‘I work for the International Opera Company,’ said Tessa, rubbing the wolfhound’s stomach while returning the caresses of the setter caught in a frenzy of adolescent adoration. ‘We’re going to perform The Magic Flute in the theatre and there’s a terrible lot to do.’

‘You mean you’re directing this opera?’ said Maxi, puzzled. There had been artistic Pfaffensteins, he knew, and queer blood like that did sometimes turn up again.

Tessa laughed. ‘No, Maxi. I work backstage.’ Turning her attention to the water spaniel, she explained her duties.

‘You’re joking?’ said Maxi nervously. ‘You don’t really let them order you about? Ordinary carpenters and people like that?’

‘Maxi, I’ve told you—’

‘Yes, yes.’ Hastily he averted the expected information that all men were created equal and that the Princess of Pfaffenstein herself was a devout republican. But really it was all a bit much. No wonder his mother worried about Putzerl and thought her fast. ‘Couldn’t you come out just for an hour?’

Tessa shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, Maxi. There’s so much to do, and I promised to have coffee with the aunts.’

Maxi’s face fell. He had spent five minutes arranging the feather in his hat at an angle which would give pleasure to his intended and though he tried not to be vain about his legs he would have been foolish not to know that few men could carry off lederhosen the way he could. But if Putzerl absolutely wouldn’t, he might as well go and fetch his gun — and try the English breakfast.

‘I shall never forget it, never in my life!’ said the Rhine-maiden, sitting astride an Act One rock and throwing out a spear-carrying arm at her audience. ‘There she was, in white satin and a tiara, with princes and cardinals absolutely grovelling to her. And then, when she picked up Bubi and the flunkeys ran forward to take him from her, she just shook her head once like this,’ continued Frau Witzler, moving her massive Silesian head from right to left and back again, ‘and they fell back and escorted her upstairs. Six of them in uniform, clearing a way for her!’

The International Opera Company were assembled in the theatre at an unaccustomed early hour. Orchestral players who were rumoured not to have seen daylight in ten years were wandering round the pit, stage-hands stood about in clusters in the wings; on stage, Witzler and his principals sat about holding coffee-cups. The first rehearsal had been called for ten-thirty but no one was even pretending to begin. There were the usual difficulties in a new theatre: lost keys, dried-out dimmers… but that was not what was delaying them. It was the news conveyed by the Rhinemaiden at breakfast and repeated again and again as new members of the company turned up who had not yet heard it. Had anyone else informed them that their under wardrobe mistress was the Princess of Pfaffenstein, they might have been sceptical, but the Rhinemaiden’s Nordic truthfulness was notorious.

‘Well, that’s that,’ thought Boris. No more laughs in the wig room, no more milk for The Mother. Only Tessa had been able to wheedle a regular supply of milk out of the dairyman. I shall die young without yoghurt, thought the wig-master, giving in to trans-Danubian despair, and what does it matter?

‘I must have a replacement,’ said Frau Pollack. ‘It is quite impossible for me to do all that work alone.’ Boris shot her a look of loathing — who on earth could replace Tessa? He could see her now, sitting on an upturned crate, that pretty fawn hair of hers rippling to the ground, saying resolutely, ‘Cut, Boris. Go on, just do it. Cut.’

Klasky, pencilling Hungarian insults into the woodwind scores, was scowling. When the revolution came Tessa would be rounded up with the rest of the aristocrats who had ground the faces of the poor and would be almost certainly imprisoned, but he found that the thought gave him amazingly little satisfaction.

‘I lent her a dress,’ thought the Littlest Heidi deliriously, leaning in the fourth position against a pillar. ‘She was my friend.’ Heidi’s grandmother had gone into black on the day that the Crown Prince Rudolf shot himself and had remained thus ever since, and Heidi was a passionate royalist.

‘Who will bring my footstool now?’ thought Pino morosely. The little tenor was a head shorter than Raisa and Tessa’s tactful way of inserting a footstool behind the tombstone, rock or sofa on which he found himself had earned his deepest gratitude.

But it was Jacob who was most badly hit. Of course he could turn the whole thing to the company’s advantage. If he talked to the press, told them who Tessa was and released some poignant photographs of her performing some menial task, it would undoubtedly be excellent publicity and for a while improve their bookings. But only for a while. Against that, he had lost Tessa. No more glimpses of the small figure in her paint-stained smock grinning up at him as she trotted through the corridors; no one to catch his thoughts almost before he had thought them.

‘All right, everybody, that’s enough,’ he shouted now. ‘We’ll do a straight run-through of Act One. The Three Ladies on stage, please, and you, Pino — everyone else off and remember—’

He broke off, aware that nobody was listening. A hush had fallen and all eyes were on the auditorium.

Coming up the centre aisle, dressed exactly as usual and carrying in one hand a can of milk, in the other a straw-lined basket filled with brown eggs, came their under wardrobe mistress.

‘Good morning, Herr Witzler.’ Tessa’s eyes were anxious, for she was late. It had taken far longer than she had expected to explain her work in Vienna to the aunts. Not that she had lied to them exactly… not exactly.

‘Good morning, Your Highness.’

Tessa reached the pit, vanished beneath the footlights and reappeared beside the Herr Direktor on the stage. Raisa had lowered her vast bulk into a curtsy, the Littlest Heidi had sunk completely to the ground.

Tessa looked critically round the set. ‘The cleat for that batten is above the dimmer-board. Shall I fix it? And then shall I unpack the Papageno costumes, because the feathers will need curling again and—’

Jacob had cleared his throat. ‘Your Highness, it is absolutely out of the question that you continue to work for us. Absolutely out of the question — you must see that.’

Tessa had turned very pale. ‘No,’ she said quietly, ‘I don’t see it.’

‘Please.’ Jacob passed a plump hand over what had once been his hair. ‘The embarrassment… Your father was equerry to the Emperor.’ Only a man who had begged his way systematically through the ranks of the nobility, year after year, as Witzler had done, could gauge the extent of the lese majesty. ‘It would be impossible for the men to continue to give you orders.’

‘Not to mention the bad language,’ put in the Rhine-maiden.

Tessa looked round at the stage-hands, old friends now looking at her with the cowed respect she had so often encountered in the past. Not seeing her, seeing some shape, some label to be revered or hated according to their creed.

Swallowing down the lump in her throat, she said, ‘Herr Witzler, I have lost my home. I have nothing left except my work. Must I lose that also?’

Jacob shrugged wearily and flinched as his ulcer expressed its views on what was going on.

‘It is impossible, Your Highness. There are three hundred years of privilege which cannot be wiped out. The position of your family… your rank. I’m sorry, your work is excellent,’ said Jacob, ‘but you cannot remain with us.’

‘I see.’

Tessa put down her can of milk, her basket of eggs. Instinctively she had moved upstage and now, turning, commanded them all. When she spoke it was quietly, but the children of Schönbrunn had been taught not only to walk down a staircase, but also to be heard at whatever distance and in whatever place they chose.

‘You make me ashamed,’ she said, and the quiet voice cut like a whip. ‘Deeply and bitterly ashamed. All of you.’

They stared at her. Klasky put down his score. A stage-hand stepped backwards as though to escape the anger in her face. Was this the little waif, the ever-willing girl who would do anything for anyone?

They were not to blame for their amazement. No one here had seen the Emperor of Germany hopping round the courtyard, nursing his bitten leg after he had shot the last auroch left in the forests of Pfaffenstein. No one had watched the procession of stretchers carried up from the straw barns of the outlying farms, bringing the wounded men to be nursed inside the castle, at the command of the thirteen-year-old princess.

‘I believed what you said,’ Tessa’s low implacable voice went on. ‘I believed what Herr Witzler said about music making everybody equal. I believed Herr Klasky when he rehearsed the prisoners’ chorus in Fidelio… when he made them sing that chorus for four hours because what Beethoven said in it about freedom and brotherhood was sacred. I actually believed him. And now… in this production. In The Magic Flute.’ She looked at Witzler, then at the old bass who sang the High Priest, Sarastro, who was staring at her with an open mouth. ‘Only two days ago, when Herr Berger gave up his lunch and his tea to make that recitative perfect; that part where he says that Tamino is more than a prince because he is a man… Dear God, when you said that that was the keynote of the opera, I believed you.’

No one spoke. A door opened at the back of the hall as Farne slipped in to greet the company. No one heard him, no head turned. There was nobody in the theatre except that slight, pale, implacable figure accusing them.