Mozart's Last Aria (13 page)

Chapter 21

A
t my inn, I found Lenerl in the taproom playing a game of tarock with three other maids. A hungover breakfaster glanced up at me from his table with resentment on his ashen face. A woman with a bruised cheek and thin, bitter lips watched in silence as her husband spooned thin gruel into his mouth.

Lenerl laid a card, laughing, and took a draft of beer. Her partners threw down their hands. One of them noticed me and inclined her head to Lenerl.

The girl rose, straightening her bonnet. “Madame,
guten Morgen
.”

I raised an eyebrow. I had wondered if the men who attacked me had, as Gieseke expected, continued to my inn to track me down. From my maid’s blithe demeanor I assumed that, if so, they had displayed gentler manners toward her than toward me. I was also none too pleased to see her gaming at cards when the sun was barely arisen.

The innkeeper came from the cellar, bottles of red wine under his arm. The hungover diner greeted him with a desperate gurgle of pleasure. It was early in the day for a man to partake of wine, even in a city where the water wasn’t fit to drink. Yet when one lodges at a public inn, one confronts such low types.

“I’ll take my breakfast over here by the clavichord, if you please,” I called.

The innkeeper bowed.

I snapped my fingers at Lenerl and went to the corner of the room. The lid of the old clavichord was open. Splashes of brown beer and gravy stained the white sharps and flats. The wood of the casing was scratched with the initials of bored drunks.

“How did you pass the night, my girl?” I said.

Lenerl’s expression suggested she wished to ask me the same question. “I was here in the restaurant. With the other maids and some gentlemen.”

The man who had received his bottle of wine belched, held his stomach, and groaned.

“Most elevating, I’m sure,” I said.

Lenerl grinned at the uncomfortable man. “Nobody’s themselves first thing in the morning, madame.”

I thought of Pergen at the cathedral. The thin dawn reflecting off the font into his gaunt face as he whispered of ghosts. Had that been a moment of early-morning weakness, like the queasiness of the drunk in this taproom?

“Quite so,” I said.

“And you, madame? The recital at the Imperial Library was a success?”

“Indeed, it was.” I thought to tell Lenerl what had befallen me with Gieseke. But I decided that if the attackers hadn’t come to the inn it would be better if the girl knew nothing of it. “Afterwards I encountered some—some gentlemen in the street, but we were separated. Did they come to look for me here?”

“No gentlemen, madame. Only a lady. And a couple of ruffians,” she said.

The innkeeper brought a pastry and a pot of chocolate. Lenerl poured me a cup.

“No doubt those ruffians were the men to which I referred.”

“But you said—”

“I was too polite, girl. They were no gentlemen.”

“They were asking for you here in the bar. I was playing cards and I was about to speak up, but Joachim took a look at them—”

“Who’s Joachim?”

“The innkeeper, madame. He looked them up and down, and he put his hand on my shoulder to keep me in my seat. He feared they might harm me. He told them they wouldn’t find you here. They went off looking very angry.”

I needed two hands to keep my cup of chocolate steady on the way to my mouth. I affected to dismiss the news of the men searching for me. “You said a lady came, too?”

“A Madame Hofdemel. She asked Joachim for you, so he brought me to her. It was late in the evening. I told her you’d have finished your concert and must’ve gone on to dinner.”

“Did she leave a message?”

“She said to tell you she had come to repent.”

I tore a corner off the pastry. “Repent?”

“Perhaps it isn’t my place to say this, but she seemed a bit disturbed. Her face was covered. Even so, it was obvious that she’d been attacked. Cut up, I mean.”

“Her husband.”

Lenerl sucked in a breath through tight lips and bit at a fingernail. “I hope he pays for it, then.”

“His punishment is ensured.”

She took her lower lip between her teeth. I saw that she was aching to know where I had spent the night.

“After the recital, I went to my brother’s house,” I said. “I comforted my widowed sister-in-law and slept there. This morning I was at early Mass.”

She let go of her lip. “Very good, madame.”

“I didn’t see you at the cathedral.”

“I thought I ought to wait for you here, madame. I said all my prayers at the foot of your bed.”

I chewed on the pastry. Lenerl lifted the pot to refill my cup of chocolate, but I held up a hand to stop her. The drunk slumped over his morning wine could’ve felt no more nauseated than I.

Wolfgang was dead. But how? At the hand of someone connected to his illegal Brotherhood of Masons? Or of the men who assaulted me in the street? Perhaps it had, after all, been the husband of Magdalena Hofdemel, avenging an adulterous affair. Why else would she come to my maid speaking of contrition?

I wondered if my brother had died with something to repent.

Chapter 22

I
rested in my room until midmorning, when I descended the stairs to practice at the clavichord in the corner of the taproom. I played a sonata by the Neapolitan maestro Scarlatti. The instrument had been inferior when new. Years of spilled food made the keys stick. The first diners arrived for lunch, chattering over my music. I struck a heavy, ugly chord in frustration and returned to my room.

As Lenerl dressed my hair, she picked at a knot in one long tress. I grabbed the comb from her hand and yanked at the tangle until my eyes teared. I pulled it through with a moan of pain and anger, and threw the comb onto the dresser.

Lenerl scrutinized me sidelong in the mirror. I wished to explain why I was so tense, but I couldn’t confide in a servant about the dramas of the last day. Someone else would have to help me unravel my confusion.

I wandered into the Flour Market with little idea where I would go. Lenerl followed along Kärntner Street until I hissed at her to wait for me at the inn.

I regretted my outburst right away. My maid could hardly be spying on me. Yet the dimensions of the conspiracy surrounding my dead brother seemed sufficiently broad that there might even be an informer in my room. It was bad enough that the police minister had sought me out before dawn to warn me—or perhaps to enlist me as an agent, I wasn’t sure. But Pergen had made me doubt those I would’ve trusted, like Lenerl, just as I now started to suspect those closest to Wolfgang.

I lunched at the Blue Bottle on the Staff-in-Iron Square. The room was large and noisy. A red-faced waiter with pale, thick arms laid a loaf on my table. I picked at the bread, but ate little of the soup or the beef that came next. My attitude must have seemed so doleful that the waiter brought me a glass of Tokay, after I had laid down eight kreuzers for the meal.

“On the house, madame,” he said.

“That’s very kind of you, sir.”

“It’ll warm you up.” He smiled. “Though I expect you’re used to the cold. Salzburg you’re from, is it?”

I had never believed that I spoke with the accent of my region. Perhaps years in the village had turned the yokel speech of Salzburg from a joke shared with Wolfgang into my true manner of talking. “That’s right,” I said.

“Missing home, I expect.”

“No doubt.”

“Still, there’re lots of sights to see in Vienna before you leave.” He pointed a pasty finger through the window.

I followed his gesture and saw a bulky post in the center of the square. It was ringed by a heavy padlock.

“What’s that?” I said.

“A couple of hundred years ago, an apprentice locksmith sold his soul to the Devil to make a lock that no one could open. His master gave him his freedom, because he’d shown himself to be a great craftsman. But then the Devil claimed him and dragged his soul down to Hell.”

“A most moral reminder to the public.”

“Apprentices hammer nails into the post to remember the lad who sold his soul.”

I sipped my sweet Tokay. “Or to remember the Devil.”

“Maybe that,” he said. His smile wavered, and he snatched the kreuzers from my table and tugged his fair hair.

On the Graben, the air felt clear. Pergen had tried to undermine my impression of Swieten by mentioning his membership in the Masons and his connection to the court in Berlin. But it was to the baron that my thoughts returned when I looked for comfort and safety. In the hours since I had seen him, I had experienced only danger, menace, and mystery. I recalled the way he had calmed me before I played at the Academy of Science—without words, by the inclination of his head and the confidence of his smile.

I turned along the Cabbage Market toward the palace. The afternoon light grew stronger the closer I came to Swieten, until the Imperial Library burst into my sight, its walls white and gleaming.

As I climbed the sweeping turns of the marble staircase, I heard a single violin. I stopped outside the door of the library’s great hall and listened. It was a solo by Johann Sebastian Bach, the master from Leipzig and a favorite of Wolfgang’s.

Baron van Swieten stood at the center of the library with a violin beneath his chin. The lofty cupola seemed to accentuate his height. Eyes shut, he rocked to the tempo of the music on legs that were strong and elegant.

Strafinger noticed me from the gallery. The clerk gave me a short bow and went toward the cupola. When Swieten finished his piece, Strafinger cleared his throat and inclined his head toward the door. Swieten twisted with the violin still at his throat.

With a smile, I applauded.

The baron laid his instrument on a pile of books and picked up his coat. He came toward me, shrugging his wide shoulders into it.

“I like to play in that very spot,” he said. “Wolfgang always said it had perfect acoustics.”

His face was fresh and alive with the music. To my confusion, I felt once more jealous of the Prussian princess whom Pergen said had shared an affection with the baron. An awkwardness came upon me. He took it for disapproval of his remark or of his musicianship perhaps, because he cleared his throat and added: “Wolfgang never needed perfect acoustics to produce perfection. In my case, even that cupola can’t rescue me from mediocrity.”

A lock of his hair had escaped the black ribbon with which he tied it at the back. It must’ve come loose as he played. I lifted my hand as though I might push it away from his face, but I checked myself. He noticed the motion and gathered the strand of hair himself, his eyes on the floor between us.

I glanced around at the tall bookshelves and the busts of old emperors. “Baron, it isn’t music that brings me here,” I said. “I need your counsel.”

He led me behind the shelves to his office. He shoved the door shut and poked at the dwindling fire in the grate.

Outside the window, in the park behind the palace, a man in a yellow suit embroidered with golden thread walked at a stately pace along a path of limestone chips. Servants and ladies, noblemen, hounds and lapdogs trailed him in a pack, jockeying to be near him. He paid no attention to them.

The emperor, I thought. Alone with his fears and suspicions. I searched for Pergen among the jostling courtiers, but I couldn’t make out faces from such a distance.

“I believe Wolfgang may’ve been involved in dangerous things,” I said. “So dangerous that your suspicions about his death appear more and more valid.”

The baron lifted the vent of his coat to let the fire warm the backs of his legs. “What has happened?”

“Men with knives attacked me and Herr Gieseke last night.”

“Where?”

I noted that he was the first to hear of Gieseke’s involvement without suggesting that it had been merely a brawl among low-living actors. “Not far from here,” I said. I recalled the knife in the night, and I heard the shrillness in my voice. “Then Count Pergen came to me at early Mass—”

“Pergen himself?”

“He made me suspect all Wolfgang’s best friends.”

“Including me?”

I bit my lip.

“It’s quite understandable, Madame de Mozart. I, too, am responsible for these dire thoughts of yours. It was I who told you Wolfgang was poisoned.” He smiled. “What did Pergen say about me?”

“He was talking about the Masons, the danger they pose to the emperor.”

Swieten shook his head.

“He said you were a Mason,” I told him.

“True,” he said. “I thought you had guessed it. Is it so damning?”

I thought of the Prussian princess. She had hit a raw point in me, but I saw nothing that connected her to Wolfgang’s death and I didn’t wish to introduce the question of romance to my discussion with Swieten. “Pergen said you had a particular bond to the king of Prussia, our emperor’s enemy.”

The baron crossed the small office and beckoned to me. Taking a key from his vest pocket, he opened a drawer beneath the bookshelf.

At the center of the drawer, a turquoise sash with a red border was embroidered with golden leaves and sunbursts shining out from four symbols. They were letters from an alphabet I had seen many years ago on the exterior of a synagogue in the Netherlands. A triangle of garnets surrounded them. Next to the sash lay a small paper-covered book bearing the two legs of a compass in its design.

“I shan’t hide it from you, madame,” Swieten said. “The crest on this sash attests that I’m a brother Mason. I can show you the secret handshake if you wish, but you’ll find that it’s not for such trivialities that we enter our noble lodges. Neither was it for such fetishes as you see in this drawer that Wolfgang joined our Brotherhood.”

“Why
did
Wolfgang join?”

“To be among men who recognized his true nobility. To be the equal of those who paid him to perform his music. To be at peace with the world. In any case, my years in Berlin were spent in the service of our emperor. Pergen wastes his time in suspecting me.”

“You were a personal friend of Prussian royalty.”

He locked the drawer and pulled a thick volume out of the shelf above. “My father made this study of vampires in Moravia at the request of the Empress Maria Theresia.” He opened the book and showed me the title page. “But that didn’t make him a vampire.”

“Did it make him a believer in vampires, though?”

“My father reported that the whole thing was peasant superstition.” Swieten shut the book and slid it into place on the shelf. “When Wolfgang was upset or preoccupied, he found music soothed him. And you?”

I thought of my frustration at the clavichord that morning. “Usually.”

“Then perhaps we might talk more after you’ve played for me?”

“Perhaps it’ll help me see things clearer,” I said.

“I’m quite certain of it.” He took my arm and led me back under the cupola.

I sat at his piano.

The baron laid his hand on my shoulder. His touch flickered with heat like a naked flame. For a moment, I felt that I couldn’t breathe.

“Would you sing for me?” he said.

“Very well.”

“An aria. ‘I wish to explain to you.’ Wolfgang wrote it to be inserted into a production of an opera by Anfossi.”

“I know it. He sent a copy to me.”

I relaxed the muscles of my throat and played the introductory passage. This aria always touched me, with its secret pleading to a lover who’s promised to another. The baron had been correct about the acoustic effect of the cupola. My soprano held in the air with all the longing my brother had written into the song.

I wish to explain to you, O God,

what my grief is.

But fate condemns me

to weep and stay silent.

Swieten held his hands behind his back and stared toward the ceiling. I let my voice ring around the cupola, so that we were encircled by Wolfgang’s music, by my breath.

When I reached the high D that signals the approaching end of the piece, the baron turned away and his shoulders shuddered. I wondered if he was thinking of the genius so recently lost to us.

Part from me, run from me.

Of love, do not speak.

I concluded the aria. The joy of music making felt so great that I thought I might float up into the dome.

The baron’s eyes glistened. He bowed with great solemnity and held out his hand. He took me to a staircase in the corner of the cupola.

I entered the spiral steps first, but I noticed that he looked about the library before he followed, as though he wanted to be sure we were alone.

His breathing was heavy and deep, as he came behind me. I held my skirts to clear each step. We climbed for some minutes. I felt perspiration on my lip.

We reached a narrow gallery high in the cupola itself, close enough to touch the ceiling fresco. The paintings were distorted by the foreshortening that would make them seem natural when viewed from the floor of the library. Famous men of science peered at maps of new lands, directing their telescopes at the farthest horizon. The shading of their robes was made with gold crosshatching. They leaned against columns painted like soapy marble.

I glanced a hundred feet down. Fear stabbed in my stomach. I put my hand to my eyes and swayed against the balustrade.

The baron took my wrist. “No, you must look, or you’ll fall,” he said.

I stumbled and found I was close to him.

“I apologize,” I whispered. “I feel such tension.”

“Because of the height?”

“Not only that. These things I’ve learned about Wolfgang’s death. If he was involved in a mission to Prussia—”

“A mission?” He narrowed his eyes.

I leaned over the balustrade again and lurid colors overcame my sight. I shut my eyes. “It might concern ruthless men. I don’t know if I can safely investigate further. But I must, I owe it to Wolfgang.”

I barely knew it, but he had taken my other hand, too, and drawn me to face him.

“Madame,” he said.

I opened my eyes. The gold buttons on his simple waistcoat angled to the light with each of his breaths, glinting.

“The emotions your singing evoked in me—” he said. “You understand? I—”

It had been love that almost lifted me into the air when I finished the aria. I couldn’t pretend it was otherwise.

Still I tugged my hands from his grasp and hurried to the staircase. With my foot on the first step, I turned. He smiled distantly, as though recalling some long-ago happiness.

I descended the stairs, breathing harder than I had on the way up. I thought of my children on the shore of the Abersee. I wished that these steps, which seemed to go down forever, would open onto the village square on the day before Wolfgang died, and I might again be Frau Berchtold and not the woman who had survived an assault in the street and who was filled with fear and who loved a baron in the Imperial Palace.

Under the cupola, I turned a circle, looking for Swieten in the gallery high above me. I wanted to see him there, to feel his smile reach me.

Without a sound, he was before me. I lifted my foot to approach him. I would’ve thrown myself into his arms, had he not spoken, had he only reached for me.

“Tonight I will take you to hear
The Magic Flute
.”