The Dragonfly Pool

  He was twelve years old and small for his age, with brown eyes and brown hair and an expression one does not often see in the portraits of princes: the look of someone still searching for where he belongs.

  Now he stretched and sat up in bed and thought about the day that faced him, which was no different from other days. Lessons in the morning, inspecting something or opening something with his father in the afternoon, then more lessons or homework . . . and always surrounded by tutors and courtiers and governesses.

  For a moment he looked out at the mountains outside the windows. On one peak, the Quartz Needle, the snow never melted entirely, even now in early summer. He imagined getting up and escaping and walking alone up and up through the fir woods, across the meadows where there were marmots and eagles . . . and up, up till he reached the everlasting snow and could stand there, alone in the cold clear air.

  There was a tap on the door and a footman entered with his fruit juice and two rusks on a silver tray. Not one rusk, not three, always two. After him came the majordomo with the timetable for the day, and then another servant to lay out his clothes: his jodhpurs and riding jacket, his fencing things, and the uniform of the Munzen Guards which Karil particularly hated. The stand-up collar rubbed his neck, the white trousers had to be kept spotless, and the plumes on the helmet got in his eyes.

  And now came the woman who would scold him and hover over him and criticize him all day. Frederica, Countess of Aveling, was tall and bony and dressed entirely in black, because someone in the Royal Houses of Europe had always died. She was in fact a human being, but she might as easily have been a gargoyle that had stepped down from the roof of a dark cathedral. Her ferocious nose, her grim mouth, and jagged chin looked as though they could well be carved in stone.

  Officially she was the First Lady of the Household, but she was also the prince’s second cousin and had come over from England after the death of the prince’s mother in a riding accident when he was four years old.

  Queen Alice of Bergania had been British—the daughter of the proud and snobbish Duke of Rottingdene, who lived in London, in a large gray mansion not far from Buckingham Palace. Although English was the second language of the Berganian court, the duke did not trust foreigners to supervise the education and behavior of his grandson and had sent the fiercest of his unmarried relatives to see that the boy behaved correctly and with dignity at all times—and never forgot exactly who he was.

  In the palace, and to Karil himself, she was known as the Scold, because scolding was all she seemed to do.

  “Good morning, Your Highness,” she said, and curtsied. She always curtsied when she greeted him in the morning, and from the depth of her curtsy Karil could tell how badly she was going to scold him. The more displeased she was, the deeper did she sink toward the ground. This morning she practically sat down on the floor, and sure enough she began to scold him straightaway.

  “I really must speak to you about the way you have been waving to children when you are out driving. Of course, to extend your arm slightly and bring it back again is right and proper. It is expected. But the way you greeted those children outside their school yesterday was quite inexcusable, leaning out of the window. You cannot expect your subjects to keep their distance if you encourage them like that.” She broke off. “Are you listening to me, Karil?”

  “Yes, Cousin Frederica.”

  “And when will you realize that servants are not to be addressed directly except to give orders to? I heard you yesterday asking one of the footmen about his daughter in a way that was positively chatty.”

  “She was ill,” said Karil. “I wanted to know how she was getting on.”

  “You could have sent a message,” said the Scold. She moved over to the chair on which the valet had laid out the prince’s uniform, picked up the helmet and peered at it suspiciously. There had been a most shocking incident once when Karil had cut the plumes off the helmet of the Berganian Rifles just before an important parade.

  “I haven’t done anything to it,” said Karil. “It was only once, because I wanted to be able to see.”

  “I should hope not. Cutting the ends off valuable ostrich feathers! I’ve never heard of anything so outrageous. However . . .” the Scold’s face changed and took on a coy and simpering look, “I have something here that will please you. A letter from your cousin Carlotta. It encloses a photograph which I will have framed so that you can have it in your room.”

  She handed Karil a letter which he put down on a gilt-legged table.

  “Well, aren’t you going to read it?”

  “Yes, I will—later. I want to go outside for a moment before breakfast.”

  “I’m afraid that won’t be possible.” She consulted a large watch on a chain which she wore pinned to her blouse. “We are already four minutes late.”

  Karil sighed and took out the photograph. Carlotta von Carinstein was a year younger than the prince and very pretty, with ringlets down to her shoulders. She was wearing a floating kind of dress with puffed sleeves and holding a bunch of flowers, and she was smiling. Carlotta always smiled.

  He already had three of her photographs.

  The countess controlled her irritation. It was obvious that Carlotta and Karil would marry in due course and it was time that the boy realized this. Carlotta lived in London with Karil’s grandfather, the Duke of Rottingdene. Of course, both the prince and Carlotta were very young but it was sensible in royal households to have these things understood from the beginning.

  “Now, Karil,” she said, “here is the program for the day: math and French with Herr Friedrich as usual, then history and Greek with Monsieur Dalrose. At luncheon you will sit next to the Turkish ambassador’s wife—she has asked to meet you because she has a son your age, and you will talk to her in French. Your fencing lesson with Count Festing is at the usual time, but your riding lesson has been put forward to allow you to change for the inspection of the new railway station at which you will accompany your father.”

  “Are we riding or driving?”

  “You are driving. Your father will be in the Lagonda; you go in the next car with the Baron and Baroness Gambetti.”

  Karil tried to hide his disappointment. He saw his father so seldom—rarely before dinner and often not then. Days passed when he did not see him at all. Even though he was not allowed to chat in the royal car, it was good to be beside him. His father was a stern and conscientious ruler, and he seemed to care for nothing except his work. Sometimes Karil felt that his father had really turned into that bewhiskered, solemn person—King Johannes III of Bergania—whose pictures hung in the schools and public places of his country.

  But the countess was still scolding. “And I don’t want to have to tell you again that your manner to Baron Gambetti is not satisfactory.”

  “I don’t like him.”

  “Like him? Like him? I hope you don’t imagine that princes of the blood can have likes and dislikes. You are entirely above such things.”

  “He wants us to give in to the Nazis. And his wife sleeps with a picture of Hitler under her pillow.”

  “I beg your pardon? I dare not wonder how you have come by that piece of tittle-tattle. Now hurry up and get dressed.”

  Breakfast was taken in a room that overlooked the moat and had a view down the hill to the town and the river which wound through it. Karil had it in the company of his Cousin Frederica and three ladies of the bedchamber, who were also the king’s aunts: plump turnip-shaped ladies with big bosoms and short legs, like roots, on which they tottered around the palace giggling and gossiping and finding fault. Karil’s uncle Fritz was also at breakfast: a vague-looking man with long silver hair and dreamy pale blue eyes. Nobody had known quite what to do with him, so the king had made him minister of culture. It was a job he took very seriously, organizing singing competitions and literary events and folk festivals. The politicians in the cabinet laughed at him behind his back, but Karil was very fond of him.

  The king n
ever breakfasted with his family. He had a tray sent to his bedroom and started to work on state papers as soon as he woke.

  Conversation at meals was supposed to be “improving” and to show Karil what was happening in the world and today there was plenty to discuss. Hitler had again sent envoys to Bergania asking the king to allow troops to march through the country in case of war, and the king had again refused. Bergania had always been neutral, he said, and neutral it would remain.

  “It was very brave to refuse a second time,” said the oldest lady of the bedchamber, slicing the top off her egg. “Very brave indeed.”

  “Perhaps a little foolhardy,” said the second lady. “Hitler is not to be trifled with.”

  “And look at what happened to poor Zog,” said the third.

  All three ladies shook their heads, thinking of poor Zog of Albania, who had lost his throne and was now having a miserable time in a villa in Spain without proper drains.

  “There were other demands,” said Uncle Fritz. “Hitler wanted all the refugees returned—the people who had fled Germany and come here, and that’s quite out of the question. The leader of our orchestra is a German Jew and the best musician we’ve ever had.”

  Cousin Frederica broke her roll in half with her bony fingers. “Herr Hitler has might on his side.”

  Karil looked at her across the table. “But my father has right on his.”

  It was not a big procession—opening a railway station is not as important as signing a treaty or welcoming a foreign ruler. All the same, the schoolchildren were let out of school early, people lined the streets, there were flags and bunting among the flowers in the window boxes, and at least five cars filled with various dignitaries stood ready to set off.

  Karil had hoped to get a chance to talk to his father before the procession left, but the king was flanked by the prime minister and the mayor and escorted to his favorite car, the Lagonda, with the royal pennant fluttering on the bonnet. Following in the Rolls-Royce with Baron Gambetti, Karil tried hard to be civil. Gambetti was a thin man with a yellow skull, sneering lips, and a pointed beard like a goat’s stuck on the end of his chin. Everyone knew that he was trying to persuade the king to give in to Hitler and that the baroness egged him on. Trying to be polite, trying not to wave too enthusiastically to the children lining the route, kept Karil busy till they reached the station and there it all was: the red carpet, the officials with their chains of office and their medals, the band of the Berganian Rifles breaking into the national anthem . . .

  A small girl in a white dress came forward to curtsy and give the king a big bouquet of lilies, and an even smaller girl was pushed forward and gave Karil a posy of sweet peas—and then the speeches began.

  Karil had liked the old wooden station, with its single waiting room hung with posters of Italy and Austria and Spain, and a black iron stove. The new one was of brick, faced with yellow stucco, and had a fanciful blue roof, and the architect who had designed it was presented to the king and made a speech and so did the mayor and the director of railways.

  Karil found it difficult to concentrate on the speeches; they always seemed to be the same, whether it was a railway station being opened or a football team being presented or a bishop being buried, but he managed to stand up very straight and not to blow the ostrich feathers out of his eyes even though a breeze had sprung up and they were tickling him badly. Then the king cut the pink ribbon stretched across the platform and declared the station open, and everyone got back in their cars for the drive home. As they made their way along the promenade beside the river Karil noticed some workmen putting up bell tents on the level ground at the edge of the park.

  “What are those for?” he asked Baron Gambetti.

  “Oh, some nonsense of your uncle Fritz,” sneered the baron, who made no secret of his contempt for the minister of culture.

  “A folk-dance festival or some such thing—children coming from all over the place.”

  “I hope they will behave,” said the baroness. “There are some from one of those free schools in England. They will carry on like savages, no doubt.”

  Karil looked at the tents, imagining them full of busy children from all over the world. But it wouldn’t help him. Maybe one child would be scrubbed clean and presented to him for a few minutes, but he would never know what was really going on in their lives . . . or make a friend.

  When he was younger and had read fairy stories, Karil had always been angry with all those goose girls and milkmaids who wanted to marry a prince.

  “Don’t do it!” he had wanted to shout at them. “Don’t go and live in a palace. You’ll be bored and bullied, and everybody you meet—absolutely everybody—will be old!”

  Back at the palace Karil changed out of the detested uniform, but the working day was still not over. A professor came from the College of Heraldry to give him a lecture on the different methods of saluting and showed him pictures of the exact angle of the hand in relation to the lobe of the ear. This was followed by the visit of a sculptor who wanted to measure Karil’s head for a bust which the Youth Center had ordered for their sports hall.

  “Do I have to do this now? There’s time for a ride before dinner,” said Karil.

  “Certainly you have to do it now,” said the Scold. “You really must stop making an unseemly fuss about this kind of thing.”

  It was true that Karil hated being painted and photographed and modeled. It had begun when he was small and a photographer’s flashlight had exploded in his face—but even now he was frightened by the way his father had turned into a portrait and his mother had become a marble statue in the park.

  The king was not at dinner. A special meeting of his cabinet had been called to deal with Germany’s new demands and it was still going on.

  “Couldn’t I go and say good night to him?” asked Karil. “Just for a minute?” He had not spoken a single word to his father all day.

  “Now, Karil,” said the Scold, “you know you mustn’t disturb him in a meeting.”

  The meeting had already lasted for four hours. The king looked gray and tired. Baron Gambetti, the foreign minister, sat next to him, leaning forward. His goatee waggled on his chin; his yellow skull glistened with sweat as he stabbed his pencil against the paper.

  “In my view it would be extremely unwise to refuse Herr Hitler his requests. He has made Germany into a great power and those who oppose him will be crushed.”

  On the other side of the king, the elderly prime minister, Wolf-gang von Arkel, shook his head. A loyal and faithful servant of the king for many years, von Arkel supported his master in his stand against the German Führer.

  “Giving in to bullying has never been a wise policy,” he said now, stroking his long white beard. He turned to the king. “I have to assure Your Majesty that your people are behind you.

  No one wishes to see storm troopers marching through our country. As for forcing those people who have sought shelter with us back into Nazi hands, it is not to be thought of by decent men.”

  Gambetti snorted. “A sensible compromise in which we grant a few of Herr Hitler’s demands in exchange for—”

  “In exchange for what?” put in von Arkel. “Empty promises and then more demands.”

  The king leaned back in his chair. He agreed with his prime minister, a good man whom he trusted absolutely. The head of the army was behind him, too. But there were others . . . He looked at his watch. There was time still to say good night to his son. He half rose to his feet and then sat wearily down again. He could not afford to let Gambetti bring the waverers around to his point of view.

  The day ended as it had begun, only in reverse. A footman came to turn down Karil’s bed, a second one brought two rusks and a glass of fruit juice on a silver tray. The uniform of the Munzen Guards was put back in the cupboard and the uniform of the Berganian Rifles was taken away to be pressed for the following day. The countess came with Carlotta’s latest picture in a frame and put out the light.

&nbs
p; Left alone, Karil got out of bed again and drew back the curtains. The mountains were dark against the sky; the rosy light of sunset was gone. He went over to the other window and looked down at the river and at the row of lamps on the promenade. He could make out the bell tents, and inside them a glimmer of moving lights as the workers finished the preparations for the Folk Dance Festival.

  He turned, startled, as the door suddenly opened. Someone had come in with a firm stride and without knocking.

  In a second Karil had run forward to embrace his father. He had come to say good night after all, and at once the world seemed to be a different place.

  The king did not ask his son whether he had had a good day. He knew full well about Karil’s day; he had had so many days of his own like that when he was a boy. Days when he felt trapped and weary and wanted nothing except to escape into the hills and never return.

  “When this crisis is over we’ll go out together, you and I, and hide,” he said, “and they can look for us as much as they want.”

  Karil nodded. “Can we go to the dragonfly pool?” he asked. “It’s the right time of year.”

  “Yes. That’s where we’ll go.”

  For a moment the king stood looking down at his son. The dragonfly pool belonged to his own childhood, before he was weighed down by duties. To the days when he had had a friend to share adventures with. The friend had betrayed him in the end, but the memory of those days still warmed his heart.

  After the king had left, Karil stood by the window, looking down at the tents in the park below. Perhaps he would not always be cut off from real people and real life. Perhaps he would get to know the children who were coming. Those few moments with his father had given him courage and hope.

  CHAPTER TWELVE