The groom got to his feet and bobbed his head to her, obviously surprised to see her dressed as she was.
“Bring the Arabian for me, will you? What’s his name, Voltan?” UVOLTAN, Baroness?” the groom asked disapprovingly.
“I’ll get him,” she said. “You go find me a saddle and a blanket.”
“Yes, of course, Baroness.” She decided not to correct him about her rank. So far as he was concerned, she was and would forever be the wife of the Baron, and thus the Baroness. It would be of little interest to him that, because she was his widow, she was no longer the wife of the Baron or that, in those circumstances, the title would pass to Manfried’s nearest surviving male relative.
Which meant that she was the UBARONESS” only by courtesy. He would be even less interested to know that in the circumstances, she had reverted to being in her own right what she had been before she married Manfried, the Countess Batthyany.
She pulled open the heavy wooden door to Voltan’s stall, pulled him out of it, and led him to the stable yard. The groom came out a moment later carrying a saddle and a blanket. She took the blanket from him and threw it onvoltan, and then, after the groom had put the saddle in place and tightened the girth, she mounted the horse and directed the adjustment of the stirrups.
Satisfied, she rode out of the stable yard, walking Voltan long enough to start his blood flowing. Then, touching her heels to his sides, she put him into a canter. He would like to have been given his head, put into a gallop, she sensed, but she didn’t think that was wise. There might be ice under the layer of snow.
She allowed herself to think of nothing but the chill wind in her face, the drumbeat of hooves, and the animal beneath her until his heartbeat against her inner thighs told her that he had had enough.
She turned his head then and started to walk him back toward the Schloss.
It was only then that she could begin to face the day ahead of her. She would much rather not have come to the Schloss at all. She had wept when they told her in Budapest that Manfried had been killed.
Manny had been a good man, and he had died too young. He was–had been–thirty. She was twenty-nine. They had been married not quite seven years and she had come to like, even admire him. And he had loved her, which had been very sweet indeed. She mourned him in her own way, and that should have been enough.
But, of course, it was not. Manny had been Oberstleutnant Baron von Steighofen, and there would have to be a public memorial for the people on his lands, for the soldiers of his regiment, and for what Der Fuhrer
“Das Volk” of the “Thousand-Year Reich.” And she was the Countess Batthyany and realized the obligations of her birth. In public, she would be the grieved aristocrat whose husband had made the supreme sacrifice for his country, his Fuhrer, et cetera, et cetera.
An assortment of Manfried’s relatives (none of hers, she had no living close relatives) headed by his cousin the Baron von Fulmar would be at the Schloss. Plus an assortment of dignitaries, local and from Berlin.
They included Helmut von Heurten-Mitnitz, representing the Foreign Ministry, and two Standartenfuhrers of the SS-SD. One of these, Kramer, was the SS-SD man for Hesse, and the other, representing the Reichsfuhrer-SS, was a peasant named Muller.
Muller had arrived with von Heurten-Mitnitz, which the Countess had thought a little odd, until Kramer had announced at cocktails that the two of them had been together in Morocco and had barely managed to escape when the Americans had invaded North Africa.
War, like politics, makes strange bedfellows, the Countess thought wryly.
She rather liked von Heurten-Mitnitz, the little she’d seen of him.
There were two kinds of Pomeranians, the ugly kind and the other kind–lean, lithe, leopard-like. This one was the other kind. It was a shame that under current circumstances there would be no opportunity to get to know him better.