Free The Lightstep by John Dickinson

young girls.'
    'Of course. But for the most part we do not mind her. And we
prefer to dance with her than not to dance at all. In the Lightstep,
the candle is the man. And the dance is a charm to bring him
back to us.'
    After a turn and another figure, because he did not ask, she had
said: 'I'm dancing for you.'
    She should not have told him. Of course it ruined the charm, if
you let them know who it was for. And so his enemies had taken
him, on the last day of the war, and they had left Adelsheim a
shell.
    She sat looking at her half-written page, fighting the thought
that there might have been something she could have done, some
prayer she might have said, that would have brought him back.
Somehow she had failed.
    You did not love him as I did. Perhaps, if she had loved him even
more . . .
    'You must bear with Mother, if you can,' said the ghost from
the settee.
    'I do not believe she wishes me to bear with her,' said the
ghost of the younger Maria, still turning in her dance with
the candle held before her.
    'Fate has dealt her a hard hand, to have a mind like hers and
yet be married to Father.'
    'Father has a good heart. Even she admits that. I am sure a
good heart is more in the eyes of God than any quickness
of wit. She will marry me to Cousin Julius, Alba. I cannot
think Father would have permitted it if his mind had been
whole.'
    'Can you not? A marriage to any Rother, even Julius, would
assure you of wealth and position.'
    'Julius is too young, and sickly. I shall spend a long engagement,
year in and year out. And I shall spend it waiting to hear if
my husband-to-be has in fact died. And listening to Mother in
the meanwhile. I declare I am as oppressed as any poor peasant,
and I long for my own revolution.'
    . . . endless sequence of bloody acts and murders that you have
committed, in your own country and in ours, horrified us, as
it has horrified all the world. And now you have continued
your murderous attacks even as your plenipotentiaries
discussed peace, and indeed it has been represented to me that
the action in which my brother died took place on the very
day that news of the armistice reached the camps. Thus it
seems that it was unnecessary, wasteful, an act of barbarity and
nothing more. I do not know how to describe to you
the virtues of the man that has been lost. I believe it no
exaggeration to say that his gentleness and compassion
approached that of our Saviour himself . . .
    Was it too much to compare him with the Lord? Would they
sneer when they read it, these men who knew no respect for
priest or altar? But surely it was the truth. Everyone had thought
the same about him. Even Michel Wéry seemed to have loved
him (or why would he have come all the way here, a stranger,
knowing that everyone else in Erzberg was too bemused by their
losses to think of poor Adelsheim?). Even a man who had once
been an enemy.
    'You should meet my friend Michel,' said Albrecht from the
settee. 'You would find him intriguing.'
    'Michel?' repeated the younger Maria with a laugh. 'You write
so much about him! Michel this, Michel that. What has become
of him now?'
    'He is still going off from time to time, trying to get himself
killed. And thankfully the Lord keeps sparing him. Did I tell you
the Prince has made him a hussar?'
    'My Goodness!'
    'My Goodness indeed. The hussars were pink with fury. I
think His Highness must have wanted to spite them. But in truth
he is attached not to the regiment but to Balcke-Horneswerden's
staff. He spends half his time carrying messages for us, and the
other half off seeing all sorts of strange people who have no love
for Privilege, but who have come to have even less for the Liberty
and Equality that France has brought them. He has become a sort
of spy. I wonder if he feels the irony of it.'
    An enemy and a spy, thought Maria. A fanatic, too. You never
told me about his hands. Yet still you could make him your friend.
Truly we are wretched, yet in our wretchedness we are only
one case among