Authors: Donna Lea Simpson
Fanny met her at the door with a candle to light their way through the dim corridors of Wolfram Castle and the two young women disappeared into the dimness beyond the doors. He sobered as he thought of the tale she had told, troubled by the impression it had made on her.
He had had English visitors before and always they had a notion that his country was less civilized than theirs. He hadn’t meant to be abrupt with her, but it disturbed him and he had reacted rudely.
When he was certain she would have begun the ascent to her bedchamber, he vaulted out of his chair and strode toward the door.
“Nikolas!”
He turned, his hand on the door handle.
“Nikolas,” Adele repeated, striding toward him. “I have something to ask.”
“Not now, Adele. Later. Tomorrow. I have things to take care of right now.” He slipped easily back into German from the English he had been using all evening.
“This cannot wait,” she said and told him of her concerns.
It was a long diatribe, and he glanced uneasily toward the group by the fire. A couple cast him side-glances, in particular Charlotte, who had appeared unhappy at the dinner table, he had noticed. He was gravely concerned about her state of mind, of late. And Christoph seemed brooding and wretched, his gaze flicking anxiously around the room. Gerta, as usual, was oblivious to the rest, only her flighty movements and agitation betraying her state of mind.
“So what should I do?” Adele finally said, after expressing her worries.
“Use your best judgment, as always. What else can I counsel?”
“I thought you would want to be consulted,” Adele said, resentment in her tone.
He glanced down at his sister and studied her expression. She had grown gaunt and bleak with the weight of their joint responsibility. For fifteen years the family had been primarily his duty, but Adele had always shouldered more than her share of the burden. She should have married and left the castle, but she had stayed and shared the obligation. Now that Christoph was fully grown and Charlotte was being prepared for marriage, one would think the responsibilities would ease.
But it was not so. There were always new worries. And there were Eva and Jakob, Gerta’s children, to think of, their future happiness.
“Nikolas!” Adele said, tugging his sleeve to remind him she was still awaiting an answer.
“Ask for Uta’s help,” he said in response to her primary worry; he spoke of Uta von Wolfram, his ancient aunt. “And let Mina watch if you are concerned.” Mina, his aunt’s personal servant, was mute, but her value was more in her absolute unswerving loyalty to the family she had served her whole life than in her silence. She could always be counted on to provide a taciturn, watchful presence when the need arose. “But I think all will be well this night.”
“I am not so sure,” Adele fretted.
Charlotte met Nikolas’s gaze across the room and he saw hostility in her blue eyes, even from such a distance. Perhaps he had given the new tutor an impossible task.
“I haven’t time for this,” he said gruffly, turning back to his sister. “Do whatever is necessary.”
“As always,” Adele said. “I’ll take care of things, as always,” she repeated and turned away.
“Adele,” he said. She turned back and stared at him, waiting. What could he say? She should have been living her own life, finding her own happiness, but instead she had devoted herself to their family. It had made her sharp and resentful, and increasingly she took that resentment out on him. But he hadn’t lived for himself either; he had sacrificed much more than anyone would ever know. He was doing his best and would continue.
“What is it?” she said, compressing her thin lips together, waiting for him to say whatever he had been about to say.
But what was there? “Nothing. It is nothing.” He tried instead to find that peace between them, the unspoken agreement as they worked in tandem, like a team of strong oxen. He pushed down on the door handle. “What think you of Miss Stanwycke?”
“I think she is very intelligent,” Adele said. “Perhaps even too intelligent And very beautiful.”
Unconsciously, she ran her hand down her gaunt frame and plucked at the expensive material of her fashionable, high-waisted gown as she gazed back at the group. Gerta was trying to sit on Count Delacroix’s lap, and he was laughing as he denied her. Adele sighed and looked back at her younger brother. “Do you not think so, Nikolas? That Miss Stanwycke is very beautiful?”
How could he deny it? No man could. “She is. But that is not what I was asking about.”
“Ah, but it is what you have noticed.” Adele glanced over at the group again. The French count had stood and moved away from Gerta; he was leaning over, speaking to Bartol Liebner. “And Maximillian, too. Even he is foolish for her. I could see it in his eyes when they met, and at dinner, making her laugh…” Adele stopped and compressed her lips in a thin line, faint wrinkles creasing and puckering the edge of her mouth.
“Miss Stanwycke is here to work,” he reminded his sister, pushing open the door.
“Yes. To work. And I… I must get back to the others,” she said.
“And I must go to my task.”
They parted ways.
EXHAUSTION claimed Elizabeth immediately as she reached her chamber. She said good night to Fanny, disrobed, slipped on her nightgown and into bed, and remembered nothing more until awakening with the room still dark and the house silent.
What time was it? How she wished she knew, but there was no clock in the room, and no way to find out. That she would need to remedy, for she must have a clock so she would never be late in a house that appeared to be strictly run.
It was quite possibly still the middle of the night, for she had retired so early and never slept more than six hours, no matter how tired she was. So it could be only three or four in the morning, hours before she could expect others to awaken. She wished she could speak to Frau Liebner, but she couldn’t even think about that for several hours at least. Her friend was not an early riser and did not like to speak before eating breakfast.
Elizabeth sighed and turned over, but sleep eluded her.
Finally she slipped from the bed, gasping as her feet hit the cold floor where the rug did not cover. It was no use; she was just not sleepy. She padded over to the fire with her candle in hand, lit a taper from the banked embers, and held the tiny flame to the wick.
Then she opened the curtains, hoping for a little predawn light—there was none, but by the waning moonlight she could see silvery flakes of snow dancing against the panes— and dressed, thinking she might as well explore her new home. Even if it was temporary, it was exciting to live in a castle. She had agreed to the position knowing it would only take a few months or a year at most to adequately prepare Charlotte von Wolfram for marriage to an Englishman, but desperation forced one to either give up and be defeated, or become optimistic. Faith in the future was her choice; once her duty to Charlotte von Wolfram was done, she felt sure she could find another employer in Germany, Prussia, or Austria with a similar situation. With the count’s good recommendation, and if she could manage to learn German in the time she was there, she would be sure to find other work. Determination would drive her to discharge her duty beyond their expectations.
She dressed in the chilly darkness—donning extra petticoats and wool stockings again to ward off the frigidity—and took the candle, exiting her room quietly, her soft shoes making no sound on the hall floor. It took a moment to orient herself in the dark hall. A dim lantern burned, casting a faint glow, and she looked to the right and then to the left. The hallway to her right stretched off into the darkness, but to her left she could dimly make out the stone staircase that led down to the second floor and the gallery that overlooked the great hall.
Hesitating for a moment, she wondered if she was wise to set out to explore alone, but who would ever know? And what harm could it do? She was restless and couldn’t just sit alone in her bedchamber for hours waiting for light. She set off toward the oldest part of the castle, the public rooms on the second floor.
The air was dank and cold and the familiar numbness set into her fingers and toes. But the excitement of exploration made her forget how icy the air seemed, and a pleasant trickle of anticipation fluttered her stomach. The stone staircase that signaled she was in the central old portion of the castle—the staircases in the newer portion were all of wood, she had noticed—took her down to the second floor, and she found her way along the gallery. She found the drawing room she had been in the night before. It seemed almost warm, with the embers of the previous night’s fire still banked in the hearth. She held her candle up high and examined the tapestries that lined the paneled walls. A hunt scene, with mastiffs attacking a beleaguered wolf, was the first tapestry. On second viewing the tapestry didn’t seem so beautiful; much of the scarlet wool was used to indicate blood, as the wolf was downed. But the next tapestry carried on the scene; two more wolves had joined the fray and were now defeating the terrified and cringing mastiffs while a huge black bird—a crow or a raven, Elizabeth supposed
—wheeled in the cloudy sky above the scene.
Interesting, Elizabeth thought, given the family name, which meant, according to Frau Liebner, “Wolf Raven.”
She exited the room and moved on, finding next a music room with an array of instruments, including a beautiful harpsichord she looked forward to playing. Thus ended that part of the castle, and so she doubled back, staying away from the railing that overlooked the great hall.
The room in the newer section—it would be directly under her own room, she calculated—appeared to be some sort of exercise room, with a variety of swords and weapons lining the walls. That made sense, she thought, remembering that the evening before this was the direction the count had come from when she first met him, and he said he had been fencing.
The candlelight glinted off the weapons hung on the paneled wall—silver-bladed swords, wickedly long and sharp, and rapiers, their tips blunted with guards. The floor was marble and there were chairs set against the opposite wall, perhaps for spectators to view the practice. She shivered at how the flicker of her weak light glinted off the blades. She exited the room, held her candle up high, and peered down the hall. It was dark, but there didn’t appear to be any other doors along the hall. Perhaps, being so long, the exercise or sword room was the only room on that branch of the castle. She returned to the gallery and slipped along the wall to the other side, the matching half of the castle, as it were.
It appeared that there was one room occupying the old portion of the castle on this side; she approached, then pushed open the big arched door and entered what turned out to be a library.
This was what she had been hoping for! Thick carpeting made the room seem warm, even though there was no fire at this time of night. She held her candle up and gazed in awe at the dark wood bookcases soaring to twenty or thirty feet, the faint light of her candle gleaming off rich gold trim. She reverently approached and ran her fingers along the leather bindings; though the majority of the books were in German, there were many titles in French and English, Latin and Greek, and other languages she could not begin to decipher.
She would ask for permission, as her German got better, to read from selected works. It was an opportunity to better herself, and she must find the courage to push herself to take it, no matter how difficult. Turning in a circle, her candle held high, she noticed glass cases containing ancient parchment scrolls and geological specimens set against the far wall, folio tables in the middle of the room with gilt-edged maps spread out on them, and deep chairs placed nearby, with modern lamps set at a good space for reading. An enormous desk took up one end of the room, with more bookcases soaring above, on the wall behind it. It was truly a magnificent room, the library of a family that valued learning.
A lectern in the far corner near some more bookcases drew her attention, and she circled it, setting her candle on a high shelf behind her. It appeared to be a family bible on the lectern, and she opened the massive tome, marveling at the lovely illuminations in red and gold and purple, and the dozens of names written, with corresponding dates of birth, marriage, and death. The count’s lineage was indeed ancient and well-documented; the names went back three hundred years or more. But she was only interested in the modern generations, so she ran her finger down the page until she found names she recognized.
Nikolas, Gerta, and Adele’s dates of birth were all recorded, as well as Johannes, Charlotte and Christoph’s father. He had died fifteen years ago, she noticed, just three weeks after their mother, Anna Lindsay von Wolfram. How tragic! The children would have been four and six years old at the time, and to lose both parents within weeks of each other was terrible.
Gerta’s marriage and her husband’s name were also recorded close by, with his date of death, and then the date of the birth of her twins, Eva and Jakob, just weeks later. Elizabeth stared at it for a moment, and then went back to the dates of Johannes and Anna’s deaths. Hans von Holtzen, Gerta’s husband, had died on the same day as Anna von Wolfram.
What had Frau Liebner said? That it was a very bad time and that they did not speak of such things. Bad indeed, in that three family members had died in such a short time—two in one day? There was no indication how they died, but certainly two unrelated people were unlikely to have died of natural causes on the same day, given that she had never heard word of any kind of plague or fever. Elizabeth bit her lip and stared down at the page, but her attention was drawn by a creaking noise and she gasped, the sound like a whisper in the cavernous library.
Another creak and a loud click echoed. Where had it come from? The castle was old but sturdy, and she had not heard such a noise since she had been in the library. Her heart thumping heavily, she stood still and listened, gazing into the dim reaches of the cavernous room, but there was no further sound. Deeply breathing in and out, calming her racing heart, she returned to her perusal of the bible, but another echoing click, sounding closer but muffled, interrupted her, and she started, swallowing past a lump in her throat. She turned to retrieve her candle, intent on returning to her room. She hadn’t considered it before, but it could be seen as prying, perhaps, to be looking at the family bible, and she would not be caught at such a thing. If the servants were stirring then she should ready herself for the day.