The Other Side of Love Read Free

the stiffly dignified appearance that takes most men a lifetime to acquire. Alfred, however, had looked much the same in 1909, when at the age of twenty, a gravely deliberate young Englishman, he had first arrived in Berlin to open a Kingsmith branch on Unter den Linden.
     
    Alfred sedately descended the stairs.
    “Well,”
    he asked, patting his daughter’s hand,
    “have you decided where to hang your gold medals?”
    The slight gruffness in his teasing indicated his paternal love and pride.
     
    She kissed him, feeling the smoothness of his heavy, recently shaved jowl.
    “Let’s wait and see how fast the others can run.”
     
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    ‘The von Graetz family have always been top-notch sportsmen.”
    As he said his in-laws”
    name, Alfred’s mouth stiffened.
     
    Clothilde Kingsmith was a direct descendant of Erhart of Graetz, who in the early thirteenth century had pledged his sword to the militantly Christian Teutonic Order, fighting valiantly to bring the True Faith to the heathen Prussians. Erhart’s line had produced warriors and daughters who wed warriors. Clothilde’s first marriage, to Captain Siegfried von Hohenau, scion of an equally aristocratic Junker family, had come to an untimely end when the captain was killed on peacetime manoeuvres a few days after the first birthday of their son, also named Siegfried. Both the von Hohenaus and the von Graetzes had attempted to cut short the stately young widow’s inclination towards Alfred Kingsmith. Not because he was an Englander several years younger than she; no, not at all. What made the match impossible was the suitor’s plebeian birth. A shopkeeper! In 1914 there was a muted outburst of thanksgiving that Clothilde’s misguided affections had been ended by the war. Alfred returned to his side of the Channel, where his eyesight had rendered him unfit for active duty and he had served in the Foreign Office. In December of 1918, when he returned to war-ravaged Germany, Clothilde, aged thirty-four, mother of a ten-year-old son, had married him immediately. The von Hohenau family kept up a limp relationship because of Siegfried, known as Sigi. The von Graetzes, however, wasted no time on the Kingsmiths. Rathe had never met her widowed grandmother or her spinster aunt. Though this rift was never mentioned, and Clothilde seemed untouched, and though Alfred made it a point of duty to mention their maternal line to his daughter and stepson, Rathe was aware how much the snubbing had wounded him.
     
    Linking her arm in his, she said:
    “I’ll give it my all.”
     
    They fell silent as feminine footsteps echoed with heavy firmness on the stone floor of the diningroom. Alfred bowed formally as his wife came into the hall.
     
    Clothilde Ringsmith’s matronly curves were rendered pillar-like by a dark-green silk gown cut in the waistless style of a decade earlier. Her greying blonde hair was coiled around her ears, and she used no cosmetics. Utterly secure in her background, she gave no thought to self-embellishment or the vagaries of fashion. Her plumply mild, unpainted and unwrinkled face gave no clue to her remarkable strength of will. Here, after all, stood a woman who, during four long and bitter years of warfare, had refused to break off her unsanctioned engagement to an enemy - a lower-class enemy at that - despite the family outrage that had increased geometrically after her two brothers had fallen.
     
    “Good evening, Rathe,”
    she said in German - she spoke not a word of English. Looking with disapproval at the trim white uniform, she
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    added:
    “The Baronin should have permitted you to wear a party-dress to greet our guests.”
     
    “Oh, Mother,”
    Kathe groaned.
    “You can’t really mean we’re going to stand in a receiving-line?”
     
    “Naturally.”
     
    “But now only politicians stand and shake hands all night.”
     
    A slight frown showed in Clothilde’s still firm skin.
    “I don’t understand you, Kathe. How else can