Read Online Madensky Square by Eva Ibbotson - Free Book Online Page A

handed me a key. No smile of complicity, no recognition though I was here less than two months ago. The Bristol isn’t intimate like Sachers; no naked archdukes come whooping out of the Salles Privees. Here is complete discretion, anonymity. No wonder the nice fat English King Edward liked it best of all the hotels in the city.
    My room was perfect. I could see over the roofs to a garden with a swing and pond with pin-sized children who should have been in bed. I took off my hat and put it on the hatstand. I sat down on the bed.
    There is no waiting like this waiting.
    Then came the knock on the door.
    ‘Enter!’
    He entered.

    Why him ? Why this one man of all the men who have courted me? He is fourteen years older than I am and God knows I
    am not young. He looks like a weatherbeaten eagle, tight-lipped, uncompromising, no softness anywhere in the cleanshaven face. Why a soldier when the whole paraphernalia of army life is repellent to me, why a landowner when I secretly share Nini’s dislike of the ruling class?
    And why a man who can never marry me and whose wife, the delicate and largely absent Elise, is the object of our continuing concern?
    Field Marshals of the Austrian Army are usually princely, glamorous or in their dotage. Gernot von Lindenberg was none of these. Rumour had it that the Kaiser had insisted on his promotion so that he could send him to interminable disarmament conferences and diplomatic missions which were doomed before the entourage ever left Vienna. To the bumbling, ancient Emperor, Gernot was wholly loyal while privately groaning at his narrow-mindedness. If the Crown Prince had lived, my lover might have taken pleasure in his work: he and Rudolf had been friends. As it was he endured the frustration and monotony of the conference table and escaped when he could to manoeuvres in obscure and lonely places or the work on his estate. Yet he had not chosen the army, any more than he had chosen the high-born Elise von Dermatz-Heyer whose family estate bounded his.
    ‘Why, Gernot?’ I asked him once. ‘Why always duty, duty, duty?’
    ‘Perhaps because I don’t think it matters. Duty… inclination… whatever you start with there are years of grinding work to be filled in before you die.’
    From what he didn’t say rather than what he did, I sensed his despairing pessimism, his conviction that the corruption, the inefficiency and bumbledom that pervaded the army and the court would land us like an overripe plum in the lap of Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, whom he loathed more than any man on earth.
    Now he came towards me. He doesn’t smile much, my protector. When he does one side of his mouth flicks upwards briefly, more in sardonic comment on the idiocy of the world than in amusement, but he has a way of doing something to his eyes which even after twelve years of intensive study I have not identified. We took each other’s hands, didn’t kiss… looked. I thought I saw further ravages played by his foul profession on his face. Then: ‘Do you like my dress?’ I inquired conversationally.
    His steel blue eyes roamed over the creamy folds of silk, lingered in the places where I had arranged for the eye to linger. He stepped back to study me more carefully as I turned slowly round, came face to face with him again.
    ‘Yes, I like it.’
    Then he said that lovely thing – the thing that women the world over see as the fulfilment of their labours; their just reward.
    ‘Take it off,’ said Field Marshal von Lindenberg. ‘At once, please. Take it off!’

    When I became Gernot’s mistress I changed. I’d been a babbler, but I had to learn discretion and I kept the secret of our liaison from everyone I knew. Alice guessed, I think, but her own affair with Rudi Sultzer was conducted so quietly and modestly that I knew she could be trusted. I learnt to wait – it was often weeks between one meeting and the next, and the best part of summer he was away on manoeuvres. Oh, those manoeuvres