He had no desire to run into the kitchen miss over whom he’d made such a spectacular romantic failure. He doubted he’d recognize her, and indeed it took him a while to recall her name. Hannelore, it came to him, with the feeling of a scarf being knotted too tightly around his neck. Hannelore. She would be a matron now. A matron with an adult child.
His route from Munich to Meersburg took him through Memmingen and then Lindau, toasted golden towns set in the rolling nap of the Alpenvorland. When it stretched itself out in languor, Bavaria seemed to Dirk, somehow, tamed. Well, he’d traveled half the world since he was stupid enough to be young. The wild forests of his youth—perhaps they no longer existed. The world was too strictly regulated now. The idea of ever being able to find his way back to that waldhütte where he had been raised—to the extent he had been raised—was as impossible as Nastaran’s need to return to her lost childhood in Persia. It couldn’t happen.
Idle thoughts for a tedious journey. No value could attach to revisiting his youth, even if he could manage it somehow.
Still, the notion returned, and he had to throw it down repeatedly, like bread crumbs in some old tale—hoping the wild thrushes would eat them up. Despite those romantic stories that had become so popular—even Felix’s little boys adored the sweetened renditions of Grimm as served up by stern Frau Gouvernante—sometimes one wandered into the woods because the ominous woods were safer than home was.
In the intervening years, Meersburg had grown, yet it opened its familiar prospects to him with a grudging heart. It seemed busier than he recalled. A gloss of foreign tongues spoke of a strengthening economy. Naturally, he’d never been invited to the von Koenig Meersburg quarters during the time he had lived with the Pfeiffers, both during Nastaran’s life and in those years afterward. But he was able to locate it easily enough. He stood looking through the iron gate at the shallow forecourt of the Kurt von Koenig manse. Maybe the brother would be in residence and maybe not, but either way, Dirk hoped to avoid Hannelore. Surely she’d been sent packing with a nice residual, but maybe she’d been taken in with her son. Lived here as a retainer of some sort.
Dirk was performing this duty for Ethelinda but really for Felix. Steady now. Some impulse Dirk hadn’t felt in years prompted him to utter a silent prayer as he pulled the bell cord. The fact of a prayer made him think of Pfarrer Johannes. Dirk had left his village church with a message for the Bishop of Meersburg and had never returned . . . What a layabout he’d been! What a bad son.
A doorman powdered in the old manner ushered Dirk into a chamber crowded with pots of straggly geraniums brought in from the early frost. A glass of beer was offered; Herr von Koenig was at home but occupied. But before long the head of the family arrived, stout as any Bavarian burgher, his thinning hair the color of melted marzipan.
“I served briefly at your family estate one summer,” said Dirk, wanting only to be honorable and not to engage beyond what was necessary. “As I’ve come recently to befriend your sister in Munich, I’ve been deputized to deliver a packet of documents to you following the death of her husband.”
“My old friend Felix,” said Kurt. “My former friend. Former in both senses, as there is no hope of reconciliation now.”
“I wasn’t asked to await a reply,” said Dirk, standing. “I’ll confirm to Frau Stahlbaum that you have received the parcel. Thank you for receiving me.”
“Sit down. Wait. A reply may be in order, whether one was requested or not.” Kurt waved a fat hand distractedly, unfolding handwritten documents. He flipped pages, humming to himself. Some were letters. “If you were thinking of marrying the Widow Stahlbaum, you’ll get neither support nor protest from me about it. We aren’t much involved in each other’s lives now.”
“I understand that.” Dirk managed to sound sniffy and also to avoid addressing the issue.
“She thinks I wronged Felix somehow.”
“I don’t enjoy such personal standing with the family that I could comment.”
“I’m not pushing my life story upon you, sir. Just explaining the circumstances. This is an interesting letter. Have you looked at it?”
“Certainly not. May I be excused now?”
“You’ve come all the way from Munich on family business. It would be improper of me not to offer a meal.”
“Thank you; it would be improper of me to accept. I’m an incidental messenger.”
“Not according to this, you’re not,” he said, gesturing to the paper. “You did say you are Herr Drosselmeier?”
Dirk looked as officious as he knew how.
“I see that some of these are letters my brother-in-law sent my sister while he was away in London one year. Explaining to her why he had stepped in and named himself as the father of my child. It seems he had thought he was protecting you, and didn’t learn I was the guilty father for some years. Until it was too late.”
Dirk, not skilled at lying, made a stab at it. “I know that story and, truly, it doesn’t concern me, or even much interest me.”
“You were close to Felix, though. How droll, for him to be shielding a peasant boy from scandal—how could a reputation for scandal have hurt the likes of you? And all along it was my good name he was accidentally saving—at least until the wretched woman, I mean of course my lovely wife, showed up with my genius son.”
“I counted him as a friend,” said Dirk. The only friend, actually.
“And what are you, really, to my sister, from whom I will remain estranged for the rest of my days, it seems?”
Dirk stood again, this time clasping his coat in business-like fashion. “I am a neighbor and a well-wisher of your nephews, Sebastian and Günther.”
“I see she has named you godfather to the boys, and that should she die, you will be the one to raise them up.”
Dirk said nothing. He hadn’t heard that item.
“Godfather, is that what it’s called now. Frankly, I was surprised that Felix could claim to have fathered them. I took him for something of a washout with the gentler sex—indeed, initially I thought his false claim of foisting a child upon a country maiden was intended to bolster for him an unlikely reputation as a ladies’ man. That much I was happy to give to him. As a friend—of course.” Now Kurt von Koenig stood, too. “There’s no written reply to my sister. But I should be in your debt if you could carry my condolences to her on the death of her husband.”
“I’m unequal to that task.”
“I loved him, too, you understand.”
“I shall tell your nephews you send appropriate greetings. They oughtn’t be tainted by the mistakes of their parents’ generation.”
“Whom are they more like? Felix or Ethelinda?”
“I never know how to answer a notion of impossible comparisons.”
“I don’t imagine you want to meet my son, so you can tell Ethelinda what he is like? His name is Adolphus Wolfgang.”
Dirk didn’t answer, just achieved the door before he turned around. “You might do me one favor. Do you know the whereabouts of an old doctor named Mesmer?”