3

The first one to reach Claire was Blacky. He swung around the corner, nimble as a fireman, and took her in his arms until he saw what it was.

“Herrgott!” he cried and let her crumple to the floor. Up the lighthouse-like stairs he lurched, pausing at the halfway window to see if he could jimmy open the shutters. They were crusted shut from years of paint. He gave up that idea quickly and raced the rest of the way to the top. He tried to tug Hans’s body up from there, but he had no luck.

Puffin Hedges, lighting Mara Morgen’s cigarette in the garden down below, saw what was going on, dropped his lighter and ran up to help. Between the two of them, they made a little headway, but then young Cosimo appeared behind them. When he saw who it was upside down at the end of the rope, he went mad. He shrieked. The men tried to calm him down and get him to help them haul Hans in, but it only seemed to drive home harder what had happened to his father.

Cosimo, his mouth in a horrible “O,” held himself captive with his long beautiful hands and batted his head against the wall. Blacky, fearing the already unstable young man would throw himself out the belfry arch after his father (there was only the knee-high ironwork guardrail), let the dead man go, told Puffin to take the other end of Cosimo and help get him down the stairs. But they couldn’t get hold of him. Cosimo was furious with strength. His head was turning bloody from the wallops. In the end it was Evangelika who got him going, walking him down the stairs, whispering that his father wouldn’t want him to hurt himself, he had to be there for Stella. He had to help Stella get through this. Someone would have to tell Stella.

The next thing you knew, everybody ran up. The gardener, the film crew, everyone. Claire wriggled Cosimo through the little mob until she got him to the landing. Stella Gabriella stood quietly in front of her lighted room. Her eyes were lit from within and removed, her lips were dry and parted, her heavy braids open, and her hair tumbled down her back. She had just removed her crystal necklace and she held it in her hands. She looked as though she was waiting for them, as though she knew what they would say.

“There’s been an accident,” Claire rushed to tell her. “It’s your father. I’m afraid he’s dead.”

Cosimo yowled and fell into Stella Gabriella’s arms. Stella flinched, but the expression in those eyes didn’t do what Claire expected it to do. It was as though her reaction itself was a hesitation, as though the real reaction went obediently off into a silent drawer, to be taken out later and fingered, like a scarf.

The rest of them were edging their way down the stairs with the body.

“Let’s get him inside,” Claire suggested.

They walked Cosimo in. “Leg dich hin,” Stella told her brother sternly, and he did as he was told; he lay down on the bed, his face rigid in grimace, the now silent tears running down both sides of his face and into his pretty ears.

Isolde filled the doorway. “What’s happened?” she demanded.

“It’s Hans.” Claire rushed to her. She put her arm around Isolde’s waist and led her from the room, a finger to her lips. “He’s fallen. From the belfry. He was tangled in the ropes. Oh, Isolde, he’s dead.”

“Dead? He can’t be dead. I was just with him. We—” She stopped herself and looked at Claire. “He can’t be dead.”

“I’m sorry, Isolde. I’m afraid he is.”

Isolde pushed her away and ran down the stairs to follow the crush already moving to the ground floor. Cosimo bolted up. He and Stella trampled past Claire and ran down as well. Claire stood there in the doorway of Stella’s surprising room. It looked sparse, Japanese. Claire felt shocked, frightened. Everything was out of control. Somehow, with Cosimo in the bed, she had had the silly notion that all was well. The child was in bed, everything would be all right. She turned, sensing herself watched, but there was no one. She ran down the hallway to the top of the back stairs, just above the kitchen, where they’d taken Hans. She didn’t know whether to go down or stay put, wanting to help but not wanting to intrude. And then she was drawn to the activity. She tiptoed down the stairs, touching the steady safety of the walls, old and painted blue. There were so many people, it wouldn’t matter if she went in or not. She slid in.

Hans was laid out on the table, Father Metz was administering the Last Rites. All you could hear were the loud clocks ticking and Father’s Latin murmurings.

Everyone was silent in the presence of death. All the doorways and windows were filled with the curious silhouettes of the guests, standing still, their hands holding on to their cheeks or their mouths.

“Ah! Everyone here! Jolly good!” Temple Fortune clumped in, the refreshed and landed gentry complete with elbow patches and the squire’s billycock. He swatted his hands together and rubbed them back and forth and stomped his feet. “The light’s lovely just now. Let’s push on for the next scene, shall we?” He stood still. “Hello, what’s up? You all look—” And he stopped at the sure sight of the corpse on the long kitchen table. “Begorra!” he cried in his otherwise tucked-away mother’s own tongue.

When the police and ambulance had come and gone, both guests and help sat together, stunned and chatty in the beer garden. Blacky had tranquilized Cosimo, and put him back to bed. Stella Gabriella was upstairs with him still. All the rest of them stayed outside in the last rays of leafy warmth. Old Evangelika, shocked herself, was kept busy transporting drinks, for everyone wanted a stiff one. No one knew what to do. Puffin Hedges, reverent with death, suggested they all pack up and leave, head for another hotel. “But we’re just in the middle of shooting the last scenes,” Temple Fortune protested.

“It would be the only decent thing to do,” Puffin Hedges insisted. “Think of the family.”

“Well, I won’t hear of it,” Temple Fortune said. “It’s not as though we’re family friends. We’re paying guests.”

“Sizable-fortune paying guests,” Puffin added. “Still, I guess it wouldn’t do them much good to take away their income.” He sat in a splendid bit of yellow light, alternately opening his portable backgammon kit and then closing it up. The Shetland collie-mutt stood underneath the spot where Hans had died, and the poor fellow wouldn’t be budged. There he stood in full view of them all, legs planted apart, baffled but steadfast. He wouldn’t come when Evangelika called him in, not even for his meal. No one hollered at him, the poor old fellow. His master was gone for good now, and no one knew what to do for him but let him be.

Evangelika was so rattled she wasn’t keeping note who drank what. The serving girl, Gaby, a tense little Bavarian butterball in earphones and a dirndl, nervous and easily rattled on a good day, had been so discombobulated by what had happened that she’d flumped onto her bicycle and taken off, pedaling home to her Mutti and the safety of the village. “More like to get a good start spreading the news,” Evangelika snorted, disgusted.

Claire felt sorry for the old woman. Here she was, long past retirement age herself, and there she went, doing for everyone else. Well, that’s it, Claire decided, all this looking after others kept you from dwelling on your own problems, kept you strong. On the other hand, she noticed the old woman falter on her way back to the house. Claire got up and went over to her. “Can’t I help you?” she asked.

“Na, na.” Evangelika wagged her head vehemently. “Ich mach schon alles,” she insisted. She could handle it herself.

“Yes, I’ve noticed how you single-handedly run this place,” Claire admired. She remembered that the old woman spoke English, even though she pretended not to when it suited her. Claire didn’t want to insult her, but neither did she like the idea of a collapsed Evangelika as well as a dead proprietor. Those steins were heavy. She noticed Puffin Hedges behind her, helping himself to the goose-liver pâté.

“Mr. Hedges”—she tapped him on his costly heather-and-moss tweed—“would you mind helping me carry out these steins? Then I can get the trays of cheese and Wurst she’s laid out. I don’t think the poor thing can manage.” Puffin Hedges looked at Claire as though she’d addressed him in Cantonese. Such an idea was preposterous, the paleturquoise eyes above that red nose indicated. “Be a dear”—he smiled—“and handle all that yourself. We’ll see to it you’re taken care of when we tally up. There’s a good girl.”

For a moment she thought he was about to include a hurry-along pat across her bottom. She would have sputtered a defiant reply, but she was so taken aback that she went numb. She’d get him back for that one, she resolved, but in her own way and time, and properly.

When Blacky saw what she was up to, balancing and lugging heavy stuff, he jumped up to give her a hand. Temple Fortune noticed the aristocratic doctor there, gravely rolling up his white sleeves to pitch in, and he joined them at once. The three of them worked swiftly and companionably until the hefty loads of food and drink were nicely arranged on a group of tables pushed neatly together by the two men.

Claire couldn’t help enjoying herself. She liked getting things done in a flurry, herself at the helm. For once Isolde was shocked into submission. She sat smoking her Merit cigarettes and looking wiped out. Her starched outfit defied her withered attitude and stood out from her like a costume on a hanger. Her magnificent hair only drizzled down over her shoulders. Claire wondered, for a moment, how much Isolde had cared for Hans von Grünwald after all.

Well, Claire wasn’t going to pretend to herself she felt any sorrow. She’d only just met the man and hadn’t much liked him. That wasn’t true, she’d liked him well enough, she supposed, she’d just been put out when she noticed he hadn’t been much taken with her. At least she would help give the poor fellow a fine send-off, something any Irishwoman knows just how to do. Funny the way a death will make you appreciate life, she mused, gathering up the small bouquet of lily of the valley Evangelika must have been working on when all of this happened. She was just about to carry the pretty thing out with the condiments when something decent, a sense of reserve, stopped her. She put the flowers down on the empty table and left them there, then said a hushed Hail Mary for the poor and maybe now still-hovering and (who knew?) listening spirit.

“What I don’t understand”—the film star Mara Morgen was batting her cigarette about for emphasis before continuing in her charming, heavy accent outside—“is why would Hans get himself tangled up in a bell rope up there anyhow? I mean, what was he doing up there? Why was he there?”

Friedel the gardener gave an annoyed wave of his hand to ward off her intrusive smoke from mingling with his own. “Haven’t we all just been asked the same questions by the police? I mean, isn’t it enough?” He’d been coming up the drive when all of this had happened and didn’t see why he should have to answer anything.

Fräulein Wintner held her arms and squeezed herself in disbelief. “This cannot be happening.” She shook her head. Blacky went over to her and looked, concerned, into her eyes. You never knew who would flip out next. The least likely people would suddenly do such outrageous things.

“It is his property, you know,” Friedel reminded them in stilted English. “He did have a right to be wherever he chose, didn’t he?” He put his mud-creased fist gently, but firmly, on the table.

“What’s he doing here?” Puffin indicated Friedel’s presence at their table.

“Hans might well have gone up to check those shutters for a scraping,” Blacky suggested. “They’re crusted shut; I noticed it when I tried to get them open. He might well have been inspecting what needed repair. And then got tripped up in the coiled ropes and fell. I’m sure it was something as simple as that.”

With his priest and his mistress waiting for him foolishly down below, Father Metz mused sardonically to himself. He finished up the lovely golden liquid of his beer and shook his head. Life was fleeting. It was good for all these fancy hedonists to realize that. Guiltily, he looked toward the door. Stella Gabriella, Hans’s daughter, poor soul, ought to be relieved from the torments of her brother. God knows what he was torturing her with now. Blaming her, perhaps. He ought to go up and see. The truth was, he was frightened of Cosimo. He stood carefully, never liking to parade his corpulence in a crowd of artists and swells and despising himself for caring. He minced his way across the garden, shook his wrinkled sleeves down over his wrists, and went into the house.

Isolde glared at Blacky. She hated the way he would run over and assist any little poppet who needed help or felt the slightest bit ill. It really was an unappealing side to him. “Check his property!” she sneered at Claire. “Hadn’t we, Hans and I, just been having a cozy little chat upstairs when Hans suddenly thought of something, asked me to wait a moment and he’d be right back, that was just what he’d said. ‘Warte doch ein kleines Momentli, gell?’ he said, asking me to wait a little moment and kissed my hand and turned and went. He never came back. I’d supposed he’d spotted Blacky or Friedel on the drive and hesitated to return to me. He was, if anything, discreet. And now this. It’s unbelievable.” She shook her head vehemently. “Unbelievable.”

“You did mention all this to the inspector, didn’t you?” Claire whispered.

“What do you think I am, stupid? They’ll think I pushed him!”

“Oh, but Isolde, you must,” Claire whispered urgently back. “What if they find out later and hear you didn’t tell them. It will look awkward for you.”

“And what will it look like now?” Isolde smiled grotesquely at Mara Morgen while she hissed to Claire. “Upstairs! Me alone with the victim a week before I’m supposed to marry his enemy?”

“Enemy? Surely you mean rival. And what is this, ‘victim’? Good Lord, Isolde, it was an accident! And why wouldn’t you be upstairs, looking over the rooms he was to provide for your guests.”

“Really? That isn’t what Blacky will think.”

Claire looked around the table. She contemplated the two dazzlers, the famous fair Mara and the notorious dark Isolde. Isolde was the one who held you, Claire noticed, foolishly, loyally pleased. But it was true. Isolde was the one with good health and dash. Big white teeth, big everything. A juicy woman. Mara had the bone structure all right, but her skin in person was drab and sallow, mottled. She had the unfortunate habit of hunching over and fumbling through her vast handbag for something to grab hold of. Something glazed about her slanty, exotic gray eyes. You had the feeling she slept while she was awake. She had the merchandise, all right. It just looked, under scrutiny, used. Poor thing, Claire thought, not knowing why, and shivered. Claire looked over at Blacky. How strange that their first meeting after all these years should be accompanied by tragedy. The memories of their happy times had filled her thoughts all month. And they had been happy then. Young and free and happy. They just hadn’t known it. They’d just been self-absorbed enough to imagine themselves miserable. Flying off to Venice for the weekend to recover from their overly theoretical, empty arguments of existentialism. What they’d needed, she realized now, were some yowling kids to fill up their vacuous days and nights. They’d had too much too soon, she and Blacky, and not enough suffering between them beforehand to absorb it and compare it with. She looked over at Blacky and found him looking good-naturedly back. Unfortunately, Isolde’s eyes, suspicious and watchful, were pointed toward her too, so the smile she made back was merely congenial and toothless.

“All right over there?” he called out across the huge table. Claire smiled again, this time warmly. If there was nothing wrong with her feelings, she had every right to expose them. She got up and went into the Mill. What she needed was a cup of coffee.

In the kitchen, Evangelika was weeping. Claire rushed over, then stood helplessly by. The old woman sobbed into a linen dish towel. When she was finished, she blew her nose into it and threw it on the floor. “Nehm die Scheisskartoffeln,” she barked at Claire and pointed, which means “Take the shit potatoes,” but which really meant “Thank you for being here, even if you are a useless American.”

Claire went wordlessly back outside with the enormous bowl of vinegar-and-parsley potatoes on a tray and put it down.

“You know,” Blacky was saying, “there is supposed to be a treasure at Saint Hildegard’s Mill. So the story goes.” Claire froze. She tried to look interested and uninterested at the same time.

“Really?” Mara peered at him. “How fascinating.”

“Hans could have been off looking for treasure,” Puffin proposed. “That would explain why he was up in the belfry.”

“What sort of treasure?” Mara pressed.

“A treasure with a curse, no less,” Puffin said.

“What fun!” Isolde said. “I knew there was a ghost. I never knew about the curse!”

“A ghost, too?” Claire smiled.

“What rubbish!” Fräulein Wintner said. “Wartime gibberish. Made up to keep the marauding peasants away from the pottery.”

Isolde looked up at Claire. “You know there really is some valuable pottery here. Not that you’d know it from the look of it. Old dusty stuff. Right up your alley.”

“Thanks a lot,” Claire said. A man walked up the curved path toward them, meandering into the lengthening shadows. He came up past the beautiful black car with running boards. It took a few moments for Claire to realize it was Temple Fortune, crunching the drive pebbles with long strides, his slender hands loose and swinging, the burgundy cashmere scarf he seemed to wear always still tucked casually in his breast. Did he consider himself delicate? She liked his hair, she thought, brown and soft. A little long, it was true. A little too attractive to every half-baked romantic female. She couldn’t imagine anyone looking at him and not thinking he was, well, gorgeous. That was the idea, she supposed, annoyed. Until now, she could only watch him from afar. If he got too close, she was careful not to let her giveaway eyes meet his. Nor he (or did she imagine it?) hers.

He came along, and for a moment she forgot who she was; forgot, for that matter, who he was. She half-expected him to walk directly toward her, to her chair. It was almost with a jolt that she watched him stop and lean over Mara Morgen.

Mara Morgen, the film star, seemed nervous and, Claire thought, hardened since the days when she was Munich’s most-sought-after face. Well, all those cigarettes wouldn’t have helped. And the high life in Europe was a hard life. Especially, she imagined, with a man as attractive as Temple Fortune to keep up with. Claire felt her own face liquefy and disassemble when he got close. He made her lose her structure. She could feel her features melting and wobbling out of position just when she would have liked them to stay put. They refused to reorganize. A dreadful state for a grown woman to be in. Claire panicked. A dangerous state.

“What’s this?” Isolde saw finally what had been set down in front of her.

“It’s just some food. I thought you might need something.”

Isolde pushed it away with disdain. “I couldn’t eat a thing.”

Ashamed of her appetite, but famished enough to overlook it, Claire seized the mouthwatering O-Bazda and dug in. This was a disgusting-looking, but curiously exquisite-tasting, mixture of battered Camembert, chives, paprika, garlic, and butter on sturdy rye bread. She then helped herself to a healthy draft of Isolde’s stein. God, that was good. She felt better right away.

Puffin Hedges was performing an epic of film-business amusement with Temple as the hero, to distract them all. Fräulein Wintner burst into a fit of hysterical laughter.

It occurred to Claire that all of what was being said was directed at, and for, Blacky. He was, she realized now as she never had done in her own self-important, independent youth, profoundly wealthy. Suddenly he, Blacky, demanded in a loud voice, “What sort of a name is Temple Fortune?” He didn’t quite slur his words, but everyone knew he’d had enough.

Temple Fortune smiled calmly back. Obviously this was not the first time this question had been put to him.

Puffin, as was his effete English schoolboy way, answered for him. “Temple Fortune was the address we were staying at in London when we had our first break with film, isn’t it, love?” Temple answered with a wink, enjoying this. His eyes, green as money, smiled calmly back. He liked to recall those happy first days of success and hard work. “It started as a joke, you know. Sort of a giggle. But it caught on, didn’t it? Yes, yes, those were the days.”

“I see.” Blacky wobbled his head at them belligerently. “You named yourself after your neighborhood.” He turned to Claire. “That would be like you calling yourself Richmond Hill, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes.” She laughed uncomfortably. What was up? Apparently she was too impressed with this film business for Blacky’s liking. He might be in love with Isolde, but he liked it best when all the gals were in love with him. “But that’s no more silly than naming someone Mr. Rosary Beads. That’s what the Germans did, after all, making the Jews take names of common objects. Rosenkranz means ‘rosary beads.’ Hello, Mr. Rosary Beads.”

“That’s not the same thing at all.”

“No, but it’s certainly as silly,” Claire said sweetly. She liked to remind him every chance she got that he shared the lion’s blood. It never shut him up, but she enjoyed indulging so sanctimonious a compulsion.

“No worse than Puffin Hedges, eh?” Puffin jabbed Fräulein Wintner with his elbow. “Not even we remember how that got started. We were pretty spaced out in those days, eh, Temple?”

“Well, you look like a Puffin,” Blacky said.

“So what’s your name, then?” Claire said to Blacky. “Clearly Redundant?”

“But my real name is Almut,” Puffin confided morosely. “Harry Almut Brown. Beat that if you can. I mean, we just had to do something about that.”

“Maybe I should have changed my name to Richmond Hill,” Claire, compulsively arbitrary, said, mulling it over. “I can imagine me quite famous with a name like that.”

Temple smiled at her and she smiled back. A dizzying rush swept through her.

Mara Morgen narrowed her eyes at Temple Fortune. “You didn’t tell me when you talked me into coming here that we would have a murder, too.” She said it lightly but accusingly.

“Mara!” Temple Fortune said.

“Yes, Mara!” Puffin Hedges’ eyes darted back and forth from one to the other, then across to Blacky. “What a hideous thing to say!”

“The poor dolt slipped,” Temple said. “Even the German Polizei said so.”

Aside, Puffin said, “And there’s nothing as suspicious as the German Polizei.”

Mara shrugged. “It could have been murder. Murders have been known to be made to look like happenstance.”

Temple stood with his hands on his hips. “Well, we’ll know in a few days. They’ll have an autopsy, I imagine. Someone’s bound to come up with the theory he was after those sixty blue-white diamonds.”

Claire tried not to choke.

“That doesn’t have to prove anything,” Mara pressed. “He could have been pushed. Tzack!” She thrust the air before her forward, gaining everyone’s attention. “Although that guardrail is so low it would be easy to fall even if you weren’t pushed.”

Isolde mopped her perspiring face with someone else’s napkin. “You ought to be whipped,” she said, narrowing her eyes at Mara.

“I’d like to see that.” Puffin’s eyes sparkled.

“Hans was no poor dolt,” Mara continued in her unruffled, accurate, if thick-accented, English. “He was a very capable megalomaniac.”

“What we used to call,” Puffin murmured, “a bully.”

Temple had positioned himself behind Mara. There he stood, wobbling her chair with his foot, a pained look on his face. “A little consideration for the dead, if you don’t mind.”

“Oh, right,” Puffin said. “Wouldn’t want to be chucked off the premises. Especially now we’re so close—”

A knife-sharp look from Temple stopped him from completing that thought. Claire wondered what he’d been about to say.

“I wish that dog would come away,” Temple said despairingly.

“It’s very upsetting,” Mara agreed.

They all looked over at the dog standing there in the drive.

“Come, old boy. Come, fellow.” Temple slapped his thigh, expecting to be obeyed, but the dog stayed still, his tongue out and panting, his eyes heartrendingly glued to the spot from which Hans had fallen. There was a collective sigh from everyone.

“What will happen now?” Puffin Hedges wondered aloud.

Hearing no one answer, Fräulein Wintner ventured, “There will be a service at the Nord Friedhof, the North Cemetery. Then he will be cremated and buried.”

“What? Both?” Claire asked.

“My God, he’s barely cold!” Temple clucked.

“Well, that’s the way we did it with his wife, Imogene, when she died,” Fräulein Wintner cried defensively. “Didn’t you just ask what happens now?” Fräulein Wintner seemed to be coming apart at the seams.

“Of course we did, dear.” Puffin patted her hand. “You just pay him a never you do mind.”

“Tell you what,” Blacky suggested heartily. “We all could do with another round. My treat.”

No one moved or said anything. Everyone was still very much in shock, Claire supposed, for all their snappy retorts. No one refused a drink, either.

“What an unbelievably terrible thing to happen on such a beautiful day,” Blacky muttered. “A catastrophe.”

“Yes,” they all agreed, looking out over the soft green hill Hans would never see again. Friedel the gardener stared madly into his beer. He gripped the table edge. He looked, Claire feared, much like her son did a minute before becoming sick. There was something endearing about the fellow, in his rumpled overalls and muddy clogs.

“Such flowers you have here,” Claire addressed him. “So beautifully thought out! Is it Stella Gabriella who takes an interest in the garden?”

“Oh, no indeed,” Fräulein Wintner interrupted before Friedel could answer. “Fräulein Stella is much too absorbed in her pottery. That’s all she cares about. She has a kiln in the house out back, you know.”

“Doesn’t she do that Japanese-style pottery?” Puffin asked. “What’s it called? Raiku? Raku?”

“I know she prepares her own mud,” Fräulein Wintner informed them with a mixture of resentment and pride. “That’s not typical, you know. She is”—her face took on the concentrated effort of quotation—“‘of the pure form.’ There’s a lot of them out in Diessen, a town out on Ammersee, the lake. Famous for potters. Like a cult, they are. Ever after the quest for the perfect pot. Fräulein Stella is their most important potter.”

“It’s Cosimo who does the garden,” Friedel finally managed.

“A right lunatic he is about the roses, too,” Puffin added. “Almost bit my head off when I tried to put Mara in the middle of them. Remember, dear?”

“It wasn’t as though we’d have harmed them,” Mara complained.

“That’s right,” the lighting man added. “We was ever so careful.”

“A lunatic,” Puffin kept on. “Flowers and the bloody piano, nothing else.”

“Oh, well.” Temple Fortune shrugged. “He’s very good at both, isn’t he? Marvelous, really …”

It is true, Isolde agreed silently. He was superb. She wondered if he would be recovered enough emotionally to play for the wedding.

Claire gazed at Temple Fortune. She liked a man who saw no need to justify a life of passion. He smiled boyishly back, ducking his head shyly and meeting her, only for a moment, with his eyes. They both looked guiltily away.

“What’s this?” Puffin Hedges pursed his lips. He didn’t miss much. “So Claire—it is Claire, isn’t it?” he interrupted this disturbing involuntary pink they both had and peered at her from across the table. “We hear that you are a photographer.”

“Ah,” said Claire, not knowing what else to say.

“Really? What is your sphere?” Mara raised her chin and squinted unflatteringly, as though small glasses might be perched upon her perfect nose at other, more private, times.

“Oh,” Claire murmured, “the unusual.”

“Well, this is certainly extraordinary enough.” Puffin made a lemon face and batted collusive eyes at Mara. His tone was baiting and unpleasant. “Perhaps you should be photographing this!”

Blacky moved disapprovingly back and forth in his chair. Irked but interested, Claire moved forward. “What do you mean, ‘this’?”

“Well”—Puffin lifted both palms into the air—“us.”

Claire smiled convivially back. “I am afraid I don’t photograph the sensational.” She savored the expression on Puffin Hedges’s face while this sank in. “What I am after is”—she stopped talking again, long enough to ask herself what it was she was after, then looked exactly at him and said—“still life.”

“Oh.” Mara Morgen peered grimly at Temple Fortune. “Fruit in a bowl.”

“No, not that. More like life caught standing still. And beauty. Whatever that is.”

Mara, sensing Temple’s interest quicken behind her, lanced back, “Oh, beauty! I would imagine one would give up that sort of thing, comes a point.”

Surprised at such ardent venom, Claire remembered when she too had reacted to the green-eyed monster. “No,” she replied kindly, “more like the first moment I saw you, on the green, under the tree, motionless in your pretty costume. My first reaction was to shoot you.”

Spontaneous laughter at the double meaning replaced the uncomfortable silence, and conversation resumed. Claire congratulated herself on handling that well, if unknowingly. She’d meant only to be honest and kind. She wouldn’t want to make an enemy of Mara. Not yet, anyway.

“Funny he should die like that,” Puffin Hedges ruminated out loud. “He’d just been telling me this morning how he wanted to—”

Mara, who’d been watching Claire shrewdly, interrupted Puffin with, “You are not the Breslinsky who used to shoot layouts in Teuer, are you?”

“Yes, I am,” Claire admitted, not wanting to be old enough, but delighted that someone should remember her better work, something other than the advertising stuff she was so often connected to.

Mara continued to eye her suspiciously. “That wasn’t you, though? The Breslinsky who did ‘The Women of India’ series?”

“You flatter me by remembering,” Claire confessed.

“Remember?” Mara’s buoyant enthusiasm obliterated her earlier mistrust and skepticism. “I just never knew you were a woman. I used to wait for things of yours!”

“Uh-oh,” Puffin joked, “disdain to cahoots. Now we’ve got trouble!”

“No, really. I used to look for your work. You used to be great.”

“Well, I’m not dead yet.” Claire tried not to look decrepit.

Puffin squinted at her with suddenly motivated interest. “It is a great pleasure to meet you,” Mara said, extending her small hand across the table.

Embarrassed and happy, Claire grasped it and shook it heartily. She felt absurdly grateful.

This was all too much for Isolde. “Hans!” she cried out suddenly and buried her face in her bejeweled hands.

Blacky knocked over his chair in his haste to get to her. He wrapped her up in his jacket and sort of lifted her by her shoulders. She was, however, too much for him, stronger and bigger, and she stayed right where she was, taller now but still right there, everyone watching and clicking their tongues. Fräulein Wintner commiserated with the appropriately woeful moanings.

Someone began to play piano upstairs. Hanging out at Iris von Lillienfeld’s had honed Claire’s classical-music-appreciation skills. On her less arthritic days, Iris was as delightful as any composer she chose. Schumann’s “Arabesque.” Claire recognized it at once and lifted her eyes to see Temple Fortune just pulling his own reluctantly away from her. She felt herself elevate with joy. Stella Gabriella, the daughter of the house, appeared at the open doorway beneath the music.

Stella was so enchantingly lovely, so luminous, with an ethereal grace that went beyond grief, so spellbinding, that they all stopped talking and gaped. Friedel sprang to his feet as if at attention, prepared to do her any bidding.

There was something alarming in the way she stood there. “Es war Cosimo,” Stella declared. (It was Cosimo.) She cradled her arms, as in a dance. If any of the women at the tables had any illusions of imagining themselves quite something, they had only to look now at young Stella Gabriella standing there in the harmonious lavender dusk to know they would never dare to be so vain again. She looked smaller than before, like a jewel. Still no one spoke. Enraptured, they waited for her to say something. Claire thought Stella was about to sing. Instead, she lifted up what she had in her hands and held it out to them. It was something horribly alive.

“Oh, Lord,” Blacky cried. “She’s cut off all her beautiful hair!”

Claire slept the next day and night away, then was up before dawn. It was chilly and still. She pulled her warm cable-knit pullover over a long skirt and put on her Frei boots. Claire kept her camera bag under the bed, an old habit picked up in vile Far Eastern hotels where thieves dropping in had sometimes only moments to sweep the room before the chambermaid returned. Any edge, Claire still maintained, was a good edge. She slipped an extra camera battery from the side pocket and laid it in the ashtray on the dresser. You always went low when you needed it most.

Now what was that? She cocked an ear. Piano. Again? At 5 A.M.? It was morning, wasn’t it? She panicked mentally. Jet lag could do strange things to you. She went over to the window and opened it, marveling at the clean, effortless ease of the Teutonic window frame, nothing like her weather-warped ones at home, which required the prerequisite bang with a fist, then a lightning-fast out-of-control whoosh where you practically found yourself thrust out of it. No, it was morning. The lightening in the sky came from the east. Schumann’s “Rheinisch,” she noted. Nicely done, too. She wondered how long the Mill would stay in business, though, with the proprietor waking the guests up before dawn with his eccentric license. She grabbed her camera and some film and crept down the quiet stairs. No one but Cosimo was up. She went out. The dog was still there, lying down but in the same spot. Claire went over and held out her palm for him to sniff. The dog raised his head slightly, then dropped it back down, listless.

“Poor kid,” Claire whispered and walked on away, past the still-standing-there old-timer car, up the drive and then eagerly out over the field and the damp, soft hills, strewn blue with wild forget-me-nots.

The sun came grudgingly up behind thick clouds, and the air was filled with birdsong. The golden weather of her arrival was past, but it was refreshing to be out and about like this, no stopping to feed and dress the kids, no worry if Johnny would put on the new socks she’d laid out for him or just rummage around to select his old favorites from the hamper.

She stopped at the top of the hill and took some shots of the Mill. It looked almost like a watercolor in its puddle of mist. “Nice,” she said out loud. She had loaded the camera with high-speed black and white. She was always happiest shooting black and white. Inevitably, she got carried away and finished the roll. Faintly she heard the rich sound of a man whistling. She looked this way and that. Far off to the other hill, there was somebody walking. “Who would be out at this time?” she wondered, picked up her long lens and captured him, an old fellow. It was the same walking figure she’d seen there the first day she’d arrived. Christ, was it just two days ago? It felt like two weeks had gone by.

She shot him just for fun. She would show this one to Iris, the fond whistling man on the hill, just above the old tree she’d described there. Claire sighed. She wasn’t much looking forward to going through a mill full of clocks, as Iris had suggested. Why hadn’t she told her there would be so many clocks? She didn’t suppose anyone would hide a bag of diamonds in a tree, not for fifty-something years, they wouldn’t, but all the same she thought she’d have a look. If nothing else, she loved a big old tree.

The hem of her long purple corduroy skirt was soaked wet by now from the high, dew-sodden grass, but she didn’t mind; she felt invigorated and alive. For no reason, she started to run.

The gray-green world stood still around her as she swirled like an animal across the field, her camera banging at her hip. She reached the tree, out of breath and exhilarated, and put her arms around the trunk, touching the bark with the tips of her fingers, wanting nothing, wanting everything.

There were no diamonds here. Just an elderly tree with an elephant’s memory. She laughed out loud. With her head still thrown back, she caught sight of a man from the corner of her eye. She jumped. He jumped. It was Temple Fortune.

“Bloody hell!” he lurched and cried out.

“Why don’t you watch your step?” she panted. Her chest heaved from the running. “You scared me. I thought you were the Whistler.”

“The Whistler?” He looked over his shoulder. “Sounds like a Fritz Lang film.”

“What are you doing here?” she said.

“I might ask you the same thing.”

She raised her chin at the scene before them. “I would use this angle if I were you,” she suggested, admiring again the view of the Mill.

“So now you are recruiting visuals for me.” He smiled. Or was that a sneer?

“Far be it from me.” She sneered (just in case it was) back.

They both hesitated.

“It’s going to rain,” she said. They were so close and breathing so heavily, she caught hold of his scent. Their eyes met with a liquid collision. They smiled daffily at each other. “Vetyver,” she concluded, recovering first, realizing where she was and that she’d run into the very one she would have hoped to; only now, his playful, exquisite presence was so physical to her that she imagined he could see right through her and read her wanton thoughts. Without another word, she ran off, away from discovery and back to the safety of the Mill.

It was not only that she didn’t want him to know her, it was simply that she was so enjoying this rare and almost forgotten feeling of lust that she was afraid it would end if he said the wrong thing. And he must almost assuredly say the wrong thing. Who could live up to an adolescent fantasy? Who knew the script but her? It was as if she kept him at a distance, she could keep him forever, an erotic intoxication prolonged at arm’s convenient length.

In the warm dark kitchen, Evangelika leaned over yellow egg yolks in a hollow of flour. She had one part of the long table set up with her rolling pin and a cold dish of water. A bowl of black cherries waited brilliantly.

“Strudel?” Claire mopped her damp face with her hanky.

The rain came down outside.

As Evangelika didn’t answer, she walked on in.

“May I watch?”

“No,” Evangelika said.

“I can pit,” Claire bargained.

“What were you doing, snooping around out there before everyone is awake?”

“What, me? I was taking pictures. Photographs. That’s what I do.” Abrasive old bat, she thought.

“Ah. Another fancy one.”

“I’m not so fancy,” Claire defended the drabness of her life. She looked at her own unmanicured and work-worn hands.

“Sit over there, then,” Evangelika sniffed, pointing to the farthest spot from her. “Just don’t let me find out you were up in the attic looking through all those old photograph albums he had up there. I have enough to do without strangers coming in here and messing everything up.” She turned her back. “Just got things in order.”

Claire took her stool happily. She found a knife she liked in the table drawer, a short sharp one, and got busy. The next thing she would be sure to do would be to go look through those photograph albums in the attic.

Dying for a cup of the delicious coffee she smelled brewing on the big stove, she thought she wouldn’t press her luck. She’d get a good pile of cherries pitted before she asked. I hope he sees me like this, she caught herself wishing. Such a visual man as he was, to come across her sitting there prettily, industriously turning her fingers a ravishing beety pink, her hair silhouetted by the cheery stove.

Father Metz stood, tired, weary, in the doorway.

I am out of my mind, she congratulated herself. I have a husband I love and little children who need me. Well, what of it? It wasn’t as though she had done something wrong. But she had, she had done something innately wrong, and she knew it. Just as surely as though she had done something really, because these feelings were more real to her than anything she’d felt for a long, long time. She had not said “Pooh, pooh” to the excitement of Temple Fortune’s presence. She’d given every part of her being to enticing him. She had closed her eyes and prayed, “Yes, bring him closer.” She had opened her mouth and breathed, irrevocably, in. If destiny wouldn’t punish her for that, she knew herself well enough, she would do it for destiny.