The children are quick to introduce themselves, offering to help George with everything he needs. He has no clothes—except for what he was wearing at the time of the train wreck—and they offer to bring him their grandfather's clothes. The trousers are too big for him and slide down around his waist, and the length is too short, but he ties them up with a length of twine and tells them he’s a pirate. He’s Long John Silver, he says, and tells them they can be his pirate crew as he begins waving the crutch he’s carrying.
Eventually, they take him out to the old stable in the back, and George asks them if this is where they keep their treasure, while they stand about him like the troublesome buccaneers they are, watching him as he picks his way across the rough trail.
They gather up branches scattered through the yard by the last windstorm, and pile them beside the stable door. George stands at the entrance of what used to be the harness room for the stable, looking at the cluttered mess inside. Daylight peeks in through the walls where the boards don’t line up properly, making the room look like a collaboration of light, shadows and darkness—giving it an intimation of loneliness and solitude. The bars of light look like the rungs of a ladder that step across the floor and climb up the other wall. It still has the faint smell of horses to it, he notices as he rests on his crutch. There’s a mustiness of damp wood and mud because the roof leaks; the smell of old leather and dry manure assaults him as he leans against the doorway, wrinkling his nose at the lingering scent.
The dirt floor is littered with sawdust, as well as chunks of wood. A large, gap-toothed handsaw hangs on the wall, the blade blackened with pitch. A double headed axe is stuck in the large chopping block in the centre of the room—reminding him of Arthur's sword in the stone—and there are knotted pieces of cut up tree trunks piled in one of the old horse stalls—the pieces Annette and her sisters were unable to chop, he supposes. He sees a dozen leg hold traps hanging from several spikes driven into a post near the far wall, and the small linked chains sing out a melody whenever the wind brushes up against them, making them sound like wind chimes. There are bridles, harnesses, leather straps for saddle repairs, horse collars, and stirrups hanging everywhere on the walls and piled up in shadowy heaps in the far corner—it’s as if they were simply placed there and forgotten. An old horse blanket lays on the workbench.
The bench is littered with bits of weathered straps, horseshoes, nails, as well as ornate buttons, snaps, and buckles for bridles and the harnesses that are spilled across it; there are dozens of odds and ends he knows the kids probably discovered shortly after their grandfather’s stroke. A pirate’s treasure, he thinks to himself as he hears them coming into the stable with their arms full of broken branches. He picks up the harness they use to pull the trees down with—it’s laying on the floor—and he struggles to pick it up and hang it on the wall. He sees the sled they dragged Baltazzi into the house with, cast off to one side, and uses his crutch to pick it up and stand it against the wall. Baltazzi's greatcoat hangs on the hook where he left it; it looks like a large grey shadow in the dark. George takes it down, awkwardly shaking the dust off as he tries it on.
“That’s Opa’s coat,” Manfred, Anastasia’s oldest, says as he enters the room. He’s grown so much, he thinks, remembering the last time he saw the boy. It was before the War, before the madness, he reminds himself.
“Where’d he get it from? It’s a little big,” George says once he has it on.
“He took it off a deserter,” Dieter, Manfred’s brother says proudly. “He killed him first,” he adds with a whispered sense of awe.
“Killed him?” George asks, looking at the boy.
“Shot him right between the eyes,” Manfred says.
“You can still see some of the blood on the sleeve if you look at in the right light,” Dieter says, pulling at the sleeve.
“You saw it?” George says, looking at the stain.
“I ran in and got him the gun,” Dieter says.
“Was the man doing anything?”
“He was a bad man,” Hans says. He’s the youngest of Anastasia’s three children. George looks at Annette's two children, the youngest of the five — Martin and Josef — but decides they’d have little to add to the story. Joesph is probably close to the same age as Dieter, and Martin younger. He doesn’t even remember which one he tutored. Obviously it was Manfred, the oldest, he tells himself.
“We buried him in the woods,” Dieter explains.
“Who did?” George asks.
“All of us. I helped dig the hole. It was deep. It had to be, because of the wolves; that’s what Opa told us,” Dieter goes on explaining. “He said he didn’t want the wolves coming around because they smelled him. So we had to put big rocks on top. Mommy was there to—”
“They hurt her,” Hans says with a whisper.
“Those were different men,” Manfred says, looking his brother.
“That’s why Opa says we have to shoot them if they get too close to the house. They’d kill us if they can,” Dieter says. “Like they tried to kill Mommy.”
It’s obvious they don’t know the real story, he tells himself.
“So who does the shooting now?” George asks.
“Oma,” Manfred says.
“My Mommy has a gun, too,” Josef says proudly. “I've seen it. It used to be Daddy’s. She won’t let us touch it, but I've seen it. I touched it once when she was sleeping."
“You did what?” George asks, suddenly angry. He turns and looks at the child. Josef looks up at him nervously, frightened, his bottom lip quivering as he swallows.
“I don’t want to hear about you touching your mother's gun ever again. You could hurt yourself, or even your mother,” George says, leaning back on a rail and trying to speak in a soft voice. He knows the boy’s afraid of him—they all are to some degree—and he has to make them aware that he’s only thinking about what’s best for them. He tells himself he should take them out with him and teach them to hunt. They already told him there was lots of game in the woods: rabbits, birds, muskrats, even some wild pigs—and he thinks that might make up for the scare he gave them. He looks at the leg hold traps on the peg behind him, and pulls one down.
Collette comes around the back of the house to call the boys in for lunch. They all go, except Dieter. He wants to stay with George. Collette calls him again, and says if he doesn’t come inside to eat, he’ll get nothing. George tells Dieter he’d better go in before he angers his aunt, and the boy leaves. George hobbles out of the shed with Dieter—the trap rattling against the crutch as he limps out—and he squints in the sunlights as he looks at Collette standing at the side of the house with a hand above her eyes, shielding the bright sun, waiting.
She’s still so strange, even after all this time, George thinks. He’s been here a week and her indifference towards him seems to infect Anastasia whenever he sees her for those brief moments during the day. He doesn’t care how they feel about him one way or the other, but he finds it odd that he has to warn himself about Collette.
He watches her as she waits for Dieter impatiently, putting a hand out to him and pulling him closer—like she’s saving him from some natural disaster, he thinks, like a flood, or a fire. She kisses the top of his head, grateful to have the boy safe in her arms—and when she looks at George, he feels as if she resents him for the power he holds over the boys. George sees her staring at him as she kisses the top of the boy’s head again, quickly turning away with a brusque sweep of her dress. George watches her until she rounds the corner of the house, shaking his head slowly. He goes back into the woodshed, and throws the small trap at the workbench in frustration.
He looks at the axe buried deep into the chopping block—the blade’s crusted with a light patina of rust that’s looks as if it’s wept into the block, staining it with dark, bloody tears. He winces at the sudden shock of pain as he pulls the axe out of the block, looking at the wedged blades and ignoring the pain of his missing limb. He turns to the tools scattered across the workbench behind him, and finds a coarse file under a pile of old, dirty rags and sawdust. He swings the axe down into the block, kneels down beside it awkwardly, ignoring the pain in his leg, and begins filing the blade.
“You seem to have made yourself some new friends,” Annette says from the doorway. She’s holding a bowl of stew in her hands, and puts it on the workbench with half a loaf of bread. She watches him as he struggles to stand. “You’ve even managed to get Stacey talking — not to you,” she adds with a smile. “But talking all the same.”
“I’m sure I’ll wear off eventually,” he say as he looks at her with a smile. He didn’t hear her coming in, and she startled him. “I’m a novelty, like a new toy—a little broken and somewhat the worse for wear,” he laughs, “like The Steadfast Tin Soldier,” he adds, thinking about that time so long ago now, with the Dwarf. It was shortly after that he returned to England and married Evelyn. It was in different life back then, and a different time, he reminds himself.
“At least you’ve got two legs,” she reminds him, and he looks at her, shaking off the memory of his mind.
“I do,” he smiles. “I suppose I should be happy for that—very happy, considering,” he adds. He winces in pain as he picks up the bowl of stew. “I didn’t realize I was so hungry,” he says after tasting the stew.
She leans against the workbench, watching him eat, as the sun and shadows play through the slats of the wall, pressing against her like unseen prison bars. She folds her arms across her breast briefly, leaning her head to one side and then runs her left hand through her hair. She shakes her long hair out, letting it flow around her in the warmth of the stable. The air is thick, and choking, and dust motes dance in the light like tiny stars hiding into the shadows.
George watches her, and is struck by her beauty. Every thought he’d ever had about her ten years ago seems to come flooding back to him. He feels awkward—embarrassed, and somehow out of place—and senses a blush creeping up on him. He clears his throat awkwardly, and tries not to look at her, which makes her smile.
He remembers his time in Vienna, before the War, teaching Novak’s son the violin. It was an excuse to see her. It was after her marriage and before his return to Rome, he remembers. There had been other times he saw her—different times—but they were from a distance, and he always kept himself hidden away from her. He thought to avoid her because she was always with her husband. George found he couldn’t dismiss her from his thoughts as easily as he would’ve liked to. It was the reason he’d become friends with Novak in the first place. What he hadn’t expected, was that Novak would use him as his own personal scapegoat, telling both his wife, and Annette, that Novak’s mistress was in fact, George’s.
George had somehow contrived to have lunch with the two sisters and Novak one afternoon, after finding the dwarf to paint the portrait of Novak’s mistress. If the lunch didn’t go anywhere—not that he’d expected it to—it did leave George with the feeling that Annette was devoted to the idea of a husband. He felt she’d made up her mind to love her husband, in spite of the man he was, and the difference in their ages. Her husband had recently been made a Prince by order of the Emperor, as a reward for controlling the damage Colonel Redl did to the Empire betraying military secrets to the Russians. It made it all that much easier for George to return to England and marry Evelyn though, knowing Annette could never love him. Later, he’d heard she was a lady-in-waiting to the Empress, Zita. He’d wondered about that, but when he looked up to ask her, she was gone.
A part of him tells him to go after her—and he tells himself that’s exactly what she wants—while the more sensible part of himself tells him that she’ll be back. He finishes the stew and then finishes honing the axe, balancing himself to see if it’s possible for a one armed man to chop wood, while standing with a crutch. He thinks about the pain in his back as he pulls the axe out of the chopping block, but it’s not there this time.
He’s looking forward to the week Annette says she’ll take the wrap off. He feels awkward with it; useless is more like it, he thinks. He finds it is easy enough to put his weight on his good leg and chop, so he tosses the crutch to the side and swings the axe. It’s not the sing-song rhythm a man with two arms would get into, and it soon has him working up a light sheen of sweat. His back poses no problem to him without the crutch, and he tells himself the crutch is the problem.
“I’ve come to take the bowl back,” Annette says, standing in the doorway once again, her body silhouetted by the light coming in from behind. He wonders how long she has been watching him work.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” he lies, driving the axe into the chopping block.
“To get the bowl?” she asks. “I find that hard to believe.”
“To talk to you,” he smiles.
“I can’t stay too long,” she says, coming in and picking up the bowl. She leans against the work bench. “There’s another loaf of bread in the oven—we’re running short of flour, so I thought I’d make as much bread as I could—until we get more flour that is."
He picks up the crutch and limps over to the workbench, leaning against it and wiping the sweat from his forehead with his sleeve. He unbuttons his shirt and pulls it off, wiping himself off.
“Where do you get it from?” he asks.
“What?”
“The flour?"
“From the hospital,” she laughs. “We all do it. They know we do it too, so I guess it isn’t stealing, is it?”
“They let you?”
“They know we have families—all of us. They’re doctors, after all. They want to give people their lives back, not take them away. You should see what they’re like when there’s a child to deliver,” she says with a smile.
“No midwives around?”
“They’re more or less camp followers now,” she smiles again.
“You really should do that more often,” he says.
“What’s that?”
“Smile.”
“There hasn’t been much to smile about lately, has there?”
“And now there is?” he asks, pulling his shirt back on. He struggles with the buttons. She looks at him and turns to face him. She puts the bowl down, pushing his arm aside and begins doing up the buttons.
“Are you trying to take advantage of me George?” she asks, looking at him.
“Am I being that obvious?”
She finishes with the buttons and reaches for the crutch, moving it closer to him. Then she leans across him and picks up the bowl again. “You’re looking at me like you did that time in the garden behind the villa—when Anastasia got married. I’m wondering, is that what you’re wanting from me now?”
“I didn’t say I wanted anything from you then. Would it have made you feel better if I did?” he says gently.
“I'm not going to lie to you and say it wouldn’t,” she smiles up at him. “But that doesn’t make it right.”
“Right?” he laughs. “It wasn’t right leaving you the first time. I should’ve come back long before I did.”
“But you didn’t, did you?”
“Because I didn’t come to see you, you mean?”
“Something like that,” she says, leaning against the crutch.
“I used to see you all the time. I'd see you from across the room in restaurants, or walking along the ringstrasse with your sisters, or your husband. And then your children. It took me a long time to get up the nerve to arrange that luncheon with you—and by that time you hated me because of everything Novak told you I was up to. I suppose it never occurred to you that he was using me as a blind for his own dalliances? But after he beat that dwarf and his mistress with his cane, I lost my only hope of ever seeing you again. So I left and went back to England."
“And got married.”
“Yes. To Evelyn.”
"Did you love her?"
“No,” he says with a smile. “I did it to make my parents happy. Did you love the prince when you married him?”
“He wasn’t a prince when I married him.”
She leans the crutch against the workbench and turns to look at him again. She needs him as much as he wants her, he tells himself. He can see it in her eyes, in the up-turned smile whenever she looks at him. It’s a feeling neither one of them can deny. He wonders if she’s been thinking about him since he first came back into her life. It would be easy to let himself fall in love with her, he knows, but that would just complicate things, he thinks.
From out of nowhere, she puts her arms around him. He feels his hand move to her waist, lightly, and he runs it up her ribs. He places his hand on her breast and she sighs at the touch; she drops her head slightly, looking at him from under her delicate brows.
“I don’t think you need to do that,” she says lightly.
“I don’t think you mind and much as you pretend to,” he says, and bends down to kiss her.
He feels her melting against him, and begins pulling at the small buttons on her bodice as he kisses her. His hand steals inside her dress like a thief. The roughness of his hand, hard and sharp on her delicate nipple; his mouth brushes down the side of her neck and exposed shoulder. He can smell the sweat on her, and feels his heart pounding under his skin as she pulls him closer to her. He doesn’t know if it’s her who’s fallen under his spell, or the other way around. Her long hair cascades down her back like a tumbling waterfall of golden tresses, and he nudges his lips deeper into the side of her neck, smelling the scent of her—the sweet scent of the dough that still clings to her hair and clothes her skin—and he takes a nipple into his mouth.
“Enough!” she says more to herself, and then pushes herself away from him rather than pushing him away from her. She hurriedly does the buttons of her bodice up, and looks up at him.
“It’s been a year since I’ve been with a man, George,” she says, looking up at him as she fastens the buttons of her bodice.
“I’m sorry for that,” he says.
“You don’t have to apologize to me for it,” she says. “It was a choice I made at the time. “I might have still been with him had he not gone and gotten himself killed.” Stepping up to him again, she runs a gentle hand across his cheek. “But you'll have to shave again.”
“You can shave me tonight if you’d like,” he laughs.
“You know I’d like that very much,” she smiles. "But Collette and the Countess might not appreciate you trying to bed me for the night. I’m still a married woman, you know?"
“A widow you mean, but still a princess,” he laughs.
“Exactly,” she says with a smile, putting on a false air of modesty that makes him smile.
“So as a princess, isn’t it my duty to do as you wish?” he points out to her.
“You mean like Catherine the Great?” she suggests.
“A notorious woman.”
“Scandalous.”
“Then where would her majesty care to meet me this evening?”
“And who says it will be this evening?”
“I felt your body speaking out to me Anna,” he says softly. “I felt you pressing against me—and it spoke to me in volumes,” he smiles, reaching a hand out to brush a wisp of hair out of her face. “You want me as much as I want you. Try as you might, you can’t deny it; besides, even if you did, I’d know different.”
“And is it me you want George, or the idea of me--am I not someone you’ve been chasing around in your imagination for as long as you’ve known me?”
He shrugs her comment off lightly. “Maybe it’s a little bit of both? But I think you’d better get back before you burn the bread.”
“The bread!”
He laughs as she pushes herself off the workbench, straightening her hair and running her hands down the length of her dress.
"Your majesty seems to have forgotten something," he says as she leaves the shack. She stops, turning around to look at him. He points to the bowl and spoon on the workbench. “Maybe you should send one of the servants out for it next time."
“I would have, if there were any.”
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