ANNIKA
LAKE HALLSTATT, AUSTRIA
MARCH 1938
Two aspirin and a piece of toast. Annika placed both beside the percolator of coffee as Vati’s snores rattled down the hall of their cottage, shaking the wood counter, oven, and lump of a refrigerator in their kitchen space.
The snoring thundered louder as she snuck along the hallway and inched open her father’s door, the cigarette smoke in his clothing searing her nose. The key to the castle’s front door dangled from a hook near his bureau, and she quietly swiped it, folding it into her palm.
As she stepped outside their home, she buttoned her woolen sweater over her white blouse and the waistband of her bluecoarse-cotton skirt. Her father’s head would be pounding when he finally awoke, like one of his hammers against a nail, and she preferred to be far away when he started shouting her name.
The spring air awakened her swiftly, much more than a cup of coffee ever could, and she heard the song of a bird weaving through the boughs of a conifer. She searched the knobby cone buttons and fur coats of the trees, but the bird evaded her.
Swallows were prevalent in Austria—the one songbird that preferred the sky to the trees or marches. A bird that the localVogelfreunde—the bird friends of their region—couldn’t catch. But this was a crossbill singing, she guessed. The parrot of the Alps.
TheVogelfreundeprowled through the woodlands and meadows with their nets every autumn in search of the crossbill, goldfinch, bullfinch, and siskin that often roamed low to the ground. During the winter months, these men and women cared for the birds and then sold them at their spring exhibition. Any unsold birds were released into the forest for the summer months.
Had theVogelfreundereleased their catch for the spring, or had this bird managed to maintain its freedom?
A branch rustled, and this time Annika caught a glimpse of the bird, his russet head coloring the winter branches like a cranberry garland on a Christmas tree.
“Fly free,” she whispered. TheVogelfreundenever harmed their prisoners, but still she thought neither the songbirds nor the silent ones should be locked in cages for the winter.
The crossbill’s song of freedom played in her head as she skirted out of the trees and around catkins fringed over the lakeshore, past buildings that housed cows and horses long ago. In the yard beyond her, the medieval Schloss Schwansee towered like a cathedral on the land between the mountain and the shore. LakeHallstatt mirrored blue below it, its glassy surface broken only by the village’s candy-colored reflection across the water.
Schloss Schwansee was smaller than other nearby castles like Hohenwerfen or Schloss Mirabell, but it was every bit as intriguing with its three turrets, each one topped with a cone of slate. Dormer windows lined the attic with a much taller tower standing at its side, a former bell tower perhaps, and a family chapel linked to the rear through a narrow corridor.
Like most of the outbuildings, the chapel was typically locked when the family wasn’t home, but during this last visit, Herr Dornbach had asked Annika’s father to build something inside the chapel. Or at least that’s what she’d overheard when Vati was talking to her friend Hermann, the youth he hired to help with all the construction projects. When Vati had seen her, he’d asked for lunch.
Between the lake that lapped up against its front lawn and the mountain wall on the other side, the house would have been well protected in centuries past from any warring enemy, but someone in the past generation had cleared a lane through the forest, connecting with a country road that led into the nearby town called Obertraun.
Herr Dornbach and Max had already taken the train that stopped in Obertraun back to Vienna, but Frau Dornbach had lingered here another week. Now that Frau Dornbach was gone as well, Annika would spend her morning sweeping floors, dusting the furniture, scrubbing the porcelain in the bathrooms with Domestos like her mother used to do.
This role of housekeeper was only for a season, but it was a role Annika wore like a badge trying to honor both Max and her mother every day with her work. If God ever allowed Mama toglimpse down from the heavens, Annika hoped that she’d see her taking good care of both Vati and this castle.
One could only polish so much silver, though, sweep and scrub so many meters of floor. In the winter, Annika would go for weeks at a time without cleaning a single room until Herr Dornbach’s secretary sent a message via telegram to say the family would arrive soon. Then she’d air the musty smell out of the house, make all the beds, stock the icebox with food from the grocer.
She unlocked the front door, and inside, the carpeted staircase dipped down into a hall floored with polished marble, the vast space between the walls built to entertain aristocrats from Vienna and local men after a hunting party in the hills.
The staircase split at the landing, and she climbed up to the left, each step groaning as if its back were on the verge of breaking, its joints aching with four hundred years of service to the Dornbachs and other families who’d called this castle home.
Others, like her mother, had spent their lives serving this house—and sometimes its inhabitants. Annika had no intention of giving up her entire life for a house, but each time Max left, it felt as if her heart were on the verge of breaking like these steps. Adeep thundering ache that made her tremble on the inside.
A giant portrait of Max hung in the corridor above a wrought-iron tripod empty of its flower vase. She didn’t linger there. His handsome face was so firm in the painting, his lips pressed together in a way that made him look cruel. Like his father could be.
The door into Herr Dornbach’s bedroom was beside his wife’s, both rooms overlooking the lake and village and rugged Alps in the distance. Max’s room was in the back of the house; the view from his window faced the forest and fortress of a mountain.
She always saved the cleaning of Max’s room until last.
Some nights, when Vati left for the beer hall, Annika returned to the house, though she never cleaned in those late hours. Sometimes she riffled through the clothing and records in Max’s room, as if he’d left part of himself there. Other nights, she’d settle into the library on the ground floor and read one of the many books neatly lined on the shelves. Sometimes she even borrowed a book or two, carefully replacing them before the Dornbachs returned.
Vati would have her head if he knew she snuck in while he was away, pretending to be the lady of the house, but it seemed to her that he often forgot his role as well, propping himself up, in his mind at least, as the king of this castle.
Annika retrieved the cleaning supplies from the hallway closet and stepped into Frau Dornbach’s bedroom. Instead of portraying family members or landscapes, the oil paintings on her walls were swirls of odd colors and shapes, contrasting with the worn chintz curtains that draped over the windows, a marigold-yellow and green design topped with marigold fringe to match the bedcoverings.
Why the mistress pulled these heavy curtains over the windows was beyond Annika, especially with the view of the boathouse in the reeds below and the village of Hallstatt across the lake with its dual church steeples gleaming like two bronze candlesticks.
The Catholic church was posted like an elegant stamp in the right corner, but next to it was the creepyBeinhausfilled with hundreds, if not thousands, of bones, dug up from graves after their ten-year lease expired. Or at least that’s what her friend Sarah Leitner said after she’d visited this house of bones.
