Murders in the White Garden
I stood disconsolate, miserable, under the linked statues of Pan and Syrinx, envious of the hold the cloven-hoofed god had over his lover. Syrinx was looking into his eyes as if she adored him with all her being. Would that a certain someone might look into my eyes with that adoring gaze, instead of those of another.
Eros and Psyche too, were in a similar passionate embrace, and not far away Meleager and Atalanta were wound around each other’s forms,
‘Dinner is ready, sir,’ said Simon, tripping over the lawn towards me. ‘I brought your coat, as the evening has lost its warmth. And with your advanced years . . .’
He held the garment out towards me. I ignored it.
‘Thank you, Simon,’ I said, coldly, ‘I am well able to withstand a temperate evening without my topcoat.’
‘As you wish, sir, but Autumn is arriving.’
Let her come, I thought, wearily, I shall welcome her to my door as readily as I do her sister, Winter.
At dinner she appeared to ignore him as he stood behind my chair, but I knew those smiles she cast around the table were all for him. My own position was excruciating. I could not turn and look at Simon: that would have given him enormous pleasure. Yet I felt him to be smirking behind my back. I wanted to kill the smug libertine where he stood: stick my dinner knife in his back; ram my silver fork in his eye. He was making my life an utter misery. She was making my life a misery.
Count Von Friedrich’s daughter was unbearably beautiful. You could proclaim no more or less. Were I able to launch into similes and metaphors which would have poets biting their lips in envy I would be no closer to the truth. Her loveliness was as pure and understated as a snowdrop. Sofia was 19, had the softest eyes I have ever seen and her smile could not have been more enchanting if her parents had been fay. My heart yearned for one of those smiles, yet I knew that Simon gathered in each and every one. He was their sole recipient, and he knew it, and revelled in it.
In the sweetest tone I could muster, I said, ‘Simon, I should like some more consommé, if you please.’
‘Yes sir,’ came his infuriatingly compliant voice, ‘at once, sir.’
A serving girl was signalled behind my back and the soup, which I did not want, was very soon ladled into my plate.
As you may have gathered Simon and Sofia were lovers, one being the manservant, assigned to me by the count for the length of my stay at Friedrichschlosschen, the other being the German aristocrat’s nonpareil daughter. Simon was of course tall and very handsome, I have to concede him that, and but a handful of years older than Sofia. But he was of peasant stock, a hill farmer’s son, of no worth whatsoever. They were doomed but seemed totally careless with the future, which made it all the more hurtful to me. If she could deliberately risk all – her wealth and position in society – she must have been so very deeply in love with the youth.
A buttered green fish was passed under my nose. The chatter around me seemed to increase in volume. Then Simon jolted my chair and I realised I was being asked a question.
‘Herr Maurer,’ the count was saying, ‘are you any closer to discovering the identity of the murderer?’
The clink and clatter of silver cutlery on bone china ceased for a moment. I was suddenly aware that all eyes around the dinner table were on me. The question had caught me in the middle of my contemplations and I was unprepared for it. However, I rallied quickly, knowing that she would be listening and assessing my own worth. I wiped my lips on my table napkin to give me more thinking-time, before replying.
‘Count, my analysis has not yet reached the stage where I can announce the results of my research. I hope to do so within the next two or three weeks, but of course as you well know, these murders stretch over three centuries, and therefore we are looking for several murderers, most of them long gone to their maker themselves.’
‘Yes of course,’ replied the count in that silky tone he used when he was annoyed, ‘while I understand your interest in historical killers, my personal concern is the current one. I have a wife and daughter to protect.’
‘My detections have not yet reached the stage, count, where I can with all confidence provide you with my deductions.’
‘Two or three weeks?’
‘Yes, count.’
He dismissed me with a wave of his fork and a shrug, and then lost interest and went back to his meal. The rest of the table continued to stare but for a moment or two longer at me, then returned to chattering with their neighbours. I sat miserably stirring my soup, despising Simon, the count, and everyone in the room except the lovely Sofia, whom I loved as much as I hated.
That night I lay in the blackness of my room, any light from outside the window completely obscured by huge, thick, dusty velvet curtains, forcing myself to think about the murders in the Weissgarten. There were three in the castle records, but there had probably been more over the centuries, which had been lost to memory and had never been recorded. The first in the Friedrich family memoirs had been a maidservant, hurrying home late at night after a liaison with a married innkeeper. Her skull had been crushed. This incident had occurred exactly 87 years before the second victim was found with his neck broken, lying appropriately amongst the lilies.
Now, 134 years after that murder the castle had witnessed a third, this time a gardener in the early hours of the morning. His smoking pipe was still clenched between his teeth when they found him, his chest battered in by some heavy instrument. Evidenced by the garden flowers, he had died in terrible agony, thrashing around for a very long time, his breath and blood bubbling from the injury, for the single blow had not only smashed his rib cage into his lungs, it had left a ragged hole the size of a fist.
All these killings – one assumes murders – occurred in the garden which was reserved exclusively for white flowers. White roses, lilies, ox-eye daisies, jasmine, white lupins, and so forth and so on. The surrounding gardens of the castle boasted amongst its other treasures two orangeries (upper and lower), a water park with channelled streams running from the hills behind down into pools within the gardens, a haha, woodland walks, a natural open-air theatre. There were deep-green hedges of myrtle and yew to scent the air.
Apart from the natural wonders there was also an abundance of Greek statues in the baroque gardens: entwined lovers such as Orpheus and Eurydice, Narcissus and Echo, Bacchus and Ariadne and others already mentioned, along with single figures such as Zeus, Heracles and Artemis.
Finally, in the sunken garden, there was the Silent Orchestra: a set of beautifully sculpted statues of cherubs ‘playing’ musical instruments. This last set piece, positioned down below the marble staircase alongside which the obsidian aqueducts ran, was famous throughout the empire and visiting kings and queens came just to look and ‘listen’ to the silent music of these works of art, carved by that wonderful sculptor Georg von Richtendorf.
After receiving the invitation from the count to investigate the murder I left Dresden the following day, to find on my arrival that the scarlet stains on the white petals were still there.
‘We didn’t pick them,’ explained one of the undergardeners, ‘so you could see the exact spot where he died.’
The exact spot was indeed visible. The shape of his dead form remained indented in the crushed foliage. The deep footprints of the monster who had caved his chest also remained. On either side however were solid paths which of course showed no such depressions. The prints went right across the White Garden, but vanished on the stone walkways. Searching the rest of the enormous gardens, I was surprised and frustrated to find that no further footprints could be found. It was as if the murderer remained, somewhere in the castle grounds: as if he had hidden under some slab or stone, waiting for an opportunity to escape the scene.
Whoever had carried out this terrible deed, he was a big man – a very big man – no doubt with great strength and not even a kernel of a conscience. To strike someone dead with a blow to the head would seem to me to be more humane than crushing his chest and leaving him to die slowly in terrible pain.
On questioning the gardeners I was told that they often found footmarks in the White Garden, the plants beaten down. It was now so common they simply accepted it and repaired the damage. Attempts to find the culprit had always ended in failure, since the nights on which these tramplings occurred were always moonless, starless nights.
So there I lay in the dark, going over these thoughts in my head, wondering about the connection between the old murders, and this new one. Coincidences rarely happen in threes. Two bodies separated by a century laying in the same garden would be a coincidence. Three was extraordinary. There had to be some link, however small, and I was determined to find it. I had been here a month now. The night of the murder had been peat black, the sky obscured by cloud. I was waiting for just such another night, before going out to the White Garden and just sitting, listening, letting my mind absorb all that went on around me, hoping for insight.
At about one o’clock I rose from the four-poster bed and went to the window, drawing back a curtain. The reward was here at last. The dark night I had been waiting for. Not a sign of the moon, nor the stars, just an impenetrable inky blackness. Why then did I hesitate? Was I afraid? Yes, my fast-beating heart attested to that. I was scared. It’s a very brave man who can revisit the scene of a murder in complete darkness. What if he were still out there, waiting for his next victim? Surely he was an unreasoning creature, whose motives for killing were locked in a chamber of insanity deep within his brain, for the murdered man had had no enemies, no wealth, no wife or lover with a surplus of passion, only a simple love of flowers.
After dressing and arming myself I left my room where I encountered Simon sneaking down the hallway in his stockings.
‘Where are you going?’ I whispered, fiercely, the jealousy rising like lava in my breast. ‘Answer me!’
‘Where have I been?’ he corrected me, smiling. ‘Ask me that, though I won’t promise to answer.’
‘I’ll inform the count,’ I told him.
His face clouded over in dim light thrown out by my lamp.
‘Do that and I’ll run off with her. She’ll come you know. She loves me. I’ll run away with her and they’ll not find her again. I think you couldn’t stand that, sir. Not knowin’ where she is. What you can be sure of is we’d be locked in poverty. She’d become a drab, sitting in some greasy scullery waitin’ for me to come back from the inn, an’ me a drunk with no prospects. Is that what you’d want for the love of your life? You’d pine away, you would. I seen how you look at her. Like all the others. You tell the count about us and you’ll bring down ruin on her.’
I could have shot the impudent swine, there and then, and most certainly would have done it. The pistol was in my shaking hand, pointed at his insolent heart. But then a draught fortuitously blew out the flame in my lamp. I relit the wick with trembling fingers. Was murder so near at hand then? Was it so easily provoked? Simon was gone, back his own room I hoped, for I could not bear the thought that he had returned to Sofia and told her what I had said. They would laugh at me. She would laugh at me. It was positively unbearable, this corrosive ardour in my breast.
Out in the gardens it was cool. My passion wafted away and my analytical brain took over. That was good. That was how it should be. Get rid of the ardour, replace it with cold hard reasoning. I found myself a place in the White Garden and doused the light. There in complete darkness I sat and waited, listening hard, hearing the occasional hoot of a tawny owl, the carolling of amorous foxes, the whispers of the breezes. All night I sat there, awake, letting my senses absorb secrets amongst the blooms, hoping for revelations to soak into my brain by osmosis.
It must have been about two hours later that I sensed, and heard, someone running past me through the flowers. Startled, I was instantly alert, my pistol at the ready. Feet thumped on the earth near me. Plants were swished aside. Here, surely was the murderer? I hastily lit my lamp, shone it over the scene, found nothing. I moved about, searching, looking behind the statues of cherub and Greek lover. Nothing. Nothing. Footprints were there. White blooms lay crushed and scattered. But there was no figure hiding amongst the hedges. No human form attempting to leave the grounds. No skulking killer on his way to the woodland walks. Surely, surely I had provided light quick enough to catch the creature? Yet there was no one. Only the silent statues witnessing my agonising frustration.
Dawn came. In the early light I tracked the deep footmarks. This time I could see where bits of soil led. The gardeners had obviously swept the paths before my first visit, thus obscuring these traces of earth. I followed the short track which led from one statue, standing near an aspen, to a pair of others, on the far side of the Silent Orchestra. No trail went beyond these two points. It was a clear line between the entwined Apollo and Daphne, and the statue of Heracles. I stood by Heracles and looked across and could see the face of Daphne, looking back. She was not admiring her partner, Apollo. Her attention, her shy knowing smile, was on the marble Heracles.
‘What are you doing out here, sir?’ came an admonishing female voice which sent my heart flying. ‘You will catch your death! Such a heavy morning dew is bad for the chest of man of mature years.’
It was Sofia, out for an early morning stroll before breakfast. She had a maid in attendance. I bristled a little at the words ‘mature years’, since I was not yet in my middle thirties, but made no protest.
‘I am at my investigations,’ I replied. ‘My eagerness to work does not pay any attention to concerns for my health.’
‘Then you are most foolish, Herr Maurer. And have you discovered the identity of the horrible man who killed our gardener?’
I looked into her eyes. ‘Perhaps,’ I said, ‘it was not a man?’
‘A woman?’ she looked thoroughly shocked. ‘Sir, a woman could not commit such a nasty crime. It had to be a man, surely?’
‘Women have murdered in the past. But I was not impugning your sex.’
‘A beast then?’ she said, looking about her as if expecting to see it. ‘Some sort of mad wild creature, escaped from a cage?’
Could I tell her I was on the verge of suspecting supernatural causes? I decided not. She would laugh at me. I was inclined to laugh at myself. Perhaps lack of sleep had muddied my brain. There was circumstantial evidence there, if one believed that statues could come to life. To do that though one would have to throw away science and accept the power of the occult. Of course I was not prepared to do that. Should I be looking for another explanation which did not involve such strange departures from reality? Secret chambers and tunnels beneath the bases statues, for example, which might afford an escape route from the scene of the murder?
‘A beast? Possibly – but I don’t want to give too much away at present. You’ll forgive me if I ask you to wait until my formal announcement. I still have some facts to check. I need to go over my clues several times, extrapolate my findings. The truth in such cases does not easily reveal itself.’
She raised her dark eyebrows – oh how I would love to lick salt from those perfect arches – and turned back towards the house without another word. I went back to my statues and stood behind Daphne, looking across at the bulky Heracles. He was staring back, a heavy expression on his face. She, saucy madam, was peering over Apollo’s right shoulder at her club-wielding giant. The entangled Apollo seemed ignorant of this capriciousness and was gazing fondly at the hair which curled about her left ear, his expression devoid of suspicion.
‘Oh you sorry myth,’ I murmured to him. ‘You don’t even seem to be aware you have been cuckolded. Heracles is but a man and you are a handsome god, one of the Twelve Olympian deities, yet even you cannot hold your woman. What chance do I stand, a mortal of plain bearing?’
There were of course no tunnels or secret passages.
All that day I wondered. What if? What if it were a murder of the preternatural? Could I accept such an idea? Could I abandon logic and accept that there was a dark fluid world which operated in camera? This was an enlightened age, but there had been earlier times when the count’s ancestors had been accused of witchcraft, of devil worship, though never brought to account because of their high rank. Yet, when I came to think of it, the count himself spoke of this history not with humour, but with a serious note to his voice, almost as if he were ashamed. Almost as if he believed it to be true and there were such a thing as black magic.
And then I had to remind myself that I actually did believe in the supernatural. I was a Christian. I believed in the spirit world, a life after death, a hell where souls were punished. If all that were real to me then, what great step was it to the satanic arts, an offshoot of that belief?
I studied Daphne once again: she once the laurel, now the minx. If she had killed, it was not out of malice, of that I was sure. Human flesh, blood and bones had simply got in her way, as she rushed back in the darkness, eager to be by her partner’s side before the morning light revealed her absence. She had simply trampled over bodies in the same way that she had squashed the flowers. A swinging marble arm catching a head or neck. A stone foot crushing the chest of a man she had knocked over in her flight. These were blind accidents, nothing more.
That evening was a black as its predecessor.
I went to the count and said, ‘I wonder if I might borrow that manservant you loaned me, count, for an experiment? I would like to leave him for the night on the spot where the murder took place.’
The count regarded me with glittering eyes.
‘What sort of experiment is that?’
‘I myself was in the same place last night, while you all slept. I – I recorded certain sounds and observations. I would like them verified by another’s ears and eyes. They are little enough in themselves, but mysteries are often solved by gathering all the tiny pieces – as with a mosaic – and putting the pieces together to form a complete picture.’
The count sighed and gestured with his palms. ‘As you wish, Herr Maurer, but do give me some sort of answer soon. I was led to believe you were the best in your field at this kind of thing, yet you have been here a month already and with what result?’
‘I feel I am getting close.’
‘Then use the man, what do I care?’
I returned to the garden.
In order that I should put Simon in the exact path Daphne would take I tied the end of a thread to Apollo’s finger. The other end I tied to the club of Heracles. I could now place the manservant anywhere beneath this line and when Daphne visited her true love, he would be in her way. She would crush him with her great weight, as she galloped headlong towards her Heracles. If my theory was correct this was Simon’s last evening on earth. I would go to Sofia in good time, comfort her, sympathise, become the older confidante, woo her slowly, and lure her to my chamber in her bereft state.
When I sent for him, Simon was his usual audacious self.
‘Here? Stay out there all night? I will not,’ he stated.
‘Then,’ I said, sweetly, ‘you will go to the count and explain why you have disobeyed his orders.’
‘Damn you, sir,’ the youth growled at me, his face dark with anger, ‘you think you can get to her in a single night? Never. All right, I shall stay there, then, and be back in the morning. She will welcome me to her bed at sunrise and you, sir, will weep into your pillow yet again.’
‘You insolent swine,’ I thought, as I walked him down with a lamp to the place where he was to die, ‘you shall spend sunrise in Hell, if all goes to plan.’
After leaving him I pretended to go back to the house, but snuffed my lamplight and skipped off the path early. I hid in the myrtle bushes nearby. I wanted to be sure Simon stayed where he was. I had provided him with blankets and had made sure he was bedded down amongst the lilies. My conscience, I was surprised to find, was not disturbed by the fact that I was about to witness a violent accident. I was not a murderer. I was simply failing to tell a manservant of a certain danger. I might have been an army commander, leaving a soldier to guard a place, knowing that he might be attacked. That was not murder. It was expediency. I needed to prove my theory correct and the only way to do that was to place an expendable manservant in the path of the danger.
The darkness was impenetrable and I could do naught but listen hard for what might come.
I awoke with a start. What? Had I fallen asleep? My scheming had obviously exhausted me. I had been unable to remain awake. My clothes were damp and I was shivering with the cold. It took me a good few seconds to decide where I was, before a chilling remembrance came.
With a jolt I realised there was a dim shielded light out there, in the White Garden. Someone had brought a dark-lamp to Simon. I could hear noises coming from the lily beds. Horrible thrashing, groaning, sighing noises. Sounds which were ugly to my ears. A couple were indulging in sexual intercourse out there amongst the flowers. I could hear their unsavoury murmurs of satisfaction, their grunts and moans. Disgusting sounds that made me feel sick to my stomach.
She had come to him. They lay together amongst the pale lilies and fragrant jasmine, making love on that deadly path. Yet where was the heavy form of Daphne? Why had these two fornicators not already been crushed to death, the pair of them? Surely Daphne should be with her own lover, grating stone against stone, sliding marble into marble? Daphne and Heracles should, like those floating-island rocks encountered by the Jason’s Argonauts the Symplegades, be clashing together in mineral passion. There were no such noises, no such boulder-to-boulder sounds, only those animal gasps coming from amongst the trampled lilies of the garden.
Yet. Yet. Are not the sounds of ecstasy are similar to those of a dying man? What if those moans and groans, that thrashing noise, were the last convulsions of life in two expiring forms? Had Daphne been and gone, smashed bones and flesh, left pulp in her wake? The thought almost choked me as the bile rose to my mouth and terror swept through me.
‘Oh my God!’ I cried. ‘I’ve killed her!’
I rushed out of hiding. Expecting to witness tragedy. My most urgent desire was to reach the lovers and separate them. If I did not they would die in each other’s arms and that would be too bitter a blow to bear. Such a death would bestow immortality on their love: a memory that would haunt me all my remaining days.
When I came to the spot they were indeed locked together, but unhurt. In their half-nakedness they looked up at me and laughed as I stood there in my clinging clothes, my sorry damp cap upon my head. Then Simon doused their dark-lamp and I heard them scurrying away, into the night, seeking another lover’s tryst amongst the maze of myrtle bushes.
I could not move. Mortified, humiliated, brimming with shame and utterly desolate, I remained standing there a very long time, until a red dawn crept from a harlot’s bed and climbed the sky. A gardener found me, was concerned for me. I told him I was all right. I said I had heard someone crashing through the White Garden in the night and had come to investigate.
‘Oh no, that were in the evenin’, sir – while you was up at the castle fetchin’ master Simon. In the twilight. We had a vandal, sir, I think – who broke a statue. No one saw him, but we heard him from the orchard, came a-runnin’ too late, for he was gone off into the gloam. Leastways, we saw not a soul, but damage were done afore we got to it.’
I looked towards the statues now, having been too excited by my schemes to notice anything untoward in the fading daylight of the previous evening.
‘Damaged one of the sculptures?’
The cherubic silent musicians were all in their places, harp, trumpet, flute, none of them broken so far as I could see.
I turned my attention to the Greeks.
Daphne was in her rightful spot, but looking unusually glum.
Apollo himself was intact but seemed less the trammelled cuckold, more the lover in control.
I spun round.
Heracles!
Heracles had lost his head! It had been shattered, smashed to fragments by a heavy blow. Even now an under-gardener was sweeping up the pieces, tossing them onto the gravel path. What an humiliating end for a Greek hero, his face to be trodden into the ground by careless feet.
It took me a little while to understand what had occurred. All those years, all those decades, those centuries, Apollo had missed his Daphne, but knew not which way she went in the darkness. He had guessed of course that she had a lover, but in the pitch darkness which of those others was he? Adonis? Heracles? Hermes? Zeus even? Or one of those who already had a lover by his side, but was dissatisfied? He knew not. He could only surmise. He could only wait and fume, hoping one night to learn the truth.
That night had come, his waiting at an end.
It was I who had shewn him, with a thread, his hated rival.
Greek hero Heracles might be, but he was no match for the righteous wrath of an Olympian god.