Magic Flutes

‘Is your foster-mother already at Pfaffenstein? Martha Hodge?’

‘Yes.’ Guy smiled. ‘She’s having a great time making friends in the village. Rudi eats out of her hand and grandmother Keller is teaching her some weird way of knitting socks.’

‘Oh, I’m glad! I’m so glad!’ The elfin face was suddenly alight. ‘And Nerine, of course, will have—’

Nerine doesn’t go into the village,’ he said tonelessly. ‘She’s afraid of catching an infection.’

‘An infection?’ Tessa’s hand had sprung to her throat. ‘Is their illness? Not typhus?’

No, no, nothing like that. A few cases of measles, that’s all.’ He paused. ‘Nerine is to be pitied, Tessa,’ he went on quietly.

Nerine! But she has everything!’

He shook his head. ‘She’s in love with her own beauty and with every hour that passes it fades a little. I’ve seen her, sometimes, looking in the mirror with panic in her eyes.’

‘“It is a fearful thing to love what time can touch”,’ quoted Tessa. ‘Who said that?’

‘I don’t know, but they were right. I would have done better,’ Guy went on bitterly, ‘to have spent three days getting to know Nerine rather than buying her a castle. I was in love with the past, with my own splendid fidelity. But she is not to blame. She is what she always was: a lovely, wilful child. It is I who made her into something else. And because of this,’ he said wearily, ‘I cannot now reject her.’

Tessa bowed her head. While she believed Guy to be infatuated, she could hope that he might wake. But he had already woken and still meant to keep his word, and so all hope was gone.

As they stood there, close but never touching, the red squirrel came cautiously down the tree, made as if to scamper away again, then calmed by their stillness, jumped down and settled on the grass, holding a beechnut between his paws.

‘What was that word you taught me at Pfaffenstein?’ said Guy, his voice very low. ‘For a wild strawberry place? Smultronställe, was that it?’

‘Yes.’

She did not ask why he enquired, for she saw in his face what he was saying. That this place, now, had become a smultronställe. That any place where they were together would be such a place, be it a railway station, a rainy street . . . ‘Here is my space’, Anthony had said to his Egyptian queen, meaning what Guy meant now.

‘Guy, when I came into the picture gallery at Pfaffenstein, when the aunts were telling you about the Lily . . . Nerine asked you then when you were born and you wouldn’t say. You said you didn’t know. But it was . . . Was it in June? Before the twenty-first? Are you a Gemini?’

‘Yes.’

She sighed, like a child reprieved from punishment. ‘I knew,’ she said. ‘I don’t believe in astrology, of course. It has to be nonsense. But all the same, I knew.’

They had been together longer than they realized. It was dusk now and a very young moon had climbed between the trees, cradling the evening star.

‘I must go – the aunts will be worried. Guy, I don’t know if we will meet again, but—’ Her voice broke and she tried again. ‘Sometimes, when you’re alone and you look up at—’ Once more, she had to stop. Then she managed, ‘If I cannot be anything else . . . could I be your Star Sister? Could I at least be that?’

Guy dug his nails into his palms. Everything in him rose in protest at the fey, romantic conceit. He did not want her in the heavens, linked to him by some celestial whimsy, but here and now in the flesh and after the death of the flesh, her hand in his as they rose from graves like these when the last trump sounded.

‘Yes,’ he managed to say. ‘You can be my Star Sister. You can at least be that.’

He felt something on his wrist – a breath more than a touch – and looking down saw that she was laying the beech leaf, like a most precious gift, into his hands.

Then she walked lightly away, pulling her shawl closer, and vanished like Giselle into the mist between the tombstones.

‘Did you find her, sir?’ asked David when Guy, with absolutely no recollection of the journey, reached Sachers.

‘Yes. But she won’t let me help her. God knows what will become of her. Unless—’ But the word ‘unless’ was more than he could bear. He turned away, then swung round once more to look intently into David’s eyes. ‘I never thought of that,’ he said slowly. ‘Would you have . . . David?’

David flushed. But when he answered it was without prevarication, his head held high.

‘No, sir. I wouldn’t even have asked her. She never had eyes for anyone but you.’

18

Guy arrived at Pfaffenstein the following evening and setting aside the servants’ efforts to announce him, found Nerine and her relatives at dinner in the Spanish dining-room.

Though a small party, they were dining in style. Light from two rows of candlesticks glowed on the walls of Morocco leather, the Goya portraits. An enormous silver epergne of writhing horsemen, which it took two footmen to lift, adorned the centre of the elaborately set table.