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Across the room Richard protested against some remark of Saye's. Lady Matlock reproved both with little severity.

"Does it pain you to see us together?" Elizabeth asked.

"It pains me to remember what I lost. But it comforts me to see what you have found. Never suppose affection for them diminishes what you may give me. I am grateful beyond words that they loved you when I could not."

Elizabeth slipped her hand into his. They stood a while listening to the sounds of an ordinary family afternoon. Albrecht had expected meeting his niece to revive his grief. He had not expected to find within it the beginnings of something like peace.

Later he showed her a tiny book bound in blue leather. Its first pages contained childish copying exercises, executed with painstaking care; later pages held songs and absurd verses in three different hands. Friedrich's script was disciplined, Albrecht's impatient, and Minna's full of flourishes that grew increasingly outrageous whenever her brothers attempted to imitate them.

Elizabeth opened to a line beneath which Minna had written: "Friedrich says duty must come first. Albrecht says the apple tree will not wait. I have decided upon the apples."

"Did she really climb the tree?" Elizabeth asked.

"She climbed it," Albrecht said, "and fell into the arms of the brother who had forbidden it. Then she blamed me for proposing the enterprise, which I confess I had done."

"That is terribly unjust."

"Quite. Friedrich thanked heaven she was unharmed and scolded us both. Five minutes afterward he fetched her the ripest apple himself."

Elizabeth pressed the book to her chest. Its pages did not tell her how Minna died or explain the fear that had followed her across the sea. But they made her mother alive in another way: a girl with muddy slippers, determined opinions, and brothers who loved her beyond all prudence.

That evening, before leaving, Albrecht asked whether Elizabeth would someday allow him to show her Falkenried.

"When peace permits it," she answered. "I should like to see her garden."

"And the apple tree," he said.

"Especially the apple tree."

He smiled, but as he entered his carriage he thought of the garden's upper terrace. He had not willingly stood there since Friedrich died. Perhaps Elizabeth's presence would one day restore that place too. He could not know how much lay buried beneath its orderly stones.

CHAPTER 21

Questions Without Answers

Adelheid had survived twenty-three years by learning to welcome ordinary conversation. A question about the gardens was an opportunity to praise the gardener. A remark about a child's education invited a discussion of instructors. Even an unkind reflection upon the past could be answered with a regretful sigh and a change of subject. Most people were relieved when she supplied a subject that required less of them.

Elizabeth Bennet was proving more difficult.

Not because she was suspicious. That would have been a simpler obstacle. She was open and affectionate toward Albrecht, anxious to know the customs of Falkenried, and grateful for every small detail of Minna's childhood. She accepted Adelheid's hospitality when it was offered and wrote her careful little notes afterward. She also possessed the alarming ability to remember precisely what had been said, although she did not always understand why a particular fact might matter.

The first real difficulty occurred over a portfolio of music.

Adelheid had brought several copies from Germany as a gift, among them a setting of a lullaby. Elizabeth, delighted, read the title aloud in German and began humming the first line. Albrecht, seated at the far end of the drawing room, looked up with a smile.

"Minna loved that song," he said. "She would sing it until the servants begged her to choose something else."

"Mama sang it when I was little," Elizabeth answered. "But the words she knew were different. I used to think she had invented them."

"She probably did. She invented new verses to everything."

Adelheid noticed Lady Matlock listening beside the pianoforte and deliberately addressed the company in English. The others followed her lead. She smiled. "She seems to have remembered more than anyone supposed."

"Little pieces of home," Elizabeth said. "My father believed that songs remained when names and places could not."

"Did she remember places?" Adelheid asked. "A room, perhaps? A garden?"

"Sometimes she spoke of a fountain," Elizabeth said. "It was never clear whether she remembered it or had dreamed it."