The Countess of Prague Read online

  Stephen Weeks

  Poisoned Pen Press

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2017 by Stephen Weeks

  First E-book Edition 2017

  ISBN: 9781464208454 ebook

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  The historical characters and events portrayed in this book are inventions of the author or used fictitiously.

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  Contents

  Copyright

  Contents

  Dedication

  Author Note

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Sins of the Father

  More from this Author

  Contact Us

  Dedication

  to

  Kateřina Z.

  And thanks to

  Auriol, Victoria & Lucie

  for their inspiration.

  Somewhere, in a mixture of these

  diverse personalities, lies the Countess.

  Author Note

  This book was written at

  Skvorec Castle, Prague East, Czech Republic

  I wish to thank the late

  Rene Tesař

  for his confidence in this work,

  William Parker for proofing

  and all those in Prague who helped me

  find my way round the city as it was in 1904.

  Prologue

  It was in late February, when the melting mountain snows had swollen the banks of the Vltava. That great river normally forms a placid mirror for Prague’s famous silhouette of golden-tipped spires, onion domes, and the gables and roofs of the fanciful houses of the age of the Empress Marie-Theresa — the view crowned by the old royal palace of the Castle. But presently the river had become an untameable monster. Its waters rushed like the torrents of hell through the genteel city and the ancient Charles Bridge was saved only by its stronger rebuilding after the great flood twelve years past.

  For four days whilst these torrents tore through like express trains, ten or twelve or twenty abreast as if in some devilish race, those good citizens of this metropolis who ventured out had their curiosity aroused by the corpse of a man whose progress through the rushing waters had been arrested by the wooden staves stationed in the river to break winter ice and to prevent the flotsam of such a flood as this from damaging the Old Town Mills or indeed the new masonry of the Charles Bridge itself. Those on the bridge with opera-glasses could see little more than those without: his was just a gaunt shape, draped with weed from the river, in an attitude of accidental crucifixion on the staves.

  And finally, on the last day of February, that is February 29th in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and four, the anger of the waters subsided, their level dropped and the water became calm enough for the watermen to go about their business again. Dimly lit by the moon-round gaslamps on the embankment — for the Superintendent of Police did not want to excite a crowd by retrieving the body in daylight — the crucified form was pulled down and dragged on a boathook towards the shore.

  An early spring mist lapped like milk on the surface of the river and was feeling its way insidiously into all the nooks and crannies of the water’s edge which included the ancient slipway now bridged by the Františkovo Esplanade.

  Two officers of the police were distinguishable by their stiff hats from the knot of watermen ready to pull in the boat and heave ashore the burden it was towing, a sodden heap of wet garments, barely recognisable as having once been a living being. It was dragged onto the cobbles.

  Thus began the grand mystery which ended my solving of petits mystères as a sort of innocuous parlour game and took me into the darker nightshades of excitement — and fear — such as I had never experienced before and from which, as a woman of Society, I had been all the time protected.

  In my mother’s house even the tops of the piano legs were given little ruffled skirts so as not to arouse the sensibilities of polite young people in the upward mental progress of thighs to varnished wooden loins. Anything to do with Nature and the Lower Classes (a somehow inseparable combination) was completely hidden from us. ‘Life’ outside our Society merely came to us by way of tradesmen’s tittle-tattle relayed by the servants or sensational articles in the newspapers which I had to steal from my brother. But then my mother was English, an explanation all in one. At least in Bohemia one felt nearer — according to her rather vivid imagination, at any rate — to the depravities of the luxuriant East or the wild Slavic splendours of Russia and beyond. The Turks had arrived at the walls of Vienna, after all, and even in Bohemia the coffee served in many establishments is what one would call Turkish.

  Half of this exoticism flowed in my veins as the blood of an old Czech family; and half of it was purebred English, thirsting to cut the prim bonds of my stays and see…an adventure. But I must not dwell on myself. By and by I am sure the reader will learn enough — perhaps too much — of my own foibles. It is the narrative of this whole extraordinary affair which is of interest, hardly me. The corpse with its disfigured face pulled from the flood, seemingly without an identity, was just the beginning…

  Chapter One

  Life’s Lottery

  “A Count without a bank account, doesn’t count” — thus spake my husband, who by his own words, should have been countless, an unaccountable Count. By the turn of a card, aided by the great agricultural depression which had gripped most of Europe for nearly a decade, his father had managed to lose the country estates with the fine castle that bore the family name, Falklenburg. They said he had died of a broken heart at his folly, leaving my husband with a worthless title, the breweries, some parcels of land in an unspeakable country town, a large pile of Brazilian railway shares and a huge social obligation.

  His wisdom should also have included “Once a Count, always a Count” — for he felt bound to keep up appearances. For a time, and that included the time directly following our marriage, we lived well. Income seemed to be increasing and whilst we were not rich, I easily persuaded my husband that we should rent the old palace of the Counts of Harrach in Jindřišská Street. At least it was a proper palace, with two carriage entrances (an “in” and an “out”) onto the street and all the rooms — the decent rooms, that is — on the first floor over the domestic offices. However, I have to admit that this was no longer the smartest part of the city, no Mayfair or Belgravia. Commercial concerns were now being built all along the thoroughfare and I understood that until our offer, old Count Harrach had been considering selling the building to a shoe manufacturer to ‘sell shoes to the people’. I didn’t realise that ‘the people’ were in need of shoes, such was my snobbery then. In the villages it was common to see young women going to the well, or children almost grown, unshod. But one cannot call prejudice ignorance.

  In fact, almo
st as an insult, or so it had seemed, a new hotel had opened practically opposite our palace only the year before: The Palace Hotel — designed not to receive members of the upper classes who might have need of such an establishment in the capital, but mere ‘commercial travellers and sales representatives’. The result of this was that I had given standing instructions to the coachman always to turn right on leaving our “out” entranceway, thus avoiding having to pass this upstart that was no more a palace than was the railway station.

  Suddenly two years ago the income which had supported our almost modest household — thant is, modest for those with aristocratic obligations — appeared to stop. My husband told me that the decline in the fortunes of our breweries had caused this. We had managed to keep the brewery next to our old castle in the country and another in the nearby town.

  Here I should point out that almost every castle in Bohemia has its own brewery. Beer is the national staple — as desirable, but more abundant than water in the Sahara Desert. To have the building’s chimney visible from the drawing room windows is de rigeur. In England, I don’t have to say that to have any associations with trade, or certainly to admit to any, is instant death in Society. Drawing room windows in country houses there must only overlook lawns, parterres or avenues cut through one’s own woods. Livestock must be kept at a distance, beyond a ha-ha. Human livestock, and the habitations thereof, must not be visible. Several great English houses had moved whole villages to prove this point. In Bohemia, castles are nearer to villages and towns, and in fact are part of them, and the scent of toasting hops and roasting malt pervading the air in garden or house is proof enough of ancestral lineage and financial stability.

  But now the Count was telling me that the rise of the great factory breweries in Pilsen and Budweis was threatening feudal brewing, and hence we were poor. We were rescued by the modest inheritance of my mother-in-law, who had died that summer. But we were living off capital, the banks offering too low an interest for us to scrape by. We were facing the prospect of having to rent our carriages by the hour and dismissing our stables. Monsieur Yves, our chef from Paris, had already gone (well, he was actually poached by the brand new Hotel Paris, but a stoneware bowl’s throw away). At least I insisted on keeping Sabine, my maid. How could a lady do without a French maid?

  So it was time to improvise, and somehow I managed to keep our heads held high enough in Prague and Vienna, and my Drawing Room Evenings were just as respected as those of greater palaces — and perhaps harboured a few more of the more interesting artists, writers, and musicians than some of the stuffier establishments of Austo-Hungarian Imperial Society.

  ***

  I had heard nothing of the corpse retrieved from the river. Sensational news of that kind was usually relayed to me by Sabine, she having heard it from Müller, the butler. But of late Müller had taken to insisting on having Saturday nights off unless it was a Drawing Room or a dinner party, and I had missed the reporting of this find from the river. Real news — and by that I mean news of new milliners setting up, who is flirting with whom, or which captains from the Újezd Barracks have now been posted to what regiments in the Imperial provinces — I would hear, of course, from my friends. Gossip is a far stronger medium than flimsy broadsheets with ink that can so easily stain a satin bodice or ruin a good pair of gloves just by opening the things — unless they’d been ironed first.

  In the end it was the telephone which conveyed the news. It was Sunday afternoon, and Müller’s discreet cough made me turn from my writing bureau. Müller, a man of middle age, was just over medium height, from a family in one of the German cities of North Bohemia, had his hair swept back in the manner of clerks, servants, and petty officials and sported mutton-chop side whiskers. As usual, his eyebrows were lifted as he spoke, as if to give some expression to his flat, unruffled speech.

  “The General is on the telephone,” he said, opening the door of my boudoir a little wider so that I could follow him to the little cabinet at the head of the stairs where the apparatus was installed.

  General Albrecht Schönburg-Hartenstein was my great aunt’s husband. Uncle Berty, as we all called him, was now retired. He spent much of his time at his clubs — the Deutscher Klub and the Wiener Cercle — and considered himself an upright Austrian, totally humiliated in war but loyal and correct nevertheless. Naturally, he patronised the theatre and the opera but no-one would have thought him artistic in any sense; he was far too conventional. He considered the Czechs in the family he had married into to be mildly seditious, which amused him rather than giving him concern. For this sweeping racial generalisation my half-Czech origins counted as full.

  The copper wires crackled.

  “Trixie,” he said without any social foreplay, as was his manner, “the Police Commissioner has been round to see me. The body of a man was pulled out of the Vltava yesterday. He is hardly identifiable, having met with a terrible death, and there were no possessions of any kind with him — but his underwear bore a distinctive laundry number.”

  The line crackled again.

  “Are you there?”

  “Yes,” I replied. “You were telling me a laundry number?”

  “Yes, it transpires that an astute member of the Police Department recognised the mark as an army number. The corpse was that of an old man, far beyond military service, so they checked with The Invalides Hospital, and it is they who must have put the police in touch with me — for, you see, it’s old Alois. They still use the old veterans’ army numbers there. From the time one first follows The Colours right to the grave, so it seems, a soldier is a number.”

  Alois had been Uncle Berty’s batman all through his army career. He had retired with my uncle more than twenty years ago, spent ten years as a valet for a German gentleman living in the city, and for the last seven or eight years had been living at the army veterans home, in the fields on the edge of Karlín. Uncle then went on to tell me that he had been asked to go to the City Morgue to see if he could identify him. Knowing my penchant for adventure, he asked if I had the strength to accompany him. It was his not-so-subtle way of ensuring I would say yes. Strong? Of course!

  Uncle Berty had been the subject of my solving the very first of my little mysteries, as I liked to call them. How simple that had been to solve, or rather to prevent from happening — a simple little party trick!

  I had found myself at a dinner party given in the Kolowrat Palace on the other side of the river, directly below the Castle in more gentlemanly Malá Strana. It was a smallish party, only twelve of us, and I noticed between the serving of the fish and the meat that Uncle Berty, sitting almost opposite me, had pocketed two of the crested silver dessert spoons that formed part of the elaborate service of cutlery and solid silver salvers on which we were being served. Now I knew of his penchant for removing items like this. He just couldn’t help himself. Whether it was the thrill of the chase, the risk to life and limb now that there was no cavalry in his life to chase him, or quite simply some disease of the mind which creates such compulsions, I do not know. However, I was certain that he had them tucked into his waistcoat.

  He always returned what he had taken. It was usually a few days later: “Look here old man, I seem to have come away with your cigarette case. I am so sorry…” But tonight, I was surprised he hadn’t realised that the irascible old Count Kolowrat always gave his butler strict instructions for the courtyard doors of the palace to be locked until all the silver plate was accounted for and securely back again in the strong-room next to the butler’s pantry. This could cause such a very embarrassing scene, very bad for Family.

  Before I withdrew with the other ladies I carefully secreted two other spoons in my evening bag. When the gentlemen had had their cigars and liquor and joined us in the Drawing Room, I took a brave step, one which had dominated my thoughts fully for the previous thirty-five minutes. I didn’t usually do this kind of thing. I was no shrinking violet, but a
lso no noisy hussy. “Ladies and gentlemen,” I announced like some kind of fairground barker, “I have a new conjuring trick to delight you — if you will allow me, Count.”

  I turned to old Kolowrat, who nodded approvingly.

  “Here I have in my hand, a pair of silver spoons,” I went on. Both my hands, I might add, were sweating. I had never done any kind of public display like this before. I was not an exhibitionist and it was before I was married. The spoons I held aloft, so that everyone could see them.

  “Uncle Berty, will you step forward, please?”

  Looking a little surprised, he did so.

  “So here you see the spoons…and now you don’t!” and I passed my hands quickly behind my back, dropping the spoons into a convenient fold of my bustle, an indication in itself that this was a few years ago. My hands returned to the front, and I opened my empty palms to this very select audience. There was a brief second of absolute silence.

  “Now Uncle Berty, if you please, allow me, ” and I reached into his waistcoat and produced the identical pair of crested spoons.

  I raised the spoons into the air. “Bravo” and hearty applause was the universal response to my apparent sleight of hand.

  As the tumult died down I quietly passed the four spoons to Countess Kolowrat who winked at me — whether from admiration for the trick, or in acknowledgment of the truth, I shall never know. “Beatrice, my dear,” she said in a confidential manner, “you are so clever.”

  ***

  Uncle Berty was pacing up and down the pavement outside the Morgue when I arrived. He turned to me immediately: “Damn bad business if it is old Alois,” he was saying. One couldn’t quite make out his expression underneath his copious moustaches and side-whiskers which seemed to unite in one continuous fur mat. But his eyes were fiery — a sign I knew of old.

  I had taken a fiacre from outside St. Jindřich’s churchyard, where there were always one or two waiting, rather than hang around for my brougham to be made ready. The fiacre’s single and singularly unattractive horse had made swift work of the journey of only a few minutes.