11

Drozde began to think that this might not be such a bad billet for the winter. The puppet show had made a good profit, and Molebacher seemed pleased when she turned over the coins. She’d go into town tomorrow, get some supplies and, just as importantly, start talking to people. With luck the village would turn out to be a rich source of stories for future performances.

For now she was free. Molebacher planned to drink with the sergeants again tonight and had dismissed her to her own devices. She had some idea of spending the night in the camp: the other women would certainly be happy to see her and talk over the show. But it had started to rain heavily, as it had the night before, and the tents outside looked bleak and uninviting under the louring sky. Almost without intending it, Drozde found she was heading towards the old ballroom where she had met the ghosts on that first night, as if they might still be there. It would be stupid to expect such a thing, of course. These spirits did not stay put like most, and she had seen them in other places since. But even before she turned into the side passage, she felt a light pressure against her hand, and looked down to see the little girl, Magda.

“It was a funny show,” the child said. “We all liked it a lot.”

“I didn’t see you there,” Drozde said, somewhat startled. “We stand at the side,” explained Magda. She beamed at Drozde. “But I’ll sit right out in front next time, because you said that.”

When Drozde opened the door of the room, the ghosts were waiting. They clustered around her, murmuring their congratulations on her performance. Several even touched her arm as she passed in a kind of greeting. Drozde was expecting their welcome this time around, and so she was ready for it. She did not flinch at their proximity, nor draw back from the feather-light contacts. The unease that she had felt so strongly before was fading now. She knew that the ghosts respected her, though she couldn’t work out why, and it felt somehow churlish to snub the open and ingenuous goodwill that she saw in their faces. Still, there was a lingering sense of wrongness to all of this, a strangeness that set her on her guard. And in spite of their frank welcome, she knew that there must be things the ghosts were keeping from her. She noticed that a few of them—maybe only one or two—held back from the press, even turned away as she came in. But their shyness was no more accountable than the friendliness of their fellows.

She had no way of making them explain these puzzles—ghosts were immune to bribes and threats alike. But perhaps, if she was patient, they might give her the answers she wanted without her having to ask.

“Can we have another story?” Magda asked, while the ghosts were still milling around her. The talk stopped abruptly, and faces turned to Drozde in expectation. Magda put a wheedle into her voice. “You’ve got some time now. Pleeease, Drozde?”

Drozde shrugged. “If you like,” she agreed, and rolled up her shawl so she could sit comfortably on the floor, leaning against the rail of the old orchestra stand. Many of the ghosts copied her. As Magda had done on the first night when she climbed the stairs, they acted for all the world as if they had substance, as if walls and floor were real to them. A young man stretched out long legs with an audible sigh of pleasure; an older one hooked one arm over the rail. This all seemed a perverse pantomime to Drozde, but if this mimicry made them happy, she thought, then why not? She had to admit that the ones closest to her really did look comfortable—and remarkably solid, as they had the day before.

“Well?” Drozde asked. “Whose story shall we hear?” She addressed the room at large, but Magda darted forward before anyone else could speak.

“Thea!” she commanded. “Tell Drozde what happened in the house when you lived here. I like that one!”

The ghosts parted, and a little knot of women came forward, their wide skirts interweaving with each other. They were severely dressed, with high collars and hair pulled back, but their expressions were eager. One of them, taller than the rest, took a further step towards Drozde, and in doing so came into sharper focus. She looked around the room as if assuring herself of her audience, and as she began to speak, Drozde saw the lines in her face, her grey eyes and shy smile.

“I was born in this house,” the woman said, “the only daughter of the family, and in my own mind the only child.”

My brother Franz-Augustus was eight years older than me: I only saw him when he came back from school at Christmas, when he already seemed like a man. Our family was rich, though I had no way of judging that we were different from anyone else. One of my earliest memories is of sitting with my mother, looking at engravings of furniture. She pointed out a curly box with legs, which she said was a pianoforte, a musical instrument. She showed it to my father, and three days later a pianoforte was delivered to our house, all the way from Leipzig. It took two men to carry it in. I was much older before I knew that this was at all unusual.

I grew up against a background of war, in a family that had made war their living. Our grandfather was the distinguished general Gebhard von Schildauer. My mother told me once that the “von” in his name, and the house itself, had been rewards for his service in the wars against the French. So of course my father was a soldier too, a major in the 6th Regiment, and my brother would be a soldier in his turn. But for me, as a girl, the surname meant very little. My mother called me Dorothea, and so did my brother, when he was home. I don’t remember my father calling me anything but “child,” or sometimes, when he was in a very good mood, “little lady.” But he did not talk to me often: he was not comfortable with children. He must already have been over fifty when I knew him, and he was away a good deal with his regiment, leaving my mother to manage the house, which she did well. I was raised mostly by my nurse, and then by my governess, both of them women of spotless reputation and strict principles. They taught me to revere God, the empire and my parents, to uphold my family’s honour, do my duty and tell the truth. Since then, I think I have broken all those commands.

I was a solitary child, but not discontented. The house was full of books that no one else ever read; I could wander where I liked, and make up my own stories to keep me company. And twice every week I had another companion. In the village nearest the house, which was called Puppendorf, there lived a glassblower who was famed locally for his skill. In the early days of my childhood, when my father came home from fighting the Danish, my parents used to entertain guests in the house. The servants were clumsy, so there was always a need for glassware. When I was about seven, the glassblower’s daughter came to the house with my mother’s latest order: six wine glasses, packed in a basket of straw as if they were eggs. My mother saw the girl pick them out and set each one on the kitchen dresser, noted how delicate-handed she was, and engaged her to come in on Mondays and Thursdays to clean the china. So I met Cilie.

She was a revelation to me. She was a year and a half older than me, but looked younger. She laughed readily, and cried to see a mouse die; her hair was always escaping from her cap, and she never stopped talking. Her given name, Cecilia, was too long for her taste, and so was mine, so when I was with her I became Thea. If my mother or the housekeeper was by, to be sure, she kept her eyes down and hid her smiles and called me Fräulein as a respectful servant should. But in the afternoons my mother took a nap, and Cilie was left alone in the little storeroom with her cloths and spirits of vinegar. At first I just slipped in and talked to her. Later I started doing half her work, to give us time when we could play together outside. The grounds were wide in those days, with many trees, and if we stayed in the orchard no one could see us.

Through Cilie’s stories I learned about the lives of her friends in Puppendorf: Sanne, who minded her little brother and sister while her mother was at our house doing the laundry; Jens the baker’s son, who rose at five every morning to help his father, and Irmal, who sewed clothes with her mother every day until the sun set. I had not realised before that other children, the same age as me, had to spend their days working. It troubled me. I had never before questioned the world or my place in it. But now it seemed wrong that Cilie, who was so clever, and so pretty with her black curls and dark eyes, had never been taught to read, and had only two dresses. She willingly learned her alphabet from me, but when I tried to give her a dress I had outgrown, which would have fitted her well, Cilie shook her head.

“They’d laugh at me at home if I wore something so fine,” she said. “Or else think I stole it, and have me whipped.” That thought appalled me so much that I never suggested such a thing again.

My mother valued Cilie’s work and gave her more to do, until she became a part of the household. But all too soon I lost her as a playmate. My mother fell ill with a nervous complaint which confined her to bed; I was needed to sit and read to her every day when my lessons were over, and had no more leisure to wander around the house. Then my father left us to visit my brother, who was about to leave school and join the regiment. We had no one whom my father trusted to manage the house while my mother was sick, and after a struggle with himself he invited his cousin Gottfried and his wife from Westphalia to stay with us.

This Gottfried was my father’s nearest relative: a big, red-faced man and a soldier, like all the men in the family. His father had been a brother of our famous grandfather Gebhard. He had a great regard for family honour and tradition, and he looked around our house with awe, as if every wall and piece of furniture was a sacred relic. My father disliked him, considering him an upstart from an inferior branch of the family who had no right to affect the full name of von Schildauer. But his wife, Eugenie, was young and fashionable, and my father hoped she would be a welcome companion for my mother while he was away.

My mother, though, did not take to her. Eugenie had a view about everything, and began her stay in our house by taking my mother’s physician to task about her diet and medicine, and instructing her to exercise every day. When my mother pleaded exhaustion, she turned her attention to me. She put my hair into curl papers and tried to teach me French. I had sometimes been able to enjoy a few minutes’ talk with Cilie when she brought my mother her medicine, which she was trusted to mix herself. But cousin Eugenie, seeing us together, scolded me for time-wasting, and after that made a point of watching the preparation every day, whether because she doubted Cilie’s competence or to prevent us talking, I could not say. She had a sharp nose for any activity of which she disapproved, and sharp eyes which seemed able to seek me out wherever I was.

I had hoped that Gottfried might take up some of her attention, but while my father was away our cousin spent most of his time hunting or fishing in the woods around the house. He was an excellent shot, and the cook was kept perpetually busy preparing the grouse and hares he brought back. I was allowed to take my supper with my mother in her room, but one night, bringing our plates down early to save the maid the trouble, I overheard the two of them at the table.

“. . . could live here very happily,” Gottfried was saying.

“But the child has been sorely neglected,” Eugenie complained. “She has had hardly any education and is far too familiar with the servants. It would be a sad task to take her in hand as she requires.”

“I’m sure you are equal to it, my dear,” Gottfried replied with a laugh.

I must have learned discretion from Cilie, for I got by the doorway and into the kitchen without them noticing me. I used the back staircase to escape to my room, where I stayed awake until morning, praying that my mother might not die.

Perhaps God heard my prayer, for only a few days later we received news that Franz-Augustus was fairly settled with the regiment and my father was returning home. I greeted him with more joy than I ever remember feeling in his presence, and my mother gained heart enough to rise from her bed for the first time in weeks. Shortly afterwards our cousins returned to their home in Westphalia. But they had taught me a useful lesson: how quickly my home might become my prison. I began to look around for some means of escape, and the day after my cousins departed I went to my father and asked if I might be allowed to learn to ride.

I owed this idea to cousin Eugenie herself, who had proposed it as one of the measures needed for my improvement. Before she left she had said as much to my father, and now he agreed that I looked pale and had been too much indoors: a little healthy exercise would be good for me.

I did not enjoy the learning. It was hard to balance on a sidesaddle, and the pony my father found for me was a stubborn little beast. But I persevered until I could canter around the park. In a few months I was allowed to ride through the woods or into the village, with Cilie behind me on a donkey as chaperone.

I had been to Puppendorf before, of course: we attended church there at harvest, Christmas and Easter. But then we always travelled by carriage, and apart from the responses in church and some how-do-ye-dos, I hardly needed to speak to anyone. Now I had to give an account of myself. Cilie’s friends, when I met them, were clearly as curious about me as I was about them. They were cautious at first: over-respectful to the young lady from the great house. I was shy and awkward, fearful with every word of revealing my ignorance. Their homes seemed dreadfully cramped to me. I did not know where to sit, or what to do if I was offered food. But as the weeks went on, we grew accustomed to each other. Sanne sold me cherries, and showed me how to pick the best ones. Casper, at the forge, gave me advice on how to manage my wilful pony.

And at last I saw Cilie’s home, and her father, whom I had never met. He was Bruno Mander, a wiry little man with a famously short temper, though I never once heard him shout at Cilie. Her mother had died when she was small, and she was his treasure. He was invariably mild-mannered with me as well, most likely out of respect for the great house. Maybe, too, he was flattered by the interest I took in his work, which seemed miraculous to me. The workshop behind their house had been set up by his great-grandfather and great-great-uncles, and he still kept some greenish jars and bowls from that time, which he called forest glass. At one time, he said, his family had employed as many as ten men from the village; now it was just two. When the furnace was stoked, the heat in the workshop was overwhelming, but the three men, with their shirts open to the waist, walked through it unconcernedly, holding between their paddles, or on the ends of tubes, little globes of pure light. I never tired of watching them blow a shining bead into a balloon, twisting handles or stem with fine pincers until the shape was a recognisable object—but luminous, transformed.

These were years of contentment. I was growing up a sad disappointment to my mother: tall and gawky, with hair that would not curl and no aptitude for either embroidery or the pianoforte. But Cilie was as beautiful as ever, and as she grew more useful to my mother she came to the house more often. When I was thirteen, she became my maid, which meant that she had a new suit of clothes and two marks more each month from my mother, and I was able to see her every day. She was walking out with Jens the baker’s son by then, and putting away money for a wedding some time in the future, but we did not think much about the future in those days. I was newly released from my governess, and allowed more freedom than I had ever known. Every morning I would read with Cilie, and almost every afternoon, while my mother slept, we would ride to Puppendorf together. I was at peace, and had forgotten that peace does not last.

The next war was already growing in the north, and it sent its upheavals ahead of it. When my father was next at home, I heard him telling my mother that his regiment would be moved before long: the Danes were once again laying claim to Schleswig and there must soon be fighting. Then a decree came that all single men below forty-five were to be conscripted. For once I heard this news before my mother did: the village was in a panic about it. And Cilie and Jens called the banns for their marriage the next Sunday.

Cilie wept to be parted from me, and I shed tears myself, but we both knew they had done wisely. When the recruiting men came round later that year, Cilie was already pregnant with their first child, and Jens was spared for a time for her sake as they had hoped he would be. But Casper, and Henek, and some thirty others, were marched away for three years of service.

Puppendorf became a different place. Without the young men’s labour, roofs went unmended and drainage ditches choked. It took frantic effort to cut, bind and safely store the crops before the rains set in. The following year the harvest was poor, and the year after that. People’s clothes began to get ragged. No one turned down my old dresses now: they took them with thanks, and my mother’s too. One dress might make skirts for two children and a jacket for a third. I once saw a girl of no more than eight or nine dressed from an old morning gown of mine, leading a troupe of smaller children, two of them clothed in the same material. After little Katya was born, Cilie looked after the young children of neighbours who now had to do their husbands’ work. And Bruno, who had lost both his helpers, kept his workshop open only with Jens’s help, and had no customers but my mother and me.

So when the formal declaration finally came—it was in winter, more than a year after the men were taken—the war had already started for us in all but name. All that was added was a heavier burden of anxiety. Our family had more luck in one respect than the villagers: my father and brother were given a short leave of absence before the fighting. My father had been made colonel, and he was more animated than I had seen him for some time: proud of his new command and delighted that Franz-Augustus would be in his own regiment. I had not met my brother for two years, and saw him now almost as a stranger, trim and brave in his blue uniform, with a moustache and newly wide shoulders. He kissed me and declared I had not changed, but I thought he looked at me differently too.

I had a chance, after supper that night, to talk to my brother as I never had before. I asked him about his training and his friends, about the causes of the war (which it seemed he understood little better than I did) and about life in the army camp. I did not dare ask him how he felt about the killing that lay ahead of him. I remembered that he had liked sketching when he was younger, and turned the talk to that instead: might he have chosen to become an artist, I said, if he had not been a soldier?

Franz-Augustus seemed puzzled by the question. “This was always my duty,” he said at last. “We don’t choose what we do.”

“It’s not so bad,” he continued, after a pause. “I have good comrades, and we’re well trained. We’ll stand together and fight for each other. In a battle, you know, that’s what keeps men strong.”

He had never been in a battle then. I don’t know who told him that piece of wisdom; I doubt it was my father. I hope it held true for him. A few days later they left together for Schleswig, my father as colonel of the regiment and Franz-Augustus as its newest ensign. And that spring we received a letter from the town of Sonderborg to say that my brother was dead. He had taken part in the storming of a fortress, the letter said, and had been hit by a musket ball. The assault had been a success, and the letter was full of words such as honour, triumph and heroism. It was not from my father.

My mother put the letter away in a drawer. I never saw her look at it again, though sometimes she would shut the door to her room and I heard her crying. She told me that she had begged my father to keep Franz-Augustus away from the worst of the fighting, and he had only said he would do what he could.

That war came to an end with the end of summer, and it was not till then that the wives and mothers in the village had their news. Eight of our men had died in the fighting or from wounds or disease afterwards. Five could no longer fight, and were brought back to us. The others had been sent to the barracks at Liegnitz to serve out the rest of their period of duty.

My father came home only once that autumn, to attend a memorial service in the village church for Franz-Augustus and the others who had died. He left us almost at once, saying that he was needed to oversee the training of the recently conscripted men. I suspected he could not face my mother and me. When he was gone again my mother seldom spoke of him, but left her room and came with me on my visits to Puppendorf, doing what she could to help the other bereaved women there.

The next war, two years later, was with the Austrians, who had been our allies against the Danish. The conscripting officers came round again to find the few men they could pick up: three boys who had been too young last time, and four married men. One of them was Jens. Cilie and I pleaded for him: he had two young children now. But Katya was a big girl of four, and Little Jens was nearly two and already running around. The officers said that Jens must go, that his country needed him. Cilie’s need seemed to weigh nothing in that balance. I wrote to my father, begging him to intervene, but he replied that there was nothing he could do, and that all of us must make sacrifices in times of war. I knew then that he was thinking of his own sacrifice, and that far from waking any fellow feeling in him, Franz-Augustus’s death had hardened him to the plight of others. In any case, by the time his letter arrived, Jens had been signed up and marched away.

He never came home, and nor did my father. The Austrian war was as short-lived as the one before, but it was enough to kill ten more of our men. Jens lost a leg to an artillery shell, we heard later. A surgeon cauterised the wound, but he died the same night. As for my father, we received a letter from the field marshal himself expressing his condolences for his death. His rank and age had made it impossible for him to fight in the front line—he was over seventy—but he had insisted on staying with his regiment and had died of cholera from an infection then raging in the camp. My mother, when she read the field marshal’s letter, turned very pale, but nodded her head, as if it were news she had long expected.

When the worst has happened, there is a kind of peace. Cilie became my maid again. Without his helpers, her father had been forced to shut up his workshop, so she was supporting him now as well as herself. We found work for two other widows from the village in the kitchen and laundry, and all their children came to the house to play in the sculleries and the garden under the eye of Sanne’s eldest daughter.

We lived half a year like this, in calm if not contentment. And then, one summer morning, a young man presented himself at our gates and begged admission. He was a captain of the 6th named Hildebrand Eckert, handsome in a swaggering way, with great moustaches and a martial air. He said he had been my father’s adjutant, and had been with him at his death. He had letters from him to give us, and begged our pardon for his delay in bringing them.

He handed my mother a slim packet: my father had never been a great writer. Since Herr Eckert showed no inclination to go, she rang for Cilie to bring him a glass of wine, and retired to the parlour to read the letters, taking me with her. When she had finished she was whiter even than when the news arrived of my father’s death. She said only that she thought Herr Eckert might stay with us for a while, and gave me two of the letters to read.

In the first my father described Eckert as a very good fellow: of indifferent birth (as indeed, he said, his own father had been) but a fine soldier and devoted adjutant, who had been a support to him in difficult times. He went on to speak of the man’s exploits in battle. I turned to the second letter. The writing here was shaky, but the words had a fervency to them that I had never heard from him in life. He was ill, he said, and thought he might die. Eckert, whom he called Hildebrand now, nursed him with a son’s tenderness, and declared himself ready to do anything for him. He would ask Hildebrand to give his protection to us, his widow and orphan, should the worst happen. He commended us to God.

I looked up at this point. My mother was reading over my shoulder, her eyes full of tears. “Why should we need protection?” I demanded.

“Dearest Dorothea!” my mother said. It was a remonstration, and I fell silent.

So a guest room was made up, and Herr Eckert came to live with us. He behaved himself well. He was charming and attentive to my mother, and polite to me. At first his presence did not even constrain me much: I was managing most of the household by now, and had developed a routine that kept me out of his way. But I could not avoid seeing him as he wandered around the house. He looked at the walls and furnishings, I thought, rather as my cousin Gottfried had once looked: with admiration and longing; also with a sort of calculation. I never spoke with him except in the presence of my mother or Cilie, but sometimes I thought I saw the same calculation in his face when he looked at me. My mother, though, seemed happier and more at peace than she had been since my brother died, so I made no protest as weeks turned into months, and Herr Eckert remained with us.

I discussed most of my affairs with Cilie, but on the matter of Herr Eckert we said nothing to each other. I think loyalty to my mother kept us both silent, but I felt that Cilie did not like him any better than I did. I had been with her once when Katya and Little Jens, running in the garden, had nearly collided with Eckert as he took his constitutional. Nothing was said, but we both saw his recoil and the curl of his lip as he walked away.

He spent more and more time with my mother. He took over the handling of my father’s business affairs. He read to her and even mixed her medicine. And one afternoon I was startled to hear her call him by his Christian name.

“Dear Hildebrand has already done so much for us,” she said. “I could not continue standing on ceremony.”

And Eckert smiled at me kindly. “I hope I may be allowed to address you as Dorothea,” he said.

He did so from that day; it seemed to me that he made a point of it. For my part I tried to avoid addressing him at all.

My mother’s afternoon naps were becoming longer; often now she would not rise until nearly supper time. I noticed that on some of these occasions Eckert would entertain two guests in the drawing room or walk around the house with them: men of business in sober suits who took notes in books. He was concluding some affairs of my father’s, he explained when I asked him who they were: debts left unpaid at the time of his death. My father had had a horror of debt—it was a rule of his neither to lend nor borrow money—but I did not contradict Eckert; only asked him whether he had told my mother. He flushed a little, and begged me not to trouble her with the matter. I might not be aware, he said, how delicate her health was. The next day he asked me to marry him.

It was not entirely unexpected, and I had my polite refusal already prepared. He received it with equal courtesy, saying only that he hoped, in time, my feelings towards him might change. It felt like the first incursion of a campaign.

He had more guns on his side than I had imagined. That evening my mother took me aside and told me she knew what had passed between us. She said that she gave her consent to the match and begged me not to be cruel to poor Hildebrand. His lack of title did not matter at all. She spoke of my famous grandfather, who had risen from obscurity by his own excellence. She spoke of Hildebrand’s valour in battle, and of his kindness to us. She could not in honesty talk of his passion for me, and she scrupled to point out the obvious—that I was already twenty and plain, and unlikely to find a better suitor. But she feared that if I rejected him he would leave us, and she had come to think of him almost as a second son. I said I did not think he would leave so readily, that his attachment was to the house and grounds, not to me. I told her that he invited speculators to look around the house behind her back. She grew angry with me then, and said that she trusted Hildebrand to manage her affairs: how he went about it was his concern and not mine. She was in tears when I left her.

I went to find Cilie. She was alone, for a wonder, mending the children’s clothes while they played elsewhere. She smiled to see me, but her greeting was polite rather than warm. I thought: We have drifted apart, and the thought made me cold.

“Herr Eckert has proposed marriage to me,” I told her.

She was silent and still for a moment. “And what did you tell him?” she said at last.

“Tell him!” I burst out. “Cilie, what do you think? How could I marry a man like that?”

“Oh, thank God!” Cilie cried, and dropped her sewing to jump up and embrace me.

She had mistrusted Eckert from the start, as I had. He had given my mother laudanum, she said, and poked around the house while she slept. But my mother would not hear a word against him—and from their conversations Cilie had believed that he was courting me, and that I liked him.

Now, at least, we could share our fears. But we were no closer to a solution: my mother loved Eckert and would not change her feelings for anything we could say.

“Send for your cousin Gottfried,” said Cilie suddenly.

I stared at her. “Gottfried?”

“He’s a von Schildauer, and a man. He’ll hate Herr Eckert, and Madame will have to listen to him.”

God forgive me, I did it. I did not even need to summon Gottfried or ask for his help. I simply wrote to tell him that my father’s adjutant had come to stay with us and had offered us his protection. Gottfried arrived a bare week after I sent the letter.

He was bigger and redder even than I remembered; but of course he was angry. His first act was to forbid me to marry Eckert, though I had said no word of any such thing. I tried to assure him that I had no intention of marrying anyone.

“Of course you’ll marry!” Gottfried roared. “It’s your duty. But it must be a man worthy of the name.”

It seemed to me that our duty as a family had only ever been to fight as soldiers or to produce them. I wanted no part of that. But I only repeated, as mildly as I could, that I had met no man whom I wished to marry. At that he calmed himself a little and gave me an appraising look.

“We’ll need to find you someone soon,” he said, and added a little doubtfully, “Eugenie has a brother you might meet.”

I escaped on the pretext of telling my mother he was here. I wondered if our solution might prove to be as bad as the problem.

His interview with my mother went badly. She insisted that Hildebrand was her protector and friend; that he had deserved only well of us and she would never throw him off. Gottfried shouted that she needed no other protector now that he was here. Eckert, who had been with my mother when Gottfried arrived, gave me a sharp look at the start of the meeting, but after that he was all gentleness, sighing to hear Gottfried traduce his birth and character but refusing to retaliate. In the middle of it, Cilie came to the door to summon me to some crisis in the kitchen. I was very glad to go.

She took me, to my surprise, not to the kitchen but up the stairs, and stopped outside Eckert’s room. He had locked the door, but my mother had a set of master keys and Cilie knew where they were kept.

“I’ve been doing my own poking around,” she said, “Since I knew you were worried about him too. Have a look: my reading’s not as good as yours.”

She showed me the box in which Eckert kept his papers. There were his army documents, one certifying his enrolment as adjutant in the 6th, and beneath it a second in a different name, as a junior lieutenant in the 3rd. There were surveyors’ reports on our house and a lawyer’s letter with a valuation of the property. And at the bottom of the pile, new and freshly creased, was a will, drawn up in a fine clerk’s hand, making Hildebrand Eckert the executor of all my mother’s property and my legal guardian for as long as I lived.

She had not signed it yet. She loved Hildebrand, but she had loved me longer.

Cilie opened a cupboard to show me an apothecary’s jar of laudanum and measuring spoons of different sizes. By then I had seen enough. I put everything back as if it burned my fingers, and hurried downstairs to the drawing room, where I could hear my mother sobbing. As I put my hand to the door it opened violently and Eckert pushed past me, his face white as snow. A moment later Gottfried came out, redder than usual, if that were possible, and strode off in the other direction. My mother, when she could speak, told me that he had struck Hildebrand, and challenged him.

I might have tried to stop them. But after what Cilie had shown me there seemed only one thing to do. I went in search of Eckert and asked for a few minutes’ speech with him. He was still very pale, but he had recovered himself enough to agree.

“Herr Eckert,” I said. “Hildebrand. I know we have not always agreed in the past. But my mother loves you dearly, and I would not have either one of you hurt. It grieves me more than I can say to hear of this challenge.”

There was a flash of malice in his face, just for an instant. Then he smoothed it over. “The Christian thing to do, dear Dorothea, is to turn the other cheek,” he said.

I must admit, I was surprised. Though I knew what Eckert was, I hadn’t thought him a coward. I suppose, growing up in the family that I did, I had never encountered a man who was. But my mother would forgive, even praise, a decision to disregard Gottfried’s challenge, and he would be as welcome in our home as ever. I could not allow that to happen.

“You’d do that? Bear the disgrace, to spare my mother? But then—” I stopped, as if checked by a sudden fear.

“Dorothea, what’s wrong?”

“Oh, Hildebrand, my uncle is such a violent man! Though he is a von Schildauer, he has none of my father’s honour.” I looked at the ground. “I do not wish to impugn my family’s good name, but—”

He waved my scruples aside with a motion of his hand. “You have my word that I will not reveal a word of what you say to another soul. I beseech you, if you have information about your uncle that concerns my person, tell me.” He added, after a pause, “I could not bear the thought of leaving you and your mother friendless and unprotected.”

I put a tremor in my voice. “Gottfried is so vengeful, so easily angered. Even if you declined his challenge, I do not think that would assure your safety. He would attack you when you were unarmed, or worse, suborn some masterless man to—I can hardly speak it!—stifle you while you slept. No, you must face him. I cannot think of any other solution.”

Eckert was good with words. He had surely used them to defraud and deceive many times before he met us, and he planned to acquire our house and my hand by the same means. But I saw him swallow my story the way a fish takes bait, and I knew that I was better at this game than he. It was a good feeling, but I did not have time to revel in it long. Quickly, before he could reply, I leaned in, as if imparting some great secret.

”I can help you a little,” I told him. “You know that my cousin is a descendant of Gebhard von Schildauer, and like him he is fearsome with a sword. He trained in the French style, as well as the Prussian, and did not stop until he could confound all his teachers. He has never been beaten. Please be on your guard: it would distress my mother so if you were harmed.”

They fought the next morning. Eckert, as the challenged man, had the choice of weapons: he chose pistols, and Gottfried put a ball through his forehead at twenty paces. I knew nothing of my cousin’s swordsmanship, but I had seen him shoot the head off a grouse when it was almost too far away to see.

There’s little else to tell. Duelling had long been against the law, and Gottfried had to leave quietly for Westphalia the next day—he had not even had time to unpack. We gave Eckert a decent funeral, making up a gun-cleaning accident as the cause of his death. He is buried in the village churchyard under a granite stone that my mother paid for. At first she grieved more deeply for him than she had for my father. When I finally persuaded her to look over the document box her grief was lessened, but the pain of his betrayal was nearly as great. It took her a long time to overcome the effects of the laudanum Eckert had given her, but longer still to forgive me for having revealed her dear Hildebrand as a deceiver.

She lived seven more years, tended by Cilie and me. She rewrote her will to name me as her only heir, to make certain, she said, that Gottfried and Eugenie would never get hold of our house.

After her death I contacted my father’s lawyers and did some travelling myself. I invited sober-suited men of my own to the house. And in a year we had built a glass foundry in the courtyard by the south wing, and turned the rooms behind it into painting and packing workshops.

One of Bruno’s assistants had returned from Austria, and the two of them trained Henek as a helper, as he had lost a leg and could no longer farm. They made jugs and glasses first, which we sold to the daughters of my mother’s old dinner-party friends, and later, vases and fancy-ware with painted designs. There was work for the women whose sons and husbands had died: painting, gilding, making crates and packing our wares in them with straw, like eggs. Several learned to blow glass themselves; Cilie’s girl Katya was one of Bruno’s first apprentices.

And after some years I followed Gottfried’s instruction and found myself a husband, though not one he would have chosen. I married Bruno, Cilie’s father. He was horrified when I first suggested it, but I persuaded him in time. We married in the village church, with two notaries present in case Gottfried tried to raise objections, and afterwards drew up our wills so that the workshop and the house would belong, at our deaths, to Cilie, Katya and Little Jens. Bruno found it hard at first to be the master of the great house, but he was respectful and kind to me, and our friendship grew with time. We had, after all, the most important thing in common: we both loved Cilie more than anything.

Thea bowed her head, as if embarrassed to have spoken for so long. For the first time Drozde noticed the woman beside her, smaller and slighter, with dark eyes and still-black curls. The two of them were holding hands, and they smiled at each other before turning back into the crowd.

There were many details in this account that puzzled Drozde, not least the fact that she had no idea where Puppendorf was; the nearest village to Pokoj was Narutsin. Perhaps, in the distant past, there had been another settlement closer to the great house.

She didn’t ask. As she knew from the day before, there were rules in this house about challenging a storyteller. And in truth she was content for once to be the receiver rather than the maker of the tale. It gave her a curious sense of freedom.