Silver Wattle (10 page)

‘I’ll take him outside,’ I told her.

The courtyard garden was covered in snow and I tugged my shawl around my shoulders. Frip scampered to the flowerbed and crouched. He did not like the cold either so finished his business quickly. I was about to open the door so we could go back inside when he growled and circled my feet. I looked up and saw in the moonlight the silhouette of a man at the courtyard gates. I could tell from his stance that he was staring at me. My fingers trembled so badly that I could barely turn the door knob. Finally I managed to grasp it and, once Frip was inside after me, I slammed the door shut.

A few seconds later there was a knock at the front door. I stifled a scream and ran to the bottom of the stairs. ‘Aunt Josephine!’ I cried, with all the voice I could muster for I was breathless with fear. From the sound of the floorboards creaking above me, Aunt Josephine was preparing for bed and had not heard me.

The knock sounded again. Frip barked. The creaking of the floorboards stopped. Aunt Josephine must have heard it this time. I picked up the lamp Aunt Josephine had left for me and ran up the stairs as fast as I could.

‘Aunt Josephine!’ I cried from the landing. ‘The man…the man I told you about is at our door!’

The knocking continued, becoming more insistent with each rap.

Aunt Josephine appeared at the top of the stairs in her nightdress, a lamp in her hand. ‘One moment,’ she said, sounding as breathless as I did. I heard her open the door to the bedroom I shared with Klara and tell her to lock the door. ‘Don’t let anyone in but me or Adela,’ she said.

Aunt Josephine ran down the stairs. ‘Get Frip’s lead,’ she told me.

I grabbed the lead from the hallstand and placed it around Frip’s neck. Hilda, who had been woken by the commotion, was already at the door. We had no time to warn her before she opened it, revealing the dark face of the intruder. He barged inside, shaking the snow off his coat.

Frip lunged forward, barking furiously. I was not sure whether to keep holding on to his lead or to let him go for fear he would choke. Hilda shut the door but lingered near it.

The man took off his hat and brushed the snow from it. He peered at us through the gloom. It was not the man from the patisserie but another man: much older, with stringy grey hair. ‘I’ve come to warn you!’ he said to Aunt Josephine. ‘Someone is after your nieces.’

He spoke with the lilt of a Polish accent.

‘Who are you?’ demanded Aunt Josephine.

‘I am Henio Tyszka,’ the man answered. ‘But you will understand better if I tell you I am the stable manager for Doctor Hoffmann, and the husband of his nurse.’

Aunt Josephine and I responded to the man’s statement with stunned silence. Eventually Aunt Josephine gathered her will to invite the man into the drawing room and asked Hilda to make tea.

Pan Tyszka stared at the bronze horse on the mantelpiece before sitting down on the sofa. Frip sniffed his boots, then, sensing the danger had passed, sat by me.

Hilda brought the tea and placed it on the table. After she had left, Aunt Josephine turned to pan Tyszka. ‘Well, you had better explain.’

Pan Tyszka, who had refused to give his hat to Hilda and now sat with it clenched in his hands, wasted no time getting to the heart of the story. ‘Doctor Hoffmann has debts. Gambling debts. He lives elegantly, and his wife, who is expecting their first child, and his father-in-law have no idea of the depth of his trouble—that his home and riches are on the verge of being carted away by ruthless debt collectors. The desire to preserve his public image is a powerful motivation for an otherwise decent man to become a murderer. A man might do anything to save his own family, especially if the victim is painted to him as an adulteress and a cruel mother.’

I reached for Aunt Josephine’s hand. She grasped mine. Pan Tyszka had described a world different from the one we inhabited. A place where life was cheap.

Pan Tyszka studied our faces. ‘It looks to me that you have already guessed what I am going to tell you. The girls’ stepfather furnished Doctor Hoffmann’s house, that’s how they met. The doctor needed money quickly if he did not want to find his wife at the bottom of the river.’

The worst I had imagined was now confirmed. I felt ill when pan Tyszka verified Mother’s death had been from an overdose of morphine. He told us that his wife had been so horrified at the deed performed by her employer—which she was unaware of until overhearing a conversation between Doctor Hoffmann and Milosh—that she ran straight to her priest. But her confession and prayers could not bring her peace. Then she overheard another conversation in which Doctor Hoffman was seeking an assassin on Milosh’s behalf.

The idea of an assassin had seemed a fantasy when I thought about it; now it was nightmarishly real. I longed to be a child again, when my world had been Mother and Father, puppet shows and an adorable baby sister. My throat was raw and I found it difficult to swallow. ‘Why?’ I asked, unable to stop the tears falling down my cheeks. I was about to tell Aunt Josephine that money did not matter, that I would give my inheritance away to keep us safe. But what pan Tyszka said next changed my mind.

‘You do not have much time. It is your stepfather’s mistress who is urging him on. She wants this house and hounds him daily about it.’

I imagined paní Benova sleeping in Mother’s bed, pawing over her jewels, sitting in her chair. Paní Benova would not touch any of those things as long as I had breath in my body.

‘Will you go with us to the police?’ Aunt Josephine asked pan Tyszka.

If Aunt Josephine had stuck pan Tyszka with a needle, she could not have made him rise faster. ‘No, that is not what I have come for. That is not what I will do.’

‘But surely…your wife is religious,’ stammered Aunt Josephine. ‘Do you not think God needs to punish the men who killed a mother and now plot to destroy her daughters?’

Pan Tyszka backed towards the door and shook his head. ‘I have got the safety of a wife and four children to look out for. What you do to protect those girls is your business. I came to warn you and I have taken a risk to do that. If you tell the police I said anything, I will deny it all.’

No amount of tears and offers of money could persuade pan Tyszka to change his mind. It was two o’clock in the morning and the snow was still falling when he bade us farewell. ‘I came and warned you,’ he said. ‘My conscience is clear. The rest is up to you.’

I remembered Klara was still in her room and ran upstairs. She opened the door then retreated to the bed again, sitting with her knees to her chest and the blankets pulled around her.

Aunt Josephine followed after me, her face grim. ‘It’s all confirmed now and there’s nothing to do but what I dreaded most. I must send you girls away. God in heaven knows I’d do anything to keep you with me. You are like my own daughters. But I must think about your welfare, for it is better to have you far away and in safe hands than close by and in danger.’

The lamp I had placed on the side table flickered. The flame died then ignited more brightly than before.

‘There,’ said Aunt Josephine. ‘It’s your mother. She’s telling me she agrees with my decision.’

‘What decision?’ asked Klara, her eyes wide with fear. She had no idea what had passed.

Aunt Josephine grabbed our hands and squeezed them in her own. ‘I’m sending you to Ota. To Australia.’

Klara and I hardly had time to grasp what Aunt Josephine had said before Hilda appeared at the door. Aunt Josephine nodded to her. ‘We must get them out of Prague without Milosh knowing.’

T
he next weeks were full of secrecy and fear. Doctor Holub was our co-conspirator. He organised our passports through the British Consulate, and correspondence from Aunt Josephine to Uncle Ota was to pass through him to avoid leaving a trail from her to Australia.

‘I have booked tickets on a ship sailing to New York in the young ladies’ names, as well as the passage to Australia, to throw anyone off the scent,’ he explained to Aunt Josephine when she and I went to see him to make the final arrangements. ‘But there’s one problem. Pan Dolezal will not be inclined to sign permission for the girls’ allowance if he does not know where they are.’

‘What do you suggest?’ asked Aunt Josephine. ‘I can wire them money.’

‘Enough to last them until they are twenty-one?’ asked Doctor Holub.

Aunt Josephine’s inheritance was tied up in her house and I was horrified at the idea that she might sell it in order to support us. I was relieved when Doctor Holub added, ‘Wiring money might be too much of a risk. Someone at the bank may contact Milosh and the girls will be traced.’

‘But I cannot ask Ota to support them,’ said Aunt Josephine.

‘Is he so very poor?’ asked Doctor Holub.

‘He is not starving,’ said Aunt Josephine. ‘But he is not well off either.’

‘Well,’ said Doctor Holub, ‘send the young ladies with as much money as they can safely take with them. They will have to live simply until they come into their fortune. The important thing is to get them out of the country.’

‘I wish we could go to the police,’ I told Aunt Josephine on our way home. The flower sellers were out on the streets and everywhere I looked there were buckets of roses, lilies and daffodils. But the colours and scents of the flowers could not cheer me.

‘We can’t, without evidence or witnesses willing to testify,’ replied Aunt Josephine.

We walked by Madame Bouquet’s drapery, which had been Mother’s favourite shop. We admired some glazed floral chintzes and gold-embroidered silks. Every time Mother and I had passed this way, we stopped to look at the fabrics. It occurred to me that I may never see the shop again. Everywhere I went in Prague these days, I was bidding some well-loved pleasure farewell.

‘Won’t you come with us?’ I asked Aunt Josephine. ‘When we are gone you won’t be safe in Prague. What if Milosh threatens you to get information…’

I stopped. I could not bring myself to imagine what Milosh or the assassin might do to Aunt Josephine to make her talk.

‘I have Hilda and Frip,’ Aunt Josephine replied. ‘I can’t adapt to foreign countries and I am too old to change. But you and Klara are young and speak English. Uncle Ota will look after you. I know that, and your mother knew it too.’

When Aunt Josephine used to read Uncle Ota’s letters to us, I often thought that it would be marvellous to travel the world. I had not been anywhere outside of Czechoslovakia. My debut into society and my education in Paris and Florence had been halted by the war. But now that I was going away, I found the idea daunting. I thought of the wretched convicts the British had transported to Australia, and imagined their faces peering through the ships’ portholes at their homeland as it disappeared in the distance. Klara and I were not convicts but we were fugitives.

I recalled paní Milotova’s reaction when we had taken her into our confidence. ‘Australia?’ she said, her eyes wide with horror. ‘It’s a wild place. What about Klara and her music? She will have to come back to study in Leipzig otherwise she won’t amount to anything!’

When we returned home, I found Klara sitting in the garden with Frip. My sister was not the innocent child she had been until I was forced to tell her the truth about Mother’s death and why we were leaving. The change was not in her smooth skin, her soft hair or her agile hands. It was in the way she looked at things. There was hatred in her gaze, and I had never known Klara to despise anything. I sat down next to her and wanted to promise I would restore the joy she had once taken for granted. But I could not guarantee anything. I was unsure of the future myself.

‘What are you thinking about?’ I asked her.

She raised her eyes to meet mine. ‘When I am old enough, I will make Milosh and paní Benova pay for what they did.’

Her voice sent a chill through me. She did not sound like Klara any more.

‘You’ve been brave,’ I told her. ‘And we must be careful to hide our feelings. You mustn’t let Marie or anybody else know that we are leaving. We must behave as if everything is the same as it always has been.’

‘It’s not,’ said Klara, leaning down to pat Frip’s head. ‘Nothing will ever be the same without Mother.’

Klara was right. Even without the murder and the price on our lives, the chasm Mother’s death had left would still be there. I longed to be reborn in another, happier life. I wanted to believe that might happen in Australia. But I doubted it. Klara and I might have been able to rebuild our lives in Paris, London or somewhere in America. But the fifth continent? We may as well have been going to darkest Africa.

The morning of our departure, Aunt Josephine and I waited in the parlour for Doctor Holub. He was to take Klara and me to the train station. The story given to our servants was that we were departing to our summer house early with paní Milotova and her husband. Klara was sickly and needed fresh air and a change from Prague. We had a local maid in Doksy and Marie would follow later.

‘I will keep visitors away and live here until I have received word you and Klara are in Australia,’ Aunt Josephine explained to me. ‘Then I will close up this house and put it in the hands of a caretaker until your return.’

Aunt Josephine planned to move back to her own house. She would be safer amongst her high-society tenants than she would be living alone.

The arrival of paní Milotova and her husband in travelling dress added to the surreal atmosphere.

‘Doctor Holub has been delayed,’ paní Milotova informed us. ‘An urgent business matter came up but he will be here before ten o’clock.’

Aunt Josephine glanced at her watch and frowned. ‘That will be cutting things fine. The schedule is tight.’

Klara appeared from the garden with some Perle d’Or roses in her hands. ‘Look,’ she said, holding out the golden-pink flowers. ‘They are starting to bloom.’

Perle d’Or had been Mother’s favourite rose because of its fruity perfume. She had grown those in our garden from seed but had never seen them come into flower.

Paní Milotova put her arm around Klara. I hated my sister looking so drawn but at least her appearance was convincing as an invalid in need of country air.