In 1956 Germany, American colonel, Armstrong, takes his wife, Betsy, and fourteen-year-old son, David, on a vacation to see Mad King Ludwig’s Bavarian castles. They engage a down-on-his-luck count to be their guide. David and the count become very good friends.
Ernst has the looks and voice of an angel in early nineteenth-century Austria. These attributes mark him inevitably to be the catamite of a rich sponsor. He is resolved to this, and is initiated by Baron Otto von Lauffen. When the boy’s voice changes, the baron transfers Ernst to an older boys’ choir and new voracious choir master. Ernst wants to be a painter, though, and meets one younger and more desirable than the baron or the choir master.
This story was written for a story-writing competition, which it didn't win. It is the morning of the day before the wedding of a young girl in a country village in Russia in the mid-nineteenth century. (A 'verst' is half a mile, and YES, it CAN be done!)
Diana is a prostitute in the temple of Aphrodite and sincerely believes in the value of her service to the goddess. But when her friend Andromeda adopts the new religion of Christianity, Diana's faith is also shaken.
Guido Sarto-Reutter is a fourteen-year old son of a Venetian-Austrian aristocratic family, that, in 1920, is both in poverty and riddled by scandal because both Guido's father and grandfather have, for years, been bedded by a Vienna baron in his castle. Guido is in a Venetian charity school for sons of families in straits like his run by a count who is pimping the boys. Guido has no trouble falling in with this demand, and the count has found a possible buyer for the boy.