid was born, so she never found it unusual.”

“How considerate.” Liesel crossed her arms. “My father changed his name as well, to Fronberg, because your parents insisted on it so you would have a harder time should you ever try to find him.”

“I cannot adequately apologize for having given you up,” Ursula said. “I honestly saw no other way forward. I had neither money nor power.”

“You could’ve tried to find my father.”

“I did. Less than a week after your birth, my mother and I were summoned back to Munich, where my father announced that I would be married a few days later. The match was a disaster, but it made it possible for me to write to your father. I sent scores of letters to Mainz. Hugo never answered any of them. After my father-in-law died and my husband was focused on his own interests, I went to Mainz to look for Hugo. His friends told me he’d married and gone to New York. This broke my heart, but I could hardly blame him.”

“They were lying,” Liesel said. “He went to Berlin, where he did marry, so that I’d have a mother.”

“The letters are here, Ursula,” I said, holding the envelope. “They were tied together with twine and on top is a note signed by Hugo, explaining that he had his landlady in Mainz forward everything to him. She promised she would never provide the address to anyone who inquired after it.”

“He had loyal friends,” Ursula said.

“He wrote that he saved them for Liesel so that she’d know you loved her, tried to make contact, and always wanted the best for her,” I said.

“Yes, wasn’t that sweet?” Liesel smirked. “Do you feel absolved now?”

“I’ll never feel absolved,” Ursula said. “I don’t deserve your forgiveness. But Sigrid … what did she ever do to you? I can understand you wanting me dead, but her?”

“The day before my father died, when he knew the end wasn’t far off, he told me that, once he was gone, I would find something important inside a sculpture of his,” Liesel said. “It was one of his favorite pieces, a stylized bust of a woman. I’d always assumed it was my mother. My real mother, that is, not you.”

“I would never suggest I have a right to that title,” Ursula said.

“I’d also always assumed it was made from stone, but I’d never picked it up until the morning after his death. He kept it on a high shelf in his studio. It was apparent at once that it was hollow and made from plaster. There was no way to open it except by breaking it, so I did. Inside was everything you found today, Lady Emily. My birth certificate, the letters the baroness wrote to my father, her notarized letter, and a thick stack of correspondence between the two of them from before he was forced to leave Munich.”

“After my father ordered Hugo away, I sent the ones he’d written to me back to him in Mainz,” Ursula said. “I knew my parents would search my room—which they did—and I didn’t want them destroyed.”

“He organized them in chronological order,” Liesel said. “It disgusted me, finding them, because when I saw how carefully he’d kept them, I knew then that he’d never really loved the woman I thought was my mother. It was always you. You’ve robbed me of what I believed was a happy childhood. All of it was a lie.”

“I’m sorry, so very sorry—”

“I’m not interested in your worthless apologies,” Liesel said. “If you hadn’t been confronted by any of this, you never would’ve thought about it again. I was furious for a while, but then I calmed down. I recognized your name. You’ve a stellar reputation among art dealers. I knew you were wealthy and I soon discovered that you had another daughter. I’ve always lived with uncertainty. There’s never enough money. My gallery is successful, relatively speaking, but there are many months each year where I’m hard-pressed to cover my expenses. My childhood had been much the same, and I was tired of it. Tired of scrimping and saving. Tired of having the dull ache of constant worry in the back of my mind.”

“If you’d asked me, I would’ve—”

“Yes, you would’ve given me an allowance,” Liesel said. “You owe me more than that, much more, and I didn’t want a relationship with you, the woman who abandoned me. I have heard of the English game of cricket and understand some call it the long game. Is that correct?”

“It can run extremely long,” Colin said.

“I decided I could play a long game,” Liesel continued. “As your daughter, I have a legal right to my inheritance. While I bore no particular grudge against my sister, I had no affection for her. So far as I’m concerned, she’s already had her share of your fortune, and she stood between me and the rest. Once she started talking about the sleigh ride, I knew it would provide me the opportunity I needed. That day, I skied to a spot the sleigh would pass, switched my boots for a pair of Kaspar’s that I’d taken from his room, so no one would notice a second set of footprints, climbed a tree, and waited. I’m an excellent shot and an excellent skier, so getting it done was no trouble at all. I dropped the gun so that I couldn’t be found with it. With Sigrid gone, I would be the baroness’s sole remaining heir.” She turned to Ursula. “After you died, I would come forward, prove my identity, and collect my birthright. I was very careful to check the details of all the pertinent laws. Your fortune would be mine.”

The coldness in her voice was terrifying. There was no hint of remorse or regret or even a desire that things might have been different.

“I took tea to your room,” I said, “and saw you sleeping.”

“When I traveled here, I brought with me a wax bust and a wig that matched my hair color,” she said. “The drapes were closed. With the room dark and a mountain of blankets, it was simple to create the illusion that I was in bed. When I returned to the house, I went back upstairs and slipped into my room, careful to avoid running into anyone, and melted the wax over my fire in a pot I’d taken from the kitchen in the middle of the night. I’d crafted a wooden mold of the Erinyes—a fitting choice, don’t you think?—and poured the wax into it. When it was hard, I removed it and burned the mold and the wig.”

“You didn’t notice that the ring fell off the pot,” Colin said.

“No, I didn’t, but was aware that after burning so much, something might be noticed in my fireplace, so I tossed a few things in and near the rest of them, so anything in mine wouldn’t stand out.”

“I expect you would’ve killed me next?” Ursula asked.

“Oh, no, I can be patient. Violence is only justified when it’s necessary. I could tolerate the anxiety around my financial state so long as I knew it would eventually come to an end. I’m not evil, after all.”

“Why the attacks on Kaspar?” I asked.

“To make everyone think he was the target,” she said. “Then, when Sigrid died, you’d all start to wonder if the clumsy attempts against him were meant to cover up the fact that he wanted his wife dead. Spouses are usually the guilty parties in these sorts of cases, I understand. Frankly, I’m shocked anyone looked further than that.”

“The police likely wouldn’t have,” Colin said. “You’d have stood by and let him hang?”

Liesel shrugged. “I’m not accountable if the courts find an innocent man guilty in the absence of physical evidence. His death would be on their hands.” Her coldness was astonishing.

“Why did you hide the papers behind the painting of Cécile?”

“I wanted them found in Ursula’s possession,” Liesel said. “After her death, if they weren’t discovered in the natural course of things, I would’ve arranged for them to be. I could have offered to value the collection or make a new inventory or something of the sort. I’d have brought in other curators as well and made sure one of them dealt with the Klimt. Then, when it all came out, I’d be overwhelmed with emotion and point out what would seem obvious: that the baroness had brought me here in the first place because she knew who I was and wanted to get to know me. No one would ever remember that it was I who asked a dealer friend in Paris to tell the Baroness von Düchtel about my gallery in Berlin. It all worked a charm.”

“Did it?” I asked, cocking my head. “A woman is dead and you’ll be hanged for her murder.”

“Not here, I won’t,” Liesel said. “Germany abandoned hanging centuries ago. It will be the axe for me. Perhaps I’ll emulate Anne Boleyn and ask for a French swordsman instead. It would be much more elegant.”