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

which took place in some unspeakable corner of the Empire: Ruthenia, Moldavia… on a forlorn and dusty plain. Some of the soldiers’ girlfriends followed them there, but not I. Gernot was fanatical about the need of officers to conduct their lives with decorum. It was not Elise who imposed on us the iron secrecy in which we moved – she was in any case involved in a constant pilgrimage round the spas of Europe – it was his obligation to his men.
    What changed most, though, was my attitude to God. I went on going to church because I needed Him and I felt, too, that it would be hard on Him to be left only with the virtuous who are frequently so odd. But I didn’t go to confession – how could I confess the ‘sin’ which had dragged me back to life and happiness after I gave up my child ? I knew I was doomed to hellfire and of course I minded, but my preoccupation with life after death was not quite the usual one. I thought of the Last Trump, the open graves, the skeletons rising and seeking out their loved ones with whom to float upwards to eternal life.
    But who would come for us, the women in the shadows, the mistresses? For on this most important day the proprieties would have to be observed, I understood that. It was the Frau Professorinen, the Frau Doktors and Frau Direktors who would be claimed by their spouses. Alice understood that it was with the musty bones of Frau Sultzer clasped in his arms that her Rudi would ascend to Paradise. And I, of course, knew that the hand of my protector, which even in life has a skeletal touch, would reach for the bones of the woman he had married: the high-born Elise von Dermatz-Heyer who had brought him a useful forest and straightened out an untidy bulge on the borders of his estate.
    But the Last Trump was not yet!

    We lay in bed holding hands. Unnecessary one might have thought in view of what had passed, but not so. I asked after his wife who, even if I knew her, I would not be able to hate, for her son had died when he was five months old and her daughter, now grown up, was a plain and unattractive woman with a discontented face.
    Gernot reached out to the bedside table for his cigars. The fact that I can exist in a cloud of tobacco smoke may explain the hold I have over him.
    ‘She’s left Baden-Baden. The waters were the wrong temperature or there wasn’t enough sulphur, I forget which. So she’s gone to Meran. There’s a splendid crook there who charges a thousand kronen to keep people sitting up to the neck in radioactive mud while eating grapes. He owns a vineyard of course.’
    ‘And the conference in Berlin?’
    His face darkened. ‘A fiasco, naturally. Wilhelm will drag us into a war, there’s no doubt of it. A purposeless war for which we are entirely unprepared.’ He shook off his thoughts and commanded me to prattle.
    My lover’s curiosity about my shop is outstanding. This complex, busy man listens like a child to nursery rhymes while I describe my customers and the life of the square. So now I
    told him about the new dress that Leah Cohen had ordered for the races at Freudenau: more expensive than her sister-in-law’s but able to be worn for planting oranges if the worst came to the worst, and of the Polish wraith opposite whom I’d had to
show
how to pat a dog. I told him about the letter Herr Schumacher’s brother had tactlessly written, urging the claims of his goldfish-slaying son even before the birth of the new baby, and of the mishap that had befallen me when I took the Countess von Metz’s Turkish dagger to the pawnbroker.
    ‘Poor old soul; she must be the meanest woman in creation.’
    But he is surprisingly kind about the Countess for he knew her many years ago when she kept house for her brother, the Colonel of some obscure Moravian regiment in a distant garrison town.
    Only when I described Frau Egger’s cloak and the strange buttons did he grow restless and frown.
    ‘An owl pierced with a lance… damn it, that rings a bell,