Castle of the Wolf Page 3

  As if she had somehow sensed Cissy’s thoughts, Evie suddenly said, “He wouldn’t ‘ave wanted it, the late master, God bless his soul. He wouldn’t ‘ave wanted fer ye to stay his spinster daughter forever an’ ever. He’d ‘ave wanted fer ye to be married to a fine young gentleman and ‘ave little ‘uns.”

  With a pang, Cissy remembered the words of her father’s will: “It particularly pains me that… I have not been able to provide for you fittingly…”

  “I suppose you are right,” she said slowly.

  Evie wiped her face with her apron and nodded. “I’m sure… I’m sure tha’…” New tears welled in her eyes, and her voice started to wobble again. “Tha’ he’s…he’s found ye a right nice young man.” Swiping her hand over her eyes, the girl sniffed loudly. “Miss.”

  Cissy stared down the street. “I sure do hope so,” she murmured, then suddenly shivered as a slither of ice whispered down her spine.

  ~*~

  He prowled the hallways of his home like a beast on the loose. Restless and always searching, searching…

  Outside, the storm howled around the casements, hissing viciously through cracks in the ancient walls. The old trees groaned under its onslaught, while overhead, wind scattered the clouds like a distressed flock of sheep. For a short moment, the dark veil was ripped from the moon and a splinter of light fell through the windows, wandered over Spartan furniture.

  Instinctively, the man shrank away from the light.

  Better the dark, where shapes became obscure and no pity existed.

  As if it had suddenly become too heavy, he leaned his head against the door frame, rubbing his leg to ease the pain of over-exercised muscles. This was all he had left: darkness and pain. All he would ever be: a ghost, a specter, a fairytale beast not fit for human company.

  A harsh laugh escaped him.

  No, not a fairytale beast. These still had hope. In the end, they would always turn back into dashing Prince Charming. But for him, there would be no salvation, no return to a past where he had been fêted as the darling of society, where women had given him smiles full of sexual promise and men had regarded him with respect and envy.

  Another flock of clouds hid the moon and plunged the room into welcome darkness.

  Bitterness churned in his stomach, a poisonous snake. And yet, together with the pain, it was his only companion in this life that had gone wrong so many, many years ago. He shuddered. No, there would be no turning back to the past for him, no return to innocence, to life in the light. No salvation for this beast. Only loneliness.

  Defeated, the man bowed his dark head, accepting the inevitable as he had accepted it all those years ago.

  Chapter 3

  “…and then the mice ate the evil bishop up so all that remained was his skeleton,” Mrs. Chisholm whispered in her most eerie voice, while peering at the stocky tower from underneath the dripping hood of her oilskin coat. Cissy stood beside her on the deck of the steamer and tried to discern something through the steady drizzle.

  Mist whirled around the base of the Mouse Tower and rendered the small island in the midst of the Rhine invisible. More mist, dirty white, poured from the hills to their right and left, and reached out its tentacles to span the expanse of the broad stream. Like an eerie apparition in a gothic novel, the towers and battlements of a castle would sometimes rise above the clogging gray.

  Her ears ringing with the never ending bluster of the steamship’s engine, Cissy huddled deeper into the folds of her own coat. She blinked. Dampness clung to her lashes like tears. Yet despite the mist and the rain, Mrs. Chisholm had insisted on staying on deck so they could properly admire the splendor of Father Rhine.

  Cissy could still hardly believe that she really was on board a ship heading up the Rhine and bringing her nearer and nearer to a new life. A sense of unrealness shrouded the journey to London with Mr. Weatherby, who had not only organized a passport and the necessary signatures for her, but had also introduced her to Mrs. Chisholm, the widow of a wealthy manufacturer. She liked to spend the winters in the town of Baden-Baden and had agreed to take on Cissy as her companion for the length of their journey. Well versed in the art of traveling at this time of year, she also had insisted on their oilskin coats.

  As Mrs. Chisholm stood beside Cissy at the railing, the widow reminded her of a rather tall, thin scarecrow. A beaming scarecrow, despite the water which dripped from her nose. Mrs. Chisholm didn’t even bat an eye when the ship stopped at yet another customs house, and they had to dig out their passports so they could leave Prussia and enter Hesse-Darmstadt.

  “This is surely the loveliest part of our journey!” Mrs. Chisholm exclaimed—as she had kept doing ever since they had left the docks in London. “Precisely like the first time my George and I took this route some forty years ago, newly married and so in love. Of course, we first had to go to the Michaelmas fair in Frankfurt, but afterwards, my George wished to show me the balls in Baden-Baden. We had the loveliest weather that year, only sunshine, sunshine, sunshine, and the balls and amusements in Baden-Baden were still in full swing. At the time, I was still a stupid young chit who had never seen anything of the world, and the glitter of Baden-Baden seemed so glamorous to me. I wish I could take you to the balls in Baden-Baden, too, dearie.”

  Cissy nodded and smiled and looked on as a flag appeared on top of the Mouse Tower, indicating their ship could proceed into the narrow curve of the Binger Loch. Mrs. Chisholm had wanted to take her to the balls in Baden-Baden ever since they had left the docks in London.

  “A few years later,” Mrs. Chisholm went on, wiping the water from her nose with the sleeve of her glistening coat, “everybody flocked to Italy. But who needs Italy when you can have the grandeur of German forests, the picturesque towns, the sweetness of Rhinelandish wine and, above all, the majestic Rhine itself!” She threw her arms wide as if she wanted to hug the river. “Oh magnificent, glorious Father Rhine…”

  Cissy suppressed a smile. Mrs. Chisholm had enthused while the waves of the Channel had tossed their ship about until all passengers had acquired a greenish tinge; and she had enthused all the way from Rotterdam to Cologne when high dykes on each side of the river had intercepted all view, except for a few church steeples which had shyly peered over them. But in Cologne, where the old cathedral, still unfinished even after almost six hundred years, greeted travelers, Cissy had felt it, too—the tingle of excitement, the reverent shudder, the awareness of history. Now she felt it again, with each castle, each abbey, each ruin they passed along the way.

  Here kaisers of old had erected their residences; Roland, the great hero and nephew of Charlemagne, had built a castle, and Siegfried had fought against the ghastly dragon; here her father’s stories took shape and her childhood heroes stepped out of the pages of musty books.

  Their ship glided on, and Cissy admired the hills where the fires of Celtic altars had once illuminated the night, where the Romans had erected the Limes and made these hills the rim of the civilized world. They had brought the knowledge of cultivating wine, and still the grapes ripened along the banks of this river. Countless armies had marched through this land, peoples had come and mingled and disappeared, and still their legacy lived on, strong and insistent, and Cissy admired it all, the din of the steamship in her ears.

  In Mayence, grown from a Roman garrison town and bearing the Celtic sun wheel in its coat of arms, the two women left the Rhine and traveled on by post chaise on the Bergstrasse to Baden-Baden. While they passed by more ruins and castles, Mrs. Chisholm regaled her with stories about them all, stories of brotherly hate and brotherly love, of star-crossed lovers, of witches and white women.

  A little way out of the small town of Heppenheim they finally crossed the border into the Grand Duchy of Baden. From then on, Mrs. Chisholm became quieter and quieter until the stories totally ceased to flow. Now, she only clucked her tongue from time to time and threw Cissy worried glances, which Cissy herself did not know how to interpret.

&nbs
p; So, even though she had come to be very fond of the widow, Cissy felt relieved when on their third day on the road Baden-Baden lay before them, nestling between the hills that formed an offset of the Black Forest. “Civitas Aurelia Aquensis,” Mrs. Chisholm murmured absent-mindedly, a deep frown marring her forehead. “Already the Romans appreciated the mineral springs, and you can find altars to their gods all over town. Just like our Bath, really. Only the people are speaking German, of course. Quite curious, isn’t it?”

  They took up residence in the only real hotel in town, the Badenscher Hof, and Mrs. Chisholm insisted a bath should be brought to Cissy’s room just as to her own. “No, dearie, you mustn’t protest. I only wish you could stay longer and I could show you the balls. You would like them, I’m sure, just as any young girl would. But instead…” The widow pressed her lips tightly together, and the line between her brows deepened. Abruptly, she threw her arms around Cissy and enveloped her in a lavender-scented embrace. “My poor girl. My poor, sweet girl.” As abruptly as before, the widow released her and, blinking rapidly, waved her away. “Shoo, now. Go and freshen up.”

  The next day, Mrs. Chisholm would not hear of putting Cissy onto the post chaise on her own. Instead, she hired a carriage for her, and after giving the coachman a long lecture, they said a tearful good-bye. “My dear child. My dear child,” the woman choked out, and pressed Cissy to her heaving bosom. “You must promise to write me and send me many letters. Most uncivilized this, to send a young girl off all by herself and let her fare alone in a foreign country. My poor child.” She patted Cissy’s back. “Do promise to write to me, and if there is anything I can do, don’t hesitate to ask for my help.”

  Finally, Cissy sat in the carriage and waved good-bye while the coach jerked into motion and rumbled over the cobblestones. Soon, Baden-Baden lay behind her, and Cissy was on the road once more. At first the silence and loneliness seemed oppressive, weighing down on her. She tried a bit of reading, but soon returned to looking out the window at the country, which became wilder with each mile they passed. And the farther they went and the more towns, great and small, with narrow streets overhung by medieval houses they passed through, the stronger grew Cissy’s feeling of slipping back in time and into the stories her father had loved so much.

  But on the second day, when they had almost reached their destination, the country changed its pleasant face. Shortly after they had stopped at an inn along the way to change horses and to take a small midday luncheon, dark clouds gathered on the horizon. Cissy watched how they built up layer after layer of bulging gray, before they sprang up and raced toward the carriage on the lonely road. As if touched by ghostly fingers, the bare branches of the trees to the left and right started to move and wave at the travelers. Dead leaves swirled up, some still colored in bright hues, others already gray with decay and gossamer like spiderwebs, mere skeletons of once green leaves, which crumbled into dust in the breeze. Twilight fell when the clouds overhead reached the carriage. The wind picked up, whistled in the cracks of the coach and made the trees groan under its onslaught. And then the snow descended upon them, first in a thin drizzle, curiously gray in the dimness; but soon thick, fat flakes fell all around. The wind was ominously howling outside, like a large beast on the prowl, out to hunt, and they the prey…

  Cissy huddled in a corner of the carriage, wrapped in a blanket she had found under the seat. She remembered all the awful stories of coaches lost in the snow, swallowed by snow storms, not only in the north of Britain; most horrid of all the stories of the great frost of 1814, when nature had held travelers prisoners in wayside inns and farmhouses for days on end. Indeed, it was said that even the Thames had been frozen that year, and an ox had been roasted whole on the thick layer of ice.

  If this carriage should disappear, none would be the wiser—nobody expected her arrival, and George would probably not register the absence of mail. He would believe her to be sulking as if she were still a little girl.

  Cissy shivered under her blanket.

  Should the snow swallow this carriage, nobody would search for it, and they would be found only by chance when the snow thawed. Blue, frozen corpses, the horses caught in midstride, nostrils still flared. And their pale ghosts would haunt this forest forevermore, inspiring fear in the unwary traveler who would venture out at night.

  Cissy closed her eyes and shuddered. Perhaps George had been right after all; she did indeed tend to lose herself in stories, believed that fairy tales could become reality. Perhaps this whole venture had not been a good idea. Perhaps she should have stayed at home.

  Under one roof with Dorinda?

  Her eyes snapped open.

  On second thought, she preferred haunting this forest as a pale ghost.

  She shook her head and looked outside. The dim light of the coach lanterns did not reach far, yet the snow brightened up the darkness, so they traveled through a world of dim gray. The trees flitted by as dark shadows in the whirling snow.

  Later—it might have been hours or minutes, Cissy was never quite sure afterward—it seemed to her she could spot a golden glow in the dimness ahead. With trembling fingers, she opened the window and thrust her head outside, blinking against the sting of snowflakes in her eyes. They were still surrounded by forest, and in the near distance black hills rose up, hovering to their right and left like enormous beasts. But before them, nestled between the hills, a golden halo of light could be seen even through the snow. And Cissy watched, as snowflakes gathered on her hair, how the halo changed form and finally transformed into the blinking lights of a small town.

  “Coachman!” she shouted.

  “Ho there,” came the cheerful answer. “We’ve nearly made it, gnädiges Fräulein.”

  A short time later, the wheels of the coach crunched through the snow that covered the streets of the picturesque little town, just about to settle for the night. Oil lamps, quaintly strung across the streets, defied the whirling snow and cast their soft light about to show the wary traveler the way to the grand pension beside the church. The coach rattled to a halt in front of a great door, brightly illuminated by two lanterns. It opened to emit a flurry of servants. The carriage door opened, and Cissy was handed down under the shelter of an enormous black umbrella.

  She turned and stared in wonder at the church, so unlike the ancient gray village church at home, which huddled against the ground as if to seek shelter from the cold winds which blew from the moor. This church rose proudly from the ground, with the bell tower pointing to the night sky like a slender finger. And even amidst the falling snow, the building seemed to shine, all done in white and red, with elegant, sweeping curves and the hint of gold on the tops of the roofs. And in dark niches along the front, saints of stone stood guard over the entrance.

  “Gnädiges Fräulein…”

  Cissy turned back.

  “Hier entlang.” The young footman made a small movement with his umbrella, pointing it toward the waiting door of the inn.

  “Yes, of course.” Cissy smiled at him and stepped toward the warm yellow light spilling through the open door. As she saw the elegant curves and the red and white repeated in the building before her, her eyes opened wide. “It’s like the church,” she said in wonder.

  “Fräulein?”

  And she remembered to speak German. “This building,” she repeated excitedly, this time in the correct language. “It looks like the church!”

  “And no wonder.” The middle-aged woman in a starched white apron who was waiting for her at the door smiled at Cissy. “This used to be a convent, and St. Margaretha’s its church. Good evening, gnädiges Fräulein. I’m Frau Henschel, the innkeeper’s wife. Welcome to our small town.”

  The coachman came up to them, carrying Cissy’s old, threadbare travel bag. “I thought it best to stop here for the night, gnädiges Fräulein,” he explained. “In the morning we can then venture to search for the castle.”

  “The castle?” Frau Henschel started. “Not the Castle of Wolfen
bach?”

  Instantly the tiredness of the journey was forgotten, and Cissy’s heart lifted with excitement. “Yes, the Castle of Wolfenbach, exactly. Do you know it?” she asked.

  Frau Henschel’s face had lost all color, and she raised her hands as if to ward off evil. “Oh, gnädiges Fräulein, you cannot possibly mean to go to that cursed place! He’ll get so angry!” She wrung her hands. “He’ll rip you apart and tear you to pieces, he surely will!”

  Taken aback, Cissy frowned. Cursed? Why cursed? And… “Who will rip me apart?” she asked.

  Owl-like, the innkeeper’s wife stared at her. “Who? Who else but the son of our dear Graf?” She lowered her voice to a mere whisper, as if afraid he might, like the devil, hear her even when miles away. “He’s been roaming that castle some thirteen years, and nobody in their right mind would dare to venture near it. Like a wild beast, he is. Dangerous. And deadly.”

  Cissy blinked.

  Dangerous, deadly, and, it would seem, her betrothed.

  ~*~

  When she woke the next morning, the pitch-blackness of night just gave way to a dreary gray morning. From outside came the crunching sounds of snow shovels against cobblestones as the small town got ready to dig itself out of the suffocating layers of white. Dark gray clouds hovered ominously over the surrounding hills, shielding them from view.

  Wearily, Cissy stared out of the window. As beginnings to a new life went, this one was not the most auspicious. As she put her hand against the windowsill, she could feel the cold seeping in from outside, as if warding her off.

  And when she lightly touched her fingers to the glass, the bite of the ice flowers seared her skin. Life is not a fairy tale, they taunted her. This is no place for you! Go home!