Read Online The Lightstep by John Dickinson - Free Book Online Page A

did not withdraw
as he should have done . . .'
    'It is no matter, Tieschen,' she had said to him, as he followed
her all the way along the corridor, pleading at her elbow. 'I will
see that Mother knows.'
    And then she was sucked upstairs to where the great queen ant
herself lay, curled on her side on the canopied bed. Mother's face
was grey and her arms were clutched tightly around herself. Her
shoulders were hard as wood, unyielding to Maria's reluctant
embrace. Between bouts of weeping she was blaming all the
world.
    '. . . That insufferable man! Why did he come here? Why did he
think he could speak to me so?'
    'He was a friend of Albrecht's, Mother. He thought we should
know what had happened.'
    'It should not have happened! He was always too selfish!'
    'There, there,' Father mumbled, looking gloomily at the floor
as if the cause of all this trouble lay somewhere at his feet.
    'We must not blame him, Mother. It was the French. They did
it. He was leading his men . . .'
    'Monkeys! That wretched d'Erles! We have all been ruined for
the sake of one lazy, brainless godson!'
    'I meant the French army, Mother . . .'
    'But was not Albrecht also his godson?' Mother cried. 'It is a
crime! He should have made peace years ago. Others did!'
    'He' now was no longer Albrecht, nor his friend Captain
Wéry. Nor was it the famously dissolute Comte d'Erles, the
French émigré who had taken shelter under the wing of his
godfather the Prince-Bishop of Erzberg. 'He' was now the
Prince-Bishop himself! And who would she blame next?
The Pope, perhaps? Maria gripped the back of a chair, and her
knuckles were white.
    'We must be strong,' she said desperately 'He would want us
to be.'
    'That's all very well,' Mother muttered. 'But you did not love
him as I did.'
    That evening she sat at her mother's desk, alone at last. She was
alone, with the grey tides of grief that had been pulling at her
heart for hours.
    The desktop was covered with the letters Mother had been
writing when the news came. Here was the one to the bailiff
Holz, on the Niederwald estate. Here was another, addressed to
the cantonal court: the body that the local Imperial Knights had
elected to oversee their dealings with each other, since no one
else below the Emperor and the Imperial courts had the right.
Mother had been telling them imperiously, and yet again, that
whatever else Grandfather's creditors might have a claim to, they
had no right to her own personal incomes, which had been
settled on her by the Rother family at her marriage.
    And this one was to the Canon Rother-Konisrat himself, listing
at great length – and some imagination – all of Franz's
virtues; for Mother had lately decided that Franz could not after
all be the one to carry on the Adelsheim line, and must be found
some position in the church, even perhaps a canonry, so that he
might have an income to maintain him when Albrecht came
home to be the heir.
    All these letters should have been completed, copied, sealed
and directed by now. On a normal evening they would have been
stacked in a neat pile on the desk waiting for dispatch. Instead
they lay scattered across the board like fallen leaves, and their
words spoke only to the air. Across the room the long-case clock
ticked, marching on and on into the night like a soldier obeying
his last command. Everything else had stopped, as if a sudden
curse had put all the affairs of Adelsheim into an enchanted sleep.
    And if ever Adelsheim woke again, everything would have
changed. Certainly Franz could not enter the priesthood now.
Somehow he must marry and have sons after all, or the last estates
of Adelsheim would pass out of the line altogether. Because Alba
would never come home.
    And Mother lay upstairs, wrecked on her bed, with Father still
sitting beside her, mumbling aimless comforts now and again. She
would not come down tonight. Perhaps she would lie there, greyfaced
and weeping intermittently, for the rest of her life.
    She deserved to!
    Had she thought