Chapter 15

Die Forelle (The Trout)

Adam woke up to the sound of singing. He was disorientated for a moment, and then it all came back. He was at the lake, lying on a blanket in the shade of—he squinted his eyes—yes, in the shade Juliet’s thin cream-coloured shawl provided. She must have draped it onto the bush next to him to protect him from the afternoon’s sun when he had fallen asleep while she read The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket to him. How one could fall asleep while listening to Edgar Allen Poe read in Juliet Heatherstone’s expressive voice was beyond Adam, but apparently the heat, the wine and not at least the emotional exhaustion of their earlier conversation had taken their toll on him.

On the way to the lake Adam had soon given up his pretense of riding a different way, and Juliet had seemed pleased to see him riding up next to her. She hadn’t been crying, either, and Adam had been relieved to see that she obviously had found solace in their talk at the Study, too. To lighten their spirits up they had started to recite poems; Adam had declaimed Longfellow’s Hymn to the Night, and Juliet had surprised him with Poe’s Raven. He had taken great pride in helping her out with some passages, but secretly admitted that she remembered more of it than he did.

Finally he had guided Juliet to the one site at the lake where a green meadow went all the way down to the shore, and was guarded from the dry and dusty prairie at the opposite end by high bushes; and while he had laid out the blanket and opened a bottle of wine, she had announced that she now would “serve the surprise.” And indeed, it had been a surprise: Juliet had reached into the basket and presented him with a cake.

“I baked it,” she had said proudly, as if she’d heralded the completion of her first novel. “It’s a queen cake, with currants.”

“A queen cake?” He had known better than to make a comment about how very fitting her choice of pastry had seemed to him. “It looks good. Very good.”

And then he had seen the tiny hole in it, and for a moment he had feared that her precious creation had been tainted by some vermin, but Juliet must have noticed his look and she had chuckled, “Never fear, Adam. That was…. I tested the cake.”

“You tested it? Or you couldn’t wait to taste it, Mylady?” he had teased. “If Miss Westlake knew that….”

“Of course I tested it. This is my first cake, and I wanted to be sure it was nothing less than perfect.” Boy, Juliet could even make talk about baking sound imperious.

“And you found it to be…” Adam had prompted.

“Perfect, naturally.” She had looked completely serious.

“Naturally.” Adam hadn’t been sure if she’d do something life-threatening to him should she find out he was inwardly dying from suppressed laughing.

“Naturally.” And then she had bent over and convulsed in laughter. Adam had joined her a surprised second later.

The queen cake had turned out to be surprisingly good. Maybe not perfect, but nearly, and Adam had made every effort to tell Juliet so. The cake had gone well with the white wine that Adam had cooled in the lake, and that, in collaboration with the now relaxed atmosphere, must have lured him into sleep while he had been supposed to listen to Pym’s juvenile adventures on a sailboat.

Adam felt rested, albeit a bit embarrassed. But then again, if Juliet had taken offense she surely would have woken him instantly, and not created a sun shelter and let him rest in peace. He propped himself up on his elbows and looked around, following her voice.

Juliet sat at the water’s edge, her back to him, and was singing Schubert’s Die Forelle, surprisingly in tune. Well, at least by her standards, Adam thought, cringing when Juliet narrowly missed the high e at “mit kaltem Blute”. She knew the German words, though, and the way they effortlessly dripped off her lips and she put feeling into the tongue-twisting syllables showed how well she was accustomed to the song and to its meaning.

He stood and silently, so not to interrupt her performance, went down to the lakeshore.

Juliet was gazing over the sunlit surface of the lake, apparently mesmerized by the dancing flecks of light on the dark blue waters. She sang her song to no one but the lake itself, it seemed, and Adam saw her fingers on her lap performing a peculiar dance. It took him a moment to realise she was mimicking the fast runs of a piano accompaniment, her fingers literally flying over her skirt. Adam wondered if she just pretended or if she had ever accompanied herself while singing the song. Well, he wouldn’t have wanted to be near that performance, anyway.

And he shouldn’t be near her now either, Adam thought guiltily, when his gaze was drawn from Juliet’s fingers to her feet. Her bare feet. She had stripped off shoes and stockings, gathered up her skirt, just above her knees, and was bathing her feet in the ice cold water. Small, delicate feet, finely boned like her hands, narrow ankles, long, slender shanks, elegant knees. Adam gulped. He shouldn’t…but he couldn’t take his eyes off her. She was wriggling her toes, and Adam watched how the movement went through the sinews in her feet and the muscles in her calves. Something stirred in him, something dark, something unseemly, something…something that had no right to be here when he was looking at Juliet.

Had she felt the same, he suddenly thought, when she had cared for him after he had gotten shot? Like an intruder, like a gazer who secretly enjoyed the forbidden place he had stumbled into by accident? Were they even now?

Adam tried to draw his eyes from her nakedness, and carefully made a step back. He would just silently return to the blanket and call her from there, maybe tease her for her singing, maybe—

He stepped on a dry branch. The crack seemed to echo back from the far away rocks like thunder.

Juliet’s head shot to him, she stopped singing and smiled. “Well, hello, sleepy—” Her smile fell when sudden realisation dawned on her; and in one swift motion she stood up and let her skirt flow back over her naked legs. Her mouth working wordlessly, she stared at Adam, who tried to look innocent, but was sure he failed gloriously at that. Adam watched in fascination how her face went through a myriad of emotions in very short a time: horror, confusion, embarrassment, denial, hope, desperation, resolve, stubbornness—until finally good breeding kicked in.

“So you caught me singing subversive songs, Adam,” she said, and her raised eyebrow dared him to imply anything else.

“Subversive?” he played along. “It’s about an angler who catches a trout, isn’t it? I can’t see anything subversive in that. In fact, I’ve caught my fair share of trout right here at the lake myself.”

“Don’t tell me you don’t know it’s actually an allegory of the poet’s incarceration.” Now back on safe ground she looked much more self-sure. And sounded surprisingly like a schoolmarm. Or a governess. Yes, Adam was pretty sure she had adopted that tone from Miss Westlake.

“Well, it’s a story of betrayal, no matter if you hear it literally or figuratively, ma’am” Adam said with a mock bow of his head. “To be honest, the words never interested me as much as the melody. And you sang it….” He broke off, cursing himself. What the heck was he supposed to say about her singing? That it had been nearly acceptable? Not the usual ear-offending—and then he saw her pleading eyes, her hopeful-little-girl face; and he said, “You sang it very beautifully, Mylady.”

She looked surprised, and grateful, and a bit ashamed; and then she ducked her head and went to the blanket and started to pry her shawl from the bush, and Adam just stayed where he was and gave her time to compose herself.

He was at her side in a split second later when he heard her cry out, “Ouch!”

Her hair had gotten caught in the spiky bush and when she tried to rip herself free, the hair slide gave way and fell off her hair and down to the ground. Juliet gathered her skirt back and searched for it, but Adam was quicker and scooped it up from where it had touched down.

He caught his breath when he straightened to give Juliet the rescued silver slide. Her bun had come undone, and her hair was flowing freely over her shoulders. It was even longer than Adam had visualised, thick and wavy, and Adam began to understand why she had so much trouble with taming it. The open hair changed her features distinctively; she looked young, soft, vulnerable; and somehow she looked even more exposed than she had with her limbs bared. Just how would it feel to touch those golden waves?

Juliet gathered together her hair as well as she was able without a mirror, accepted the barrette with a formal “Thank you, dear,” then struggled with and finally succeeded in fixing her bun anew. She smoothed over her hair and tucked in some free strands for some time before she nervously looked at Adam and asked, “Do I look acceptable now?”

Her hair was in even more disarray then usual, a whole day of exposure to the sun had intensified her freckles considerably, her dress was crumpled and wet at the seam of the skirt; at her temple the stitches Paul Martin had administered stuck out of the still angrily red skin surrounding them (Adam was sure the doctor wouldn’t approve that she had taken off the hated head bandage); a small twig stuck out of her hairdo and her face looked flushed and anxious—and Adam was certain he had never seen anything more beautiful.

“You look…very acceptable, Mylady.” He coughed to get rid of the croak in his voice. “You may want to remove the greens from your hair, though, before we go back to the ranch for supper.”

Her hand went up, searching, then she smiled, “Could you just….”

Adam picked the sprig from her hair, brushing her silky waves with his fingertips; and there it was back again, the dark desire to…nothing!

“Thank you,” Juliet smiled, blessedly oblivious to his agitation. “One day I’ll have to learn how to cope better with my hair. Maybe Mrs. Hawkins can teach me this, too.”

“Mrs. Hawkins? No, please, Juliet,” Adam chuckled. “You may end up with a Brobdingnagian taffeta bow in your hair.”

She laughed. “Oh, yes, and that would suit me well! Oh dear, I think I’m a lost cause on this account, anyway.”

“Now, now, don’t you give up, Mylady. You learned how to handle a gun, you learned how to bake a cake—next thing we know, you may even learn how to saddle a horse.”

“Never!”

“Or to muck stalls.”

“Adam….”

“To build a barn?”

“Maybe?”

“Or to raise chickens?”

“Unlikely. Perhaps I’ll try my hand at bronco busting.” She made it sound like a foreign word.

“Over my dead body! Not to mention that it wouldn’t work too well with a side-saddle.”

She raised an eyebrow, and her mouth made that sarcastic pout Adam knew so well. “Oh, you think you have a say in this?”

“I have.” He mimicked her expression. “As your riding instructor.”

“But you aren’t my riding instructor anymore. Our contract was completed; you’re just a friend now.”

“Well, as ‘just a friend’ it’s even more my business to make sure that you won’t hurt yourself.”

“Your business?” she teased, indicating his left hand. “Remember, you are the one prone to losing limbs. Did you count them lately? Are they all still there?”

“At the last inspection they were. Not in the best of conditions, but there. And I’ll use every single one of them to hold you back from any wild horses, my sophomoric lady.”

Her silvery laughter told him she knew better than to overestimate her riding skills; but apparently the topic held some fascination for her, for she soon became serious and asked, “What is it like, busting a horse, Adam?”

“It’s like sailing on a stormy sea in a very small boat and trying to communicate with the water to still it, I guess.” Never before had he thought about it like this, but never before had someone asked this particular question, and somehow with Juliet he related everything to the sea.

“You do this quite a lot, don’t you? I’d really like to see that one day.”

“You want to watch me fly into the dust, Mylady?”

“I want to see you taming the sea, Adam.” She gave him a brilliant smile. “And if you fly into the dust I’m sure you’ll do it in a very sophisticated and gracious way.”

“More like a bag of potatoes, I can assure you,” he chuckled. “But if you’re really interested in how it’s been done, I’ll let you know next time we’re working on the horses.”

“Do that, please.” She sat down on the blanket and reached for the abandoned book. “I’m not sure when exactly you fell asleep during Young Pym’s very exciting adventures…what is the last thing you remember?”

Adam settled next to her, marveling not for the first time about the velocity and smoothness of her changes of topic. “Hmm, Pym and his friend were on that sail boat, and…yes, the drunken Augustus had just passed out. That’s it. No more after that.”

“All right, then I’ll start here. Are you comfortable? Good. So…. It is hardly possible to conceive the extremity of my terror. The fumes of the wine lately taken had evaporated, leaving me doubly timid and irresolute. I knew that I was altogether incapable of managing the boat, and that a fierce wind and strong ebb tide were hurrying us to destruction….”

Adam listened to the haunting words, to her passionate reading, and watched her eyes skimming over the pages, and the strands of silky hair that escaped her bun and slid over her soft cheeks.

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Die Forelle

In einem Bächlein helle,
Da schoss in froher Eil’
Die launische Forelle
Vorüber wie ein Pfeil.
Ich stand an dem Gestade
Und sah in süßer Ruh’
Des munter’n Fischleins Bade
Im klaren Bächlein zu.

Ein Fischer mit der Rute
Wohl an dem Ufer stand,
Und sah’s mit kaltem Blute,
Wie sich das Fischlein wand.
So lang des Wassers Helle,
So dacht ich, nicht gebricht,
So fängt er die Forelle
Mit seiner Angel nicht.

Doch endlich ward dem Diebe
Die Zeit zu lang. Er macht
Das Bächlein tückisch trübe,
Und eh’ ich es gedacht,
So zuckte seine Rute,
Das Fischlein zappelt d’ran,
Und ich mit regem Blute
Sah die Betrogene an.
~ Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart

In a bright brook,
Passed in eager haste
The merry trout
Like an arrow it did fly.
I stood on the shore,
And in delightful peace
I watched the temperament fish’s swim
In the clear creek.

An angler stood at the shore
With his rod in hand.
He watched cold-blooded
The fish squirm and wend.
I guessed as long as the water
Would not lose its clarity,
He would not catch the trout
With his fishing rod.

Finally the thief lost patience
And made the brook muddy,
In guileful intent.
And sooner than I’ve thought
The rod jerked and;
The squirming fish was hooked.
And I, with agitated blood,
Looked at the betrayed.