Free The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald

of fact the place had been built fifty years earlier by the father of his wife’s first husband, Johann von Kuhn. Rockenthien, therefore, had only come into it in 1787, when he married. But he was not the kind of man whose behaviour would be affected by coming into property, or indeed by losing it, and he was not intimidated by finding himself responsible for a large number of other lives.
    The district tax office had been established in a relatively small front room to the left of the main entrance. There Rockenthien, in principle, as inheritor of the Rittergut , presided, but, though far from a weak man, he was too restless to preside for long over anything.Coelestin Just, with a clerk, rapidly got through the business.
    Fritz told Just: ‘Something happened to me.’
    Just replied that whatever it was, it must happen later, since his job, indeed his duty, was to come to the front office, where in former days the tenants of Schloss Gruningen had brought in their corn, their firewood and their geese, and now wrestled over their payments in compensation for the field work they no longer did for the Elector of Saxony.
    ‘We have arrived in good time, Hardenberg, but should start at once. It will take us certainly all this morning, then we may expect a good dinner, have no fear of that, then the Nachtisch , when we may all talk and express ourselves freely, and the after-dinner sleep, and we may expect to be at work again from four until six.’
    ‘Something has happened to me,’ Fritz repeated.
    Fritz wrote immediately to Erasmus at the School of Forestry at Hubertusberg, sending the letter by mail coach. Erasmus replied: ‘I was at first amazed when I received your letter, but since they have done away with Robespierre in Paris I have become so used to extraordinary happenings that I soon recovered.
    ‘You tell me, that a quarter of an hour decided you. How can you understand a Maiden in a quarter of an hour? If you had said, a quarter of a year, I should haveadmired your insight into the heart of a woman, but a quarter of an hour, just think of it!
    ‘You are young and fiery, the Maiden is only fourteen and also fiery. You are both sensual human beings and now a tender hour comes and you kiss one another for all you’re worth, and when that’s over you think, well, this was a Maiden, like other Maidens! But let’s suppose you get over all the obstacles, you get married. Then you can indulge as you never could before. But satisfaction makes for weariness, and you end up with what you’ve always so much dreaded, boredom.’
    Fritz was obliged to admit to his brother, from whom he had never had any concealments, that Sophie was not fourteen, but only twelve, and that he hadn’t had a tender hour, only the quarter of an hour he had mentioned, surrounded by other people, standing at the great windows of the Saal at Schloss Gruningen.
    ‘I am Fritz von Hardenberg,’ he had said to her. ‘You are Fraulein Sophie von Kuhn. You are twelve years of age, I heard your gracious mother say so.’
    Sophie put her hands to her hair. ‘Up, it should be up.’
    ‘In four years time you will have to consider what man would be fortunate enough to hope to be your husband. Don’t tell me that he would have to ask your stepfather! What do you say yourself?’
    ‘In four years time I don’t know what I shall be.’
    ‘You mean, you don’t know what you will become.’
    ‘I don’t want to become.’
    ‘Perhaps you are right.’
    ‘I want to be, and not to have to think about it.’
    ‘But you must not remain a child.’
    ‘I am not a child now.’
    ‘Sophie, I am a poet, but in four years I shall be an administrative official, receiving a salary. That is the time when we shall be married.’
    ‘I don’t know you!’
    ‘You have seen me. I am what you see.’
    Sophie laughed.
    ‘Do you always laugh at your guests?’
    ‘No, but at Gruningen we don’t talk like this.’
    ‘But would you be content to live with