Sophie and the Sibyl Page 9

  ‘Very becoming that – a girl who can master a horse.’

  ‘The younger Duncker son used to be here every night at the tables. Haven’t seen him this year. He must have been mastered by the little Countess.’

  ‘Well, I gather she’s taken his place, and had a luckier swing at Fortune’s Wheel.’

  Max dragged Sophie through the lighted streets towards the Marktplatz, nodding to the odd acquaintance. He glowed with rage, and never noticed the social sensation caused by their rapid progress. What irritated him most? The fact that the Sibyl could write out a credit note for a thousand thaler without a flicker, and he couldn’t? His prospective bride rubbing shoulders at the gaming tables with men who were hardly gentlemen, and ladies who were certainly not ladies at all? Sophie von Hahn exposing herself to gossip, comment and impudent glances? The delinquent behaviour of Fräulein Garstein? The irresponsible Count? Or was he incensed by the bitter truth that she was winning, and winning large sums, whereas he always lost every stake, without fail?

  ‘You don’t need to hang on to me as if I was a criminal, Max. Let me go.’

  ‘You’re coming straight back to the hotel. How could you be so indiscreet?’

  ‘In what way? By winning?’

  Sophie pulled herself free, and shaking with pink-cheeked resentment, took her stand on the steps of the Grand Continental, and declared, for all the world to hear:

  ‘How dare you spoil my game? I was well ahead. I know when to stop. Unlike you, by all accounts. You haven’t even asked for my hand and yet you think that you can treat me as if I were an abject wife, to be bullied and pushed about. You have no right to tell me what to do. And you never will have.’

  Max hurled her and her ill-gotten gains through the hotel doors. And behold Fräulein Garstein, rushing towards them, a respectable middle-aged bundle of grey silks.

  ‘Ah ma chère, there you are! I was most anxious. The reception clerk told me that your headache had quite gone and that you had stepped out. I looked for you in the gardens. But I am so relieved to see that you were not alone! Indeed, you have discovered a most acceptable escort!’

  She smirked at Max, the fiancé-in-waiting. Sophie laid down her heavy bundle of notes and cash on the marble table in the foyer, turned her back upon him, and began, with slow and ostentatious care, to unpin her hat. Max bowed low to both women, speechless with fury, and stalked out of the building. He pounded back down the Obere Promenade to the Kursaal, cutting several people dead en route and causing lasting offence.

  The Sibyl stood in the hallway, buttoned, cloaked and muffled, gently acknowledging curious little troupes of admirers, her washed eyes anxious for home and her beloved scientist. She drew him aside, pulled forth a cambric handkerchief from her nécessaire and opened her palm to reveal a glittering shaft of colours. The pure stones flickered and swam in the gas light.

  ‘There are the very jewels, I believe?’ Max gasped. How had she conjured them up in so short a time?

  ‘They must be returned at once. And, I rather think, delivered up to the hotel safe.’ The Sibyl reflected for a moment. ‘For her to accept them from either one of us, my dear, would be utterly compromising, and extremely humiliating. She has taken control of her own destiny and here we are, robbing her of all her freshly awakened powers.’

  The Sibyl flashed him a glance of pure mischief.

  ‘I took the liberty of writing this note. She will not know my hand.’

  She handed him a scrap of torn-off notepaper, on which was written with a pencil in clear, but rapid handwriting:

  A stranger who has found the Countess von Hahn’s necklace returns it to her with the hope that she will not again risk the loss of it.

  Max reddened and gazed at the Sibyl, trumped, upstaged, and quite unable to speak. She handed him the necklace and the message, then took his arm in hers, as if they belonged to one another.

  ‘And now, my dear Max, I have enjoyed a sufficient number of adventures in the Spielsaal for one evening, and would be delighted if you would see me home.’

  END OF CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  in which Our Author sorts out Several Muddles.

  Max slouched in his chair, eyeing the new arrivals in the breakfast room, and nibbling thin slices of buttered brioche, while the Count deciphered the English newspapers. The papers were all out of date, but still vigorously fought over by the early guests in the Grand Continental. Had Max calmed down overnight? As we all usually do? Not a bit of it. His emotional temperature had risen ten degrees. A reprise of the previous night’s rage engulfed him while he composed a brief note to the Sibyl, enquiring after her husband’s health. Should he mention the apparition of Sophie in the Spielsaal? No, be oblique. Nothing specific or incriminating. And I thank you for your kind comprehension concerning last night’s incident. That will do.

  But it didn’t do at all. He sat facing the Count, compromised by his own silence concerning Sophie’s gambling escapade, convinced that the Count would hear of it anyway. Most of the visitors in Homburg had watched her gambling. But that now appeared to him as by no means the worst moment of the night’s events. He sat there, appalled that the young Countess had refused him, point blank, in public, before he had even got around to proposing, on the hotel’s front steps and in ringing tones. Surely the Count would get to hear about that too? Why hadn’t he said anything? Here he was, combing the columns of The Times, a paper he described as detestable, and gently chuntering to himself.

  ‘Home of democracy indeed! A second Athens! They forget themselves. Athenian democracy was an oligarchy, based on a slave state. And no question whatever of votes for women.’ None of the random, irritated expletives were directed at Max.

  ‘Ah! Here you are, my dear!’

  The boyish stride, criticised as unladylike, crossed the sunny breakfast room in two bounds, and a large kiss descended upon the Count’s whiskers. She wore her riding habit, the blonde plaits wound round her head, like a true rural maiden, bent on pigs and harvests. Max immediately stood up and bowed, peering at her dimples from beneath his lowered lids.

  ‘Countess,’ he murmured. Sophie von Hahn flushed brick red, and merely bowed in return. She sat down with a thump.

  ‘I’ll just order your chocolate. Max and I have been drinking coffee.’ The Count noticed their mutual embarrassment and grinned, ah, Bonjour, l’amour, how perfectly suitable for young lovers to blush and tremble in each other’s presence, and we were all young once. He began waving at waiters.

  The supposed lovers looked at one another, mortified. Nothing could be said in front of the Count. Sophie recovered first and mouthed her apology in dumb show. I’M SORRY. The shape of her lips and the downcast glance shimmered with genuine repentance. Max sat bolt upright and mouthed back, I’M SORRY TOO, disarmed. The silver pot of chocolate and a rack of fresh toast scurried towards them, but so did the hotel manager, with a packet for the little Countess, handed in late last night, delivered by a young boy he didn’t know. Max, standing just outside, smoking on the steps, had paid said young boy to deliver the package to the reception clerk, then sauntered in himself, giving no sign of recognition, and insisted, as a responsible family friend, that it should be locked in the safe until morning. He dare not let the jewels, so recently redeemed, slither out of sight.

  Sophie, unknowing, innocent, dropped the packet beside her plate and chomped the toast, avoiding Max’s eye. He sat quite still, transfixed by the packet, and pretended to listen to the Count’s political commentary. Finally Sophie reached over and slit the packet neatly open like a fish fillet, with her slightly buttered knife. The jewels flooded out from their shroud, bound and muffled by the Sibyl’s handkerchief. And here lay the fatal note, a torn slip, containing the gentlest of reprimands. The Count leaned over, astonished.

  ‘What on earth are you doing with your mother’s necklace at breakfast, Sophie? I told you to lock it up in the hotel safe when you weren’t wearing it. It’s much too valuable
to carry about.’

  Her eyes flickered across the note. She reddened again, then turned white. Her fingers trembled on the butter knife. Was she consumed with vexation, or wounded pride? She must have realised at once that the clear straight lines of writing before her were not from Max. He would never write to her in English. But did he know who this stranger was? She raised her savage green eyes and searched his impassive face. He began fiddling with his cigarette case. Then who? Who knew? Or had the Jew himself returned the jewels?

  ‘Sophie? Are you listening?’

  ‘Oh yes, Father. I’ll put them back in the hotel safe at once.’ She gave no sign that they had ever been anywhere else.

  ‘You might wear them tonight for the dinner and the ball. Your mother would be pleased.’

  So the necklace wasn’t even hers to pawn. Max transformed an indignant snort into a cough. Sophie tucked the crushed note up her sleeve, and swept the guilty necklace on to her lap, out of sight. He watched her fasten the button on her cuff one notch tighter to secure the note. She’ll pore over that in her bedroom, later. And she will scan the English here in the hotel, wondering, which one, which one. Nothing, however, interfered with her appetite. She wolfed down two more chunks of toast, a large bowl of pears in honey, and then swigged her steaming chocolate, two cups, at speed.

  ‘Please excuse me.’

  She rose, clutching the jewels in both hands, and made off towards the hotel office. She’ll interrogate the manager, thought Max, and then have it all out with Wiener. Would she go that far, he wondered? Of one thing he was completely certain. Sophie von Hahn believed that the unknown stranger, who had returned her jewels, and whose identity remained a mystery, was a man. A man who was probably watching her.

  Did the young Countess feel compromised, humiliated, exposed? As she should have done? Max had no idea. The Count turned to Max, but his thoughts were so saturated with Sophie that the Count’s sudden change in demeanour and proximity, a shift in tone and rhythm, generated a gentle shock in his brain.

  ‘Will you take care of Sophie? There’s a good chap? Just for a couple of hours while I amuse myself in the Kursaal?’

  Gambling? The Count? The elderly gentleman lurched forward like a predatory owl spotting a mouse, and thrust his whiskers into Max’s face. ‘And not a word at home, eh? You can tell Wolfgang I stopped you coming with me.’

  Everyone traipsing round the shops and streets in Homburg vor der Höhe, or taking the waters, with their extraordinary curative powers, an amazing tonic which eliminates arthritis, lesions and psoriasis, was actually there for the Spielsaal and the roulette tables. Those canny French entrepreneurs, the brothers Blanc, François and Louis, negotiated the thirty-year concession with Landgraf Ludwig von Hessen-Homburg to build the Spielbank, and ensure an annual turnover of at least one hundred thousand gulden. The Casino opened on 23rd May 1841. And thus an insignificant country town, capital of a tiny principality, with an elegant chateau on a hill, surrounded by farms and woods, became an international spa with a fashionable Spielsaal and high stakes. Dostoevsky named the place ‘Roulettenburg’, for the Kurhaus did indeed resemble a miniature castle, all columns and decorative turrets, with the fatal wheels turning in the left wing. The town flourished and filled up with the wicked and the dissolute; they too prospered, like the biblical green bay tree. Streetlights glowed in the thoroughfares, and a direct train link to Frankfurt united Homburg with the great world. By 1866 the three most opulent Prussian casinos, much visited by the British, were Wiesbaden, Ems, and Homburg. But puritanical Prussian morals kicked in, and with the founding of the Deutsche Reich came the order to close. The brothers Blanc decided to play on until the last possible minute – the twenty-third hour of the last day – 31st December 1872, before returning to their other profitable little enterprise, the Spielbank Monte Carlo.

  The urgency of imminent closure packed the Spielsaal in the Kurhaus with passionate addicts and curious tourists. If pressed to explain himself, the Count August von Hahn would have offered two motives for disappearing in the direction of the card tables and Fortune’s Wheel. He genuinely did wish to partake of those Silenic pleasures, before the unkindly Prussian harpies whisked them away, but he also wanted to arrange a little tête-à-tête between his innocent, vivacious daughter and her intended. Let the young people get to know each other better. He never doubted Max’s honour or his intentions. Of course Max wanted to marry Sophie. Every young man with means and ambition would want to do so. The Count was prepared to place all his stakes on that square. Well, young man, here’s your chance.

  ‘Yes, of course, sir, of course.’

  Max rose and bowed, as the Count slipped away, in search of his wallet and coat. Sophie reappeared a moment later.

  ‘Where’s Father?’

  ‘Heading off to the Kursaal,’ said Max, and met her eye for the second time that morning.

  ‘No, really?’

  A moment of mock horror engulfed them both, and then erupted into shaking giggles. They clutched each other’s hands and rocked with laughter. The breakfast room stared; the unmentionable could now be discussed.

  ‘He’ll find out, Sophie. Someone will tell him.’

  ‘I know. I’ll have to come up with some dreadful excuses. But you’ll back me up, won’t you? You saw me win.’

  ‘I can’t say that I encouraged you. I pulled you out of that place.’

  ‘Well, at least you weren’t playing. Wolfgang would have a fit.’ She smothered a fresh wave of laughter.

  ‘Come on,’ commanded Sophie, ‘I’m engaged to go riding before dinner and I’ve got something to show you.’ She snatched up an apple from the fruit bowl.

  ‘I hope you’re going to give me some explanations for your behaviour yesterday. Even if you aren’t in the least repentant.’

  She paused. They were already striding down the Dorotheenstraße, and a gust of cold air flooded his unbuttoned coat. It was warm in the sun, but nowhere else. She grinned up at him.

  ‘I’m going to reveal all my secrets!’

  Then she took his arm and laughed, laughed as she had once done when she guided him through the bushes in the woods near the Jagdschloss, to their secret cabin, a little wooden shack with real curtains, built with her own hands, where the children carefully arranged their broken crockery for dinner. Max noted with some alarm that they had marched out of town in the same direction as the Königgasse, and feared the worst, but she turned off into a mucky cobbled alleyway, where the stables looked out over the meadows. The Schlosspark with the new Tannenwaldallee now lay behind them, and the fresh damp mass of fields stretched out, the cows wandering into the distance. Sophie turned abruptly into a narrow lane and they both leaned back against the hedges as two ladies on horseback, veiled against the dust, trotted past. Max felt the prickle of twigs on his back. He had forgotten Sophie’s refusal to marry him, and already begun to imagine their life together. She attended the Berlin charity subscription concerts with her mother, but he had never seen her at the theatre or the opera. He hoped she wouldn’t insist on spending all their days in the country. Would she be content dealing with farmyards, gardens and stables?

  ‘You don’t ride much, do you, Max?’ He detected a note of puzzled reproach, and experienced a ripple of panic; she clearly imagined him strolling down an eternal boulevard.

  ‘Wolfgang keeps a carriage, but no saddle horses,’ admitted Max, alarmed that the Duncker brothers appeared to be living well within their means. But here they reached the stables. Sophie leaped a puddle at the corner, hauling up the skirt of her riding habit and revealing her boots. Max noticed her tiny silver spurs and heels flecked with mud. He observed her frank and cheerful manners with the head groom, who immediately strode out to meet her. She shook his hand warmly, as if she were concluding a deal. Then he realised that she was in fact doing exactly that, concluding the deal.

  ‘Tell Herr Halmers that I have arranged for the money to be paid directly to his agent. The balance is
already waiting for him at the hotel. And I shall expect the signed papers, including the documentation and the bill of sale, to be delivered to me by the end of the day, so that I can arrange transportation by train.’

  She swung round to Max. ‘Come! Look.’

  And she pranced into the long dim tunnel of the stables with loose boxes ranged on either side. His eyes gradually adjusted to the dark; the sweet warm smells of crushed hay and horses mingled and thickened in the gloom. Sophie gently opened a box door and spoke quietly to a huge bay mare that raised her head and snorted slightly. Behind the mare stood another young horse, a smaller bay with two white socks, perhaps a yearling. Max caught the flicker of the creatures’ startled, retreating eyes. Sophie fastened a halter on the mare; the animal bent her neck and shivered. The Countess talked softly to both horses all the time.

  ‘There you are. They’re mine now. Both of them.’

  Max stood well back, open-mouthed, batting the flies away with his hat.

  ‘Are you telling me that you were gambling in the Kursaal just to win money and buy horses?’

  ‘Yes. And I won a lot more than I needed as it turned out.’

  Was she thinking of the redeemed necklace? Max couldn’t ask without giving himself away.

  ‘Mind. Stand back. I’m going to lead her out.’

  And into the warm autumn sun stepped the dark bay, her neck arched, her powerful flanks trembling slightly as she raised her tail and deposited a pile of steaming golden turds dangerously close to Max’s recently polished boots. Sophie laughed out loud at his elegant withdrawal to safer ground, and stood back herself to let the young filly trot out past her mother, nickering with excitement in the fresh air. The still-stabled horses began to stamp and neigh, calling to their two companions, now smelling freedom and open fields. The head groom slapped the yearling’s rump and she circled the yard rapidly, her unshod hooves slithering on the cobbles. Both animals shimmered with unspent energy and strength.