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At this thought, she, too, dropped her eyes to the biscuits and chewed softly on her lower lip. “Three days to say goodbye to Austria,” she whispered, marveling at the thought.
“Make sure you say ‘auf Wiedersehen’ to as many of these chubby-cheeked Austrians as you can,” her mother said coldly, utilizing a wretched Austrian accent.
**
When Marta arrived back in her bedroom, she found her maid, Laura, awaiting her. In German, she cried, “Darling Marta! Your mother has informed me of the adventure we’re to embark upon.”
Oh, how dreadful that her mother could be correct about so many things. Marta curved her own smile between her cheeks and nodded. “I suppose it’s the sort of thing I can’t get out of now. Not with my Aunt Margaret lying in what for me, waiting endlessly to suit me up with some lacklustre Englishman.”
“Oh, but aren’t they endlessly attractive, the Englishmen?” Laura asked. She batted her eyelashes swiftly.
“Laura, I can’t imagine they’ll be anything too exciting. Aren’t they meant to be rather stuffy, rather boring?” Marta returned. She perched on the edge of her bed and gazed out again at the mountains, her heart surging with panic.
“I’m rather sick of Austrian men,” Laura returned. “Not that your mother has given me much time to myself for such matters.”
“I understand that,” Marta murmured, resolving herself to give Laura as much time as she required off to truly experience this strange “English” existence to its full potential.
“Oh, but I’m rather worried about my English,” Laura continued. “It’s entirely lacklustre, and I know it will get me into heaps of trouble.”
“Perhaps I can teach you a bit on the way,” Marta offered. “It’s a very long, very arduous journey. We’ll need something to keep our minds preoccupied.”
Laura chatted on for a long while about her suspicions of the way of life in England. Marta continued to gaze outside. Dread seemed to envelope her. When she finally cast her eyes back toward Laura, Laura placed her hand on her heart and swept toward Marta.
“Darling, I’ve known you for years and years, and I’ve never seen you looking so tremendously…”
“Oh, it’s just this heartache,” Marta stuttered. “Part of the reason my mother wishes to send me away. I feel as though everything I’ve ever known and loved, everything I’ve ever dreamed of, is about to be taken away from me.”
“You’ve looked so stricken over the past weeks,” Laura admitted. “I haven’t drudged up the courage to ask.”
“You must have heard the gossip about the market,” Marta said, her voice heavy. “I’m widely known as the loser in a love triangle; the woman left behind. I know my mother wishes to shield me from such wretched labelling. But in truth, I believe that heartache is so powerful that it will follow me across the continent, all the way to that tiny island she loves so dearly. I cannot understand it, Laura. If she loves England so much, why doesn’t she return? Her love for my father seems lacklustre in comparison.”
“Your mother, leave your father? She would never operate so outside the bounds of societal expectation,” Laura returned.
“I suppose. But why would she remain so miserable throughout the rest of her life?” Marta considered. “She looks at these beautiful mountains—these incredible gifts from God himself—and doesn’t feel a thing. I know it because I can see the coldness in her eyes. She sees this next step in my life, this journey to England, to be a necessary and mathematical one. She cannot fathom the depths of my soul.”
“But didn’t she come to Austria in the first place because of some sort of wild belief that your father was her dearest and only love?” Laura asked. She said it sneakily, as though she wanted to remind Marta of just how similar she and her mother truthfully were.
Of course, Marta yearned to reject this concept. She sniffed and said, “I really don’t need anything else from you today, lovely Laura. Please, take the rest of the time for yourself. I can begin to pack myself. I know it’s nothing an English girl would do, but it’s what I feel I must do to prepare myself.”
After Laura left, Marta lay back on her bed and felt her heart drum up a reckless beat in her chest. She felt her best-laid plans shrivel up and die, right before her eyes. All the while, the man she’d fallen for, the man she’d given her heart to, was assuredly off with this other, beautiful, entirely-Austrian woman, a woman who’d beaten Marta in every single manner, in heart and soul and beauty.
Marta clutched the fabric of her bed’s blanket hard so that her fingers lost their colour. She sighed, recognising the severity of her anger, and slowly unclenched.
England. It was to be a fresh life. The sort of one that would allow her to make up her story as she pleased. Just then, her story in Austria had been cut short.
But there would be other things. Other events. She was Marta Schnitzler, and she lived only within the bounds of her own adventurous reality. Regardless of her mother’s “sentence,” she would embark on this journey with her eyes open to the possibility of it.
Perhaps that was how she could best her mother: to prove to her that she didn’t need anything but the wild imagination of her own mind.
