Authors: Donna Lea Simpson
“I don’t believe in curses,” Elizabeth said, but then her curious mind teased at her, and she knew she would ask. She leaned in to Countess Uta and said, “What was the curse? Who laid it?”
“See?” The old woman cackled in delight. “Even you, my rational English friend, are not immune from curiosity and excitement of dat which is unknown.”
“I don’t say I believe it, ma’am, just that I am interested.” This was better, Elizabeth thought, edging forward. At least the old woman was entertaining, which was more than she could say for the rest of the brooding, melancholy family.
“Well, dis started long ago, thirty, forty years. Or perhaps longer. Yes, longer… the rest is faded in mist now, my memory like fog rolling over meadow on a spring evening.”
“What started?”
“The curse of the von Wolfram heir. Once, von Wolfram men were as sturdy and robust as the wolf pups in spring.”
“I certainly would call Count Nikolas robust,” Elizabeth remarked dryly, thinking of his broad shoulders, muscular frame, and commanding presence.
“True. But he is only young yet.”
“He’s in his middle thirties, ma’am. Hardly young.”
“Youth or age… dat depends on from what end you see it, young lady. From your view, so young you are, he is middle years, but from my twilight he appears callow and unformed, not nearly the man he will be, given time.”
“I interrupted your story, ma’am. Please continue,” Elizabeth said, not wanting to think of the disturbing and altogether too fascinating count. His recent behavior toward his nephew had been appalling, to Elizabeth’s tender sensibilities, but then, she didn’t know what had proceeded his disciplinary action. If it didn’t excuse it, it could possibly explain it.
“I remember now… it was longer dan forty years. Perhaps fifty.”
She gazed into the distance, her lips moving, and Elizabeth waited patiently.
“Yes, fifty years ago or maybe more, for I was a young woman, ripe, ready to wed, wanting a husband and babies. I had four brothers, you know, each more handsome and healthy dan the last. Jakob, Nikolas’s father, was youngest of the boys. We had bad winter, and wolves, dey were starving. It was terrible year. My brother Jergen—he was eldest—shot many wolves dat year for depredations on our cattle. Dat summer a band of gypsies roamed by and camped on our land. My father went to dem and told dem to get off, dat dey were not welcome. He shot one for insolence.”
“Shot one?” Elizabeth gasped.
“It was just a gypsy,” the old woman said with a shrug. “Dat was how Papa saw it. One less gypsy, one less thief.”
Elizabeth swallowed back her indignation that any human life could be treated so casually. It was not her story, and not her family. “What did they do?”
“Old gypsy woman came to the courtyard… where old tree is now. Was good tree then, big, strong. She stood in courtyard on night of full moon and…” The old woman stopped and stared into space. Her eyes closed.
Elizabeth, in some alarm, was about to stand and administer assistance, when the old woman’s eyes flew open again.
“She was dat man’s mother. The dead one. She shrieked out dat the full moon would see us cursed. Never would a son of our house prosper. All would be blighted and cursed, blasted like the tree in the courtyard.”
The tree… the withered and blackened stump Elizabeth had commented on to Charlotte. The family tree.
“My father laughed. He said the tree was as strong as the family, and dat she was just an old crazy woman. He drove her away, but dat night a storm blew in, and lightning struck. The tree was split and burned, though still it lives on, a few sprigs of it alive every spring.”
She fell silent again and Elizabeth waited, thinking about what she had said. But finally she asked, “What happened to your brothers?”
“Friedrich died dat spring of fever. Karl… he went… hmm, I don’t know in English.
Verrueckt. Ach, ja
, I know word now. Crazy, he went, and killed himself. Or so we think; no one would ever say it, but I know it was true. And Willem… sweet Willem. He was the best of brothers. Too good for dis world, my mother said.”
After a pause, Elizabeth gently asked, “And Willem? What happened to him?”
“My father made Willem go into army, you know, as officer, though he was like Christoph and liked to hold violin more dan rifle. He was cleaning gun and it went off, killed him. So dey say. My mama did not believe dat.”
Silence fell between them until Elizabeth, puzzled by one thing the old woman had said, asked, “Why did you talk about the wolves in the winter… your brother killing them?”
Uta remained silent for a long time, and then said, “It was nothing. It was… just how I remember dat winter, and the spring after. It was the winter of wolves.”
She would speak of it no longer, for her mood had turned somber and dark. Elizabeth, concerned that she had led the poor woman into talking about worrisome things, stayed and asked if Uta would teach her some German, for she was determined to pick it up. She had learned some in the month she had been there, but she still had a long way to go. Her ploy worked, and she soon had the old woman laughing at her fractured pronunciation of the long string of syllables that made up so many German words.
At the end of two hours, Mina came in and with a wave of her hand indicated that Elizabeth should leave. Though she was about to protest, she glanced down at the elderly woman and saw the strain on her gray face. She really had taxed her too much. Heartsick, she gave the maid an apologetic look, then leaned down and said her good-byes, laying a kiss on the wrinkled brow. The countess was already asleep.
At loose ends, Elizabeth wandered down to the gallery and stood at the railing overlooking the great hall, thinking about all she had learned. It still seemed to her that the family’s troubles had a more recent vintage, and that was from fifteen years ago, when tragedy struck.
The uneasy feeling she had noted in the castle still overlaid it like a dark shadow. Even Fanny, that morning, when she had come to Elizabeth’s room to pull open the curtains, had appeared tense and worried, though when accosted by Elizabeth she claimed there was nothing wrong at all. She didn’t like being driven to question the servants; it wasn’t seemly and she would resist the urge when next it appeared.
As she brooded she could hear the sound of horses outside, the jingle of sledge bells and voices. A heavy
thud-thud-thud
on the front door sent footmen scurrying, and when two opened the big oak doors, a flood of men pushed into the great hall. Their voices raised, they demanded to see, from what Elizabeth could understand, Count Nikolas.
Snow swirled into the great hall as the servants slammed the doors shut. Cesare Vitali scurried down the stairs past Elizabeth, not noticing her in the shadows, and faced the group, telling them in excellent German to leave and await the count’s visit in their homes. They loudly refused and were arguing vociferously with the secretary when Nikolas himself strode into the great hall from some other room. They hushed immediately, and every one, even the man in front, regarded him with some trepidation.
Nikolas planted himself in front of the group, his feet wide apart, his hands on his hips, his very stance confrontational. “What do you want?” he asked of the leader, in German.
Elizabeth crouched down by the railing and watched, her gaze taking in the leader’s cape, the thick, gray fur dark-tipped and silvery in the weak winter light from the big windows that lined the north side of the great hall.
The leader said something, but Elizabeth couldn’t understand his thickly accented and rapid spate of words. From his intonation she guessed he was the village mayor, perhaps the father of the girl who was attacked, and he was demanding something of Count Nikolas.
But Nikolas merely told him to leave and never come back. Those words were simple and clear. From there the confrontation devolved into a shouting match, with Cesare Vitali trying to intercede and getting roughly shoved out of the way by one of the village men, a stout fellow with a thick cudgel.
“What is going on?”
The whispered voice made Elizabeth jump, but it was just Bartol Liebner at her side.
“I’m not sure,” she said. “I don’t understand all of what they’re saying but…”
Herr Liebner was listening intently and shook his head. In the dim light of the gallery Elizabeth could see his frown and his anxious expression.
“What are they saying? What do they want?”
“Terrible, this is. Awful.”
“What is?”
“They…” He paused and listened some more. “That man in the wolfskin cape, that is Wilhelm Brandt, the mayor of Wolfbeck. He is saying there are werewolves gathering in the von Wolfram forest, and he is demanding that… that some of the village men be allowed to patrol the forest at night.”
Nikolas was speaking and Bartol Liebner stopped to listen. Elizabeth could catch much of what the count said, that he would never countenance villagers patrolling his woods, and that they were being fools to believe in such superstition anyway. There were no werewolves; Magda Brandt’s wound came from some other source than a wolf, let alone a werewolf.
When the village mayor spoke again, Bartol Liebner translated. A werewolf was sighted in the last full moon, and now the moon was waxing full again. What would Nikolas do in the nights to come? How could he assure them safety in their bed? How could he say he would not allow them to protect their women and children?
His voice loud, rage in his very stance, Count Nikolas said that if even one of them dared to step foot on his land at night, with or without a weapon, he, Nikolas, would shoot him, flay him, and send his skin to his family. With that he gave a command to his footmen and strode to the stairs, bounding up them two at a time. Seeing her and Bartol Liebner at the railing, he glared at them, then strode off to his library.
Quivering, Elizabeth watched the aftermath as the footmen, bolstered by a couple of stout stable hands, herded the villagers out as snow again swirled into the great hall and wind made the pennants flutter and dance.
She turned to Herr Liebner as the big doors were slammed shut and bolted. “Why do they think what they saw was a werewolf?” she whispered in the sudden silence. “Don’t werewolves supposedly look just like wolves? And why didn’t the count try to reason with them?”
“I don’t know why they think there are werewolves here,” the man said, his expression grim and his cheeks pallid. “Nikolas did try to reason… he told them werewolves are just fairy tales used to frighten little children, and that he had thought better of them than to believe such nonsense.”
Herr Liebner looked frightened, Elizabeth thought, but it was likely that the anger of the villagers had alarmed him. Cesare Vitali, having overseen the exit of the villagers, disappeared and the great hall grew calm, the only remnant of the confrontation a hank of fur from the mayor’s cape on the stone floor.
Quickly, Elizabeth raced down the steps, snatched up the hunk of fur, and retreated back up the stairs as Bartol watched in fear. In the weak lamplight she examined the patch, a square of fur around four inches. The fur was soft and thick, gray with dark tips.
“You should get rid of that,” the older man said, backing away from her.
“You don’t believe in werewolves, do you?” Elizabeth said, looking up at the man, surprised at his fear.
“No. No, of course not,” he said. “But is bad luck to keep it. Excuse me, please, I must… I must go.”
Count Nikolas could not have handled the delegation more badly if he had set out to infuriate them, Elizabeth thought, rubbing the fur between her fingers. How could a man so intelligent not see that they were badly frightened and needed to be reassured, not threatened? And how could he threaten such a barbaric punishment anyway? But it was not her business. She should go and read a book, or prepare a new lesson for Charlotte. Or go speak to Frau Liebner or Melisande.
She strode down the hall and without knocking flung herself into the library. “How could you treat those poor men so cavalierly?” she said, crossing the room to the desk, where Nikolas sat. “All they wanted was to protect their families.”
When he looked up, she fell back two paces. His eyes were dark with shadows under them, and his mouth was set in a grim line. He stood, slowly, his height imposing even in the high-ceilinged library. “Am I to understand that you are questioning my handling of the villagers?”
“I…” She stiffened her resolve. “I suppose I am.”
“And where do you get your right, from your vast store of knowledge about ancient superstition and German village affairs?” His tone was a growl and his expression grim.
She quailed at his look but, holding the hank of wolfskin as a talisman, took a deep breath and straightened her backbone. “I have no right,” she admitted. “But—”
“But you are going to tell me your opinion anyway.”
“Yes, if you will just listen. How did railing at them and threatening them soothe their worries? They are clearly fearful and upset. They clearly believe that there are such creatures as werewolves and that they are in imminent danger from them. How did threatening to kill them further your cause, which must be to calm their anxiety and reassure them? They cannot help their superstition. You should have been more patient.”
His expression, dark with fury, calmed. It was like a tide receding, the darkness ebbing from his eyes. “Miss Stanwycke, did anyone ever tell you that you should not speak about that which you know nothing?”
“Yes,” she admitted reluctantly.
“And has that ever stopped you?”
“No.”
Her simple response, said with all the dignity she could obviously summon, was like a sunray to him, peeking through a dark cloud. She stood before him, hands folded in front of her, back straight, expression sober, and admitted her inability to stay out of that which did not concern her. His mouth split wide in a grin that he could not contain. “I do not know how you do it, but always, no matter how angry I am—and no matter how angry I should be for your interference—you make me laugh.”
“I prefer not to be laughed at, sir,” she said.