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“Don’t say anything smart, Dick,” he said softly. “Just turn around and sing.”
Canidy met his eyes for a moment and nodded.
They sang "O Little Town of Bethlehem” and “Good King Wenceslaus,” and as they were singing “Away in a Manger,” Ann Chambers, in her war correspondent’s uniform, came into the refectory, walked up to Canidy, kissed him on the mouth (which introduced applause into the caroling), and then stood with her arm around him.
They sang until it was time for dinner.
After dinner they went to Canidy’s apartment and discussed killing the enemy.
Chapter THREE
Schloss Steighofen Hesse, Germany
28 December 1942
Beatrice, Countess Batthyany and Baroness von Steighofen, woke shivering, her arms wrapped over her large, dark-nippled breasts for warmth. In her sleep, she had kicked the sheets and blankets off. She reached down for them, dragged them over her, and glanced at the other side of the bed. It was empty.
She had not, she concluded, taken the captain of the honor escort into her bed. She reconstructed the end of the evening: The captain had been the perfect German officer and gentleman. His training and standards had not permitted him to believe that sexual congress between himself and the widow of his late commanding officer, in the familial Schloss and on the eve of a memorial service to the late Oberstleutnant Baron Manfried von Steighofen, could possibly take place.
Beatrice was now pleased that sexual congress had not, in fact, taken place. It had seemed like a splendid idea around midnight, but in the cold light of morning, she was glad to avoid the consequent awkwardness.
She rolled on her side and looked at the clock on the bedside table.
It was not the cold light of morning. It was the cold light of almost two o’clock in the afternoon. With a sudden movement, she kicked the bedclothes down and swung her feet out of bed. She searched with her feet for her bedroom slippers for a moment. When she could not immediately find them, she stood up and walked to the window.
The apartment Manfried had built in the Schloss (with her money) looked down upon the snow-covered fields outside the Schloss wall. It was a beautiful day, clear and bright. She liked cold, crisp, clear days. What she would do was take a ride, perhaps even a fast ride, a gallop, if the paths were not icy. It would sweat the cognac out of her, and then she would return and take a long bath.
She walked to her chest of drawers and took out a rather unattractive pair of und
erpants. No one was going to see her in them anyway, she thought, so it wouldn’t matter that the heavy cotton underpants concealed the curves of her belly and buttocks and hung down nearly to her knees. They would absorb the sweat of her ride. She put on riding breeches and sat on the floor to tug on English-made, knee-high riding boots.
She glanced at herself in a mirror as she walked to another chest of drawers for a blouse. In riding breeches and boots, and naked above the waist, she looked like a character in a blue movie she had been shown in Budapest. All she needed to complete the costume was a whip and a black mask over her eyes.
She put on a white cotton blouse and tucked it into her breeches. Her nipples pushed against the thin material, making them clearly visible. She was going to have to wear either a brassiere or a sweater, or face the disapproval of the servants and the captain (whose name, she realized, she could not remember) if she took off her tweed riding jacket.
She opted for the sweater, taking a tan woolen pullover from a closet and pulling it over her head.
Then she realized that she wasn’t going to be able to make it to the stables, much less mount a horse, without help.
She went to the bedside table and poured two inches of Rémy Martin cognac (about the last cognac here; and she had not remembered to bring any from the house in Vienna) into a glass and drank it straight down. She held her breath as she felt the brandy burn her throat and stomach, and then exhaled as the warmth spread through her body.
After that she left the apartment, which was like stepping from the present into the past. A few years ago, she had hired a Berlin architect to do it over. The Bauhaus School was now frowned upon by the Bohemian corporal and his sycophants, but the architect had studied there, and that was obvious in what he’d done to this wing of the Schloss.
Outside the door she was back in the Dark Ages. The Cold Ages would have been a better term, she thought. The walls were stone, the floors wide oaken planks. There had been no way to install electricity except by bolting conduits to the walls. Crossed lances and crossed swords, ancient battle flags, and dark portraits of the Barons von Steighofen and their women hung on the walls above the conduits. A narrow carpet ran down the center of the corridor, but it did nothing to take the chill from the place, either physically or aesthetically.
There was no grand staircase, either. One moved from floor to floor in the Schloss via one of five semicircular sandstone staircases. A handrail fixed to the wall was a recent—say, around 1820—improvement.
She descended three floors to the level of the courtyard, entered it, and walked across the cobblestones to the stable door. The stables, too, were a recent improvement to the Schloss. Sometime in the early 1800s, these had been constructed outside the Schloss wall, and a hole forced through for access to them.
The smell of the horses was pleasant and reassuring. A groom was working on a saddle, which he had put onto a dummy. What he was doing, Beatrice realized, was working on Manfried’s saddle. She remembered Captain Whatshisname telling her about that. Manfried’s“caparisoned stallion”would be part of the memorial ceremony, standing there with Manfried’s cavalryman’s boots reversed in the stirrups, while they did whatever they were going to do to mark Manfried’s passage into Valhalla.
The groom got to his feet and bobbed his head to her, obviously surprised to see her dressed as she was.
“Bring the Arabian for me, will you? What’s his name, Voltan?”
“Voltan, Baroness?” the groom asked disapprovingly.
“I’ll get him,” she said. “You go find me a saddle and a blanket.”
