He had viewed the immobile equine watchdog every day since he was a lad, and to his knowledge it had never scared, inspired, or otherwise moved man, woman, or child with any emotion other than complete disinterest. Every time a winter’s storm struck, he walked out his front door the morning after its passing, secretly hoping to find the thing blown over and broken beyond repair. He could never have brought himself to demolish it intentionally. But he would much rather plant roses at the center of the circular drive, and he prayed a violent wind from the north might assist him toward that end.

Thus far, however, the brave, silent, ugly creature had withstood every blast with which it had been assailed for a hundred years and still stood rearing and spewing water toward all who dared approach the estate von Dortmann.

The baron parked the car in front. He would put it in the garage later. They were both anxious to see their wife and mother.

Leaving the granite steed behind them, they now approached the front doors of the house—a sprawling complex comprised of two wings set in an L-shape, both three floors in height, one of which boasted an ornate tower that could be seen for a great distance from anywhere in the low-lying plain. From the outside, the composition appeared altogether drab and colorless, offering no hint of the palatial mansion that existed behind its walls of stone.

Had the construction been taller instead of spread out, more ornate around the windows and archways, and the setting along the Rhine or in one of Scotland’s rugged highland glens the baron read of with such keen enthusiasm, they would have called it a castle.

As it was, set in the Baltic plain of Pomerania, they only called it Lebenshaus.

The unassuming architecture, however, took nothing away from the magnificence of the entire aspect of the place. The hills here were not of great height, rising occasionally only a handful of meters above the Baltic and the valley of the Oder to the west. That slight undulation of the plain upon whose gently rising crest the Dortmann estate sat was probably some hundred meters above the sea itself, and rose half that in a wide circular slope out of the farmland that lay surrounding it and spread out in all directions.

The location, upon what more accurately would be called the plateau of a huge knoll, had probably been chosen for defensive rather than agricultural purposes five hundred years earlier, which accounted for the fact that, unlike most farms in Germany, the barns were separate rather than attached to the main structure. The first house had been built, and on that hill it had been added to, torn down, partially burned, abandoned for a time, and rebuilt another three or four times.