Weighed in the Balance (11 page)

She walked in and sat down. For a moment her fingers moved as if to rearrange her skirts. The new concertina-type steel hoops could be quite awkward, even if they were better than the old bone ones. Then, with an effort of will, she ignored them and let them fall as they would.

Hester waited for the inevitable “How are you feeling?” Even Robert looked prepared for the traditional answer.

“I imagine now you are over the fever and most of the pain, you are thoroughly bored,” Victoria said with a little shake of her head.

Robert was startled, then his face broke into a wide smile.

“I didn’t expect you to say that,” he admitted. “Yes, I am. And terribly tired of assuring everyone that I feel all right—far, far better than I did a week ago. I read, of course, but sometimes I can hear the silence prickling in my ears, and I find my attention wandering. I want a sound of some sort, and something that responds to me. I am weary of being done to, and not
doing.”
He blushed suddenly, realizing how forthright he had been to a young woman who was almost a complete stranger. “I’m sorry! You didn’t come here out of kindness just to hear me complain. Everyone has been very good, really.”

“Of course they have,” she agreed, smiling back, tentatively
at first. “But this is something they cannot alter. What have you been reading?”

“Dickens’s
Hard Times,”
he replied with a grimace. “I admit, it doesn’t cheer me much. I care about its people,” he added quickly, “but I’m not happy for them. I go to sleep and dream I live in Coketown.”

“May I bring you something different?” she offered. “Perhaps something happy? Are you”—she drew a deep breath—“are you familiar with Edward Lear’s
Book of Nonsense?”

His eyebrows rose. “No. But I think I might like it. It sounds like an excellent refuge from the world of Coketown.”

“It is,” she promised. “You’ll find in it the Dong with the Luminous Nose, and Jumblies, who went to sea in a sieve, and all sorts of other oddities, like Mr. Daddy Longlegs and Mr. Floppy Fly, who played at battlecock and shuttledore in the sand.”

“Please do bring it.”

“And there are drawings, of course,” she added.

Hester was satisfied. She turned and tiptoed away and went down the stairs to where Dagmar was waiting in the hall.

Victoria Stanhope visited again, on two more occasions, staying longer each time.

“I think she does him good,” Dagmar said when the maid had shown Victoria upstairs on the fourth time she called. “He seems very pleased to see her, and she is a most agreeable child. She would be quite pretty, if she were—” She stopped. “Oh, dear. That is very uncharitable of me, isn’t it?” They were standing in the conservatory in the early autumn sun. It was a charming room, full of white-painted wrought iron furniture and shaded by a mixture of potted palms and large-leafed tropical plants. The air was filled with the sweetness of several late, heavily scented lilies. “That was a terrible business about her family,” she added sadly. “I expect it has ruined her chances, poor thing.”

Naturally, she was referring to Victoria’s chances of marriage. There was no other desirable life open to a young woman of breeding, unless she had a great deal of money, or some remarkable talent, or excellent health and a burning desire for good works. Hester did not tell her that Victoria’s chances for any of these things had been ruined long before her family’s disgrace. That was Victoria’s secret to keep or to tell as she wished. Were Hester in her place, she felt she would never tell anyone at all. It was about as private a tragedy as could be imagined.

“Yes,” she said bluntly. “I expect it has.”

“How very unfair.” Dagmar shook her head slightly. “You never know what is going to happen, do you? Six weeks ago I could not have imagined Robert’s illness. Now I don’t know how much it will change our lives.” She was not looking at Hester, perhaps deliberately. After only a moment’s hesitation, as though she did not want to allow time for an answer, she hurried on. “Poor Princess Gisela must feel the same. This time last year she had all she cared about. I think every woman in the world envied her, at least a little.” She smiled. “I know I did. Don’t we all dream of having a handsome and charming man love us so passionately he would give up a kingdom and a throne simply to be with us?”

Hester thought back to being eighteen, and the dreams she had had then.

“Yes, I suppose so,” she said reluctantly, oddly defensive of the girl she had been. She had felt so wise and invulnerable, and she had been so naive.

“Most of us settle for reality,” Dagmar went on. “And find it really quite good in the end. Or we make it good. But it is still natural to dream sometimes. Gisela made her dreams come true … until this spring, that is. Then Friedrich died, which left her desolated. To have had such a … a unity!” She turned to Hester. “You know they were never apart? He loved her so much he never grew tired of watching her, listening to her,
hearing her laugh. He still found her just as fascinating, after twelve years.”

“It would be natural to envy that,” Hester said honestly. She would not have found it easy to watch such happiness and not wish it for herself. And if she had at one time been in love with the Prince, it would never really stop hurting. She would wonder why she had not been able to awake that love in him, what was lacking in her. What gaiety or charm, what tenderness or quickness to understand, what generosity or honor did she fail to have? Or was it simply that she was physically not pleasing enough, either to look at or in those areas of intimacy of love in which her only experience lay in the imagination and the longing of dreams? Was all that the wound which had festered in Zorah Rostova all these years, and perhaps driven her a little mad?

Dagmar was absentmindedly picking off the occasional dead leaf and fiddling with the bark around the palms.

“What was the Prince like?” Hester asked, trying to picture the romance.

“To look at?” Dagmar asked with a smile.

“No, I meant as a person. What did he like to do? If I were to spend an evening in his company—at dinner, for example—what would I remember most about him?”

“Before he met Gisela, or afterwards?”

“Both! Yes, tell me both.”

Dagmar concentrated her memory, forgetting the plants. “Well, before Gisela, you would think first how utterly charming he was.” She smiled as she recollected. “He had the most beautiful smile. He would look at you as if he were really interested in all you said. He never seemed to be merely polite. It was almost as if he were half expecting you to turn out to be special, and he did not want to miss any opportunity to find out. I think what you might remember afterwards was the certainty that he liked you.”

Hester found herself smiling too. The warmth rippled
through her at the idea of meeting someone who gave so much of himself. No wonder Gisela had loved him, and how devastated she must feel now. And on top of the loneliness and the loss which darkened everything had come this nightmare accusation. What on earth had possessed Rathbone to take up Zorah’s case? His knighthood had gone to his wits. When the Queen touched him on the shoulder with the sword she must have pricked his brain.

“And after he met Gisela …” Dagmar went on.

Hester jerked her attention back. She had forgotten she had asked that question also.

“Yes?” she said, trying to sound attentive.

“I suppose he was different,” Dagmar responded thoughtfully. “He was hurt that people wouldn’t accept Gisela, because he loved her so much. But he was never so very close to his family, especially his mother. He was sad going into exile. But I think he believed in his heart that one day they would want him back and then they would see Gisela’s worth and accept her.” She looked along the passage between the leaves and fronds towards the windows. “I remember the day he left. People were lining the streets. A lot of women were weeping, and they all wished him well, and cried ’God bless you!’ and waved kerchiefs and threw flowers.”

“And Gisela?” Hester asked curiously. “What did they feel about her?”

“They resented her,” Dagmar replied. “In a way, it was as if she had stolen him from us.”

“What is his brother like?”

“Waldo? Oh!” Dagmar laughed as if some memory amused her. “Much plainer, much duller, at first. He hasn’t any of Friedrich’s charm. But we grew to appreciate him. And, of course, his wife was always popular. It makes such a difference, you know. Perhaps in a way Ulrike was right. Whom we marry does alter us more than I used to think. In fact, only when you ask me do I realize how both brothers changed over
the years. Waldo became stronger and wiser, and he learned how to win people’s affection. I think he’s happy, and that makes people kinder, don’t you think?”

“Yes,” Hester said with sudden feeling. “Yes, it does. What happened to Countess Rostova after Friedrich and Gisela left? Did she miss him terribly?”

Dagmar seemed surprised by the question.

“I don’t know. She did some very strange things. She went to Cairo and took a boat up the Nile to Karnak. But I don’t know if that had anything to do with Friedrich or if she would have gone anyway. I liked Zorah, but I can’t say I ever understood her. She had some most peculiar ideas.”

“For example?” Hester asked.

“Oh, about what women could achieve.” Dagmar shook her head, laughing a little. “She even wanted us all to band together and refuse to have relations with our husbands unless they gave us some sort of political power. I mean … she was quite mad! Of course, that was when she was very young.”

Something stirred in Hester’s memory. “Wasn’t there a Greek play about something like that?”

“Greek?” Dagmar was amazed.

“Yes, ancient Greek. All the women wanted to stop a war between two city-states … or something of the sort.”

“Oh. I don’t know. Anyway, it’s absurd.”

Hester did not argue, but she thought perhaps Zorah was not as alien to her own thoughts as she had supposed. She could imagine Rathbone’s reaction if she were to tell him of such an idea. It made her laugh even to contemplate it.

Dagmar mistook her reaction, and relaxed, smiling as well, forgetting old tragedies and present threats for a while as they walked the length of the conservatory and smelled the flowers and the damp earth, before Hester went to see how Robert was.

As usual, she climbed the stairs and walked across the landing almost silently. She stood outside Robert’s door, which was open about a foot, as was appropriate while he had
a female visitor. She looked in, not wishing to interrupt should they be in conversation.

The room was full of sunlight.

Robert was lying back against his pillows, smiling, his attention entirely upon Victoria. She was reading to him from Malory’s
Morte d’Arthur,
the love story of Tristram and Isolde. Her voice was gentle and urgent, filled with tragedy, and yet there was a music in it which transcended the immediacy of the quiet sickroom in an elegant London house and became all magic and doomed love, a universal longing.

Hester crept away and went into the dressing room where she had a cot bed made up so she could be close to Robert and respond instantly if he called her. She busied herself with a few duties of tidying up, folding and putting away clothes the laundry maid had brought back.

It was fifteen minutes later when she tapped on the door between her room and Robert’s, and then gently pushed it open to see if perhaps he would like something to eat or a cup of tea.

“Next time I’ll read about the Siege Perilous and the coming of Sir Galahad,” Victoria said eagerly. “It is so full of courage and honor.”

Robert sighed. Hester could see his face, pale and pinched with a kind of sadness at the corners of his mouth. Or perhaps it was fear. Surely he must have realized that he might never recover. He had said nothing to her, but he must have lain alone in that silent, tidy room with everything placed there by his parents’ love. They were always just beyond the door watching, aching to help him, and knowing that nothing they could do did more than touch the surface. Underneath, the consuming fear, the darkness of dread, was beyond their ability to reach. It must never be out of their minds, and yet they dare not speak it.

Looking at Robert’s eyes with the shadowed skin around them, thin and bruised, Hester knew it was just under the surface of all he said.

“Good,” he replied politely to Victoria. “That’s very kind of you.”

She looked at him steadily.

“Would you rather that I didn’t?” she asked.

“No!” he responded quickly. “It sounds an excellent story. I think I probably know much of it already. It will be good to hear it again, as it should be told. You read so well.” His voice dropped on the last word, in spite of his effort to be courteous and appreciative.

“But you don’t want to listen to stories about heroes who can fight, and wield swords, and ride horses, when you are lying in bed and cannot move,” Victoria said with shattering bluntness.

Hester felt a chill run through her as if she had swallowed ice.

Robert’s face went white. He was still for so long she was afraid that when he did speak he would say something so violent it would be irretrievable.

If Victoria was afraid, she hid it superbly. Her back was ramrod stiff, her thin shoulders straight, her head high.

“There were times when I didn’t want to either,” she said quite calmly, but there was a tremor in her voice. The memory hurt.

“You can walk!” The words tore out of Robert as if speaking them caused him a physical pain.

“I couldn’t for a long time,” she replied, now almost matter-of-factly. “And now, when I do, it still hurts.” Her voice was trembling, and there was a flush of shame and misery on her cheeks, the delicate bones showing under the too-thin flesh. “I walk badly. I’m clumsy. I knock things. You don’t hurt.”

“I …” He started to retaliate, then realized he had no grounds. His pain of the body was almost gone. Now it was all the desperate, aching, helpless pain of the mind, the knowledge of imprisonment with his lifeless legs.

Again Victoria said nothing.