Angels and Exiles (35 page)

They rented a small room on the third floor of an inn on the Weinenstrass. Anna blew out the candle and lay down next to Pieter in the single bed.

“I’m happy, but frightened at the same time,” she said.

“I’m afraid too, Damoiselle—Anna. I don’t know what we will do now.” Pieter’s voice shook. Anna put her head on his shoulder.

“I’m not . . . not so different from Radulf, Anna.”

“Never say that. Radulf wanted me like a man wants a statue, or a precious stone: with the knowledge money will be enough to acquire it. You are not Radulf.”

“I’m seventeen. I don’t understand what I feel, I don’t know if it’s what I think, or something else. . . .”

“I’m the same age as you, Pieter Havel, and I don’t understand what I am feeling either. We will have to learn, that’s all.” And she kissed him.

They made their home in a small house on the Fernestrass, at the periphery of Wessendam. Anna had pilfered a considerable sum from her father’s coffers, and this money served them well. Refusing to depend only on Anna’s resources, Pieter found work at a neighbourhood trader and Anna, for her part, insisted on doing embroidery work at home.

“But you’ll ruin your fingers,” objected a dismayed Pieter, until she slapped him.

“Hear me well, Pieter Havel. I will nevermore be the Damoiselle Anna I used to be. Stop treating me like a prize doll; when you do, you are Radulf. Have the courage to see me as I am, if you want me to share your life!”

She was crying. He took her in his arms. She murmured against his shoulder: “Make me forget, I can’t go on anymore, make me forget my house and my father and my mother, make me forget it all . . .”

Without need to speak of it, they avoided the aristocratic districts of the city. They lived in another Wessendam, a city they might have believed a thousand leagues from the one they had always known.

Once only, they broke that rule. At the Solstice holiday, the whole city went to dance in the dynastic gardens. Anna could not resist going.

They danced a tarentelle, and a waltz, and a Hopfentanz that made everyone giddy, and suddenly Anna met Radulf’s eyes.

He was only a fifteen-year-old boy, disguised as a petty aristocrat to better mix with the celebrants; but his haughtiness set him apart better than all the rich clothes in the world. Anna’s face froze, trying to mask her fright and contempt. After a heartbeat, she turned away and fled, dragging Pieter along.

Radulf knew he had been recognized, and he had been able to read the young woman’s emotions on her face. The affront seared him. He tried to make his way to her, but she had vanished in the crowd.

Then he went to his apartments and buried his face in his hands. Humiliation pained him as nothing ever had before. He was the son of the Dynast, and it was for that very reason that this young woman with the heart-stopping face despised him.

Rage now burned in him, and spread its fire to his loins. The Palace’s servant girls had compliantly let him rummage under their skirts, but he had never fully proved his virility with a woman. He conceived from this a shame as sudden as it was overwhelming. He put a cloak on his shoulders, took a purse of gold, and went to the poor districts.

He signalled to the first whore he saw. His legs trembled; he told himself it was desire. In a narrow, badly lit room, he made her undress and immediately entered her, spilling his seed after three back-and-forth motions of his sex inside her. Afterwards, she tried to caress him, to give him a chance to recover his ardour, but he pushed her away.

He could not bring himself to ask how much he owed her; he put three gold coins on the small bedside table and retied his breeches. As he opened the door, she whispered, awed by the gold, “Thank you, Highness!” Then he turned to her, terrified: “If you tell—if you say anything of this, I will have you killed!” The girl begged him for mercy, but he was already sprinting down the stairs.

He came back to the Palace, locked himself in his rooms, and washed his whole body, overcome with disgust. He curled up in his bed and told himself again and again that nothing had happened, that he had dreamed, that he would forget it all. He built a wall around his memories of that night, so well so that, many years later, convinced it was from moral purity that he was still chaste at thirty-two, he would never be able to understand why Anna Holtz’s face tore through him so painfully, why suddenly he absolutely must possess the young woman, why he could no longer conceive of living without her by his side.

Anna found out in early July that she was pregnant.

“You will give birth to a bastard,” Pieter remarked, more than half serious.

“As marriage proposals go, I have heard better.”

“ . . . But, after what happened with Radulf, how could you think of . . .”

“You will never know unless you ask.”

He asked. She said yes.

One night in December, Pieter was woken by a strangled cry. He lit the candle and saw Anna holding her belly with both hands, her face twisted in pain.

“Pieter, please, take me to the Geburtshaus right now. I hurt so bad; something’s wrong.”

Pieter went down into the street, fetched the neighbours, and with their help took Anna to the birthing house.

She began to scream, eyes wide open, looking at nothing. She was made to lie down on an elevated bed, in a secluded room. Pieter held her hand while the doctor helped her push out the dead and bloody piece of flesh her womb had sheltered. He held her hand until she stopped screaming, and long afterwards, until the doctor made him let go.

He walked with Pieter through the corridors of the Geburtshaus. “She had lost too much blood,” he said tiredly.

“I don’t blame you for anything,” said Pieter. He tore away from the doctor’s grip and ran out of the Geburtshaus. Something was rising in his throat, and he feared the scream would be nothing more than a terrible burst of laughter.

He strode the streets of Wessendam, unaware of their names. He went downhill, then up, a dozen times. The winter snow made its way into his shoes and froze his feet, but he felt nothing.

Finally, he found himself facing the Schwarze Kanal, whose black water reflected the stars. He leaned above the stone parapet, and saw himself indistinctly in the watery mirror, a shape darker than the night sky, visible more by the stars it occulted than by itself.

On the other side of the canal, he could see the alley separating the houses on the Herbstestrass from those on the Sommerstrass. This alley he hadn’t dared descend, fearing the waters of the canal where now he planned to drown himself. This alley he had ascended less than a year ago and that he would ascend, seventeen years in the future, to reach the house where Anna Holtz lived, this house where Anna would be born in a few weeks.

The morning of December fifteenth, a young man who called himself Stefan called at the Holtz house on the Sommerstrass, and was hired as a domestic. Courteous, efficient, he was soon noticed by his employers and rapidly climbed in the servants’ hierarchy.

Damme Holtz gave birth in January to a baby girl, who was given the name of Anna. Stefan saw her grow up, at first from afar. But when she became old enough to move about the house alone, he became her favourite domestic, outranking even her governess in her affections.

Anna was a wilful child, spoiled by her parents. When she turned ten, her father, at her request, had a small room built for her use alone, in the basement of the house, which was full of a clutter that delighted the child. Stefan found there a faceted pink quartz bowl Anna used as a candle holder.

There were five idyllic years, during which Anna became a young woman. Stefan remained a privileged confidant. She admitted to him, the day she turned fifteen: “My parents are beginning to want to marry me off. But I don’t want an arranged marriage. I want to choose myself the man with whom I will live the rest of my days, but they won’t understand!”

“If you want to choose him yourself, Damoiselle,” said Stefan, his throat tight, “no one will be able to prevent you.”

During the next two years, Anna had to refuse, politely but without appeal, one good match after another, every three or four months. Her parents at first blamed themselves: they had been too hasty; was she still not a child? Many young women only found a husband when they were eighteen or nineteen.

But after her seventeenth birthday, they began to worry. They regretted never having bent her to their will before; she had never learned obedience.

And then, on a night at the beginning of autumn, they received the visit of a dynastic servant: the son of the Dynast, his Highness Radulf, had glimpsed young Anna during a stroll along the canals, and desired to meet her. Anna was directly informed of the visit and, horrified, went to confide in Stefan.

The man who had spent seventeen years living only for her felt the hand of Chronos close upon him. He asked “But isn’t this wonderful news?” in a tone meant to provoke Anna even further. She fled to her room.

The next day, Pieter Havel was beaten and thrown out of the Achinger house, on the Herbstestrass. He crawled painfully along the gutter in the middle of the alley that ran at the back of the houses, until he disturbed a wasps’ nest. He owed his life to the intervention of Anna, who opened the basement’s window for him. Stefan, who was watching from the attic window, saw him vanish inside the house.

He waited for Anna to come find him and tell him what had happened, and to swear him to silence. Then he went down to see Pieter. For a long while he watched the young man he had been seventeen years before, then he roused himself, undressed Pieter, and bandaged his wounds. When he was done, he covered the boy up as best he could, heaved a deep sigh, and blew out the candle stub.

With early morning he returned, bringing a tray of food, but Pieter still slept. Stefan left, and waited in his quarters for Anna to come to him. Morning was well advanced when she came, asking him to accompany her. They went down to the basement, and Stefan was barely in time to catch a collapsing Pieter in his arms. He took him back to the little room and put him back to bed.

Anna began to speak with Pieter. Stefan remembered this conversation and the burning wish he had had, to be left alone with a young woman with whom it seemed to him he had already fallen in love; so he left the room and shut the door.

He felt destiny’s grip squeezing him almost hard enough to crush him.

Night fell; in the parlour, Anna and her parents awaited the Dynast’s son. The clock struck eight. Finally, His Highness’s carriage stopped in front of the house on the Sommerstrass. Stefan steeled himself to patience. He had never known what time it was when he met with Radulf. He resolved to listen at the parlour’s door; he heard Radulf invite Anna to the ball, heard Anna decline and explain her refusal. Then he ran to the basement stairs, afraid he would be too late.

Pieter saw him and spent an eternal second beholding him in silence, before taking flight along the great hall. Stefan followed him and took up Radulf’s cloak as Pieter ran into the son of the Dynast. Stefan interposed himself between the two and unleashed a flood of apologies, giving Pieter enough time to flee.