Magic Flutes

1

Guy returned to the capital of a dismembered empire: a city impoverished by defeat, in the grip of inflation but still beautiful. The theatres were open, the concert halls were packed. The Viennese still danced, still sang. Sometimes, as the new republic struggled with the shortages and disruptions left by the war, they even ate.

Guy took a suite at Sachers, saw that his stenographer and chauffeur were suitably housed nearby and allowed himself a week of the swashbuckling entrepreneurism that was his hallmark, wresting the copper concessions in the Eisen Gebirge from an Armenian syndicate after a spectacular battle, and gleefully beating a South African tycoon to the lignite deposits near Graz. After which, considerably refreshed, he presented himself at the Treasury and plunged into the work which had brought him to Vienna.

It was work shrouded in secrecy, as vital and exacting as it was outwardly unspectacular. For Austria was seeking a huge loan from the League of Nations, seeing in this her only chance to stabilize her currency and set off along the road to recovery. It was to assist the new republic in presenting her case to the League that Guy had been sent out by the British government, who feared that a permanently weakened Austria would seek union with Germany. No one seeing him, day after day, courteous and patient, would have imagined how irksome he found the ponderous bureaucracy and time-wasting social functions in the stuffy, grandiose rooms of the Hofburg.

Then, on a fine Saturday at the end of March, Guy, obeying a summons from his young secretary David Tremayne, left the city, dismissed his chauffeur and turned his car southward towards the fortress known as Pfaffenstein. This is the most famous castle in Burgenland, an emblem for the whole of Austria — the embodiment for close on a thousand years of defensive power, aggression, grandeur and pride.

The position alone is breathtaking. At the head of a dark green lake whose glacial waters chill the blood even in midsummer, is a great pinnacle of rock rising skyward from the pines which cling to its base. To the east the crag, split from top to bottom by a fault in the rock, drops sheer to the Hungarian plain. To the north are the wooded slopes and jagged peaks of the Pfaffenstein mountains whose passes it dominates; to the west, sloping more gently, are the vineyards and orchards which merge in the far distance with the snow crown of the Alps.

On the summit of this gigantic eyrie, the last outcrop of the Pfaffenburg spur, the Franks built a fort at the time of Charlemagne, but even they were not the first. Two hundred years later, the Crusaders added a square of turreted towers, threw a drawbridge over the dizzying ravine to the east of the castle and rode out full panoplied against the infidel, bearing aloft the banner of the Pfaffensteins with its impaled griffin and crimson glove.

By the time Richard Coeur de Lion was brought there, pending his imprisonment at Durenstein, Burg Pfaffenstein was a thriving Romanesque citadel with a council chamber, a chapel and a village clinging humbly to the base of its crag. In subsequent centuries, as the Tartars invaded Hungary, the Hungarians invaded Austria and the Turks invaded both, its fame and importance increased as steadily as the power of its owners who became, by conquest and marriage, first counts, then margravines, then princes.

The rout of Sultan Mahomet’s troops after the second siege of Vienna, which banished the Turks for ever from Christendom, set in train a riot of new building as cannon bastions and barrier walls were blown up and the years of imperial splendour under the ever mightier Habsburgs were reflected in Pfaffenstein’s steadily increasing grandeur, opulence and pomp. Ignoring, but never quite managing to erase, the dungeons built deep into the rock, the torture chambers and oubliettes of the earlier fortress, the princes of Pfaffenstein built a palace along the southern front, the windows of its great state rooms sheer with the crag as it rose above the lake; blasted terraces out of the rock and threw pepper-pot turrets on to the flanking towers. A musical Pfaffenstein built a theatre, an Italianate one arcaded the courtyards, a prince of the Church enlarged the Romanesque chapel to form a soaring, gilded paean to the glory of God.

Larger than Hochosterwitz, more heavily fortified than the Esterhazy palace at Eisenstadt and far, far older than the castles that the poor mad Swan King Ludwig had built to the north in Bavaria, Burg Pfaffenstein, by the end of the nineteenth century, had become the subject of innumerable paintings and the inspiration of countless minor poets. The redoubtable Baedecker, when he arrived, gave it three stars.

To this castle, driving himself in his custom-built, tulip-wood Hispano-Suiza, came Guy Farne on a spring afternoon in 1922, with a view to purchase.

He came, as all who come from Vienna must, by the road which skirted the western side of the lake and as the fantastic, towering pile reared up before him, his wide mouth curved into an appreciative smile.

‘Yes,’ he said to the young man sitting beside him, ‘it will do. Definitely, it will do. You’ve done well, David.’

His secretary, David Tremayne, whose fair good looks and puppyish desire to please concealed a tireless efficiency, turned a relieved face to his employer. ‘I thought you’d like it, sir. I saw a few others but I don’t know… This one put them all in the shade.’

‘It certainly makes its own quiet statement,’ said Guy sardonically.

But as he switched off the engine and got out of the car, he momentarily caught his breath. Burg Pfaffenstein’s role as fortress, as refuge and as palace was evident in every stone. Now, in the still, green lake which mirrored with exquisite accuracy each tower and pinnacle and glistening spire, Guy saw it in another guise: as Valhalla or Venusberg — the castle as dream.

‘You’re certain the owners want to sell?’

‘Absolutely, sir. There are only the two old ladies left now and a great-niece in Vienna.’ And David fell silent, thinking with compassion of the proud, impoverished families he had visited in his search, all desperate to offer him their ducal Schloss or moated Wasserburg or hunting lodge.

Guy nodded, measuring the road which passed under the crag at the head of the lake and then vanished into the ravine.

‘Let’s see if we can make it without oxygen, then,’ he said and climbed back into the car.

But as Guy drove skilfully round the hair-raising bends that led up to the Burg, David was frowning. His instructions had been simple: to find an impressive and imposing castle (‘toffee-nosed’ was the word his employer had used, reverting to his origins) which the owners were willing to rent or preferably to sell.

Only why? This was something Guy Farne had not chosen to reveal to his otherwise trusted secretary, and the whole enterprise seemed totally out of keeping with what David knew of his employer’s tastes and inclinations. A millionaire he might be, and several times over, but his personal habits were spartan to a degree which caused deep pain to Morgan his chauffeur, to Miss Thisbe Purse, his stenographer, and at times to David himself. Farne’s indifference to comfort, his ability to go without food or sleep, his detestation of pomp were a byword, nor had he troubled to conceal his contempt for those post-war profiteers who conned the newly-poor out of their houses and possessions. True, his sojourn in Austria was likely to be of some duration and he needed a base — but why this gigantic castle? In Brazil, where other men of his wealth had bought palaces, he had lived in a simple if lovely facienda by the river, his only extravagance a steam yacht with which he explored the mazed waterways of the Amazon. In London he lived in an apartment in the Albany, in Paris in a roof-top flat in the Ile St Louis which but for the glory of its plumbing might have belonged to any Left Bank painter or poet. Only on movement — elegant boats, fleet cars and (his latest acquisition) a small bi-plane — did Farne habitually spend the awe-inspiring sums which betrayed his stupendous wealth.

They had negotiated that last hairpin bend, crossed the drawbridge, been sneered at by the griffins on the gatehouse arch and now drew up in a vast and silent courtyard.

Ten minutes later, having followed an ancient retainer in the Pfaffenstein livery of crimson and bottle-green along an immense groin-vaulted corridor and through a series of shrouded and magnificent rooms, they found themselves in the presence of the two old ladies who were now the castle’s sole occupants.

Augustine-Maria, Duchess of Breganzer, was in her eighties, her eagle’s beak of a nose and fierce grey eyes dominating the wrinkled, parchment face. The Duchess wore a black lace dress to the hem of which there adhered a number of cobwebs and what appeared to be a piece of cheese. A cap of priceless and yellowing lace was set on her sparse hair and her rather dirty, arthritic hands rested on a magnificent ivory cane which had belonged to Marie Antoinette.

Her sister-in-law Mathilde, Margravine of Attendorf and Untersweg, was a little younger and in spite of recent shortages, resolutely round-faced and plump. Unlike the Duchess who had received them standing, the Margravine remained seated in order to embrace more efficiently the quivering, shivering form of a goggle-eyed and slightly malodorous pug whose lower extremities were wrapped in a gold-embroidered Medici cope.

Driven back room by room by their poverty, the demands of the war (which had turned Pfaffenstein into a military hospital) and their own increasing age and infirmity, the ladies had taken refuge in the West Tower, in what had been an ante-room connecting the great enfilade of state rooms on the southern facade with the kitchens.

Its round walls were hung with tapestries which Guy suspected had been chosen more for their capacity to exclude draughts than for their artistic content, for they mainly depicted people holding heads: Judith that of Holofernes, Salome of John the Baptist and St Jerome of a dismembered stag. The Meissen-tiled stove was unlit; dust lay on the carved arms of the vast chairs fashioned, it seemed, for the behinds of mountain ogres — but the condescension and graciousness of the ladies was absolute.

‘Welcome to Pfaffenstein, Herr Farne. We trust you found your journey enjoyable.’

Guy, kissing the extended hand and replying suitably, noticed with pleasure that the Duchess spoke what was called ‘Schönbrunner Deutsch’, a dialect which the high nobility shared with the cab drivers of Vienna. And indeed both ladies had been attendant on the Emperor Franz Joseph’s family in the palace of Schönbrunn outside Vienna where the gruelling Spanish ceremonial, the staggering absence of lavatories and the indifferent food had proved an excellent preparation for their present way of life.

Refreshment was offered and refused, the necessary courtesies were exchanged. Then Guy, whose German was fast and fluent, came to the point.

‘You will know already that I would like to buy Burg Pfaffenstein. My solicitors have mentioned the terms?’

The Duchess inclined her head. ‘They are fair,’ she conceded, ‘and we are willing. But as I have already informed your secretary, for a final decision we are awaiting a reply from Putzerl.’

Hearing the name, the pug shot like a squeezed pip from his golden cope and began to run round the room yapping excitedly, causing Guy to exchange an apprehensive glance with his secretary. If Putzerl was the name of the little dog they were in trouble.

The danger passed. For Putzerl, as the ladies now explained, was the great-niece in Vienna, more precisely the Princess of Pfaffenstein and (her mother having been an archduchess) of quite a few other places, and now the sole and legal owner of the castle with its dairies, sawmills, brewery, villages, salt-mine (now defunct) and 56,627 hectares of land.

‘Because, you see, when her father went off to fight he managed to break the entail on the male heir and a great fuss it was. He had to go and see poor cousin Pippi in the end,’ said the Margravine.

‘But we’re certain she’ll agree. She’s been urging us to sell. Putzerl is extremely modern,’ said the Duchess. ‘And of course the money will be invaluable for her dowry because poor Maxi really doesn’t have a kreutzer to bless himself with.’

The dizzying capacity of the Austrians to refer to absolutely everybody by some appalling diminutive or nickname, which Guy had forgotten, now returned to his mind. Having gathered that cousin Pippi was Pope Pius XV, he was now informed, though he had been careful not to ask, that Maxi (alias Maximilian Ferdinand, Prince of Spittau and Neusiedel) was the young man they had picked for Putzerl to marry, there being — owing to the cruel war and the sordid revolutions in various places which had followed it — quite simply no one else.

‘The Gastini-Bernardi boy would have done quite well, actually,’ said the Duchess, on whom the thought of Maxi seemed to be working adversely. ‘But he’s dead. And I must say there always seems to be cholera in Trieste.’

‘Or Schweini,’ said the Margravine, her voice soft. ‘Such a sweet-looking boy.’

‘Don’t be silly, Tilda. The Trautenstaufers only have twelve quarterings.’

‘Still, they’re in the Almanach…’

The argument that followed seemed a little pointless since Schweini, though destined for the Uhlans, had apparently been speared to death by one of his own boars before he could cover himself with glory. Guy, while not wishing to appear indifferent to Putzerl’s matrimonial prospects, now felt free to indicate that he would like to look round the castle.

If he had hoped that he and David would be allowed to roam at will, his hopes were dashed. The retainer was rung for, the pug lowered on to the ground again; shawls, walking sticks and bunches of keys were fetched and the expedition set off.

Within ten minutes Guy realized that Pffaffenstein, inside and out, was exactly what he had been looking for. Its neglect, though spectacular, was recent. In the three months he had set aside for the task he could easily restore it to its former splendour. The huge, baroque state rooms with their breathtaking views over the lake were ideal for his purpose; the guest rooms in the loggia were sound and the outer courtyards with their stables, coachhouses and servants’ quarters would house his workmen without inconveniencing the villagers. Above all, the private theatre with its aquamarine curtains, gilded boxes and ceiling frescoes by Tiepolo was a jewel which would be the perfect setting for the entertainment that was to set the seal on his plans.

But if he had seen enough to satisfy himself almost at once, there was no way of hurrying the ladies.

‘This,’ announced the Duchess unnecessarily as they entered a low building piled from floor to ceiling with skulls, ‘is the charnel house.’

‘Those skulls on the right are from the Black Death,’ said the Margravine helpfully.

‘And the ones on the left are Protestants,’ said the Duchess, murmuring, as she recalled the probable Anglicanism of Guy and his secretary, that there had been a ‘little bit of trouble’ during the Thirty Years War.

But it was before a lone skull displayed on a plinth in a kind of bird-cage and still boasting fragments of a mummified ear, that both ladies stopped with an especial pride.

‘Putzerl found this one when she climbed out through the dungeons on to the south face, the naughty girl.’

‘She believes it’s a Turk and we never had the heart to contradict her, though it is most unlikely. The Turks were all impaled on the eastern wall.’

‘We think it was probably a commercial traveller who came to see her great-grandfather.’

‘About saddle soap,’ put in the Margravine.

‘He came by the front entrance, you see. And poor Rudi was always so impulsive.’

They inspected the chapel with its Eichendorfer altar piece, climbed up yet another massive flight of stairs to the weapons room bristling with flintlock pistols and percussion guns; the museum packed with the heads of wolves, boars and the last auroch in the Forest of Pfaffenstein which Kaiser Wilhelm II had shot, only to be bitten in the leg by the three-year-old Putzerl for his pains… And down again, passing the well into which a seventeenth-century princess of Pfaffenstein, who had not cared for the matrimonial arrangements made on her behalf, had thrown herself on her wedding day.

‘Which was extremely silly of her,’ added the Duchess, ‘because he would have had Modena and Parma had he lived.’

‘Oh, Augustina, but he had no nose,’ expostulated the gentler Margravine. ‘It was all eaten away, you know,’ she explained to Guy, blushing, ‘by a… certain disease.’

‘Putzerl used to sit here on the rim of the well for hours when she was little,’ said the Duchess, ‘waiting for a frog to come.’

‘She wanted to throw it against the wall, like in the fairy tale, and turn it into a prince.’

‘And then one day a frog really did come and she cried and cried and cried.’

‘The frog was so much prettier than a prince, you see — even than Schweini, and he had the most lovely curls!’

‘So she kept it in the oubliette as a pet. Now here,’ continued the Duchess, opening a studded door from which a flight of slime-green steps led down into the darkness, ‘we must be a little careful. But you’ll be interested in the third Count’s collection of torture instruments. It is arranged exactly as the Inquisition left it!’

But at last they were back in the tower room, solicitors’ names exchanged, contracts mentioned and a bottle of Margaux ’83 brought up from the cellar.

‘And how soon would you wish us to leave?’ asked the Duchess, her voice carefully expressionless.

Guy leaned back in his carved chair and, the ladies having given him permission to smoke, selected a Monte Cristo, rolled it between his long fingers and began the careful husbandry that precedes the lighting of a great cigar.

‘There is no need for you to leave at present unless you wish to,’ he said. ‘On the contrary. In fact, you could say that in proposing to purchase Pfaffenstein I am endeavouring to secure your services.’

The ladies, whose small breath of relief had not escaped him, looked at him in puzzlement. ‘What had you in mind, Herr Farne? Not tourists? Because I’m afraid we couldn’t countenance that.’

No, no,’ said Guy soothingly. ‘Nothing like that. I propose to give a house party here at Pfaffenstein. It will last for a week and include a ball, a banquet, possibly a regatta on the lake — and finish with an entertainment here in the theatre. And I want you to select the guests.’

‘Us?’ faltered the Duchess.

Guy inclined his head. ‘I only ask that they should belong to your social circle.’

‘You wish to entertain our friends to a banquet and a ball?’ said the stunned Margravine.

‘And a house party to follow,’ repeated Guy. ‘I myself shall bring only one guest: a lady.’

Guy’s voice had been carefully expressionless but David leaned forward, aware that he had touched the heart of the mystery. At the same time he felt an inexplicable sense of unease.

‘A lady to whom I hope to be married,’ Guy continued. And answering David’s look of bewilderment, the slight hurt in the boy’s face, he added, ‘She is the widow of an officer wounded in the war and her period of mourning will only end in June, so no formal engagement exists as yet.’ He paused, and David saw the extraordinary change in the colour of his eyes as he remembered happiness. ‘I knew her years ago in Vienna.’

‘She is Austrian?’ enquired the Duchess.

‘No, English, but she loves your country. I should add perhaps that I am myself a foundling and was discovered in circumstances so disreputable that they must entirely preclude my seeking an entrée into the nobility. Indeed, my ambitions in that direction are non-existent. It is otherwise, however, with Mrs Hurlingham. Her aunt,’ said Guy, who had been made well aware of the fact, ‘was an Honourable.’

The ladies exchanged glances. ‘That is not a very high rank, Herr Farne,’ said the Duchess reprovingly.

‘Nevertheless she wishes, most understandably, to take her place in society. And I,’ he went on, his voice suddenly harsh, ‘do not wish her to suffer from being married to a man who is not even low-born but not “born” at all.’

‘It will be difficult,’ stated the Duchess.

‘She is not perhaps a Howard? Or a Percy — the aunt?’ enquired the Margravine hopefully.

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Oh, dear.’ The Duchess was perplexed. Well versed in the ways of the world, she was aware that the attractive Herr Farne with his wealth and obvious indifference to what anybody thought of him would be accepted far more easily than a fiancée with aspirations. ‘You see, our friends are rather particular. Prince Monteforelli, for example…’

Though highly entertained by the deep and ingrained snobbery of these old women, whose country on the map now looked like a severed and diminutive pancreas, whose court and emperor were totally defunct, Guy felt it was time he made his position clear. So leaning back, gently lowering a wedge of fragrant ash into the Louis Quatorze spittoon with which he had been provided, he said placidly that if they felt unable to introduce Mrs Hurlingham to European high society he regretted that the sale would be cancelled.

The ladies now retired behind a screen to confer. Though they spoke in whispers, they were sufficiently deaf for their deliberations to be perfectly clear to Guy, who gathered that their desire not to deprive Putzerl of her dowry, along with the lure of the word ‘banquet’ was fast overcoming their reluctance to offend their friends by introducing them to a lady whose aunt, though an Honourable, was unrelated to the great ducal families of Britain.

‘Very well, Herr Farne,’ said the Duchess with a sigh. ‘We will present your friend.’

‘Good,’ said Guy. ‘You should hear from my lawyers in a few days, by which time I trust your great-niece will have been in touch, and then I will send in the workmen. Mr Tremayne here,’ he continued, grinning at David, ‘will see to everything. There is one other condition. I want complete secrecy. My name is not to appear in the transaction; the deeds will be made out in the name of one of my companies. I would prefer that even the local people do not know that I am the new owner until everything is completed. I suggest June the eighteenth for the reception and the opening ball?’

‘Very well, Herr Farne.’

‘Oh, and I want to hire an opera company. Is there one that you can recommend?’

Even the ladies of Burg Pfaffenstein were impressed by the high-handedness of this.

‘The International Opera Company in the Klostern Theatre is said to be very good. Putzerl often speaks of it.’

‘And she’s extremely musical. In fact she’s studying music’

Guy thanked them, removed a spider which had fallen into his wineglass and took his leave.

It was not until they were halfway back to Vienna, eating supper in the candle-lit dining room of the White Horse Inn, that Guy, crumbling a roll in his long fingers, chose to give his secretary some kind of explanation.

‘You’ve been very patient, David. You must think I’ve gone quite mad. All that for a woman… Only, you see, she’s had a rotten life — forced into an unhappy marriage, then watching the poor devil take four years to die.’ He was silent for a moment, his eyes on the candle flame, the customary mocking look momentarily absent from his face. He looked years younger and to David, who worshipped him, suddenly and frighteningly vulnerable.

‘I want her to have everything she wanted at seventeen, however absurd,’ he went on. ‘Everything. She doesn’t even realize I’m rich — we only met a fortnight before I came away and I didn’t tell her. When I knew her before, I was twenty years old and penniless. I want her to come upon Pfaffenstein lit up for a ball and peopled with princes. I want her to walk into a fairy tale — and know that all of it is hers.’

‘She must be very beautiful,’ said David quietly.

‘The most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. She’s lovely now but at seventeen — oh, God!’

And for the first time in his life, Guy began to speak of his love for the girl who had been Nerine Croft.