The Memorist (18 page)

Tuesday, April 29
^th
—10:14 a.m.

A
s Meer traveled from the elevator down the long hospital corridor checking the numbers on the doors of the rooms, she tried not to look inside as she passed. She didn’t want to spy on strangers suffering in their sickbeds, helpless to shut their doors if nurses had left them open. Their fear and distress would stay with her for days if she glimpsed it because she knew too well what they felt. Though she’d only been nine, the long weeks she spent lying, immobilized in a bed, unable to protect herself from the prying eyes of the people passing by her room, were seared in her memory.

The door to room 316 was open wide enough to reveal a white-coated doctor standing beside her father’s bed. The woman’s back was to Meer so she couldn’t see the expression on her face but her tone sounded serious—too serious for a situation her father had manufactured on the spur of the moment.

“Excuse me,” Meer said from the doorway.

The doctor turned, annoyance clearly visible on her
face, and said something in German that Meer didn’t understand.

Jeremy sat up straighter in the bed, spoke to the doctor in German and then to Meer. “Come in, sweetheart. This is Dr. Lintell. Dr. Lintell, this is my daughter.”

Now the doctor offered a smile. “Hello,” she said, extending her hand.

Meer shook it and asked, “How is my father?” Even though she knew nothing was really wrong, she needed to keep up the charade.

“We need to run some more tests.”

Surprised, but trying not to show it, Meer looked over at her father. “Tests? Why?”

Jeremy smiled. “Even though the doctor thinks it was just an anxiety attack she wants to torture me a bit more.”

Meer didn’t understand. She and her father had planned his attack in the crypt during a minute-long whispered conversation after she’d realized—suddenly amazingly known—there was a clue buried in the crypt and where it was. She’d asked her father if he could distract the monk so she could search for it. A panic attack, her father had whispered back, and she’d understood. He’d done it before, and it had been one of her favorite bedtime stories…how he’d outsmarted a border guard in East Germany by faking a heart attack that was then diagnosed as a panic attack. All without arousing suspicion.

“He told you he’s had panic attacks before, hasn’t he?” Meer asked the doctor.

The doctor nodded.

“How many tests do you have to give him for anxiety?”

“Actually we need to rule out some other possibilities, too.” She was very brusque. Not cold, but not offering up one word more than was necessary. Meer
wasn’t sure if this was a Germanic trait or a bad bedside manner.

There was a third possibility too.

“Dad, is there something really wrong?”

He laughed in that reassuring way of his that made the most monumental problem appear under control. That laugh was one of the things she missed the most when he moved out of the apartment when she was twelve. That laugh, and the relief she felt when she swam in its wake. “No, sweetheart. There’s nothing really wrong. The tests are all routine, isn’t that right, Doctor?”

The doctor responded to him tersely in German. And he replied, but also in German.

All her life Meer had hated secrets. Her mother used to catch her listening on phone extensions, hiding behind doors eavesdropping, always trying to find out what they weren’t telling her. There was so much they hid. So much her own mind hid from her. Images and sounds wrapped up in blankets of fog, memories just beyond reach.

Meer wondered if it was her imagination but her father seemed frailer here, as if the last hour had sucked the energy out of him. After the doctor left she was about to question him again but was interrupted when Sebastian and Malachai came in.

“Are you all right? What happened in the crypt?” Sebastian asked.

“You were with the doctor for a while,” Malachai said. “What’s the prognosis?”

Jeremy explained that Meer needed some time to look inside one of the urns and he’d faked the attack to draw attention away from her. “Even so, I have to stay for some tests. I’m at that age when they won’t just let me out of here without making sure every part of me is working
right. In the meantime, we need to figure out what Meer found, what it means, and what we need to do next.”

Meer understood why her father included Malachai in this effort but not Sebastian. She glanced over at him and found him watching her and met his eyes. Once again she felt that push-pull of being both drawn to him and repelled at the same time. Comforted to see him. Frightened that he was there. She turned to Malachai. “What did you say?”

“I asked you what you took.” His ebony eyes were gleaming with anticipation.

Reaching into her pocket, Meer pulled out the object she’d extracted from the ninth silver chalice in the Heart Vault. No more than an inch long, it was made of tarnished metal, silver perhaps, pitted with black. She examined the small tube that had a hole in the top and one notch on the side. There were no other markings on it and it was cold to the touch, a cold that traveled through her fingertips, up her arms, down her neck, across her back. As she shivered, the small object trembled in the palm of her hand.

“What is that?” Sebastian asked.

“Did you know you were looking for a key when you went down there?” Malachai asked.

“No. I had no idea.”

“Do you have any idea what it’s for?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“We have to figure out what the key’s for but we aren’t going to be able to do that from here,” Jeremy said. “Sebastian, are you free today? Can you help?”

“I have to go to the Musikverein for a rehearsal for Thursday’s performance but not until seven.”

Jeremy was perplexed. “I don’t have tickets for Thursday night?”

Sebastian explained and then looked at Malachai. “If you’d like to come also I think I can get one more ticket. I’d be pleased to have you as my guest. We’re doing Beethoven’s
Eroica.
”

“I’d love it,” Malachai said enthusiastically.

Meer wasn’t listening anymore. Hearing the maestro’s name she was visualizing his tombstone yesterday. And Margaux’s.

“Are you remembering something?” Malachai asked.

Meer heard the desperate searching in his voice, the leitmotif of her childhood. Malachai and her father, trying to sever what they believed was the membrane that kept her past from spilling into her present. “You’ve worked with thousands of children,” she said to him. “Haven’t they given you enough chances to find the proof you want?”

“A memory tool would be validation of a very different kind.”

“If there really is such a thing, how would it work?” Sebastian asked. “Do you imagine the sound of the music will be enough to bring back someone’s memory?”

“That’s what the legends claim,” Malachai answered. “Either the music or the vibrations made when the flute is played.”

“And if there was an actual physical way to manipulate time like that would it work with the more recent past too, or just the deep past?”

Meer understood what Sebastian was asking, even if Malachai didn’t. He was wondering if the flute might be able to help his son, Nicolas. She could tell from the shift in his voice, the desperation under the words. Sebastian was scavenging for information that might enable him to help his child. She wished she could aid him too but she was thirty-one years old and hadn’t yet been able to help herself.

She shivered and this time the cold was like a blizzard of emotion, freezing her own heart. The taste of metal filled her mouth. Her father and Malachai and Sebastian were shimmering as if they were no longer solid forms.
No, not here, not now,
she thought as she tried to stop the images from forming in her mind, but they were coming too fast and with too much force.

Vienna, Austria
October 18
^th
, 1814

A
cross the room the Tsar caught Margaux’s eye and smiled disarmingly. There were two men standing in front of him but the monarch towered over them, so while they believed they had his full attention, he was able to play his eye games with Margaux.

Even though the salon buzzed with conversation and the string quartet’s delightful music, nothing lessened the underlying note of sadness that played for Margaux no matter where she was, what she was doing or who was flirting with her.

The more lovely the moment, the more aware she was of Caspar’s plight and the more desperate her mission became. How much longer could she afford to wait? Day after day, she visited Herr Beethoven and witnessed his continual inability to decipher the memory song while Caspar languished in some unimaginable monastery on another continent. How ill was he? Would he survive until
she raised the money? How long would it take to find him? She took a breath, deep and disconsolate, and let it out slowly, wishing she could give in and cry instead of standing so straight and making this effort at control. If she could stop loving her husband she would. Give it up for a day without worry, without the fear of what would happen to him if she failed. But she couldn’t stop. Neither loving him nor trying to save him.

The Tsar, one of the richest men in the world, was glancing her way again, his gray eyes intent and inviting. She returned his gaze.

If Major Archer Wells wasn’t authorized to purchase the flute for the Rothschilds without the score, perhaps the Tsar could be tempted by the idea of the object’s magic. Now. Before it was too late. She fought her rising panic. Double-dealing was dangerous but grief tempered her fear. Now was not the time for retreat; she’d spent too many days setting up this meeting.

Margaux’s lovely home was filled with clever and important people, fine food and charming music. It was all a patina. The threads that held the partygoers’ polite masks in place were fragile. Everyone in Vienna had an agenda and a plan for how the reapportionment of Europe would work best for them now that Napoleon was in exile. To the victor had gone the spoils, and now that the victor had been vanquished they were all arguing about how the spoils would be doled out. Despite the lofty talk about doing what was best for all nations, each country was ultimately concerned only with its own interests. So even here tonight, at what purported to be a totally social gathering, nothing was as it seemed.

Margaux looked at the Tsar again, responding not with the flirting she knew he expected but with a straightfor
ward glance. She was betting the best way to play this game was not to play it at all. The power of the unexpected. One of the lessons Caspar had taught her along with a hundred others. So she held the Tsar’s gaze with a cool indifference, and from the intensity of his returning glance it appeared nonchalance intrigued the man no one dared treat with anything less than reverence.

Picking up two crystal glasses of champagne from a tray her servant passed around, Margaux crossed the room and delivered one to the Russian monarch, not only interrupting his conversation but ignoring the men with him. A handsome man with light auburn hair, the monarch wore the uniform of a field marshal and the many elaborate medals and thick gold epaulettes on his green coat caught the candlelight and gleamed as brightly as any queen’s jewels. Most women would have hung back at first, tried to be charming about the intrusion but she wanted to ensure the Tsar knew just how different she was.

It hadn’t taken much to pry the Tsar away. He agreed to her suggestion of a stroll in the garden with an intimate smile and the offer of his arm. Outside, where the moon and the lanterns cast the intricate paths in seductive shadow and the blooming night flowers scented the air with sweet smelling perfumes, the monarch—who had a reputation for being a Lothario—leaned in close to Margaux and thanked her for rescuing him from a boring political argument.

“It was my pleasure. I’d been wanting to talk to you all evening.” As did most people in Vienna that season, they spoke in French.

“Ah, so you have an agenda of your own. Nonpolitical, I hope. I’ve had enough of that for one night.”

“It is political but not the kind of politics you were discussing.”

Alexander smiled more intimately still. “How clever. I never tire of politics of the bedroom.”

“We’ve all heard about your spiritual marriage. Is it really true?”

“You take me by surprise. That’s a serious subject and here I thought we were having a frivolous conversation.”

“Do you mind?”

“Not at all. Are you a student of mysticism?”

“My husband is, and I learned from him. He’s talked to me about many things, Your Excellency, including the idea that two people can communicate with each other through prayer, no matter how far apart from each other they are.”

They’d reached the center of the mazelike gardens. Here among the rose bushes was a stone bench that the Tsar brushed off for her. Once they sat, they were instantly hidden by pruned boxwood bushes so thick they functioned like walls.

“Yes, that’s what it’s like for us.”

“There are three of you involved in this marriage?” she asked, already knowing the answer, having grilled two ladies-in-waiting to the Tsarina yesterday and paid them off with jewelry she could ill afford to lose.

“Yes. We support each other with our hearts and our souls.”

“Is your spiritual wife here with you in Vienna?”

“She’s my own wife’s lady-in-waiting. Countess d’Edling. Maybe you’ve met her?”

“I haven’t had the pleasure,” Margaux said as she searched Alexander’s eyes, looking for a spark so she’d know if she should make the joke that was on her lips or stay away from making light of the situation. The Tsar’s expression was intensely serious.

So her spies had been right. His mystical interests were
not sexually motivated but deeply held convictions. Everyone knew he believed Russia had been ordained by God to execute Napoleon’s downfall and then help organize the security for all European nations. So when his country did, indeed, prove instrumental in stopping the French Emperor, Alexander took it as confirmation of what he had to accomplish next. That mission was the reason he was in Vienna. He believed it was his destiny. But Alexander’s efforts to annex Poland and move Russia’s border several hundred miles west concerned the other heads of state at the Congress because the Tsar’s mystical beliefs made all of his reasoning suspect.

They’d fallen silent. Around them insects hummed. From inside her apartments came the murmurs of conversation and strains of the chamber orchestra’s music. It was cooler out here but she didn’t pull her shawl up around her shoulders because she knew the moon made her skin glow and that the Tsar was looking at her bodice even while he discussed philosophy.

“It impresses me that you are so generous with your soul that you’d share it with a woman who shares hers with another man.”

The Tsar laughed. “You mean the Theosophist, Schilling?”

She nodded.

“It was actually after meeting with him that I decided I wanted to be part of his union. You should hear how eloquently he explains the ways in which the spirit is superior to the flesh. Of all of us, he enriches the marriage. There is a fourth too, Baroness Kruedener. They are my phalanx of angels.”

Margaux did know, but feigned interest and surprise. Everyone knew. The Tsar’s spiritual marriage was a joke
to most of them. “I heard that Schilling is a friend of the poet Goethe. Have you met him also?” she asked.

“No, but I’m familiar with his work.”

“Do you know about Goethe’s beliefs in reincarnation?”

“I do.”

“And do they interest you also?”

“Of course. Do you believe in past lives?”

“My husband does, Your Highness.”

“Ah, that’s right. The explorer. He was lost in India, wasn’t he? On some kind of treasure hunt.”

As Margaux told the Tsar about the flute, he was wholly absorbed in what she was saying. She was concentrating so hard on tantalizing him with her offer that neither of them noticed the flicker of a shadow on the path as someone approached.

“So this artifact belongs to you now.”

“Yes,” she said, “in fact I’ve been approached by the agent of a powerful family who wishes to buy it from me.”

“Why don’t you show it to me first,” the Tsar said. “I’d like to see it before you sell it to anyone else.”