The Dragonfly Pool

“No, of course not.” Tally was very firm. “This kind of thing happens all the time in the film business, you know it does. I expect her agent wanted more money and the studio is being difficult. You’ll see, it will all resolve itself.”

“It will be awful if it doesn’t. She absolutely lives for her work.”

Tally looked at the picture again. Ridiculous Gloria was lying on her stomach on some sort of animal skin with one foot in very high heels cocked up behind her. Yet it was only because she had gone to see Gloria at the cinema in St. Agnes that they had seen the newsreel which had set the whole Bergania adventure off. But for this horrible woman who treated her daughter so abominably, Karil would now be in the clutches of the Nazis.

That evening Tally wrote one last letter to the prince, calling up everything she could think of to amuse and interest him: Matteo’s last biology lesson, when they had camped for a night on the moor and watched the stags preparing for their annual rut . . . the visit of the Spanish children, who had given a marvelous moonlit concert in the courtyard . . . and that the cow Borro was looking after was expecting a calf.

But once again, there was no reply.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Karil and Carlotta

When you are unhappy, time goes very slowly. Karil had been at Rottingdene House for only a few weeks, but he felt as though he had been buried at the bottom of a well for years.

When he woke in the morning, he thought for a moment that he was still at home, because the first thing he saw was a tray with two rusks on it and a glass of fruit juice. But it was not an equerry who brought them; the duke’s servants were so hard-pressed, looking after a household packed with people who could do nothing for themselves, that they could take on nothing extra and it was the Countess Frederica who handed him the tray. The countess had seen to it ever since they had arrived in London that Karil’s life went on exactly as before, and now she told him his lessons for the day and his engagements for the afternoon.

Karil never thought he would be homesick for Monsieur Dalrose’s history lessons, nor that he would miss riding in a procession to open a railway station or welcome a foreign deputation, but it was so. For his lessons now were given by his uncles and they taught him the very few things that they knew. Uncle Dmitri showed him how to design crests and mottoes; Uncle Franz Heinrich taught him how to write national anthems and music for royal occasions, and Uncle Alfonso was a specialist in the design of state uniforms.

No one taught him anything he might have wanted to know, or needed, and there had been no talk of sending him to school. For while no one spoke of money, it was clear to Karil that however grand and pompous the duke was, and however formal the household, there was not much spare cash. Even Carlotta, who could usually get blood out of a stone, found it hard to wheedle money out of her grandfather, and when his relatives needed anything they had to scrabble about among the few jewels that still remained to them and take something to be pawned or sold.

While he was dressing he heard a familiar thud, but as no cries or screams followed, Karil did not come out of his room to see who it was that had fallen over Pom-Pom. The little dog was black and tubular and almost impossible to see in the dimly lit corridors of Rottingdene House as he padded about looking for feet that were worthy of his care.

The duke himself did not come down to breakfast, but the three uncles and their wives were there. In front of Uncle Dmitri was a marmalade jar labeled with the crest of the Drimadoffs. In front of Uncle Franz Heinrich was a toast rack decorated with a silver griffon, which was the emblem of the House of Carinstein, and Uncle Alfonso was feeding a piece of bread to his shivering monkey, who wore a jacket modeled on that of the household cavalry that had guarded Alfonso when he still ruled his lands.

When Karil entered, the three uncles very slightly raised their buttocks from their chairs, because a search through the Almanach de Gotha had shown that the son of a reigning king, even a dead one, did definitely take precedence over another prince or an archduke or a don, and this was the nearest they would get to bowing to their nephew.

The dining room at Rottingdene House was so dark that the light had to be put on even at breakfast, and the food was quietly nasty. The bread was never fresh, the butter slightly rancid, and the bacon undercooked. The truth was that the servants were so ill paid and badly treated that they had long ago given up any attempt to do their job well.

The last to appear as usual was Carlotta, who came into the room in a freshly ironed blouse and a pleated kilt with a tartan ribbon in her shining curls.