Magic Flutes

8

In the arcaded Fountain Courtyard, the members of the International Opera Company were preparing for bed.

Their spirits were low. They had eaten excellently, for Guy had ordered that the same food should be served to the company as to the guests who were dining in the banqueting hall. But as they sat at the trestle tables put out in the courtyard, washing down the roast veal, the raspberries and cream, the luscious cheeses still unobtainable in Vienna, with unlimited supplies of Pfaf-fenstein’s wild, white wine, conversation was desultory and the nightingales who presently trilled from the darkening woods trilled in vain. For there was no news of Tessa and in her absence this first night, which should have been a triumph, had turned to ashes.

Witzler had spent the afternoon rushing through the castle, questioning every servant he could find, making a nuisance of himself to the steward and to Farne’s own staff. But no one had seen a vanished wardrobe mistress or seemed unduly interested in her fate. Boris had run down to the village to question the local policeman; Jacob had rung the mayor in Oberwent. No one had seen anything suspicious or found anything to report and the men who had marched her away had gone off duty and were nowhere to be found.

‘Herr Tremayne will find her in the morning,’ soothed the Rhinemaiden now, lowering her vast bulk, encased in a nightdress of shirred mattress ticking, on to the bed and allowing her flaxen hair to ripple over the pillows in a way that her husband frequently found soothing.

But nothing at that moment could soothe Jacob, who blamed himself ceaselessly for Tessa’s fate.

There was a knock on the door and Klasky’s dark and tortured face appeared.

‘Any news?’

Jacob shook his head.

‘Capitalist swine,’ said the conductor, a dedicated Marxist. ‘She’s probably in a dungeon somewhere.’ Entering gloomily, ignoring the Rhinemaiden in bed, he proved — despite his political principles — to be wearing jet-black silk pyjamas monogrammed in gold, and to be carrying a briefcase containing his opera. He flinched as the sound of ‘Wiener Blut’, played by the local hired band, wafted over the battlements and closed the Witz-lers’ window without asking permission. Tomorrow he was taking over the music. His orchestra would play during the firework display; he himself had agreed to accompany Raisa in a recital of lieder — but without Tessa, now, to turn the music. Only Tessa turned the pages at the right time. Only Tessa did not have to be grimaced at for being too late or too soon.

‘There has been heard nothing?’ enquired Pino, arriving in a resplendent Paisley dressing-gown lightly streaked with egg.

The stage-hands, in their dormitory under the rafters, were still muttering mutinously.

‘If they’ve done anything to her I’ll murder them. I’ll murder the whole lot of them,’ said Stefan.

‘Do you remember that night we took her to the jazz club and she danced till four in the morning and then we found her asleep in the cloakroom curled up on her coat?’ said Georg.

But at last sleep overtook the company which had, after all, laboured since dawn. In his room Jacob slumbered, one hirsute arm buried in the tresses of his Rhinemaiden. Boris slept, The Mother flocculating quietly on his bedside table. Frau Pollack slept, whimpering and wracked by her dreams. Klasky, his ears stuffed with cotton-wool against the noise of the yokel band, finally put down the pencil-stabbed score of his opera before he, too, closed his eyes.

But in his cot in the small room assigned to Witzler’s under wardrobe mistress, Bubi, the Witzlers’ infant son, now woke.

The nightlight, glowing on soul-filled, coal-black eyes and an ear strangulated by the blond curl he was winding desperately round it, illuminated a scene of despair. Bubi was wearing new, utterly masculine pyjamas that replaced his infantile nightdress and had been bought in the flush of affluence that Guy’s commission had brought to his papa. Bubi had cleaned his teeth; he had prayed; everything that could be done had been done and where was she? They had said that if he went to sleep like a good boy she would be there when he woke — and he had, and she was not there. The unfairness of it was beyond belief. He had been promised Tessa. She was going to tell him about the giant whose stomach rumbles caused the thunderstorms; she was going to play the game where he crawled under the bedclothes and she had to guess what animal he was being. She was going to be there all night!

And where was she? Nowhere. Her bed was flat and empty: there were no clothes on it, nothing.

Pondering on the wickedness of mankind and on promises betrayed, Bubi, biting his lip, now heard the soft but unmistakable sound of music. Unwinding a fat finger from the coil of his hair, he listened. Hope dawned. Music meant people, and rows of chairs to crawl between. It meant men with hammers who let him bang things — and it meant Tessa.

Carefully he climbed out of his cot, padded along the landing and emerged in the courtyard. There were lanterns in brackets lighting the fountain, and flares in the archway from which the sound of music came. Hitching up his striped pyjamas, which had been bought to last, he set off resolutely across the cobbles. Bubi’s first word after ‘Mama’, ‘Papa’ and ‘No’ had been ‘Bailiffs’ and men in bowler hats still made him cry, but the shadows behind the flaring lamps held no terrors for him.

Passing through an arch he found himself in an even larger courtyard; at the sight of the vast, dark expanse which faced him, and the looming statue of someone on a horse, he did for a moment hesitate. But it was from the long building opposite, with the light streaming from the windows, that music came, and with a last resolute hitch of his pyjama trousers Bubi set off staunchly in the direction of the open double doors.

‘Oh, Guy, isn’t it wonderful!’ breathed Nerine, circling the brilliantly lit ballroom in Guy’s arms.

‘You’re happy, then?’ he asked, looking down at her tenderly.

‘Happy! My dearest, you can’t imagine…’ she gazed reverently at the vast, brocaded backside of the Archduchess Frederica undulating two feet away in the heroic clasp of the Prince of Spittau. ‘All these people here — and as your guests!’

‘Our guests, Nerine. All this is for you.’

She looked up at him under her lashes, smiling — that long, slow, curving smile which had entranced him all those years ago. ‘You spoil me, darling.’

It was all worthwhile, he told himself again. He would have endured for eternity the company of these relics of the Almanach de Gotha (now proposing to eat him out of house and home) to see her look like that.

The Pfaffenstein Serenaders, engaged for the first night so as not to offend the susceptibilities of the locals, paused for an instant to wipe their perspiring faces before thundering into the ‘Gold and Silver Waltz’. Guy, steering Nerine between the couples, resolutely ignoring the spectacle of the Princess of Pfaffenstein supporting, without seeming to, the creaking form of the aged Prince Monteforelli while that disgusting old creature whispered his gallantries into her small, pricked ear, pulled his fiancée closer and said:

‘Do you remember, darling? This is the first waltz we ever danced to? At the Academy…’

The high, bare room, the young girls in their pale dresses, the Hungarian killed on the Eastern Front who had been his friend and loved the freckle-faced American… that incredible moment when the music allowed him to do what would otherwise have been unthinkable: to take Nerine into his arms…

‘Do you remember?’ he asked again.

Panic flickered for a moment in Nerine’s eyes. Guy had been asking her if she remembered things ever since they had come to Vienna, and the long and the short of it was that she did not.

‘What was I wearing?’ she prompted.

Guy frowned in concentration. ‘Something pink… soft… floating.’

Relief spread across Nerine’s face. Of course: the rose georgette, high-waisted, with puffed sleeves. The maid at the Academy had made an appalling mess of ironing the flounces and she had had to be very sharp with her.

‘Yes, yes, my dear,’ she said happily. ‘I do indeed remember.’

The Unconscious, lately discovered by Professor Freud and used by others to store their joys, fears and frustrations, was for Nerine a gigantic subterranean wardrobe.

Nerine’s brother was hardly less ecstatic than his sister. True, the oil-stained lady with whom he was dancing resembled nothing so much as a stranded sea cow patiently awaiting a gift of fish; true, her moist round eyes seemed unable to tear themselves from Farne — but what did it matter? She was the Countess Waaltraut von Waneck and could trace her descent back to Bohemian kings. Of course, to dance with the Princess of Pfaffenstein would really be something, but there was not much hope there. They were queueing up for her in order of rank, as was proper. Incredible, the catch Farne had turned out to be! What must all this be costing him, thought Arthur, and began happily to calculate again.

‘Jolly good show, this,’ said a captain of the Uhlans who was stranded, on account of a wooden leg, beside the Bath chair of Waaltraut’s mother. ‘Everything being done just as it should be. And the fellow seems to know how to behave too.’

The gouty old countess nodded. ‘If he hadn’t been engaged,’ she said, ‘I might almost have let Waaltraut demean herself.’

‘Oh, I say, no!’ said the Uhlan, shocked.

David Tremayne, standing unobtrusively by the great double doors, keeping an eye on everything, was satisfied. There had been numerous problems, and even this afternoon the director of the opera company had pursued him with some complaint about a missing wardrobe mistress — a complaint which David found hard to take seriously. Surely massive Viennese sewing ladies did not vanish into thin air? But now everything felt right. Farne’s guests were clearly having the time of their lives and Farne himself, waltzing with the lovely widow, must surely tonight be the happiest of men? How beautiful she was — staggeringly so, thought David — and turned to look yet again at the Princess of Pfaffenstein.

Already it seemed incredible to him that when she had first appeared in the aunts’ Tower Room just before the reception, sleepy and bewildered, he had been disappointed. From the talk which had preceded her, he had imagined someone sweetly pretty with curls and dimples, and the grave, narrow little face and shorn head had come as a shock. Then she had hugged the aunts and smiled at them and it was as though a flame had been lit inside her. Long before her old nurse had come and led her away, protesting, to dress, he had not imagined how she could look otherwise.

Since then he had admired, increasingly, her determination to stay out of the limelight. She had refused to let the band serenade her for her birthday, and had left the ballroom on some pretext before the first dance so that Mrs Hurlingham and Guy could open the ball alone. Not that it helped, thought David. Those dotty aristocrats, one and all, seemed to adore her.

Now he watched as she deposited her ancient, creaking kinsman in a gold-backed chair beside her aunts — and was immediately claimed by the man everyone said she was going to marry, the Prince of Spittau.

‘Nice tune, isn’t it?’ said Maxi happily, as the band broke into yet another waltz.

‘Yes,’ said Tessa. ‘Though I must say, Maxi, I would simply love to Charleston.’

‘To Charleston! Can you?’ Maxi was shocked. No wonder his mother worried about Putzerl!

‘A bit. Some friends took me to a jazz club and they taught me.’

But Maxi was bent on business. The music was heady and he would have been foolish not to know that in his sky-blue tunic and white trousers piped in red, he was looking his best. If he could propose and be accepted now, even without the dogs, he could really settle down and enjoy the house party.

‘They should make a very suitable couple, shouldn’t they?’ said Nerine as Maxi and Tessa drew level. Her rage at Tessa’s entry had been soothed by Arthur, who had informed her that the Princess was soon to be removed, and permanently, to the Prince of Spittau’s Wasserburg. ‘The prince so handsome and she — thanks to you — so rich.’

‘She won’t have all that much,’ said Guy. ‘Her father left a pile of debts.’ Though not naturally an ostentatious dancer, he now performed a chain of double reverse-turns which took them rapidly to the other end of the ballroom.

‘Putzerl, you know how fond I’ve always been of you,’ Maxi began.

‘And I of you, Maxi.’

Oh, please, not tonight, thought Tessa. My head aches so much and I just can’t face hurting him again. It seemed to her that the ball had been going on for ever and Guy had not spoken a single word to her all evening, had not once glanced her way.

But it looked as though there was no way of avoiding it. Maxi had tightened his arm and his duelling scar was pulsating, always a sign of deep emotion. There was no doubt about it, he was going to propose.

‘Putzerl, don’t you think you could—’

The prince was halted by a scuffle and the sound of laughter. Then, eluding two flunkeys in crimson and green, a tiny boy in awesomely striped pyjamas tottered barefoot into the ballroom and stopped, blinking in the light of the chandeliers.

Bubi, having gained his objective, now took stock. The people were there, and the music, but where were the men with the hammers, where the rows of seats? And where was she?

A lady in a red dress tried to seize him but Bubi, used to nipping between scene-shifters, easily wriggled free. The laughter was growing now; more and more dancers had stopped and now the music, too, came to an end.

Had he made a mistake? Bubi’s lower lip jutted out, began to tremble…

‘Bubi!’

In an instant the little boy’s face was transformed. Joy and relief shone in the coal-black eyes. It was her voice. She was here! And then she was bending over him and as she picked him up and he put his arms round her, he heard the words he longed above all others to hear.

‘You’ve got pyjamas, Bubi,’ said Tessa, her voice full of awe. ‘Real, proper, grown-up, striped pyjamas!’

Thus the Rhinemaiden, alerted by some sixth sense to her son’s disappearance and making a Wagnerian entrance, a shawl over her nightdress, put aside the images of Bubi impaled on iron spikes or drowned in a dark well, and saw him safe in the arms of a slim girl in white satin, light dancing from the tiara on her lovingly bent head…

And saw, too, that the search for their under wardrobe mistress had ended.

Tessa slept badly the night after the ball and not because Bubi, refusing to be parted from her, shared her bed in the turret in the West Tower.

Shortly before daybreak she rose, carried the still-sleeping child to her nurse next door and extracted the working smock which the old woman, clucking with disapproval, had washed, dried and ironed the previous day. Then slipping it on, she crept downstairs.

In the castle no one was stirring yet, but carrying up from the village she heard the familiar sounds of a country dawn: a cockerel crowing, the clank of a bucket, the creak of bolts pulled back on a stable door.

She passed the chapel, hesitated and went on. God, she felt, would not be very pleased with her this morning, and crossing the main courtyard she passed through the gatehouse arch, crossed the drawbridge and climbed the worn, stone steps which led to the eastern ramparts. The sunrise place, she had always called it, as she now stood looking out to where, from the rim of the plain whose inhabitants had once brought devastation and sorrow to her house, a silver disc of brightness had begun to lift itself above the haze.

It was not sensible, after all, thought Tessa, feeling the first rays of warmth touch her face, to feel so hurt, so finished, because a man had been rude to her. It was natural, after all, that he did not want to dance with her, that he had no use for her in the presence of a woman so beautiful that he could only resent anyone who seemed to intrude.

Only, I didn’t want to intrude, thought Tessa bleakly; I just wanted to be friends. Surely he could have spared me a few words when he has everything: Pfaffenstein, the woman he loves, untold wealth and this power that makes everyone, even poor silly Waaltraut in a single evening, want to be where he is? Could he not be generous, having so much?

She leaned her cheek against the cool stone. This was the oldest part of the castle, the part she loved as she could not love the baroque grandeur of the south facade. Yes, after all, it would be hard to leave: harder than she had dreamed it could be.

She was turning to go when she heard footsteps and saw a solitary man seeking the eastern ramparts as she had done, for the glory of the sunrise.

‘Good morning, Your Highness.’ The Lithuanian look, much commented on in Byker, was greatly in evidence, the voice still cold.

‘Why do you call me that?’ she said wretchedly. ‘When you know…’

‘Know what? That you are a staunch republican?’ Tessa, he noted, was looking pinched and plain, a fact that gave him an obscure satisfaction.

She caught her breath. ‘I don’t understand why you are like this. In Vienna you were so kind.’

‘I don’t mean to be unkind. But you must see that this masquerade of yours is apt to annoy people when it’s discovered. Dear God,’ he said, rage overtaking him again when he remembered her entry on the previous night, her upstaging of Nerine, ‘the way you came down that staircase!’

Tessa had turned her face to the horizon but as she spoke one small hand traced, with unconscious familiarity, the pattern of a lily carved deep into the stone. ‘Yes,’ she said tonelessly, ‘I know how to come down a staircase. They began to teach me when I was five. I had a book on my head — Plotinus, usually, bound in Spanish leather — and my skirt was too long on purpose. If I dropped the book, or stumbled, I was sent to bed without supper. There’s a marble staircase they use at Schönbrunn; it’s kept specially polished so as to be slippery. I used to think that if you looked at the little red flecks in the marble you’d find they were bits of dried blood shed by the children who have come down that staircase.’ She finished tracing a lily stem, laid her hand flat on the wall. ‘So you see, I know how to come down a staircase. This useful accomplishment I have.’

The bitterness in her voice held Guy silent for a while. ‘Were you often at Schönbrunn?’

She nodded. ‘My father was in the Emperor’s suite. Pfaffenstein was all right, one could always escape into the woods, but Schönbrunn… it was so lonely, like being in a prison. The long corridors and the rules. If your curtsy wasn’t quite deep enough, if you didn’t put your fork down the second the Emperor had finished, it was a scandal. My parents wanted a boy, of course. They went on hoping, but there weren’t any more children so I was always a disappointment. I used to go and talk to a little girl in a picture. She was pretty, not like me, but I knew she felt the same. The Infanta Margarita, she was called, by Velasquez — do you know her?’

The sun was fully up now, turning the pigeons wheeling below them into triangles of light. Guy nodded, calling to mind the little Infanta kept captive in the Escorial outside Madrid until she was ready to ship as a bride to the boring, pompous Leopold of Austria.

‘Sometimes my mother used to take me driving, sitting very stiff, you know, with footmen everywhere, and I’d see all those ordinary children belonging to each other… and to the world. Really belonging. Playing in the park or eating ices in a café… I remember, once, there was a pair of twins with bright red curls sitting on the rim of a fountain in the Volksgarten with their mother. She had an arm round each of them and they were splashing in the water and laughing. I started to beat on the window… I wanted the coach to stop and to get out and ask them to let me just be there… just to be there and belong.’

‘Go on.’

‘Then my parents died and Pfaffenstein belonged to me. But the money had gone too and I was always failing everyone. I’d ride round to visit my parishioners and I’d see an old lady with a hole in her roof and I’d send for the steward and say, why haven’t you mended Frau Keller’s roof? And he’d say I have only ten men, Highness, to do the work that two hundred did before, and he’d show me their time-sheets. We’d begun already on that hopeless business: selling off pictures, selling off forests… So then I knew that the only thing I could do for Pfaffenstein was to leave it, and I told my aunts to sell.’

‘Yes,’ said Guy, ‘I see.’ His anger had evaporated and he regretted its passing. It had been an effective armour against the troubles of this child. ‘And music? Has it always meant so much to you?’

She nodded. ‘Ever since I can remember. Once when I was at Schönbrunn — I was about six, I suppose — the Vienna Choir came to give a concert. I was standing by the window in my room when these voices came from the chapel. It was only a little Schubert song, ‘Auf dem Wasser zu Singen’, but it just stabbed me. It was an absolute coup de foudre. You know what music is like when you aren’t expecting it… when you overhear it? And I thought then that if I could just serve music… sort of help it to happen… I could bear it.’

‘Bear what?’ Guy wanted to say, but refrained, for after all he did know. Once, in London, he had spoken to one of Diaghilev’s ballerinas about her fabled grace and lightness, wondering to what extent these qualities were ‘natural’. He could remember her huge, Byzantine eyes turned on him, the slightly pitying shrug as she said, ‘Dancing hurts, my friend. It hurts all the time.’ Now, looking at Tessa’s fawn head turning to copper in the risen sun, he realized that she could say the same about being a princess.

Suddenly impatient, irked by the understanding she had forced on him, he began to make his way down the steps, impelling her to follow him. As they crossed the drawbridge he noticed another lily, spare and formalized, carved into the gatehouse arch. A strange emblem for the bloodthirsty Pfaffensteins, he thought, for he had noticed this flower also worked into the gaudy standard with its impaled golden griffin and scarlet glove.

‘What will you do with the money from Pfaffenstein?’ he asked abruptly.

‘Well, half will go to the aunts, of course.’

‘I doubt if they will countenance that. They intend it for your dowry.’

‘My dowry?’

‘For your marriage to Prince Maximilian of Spittau. The only man, they informed me, with enough quarterings to aspire to your hand.’

The harshness was back in his voice and hearing it Tessa closed her eyes in sudden weariness.

‘It’s no use being angry with them; they’re old, they cling to the old ways. But there’s no question—’

She broke off and Guy watched her face suddenly light up with a pure and shining joy. The next second Prince Maximilian, in lederhosen, a woodcock feather in his loden hat, came round the corner.

‘Oh, goodness, how lovely! Rinty, how you’ve grown! Down, Hector, down… Yes, yes, Samson, I know how you feel; you are the oldest.’ Talking tenderly in her own language, laughing, Tessa let herself be submerged in a sea of wagging, thumping, blissfully slobbering dogs. She stroked the black muzzle of the wise old labrador, fondled the ears of the pointer with her velvet mouth and loving eyes, fielded the quicksilver ecstacy of Maxi’s new, half-grown red setter — and was felled by the wolfhound bred for the prince’s rare hunting excursions on to dry land. ‘I’ve missed you all so much,’ she said. ‘It’s really awful not being able to have dogs in Vienna.’ Freeing an arm, she pulled in the Irish water spaniel, whose liver-coloured clown’s face had begun to quiver with impending rejection, and swivelled round to smile at Guy, wanting to share with him the happy innocent world of these working dogs.

But Lithuania had reclaimed the new owner of Pfaffenstein. He scowled, answered the prince’s, ‘Good morning’ curtly, and strode away across the courtyard.

‘What’s the matter with him?’ said the prince, somewhat offended, for he had been well-disposed towards the Englishman.

Tessa shrugged. ‘He’s like that,’ she said. But it wasn’t true; to everyone else he was polite and friendly. It’s only me he doesn’t like, she thought, and buried her face in the labrador’s sturdy neck.

‘I wondered if you would like to come for a walk,’ said Maxi. There was going to be a pigeon shoot, followed by an English breakfast: kidneys were rumoured, and scrambled eggs and kedgeree. The English were swine of course, everyone knew that, but they did understand breakfast. But he was willing to forego all this in order to get things settled with Putzerl. His mother, recovered from her migraine, had already managed to make herself unpleasant about Maxi’s failure on the previous night. And now, in the freshness of the morning, with the dogs looking really very well indeed, it seemed to him he had an excellent chance.

‘Maxi, I can’t,’ said Tessa. ‘I have to work.’

‘Work?’ said Maxi, his long Bourbon jaw hanging open. ‘What do you mean?’

It occurred to him that Putzerl was oddly dressed. Was she perhaps going to milk a cow? He looked anxiously behind him but the great courtyard was reassuringly devoid of cattle.

‘I work for the International Opera Company,’ said Tessa, rubbing the wolfhound’s stomach while returning the caresses of the setter caught in a frenzy of adolescent adoration. ‘We’re going to perform The Magic Flute in the theatre and there’s a terrible lot to do.’

‘You mean you’re directing this opera?’ said Maxi, puzzled. There had been artistic Pfaffensteins, he knew, and queer blood like that did sometimes turn up again.

Tessa laughed. ‘No, Maxi. I work backstage.’ Turning her attention to the water spaniel, she explained her duties.

‘You’re joking?’ said Maxi nervously. ‘You don’t really let them order you about? Ordinary carpenters and people like that?’

‘Maxi, I’ve told you—’

‘Yes, yes.’ Hastily he averted the expected information that all men were created equal and that the Princess of Pfaffenstein herself was a devout republican. But really it was all a bit much. No wonder his mother worried about Putzerl and thought her fast. ‘Couldn’t you come out just for an hour?’

Tessa shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, Maxi. There’s so much to do, and I promised to have coffee with the aunts.’

Maxi’s face fell. He had spent five minutes arranging the feather in his hat at an angle which would give pleasure to his intended and though he tried not to be vain about his legs he would have been foolish not to know that few men could carry off lederhosen the way he could. But if Putzerl absolutely wouldn’t, he might as well go and fetch his gun — and try the English breakfast.

‘I shall never forget it, never in my life!’ said the Rhine-maiden, sitting astride an Act One rock and throwing out a spear-carrying arm at her audience. ‘There she was, in white satin and a tiara, with princes and cardinals absolutely grovelling to her. And then, when she picked up Bubi and the flunkeys ran forward to take him from her, she just shook her head once like this,’ continued Frau Witzler, moving her massive Silesian head from right to left and back again, ‘and they fell back and escorted her upstairs. Six of them in uniform, clearing a way for her!’

The International Opera Company were assembled in the theatre at an unaccustomed early hour. Orchestral players who were rumoured not to have seen daylight in ten years were wandering round the pit, stage-hands stood about in clusters in the wings; on stage, Witzler and his principals sat about holding coffee-cups. The first rehearsal had been called for ten-thirty but no one was even pretending to begin. There were the usual difficulties in a new theatre: lost keys, dried-out dimmers… but that was not what was delaying them. It was the news conveyed by the Rhinemaiden at breakfast and repeated again and again as new members of the company turned up who had not yet heard it. Had anyone else informed them that their under wardrobe mistress was the Princess of Pfaffenstein, they might have been sceptical, but the Rhinemaiden’s Nordic truthfulness was notorious.

‘Well, that’s that,’ thought Boris. No more laughs in the wig room, no more milk for The Mother. Only Tessa had been able to wheedle a regular supply of milk out of the dairyman. I shall die young without yoghurt, thought the wig-master, giving in to trans-Danubian despair, and what does it matter?

‘I must have a replacement,’ said Frau Pollack. ‘It is quite impossible for me to do all that work alone.’ Boris shot her a look of loathing — who on earth could replace Tessa? He could see her now, sitting on an upturned crate, that pretty fawn hair of hers rippling to the ground, saying resolutely, ‘Cut, Boris. Go on, just do it. Cut.’

Klasky, pencilling Hungarian insults into the woodwind scores, was scowling. When the revolution came Tessa would be rounded up with the rest of the aristocrats who had ground the faces of the poor and would be almost certainly imprisoned, but he found that the thought gave him amazingly little satisfaction.

‘I lent her a dress,’ thought the Littlest Heidi deliriously, leaning in the fourth position against a pillar. ‘She was my friend.’ Heidi’s grandmother had gone into black on the day that the Crown Prince Rudolf shot himself and had remained thus ever since, and Heidi was a passionate royalist.

‘Who will bring my footstool now?’ thought Pino morosely. The little tenor was a head shorter than Raisa and Tessa’s tactful way of inserting a footstool behind the tombstone, rock or sofa on which he found himself had earned his deepest gratitude.

But it was Jacob who was most badly hit. Of course he could turn the whole thing to the company’s advantage. If he talked to the press, told them who Tessa was and released some poignant photographs of her performing some menial task, it would undoubtedly be excellent publicity and for a while improve their bookings. But only for a while. Against that, he had lost Tessa. No more glimpses of the small figure in her paint-stained smock grinning up at him as she trotted through the corridors; no one to catch his thoughts almost before he had thought them.

‘All right, everybody, that’s enough,’ he shouted now. ‘We’ll do a straight run-through of Act One. The Three Ladies on stage, please, and you, Pino — everyone else off and remember—’

He broke off, aware that nobody was listening. A hush had fallen and all eyes were on the auditorium.

Coming up the centre aisle, dressed exactly as usual and carrying in one hand a can of milk, in the other a straw-lined basket filled with brown eggs, came their under wardrobe mistress.

‘Good morning, Herr Witzler.’ Tessa’s eyes were anxious, for she was late. It had taken far longer than she had expected to explain her work in Vienna to the aunts. Not that she had lied to them exactly… not exactly.

‘Good morning, Your Highness.’

Tessa reached the pit, vanished beneath the footlights and reappeared beside the Herr Direktor on the stage. Raisa had lowered her vast bulk into a curtsy, the Littlest Heidi had sunk completely to the ground.

Tessa looked critically round the set. ‘The cleat for that batten is above the dimmer-board. Shall I fix it? And then shall I unpack the Papageno costumes, because the feathers will need curling again and—’

Jacob had cleared his throat. ‘Your Highness, it is absolutely out of the question that you continue to work for us. Absolutely out of the question — you must see that.’

Tessa had turned very pale. ‘No,’ she said quietly, ‘I don’t see it.’

‘Please.’ Jacob passed a plump hand over what had once been his hair. ‘The embarrassment… Your father was equerry to the Emperor.’ Only a man who had begged his way systematically through the ranks of the nobility, year after year, as Witzler had done, could gauge the extent of the lese majesty. ‘It would be impossible for the men to continue to give you orders.’

‘Not to mention the bad language,’ put in the Rhine-maiden.

Tessa looked round at the stage-hands, old friends now looking at her with the cowed respect she had so often encountered in the past. Not seeing her, seeing some shape, some label to be revered or hated according to their creed.

Swallowing down the lump in her throat, she said, ‘Herr Witzler, I have lost my home. I have nothing left except my work. Must I lose that also?’

Jacob shrugged wearily and flinched as his ulcer expressed its views on what was going on.

‘It is impossible, Your Highness. There are three hundred years of privilege which cannot be wiped out. The position of your family… your rank. I’m sorry, your work is excellent,’ said Jacob, ‘but you cannot remain with us.’

‘I see.’

Tessa put down her can of milk, her basket of eggs. Instinctively she had moved upstage and now, turning, commanded them all. When she spoke it was quietly, but the children of Schönbrunn had been taught not only to walk down a staircase, but also to be heard at whatever distance and in whatever place they chose.

‘You make me ashamed,’ she said, and the quiet voice cut like a whip. ‘Deeply and bitterly ashamed. All of you.’

They stared at her. Klasky put down his score. A stage-hand stepped backwards as though to escape the anger in her face. Was this the little waif, the ever-willing girl who would do anything for anyone?

They were not to blame for their amazement. No one here had seen the Emperor of Germany hopping round the courtyard, nursing his bitten leg after he had shot the last auroch left in the forests of Pfaffenstein. No one had watched the procession of stretchers carried up from the straw barns of the outlying farms, bringing the wounded men to be nursed inside the castle, at the command of the thirteen-year-old princess.

‘I believed what you said,’ Tessa’s low implacable voice went on. ‘I believed what Herr Witzler said about music making everybody equal. I believed Herr Klasky when he rehearsed the prisoners’ chorus in Fidelio… when he made them sing that chorus for four hours because what Beethoven said in it about freedom and brotherhood was sacred. I actually believed him. And now… in this production. In The Magic Flute.’ She looked at Witzler, then at the old bass who sang the High Priest, Sarastro, who was staring at her with an open mouth. ‘Only two days ago, when Herr Berger gave up his lunch and his tea to make that recitative perfect; that part where he says that Tamino is more than a prince because he is a man… Dear God, when you said that that was the keynote of the opera, I believed you.’

No one spoke. A door opened at the back of the hall as Farne slipped in to greet the company. No one heard him, no head turned. There was nobody in the theatre except that slight, pale, implacable figure accusing them.

‘I believed it. I believed it all,’ said Tessa. ‘That you served music, all of you, because it was above pettiness and rank. Because it makes everybody one: rich and poor, sick and well. Because it comes to us from God. I believed it — but not you. Not one of you.’

She paused and momentarily passed a hand across her eyes.

‘The Princess Lichnovsky knelt to Beethoven; she knelt to beg him to give back the score of Fidelio which the Viennese had sneered at. She knelt, and she was right to kneel. Well, I won’t kneel for my right to work. I won’t kneel because I don’t kneel to hypocrites and time-servers and snobs!’

Silence. Total, unbroken silence as Tessa bent to pick up her basket, her can of milk. Then, suddenly, it began. The stage-hands started it, clapping first; then stamping and shouting as if the theatre was packed to the roof, and the orchestra banging on their music stands and Boris, dabbing his eyes with the end of his muffler and leading the yells of ‘Bravo!’ and ‘Bis!’

It was left to Raisa to bring some sense into the proceedings. Ovations were all very well but they belonged, in general, to her.

‘’er ’ighness is being perfectly correct,’ she stated. ‘In art all is being of equalness.’ She pushed aside the people now crowding round Tessa and said firmly, ‘In zis bodice ’ighness, I cannot zink. I cannot zink even an ’igh C, and an ’igh F you can forget absolutely it.’

Tessa finished blowing her nose on Jacob’s handkerchief and turned a radiant countenance on the soprano. ‘Yes, Frau Romola. I quite understand, Frau Romola. If you will give me the bodice now, I can have it ready for this evening. It only needs a gusset…’