Coronets and Steel (2 page)

And that’s when I met my first ghost.

I
SET OUT without a goal, taking any turn that looked interesting. The buildings along the broad streets got bigger and finer, the aqua baroque domes and elaborate statuary giving way to a square that I recognized from pictures: I’d found my way to the Michaelerplatz and the grand arched entrance to the Hofburg, the imperial palace of the Hapsburg emperors.

The gold and white entrance extended in a wide curve, flanked by mighty-thewed mythological statues. What did it feel like to live in such a place? For the first time in weeks the driving sense of urgency eased up a little.

I paused, wondering if I should hunt up a tour or cruise the place myself when a waft of chilly air startled me; the sun was so warm. A young woman more or less my age walked through the huge arched entry, twirling a silken parasol over a roguish flat hat of the 1760s that crowned a high white-powdered wig of elaborate curls. Instead of a walking dress she wore a square necked sacque, the rich satin skirt divided in front and gracefully looped back over a brocade underskirt.

She looked like a swan among the bobbing gray pigeons and busy brown wrens of people in modern clothes. It surprised me that no one paid her the least heed—but maybe Austrians were used to reenactment dress, or they were more sophisticated than LA students like me.

As she passed, she cast a laughing glance at me, her eyes crescents of merriment, her cheeks dimpled on either side of a secretive smile, as if she knew a good joke—or was playing one—then the parasol hid her face as she tripped away, her skirts swaying.

She had to be going somewhere interesting. I decided to follow her.

The young lady minced along in her high-heeled shoes with diamond buckles. While I followed about fifty paces behind, I considered talking to her. If I saw her interact with anyone else, I’d know it was all right to talk to her; she might be like those Disney characters who walk around the park but they don’t speak, so as not to ruin the atmosphere.

She stepped daintily across the Michaelerplatz at a drifting pace. I stopped once or twice to twirl around on my toes in an effort to take in the sheer enormity of the Hofburg, to banish the Disneyland feel and see the place as the private home of power it once was. Though I knew from years of reading history that power does not automatically bestow happiness, and royalty was not exempt from personal tragedy, the romantic sweep of royal palaces is inescapable. At least to someone like me who loves the stylish and romantic face of history.

I was thinking over dramatic events that had happened in this very space when I discovered that the palace buildings were behind me. People streamed in all directions. When the crowd thinned, I found we’d reached a station for the red and white streetcars called “Bim.” This was the Schwedenplatz. A string of fast-moving people left the tram, dividing me from my quarry.

Gone! So much for Supersleuth Murray.

On the other hand, I was right before the underground station that listed Schönbrunn Palace along its route. Of course that woman would be going there. Schönbrunn had been the Versailles for the imperial family for two hundred years. There had to be either a reenactment or a movie being shot there.

The ride to Schönbrunn Palace did not take long—but this is where I first got that twitch between my shoulder blades, as if I was being watched. Or maybe even followed.

Too much imagination was tantamount to lying, that’s what my grandmother had taught me. So after a couple of glances at other riders, when no one met my eyes or looked like a creepy stalker, I tried to shake the feeling. It had to be my imagination—imaginary payback for my having followed that reenactment actor.

Schönbrunn was smaller and brighter than Versailles. I paid for the German tour, figuring the swift speech of the guide would be good practice. As I walked from room to room and viewed the furniture the inhabitants had used, and the things they had touched, and the windows they had looked out of, I gained an odd, swift sense of substance or essence, not quite immanence. It was the visceral conviction that if I walked through the right door, or closed my eyes and breathed in the faint, complicated scents, I’d find myself in the same place but in a different time, and there would be the young Prince Joseph, or the restless, brooding Prince Rudolf. Or Napoleon, or Maria Theresia. Or the beautiful and unhappy Empress Sisi.

When the tour ended, and I hadn’t found sign of a reenactment or a setup for a Hollywood-style shoot, I followed the crowd back down the marble stairs. Maybe something was going on in the gardens? Not long after the shadows of the geometrically tended maze closed around me I got that shoulder-crawling sense again, as if I were being watched from the many sun-glittering windows in the warm golden walls of the palace.

No one in sight. Of course not! It was my imagination—spoiling my enjoyment. I got up, hoping to leave my overactive imaginings behind, and walked farther on, but the feeling stuck as close as my shadow as I neared the fountains.

I sat down with my back to a wall and satisfied myself with a thorough scan. Nothing to see besides tourists, none of whom were the least bit interested in an American student in old jeans, a cotton blouse, and sandals, her blond hair swept up in a practical knot.

A second scan away from the palace, and there was the actor again. She strolled on the Gloriette monument, her parasol twirling in the golden rays of the sinking sun, the heavy satin of her sky blue gown gleaming.

The slanting afternoon sunlight limned the trees of the park with golden green light, casting the palace into shadow when I reached the Gloriette. I climbed up the stairs onto the roof of the belvedere, which is a triumphal arch with colonnaded wings at either end, topped with military trophies. Built on a hill at the other end of the palace’s extensive garden, it affords a view of the palace and the gardens. I wandered to the rail, trying to imagine its famed inhabitants standing there with the pride of ownership.

When hunger reminded me of the long trip back to my pensione, I turned away from the balustrade I’d been leaning against.

A short, dapper older man stepped toward me. I gained a hazy impression of a broad build, a short gray goatee, and a Tyrolean blue- collared gray suit before he smiled and addressed me in a vaguely Slavic-sounding language.

Whether on purpose or inadvertently, his angle of approach had cut me off from the rest of the roof.

He stretched a hand toward my arm as he spoke. I jerked away and snapped in English, “Get lost, creep!”

The man started back as if I’d slapped him, his face creasing in dismay.

What’s up with that? I’d been propositioned a couple times in Paris, but that had been at night, when I was alone. I stalked away, furious at being hassled during broad daylight—and at a
monument.

My mood stayed grumpy until I got back inside the city and sat down to dinner at a small corner gasthaus. The
Kurier,
Vienna’s newspaper, had been left at the table. I picked it up while waiting for my food and discovered that the London Ballet was coming to the Opera House.

I’d had to give up dance when Gran’s situation worsened, as we couldn’t afford for me to study two sports, and anyway I had to take my share of helping to nurse Gran when Mom was at work and Dad handled the household errands. A ballet . . . totally frivolous, when I had to make every euro stretch, but . . .

The cloud of urgency, disappointment—failure—closed in until I compromised with myself. If I skipped a couple of meals, that would even things out.

When I got back to my pensione and asked where I should go to purchase a ticket, the manager offered to arrange it for me. “Get me the best seat you can,” I said.

If you’re splurging recklessly, at least do it right.

T
HE NEXT DAY I took the Bim to the Staatsarchive to see how much detective work I could accomplish on my own.

Zip. But I’d tried, so I left feeling virtuous, returned to my pensione to drop off my folder of evidence so I wouldn’t have to lug it around, and set out on foot to do some more sightseeing.

Within three blocks of leaving the pensione, I once again got that sense that I was being watched.

Glad of those strenuous years of ballet and fencing, I went into power walk mode, dodging around slower pedestrians like somebody on inline skates. Good workout, I decided after a few blocks, though not as good as a fencing match.

Then I remembered the date, and my mood soured even more.

Today was the championship tournament. The senior fencing team at UCLA would be there—everyone except me. Our coach had been disappointed when I’d announced that I wasn’t going, that I was leaving for Europe the day classes ended.

My teammates had been surprised—some dismayed—but hardest to take was how my oldest friend, Lisa Castillo, had looked away, her expression closed. She didn’t actually say “Whatever,” but I’d felt it.

I tried to explain, but how do you explain to someone who’s always regarded you as a bit flaky—incapable of practical goals—a sense of urgency that you cannot even define to yourself?

To Lisa I was flaking out yet again and letting the team down. It had continued to bother me while I tramped fruitlessly through every Paris archive I could find. When I got on the train to Vienna, I started a letter to her and another teammate to explain, but I ended up at the train window, watching the Bavarian countryside roll by with its occasional glimpses of tiny ancient villages gleaming creamy gold against their emerald setting; Austria seemed another world and time away from the eternal sun of Los Angeles and Lisa’s goal-oriented energy.

Modern practicality and old-world romance, that summed up Lisa and me. Living on the same block, Lisa and I had played together as kids. We’d shared rides through middle and high school when we both started fencing; she loved the sport for its precision, and I loved it because I could pretend I was Douglas Fairbanks Jr. She liked Tom Stoppard and the Coen brothers, while I’d rather rewatch Colin Firth’s
Pride and Prejudice
or Ronald Colman’s
Prisoner of Zenda.

She had planned out a life in investment stockbroking when she was twelve, to break the family blue-collar cycle; I’d bounced majors from French to German to linguistics to comparative literature, and I’d been about to change it back to German so I could research the origins of the fairy tales Gran had told me when I was small. None of those majors was ever going to boost my family out of our falling-apart little house in Santa Monica.

The last thing Lisa said to me was,
“Kim, I seriously hope you get whatever it is you’re looking for. But dude, you’re never going to find Mr. Darcy.”

I walked even faster, until the hairpins holding up my bun began pricking my scalp at every step, and my hair threatened to come loose and fall down my back.

Then I slowed. Why was I running, anyway? I walked into the nearest coffeehouse, ordered a delicious cold-coffee-and-cream
Einspänner
and sat with my back to a wall, glaring at anyone who came within ten feet of me.

When I left, the feeling was gone.

 

There was no news from the genealogists the next day, or the one after that.

I’d nearly reached the end of my resources: if the genealogists found anything, they were going to have to mail it.

At least I had the ballet to look forward to. But . . . what to wear? The afternoon of the ballet, I searched through my suitcase as if something appropriate had sneaked in when I wasn’t looking. Nope. Just my familiar LA jeans and tees, chosen for ease and comfort, but totally wrong for the Vienna State Opera House. I sat down on the bed and examined my meager stash of cash. If I stretched my once-a-day meal plan to an entire week, I could buy something nice to wear.

Walking up the narrow old streets to Mariahilferstrasse, I got that feeling again! This time it was sharp, like a cold finger poking my neck.