Again Mayerling The Last Night of the Young Baroness

Continued. Start at No. 529

An hour later, Elsa and Garanin were already at the South Station. As if waiting for them, the train to Baden immediately set off as soon as they got into the car. They went to a second-class office, where two plush old ladies, a plump woman with a basket of eggs on her knees, and a lady with an almost bare chest, smoking a long cigarette in the mouthpiece, were swinging their legs in a lace stocking with which the red shoe was falling.
The locomotive gave a shrill whistle, the cars twitched, and slowly began to creep back to the station with trays, wheelbarrows, chestnut vendors and sausages. Then, faster and faster, they began to go back to their homes, churches, squares, alleys ... Not even ten minutes had passed before the fields in golden patches of sunspots turned around in the carriage window. The beech forest flew by, the mauve oak trunks speckled by the sun rippled.

Garanin slowly stretched his legs, took out a newspaper from his pocket and froze in bliss. Elsa sat opposite - in a black suit, in a black hat with a small glass swallow, inaccessible, serious, coldish eyes are fixed on a small volume of poems. During separation, it became somehow more distant, inaccessible.
“Shakespeare's Sonnets,” read Garanin, squinting his eyes. Not taking her eyes off the book, Elsa smiled at the sonnet she had read, and this precious smile remained on her face for several moments. For the entire journey, they did not utter a word. An hour later, the train began to slow down, and Baden suddenly appeared in the windows.
Garanin and Elsa got out of the car and quickly, without looking at each other, walked along a long platform past the cash desks, announcements, schedules, and low warehouses. They went to the station square, which was bathed in a pinkish mist of a sunny autumn day. Stone Mozart on the square, a dark train station, glittering signs of shops and shops - everything was flooded with sun. The sunbeam that had slid through the crown of an old oak, as if exposed Elsa's face, gave warmth to her eyes with lovely long eyelashes, her lips glittered with carmine.
The city was the headquarters of the Central Group of Forces of the Soviet Army, and it was filled with Soviet soldiers and officers. Garanin quickly found the car, the driver of which agreed to throw them to Mayerling. The car stopped at a fork in the road, and Garanin and Elsa silently headed for the monastery gates along a shady linden alley. Clean air filled the lungs, the birds called over, smelled of rotten foliage and some special, dizzying smell of autumn. The forest washed by the recent rain, a cloud of delightful whiteness, black slippery walkways, a huge gray boulder surrounded by elderberry bushes - all this was fabulously beautiful.
It seemed to Garanin that he had fallen into a unique world, a world where everything was tender, weightless, radiant. In this dream, anything could happen in reality. In the autumn air there was a cold afternoon clarity, the sharp blue shadows of the trees stretched to the high brick wall of the monastery's garden, covered by a thousand-creeping creeping plant.
Garanin looked at Elsa and more and more understood that now his whole fate, his whole life depended on her.
“Elsa,” he said unexpectedly to himself, “for the sake of all that is holy, listen to me.” What you saw in Moscow on that damned day for me is not what you thought it was, no matter how strange it sounds, part of a special special operation ... Believe me, Elsa, from the day I kissed you , your shadow blocked the whole world for me. Elsa, I can not live without you ...
She walked beside him, slightly bowing her head and smiling at something.
- What are you smiling at, Elsa? Just do not be silent!
Suddenly, Elsa turned to Garanin and said softly:
- Yes, I am silent, not knowing
what to say,
Not because the heart
got cold.
No, she puts it on my mouth
Printing
My love, which is not
limit.
This is not me, this is Shakespeare's 23 sonnet. And please, Willie, don't ask me anything else. I can't remember that horror when I saw you with this ... I cried all night. Now this is not the time to talk. Come on, we have a lot of work to do today. Magda Yagic can really get away from us!
All day without rest, they interviewed the nuns, the villagers, the visitors of the village squash, the local policeman, the princess and her maid. Some information seemed interesting to them, which could lead to a trace. But when at ten in the evening they gathered to go to Baden, it turned out that the last train to Vienna had already left. Fortunately, the maid of Princess Gertrude gave them her room in the outhouse, where there was a passable bed and a sofa.
Elsa wished Garanina good night and went to the bed that stood behind the screen, but suddenly it turned out that he was holding her shoulders, pressing her lips to her chest, leaving her hot, obedient flesh. With his free hand, he stroked her hair, burning from such a keen pleasure that he had never felt before. Some amazing tenderness changed in him all the awkward, rude things that had recently tormented him so much. Now he knew that in a minute, perhaps they would recognize such happiness, before which everything, the whole world, is nothing. He took her hands, opened her eyes with a kiss.
“Please,” he murmured, “please ... I beg you ...”
“Stupid ...” she said softly, “you need to lock the door ... Wait a minute ...”
The warmth of her body slipped away for a moment, twice gently snapped the key in the lock.
“Well,” Elsa said.
He felt her palm on the back of his head, quietly poked his lips into the hot corner of her half-open mouth, slipped, found, and the whole world immediately turned dark pink. And then, when Garanin, already sitting next to her on the edge of the bed, not tearing his lips from her temple, stroked her thighs, he felt not at all that hasty excitement that he had felt more than once, but some kind of fertile, delightful force, the unbearable rise of all the senses, the presence of something worth living for.
Elsa responded to his every movement, to his every desire. There was extraordinary grace in her responsiveness. It seemed to have flown by just a moment, but already her bare arms, exhausted, stretched out and fell like dead men. Elsa lay with her eyes closed, and a smile, a strange, impotent, tired smile wandered across her face. And Garanin, leaning his hand on the pillow, looking at her tender bare chest, on her clean forehead, found in this face a resemblance to Madonna Rafael.
“Willie ...” said Elsa, without opening her eyes. “Willie ... because it was paradise ... I have never, ever ...
Then she turned to the window, through which the main monastic church was visible and said:
“Do you know this story about Prince Rudolph and the young baroness, who spent their last night here?” They loved each other as much as we did! And just lay on the same bed. Just a hundred steps from us ... I want to understand everything, to see how it was ...

How it was

Trieste Express C-1 (Trieste Kurierzug C-1). Station Baden (Baden bei Wien). In 26 km southwest of Vienna. 30 January 1889 of the year. Tuesday. 9: 00 AM.
There was a blizzard at night. The village of Mayerling, lost in a dense forest, snow-covered to the roofs. She seemed empty and quiet, even the dogs stopped barking. In the morning the sky cleared, light white clouds, illuminated by the pink shine of the sun, floated lazily in transparent heights. Suddenly, the gates of a small hunting castle, the main pride and the main attraction of the village, opened, and a carriage pulled by three horses flew out of them. Carrying headlong over the icy road, the driver, risking to tip over and break, managed to ride to Baden railway station eight minutes before the arrival of the Trieste express train. A man in a stitched hunting suit jumped out of the pram. Quickly rising to the platform, he went to the station commander, standing alone at the station bell.

- A ticket to the Trieste Express! The hunter says imperatively and arrogantly.
- Trieste Express in Baden does not stop! - the station manager answers, surprised that someone might not know this.
The hunter thinks for a minute.
“I am Count Hayos, I appeal to you,” he says solemnly, “not as a private person, but as a chamberlain of the court of His Imperial Majesty.” An event happened that ... Earl leans to the very ear of the station master and whispers something to him.
- What should I do? After all, only His Excellency the Minister of Railways has the right to stop the Trieste Express! - pulling at the string in front of the graph, babble of the station chief.
- Close the semaphore, dummy! Immediately! A matter of special national importance! - shouts the graph. - One minute will be enough for me to get into the nearest car! And one minute will be enough for me to throw you out of your lousy position if you do not obey the order!
The stationmaster, pale as death, runs toward the semaphore lever. It seems to him that after he closes the semaphore in front of the Trieste express train, a flood will begin or, at worst, a volcanic eruption.

***

The express train Trieste Kurierzug C-1 rushes to break the pre-morning fog. Far off you can see the pale lights of Baden station. Soon - Vienna! But the Baden station semaphore is closed! For the first time in the life of Josef Wuycek, an old machinist who has been driving this express for 10 for years! Having made incredible efforts, the driver stops the engine. A red-hot red-hot door, near which a fireman stands at the ready, roars like an angry dragon, casting ominous purple shadows. There is a ringing silence. Only a loud puff of a locomotive is heard, which releases waves of steam enveloping the station in a white cloud. 9: 10 AM. The semaphore raises its rod. The train starts off and almost instantly disappears from sight. On the last carriage, three bright lanterns are visible - as if traces of bullets entering the human body.
The head of the station runs to the station house, where incessantly, like an annoying sewing machine, scribbles the Morse machine, and in its knock the excited voices of the whole empire sound. The station chief feels that on him, on the insignificant cog of the imperial railways, lies the hand of history this minute! A minute later, telegraphic devices are already knocking on the entire line, reporting monstrous news.
Awesome news ...
Vein. South Station 30 January. Tuesday. 9: 50 AM.
From the depths of the South Station, plunged into the darkness, one can hear the feverish breath of steam locomotives, sharp whistles of locomotives, the sound of wheels of arriving and departing trains. And in the midst of all this chaos, the station triumphantly, like the owner of its possessions, enters the elite express Trieste - Vienna. The mighty courier engine gives sharp short whistles, demanding that he be cleared the way. In 9: 50 he approaches the platform, releasing jets of white steam. The doors of the cars swing open, and passengers spill onto the platform. The usual hustle and bustle begins: cries of joy, tears, hugs, rumble of luggage carts, the pounding of porters. Count Chayos hurries out of the first-class carriage. He looks around helplessly. When he was here for the first time without a footman and servants, he unsuccessfully tried to find a way out onto the street ... A gendarme arriving in time prompted him to the station square and put him in a fiacre.
The imperial palace clock (Hofburg) showed 10: 08 when Count Hayos entered the main lobby. Sentinels salute. Slowly it rises along shining flat steps, already whitened by the morning sun. Count Hayos enters the palace and immediately begins to reflect on who, in fact, should tell the emperor the incredible news brought by him, Count Hayos. Is he, Hayos? So that every time the emperor glances at him, he remembers this horror? And does he even dare to enter the emperor in the morning without an appointed audience?
Count Hayos rises in the office of Count Bombelli, chief cofprinder of Crown Prince Rudolph. The startled Count Bombelli cannot recover from horror:
- In what form, Count Hayos, you appear in the palace! In a wet hunting suit, without orders and uniform!
“Count, I brought terrible news ...”
- The most terrible news, which may be, is the news of your appearance in the palace in this form!
“Count, that's not the point ...”
- How not in this? I just can't continue the conversation with you until you ...
“Count, do not interrupt me, for the sake of all that is holy ... I have come to tell you that Crown Prince Rudolph is in Mayerling ...
- I know that he is in Mayerling on a hunt ... with you ... By the way, why are you here and not there?
- Count, please do not interrupt me. The heir ... He is no more ... He committed suicide ... In addition ... his mistress, Baroness Maria Vecher, was discovered next to him, which he, apparently ... Probably by mutual agreement. Double suicide ...
There is heavy silence in the office of Count Bombelli. Both courtiers mourn for the heir who has passed away. At the same time, Count Bombelli is counting on what position he will be able to qualify for in these conditions. Such a position, as with the crown prince, he cannot be found ... Damn it, what devil did the heir decide to take such a tactless step? By the way, who will be the heir now? There may be a dynastic crisis.
Finally, Hoyos breaks the tragic silence with a reminder that the death of the heir must be immediately reported to the emperor. But Bombelli categorically refuses to tell the emperor the sad news. Only Prince Hohenlohe, the chief chambermaster of His Majesty, has the right to personally report to His Majesty. He is, however, away. But since the heir was also the general inspector of the infantry of the Imperial-Royal Army, only the Adjutant General of His Majesty Count Paar can be authorized in this matter, only he has the right to report to the emperor on the affairs of the army. The two graphs inform the third column, the graph of Paar, the tragic news, and at the same time that he must inform the emperor about the death of the heir. But the adjutant general also has doubts. He states that crown prince Rudolph is first and foremost a heir and son. And he, Count Paar, cannot make to the emperor messages about members of the highest family. After a brief mournful silence, the graph is littered with a brilliant thought: let the emperor let the empress know! But who will tell the Empress about this? Of course, Baron Nochcha, her chamberlain.

To be continued