The Countess - Part One

When my father passed away I was scarcely into my twentieth year. My mother I never knew as she had died giving birth to me. I have met others with similar beginnings who, though obviously blameless in the matter, suffered unpardonable resentment and mistreatment as a result. My father however was off a different stripe and rather than blaming me in any way, he had cherished me all the more. Perhaps he thought that his loss would have been felt all the stronger by me and wished to compensate by showering affection and indulging me whenever he could. He was the dearest man imaginable and I loved him truly but I can now admit that I often repaid his unconditional love with a waywardness that must have discouraged him. If he did feel so, he always hid it well and his patience seemed inexhaustible.

He was a canon in the Church of England and we had lived a comfortable life in a cathedral town in an affluent southern shire. I was therefore brought up fully aware of all the principles and moral teachings of the church though my father was something of a free-thinker in terms of an individual’s path to righteousness. He felt, not only that women should be given a first-class education, but also that I, his daughter, was entitled to be left to approach faith and belief according to my own lights. He was the least dogmatic person I have ever known but I fear I took full advantage of his liberality and many of his acquaintances voiced the opinion that I was an undisciplined wild-child and sure to end badly.

Although I am sure that he would have preferred to keep me near him, Father was conventional enough to accede to the received wisdom of the day that education and the building of character, were things best conducted in their proper milieu. That was, as I experienced it, in the privation of inadequately-heated and under-victualed establishments, always attended by the threat of corporal punishment for the most minor transgression of petty rules. Moreover, those who were charged with supplying this service seemed, for the most part, to be dried-up old maids and disappointed academics enjoying far more the dispensing of chastisement than delivery of the learning. Their only point of accord so far as I could discern was that they all knew they were, and would remain, unattractive specimens of the race and irredeemably unmarriageable.

I graduated through a succession of these kinds of foundations, in several different European countries, garnering a passable knowledge of languages, natural philosophy and the classics but without ever regarding such things as in any way essential to my desire for more corporeal enjoyments and hedonistic pursuits. As a consequence of the reputation I had for being a corrupting influence on those around me, a pose I eagerly cultivated, many of my re-assignments of institution were not entirely voluntary. In short, I was expelled several times, each occasion enhancing my status in my view but making me a more unwelcome addition to the rolls of the diminishing number of schools that my father was prepared to countenance.

I was at a ‘Finishing School’ in Switzerland when news of my Father’s illness reached me and I travelled in haste to be by his side for he was, until I learned of my true destiny, ever then the dearest to my heart. I sat with him and nursed his fever as well as I was able but he died in my arms after but a handful of days.

He had left all his worldly goods to me, a substantial sum of money, investments and properties, but left clear instructions for it to be administered by his solicitor, a good and trusted old friend. This arrangement was to last until my majority, twenty one being the age at which that was set.

Father had every reason to be confident that I respected his friend, whom I had always called Uncle John, and he was doubtless persuaded by my filial love for him to expect that I would also honour his final wishes. I believe that he was sufficiently wise to realise that I would fulminate against any constraints put upon me but he must have felt that even his tempestuous daughter would be prepared to suffer the concomitant indignities if it were for a brief and specified period. In all essentials he was correct in this assumption for although I was determined to be as difficult as I could possibly be in public, I would, if without good grace, accept compromise in private.

There was one extra condition which, even now bemuses me and I remain unsure as to the reasoning behind my father’s inclusion of such a prohibition. I was not to marry or be betrothed, even should it to be to Lord or Prince, until I attained the said majority age of twenty one.

It was an unforeseen, and surely undesired, consequence of this eccentric and inexplicable injunction that has ultimately led me to begin a journey down a strange and exotic pathway, a possibility but lately encountered and full-willingly taken.

Being sensible of my hot-headedness and anxious to help me avoid any situations that might prove too tempting for his reckless ward to resist, Uncle John used all his skills of eloquence and persuasion on me. I resisted of course and raged at him but I could see the sense of his advice. I toyed with him dreadfully and caused his poor grey head a great deal of worry, but I had no intention of foregoing the undoubted benefits of my father’s bequest and was quite quickly disposed to do as he suggested. I simply acted out of long habit and natural inclination but also to make clear that when I became mistress of my own fortunes I would brook no further interference.

Eventually, I agreed to take a position as a lady’s companion though I insisted on it being in some place on the continent of Europe and he providing a generous yearly allowance to provide for clothing and other womanly accoutrements and divertissements. Uncle John was a bachelor and always uncomfortable discussing such things, as I well knew, so he did not demur at these stipulations. Indeed, he now embarked on the project with some relief and used the good offices of colleagues and business associates to find some suitable situation.

He clearly had in mind some prosperous but elderly noblewoman who would make few demands of me but whose home was located far from any Opera House or Theatre. I allowed him his delusions, thinking that I could manipulate an old woman as easily as one near my own age and, with an affected air of resignation, permitted him to arrange it as he would.

I know not how he happened upon the name or circumstances of my mistress, nor what negotiations he undertook or with whom. By then I had wearied of the whole affair and was impatient to be away. I confess though that my heart fell when he described my prospective chaperone (for so I already thought of her) and the life he supposed she led.

La Comtesse de Lilitoux was, he said, a lady of some substantial means and irreproachable antecedents. An unmarried French countess in her own right, she had fled La Grande Terreur all unmolested and with her fortune intact. She now resided in a chateau near the eastern bank of the Rhine in the Grand Duchy of Baden. My spirits sank further at this for I estimated that she must be at least seventy years of age if not considerably older. Immediately, Uncle John was at pains to assure me that she remained hale, both in body and mind but this gave me little cause for comfort and I feared that I had fallen into a trap constructed out of my own conceits and insouciance. However, I deemed that there was nothing useful I could do at that moment; I would simply have to manoeuvre my way around any restrictions she thought to impose when I was settled in residence.

The journey to Der Schwarzwald was a long and tedious one which I would prefer to forget but my worst fears seemed to be realised when I first beheld the place that was to be my home. A chateau, Uncle John had termed it, but it was in truth a grey-stone, gruesome fortress, far more burg than schloss.

In the ominous and heavy mist that had dolefully greeted my arrival, it loomed out from atop a wooded hill. Not particularly ancient or large, it still managed to appear forbidding. To my imaginative eyes, it seemed not so much to command the valley below as to be poised to prey upon it.

As the carriage bearing myself and my possessions laboriously climbed the hill, the mist swirled and I caught a glimpse of what lay in the valley. The River Rhine flowed dark and moodily through a forest of gloomy pines and the only points of colour that were not either green-black or full black were the white walls and red tiles of the small, inoffensive village that I immediately thought of as being terrorised on all sides by river, tree and castle.

The carriage pulled up in a courtyard and my trunks were spirited away through shadowy portals before I had even thought to give orders for their unloading. I was greeted by a cadaverous looking diener who wordlessly led me through an enormous oak door into the main living quarters.

I confess I was not simply pleasantly surprised but quite astonished by the contrast between the exterior and interior of the castle. Outside was all grim, grey Gothic but the inside was full of fine furniture, subtly-woven tapestries and magnificent paintings. It was an abode of luxury that was effectively palatial in terms of quality and tastefulness.

A rather pretty if decidedly common-sounding housemaid presented herself and bade me follow her upstairs to the suite of rooms that had been prepared for me. I did so with a far lighter heart than I had had since leaving my erstwhile home in England and was soon shown into a well-appointed set of rooms that delighted me. They included not only a fair-sized bedroom but a small study and a room dedicated to my toilette that featured a large, copper bath-tub. All the rooms had casements to the outside but heavy curtains were drawn across them and so I could not yet tell what view they afforded. The night and mist would have rendered this impossible in any event but I looked forward to the morning when I would be able to reconnoitre my surroundings.

Each room also boasted cheerful wood-fires already burning in masonry fireplaces and I warmed myself before the one in the bedroom while I supervised the unpacking and dispersal of my clothes into chests, drawers and wardrobes. The little maid worked readily if with rather more mindless babble than I was accustomed to but I learned to my relief that she was merely an under-maid. I would normally be attended, when other duties allowed, by La Comtesse’s own personal maid.

I refused the servant’s help with washing and dressing and after enquiring as to the time for dinner, dismissed her. I cleaned myself of the grime of travel and felt much better for having done so. For this first night, I dressed with an eye to modesty for I wished not to outrage any over-delicate sensibilities, whatever I might truly think of them. Nevertheless, feeling that I should still present myself as a woman with a mind and style of her own, I made up my face a little and wore the few good jewels that had once belonged to my mother. My hair I piled into a loose bouffant style, fixing it with silver pins and grips and a single riband. The compromise I had thus reached was an admittedly somewhat frivolous head atop an irreproachably decorous blue gown. ‘Let La Comtesse make of that what she will’, was my impudent thought.