‘Is anything the matter?’

‘No… Only… would you mind very much if we changed places?’ Guy, following her gaze, found that Tessa was confronting the portrait of an obese and haughty lady whose plump bosom was bisected by the Order of St Boniface. Narrowing his eyes to read the title, he learned that he was in the presence of Her Imperial Highness, the Archduchess Frederica.

‘Certainly.’ Guy rose and the change was effected. ‘Your republicanism again?’ he enquired politely.

Tessa nodded. She was now staring with every appearance of pleasure at a painting of Leda welcoming with unmistakable concupiscence the attentions of the swan.

‘Yes, but this lady at least is enjoying herself,’ she said, answering Guy’s grin.

It was an agreeable meal. Someone, somewhere, had taught this waif the art of conversation. Tessa touched him with her ardent belief in art as the passport to man’s freedom and happiness, but she could be very funny about the International Opera Company’s preparations for their exciting and mysterious assignment. And she could listen. Guy, telling her about his travels in Brazil, saw her almost visibly drinking in his descriptions of that fabled, exotic land.

But as the meal drew towards its close, he noticed her small face slewing round more and more to the object only partially concealed by the half-drawn curtains in the alcove: an object which, without blazoning it to the world, was not really a couch or a sofa — was, by its width, the humped softness of its pillows… was, in short… a bed.

The waiter brought coffee and a liqueur for Guy, and closed the door with finality. Requesting permission to smoke, Guy watched, concealing his amusement, as the highly expressive face of the little wardrobe mistress registered in rapid succession a series of emotions: apprehension, followed by resolution, followed again by a flicker of despair.

‘Do people often bother you like that?’ he said, deciding to force the issue. ‘Like that old man just now?’

‘Well, a bit. It’s worse since Anita cut my hair.’ Her eyes slid back to the bed. It was awful not knowing how to behave, what was correct. That so handsome and wealthy a man — a man who clearly could have any woman he wished — should have any real interest in her seemed most unlikely. On the other hand, that so handsome a man — any man — should buy her a dinner, a three-course dinner with rindfleisch suppe and kalbsbraten which nowadays cost a week’s wages, and want nothing in return, seemed equally unlikely. Caught thus between Scylla and Charybdis, Tessa reached for her wineglass, gulped and plunged.

‘It is very difficult. You see, I believe that one must be completely generous. One must be like Sonia in Crime and Punishment when she went to Siberia with Raskalnikov, and like Isadora Duncan. I mean, not dancing in bare feet but giving. And like Madame Walewska with Napoleon. Everything must be given freely — money, property… oneself. But though I believe this absolutely when anyone… the second double-bass player or the electrician… or anyone wishes to,’ she went on, looking suddenly extremely miserable and somewhat wringing Guy’s withers, ‘I can’t, I absolutely can’t.’

Overcome by failure, she bent her head. Silky lashes curtained downcast eyes, and in the whispered murmur which now escaped her Guy, hair-raisingly, caught the name of Professor Freud.

With some regret, for it was burning beautifully, Guy now extinguished his cigar. Then he leaned over and laid his strong, chiselled fingers briefly on Tessa’s clenched knuckles, whitened by confession and strain.

‘Tessa, I promise you that one day it will not be like that. One day somebody will come — not the second double-bass player or the electrician, but somebody. And you won’t have to think about being like Isadora Duncan or going to Siberia and you certainly won’t have to trouble poor Professor Freud. When that person comes, whoever he is, all the fear and doubt will go and you’ll know.’

‘Will I?’ Her face, wistful yet trusting, was turned to his. ‘Are you sure?’ Yet even as she spoke she felt, with a strange kind of puzzlement, that the question already belonged to the past.

‘I’m sure,’ said Guy. And meaning only to reassure her, he added, ‘as for me, my dear, I promise I mean you no harm. In fact, I am waiting for someone to join me here in Vienna — someone I love and hope soon to marry.’ He paused and Tessa drew in her breath, seeing what Martha had first seen in the child of six: the lightening of his eyes to a lyrical and tender blue. Then he rose and pulled the red curtains firmly across the alcove. ‘So you see, you are perfectly safe!’

Tessa smiled. ‘I’m glad,’ she said, and took one of the crystallized plums from the box he held out to her.

She was glad. She was very glad. She was happy. Nothing was going to happen, not ever. He loved someone else.

Odd, though, that happiness should feel so much like a weight pressing against her chest; odd that the room looked suddenly a little misty.

Odd, too, that when she so much liked Karlsbad plums, the one she was eating should taste as if it had been dug out of an Egyptian tomb.

6

Nerine and her brother arrived in Vienna with fourteen pieces of luggage and a cowed maid called Pooley. Nerine was pleased with the suite Guy had engaged for them at the Grand Hotel, rather less pleased when only three days later he informed them that they were leaving for the country.

The country — even the dazzlingly beautiful landscape of Lower Austria — did not figure high on Nerine’s list of priorities. Though Vienna was sadly changed from the Imperial capital she had known as a girl, there were always amusements of some sort to be found in the city.

Nevertheless, she made no attempt to delay their departure. Guy had been a courteous host in Vienna but he had not, so to speak, shown his hand. True, there were flowers in her hotel room but no gift of jewels, no offer to take her shopping, no hint of the fabled wealth with which he had been credited. If, as seemed likely, he now expected her to join some drunken businessmen in a damp hunting lodge somewhere in a forest, or don a dirndl and act the village maiden, he would find himself disappointed. Marie Antoinette playing at being a milkmaid was not to Nerine’s taste. And if things went wrong there was always Lord Frith, languishing for love of her in Scotland.

Now she sat beside Guy who was driving the Hispano-Suiza himself, with Arthur dozing in the back. A second car, driven by Morgan and carrying the rest of the luggage, followed behind. It was the seventeenth of June and the countryside through which they drove was straight out of one of Schubert’s more ecstatic songs. Mill-wheels raced in emerald rivers; larks ascended, linden trees spread their murmuring crowns over ancient wells — and in the distance, glimpsed for an instant and then lost again, was the snow-glitter of the Alps.

She threw a glance at Guy, who was unusually silent, and sighed. He really was amazingly attractive with that caged-wild-beast look, those strong hands lying so easily on the steering wheel. No one, looking at him, would ever guess that he had been found in the gutter. That was one thing she would have to cure him of, telling everyone about his birth. It did no good, that kind of thing, it only embarrassed people.

They lunched in the courtyard of an inn from whose every window there tumbled petunias, geraniums and tousled orange marigolds, and then continued their journey.

The golden morning was turning into a wild grey afternoon, the peaks shrouded in cloud, and now with the suddenness of mountain weather, the sky opened to release a torrent of rain.

Guy, driving carefully through the downpour, listening to the windscreen-wiper’s slow adagio, had to fight down a sudden sense of desolation. He had hazarded so much on Nerine’s first glimpse.

Then, as dramatically as it had begun, the rain stopped, the clouds parted and in the new-washed, azure sky there appeared a perfect rainbow.

It was thus that Nerine, stepping out of the car where Guy had halted it beside the lake, first saw the castle: its towering, fairy-tale pinnacles spanned by a radiant, multi-coloured arc.

‘Good heavens, Guy, that’s Pfaffenstein, isn’t it?’ Her lovely head was tilted upward, her voice reverent. ‘Frau von Edelnau had a picture of it in her dining-room.’

‘Yes, that’s Pfaffenstein,’ said Guy, making obeisance to the gods, for the skyscape framing the fortress was breathtaking.

Arthur climbed out ponderously and joined them. His finger in his Baedecker, he was able to inform them that parts of the castle dated back to the year 909, that it had been in the possession of the Pfaffenstein family since 1353, that it comprised the demesnes of Hohenstein, Untersweg, Breganzer and Pilgarten, and that the original ramparts measured two kilometres in circumference.

‘It’s staggering,’ said Nerine. ‘There’s nothing remotely like it in England, is there?’ Forgetting for once her determination never to screw up her eyes for fear of wrinkles, she peered at the gatehouse tower looking for the family flag. ‘Do they still own it, the Pfaffensteins?’

‘No,’ said Guy.

It was coming, the moment to which his whole will, his whole being had been directed… the moment which had had its birth in the Vienna Woods so many years ago.

‘Who does, then?’ And as Guy was silent, she persisted, ‘Whose is it, then?’

He turned his back to the castle, wanting to see nothing but her face.

‘Mine.’

She did not understand him at first; it was too incredible. ‘What do you mean, Guy?’

‘I mean that I have bought Burg Pfaffenstein,’ he said carefully. ‘It is mine and — if you wish it — yours.’

If ever a man had his reward, Guy had it then. Nerine’s eyes widened, she drew in her breath; her face became transfigured and in the first spontaneous gesture of love that she had shown him, she let her head fall against his shoulder.

‘Oh, Guy,’ she breathed. ‘Oh, darling!’ All doubts left her, the spectre of Frith vanished into the mists of his native air. ‘I can’t believe it.’

Arthur, stunned into tact, retreated. Guy, closing his arms around her, feeling her hair against his cheek, hearing her whispers of gratitude, had that sense of complete ‘arrival’, of ‘being there’, which human beings continually crave and hardly ever actually experience.

He belonged to the old tradition of knight errant: the chevaliers sans peur et sans reproche who ask of their lady only that she is beautiful and willing to be served in order to ride to the ends of the earth at her bidding. Valiant, selfless — and generally slain — the Lochinvars and Lancelots of this world, however, were not granted the benison that was now to be bestowed on Guy: a prolonged, close and domestic sojourn with the beloved.

‘Come!’ said Guy now, holding open the door of the car. ‘I want to show you everything.’

She smiled up at him, lovely as daybreak. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Oh yes, my darling. Yes.’

But in the room in the West Tower where the Duchess and the Margravine were waiting with David Tremayne to greet them, anticipation and excitement had suddenly drained from the day.

‘She can’t come at all?’ said the Margravine, her plump face puckered. ‘Not even for the reception and the ball? Not for her birthday?’

‘I’ve read you what she says,’ said the Duchess, holding out the letter which had just been delivered. She was regally dressed for the occasion in a grey silk dress entirely devoid of cobwebs or even the smallest piece of clinging cheese, but the hooded old grey eyes were suddenly bleak and lifeless. ‘She has asked her professor for leave, but she is needed in Vienna; she cannot be spared.’

The Margravine groped for her handkerchief and surreptitiously wiped her cheeks. ‘It won’t be the same without Putzerl,’ she said, and the pug — hearing the name which meant walks, games and being scratched in exactly the right place on the stomach — shot out of his cope and (as was his wont) began to slither, yapping, round the floor.

David was silent, but he too had to fight down a sudden sense of desolation. He had worked unstintingly over the past three months, turning Pfaffenstein into a place in which Le Roi Soleil himself would have been pleased to dally during a summer progress through the countryside. But though he had worked for Guy and thus for the woman at whose feet Guy wished to lay the castle, it was the image of the small princess of whom everyone spoke with such warmth that he had held in his mind. It was the thought of pleasing her, of showing her that her home was in good hands, which had given a special zest to his labours. Now, suddenly, everything seemed pointless and flat.