Song of Seduction (12 page)

When Mathilda entered the dining room to break her fast, Ingrid and Venner’s hushed words ceased. Two serving girls tittered and fled down the stairs to the kitchen.

“Guten Morgen,”
Ingrid said too brightly.

Venner regarded her curiously, candidly. “Your performance was a surprise, Frau Heidel.”

This from a man determined to let all of Salzburg know of his disinterest in the arts. She nodded, dumbfounded by his stiff, formal declaration and altered demeanor. That he seemed to dismiss the topic altogether, spreading preserves on a slice of bread, comforted her only a little.

Ingrid watched her with worshipful eyes. “Did you sleep well, dearest?”

“Fine.”

In truth, she had endured wretched nightmares borne of fearful scenarios and doubts. Haunted by the snippets of talk, she dreamed a deluge of repetitive questions and mean-spirited accusations. Either she aspired to more than she was born to be, or she perpetrated an elaborate hoax. That terrifying world dubbed her a pretender and a fraud.

In dreams, she could not escape the budding paranoia stalking her through the Venner residence, in the market and along the streets of her birthplace. Like the discussion she had just interrupted between Ingrid and her husband, conversations ended when Mathilda entered a room. Stares pinned to her. She became the subject of unchecked gossip. Word of her debut produced a sudden musical celebrity where a quiet, respected widow had once breathed.

She awoke to find her nightmares fully realized. No one and nothing remained the same. Her anger with Arie swelled over the following days, becoming a single-minded purpose.

On
Fasnacht,
the Tuesday of her lesson and the day before Lent, she resolved to avoid those compact rooms on Getreidegasse. She would not obey his pleading command. She wanted to reverse the endless stream of time and undo the damage her performance had wrought on an otherwise orderly life. She preferred the previous year of restlessness, boredom and regrets to her new status as an oddity.

Yet her surging disgust and a deeper, more frightening magnetism propelled her to his residence.

Arie answered his door nonchalantly, and his casual disregard nearly snapped Mathilda’s control in half. She wanted to slap him. She wished desperately to hate him, but fury and memories stole her capacity for thought or action. The sight of his face and his distressed hair cleared a new avenue of resentment for her to travel, because no matter the repercussions, she had loved every second of her performance.

When she recalled those transcendent moments—those few minutes when she had stood with her splendid idol before hundreds of expectant people—her body had tingled with a riotous energy. Although every face had fallen away the moment she raised the bow, leaving only the sound of her music and Arie’s manipulation of that sad old pianoforte, she had been deeply aware of performing for their eager audience. Being subjected to their scrutiny and expectation had heightened the thrill and the need to perform to the very limit of her abilities. She should have been intimidated, but the rightness of her place on stage stole her breath.

Memories of those precious instants briefly assuaged her grief. But that magic belonged to the past. Mathilda was a pariah, and her gentlemanly idol was a mere man—a smirking, infuriating man.

Sitting beside Arie on her customary stool, she held the bow like a saw, clumsy and destructive. Every pull of that tool across the violin’s strings loosed a dissonant pain.

“You seem distracted,” he said blandly.

She could have spit in his face. Frustrated with his apparent amnesia or intentional disregard, Mathilda wanted to hurl the bow and unleash the crazy, terrorizing panic to mark the end of her old life.

Yet he remained calm. No apology. No explanation.

While Ingrid, Venner, Oliver and every other soul in the city seemed to treat her differently, deferentially, Arie held fast to the professional demeanor he had adopted weeks before. The intimacy they shared across the expanse of the alehouse, however tacitly and swiftly, had burned away, exhausting the enchantment and power of their performance. He sat casually on his stool, waiting for her to continue the sight-reading exercise.

“I wonder if your admirers would be quite as appreciative, Maestro, if they knew how frightened you are of them.”

He stiffened, registering a trace of surprised pain. “We promised to dispense with insults.”

“I lied.” Her taunt, attacking the anxiety he barely masked, produced more shame than satisfaction. Vengeful tears threatened. “You deserve all I can throw after what you did to me.”

“But you returned.”

Mathilda shot to her feet and thrust the violin at his face. “To rail at you, not for more practice!”

“Then rail.” He freed her hands of the instrument and returned it to its case. “I am waiting.”

“Stop being calm!”

“Why?” Arie rose to meet her. A mere breath whispered between them. “I am not the angered one. Your hands can no longer torture the violin, so be cross with me.”

Blood raced circuits through her body and burned the skin at her temples. Tears spilled without inhibition. The arrogant tilt of his smile and the shield of his sarcasm faded, replaced by a kindred sympathy, catching her unaware. That unsettling sensation of knowing him, of seeing the real man, returned.

Mathilda slumped onto her stool, defenseless and defeated. Because Arie De Voss represented every forbidden impulse and secret dream she had ever possessed, the capacity to hate him was as foreign to her as his native tongue. To hate him was to hate herself.

Whispering, she asked, “Do you have any idea what I have endured? People I have known my entire life are like strangers. You had no right.”

Arie knelt and took her hands. She flinched. He held fast. The dull winter sunshine spreading through the western windows haloed his face.

“You enjoyed our show, I think.”

Mathilda shook her head, denying that kernel of truth. Her will to fight faded, but she needed him to understand the damage he had wrought. “You believe I enjoyed being hauled in front of hundreds of my countrymen to perform like an exhibition freak?”

“You are not a freak. You are…are—”

“What?”

“Miraculous,” he breathed.

“People have a history of misinterpreting miracles. Women have been burned as witches for less than I did Friday.”

Confusion marred the composer’s sharp brow. “But you were wonderful.”

“No, don’t distract me.” She snapped her hands out of his grasp. “I’ve never behaved in a manner that solicits idle talk. After Jürgen was killed, well-wishers besieged me with curious glances. They pitied me. They asked endless questions and offered well-intentioned help. I grew sick and weary of the attention. The talk subsided eventually, but now…”

She stopped short of revealing the deep roots of her desire for an inconspicuous life. The extraordinary circumstances of her parents’ marriage ensured that she had been, since the hour of her birth, the subject of scandal. No one privy to the tale of her parents’ sad romance or the grim details of her mother’s suicide believed Mathilda’s destiny would be anything less than tragic.

Her decision to marry the respected Dr. Heidel had been the solution to a childhood lived within a haze of scrutiny. At Jürgen’s side, she had garnered a measure of the respectability and acceptance that hard work and unadventurous living had failed to secure. She had craved an ordinary life, and in a handful of winter weeks, culminating in her impromptu violin debut, she shattered any such illusion.

And she had brought it on herself.

Arie walked the few steps to his kitchen and returned with a tumbler of sherry. He pressed the glass into her numb fingers and she glanced at the alcohol. He remained standing, his hands empty. She had not seen him take a drink in weeks.

“People will always watch and talk,” he said.

Mathilda sniffed her glass. The hairs inside her nose stood on end. The tender flesh within the walls of her lungs burned when she inhaled those stabbing fumes. She grimaced. And she drank. The burning rush of liquid offered a distraction from the hurt encasing her heart.

She cleared her throat, refusing to cough. “You can be blasé because you are famous.”

He chuckled, his deep blue eyes overflowing with a resigned belief in his shortcomings. “And I handle fame very well, you think?”

“No, you’re miserable. Why am I even trying to make you understand this?”

“Because I know what you are disliking.” He moved away and sat at his small pianoforte. Above it a pair of six-pane leaded windows overlooked Getreidegasse and welcomed what little sunshine the day offered. Languid fingers pressed a few ivory keys, but Arie’s gaze remained trained on her. “The curious glances on you when you walk. The whispers. The doubts. I know these things.”

“I hardly mind the talk if I’m well regarded. I
do
mind feeling they’re wide of the mark.”

“Tell me.”

The melody beneath his fingers defined and sharpened. In her mind, Mathilda unconsciously played with his array of notes, just as she had once toyed with her
Fraiskette.
She found herself guessing the next chord, the next harmony, anticipating his lazy handiwork in advance of its creation. She felt him plucking secrets from her brain and holding them to the light, forcing her to share. He became her hypnotist.

“I fear that if they look too closely, people will see my flaws.” She took the last gulp of sherry into her mouth. The acidic burn flowed into her blood. “But if they don’t see the flaws, they won’t know who I am.”

He arched his left eyebrow. “Shall we compare flaws, Mathilda?”

“No. I want to forget the entire ordeal.”

“As you wish. But nothing has changed. Within these walls, we write our rules.”

On the heels of his promise, Arie hunched over the keyboard and pounded a radical, mischievous scherzo into being.

Mathilda shivered. An odd sense of unease crawled along her skin. His music echoed the wild bacchanalia of sound he had created at the alehouse competition. The music hardly resembled any of his early works, and its experimental power urged her to take up the violin. She responded to his unspoken invitation.

They played. They dueled. They fought.

And Arie yielded.

With a sudden thud of his fists against the keys, he raised his head and tossed Mathilda a bright, careless smile. Her bow screeched across the violin strings again, not out of frustration but in surprised wonder. He became an entirely different man when he smiled, still taking her by breathless surprise.

“See? Our own rules.”

She exhaled. “Good.”

His smile died, transforming his expression into a picture of befuddled curiosity. “Except I want to know why. Why did you let me win on Friday?”

“I did not.”

“You did.”

Mathilda shrugged, lowering the violin from her chin. The intensity of his regard affected her like the touch of skin to skin.

How could she explain those last, sweet, dangerous moments of their impromptu duet? On stage, standing with her back turned to the piano, she had not seen his face. Yet his music had teased her with relentless invitations, asking her to join him where speech and thought were clumsy, even useless. She had acquiesced to their intimate connection.

Excitement warred with guilt. Need and shame had dueled. And a profound sense of inadequacy had inundated her. What if she had turned to see his face? What if the intimacy she heard in his composition proved the desolate fantasy of a lonely, confused woman?

Rather than finding the strength to turn and learn the truth, she had retreated.

And in his studio, beneath his eyes, she retreated again. “You won,” she said. “Our performance was merely an encore gone on too long.”

Arie watched Mathilda, wanting to deny the creeping finality in her simple declaration. For reasons at which he could only guess, she fled whenever possible, denying and hiding from what he plainly understood. Her talent. His attraction.

Having given up the chance to kiss her, he would suffer for his ambition.

And he was bored. He had behaved himself for weeks, confronting daily the anxieties keeping him prisoner. His newest students would not recognize the Dutchman who had arrived in Salzburg the previous summer. But reforming a half-decade’s worth of bad habits took time. The effort to remain starched and mannered was exhausting.

In the push to smooth his rough edges, Arie had learned that his most taxing chore centered on Mathilda. He had contented himself with retaining her as a pupil, seeing her each Wednesday afternoon, but her brave, phenomenal performance on Friday evening heightened his unfamiliar hunger.

He could control his thoughts. The bare nape of her neck, however, teased him to lustful distraction. Frustration milled his nerves to powder.

Arie was no saint, no bastion of patience. His symphony had stalled, a half-formed catastrophe. He wanted a woman who, until a few minutes ago, stood prepared to assault him. And no matter the transformations he forced on his unruly character, he remained unworthy of her misplaced regard. In the weeks to come, he would finish his symphony, perhaps attaining a measure of the forgiveness and genuine, hard-earned recognition he craved. In the meantime, he remained a discouraged fraud.

His struggles erupted. “This is
Vasteloavend.
What do you call it?”

“Call what?”

“
Vasteloavend.
This night before Lent.”

“Fasnacht.”

“Fasnacht.”
He shuffled sideways from behind the piano bench. “Tomorrow we will be good parishioners and make sacrifices. But we should celebrate tonight, not sit here to argue.”

Mathilda visibly shrank from his suggestion, shaking her head before he even finished speaking. Wariness eclipsed her irises, darkening her hazel eyes with clouds of fear. “I cannot.”

“Come now, put away the violin.”

“Why?”

“You are suspicious of me.” Sensing a flourish of possibilities opening before them, he staunched his excitement to keep from overwhelming her. “I have honest intents, Mathilda.”

Grounded fast like the stump of a tree, she would not budge from her stool. Her expression lobbed hostile accusations about the night at the Stadttrinkstube, condemning him with a silent language more eloquent than speech. She did not trust him. She had not forgiven him.

Arie stalked the room, a hunter seeking his quarry, but he was a tentative warrior. Before meeting Mathilda, engaging in conversation with a woman he found attractive would have been even more difficult than negotiating crowds and speaking to strangers. Limiting his amorous encounters to female admirers who aggressively sought his attentions, he had never pursued a woman. He restricted his use of sexual play to situations in which his partner had already decided the outcome.

Now, when his fascination approached a dire crest, an absolute lack of meaningful experiences left him inept and stranded in dark ignorance. He longed for any meager flame to guide his way.

“Are you afraid of me, Arie?” The clouds of her fear had dispelled. She assessed him, clear and smiling. Her slight laughter somehow denigrated herself at the same time.

Arie could not understand a whit of her humor. Afraid of a woman? What sort of man would he be if he admitted such a thing?

He cringed when he considered the answer, knowing by the desperate, eager thump of his heart that she terrified him. She ushered a crack of light into his darkness, and he would be a fool to blot out that glow. He was a careless idiot and a miserable Lothario, but he was no fool.

“Why do you laugh?” he asked.

Another unruly giggle pushed into the air. “Look at you!”

Worried his attire disappointed her again, he flashed a glance down to his shoes. “What?”

“You’re Arie De Voss!” She stared hard as if willing him to understand. “
You
are afraid of
me?
”

“Yes, yes, I am the famous man and you are the plain, dull
Frau.
You are in awe of me, is that it? I am not allowed to feel the same?”

Her eyes skittered away. Fear, humor, playfulness and even the anger she had displayed with such merciless intensity disappeared. Assuming a rigid posture, she stood and regarded him with a look that flattened his pride and ambition. “I should go.”

Arie watched her retrieve the pelisse. She was pulling away again, and he had grown tired of trying to comprehend why. Devoid of reason, besieged by emotion, he knew she readied to leave for good. In the wake of the damage they carelessly inflicted on each other, a single certainty remained. He needed to take a chance.

“I understand the phrase now,” he said quietly.

Mathilda stopped, turned. “What?”

“Falling.” Desperation shaped his words and made them honest. “Falling in love. I have stepped off a ledge. And yes, I am afraid.”

Her hands froze in the task of donning her outerwear. Her eyebrows shot up, providing Arie with a glimmer of hope. She felt something. She must.

“You aren’t in earnest.”

“I am,” he said. “Why otherwise will I say something so ridiculous?”

“You negate your fine sentiment by deriding it.”

“But it
is
ridiculous.” He laughed at their shared idiocy. “I do not enjoy the experience.”

Exhaustion pressed behind his eyes. He clenched his molars at the insistent knowledge that she would leave at the first opportunity, at his first ill-chosen word. So much depended on a mere handful of minutes. And he only wanted to kiss her.

“You speak as if this is all new to you.” Curiosity peeked through her attempt to remain rigid and impassive. Again, hope flared within him.

“Of course,” he said.

“What do you mean ‘of course’?”

Arie walked to her, confident for once in his own honesty. “If I were in love before, I would not marvel at our attraction. I would be with that woman, whoever she might be.” Closer, he took her pelisse and returned it to the hook. They held hands. “But there is no one else. And I am with you.”

“You’re not
with
me,” Mathilda sputtered. She backed against the wall, inadvertently pulling him with her. “You speak nonsense. An impossibility.”

“Not so.”

“Go to the devil!”

“This is my house. If you are angry, you go.”

He assumed a nonchalant posture at odds with the urgency building within his body. Could she feel the truth of that tension through the hands she held?

“But I do not think you will,” he said. “You want to be here because you are safe with me. I am not those people, those gossips, nor do I need to learn every flaw. I know you.”

“You know no such thing!”

“I know you cannot leave.”

“I can.”

So near, the conflict between their bodies radiated like dancing air currents above a torch. Arie’s line of sight narrowed. His attention centered on a single being, memorizing her every feature. With an unsteady forefinger, he traced the angular slope of a cheekbone. Her respiration accelerated, and the metronomic pulse of blood under the pale skin of her neck hypnotized him. He smelled the gentle echo of sherry on her silent exhale. Dizziness mingled with passion. Intoxicating.

How could they continue this wanting and not having? This restless, destructive combination of desire and denial?

“I have never been in love because my ambition overshadowed all.” He released her hands in favor of the softness of her hair, without another thought about how reckless he had become. He swept soft, loosened tendrils away from her face. “With you, Tilda, I had no choice.”

“Don’t call me that.”

She struggled to break free of his hands, his words, but Arie tightened his hold. “Do you understand? I could fall in love or go mad from wanting you.”

He kissed her then, their searching mouths melting together. She relaxed into the wall and he eased deeper into the shelter of her body. She tasted of sherry and heat. Nothing existed between them but luminous impulse. A kiss. A masterpiece. Bliss.

Embracing, pulling, Arie lost the capacity to gauge time. With his breath burning in his chest, he relished the mingled sensation of pain and wild pleasure. His hands, so perceptive and skilled on the keys of a piano, became numb and clumsy. Her delicate textures escaped him. Her passion, her devastating reaction to his hands, stole reason. The language they invented had no words, no music—only touch, rhythm and an implacable need Arie could not ease, no matter the secrets he discovered with his lips and tongue.

He pulled his mouth from her sweetness with the reluctance of a man returning to the frigid isolation of winter. She nuzzled her face in the crook of his neck while her fingers wound into the disarray of his hair.