By Royal Command Read Free

his arm.
    ‘You are trying to scare me, Otto.’
    ‘On the contrary! I am trying to wake you up. It is only when we are close to death that we feel fully alive.’
    Liesl wasn’t sure about this. She felt most fully alive eating chocolate in a nice hot bath while her gramophone played something smooth by the latest American jazz crooner.
    The car slithered round a hairpin bend and they continued their descent between high banks of clean white snow.
    ‘So what did you make of my little cottage?’ von Schlick asked. By cottage he meant his ancestral home – Schloss Donnerspitze – a monstrous medieval castle built high into the side of the Schwarzkogel above Jochberg. To describe it as a cottage was ridiculous. It was a huge pile of massive grey-black stones, ugly and domineering, like a great bully squatting on the mountainside, sneering at the puny houses below.
    Growing up, von Schlick had found the castle cold and dark and oppressive. It was built on a giant’s scale and he had never been happy there. He envied the farmers’ children in their pretty and cosy-looking wooden chalets, with flowers round the doors in summer and peaked hats of snow in the winter.
    He had left the castle at the earliest opportunity, and gone to university in Vienna where he had bought himself an attractive modern house near the Karlsplatz. It was everything the family castle wasn’t, light and airy and clean and warm. His mother had stayed on at the Schloss, all alone with a dwindling staff, until she had died four years ago, at which point Otto had had the place closed down and packed in mothballs. He had vowed never to return and had been considering selling the hated pile.
    Otto’s life was in Vienna now, not here in the backward and boring countryside. He had married Frieda, a minor aristocrat, and they had lived a city life of parties, opera, theatre, nightclubs, eating, drinking and dancing. It was only when he stopped and took a breath after five years of marriage that he realised he had very little in common with his wife. He was certain he didn’t love her and in fact he wasn’t sure he even liked her.
    He began spending time with a string of younger, more exciting women who had meant little more to him than the contents of a packet of cigarettes. To be smoked and thrown away, forgotten. Things had changed, though, when he had set eyes on the charming Liesl at the theatre. She was an actress and a dancer, and Otto was utterly captivated by her.
    It was soon after they met that Otto announced to his wife that he was tired of city life and had a yearning to return to his roots in the Tyrol.
    ‘From now on,’ he told her, ‘I will be spending my summers at the Schloss and I will winter here in Vienna. Apart from the odd weekend’s skiing.’
    ‘Then you will be spending your summers alone,’ said his wife. ‘I have no desire to set foot inside that gloomy monstrosity.’
    ‘So be it,’ said Otto.
    What his wife didn’t need to know was that he had no intention of spending his summers alone. His plan was to install Liesl in the Schloss. She could still act if she wanted, during the winter season in Vienna, but her summers would be spent at Schloss Donnerspitze where she could play at being a Gräfin and mistress of all she surveyed.
    They had driven over this morning, taking the road from Vienna at breakneck speeds, their helmets and goggles protecting them from the worst of the icy winds. But when they arrived at the Schloss Liesl had felt more dead than alive and had needed a large brandy to restore her senses.
    Her first sight of the castle had not been encouraging and now, on the way back down the mountain, she told Otto that she had grave doubts about moving here.
    ‘But, Liebste ,’ Otto pleaded, slowing down slightly so that he wouldn’t have to shout, ‘you did not see the dear old place in its best light. When the sun comes out, and the grass is green and the shaggy-haired dairy cows are gambolling in the