Sally Wentworth - King of the Castle by King of the Castle

Author:King of the Castle [Castle, King of the]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: x
Published: 1978-08-12T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

At breakfast the next day they were joined not only by Katrina and Hendrik, but also by Hendrik's father, Herr Nimsgern, who was an equally charming but older and more urbane version of his son. He and Frau von Reistoven were perfectly at ease with one another and it seemed a matter of course that both parties should join up to take a motor tour of the quaint villages and towns around the lake. At one point they boarded a ferryboat that sent-up a churning wake and carried them quickly across Lake Constance to neighbouring Switzerland, which Lee was rather disappointed to find almost exactly the same as Austria. The architecture was very similar and the people spoke German at the restaurant where they went for a meal.

Hendrik hardly left her side and insisted on buying her several souvenirs, although she protested that she couldn't carry anything else.

'But surely you would like to take a fondue set back to England?'

'But really, Hendrik, I won't have room in my luggage.'

Max strolled over to them and said lightly, 'Hendrik, you must not indulge her any further or Lee will have to charter a special plane to take all these things home. Come, there's something rather special you must see.'

He adroitly led her away, but Lee bit her lip with vexation when she realised that Max probably thought she had been encouraging Hendrik to buy her presents.

The something special was a round, one-storeyed building that housed the most unusual painting Lee had ever seen. It was a panoramic oil painting which covered the entire walls of the round hall from floor to ceiling and which depicted an incident in the Franco- Prussian war when the defeated French army crossed into Switzerland in the depths of winter and asked for help for their wounded and dying soldiers. The nearer figures were life-size, the long, long column of thousands of slowly moving men, interspersed with carts of wounded and silent guns, receding into the distance. On one side there waited a train to take the wounded to hospital and Lee saw with surprise that one of the coaches was real, but it blended in completely with the picture. To stand with the painted figures all around her gave an uncanny feeling of reality, and she shivered as she saw the blood on the snow.

A hand, warm on her suddenly cold arm, made her turn to find the others gone and not Hendrik but Max looking down at her. 'It's incredible,' she told him. 'Everything seems so real, as if you expect the soldiers to start talking and moving again at any second.'

'A moment of suspended animation?' He looked round at the picture. 'Yes, I see what you mean. An instant in history has been taken and held for ever. But surely that is what a painting or a photograph is for, isn't it? But you're cold, let's go out in the sunshine again. I'd forgotten that you were—how did you put it?—a sucker for sad endings,' he said with a quizzical smile.

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