Laura Westenra
Styria, Austria
18??
Love we had in abundance during my childhood, but we were by no means a magnificent family in terms of wealth or status. But we did inhabit a castle in rural Austria, in a sleepy farming region called Styria. I suppose that is quite the arrogant statement, isn’t it? Let me clarify. What I mean to say is, we were well off, and far more than I appreciated at the time. As a child, I naturally took servants and such for granted because that’s simply the world I grew up in. It took years and a brutal dose of humility before I was wise enough to realize that most people in the world most definitely do not live in castles and that I was very, very lucky to do so. It’s just that we certainly were not some royal or noble family, by any means. One might call us a sort of upper middle class. We didn’t have fancy balls or diamond brooches or walk around in powdered wigs and glass slippers. But, while we dined on the same simple breads and potatoes that the farmers ate, we did, after all, live in a castle, and did, I admit, have servants.
You may wonder how it was that we could afford to live in a castle, even a small one. A small income, in this rural part of the world, goes a great way, especially as more and more nobles and rich folk moved from the countryside to the big cities to be close to the action, as they say, building fantastic new mansions and leaving crumbling, older country estates to languish into disrepair. My father, bless him, knew how to stretch a penny and had the wisdom to do so. In England, especially London, our fortunes would have been scant compared to the truly wealthy. Here, in this lonely and primitive part of the Austrian countryside, everything old was so marvellously cheap. Well, relatively speaking.
I was not raised to feel any great need for expensive things in my life. My father did not want me to measure happiness in new dresses and by having more of something than someone else had. Of course I, like most teenage girls, did not understand and begged him for new dresses more often than I should have, and couldn’t help but compare myself to the fine fashions shown off by some of the other, wealthier girls in the region. I longed to be just as pretty, or, perhaps, just a little bit prettier. What girl doesn’t?
My father tried very hard to teach me early on that the best things in life are not material things, but love, honesty, loyalty and wisdom. Looking back now, I really don't see how any more money would have materially added to our comforts, or even to our luxuries. We had each other, my father and I, and with our familial love we should have been content. But, again, what teenage girl is so easily satisfied by things it is far too easy to take for granted? Especially when we see other girls driven around in four-horse carriages and wearing the latest Paris fashions and with gold braided into their hair, capturing every boy’s eye as they grace the dance floor in this palatial mansion or the next? One sees what others have and can’t help but want it for ourselves, or to have even more than them the way they seem to have more than us. My poor father. At least I never had any sisters to compound my youthful demands, my selfishness, insecurity and greed. Oh, what nightmare we would have been for him, especially without my mother to keep us in line.
My father was English, which is why I bear an English name despite having an Austrian mother and being raised in that country. As a little girl I never had the opportunity to visit the country of father’s birth. He had been a prominent English envoy in Vienna for many years. This is where he met and fell in love with my mother, a very prominent dancer at the time. His own father had been a successful railway engineer during the early boom decades in England and America. When grandfather died, he left my father a significant inheritance. This allowed my parents to retire young, both eager to start a family somewhere quiet and away from the hectic city life they’d known. The inheritance allowed my parents to purchase our grand feudal residence and the estate on which it stands, which includes fields for crops and animals.
Truth be told, there was a factor that made our castle, our schloss, rather more affordable than it otherwise might have been. Fearful local folk said the place was haunted, due to the last owners all having been brutally murdered there some twenty years previous to my parents’ arrival. The castle had stood empty and desolate ever since. The sole surviving member of the family that owned the place, now living in the nearby city of Graz, had been quite desperate to sell. My parents spent a good few years making it habitable again while I was just a babe. To this day I have an odd fondness for the smell of fresh sawdust and the sounds of construction.
Nothing could be more picturesque or solitary than the home they made for us. The low mountains of the Eastern Alps rise behind us and the Styrian lowlands stretch the other direction. The schloss stands on a slight rise at the edge of a thick evergreen forest. The dark green wood is filled with cool, deep shadows and ancient mysteries. Opposite the forest are grain fields and orchards and pens for sheep, goats and a few cattle.
The schloss was built many generations ago when knights and princesses were more common and not something out of a fairy tale. The road from the nearby village borders the old woods as it approaches us. It crosses a bubbling little stream via a steep Gothic bridge close to the castle, and then curves past our home and plunges into the woods, ending in the ruins of a village long abandoned. There is a moat around the schloss, connected to the nearby stream. It is stocked with perch and sailed by many swans, with fleets of white waterlilies afloat on it’s surface and dozens of different wildflowers along the banks. It’s heart-squeezingly beautiful in the summer, the air alive with birds and bees during the day and with fireflies and the croaking of toads at night. And it makes a perfect little ice rink in the wintertime.
Towering over everything, the stone schloss has a many-windowed front. The design was one of the inspirations for the famous castle of Burg Kreuzenstein when it was rebuilt, though is much smaller and humbler. The stone is simple brown and the the wood-tiled roofs and window trims are green, so that it all blends in with nature, rather than standing out. We have two towers, one round one with a tall, conical roof and one square tower with a pyramid-shaped roof sporting windows in the four corners. There is a short cobblestone bridge outside the front door, over the moat.
Inside, my parents had long ago converted a training hall into the most brilliant dance hall instead. This had been a gift for my mother, who loved to dance. I have heard tales of the splendid parties my parents used to throw, inviting the entire nearby village and beyond. My mother would wow them with her skills and my father would do his best to keep up. Unfortunately, following the premature death of my lovely mother, the dance hall was never used again. I often begged him to put on an event as I grew up, wanting to enjoy such parties as a young adult, since I’d been too young to remember much of them. I think my father was just too heartbroken; it pained him too much to see others enjoying my mother’s passion, knowing that she could no longer enjoy it herself.
Though we are quite out in the country, the schloss is not always a very lonely place. The nearest inhabited village, Kinderberg, is only a fifteen minute walk away, straight down the road. Graz, the largest city in the region is a few hours ride. We visited Kinderberg most market days, on Saturdays. We made trips into Graz less often, though more often as I grew older and begged to attend dinners and balls and other occasions with friends that I only rarely got to see, events far more sophisticated than anything in in our sleepy village.
I have said that Kinderberg is the nearest inhabited village. That is because there is, only three miles deep into the old forest, a very spooky ruined village once called Steinbach. The forest reclaimed most of the farmers’ fields surrounding it decades ago and continues to work steadily on the rest. The houses are all abandoned and some roofs have fallen in or have trees growing right up through them. Rats, pheasant and foxes make their homes in them now. A quaint little roofless town hall pokes out of the ruins, blackened by long-ago fire damage.
There is a huge and desolate chateau that sits on the edge of the village, overlooking the silent ruins from the edge of the ancient forest. A grand family once resided there, the Karnsteins, a long line now extinct. But now the place is falling apart, also much damaged by fire, though the stone structure has stood up fairly well over the almost two centuries since people lived there. It’s still an impressive building, but awes in a way that sends chills down your spine when you think of entering it at night.
There is an extensive and ancient graveyard in Steinbach. It is strewn with peasants’ remains, all long rotted under decrepit, simple headstones. And there are extensive, large moldering tombs housing the once-proud family of Karnstein, dating back hundreds of years.
Of course, in this very superstitious part of the world, there is a mysterious legend regarding what event brought down Steinbach so long ago. What old ruin in central Europe, with its archaic peoples and long memories, does not have such story? If people thought of our schloss as creepy and haunted, such ill feelings truly paled in comparison to how people felt about the ruined village. It took months for my parents to convince others to help rebuild the schloss, to move in and staff it after tales of death had become associated with it. It has been several generations since Steinbach fell and still no local will so much as set foot within a mile of the abandoned place. My father, not being a superstitious man, did take me on picnics there on occasion and I did enjoy exploring the broken homes and ruined graves, as long as my father was there to protect me from whatever ghosts or goblins might be hiding within.
While our castle was in a somewhat remote place, it wasn’t entirely a lonely way to grow up. There were several servants and staff who occupied rooms in the schloss; gardeners, labourers, cooks and the like. And our fields and orchards were looked after by men and women of Kinderberg, and we saw them daily.
I had a good-natured governess, who raised me from birth. I cannot remember a time when her fat, kindly face was not a familiar picture in my memory. Her name was Frau Griselle Becker and she was a native of Berne, Switzerland. Her gentle care and endless good nature partly helped me endure the loss and absence of my mother. She helped feed and bathe me as a child, cared for me when I was sick, took me to play with other children. She took me skating in winter and accompanied me to market as often as father. She taught me to cook and garden, to sew and knit, and instructed me in our many household duties. After my mother passed, she was like an aunt and grandmother all rolled into one.
Mademoiselle Yvette de Lafontaine, a ‘finishing governess’ from Marseille, France also came to reside with us once I turned fifteen. She was herself only a few years older than me. She’s slender and tall, with long, dark hair and is very pretty, although stern. And she has the most beautiful accent! Where far too many French I have met are unfortunately snobbish and rude, she is elegantly dignified though a bit blunt, as the French often can be. I half admired her and looked up to her for her beauty and fashion and poise, though as a young woman I did chafe under such a strict taskmistress. She was brought on to help tutor me. While my father taught me politics and math and physics, she struggled to impart manners and social skills, taught me song and dance, and helped me to learn art and history and literature.
My two gouvernantes had just as much control over me as you might conjecture such sage persons would have in the case of a rather spoiled girl whose only parent allowed her pretty much her own way in everything. Frau Becker was very generous but capable of tough love when I needed it. Mademoiselle de Lafontaine was quite firm most of the time, yet fair; I resented the discipline at the time but sorely needed it, something I only recognized after having a daughter of my own many years later.
Yvette spoke French and English. Frau Becker spoke German and imperfect English. My father, my gouvernantes and I switched between all three languages regularly so that I might become fluent in them all at an early age. The consequence was a Babel of tongues in our conversations which often caused confused strangers to laugh. Although, one might be surprised by how many people I’ve met who do speak multiple languages, it’s really quite impressive.
Children always complain of this or that silly and selfish thing when growing up but, looking back, with father and Frau Becker and Yvette and everyone else, all snug and provided for in our little castle, I know now that I was quite privileged. In general, I had a very good childhood, safe and comfortable.
That said, one of the most scarring and terribly impressionable events of my childhood happened at the age of six, just after my mother passed. No matter how hard I have tried to forget such things, it remains clearly with me to this day. At the time, my father and the others thought it a trifling incident.
We had no idea what terrible significance it would have until many years later.
