Well, well, I thought; Ma in love. Of course, she wasn’t really, and it was just the excitement of the shooting contest and the novelty of having a performer in the inn and so on; and perhaps she’d had a drop of the Johannisberger wine I saw all frosty in the corner. Certainly she wouldn’t have spoken like that if Peter’d been there to guffaw at her. At least she seemed to have stopped worrying about him for a while. But the main thing—I had to keep reminding myself—was Lucy. It was the first question I’d asked when I got to the inn, and the answer had been: no, she hadn’t turned up here—no one had seen her. I just had to keep hoping.

Doctor Cadaverezzi’s performance was arranged for nine o’clock, and when the great old wooden clock in the parlor ticked and lurched its way round to that time, the air of excitement was so thick you could hardly see through it—though that might have been the smoke from the bright China pipes many of the visitors were smoking. Silent, red-faced men, with an air of huge secret enjoyment, as if they were in on a joke that no one else suspected; men from far away in clothes that looked like costumes from a play; stout, slow-moving men, like elderly bears; brisk, dark-featured men, like monkeys; men who couldn’t speak a word of German and who had to point to what they wanted and mime and make faces to explain; men with pale faces from the great forests further north; men with sunburned faces and bright narrow eyes, from the snowy glare of the mountains—all of them come for the shooting contest, of course. And then there were the villagers: the raucous boys, Peter’s pals, sharp and easy and full of themselves, flirting with Elise and Hannerl; wide-eyed children at their mothers’ skirts; middle-aged men who sipped their wine and talked energetically with their fellows; older men who took great care to settle themselves comfortably in a corner and get their pipes going nicely, reckoning that the height of their present ambitions.

And when all this company had crowded into the parlor—Elise and Hannerl at the back, tea towels flung over one shoulder, arms folded, and an attentive young huntsman beside each of them in case they should need an escort to find their way outside during any interval that Doctor Cadaverezzi might allow for, and finally Ma and me, standing on a table by the streaming window—when all this was ready and the show about to begin, I had the first of two surprises that came my way that night.