Chapter Two Thousand Eighty-Three
12th August 1971
Amsterdam, Netherlands
Sitting in the bow section of the Meta, Bram could hear music from the saloon through the skylights. When the Englishman and his girlfriend had arrived earlier that evening they had been warmly welcomed. Apparently, he was an old friend of Kristina’s and was one of the front men of a band whose music she listened to. The music on the album had sounded like an industrial accident to Bram and what was coming out of the saloon couldn’t have sounded more different. The simple arrangements favored the guitar and viola duet, which made Bram wonder why they had not done that on the album as opposed to the heavily distorted guitars and pounding drums. It was one more thing about the world he was finding foreign now that he was out in it.
It seemed that feeling useless or lost at times was a part of the job. Bram had no idea what he was getting into when he had been appointed to be the Aide of Oberstleutnant Markgraf von Hirsch zu Balderschwang. He had been excited about the prospect of learning from a Luftwaffe Ace and highly decorated hero. The presence of his wife Kristina, the current Princess Royal of Germany, or this long voyage to nowhere that they were indulging in over the Summer Holiday were not what he was expecting.
It wasn’t the accommodations that had been a shock to his system. He had gotten used to crowded conditions at the schools he had attended and if anything, the food on the Meta was far better. Instead, it had been the people who surrounded him now. It was hard not to feel a bit of hero worship for the men from the First Foot, they were basically who Bram aspired to be in a few years. Gregor the Helmsman was always kind to him, telling him ribald jokes and explaining to him how things really worked when Bram got confused by something the Princess or the Markgraf did, which was often. He was a Petty Officer in the Naval Reserve, something that Bram had never encountered, and Gregor had explained that part of his job was to show Apprentice Sailors the ropes. Steffi Bader barely acknowledged Bram’s presence. Fianna Dunn was nice to him, except there was an undercurrent to that. Like if there were things about him that she found distasteful at times but was too tactful to say anything.
Finally, there was the Princess and the Markgraf themselves, they had odd tastes, listened to outlandish music, and their friends… First there had been Wim, who was supposedly a highly regarded WSO who had flown with the Markgraf but was the most unlikely Officer Bram had ever met. Then he had met Zella when they had gone up that side canal and he had thought people like her only existed on television in some weird, oversaturated parallel reality. She had pointedly refused to stay on the Meta, going to find a hotel every night. Zella said that she wasn’t interested in sleeping in a bed that moved if there were better options. There was another woman who they had met Leipzig, Aurora. Kristina and Zella had spoken at length to her about the plans for an upcoming wedding and some of the terms had sounded strange until Bram had figured out that Aurora was Jewish. Bram liked to think that he wasn’t an elderly reactionary like his grandfather, but he had noticed his own reaction to learning about Aurora and the man he had been told was her intended. Bram had felt a sense of revulsion, but for himself for thinking that way. Gregor had told him that was a good thing, it meant that he was learning. Then there was that other incident that was too embarrassing to talk about.
He knew that Kristina had a baby and had spent his childhood on his grandfather’s rural estate, so he knew about what happened. The embarrassing part was that when he had walked in on the women discussing their upcoming plans and she had been sitting there half naked with her baby at her breast. It was the first time he had seen anything like that in real life. That was not something that he didn’t want to talk about with anyone.
It was perfectly keeping with what Bram’s grandfather had been telling him for as long as he could remember. That because he was the in the line of succession after his uncles it was rather likely that he would need to make his own way in the world a task that seemed impossibly daunting at times. While it was just as well his grandfather had made sure that Bram wouldn’t carry the name of his father, a man who Duke Joachim had loathed, Bram was actually glad that there was little chance he would inherit the Duchy. It was that concept of manhood that bothered him though, what would his grandfather have to say if he knew that Bram was clueless about women? That he found girls his own age intimidating and his brain seemed to turn to mush when he tried to talk to them? The episode with Kristina only seemed to highlight that and she was old, almost thirty.
Looking at the lights reflected off the IJ, Bram seriously wondered what he was doing with his life and realized that little of his education had prepared him for what he was encountering in the real world. Knowing that, how was he supposed to return to Ballenstedt next year and not make a total mess of things?