CONTENTS

ABOUT THE BOOK

The Goldbaums’ influence reaches across Europe. They are the confidants and bankers of governments and emperors. Little happens without their say-so and even less without their knowledge. But Greta Goldbaum has no say at all in who she’ll marry.

While power lies in wealth, strength lies in family. Greta’s union with cousin Albert will strengthen the bond between the Austrian and the English branches of the dynasty. It is sensible and strategic. Greta is neither.

Defiant and unhappy, she is desperate to find a place that belongs to her, free from duty and responsibility. But just as she begins to taste an unexpected happiness, the Great War is looming and even the Goldbaums can’t alter its course. For the first time in two hundred years, the family will find themselves on opposing sides.

The House of Goldbaum, along with Europe herself, is about to break apart.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Natasha Solomons is the author of the internationally bestselling novels Mr Rosenblum’s List, The Novel in the Viola, which was chosen for the Richard & Judy Book Club, and The Gallery of Vanished Husbands. Natasha lives in Dorset with her son, daughter and her husband, the children’s author, David Solomons with whom she also writes screenplays. Her novels have been translated into 16 languages. When not writing in the studio, Natasha can usually be found in her garden.

Also by Natasha Solomons

Mr Rosenblum’s List

The Novel in the Viola

The Gallery of Vanished Husbands

The Song Collector

VIENNA, APRIL

The Goldbaum Palace was made of stone, not gold. Children walking along the Heugasse, buttoned smartly into their coats and hand-in-hand with Nanny or Mutti, were invariably disappointed. They’d been promised a palace belonging to the Prince of the Jews, spun out of ivory and gold and presumably studded with jewels, and here instead was simply a vast house built of ordinary white stone. Though it was the very finest limestone in the whole of Austria, and had been transported from the Alps to Vienna along a railway line constructed thanks to a loan from the Goldbaum Bank, and hauled by an engine and train owned by the Goldbaum Railway Company, painted resplendently in the family colours of blue and gold and adorned with the family crest: five goldfinches alighting on a sycamore branch. (Wits liked to refer to the coat of arms as ‘the birds in the money tree’.) Inside, the great hall was gilded from the wainscot to the highest point of the domed roof, so that even on gloomy days the light it reflected brimmed with sunshine. Such was the power and wealth of the Goldbaums that on dull days, it was said, they hired the sun, just for themselves.

At night every window was lit with electric light and the house shone out like a great ocean liner buoyed along the Vienna streets. Sometimes at the grandest parties they released hundreds of goldfinches into the hall, so that they warbled and fluttered above the guests. (The birds were accompanied by an extra two dozen maids whose sole task for the evening was to wipe up the tiny spatters of bird-shit the moment they appeared on the marble floor; there were limits, it appeared, even to the power of the Goldbaums.) All the same, little happened in the capital and beyond without their say-so, and even less without their knowing it. The Emperor himself despised and endured the Goldbaums like inclement weather. There was nothing that could be done. They owned his debt.

The palace on Heugasse was merely the expression of their influence. The real source of their wealth was a small, unobtrusive building on the Ringstrasse. Behind the black door lay the House of Gold: the Austrian branch of the family bank. The Goldbaum men were bankers, while the Goldbaum women married Goldbaum men and produced Goldbaum children. Yet the family didn’t consider themselves solely a dynasty of bankers, but also a dynasty of collectors.

The Goldbaums liked to collect beautiful things: exquisite Louis XIV furniture, paintings by Rembrandt, da Vinci and Vermeer, and then the great manors, chateaux and castles to put them in. They collected jewellery, Fabergé eggs, automobiles, racehorses – and the obligations of prime ministers. Greta Goldbaum followed in the family tradition. She collected trouble. This was the trait that Otto Goldbaum most valued in his sister. Before her arrival, his mother had visited the nursery, wallowing in state on a chair reserved especially for this purpose and, with the assistance of his favourite nanny, explained that in a few weeks’ time he would be joined by a little brother or sister. They sipped hot chocolate from a miniature china tea service adorned with the family crest in twenty-four carat gold, and nibbled tiny slices of Sachertorte dabbed with swirls of blue and pink, ordered especially from the grand hotel. Otto listened in silence, watching with considerable suspicion the rise and fall of the Baroness’s vast belly. And yet when, four weeks later, Greta appeared in the nursery with her own fleet of starched nursemaids, he was not put out in the least. For the first time in his three years Otto had an ally. Greta certainly seemed to belong more fully to him than to the parents who lived downstairs. The Baroness was considered an extremely dedicated mother by visiting the new baby almost every day, while Otto was still summoned to luncheon with the Baron and Baroness at least twice each week. He listened to the cries and gurgles of his sister through the walls and, when the nurses slept, crept in to lie on the floor of her night nursery. He did this so often that the nurses gave up either berating him or carrying him back to his own bed and set up a little cot for Otto beside her crib.

Greta was not a favourite with the nurses. They could never make her look smart for Mama during her visits. Her hair would not lie flat, like Otto’s, but popped up around her head in disordered curls. The rubbed patch at the back, like a monk’s round tonsure, did not grow back until she was nearly two. She usually had a cold. As she grew older the maids delighted in telling her, ‘If you weren’t a Goldbaum, you’d be given a proper hiding.’ Greta told Otto in that case she was frightfully glad she was a Goldbaum, but she felt terribly sorry for all the children who weren’t, as it seemed that they must spend much of their time being beaten for petty crimes (melting soap on the nursery fire to make modelling clay; hiding unwanted food at the back of the toy cupboard until it was found weeks later, festering; removing the saddle from the rocking horse and fixing it to Papa’s favourite bloodhound and riding the dog around the tulip beds). Greta was frequently sent to bed with nothing to eat but bread and milk. None of this mattered. She had Otto.

His character ran counter to his sister’s. Where Greta was impulsive, Otto was careful. She talked and he listened. His hair was perfectly smooth, his parting immaculately combed. Where Greta was in constant motion, Otto possessed a stillness that often unsettled his contemporaries, although he did not consider himself quiet, since his thoughts were so loud, his mind always restless and busy. It took Otto time to reach a decision but, once he had done so, he acted decisively. He was of average height and slim, but he fenced and boxed with skill, taking pleasure in the exercise and in anticipating his opponent’s game. He considered both pursuits to contain the perfect blend of brutality and elegance.

As Greta grew, so did the trouble. She borrowed Otto’s clothes and disappeared for a picnic beside the river, where she was discovered sharing a cigarillo with a pair of lieutenants. She persuaded Otto to take her to the university so that she could listen to one of the astronomy lectures he attended. Otto decided that she looked like a bird of paradise roosting amongst the thrushes, in her bright-blue coat and hat, sitting amid a hundred men in brown and grey suits. He asked her if she liked the lecture. ‘Adored it. Didn’t understand a word.’ Greta went every day for a week, saying it helped her sleep magnificently. She secured clandestine lessons on the trumpet and became rather good, before the Baroness discovered her and put a stop to it. Piano, harp or, at a push, the violin was deemed sufficiently demure. Wind instruments were far too louche; all that work with the embouchure. The very word made the Baroness blush. Otto developed a spontaneous interest in the trumpet. Another tutor was procured. Otto surreptitiously shared his lessons with his sister and pretended the practice was his. Greta, however, lost interest. Trumpet voluntaries were only fun when they were illicit. Otto accepted that one of his tasks in life was to help his sister out of mischief. For twenty years this had been a source of pride and pleasure to him, and of only occasional exasperation.

If anyone had asked Greta if she wanted to marry Albert Goldbaum, she would have said no, certainly not. But no one did ask. Not even her mother. They asked her all sorts of other things. Which blooms would she like in her bouquet. Roses or lilies? Did she want ten bridesmaids or twelve? Greta replied that she was quite indifferent to the number of bridesmaids. Her only stipulation was an assortment of footmen carrying white umbrellas. Her mother paused for a moment. ‘Supposing it doesn’t rain?’ ‘Of course it will rain,’ Greta replied, ‘I’m going to England.’

Greta knew that Baroness Emmeline was tormented by the prospect of appearing inappropriately attired. Three cloaks were to be made to match Greta’s wedding dress: one of arctic fur, one of the finest lambswool and another of silk and lace. The Baroness insisted that a lady must always have a choice and be prepared for the unexpected, in matters pertaining to the wardrobe at the very least. She invariably travelled with at least three pairs of spare shoes in the trunk of the automobile: a pair of stout leather boots, should the weather turn; a pair of elegant shoes to change into afterwards; and a pair of satin slippers, just in case. In case of what, Greta never could ascertain.

She offered no further opinion on the wedding preparations. She acquiesced to every suggestion with such pointed apathy that the Baroness ceased to consult her. This suited Greta perfectly. She visited her friends and drank coffee, and changed the subject if any of them were tactless enough to raise the topic of her looming nuptials. The wedding was an unpleasantness to be endured, and for a while it was sufficiently far away that she could pretend it was not happening at all. It stalked her, though, through her dreams. Her fear was indistinct and sinister, something nameless to be dreaded. Only it did have a name. Albert.

‘He probably doesn’t want to marry you, either,’ said Johanna Schwartzschild one morning as they sat in the orangery, taking coffee and sweets, some weeks before the wedding. ‘Perhaps he’s in love with someone else. Either way, he might just not fancy it.’

Greta set down her cup of coffee in surprise and stared at Johanna, who started to colour, perhaps wondering if she’d pushed it a little far and this was why she was not one of the twelve bridesmaids. But Greta was not offended, simply intrigued. Up until then she’d considered only her feelings on the matter, and had taken all the reluctance and resentment as her own. Of course it wasn’t pleasant to think that someone else was considering the prospect of marrying you with horror and revulsion, but, she reasoned, it wasn’t personal. Albert didn’t dislike her; he couldn’t. He didn’t know her. But poor Albert probably didn’t think much of marrying some stranger simply because she was his first cousin twice removed and had the right surname. Now he became, in her mind, ‘Poor Albert’ and she began to think of him almost fondly. She rang the bell. A maidservant appeared.

‘More coffee, Fräulein?’

‘No, thank you, Helga. Tell my mother that I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want roses or lilies. I would like gardenias for my bouquet.’

For the first time since her mother had summoned her to her dressing room and informed her that she was to marry Albert and move to England, Greta began to read English novels once again. Her English conversation lessons had still taken place for three hours each morning with the apologetic and sweaty-palmed Mr Neville-Jones, but in a silent and futile gesture of displeasure she’d set aside English literature for French and Italian. Now, softening towards Poor Albert, she penned herself a firm reading list. Dickens she enjoyed immensely. The hustle and stink of London sounded enchanting, compared to the museum hush and desiccated formality of Vienna. On the other hand, Jane Austen she couldn’t get along with at all. There were far too many young ladies far too eager to get married. Mr Darcy sounded like a bore, and Mr Bingley worse. She hoped that Poor Albert was nothing like either of them.

Then she discovered Jane Eyre. Oh, the thrill of being a governess and being entirely dependent on oneself. The danger and wonder of being alone in the world. Jane Eyre might have been a governess dreaming of becoming a bride, but Greta Goldbaum was the bride dreaming of becoming a governess.

As Greta walked through the park arm-in-arm with Otto she saw that the crocuses were erupting beneath the aspen trees, regiments of purple and shining yellow in imperial shades, like thousands of miniature soldiers. There were only tiny patches of snow remaining, shovelled into wet heaps the colour of sodden newspapers.

A fluttering notice pinned to a tree caught her eye and she paused to read it. Greta liked these notes. The trees in the park were full of them, like a species of white bird. They were messages from another world – the ordinary one, where people struggled and drank schnapps straight from the bottle, and ate schnitzel and sausage for supper, and owned an ordinary number of trousers. (Greta estimated this number to be something between three and fifty pairs.) The notices on the trees were for lost dogs, rooms to rent, or ladies of low regard advertising their services. The most desperate were the most intriguing: a violinist offering lessons in exchange for a decent meal and a bucket of coal.

To Greta, it was the ordinary and mundane that contained the sheen of glamour. The aura of her name followed her everywhere like a gleaming shadow; she could never escape from its glow. People who were not kind in general were invariably kind to her, or so she was frequently informed by her friends. She suspected that her view of the world was distorted, as if everything she consumed was sprinkled liberally with sugar. She longed to taste life unsweetened.

It was better for Otto, she thought, a little resentfully. His misadventures weren’t merely tolerated but encouraged. He’d been permitted to spend six entire months at the Imperial Observatory on the border with Russia, where the winds gusting through the great forests were chilled with the enemy’s breath. He’d seen not only stars and comet tails, but Cossacks riding through the plains separating the two great empires, the handkerchiefs covering their faces red and blue in the moonlight. Or so she presumed; Otto had been disappointingly vague on the details in his letters home. There had been far too much about the mathematics of observational stars, and far too little about bandits and Cossacks, or the legendary eastern Jews who thrived in the border swamps and had long red beards, flaming out like Moses’s burning bush.

Everything had become imbued with sudden meaning: the silver coffee pot and pats of butter stamped with tiny birds were no longer merely objects, but ciphers. Earlier Greta had remained as the maid arranged the Baroness’s hair – something she’d not done since she was a child, watching the maid brush and brush the long silvering hair, sleek as the tail of a weasel. Then it was wound round and round, pinned neatly into a smooth wheel. The ivory brush sat on the dressing table and Greta looked at it, knowing that the days of such intimacy were nearly over. When she left the Baroness to her coffee, she felt a pang of unexpected tenderness.

‘Leaving Vienna feels a little like death,’ Greta declared to Otto when she joined him at the breakfast table a few minutes later. He glanced at her over his newspaper and, seeing that she was perfectly serious, laughed.

‘What do you know about death?’ he asked, setting the paper aside.

‘As much or as little as anyone,’ she answered primly while buttering her toast.

Newspapers in four languages were laid out on the sideboard in the breakfast room. Only those in German and French were today’s. The Italian and English editions were sent from Milan and Paris, but this always took a day, so they bore yesterday’s date, as though those nations were always racing to catch up with the present. Greta supposed that in England this would be reversed and she’d be forever reading the news from home a day late.

A bowl of oranges rested on the table like glossy midday suns. They’d been plucked from the greenhouse early that morning. The fruit was cosseted like a dowager duchess, the glasshouses heated and moistened by solicitous gardeners. Greta liked to disappear into the greenhouses with a novel, pick oranges herself and peel them with her fingers, slurping them untidily, wiping the juice on her blouse. Once she’d been caught, and the offence reported to the Baroness. Her punishment had been to sit in the morning room for several hours, while learning to peel an orange with a knife and fork, without soiling her white cotton gloves with a single drop of juice. While she was practising, the Baroness instructed her to sit with an orange between her shoulder blades. She needed to become more like a proper lady, with suitable deportment and decorum, the Baroness insisted. Apparently, it started with oranges, the most civilising of fruits.

‘Would you like me to peel you one?’ she asked Otto.

‘Yes, all right.’

He sat back, smiling while she skilfully dispatched the orange with a tiny silver knife and matching fork.

‘Now who will do that for you next week?’

‘Who indeed?’

He ate in silence as she watched, both of them aware of this awful list of last times – last breakfast, last day at home, the last orange. Otto realised that Greta was right and that her leaving, if not quite a death, certainly marked the end of something.

Under the Goldbaum Palace, Karl was sieving for bones in the dark. He reached into the black water with his net and, raising it, poked amongst the debris for the sharp point of a bird’s wishbone, the round nub of a larger animal’s shin. He rested his lamp on the ground, relit it and replaced his matches in his backpack, trying not to breathe in the oily fumes. Some of the other Kanaltrotters had nicknamed Karl ‘Kanalrat’, since he was as at ease in the tunnels and pipes as the fat black rats that scuttled about them, their feet scratching in the dark, rivals in their hunt for bones.

Karl squatted barefoot on the edge of an underground canal and rapidly sifted, again and again. An hour passed, or perhaps four or five. He had no clock and it was always midnight down here. When he was asked where he lived, by the condescending but well-meaning secretaries of the children’s shelters he periodically visited, he always liked to say, ‘The Goldbaum Palace. Just beneath.’

It was a fair spot. Porters from the Goldbaum kitchens distributed leftovers every night at the entrances leading to the sewer tunnels, and there was usually something, if you were quick about it. Mostly Karl preferred to sieve in the dark. He’d found all sorts of treasures over the years, the most precious of which he hoarded in his backpack. There was a blue glass button, round and smooth as a washed pebble, a twisted metal spoon engraved with five tiny birds. Every so often he found a coin. Those were silver days, when he stopped fishing at once, packed his belongings neatly away and bought his own supper of stew, bread and beer; and once, when he found a whole ten kronen, a fat roll of apple strudel sprinkled with almonds. He hadn’t known what almonds were until he licked them, and at first he’d thought them little slivers of bone.

Mud. Mud. A twig. A dead sparrow, its bones too light to be worthwhile. He raked and sieved. Ribs from a pig-roast. Some of the others preferred to sieve beneath the restaurants where the pickings were richer, but the competition was fierce. There was a hierarchy even down here. At the top came those who hunted for scrap metal, while the bone-seekers were at the very bottom. The bigger men took the best spots near the abattoirs or the beer halls, while the boys like Karl were left to sieve wherever they could. He didn’t mind. He preferred the quiet of the deeper, narrow channels, where even seasoned Kanaltrotters were seized with choking panic. He measured time only by the filling of his bucket. A piece of leather. Sludge. Teeth. Animal or human, he didn’t know. Half a sheep’s skull with the jaw still attached. The bucket was full.

His lamp had stuttered out, but he could find his way in the dark. He raced back through the channel, splashing through the freezing water, his feet numb. He tried to guess the weight of his bucket: two kilos, three? Five kronen perhaps, if he was lucky. The bones were sopping wet, and he must dry them carefully before he could take them to Atzgersdorf to sell to the soap-boilers.

The evening of the ball Greta soaked in the bath. She unwrapped a fresh bar of mimosa soap from its scarlet-and-gold paper and washed her hands and face. She did not consider who had made the soap or where it had come from. Once she had dried herself, she sat in her new white dress, in a chair beside the fire, tucked her knees beneath her chin and surveyed her girlhood bedroom. It was already devoid of many of her most precious things. Anna had packed a dozen crates to be sent ahead to England and her new home. Most of them had been filled, at the Baroness’s direction, with wedding jewellery, dresses from Paris, an eighteenth-century Persian rug, a porcelain dish for earrings that once belonged to the Empress Josephine. Greta had little interest in these objects. They were merely to remind her soon-to-be in-laws that the new bride might not have quite the wealth of the London family, but she was still a Goldbaum. With Anna’s assistance, Greta had stowed her own valuables, which were of a different order to her mother’s selection. There was a painted book on hummingbirds that Otto had given her on her eighteenth birthday. The illustrations were hand-tipped, but to her shame there was a fat fingerprint of chocolate on the cover. The pictures had gone from her bedroom walls. Already it wasn’t hers, she decided. It was bereft of those things that had made it home.

‘Sit,’ commanded Anna, bustling into the room and pointing to the chair before the dressing table. ‘I’ve brought Helga to try again with your hair.’

Greta sighed and moved over to sit before the mirror, and fiddled with a box of hairpins as the two maids squabbled and pulled at her hair, trying to cajole it into obedience.

‘I don’t know why you’re bothering. It won’t work.’

‘The Baroness insisted. She’s asking for you.’

‘Leave my hair then. I’ll go and see her now. I’ll tell her you fought valiantly. The enemy could not be defeated.’

Greta stood and allowed the two girls to smooth and pat the folds of white silk and adjust the beadwork around her shoulders.

‘It’s a shame Mr Albert Goldbaum can’t see you. You’re a picture,’ said Anna, admiring her handiwork.

‘Yes, poor Albert,’ agreed Greta without conviction. He had caught a bad cold in London and was unable to travel. Tonight’s wedding party lacked a groom, which Greta acknowledged was inauspicious. Who knew what Albert would make of her? She was taller than was considered fashionable, her hair thick and untidy, her hands large or ‘expensive’, according to the jeweller who measured her fingers for the engagement and wedding bands. Her mouth, however, was perfectly shaped. Not that people were ever given much of a chance to notice because, as the Baroness complained, it was usually talking.

Greta’s photograph had already been dispatched to England, no doubt to reassure Albert that his mysterious bride had sufficient charms. No one had thought to send her a picture of him. He was young. He was a Goldbaum. What possible objection could she have?

She turned to leave, but Anna cried out, ‘Your shoes! You’re wearing the wrong shoes. You can’t wear the green ones. The white silk are for tonight.’

‘They’re a half-size too small. I swear Mother does it on purpose.’

Anna nodded sympathetically. ‘All the same. The Baroness—’

‘For goodness’ sake.’

Resignedly Greta wedged her feet into a new pair of low-heeled dancing shoes.

She walked along to the east wing to her mother’s suite of rooms, a fleet of Gretas dressed in identical white flanking her in the vast mirrors. From below she could hear the strains of the orchestra, strands of Strauss drifting up, warm and sweet as patisserie baking in the cafés along Herrengasse. Footmen in their finest livery stood regimentally on either side, their sideburns groomed and waxed. To the consternation of the recruiting sergeants, her father always hired the tallest, most handsome men lining up outside the recruitment offices of the cavalry of His Apostolic Majesty. Baron Goldbaum sent along representatives of the household staff, who always offered generously more than a soldier’s pay. The livery, in splendid blue and gold, was a uniform of sorts for those who hankered after military tailoring; but, the under-butler liked to joke, unlike joining the army, in the Goldbaums’ service there was no risk of death. The recruits smiled at this little joke: apart from an all-too-brief skirmish with Serbia, there hadn’t been a decent war for years. What use is a soldier in peacetime?

Greta passed two footmen, poised on stepladders, starting to light the five hundred candles on the Montgolfier chandelier at the head of the great staircase. The Baron had declined to convert it to electricity, preferring the effect of candlelight as it diffracted through the soda-glass. It was not he who had to balance on a ladder at the top of the staircase with a burning taper. After one of the footmen had set fire to his hat while lighting the candles, permission was granted to remove hat and wig in order to light the chandelier – a progression towards informality that was considered by the Baroness almost as dangerous as the risk of immolation. Otto, however, more sympathetic and intrigued by mathematical problems, had spent an afternoon devising a system that denoted the order in which the candles ought to be lit, with the least risk. The Baron stipulated that this regimen must be followed, and Greta noticed a third footman carefully holding Otto’s diagram out of reach of the flames.

She knocked and was admitted to her mother’s dressing room. The Baroness reclined on a day-bed, sipping black tea and lemon, her usual ritual before a party. The cream walls had turned yellow in the gloom, while the red roses on the dresser appeared black. A pair of fat cherubs played shuttlecock with a dove on the frescoed ceiling. The curtains were tightly shut, a coal fire flickered and Greta grimaced at the stuffiness. She turned on a light and asked the maid to open a window, then she leaned out and breathed in damp spring air. Oil lamps were being lit across the gardens, and through the darkness she could just discern steam rising from the greenhouses. She glanced back to her mother, sitting stiffly in grey lace, a cobweb of diamonds around her throat.

‘Did you love Father?’

The Baroness looked up at Greta in surprise. They did not have these kinds of conversations.

‘Well, not at first of course. I knew him a little before we were married. I didn’t dislike him.’

‘And now?’

‘I’ve grown very fond of your father.’

Fond as a pond, thought Greta. It was a soggy, limp sort of affection. At that moment she was overcome with pity for her mother and, to the astonishment of both of them, she sat down on the couch beside the Baroness and threw her arms around her. She wanted to cry, but did not, knowing that the Baroness wouldn’t like that at all.

‘I shall miss you. Really I will,’ said Greta.

‘Then I hope you will write. You’re usually a dreadful correspondent,’ said the Baroness.

Greta sat back and looked at her mother, at the familiar blue eyes, not sapphire-bright, but a watery, over-washed sort of blue. In this light she couldn’t see a single line or crease on her skin. When she smiled, the Baroness was beautiful, only she didn’t smile very often. Greta noticed that on the tray beside the glass of tea was another glass, empty, which smelled rather strongly of schnapps.

The Baroness took Greta’s hand in her gloved one.

‘My dear girl, do you know everything you need to about the “unfortunate side of marriage”?’

‘You mean coitus?’ asked Greta.

‘Oh God,’ said Baroness Emmeline, rolling her eyes. ‘Always such language from you.’ Clearly one glass of schnapps had been insufficient.

Greta toyed for a moment with asking her mother to furnish her with spectacular detail, and then she relented.

‘Oh, I know all about it. Otto is a scientist after all. He never could keep a discovery from me. Years ago at the Lake House he found a fascinating book on cattle husbandry—’

‘Enough!’ said Baroness Emmeline, mostly in relief. ‘Just remember that, regrettable as it is, that unfortunate part of the business is your duty. Never refuse Albert more than one time in three. But,’ she warmed to her topic, a little flush of schnapps in her cheek, ‘do not accept him every time. A man must be kept on his toes, uncertain as to whether he shall succeed.’

‘One time in three? Not one in four, now and then? Because if every third time I refuse him, then he’ll know I’m about to say no, and he won’t be on his toes at all.’

The Baroness fixed her with a cool glare.

‘One in three. No more, no less.’

They sat in silence for a few moments, Greta’s bravado dissipating like popping champagne bubbles as she tried not to think about going to bed with a stranger, in less than a week. She was tired, her feet chafed in her too-small shoes and she felt anger with her mother, pooling in the pit of her stomach like undigested food from a too-rich dinner. She glanced up to meet her mother’s eye and spoke slowly.

‘When I’m a mother, I shan’t be like you. I shall see my children every day. And I shall kiss them and hug them and let them leave little traces of snot on my shoulder like the trail of a snail. And they will know that I love them.’

Greta kissed her mother on the forehead and left her alone in the darkening room. Baroness Emmeline reached for her glass of schnapps, to find it already empty.

‘Don’t you know?’ she said, but Greta did not hear.

There had been much discussion as to how to open the ball. It ought to have been Greta dancing with Albert, but Albert was not there. In the end Greta danced with her father. Baron Peter was a good dancer. It was one of the things about him that his wife was quite fond of. He looked elegant as he stepped out with Greta, the superb tailoring discreetly concealing his growing paunch (a part of her husband of which the Baroness was notably less fond). His moustache was waxed, his sideburns combed par excellence, and he looked every inch the proud papa. He steered Greta along the room in a slow and imperial waltz, with five hundred pairs of eyes watching. The room was so long, and the beat so slow, it took them two whole minutes to reach the far end. Hundreds of fans fluttered like a flotilla of tropical butterflies, concealing the whispering mouths of the watching women. The room smelled of powdered bodies and gardenias. Ten thousand stems filled the ballroom in hundreds of vases, perfuming it with an overpowering sweetness. Greta and Baron Peter spoke softly, trying to ignore the onlookers.

‘Just laugh at Albert’s jokes,’ said the Baron.

‘What if they’re not funny?’ asked Greta.

‘Laugh at them anyway.’

‘Did Mama laugh at your jokes then?’

‘Well, no. But I always thought it might be nice.’

He sagged and Greta squeezed his hand. ‘Mama doesn’t laugh at anyone’s jokes. I wouldn’t take it personally.’

‘No, you’re quite right,’ agreed the Baron, cheering up a bit.

‘On the other hand, I’m not sure if I ever heard you tell one,’ said Greta slowly. Then perhaps he’d always wanted to try, and she’d been too afraid of him to listen; and now she was leaving and it would soon be too late.

‘Why don’t you tell me one now, and I promise to laugh.’

The Baron frowned and was quiet for a few moments, considering. ‘I can’t think of a single joke,’ he said at last, his voice full of such disappointment and regret that Greta couldn’t help throwing back her head and laughing with such fulsome enthusiasm that the Baron began to laugh too, a full-bodied chuckle that threatened to release the carefully concealed paunch from its restraint. The whisperers stationed around the ballroom all commented to one another how agreeable it was to see such a happy bride (despite the lack of groom), and how charmingly close the Baron was to his daughter.

At eleven o’clock the dancers were summoned to supper by a silver swan. The automaton had been made by a jeweller and watchmaker in Paris, who was eager to demonstrate a skill so remarkable that it lingered on the boundary between mechanics and magic. A footman donned a hat with matching silver brocade and turned the handle; then, as the guests gathered to watch, the full-sized swan swam to life. The thousands of silver feathers in its plumage ruffled, the muscular neck stretched and turned to gaze at Greta with cool black eyes. A tune tinkled and the swan struck out into the mirrored water for a tiny, wriggling fish. It swallowed and was still. The music faltered and stopped. The guests laughed and applauded, the gentle thud of clapping gloved hands like distant horses on soft ground.

The Baron and Baroness led the guests into the dining room. Most followed, but some slid into a side-chamber set up for games of baccarat, whist and tarock, being hungrier for cards than anything else. In the dining room a battalion of footmen and maids in the family shades of blue and gold flanked the walls. Glossy candles ringed with pleats of gardenias sat on long banqueting tables. There might be no pork loin or lobster or oysters or plump Austrian sausage, but there was a vast and bloody chateaubriand with a jug of Béarnaise, while a special table commissioned by Baron Peter and inlaid with a marble map of Europe was set aside for cheese. Emmenthal and a large slab of Gruyère roosted on the Swiss Alps, while a snowy wheel of Camembert rested in northern France, a cliff of Parmesan sat on Italy and a forest of smoked cheeses were sprinkled across the Austrian Empire. Only one table was set apart from the rest, where the more religious and observant members of the family and their friends gathered, a little furtively, conscious that fewer and fewer of the city’s Jews kept kosher nowadays, yet unwilling to dispense with the laws themselves. The Baron and Baroness were excellent hosts and even if, in private, the Baron may have partaken of a sample of ordinary pork schnitzel, they ensured that all their guests were meticulously cared for. At the end of the meal, if there was any chance that a kosher meat plate had been accidentally sullied with a stray slice of Roquefort, it was broken and discarded. Several dinner services were dispensed with in this manner every year.

Greta found it was too hot and too loud, the chatter and shouts of laughter pushing against the notes of the orchestra, which played louder and faster to compete with the noise. She noticed Johanna in a pink silk dress sitting with a few of their friends, picking at plates of cold chicken and plum dumplings. They waved at her to join them, but it seemed to her as if she’d already left and their voices were floating to her across the sea.

‘I’m going to get some air,’ she said, rising and hurrying from the dining room before any of them could follow.

She slipped into the crowded chamber behind the ballroom and then through a door into the gardens. She could see a scattering of dancers in the ballroom through the great arched windows, silently turning and turning. It was cool outside and a feathering of frost edged the lawn. She sat down on a stone step and took off her shoes and, with considerable relish, flung them into a rose bush.

‘Not your best plan,’ said a voice behind her.

Greta turned and saw Otto. She smiled and shrugged. ‘On the contrary. If I can’t find them, I can’t possibly put them back on.’

She rubbed her toes and prodded a round blister on her heel. She did not ask Otto why he was out here alone. He’d always loathed parties. He didn’t object to dinners with friends (fellow scientists), but dances with endless acquaintances bored him. Otto, unlike Greta, was rarely compelled to partake in things he did not enjoy. He produced a hip flask from his pocket and handed it to her. She took a swig, spilling cognac down her chin.

‘You will come and see me, won’t you?’ she asked, trying to keep the trill of desperation from her voice.

‘Well, I’m terribly busy and you’re terribly tiresome, but yes. I might even be in Cambridge before the end of the year.’

‘And that’s in England?’ asked Greta, teasing.

Otto flicked a leaf at her.

She grabbed his hand and half-cajoled, half-dragged him to the lowest part of the garden, running barefoot across the gravel, the stones cold and sharp beneath her feet. The night was yellow and full, and Greta imagined she could hear the hum of the stars. Somewhere to the east was the Danube and, breathing deeply, she could almost smell it, a spool of black coiling and uncoiling in the dark. At the stone edge of a pond they paused, observing a tiny moon tremble on the surface. A white statue of Venus watched them mournfully, clasping her sopping dress to her marble bosom. Greta let go of Otto’s hand, hitched up her skirts and climbed in. The water was deeper than she remembered, reaching almost to her knees.

‘Oh, come in, don’t be a sissy,’ she cried.

Otto sighed and unfastened his shoes and socks, attempted to roll up his trousers and stepped in. He gave a shout at the cold.

‘Isn’t this better than the party?’ Greta asked happily.

Otto reached into his jacket for the cognac. ‘I’m standing in a freezing pond in wet trousers. And, yes, it is infinitely better.’

Above them they heard the scuffle of doors opening and the sound of voices on the terrace. Johanna’s voice hissed across the garden, ‘Greta? Where are you?’

Greta waited for a moment before calling out, ‘Down here!’

A minute later Johanna appeared with a footman bearing a lantern. His face did not falter as he observed Greta and Otto in the pond.

‘Baroness Emmeline is asking for you,’ said Johanna breathlessly. ‘You’ve missed the whole kerfuffle. There was nearly an international incident. The wife of the British Ambassador was dancing with the Foreign Minister, and then the Russian Ambassador cut in and started to dance with her and the Foreign Minister was furious!’

‘So there’s going to be a duel?’ asked Greta, suddenly interested.

‘No such luck,’ said Johanna. ‘The British Ambassador stepped in and smoothed things over. Oh yes, and now you’re supposed to dance with him. The British Ambassador. Not any of the others.’

‘God forbid,’ said Otto drily.

Greta sighed. ‘Well, I suppose it is a little cold out here.’

She climbed out of the water and let go of her skirts, unpeeling them as they stuck to her wet legs. She trailed after Johanna back to the house. Otto, as he followed a few minutes later, noticed the line of wet footprints straggling across the hall. As he walked into the ballroom and watched Greta dance a two-step with a slight, elderly English gentleman, he wondered whether anyone else would notice that beneath her floor-length gown she danced barefoot, with dirty feet.

Behind the Goldbaum Palace a seemingly endless stream of Kanaltrotters emerged from a round tunnel entrance near the river’s edge and joined an orderly queue, as if waiting patiently for the morning tram to bear them to offices along the Ringstrasse on a Monday morning. Karl was amongst the last of them. He was in no hurry. The stars were unfathomably bright, after the darkness underground. Somewhere music played. The Goldbaums always distributed leftovers after a party. Seasoned Kanaltrotters watched for the orchestra arriving at the palace: the more numerous the musicians, the grander the party and the more plentiful the leftovers. Today someone had counted twenty violin cases and a vast bell-shaped instrument in a case like a coffin, dragged along the pavement on a set of wheels. Karl had high hopes. He slunk forward, keeping his backpack close. Men slipped past, hands and mouths full, pockets bulging as they scattered into the dark; some vanishing down the tunnels and others sliding away into the city streets, as smooth as shadows.

A row of half a dozen servants from the Goldbaum Palace stood behind a long table. One of the serving women was young and pretty. As he shuffled closer he saw that the dark hair pinned above her neck was as smooth and polished as the surface of a nut. He wanted to reach out and touch it with his finger. She handed out large hunks of bread as the stout woman beside her ladled food into the outstretched mugs and bowls of the men. Karl rummaged amongst the treasures in his backpack for his tin mug. Tonight he would sleep with a full belly. He must be careful and make himself eat it slowly or the cramps might make him sick, and that would be a waste. He watched the woman with the lovely hair. The woman glanced down at her basket of bread and, seeing it was nearly empty, muttered something to the large woman beside her and hurried back to the palace, basket on her hip. Another servant took her place and handed out chunks of black bread from a different basket.

Karl reached the front, but lingered, letting others shove their way in. He wanted his bread from the pretty girl.

A pair of older men pushed past him. One smiled toothlessly at him. ‘Kanalrat,’ he said, with a nod. Karl grunted in reply.

The large woman at the front noticed Karl hanging back.

‘You – you’re not hungry?’ she called.

Karl shrugged. He was no hungrier than usual.

‘Let the little one through,’ she said to the older men in front.

Karl shook his head. ‘I’m waiting for the pretty one. The one with the nice hair. I want my supper from her.’

The woman laughed, so that her significant bosom shook. ‘Beggars with requests. Would you like to see a menu, while you’re at it?’

Karl ignored her. The smell of the food made his belly grumble and churn. He began to regret his decision. What did it matter if he was handed his bread from a girl with shining hair? Men shuffled in front of him. He began to feel dizzy, his legs spongy. She was coming back, basket perched on her hip, heavy now.

‘Anna, you’ve an admirer here,’ called the woman with the bosom. ‘Won’t have his bread from anyone but you.’

Karl elbowed his way to the front.

Anna had a snow-dust of flour on her cheek from the bread. She didn’t smile and did not meet his eye, only held out the bread, passing him his portion.

‘Thank you, Anna,’ he said.

She made no reply, but as Karl walked away, his mug full of food, he saw that she’d pressed two pieces of bread into his palm.

GOLDBAUM TRANS-EUROPE EXPRESS, JURA, MAY

Up till now Otto had relished journeys on the family train. The Goldbaum Trans-Europe Express had borne them to summers at their villa on Lake Geneva every July, to the opera in Paris and to visit cousins in Frankfurt or Berlin. Otto had even ridden the train to the Russian border with his colleagues from university (at the Baroness’s insistence – she wouldn’t hear of him travelling on an ordinary passenger train, even in a private saloon carriage). He never slept so well as in his bedroom on the train, picturing himself shrunk very small and fitting into a toy train speeding across an open atlas of Europe. He always instructed his valet to leave the blinds undrawn, so that he could lie in bed looking out at the stars through the mist of steam and watch the moon rise and sink, a bubble in the dark. This trip was different. He wanted it to be slower, but it seemed faster.

Greta’s melancholy was catching. It spread through the few passengers like the measles. Otto understood that she was uneasy about her forthcoming marriage, and he was sympathetic, but her predicament also served to remind him of his own fate. For the present he was left to pursue his own course, a degree in physics and astronomy at the university in Vienna, a semester at the department in Berlin and a heavenly summer of research at the Observatory on the easternmost reaches of the Empire. But he knew that this respite from his fate was temporary. Sooner or later – and Otto had a sense of foreboding that it would be sooner – he must leave his love and enter the bank. He hated it; he hated the smell of the cedar panelling and the whispering of the clerks, the scratching of their pens and the yellow electric light, and the stultifying luncheons with all fifteen partners. Yet he knew it must come. He couldn’t exactly plead that he didn’t have a head for numbers.

He wondered what it would be like to be a regular man. He did not fool himself that he wanted to be poor, merely ordinarily wealthy. He would step off the train at the next station and become simple Herr Schmitt and live in a pleasant hotel. He rebuked himself: the thought was absurd.

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