One of the great advantages of being a woman, Maria had learned from her experiences in Möllersdorf, was that most people supposed it to be a disadvantage. It rendered her harmless in their eyes, insignificant, virtually anonymous. To the police in Vienna she was merely an adjunct to Mattachich: his mistress, the mother of his little bastard, a flighty, unreliable female who had managed to get herself pregnant by him while employed in Möllersdorf gaol, and then compounded the offence by letting herself be used by a crowd of seedy left-wing politicians and journalists. Now that Mattachich had been freed the authorities saw no reason to take any special notice of her – which meant she was able to travel alone to Dresden and Coswig without being observed. During these journeys she befriended a female member of the asylum’s staff and through her made contact with Olga Börner. Maria’s story was that she was a journalist interested in Mattachich’s case, and therefore wanted to learn whatever she could about Louise’s condition and the circumstances of her confinement. Olga did not dare to bring Maria into the asylum to meet her mistress, but promised to pass on any letters Maria or Mattachich might write, and to report to Maria, via a poste restante address, any changes in the princess’s circumstances.
With this shaky line of communication established, Maria set about looking for partners in the project she and Mattachich were committed to: that of getting Louise out of the asylum. Since she was kept there under a legal ‘guardianship’ lodged with the Lord Marshal – against which there could be no legal or medical appeal – it was plain to them that their effort amounted to the organizing of a criminal conspiracy. They knew also that they could neither do it on their own nor hire outsiders to do it for them. Anyone who took part in the scheme would in effect have to pay for the privilege of endangering his own freedom.
Preoccupied with writing the final pages of his memoir, convinced by now that it would have an ‘explosive’ effect on public opinion in Austria, Mattachich simply let Maria get on with it. In the end, after a few false starts, she managed to assemble a curious crew of fellow conspirators. There was Joseph Weitzer, a hearty, tough, good-humoured, bald-headed simpleton: the landlord of a pub around the corner from Maria’s flat in Florisdorf who was excited by the thought of joining in such a romantic, high-society venture, and who managed to convince himself that if they were to succeed Louise’s fabulously wealthy father would reward him with payments far exceeding the sum he offered to put into the enterprise.* Then there was a Social-Democratic deputy in the German parliament and a frequent visitor to Vienna, Albert Südekum, whom Mattachich had met through Daszynski and who joined the conspiracy out of a generalized anti-monarchist zeal, together with the hope that a stunt of this kind would raise his standing with his comrades in Germany.
Finally, and most importantly, there was a young French journalist by the name of Henri de Nousanne who worked as a freelance in Vienna for the Paris paper Le Journal, and who ingeniously persuaded his parents and the newspaper itself to pool their resources, in order to provide Maria and Mattachich with the largest of the financial contributions they needed. Le Journal did this in terms of an agreement so ‘modern’ in style and language you may well feel wounded in your twenty-first-century pride to read of it. What was jointly agreed by Maria, Mattachich and de Nousanne on one side, and by Le Journal on the other, was that in return for putting up the lion’s share of the money for the project, the paper would hold exclusive rights to the story of Louise’s escape from captivity.† (To be written of course by de Nousanne himself.)
The three musketeers they called themselves, the members of the team Maria had brought together. They were all looking for excitement; they admired Maria and were agreed that she deserved someone better than Mattachich; having committed themselves to the project, they stuck with it to the end – until they had indeed succeeded in snatching Louise from her captors and putting her beyond the borders of the Austrian and German empires.*
Yet all Maria’s helpers were to be disappointed in the end, though for a different reason in each case. Weitzer never saw his money again, let alone the bonus for which he had been hoping; Südekum’s career did not take off as a result of the newspaper headlines earned by Louise’s escape; and even Henri de Nousanne, the youngest of the three and apparently the clear gainer among them, emerged from the coup a more despondent figure than he had been before signing up for it. He did write his articles on the escapade; he was paid for them and subsequently promoted to become a staffer on his paper, instead of working for it merely as a freelance. The trouble with de Nousanne, however, was that he had fallen in love with Maria – seriously in love, hopefully, hopelessly, every way he knew how to be in love, including some he would not have thought possible beforehand. Maria was not his first love; from boyhood onwards he had had a habit of falling in love; but she turned out to be his last love, in the sense that she remained his ideal loss, the one he could not forget, the standard by which he judged all other passions, and losses, before and after.
Her only shortcoming in his eyes was her attachment to Mattachich – ‘the jockey’ as he venomously thought of him. But even as he asked himself how a woman like Maria could have fallen in love with such a shallow, stupid, self-important creature, he was gnawingly aware that had she not become the man’s lover he would never have met her, never have managed to get close to her. What a quandary! What a stupid business! She loved Mattachich enough to help his former mistress escape from imprisonment; he, Henri, loved her enough to help her in this enterprise; while for the moment Mattachich himself helped nobody and did nothing aside from getting on with writing his book.
Which left Henri to torture himself with the thought of Mattachich’s lips and tongue grazing over Maria’s body like a cow’s over a pasture, his breath penetrating her mouth and nostrils, his hands going everywhere, to all the places her undeclared lover would never visit. And even worse, Maria thrilling to every crude caress! His only consolation was the thought that no one would guess what he felt about her; that no one could see through the light, casual, boyish manner that was both his disguise and his curse, since he could never shed it. Even his prematurely greying hair, with its untrimmed ringlets hanging over his ears and the shafts of his metal-rimmed glasses, were part of that disguise; and so was the one white canine that came to rest on his lower lip when he smiled. Beneath which there lay a melancholy and vulnerability that had long predated his acquaintance with Maria and would remain with him long after his very last visit to her.
He made that visit – to Möllersdorf of all places – on hearing that after many years she had returned to live there. He set out on the journey in a divided state of mind all too familiar to him: unable to repress the faint hope that she might welcome him now as a suitor, and the incurable conviction that she would do no such thing.
Yet he had to go, if only because he knew how he would reproach himself if he did not at least try. Years before Mattachich had felt much the same about his approaches to the Princess Louise. But to what different effect.
The publication of Mattachich’s book produced less of an ‘explosion’ than he had hoped. Philipp and Bachrach were of course disgusted by the insults it heaped on them and the army high command enraged by his attacks on its system of ‘military justice’. But just as writing the book had distracted him from his failure to reach Louise, so now the thought of reaching her again helped him to get over his disappointment at the book’s reception. He, Maria and their co-conspirators discussed various schemes of rescue, some of them more hare-brained than others. An armed, daylight raid on the asylum? Kidnapping Louise when she was allowed out for one of her rural drives? Smuggling themselves into the institution in the guise of voluntary patients? Passing themselves off (with forged papers) as members of staff ?
In the end a real opportunity was given to them by Dr Pierson himself, the master of Lindenhof. Having allowed Louise to resume her drives outside the walls, he proposed to Dr Feistmantel that she should return to Bad Elster for a few weeks in the coming August. He was sure, he wrote, that she would benefit both physically and psychologically from the change. She would stay in the Wettiner Hof Hotel, as she had previously, so the surroundings would be familiar to her, and his assistant Dr Mauss, and two guards as well as her maid and lady-companion, would accompany her throughout. Feistmantel agreed, provided the local police were advised of her visit and would join in the watch to be kept over her.*
Pierson accepted this condition without demur, and went bobbing across the grounds of his institution to let the ladies in the villa know of the summer-treat he had arranged for them. Louise did not respond to the news, but the Fräuleins von Gebauer and Börner were delighted. For them any break in routine was welcome. Pierson bowed low, as he always did to his apathetic royal prisoner, and left the villa – not knowing that immediately he had passed through the garden gate opening on the unpaved roadway running through the institution, Olga went to her bedroom and wrote a hasty note to Maria. Several months had passed since the two women had met, and in Maria’s absence she had developed something like a crush on her, or on the idea of her: this young, independent ‘journalist’ woman, leading a life so different from her own dreary, double confinement – no, triple confinement – as a lady’s maid in a villa that was itself set in the grounds of a lunatic asylum. And to think of her friend being in contact, daily perhaps, with the handsome, famously disgraceful gentleman on a bicycle whom she, Olga, had encountered in the woods last autumn! She gave Maria the dates when the princess and her party would be in Bad Elster, and where they would stay and who would accompany them. She could not bear to think of the consequences her letter might have for herself or anyone else, the handsome gentleman included. But she could not bear to keep silent either.
With great daring she added at the end of the letter: From your trusted and trusting friend, Olga.
Two days later the letter was read aloud by Maria to Mattachich. It produced an immediate result.
‘Now’s our chance!’ Mattachich cried to Maria. ‘I’ll show the bastards! I’ll teach them a lesson!’
That was his first thought: one of revenge. Writing his book had discharged a little, though never enough, of the bitterness he felt over his imprisonment, his ruined career and prospectless future; but it had done nothing for the injury he had suffered to his pride as a military man. Big-arsed staff officers in Vienna, wretches like Bachrach and Fiedler, traitors in his own regiment conspiring with unknown spies and imbecile policemen in Agram – all of them had laid an elaborate, military-style ambush for him; and he, with trusting Louise behind him, had obligingly stumbled into it. Unable to defend themselves, caught naked (literally so in his case, virtually so in Louise’s), they had been torn apart and thrown into their captors’ cages. That was all his years of training as a soldier had done for him, the months he had spent on manoeuvres, the lectures he had attended and battle plans he had studied, the military histories he had read and dreamed over in his spare time. All nothing. All wasted.*
But Bad Elster? That was another matter. Where better for him to demonstrate his daring and leadership than a small, peaceful spa-town overrun by its August visitors? How well, after his travels with Louise, he knew such places, with their crowds of invalids and hypochondriacs, idlers and quacks, gamblers and servants. Filling the hotels, riding in coaches and bath chairs, following their baggage through the streets, walking in parks, boating on lakes, listening to music, drinking the waters, immersing themselves in the pools of various bathing houses before wrapping themselves in layers of sheets…who in such a throng would notice him and his co-conspirators? It was perfect. If they couldn’t snatch Louise there, they would never be able to do it.
‘Give me two days,’ he said to Maria, ‘and I’ll have a plan worked out. They’ll never forget what I’m going to do to them.’
‘We’re going to do,’ she said.
He ignored the correction. Rapt, he replied with words uttered by some forgotten officer on some forgotten exercise a long time ago. ‘Four things I must have – ’ and began counting them out with the index finger of his right hand on the outspread fingers of the other hand: ‘Maintenance of aim, clarity of mind, discipline, courage.’
Only his thumb remained untouched. Maria closed her fist around it.
‘Luck.’
Rough-and-ready Weitzer was the first to leave for Bad Elster. He booked himself into the Wettiner Hof for the entire month of August, and spent his first few days spying out the general plan of the hotel and learning as much as he could about its routines; he also established which of the rooms Louise, her ladies and the asylum guards would occupy. The role he assumed as a guest at this hotel, the largest and most expensive in the spa, came easily to him: he claimed to be a self-made businessman (which he was) of working-class origins (ditto) who had come to take the waters for the sake of his gout (from which he did in fact suffer). Having worked as a bar-keeper all his life, and being sociable and unscrupulous by nature, he did not have much difficulty in picking out which members of the hotel’s staff were likely to be the most usefully bribable. His first choice was the head of the room-service waiters, with whom he drank during the man’s off-duty hours, and to whom he eventually confided his real purpose in being there. His confidant promptly appointed himself as the man who would bring the princess’s breakfast tray into her room every morning – in this way providing the conspirators with a means of communicating with her. Weitzer’s second recruit was a member of the hotel’s security staff, who produced duplicate keys to Louise’s room, the hotel’s ground-floor back entrance, and the garden gate at its rear. Both men were to show themselves as loyal to the conspiracy as they were disloyal to their employers, and were rewarded not only by the money paid out to them by Weitzer but also by an enthusiastic if self-centred reference to them in Louise’s autobiography.*
Next: Maria. Having handed the unfortunate Viktor back to his grandparents, she took little Berthold and departed with him for Bad Elster, together with a recently hired nanny. There she rented two rooms in a modest guest house, where she passed herself off as a widow recovering from the sad loss of her spouse. She claimed to be suffering from ‘nerves’ as a result of her recent bereavement and made arrangements with the owner of a fiacre to go occasionally for insomniac, moonlight drives – some of which were extended until as late as two or three in the morning. She found these outings very soothing, she explained to the coachman. The first couple of drives she took on her own; later she was accompanied each time by two or three gentleman friends. By day she seldom went out, once the princess’s party had turned up, to minimize the risk of her being seen by Olga. Who could say what she might unwittingly reveal if she knew something was afoot?
Lastly, travelling from Vienna in separate trains and to separate boarding houses, came Südekum, followed almost immediately by the nervous but financially indispensable de Nousanne, and then Mattachich himself, who had been keeping indoors in Vienna for a few weeks and letting his beard grow. All three men did as he had done in Coswig when he had been hoping to encounter Louise in the neighbourhood of the asylum: they hired bicycles from shops in the town, on which they went for long rides on little-known roads in the surrounding countryside. They also intermittently accompanied Maria on her nocturnal jaunts. Their intention was to find the best way of crossing the nearby border between Saxony and Bavaria without having to produce passports of any kind.*
Then they waited for Louise and her ladies, her guards and the medical Mauss to move into the Wettiner Hof. It was Weitzer’s job to communicate with her via his friend the head waiter and to sit on the terrace taking note of the times when police and private guards came and went. Weitzer’s other friend, the security guard, saw to it that the locks and hinges of the relevant gates and doors were well oiled beforehand. Louise was told to wear her darkest clothes on the chosen night.
Everything went according to plan, more or less, though many tense moments passed before all involved could begin to feel confident their scheme had succeeded. One of these moments, which literally left two of them out of breath, was the lifting of Louise through her open bedroom window, stockinged feet first, and the depositing of her on the veranda outside. The most dangerous moment came when two policemen stood in the road outside the hotel and talked idly together (instead of crossing and continuing their patrol in different directions as they were supposed to do), while just yards from them the escapee and her friends crouched behind an excruciatingly thin screen of bushes. Almost as tense was the delay at the tree-shrouded crossroads appointed for the rescue party’s meeting with the fiacre and its insomniac passenger. It was supposed to have been standing there, but was not. De Nousanne went in search of it through the deserted streets and found it waiting in the wrong place.*
Such mishaps aside, all involved did everything that was asked of them – from Mattachich, the chief planner and overseer of the operation, to the bemused fiacre owner, who could not understand why his last late-night drive with this special client of his, this sympathetic widowed lady, had been interrupted so abruptly and ended so strangely, when three men and a woman he had never seen before jumped in a great hurry into his cab and directed him to drive along minor roads until, just after crossing the Saxon–Bavarian border, they arrived at a small town on the main railway line to Berlin. There the party got out and disappeared into a modest hotel next to the train station, after making sure that the driver would be put up for the night and his horses stabled and fed. By then it was past two in the morning. At dawn the driver was paid for the work he had already done and given an additional sum to wait until evening at the station. It was explained to him that the group was now setting out on a further excursion by rail, and would be needing his cab later to take them back to Bad Elster. The first northbound train came in, they climbed on to it, the train departed, he waited all day – and never saw any of them again.*
The three men who had jumped into the cab were Mattachich, de Nousanne and Südekum. Weitzer remained in Bad Elster, enjoying the consternation and recriminations that followed – the moment he prized best being a public fainting-fit by Fräulein von Gebauer when she discovered that the princess had disappeared. (Leaving almost all her luggage behind, which scandalized Gebauer almost as much as the disappearance itself.) Having waited to see his two friends emerge unscathed from their grilling by the management of the hotel and the local police, Weitzer gave them a wink, quietly paid his bill and left for Vienna. The nanny and the baby had preceded him there several days before. The three of them would join the others later.
For their part, the travellers stayed in the train until it reached Berlin, then lay low in Südekum’s house there, waiting for the excitement in the press to subside. When they judged it to be safe, they moved (though not as a group, and with various stops between) from Berlin to Paris. This involved their passing through Belgium and was thought to be the most risky part of the journey. By then the Lord Marshal in Vienna had issued a stern reminder to all European governments that under the Hague Convention of 1896 they were obliged to return the runaway princess to Austria immediately – ‘and by force if necessary’.†
Once in Paris, however, they were safe. The French press and French public opinion were on their side, and the French government had no inclination to kowtow on this issue to Franz Joseph and his Lord Marshal. The delighted escapees set themselves up in the Westminster Hotel and, once Le Journal had published its account of the getaway, gave interviews to almost anyone who asked them for one.
A question remained, though. Exactly who, now, were ‘they’?
Who indeed? For an answer to that question you have to go back to the spartan little hotel in which Louise and her liberators had waited to catch the train to Berlin. It was a brief night in an inconsequential location; yet an event took place there – if something that passed so quietly can be called an ‘event’ – that was as unexpected as anything else the parties had experienced over the previous seven years.
Imagine once again, then, the crowded fiacre drawing up in front of the hotel. It has been locked up for hours past. Situated in the lower part of the town, it dominates the nondescript little dwellings scattered about simply because it has two storeys above ground level. A few trees are the only other tall objects to be seen. No lights burn in any of the neighbouring buildings or in the hotel itself. There is no sign of dawn in the sky, but the air smells of late summer and the trees stir expectantly from time to time, only to fall silent until the next small breeze arrives. There is a night bell to the side of the hotel’s front door, and one of the men in the party pulls at it fiercely. The cab driver remains seated on his bench, high above them, wondering what he has let himself in for and whether this client of his, this young widow who has made such a strong impression on his kindly old breast, is all she has appeared to be. After a long delay a woman with an oil-lamp in her hand can be seen squinting through the thick glass panel in the upper half of the door. Reassured by what she sees (the cab driver, the two women), she turns the lock. She is stout and squat and is dressed in a flimsy gown and a frilly nightcap. Lamp hoisted before her, she tells them yes, she can offer them accommodation for the night. But there is a difficulty: she has only two rooms available, one with twin beds in it, the other with a double bed. A third bed can be brought into the twin-bedded room at a pinch; nothing can be done with the other room.
An awkward moment. An exchange of glances. Mattachich seizes the initiative. The ladies will sleep in the double bed; the three gentlemen in the other room. It is the obvious thing to do. No one demurs. The gentlemen order a bottle of brandy and some glasses to be sent to their room; the ladies ask for tea. Nobody asks for food. Each of the men carries a small valise; the ladies, their handbags only. None of this is lost on the landlady, who knows also that none of it is her business. De Nousanne helps a sleepy porter – a strongly built, shirtsleeved, slow-moving yokel, with an obscure stammer in his walk – to bring the additional bed into the men’s room. The porter lights the lamps in the rooms and jerks his way to the back of the building, where he tends to the driver and his horses. The men fall on the brandy the moment the landlady brings it into their room. Each pours himself a large drink and even before she has closed the door behind her they embrace, slap each other on the back, laugh, display some of the relief and elation they have been careful to hide from the cab driver.
Things are different in the ladies’ room, as the landlady discovers minutes later, when she brings them their tea. The older woman is seated on the only chair in the room, a bentwood affair with a plaited straw bottom; the younger sits awkwardly on the big double bed. There is no relief and elation here; only silence. The room smells of damp and must; the bed leaves virtually no space between it and the walls on both sides; the washstand carries a floral china jug with ancient chips on its rim and a basin in the same state; the net curtain across the single window is yellow with age and tobacco smoke. But the landlady is convinced it is not their surroundings that keeps the ladies so subdued.
The young woman murmurs a word of thanks as the tray is put down on top of a small chest. She gets up to pour the tea, while the other looks timidly around her. The door closes behind the landlady. Her footsteps can be heard retreating down the wooden-floored passage outside.
Sitting with both hands still clutching the handbag on her lap, Louise is the first to speak.
‘Who are you?’
‘A friend of the count,’ Maria answers.
She adds awkwardly, after a pause: ‘Your highness.’ After another pause: ‘Your friend too, madam.’ Pause again. ‘If you would like me to be your friend.’
They slept little that night. By the end of the first hour Louise knew ‘everything’. She knew about Maria’s marriage and her elder son; about the scrapbook of newspaper cuttings on Mattachich and Louise herself; about her separation from her husband, her journey to Möllersdorf and the job inside the prison she had managed to get; about her affair with Mattachich and the birth of little Berthold; about the work she had done in Vienna to procure Mattachich’s release from prison; even about the visits she had paid to the neighbourhood of the asylum and the letter Olga Börner had written giving the dates of Louise’s stay in Bad Elster. (To which, for safety reasons, Maria had not responded.) Louise listened to it all with a mixture of amazement, pain and envy. What an exciting time this humbly born young woman had managed to contrive for herself, while she herself had rotted and grown old in the asylum.
And now this! She was the one who had spent so many years thinking of the absent Mattachich, raging against him sometimes, more often trying to remember his arms around her and his body next to hers, trying to picture him in the room with her or simply appearing from nowhere before her, from behind a tree or around a bend in a path in one of the asylums in which she had been imprisoned, smiling at her as he drew closer until at last he was close enough to take her by the hand and then simply set her free, to release her from imprisonment, just as he had done when they had left Vienna: only more so. Then he had actually done it: just a few hours before he had helped her over the sill of an open window and passed her to strangers, all well disposed, who had led her magically through one locked door after another until they gained an empty road and waited for the sound and sight of a cab approaching, with lamps affixed to its body and a single lamp swinging from the front of its shaft. Crouched low in the darkness against a stone fence, she and the other men, Mattachich the only one of them she knew, had not dared to move before the cab came to a halt, its door opened and a young woman’s voice called out softly, ‘Géza!’
The moment the name came out of Louise’s own mouth, she heard it clearly and flung herself full length on the bed. She had no idea how much she had actually said aloud of all that had been surging through her mind moments before. But that name she had distinctly heard herself say. She lay facing the wall, her back turned to Maria.
‘Who are you?’ she wailed again, as if Maria had not yet said a word about herself. ‘Why are you doing this to me? Why didn’t you leave me where I was?’
‘Never! Never!’ Maria answered.
She lay down too, behind Louise, and put an arm around her – surprised as she did so by the girth of the woman’s body. But she felt no distaste for it. Pity, rather, as she might have if she had been lying next to a child. They lay like that, Maria waiting until the sobs shaking the body beside her ceased. It happened quite suddenly; a sob that sounded exactly like the last was simply not followed by another. After a long silence, and with an unsteady voice, Maria spoke into the head of hair against her lips.
‘Now listen to me. I don’t hate you and I don’t want to hurt you. Géza couldn’t live like a free man as long as you were still locked up. It shamed him too much. It was eating him away. I could see it happening when he thought of you and when he tried not to. And when he talked of trying to help you. So what was I to do? If you stayed locked up, you would destroy us both. I was sure of it. If you were set free…perhaps you wouldn’t! Is that so bad? Besides, I was curious – about you – and proud of what I’d done for him – and I thought I could do something like it again for you. And I have. I have. We’ve all done it. It’s wonderful…’ She went on, murmuring whatever came into her head, growing more and more drowsy the longer she went on. ‘We’re all the same, you and me and Géza…Too stuffed with dreams, too greedy. Too little sense, too little patience. But loyal! Look how loyal you and Géza have been to each other. Look how loyal I’m trying to be to both of you. If I love Géza then I must love you too…’
Eventually she moved to take off Louise’s shoes, and kicked her own to the floor. There was a folded blanket at the foot of the bed, above the counterpane, and she pulled it over them both. They fell asleep. Later they woke and talked some more.
‘You’re so brave,’ Louise said into the darkness.
‘No, I was just infatuated.’
‘Are you still?’ Louise asked.
‘Infatuated?’ After a silence: ‘No.’
‘But you’re still loyal?’
‘So are you. It’s a curse. To be loyal to your own imaginings – ! What could be more stupid?’
Another silence, broken eventually by Louise. ‘But just try to imagine yourself without them! It can’t be done.’
They did not fall asleep again, but nor did they have more to say. When they got up in the morning they exchanged a kiss. It was settled between them: they were friends. Old friends in fact. Bizarrely, it was as if the years that each of them had shared separately with Mattachich had become a property common to them both, the source of a stock of shared understandings.
Coming into the bleak, underfurnished dining room downstairs – its air still heavy with the smell of the meal eaten the previous night – they found the men waiting for them. Mattachich went once more through the introductions that had first taken place in the darkness of the cab during their escape from Bad Elster. The women and de Nousanne and Südekum exchanged stiff, idle words, keeping their voices low in order to prevent anything they said reaching the ears of the bedraggled handful of guests at other tables. Once he had made the introductions, Mattachich remained silent. Each time Louise or Maria spoke to each other, or just exchanged glances, his eyes hardened. Knowing him to have been the lover first of the one and then of the other, and to be responsible for the presence of them all in this room – a bleak place conjured out of nothing, never to be seen again – his companions thought he might be embarrassed by the situation he had created. But the fierceness of his stare suggested otherwise. Seeing Mattachich’s eyes fixed on the two women, and sensitized by his own heartache, de Nousanne suddenly sprang to a conclusion that astonished him and flicked at him with a painful moment of hope. Something had happened between the two women during the night. They were not jealous of one another. It was Mattachich who was now jealous of them both.
When Mattachich and Maria managed a moment together with no one near by, he said accusingly to her, ‘You’ve told her about us, haven’t you?’
‘Yes,’ Maria admitted. ‘How do you know?’
‘I could see it at once. Any fool could see it. We agreed, I was going to be the one to tell her, not you. And the first chance you get, you open your mouth – !’
‘Yes, yes, yes,’ Maria answered angrily, standing her ground. ‘Everything’s changed now. Don’t spoil it!’
A half-hour later the train to Berlin drew up at the one-platform station, virtually across the road from the hotel. By then de Nousanne, who had his own axe to grind, his own hopes to nourish, was sure of his hunch. The princess and Maria accepted Mattachich’s leadership, but they were no longer his. If they belonged to anybody, it was to each other.
Hooting, hissing, flourishing a white scarf of steam over its head, the train began to urge itself forward.