Mozart's Last Aria (12 page)
W
hen we broke our embrace, the Prussian’s coins rattled in the purse. Constanze caught her bottom lip between her childish white teeth.
“One hundred ducats,” she said. “For each composition. A total of eight hundred ducats.”
I murmured a noncommittal acknowledgment and glanced at the scores on the desk.
In the kitchen, the maid yelped and Constanze’s little dog scampered over the bare floorboards. Gaukerl arrived with a roll between his jaws. He dropped the bread at Constanze’s feet.
“He snatched it from my hand, madame,” the maid said.
Constanze laughed, slipped Jacobi’s purse into her sleeve, and picked up the dog. “It’s all right, Sabine. He can have a munch of bread for supper. Can’t you, little trickster.” She ripped the roll and dangled it before the eager dog.
She twirled on her toes with her pet pressed against her neck. “Sister, I’m in high spirits. Let’s have some billiards.”
“I haven’t played in a long time.”
“Wolfgang and I had a game every day. He used to smoke his long pipe and hum a silly ditty to himself. I’d have to tell him to be silent while I took my shots. The next time I’d hear the tune, it’d be a wonderful symphony.” She squeezed the dog and set it down.
The burst of happiness which had come over her was infectious. I followed her into the next room. We pushed the chairs against the wall, so that there’d be room for our billiard cues.
Constanze took the first shot. She caromed her ball off the red and into mine.
“Your point,” I said.
She gave a cheer and pretended to blow a trumpet.
All evening I had been preoccupied with strange revelations about Wolfgang. I still felt the terror of the knife attack, too. It was an extra beat that slipped into the rhythm of my pulse, making it irregular and frenetic. With relief, I laughed at Constanze.
She sent her ball toward mine, striking below the center with the tip of her cue so that the spin brought her back to clip the red. She whooped and shook her hips in excitement. “Bagatelle,” she called.
Her exuberance was liberating. The room seemed warm, despite the frost in the window mullions.
When I took my shot, I scuffed the end of my cue into the baize. My ball trickled toward the cushion.
“You’d do better if you simply drove the ball across the table by farting at it.” Constanze laughed, but was suddenly silent. She stared at me, fearful that I’d disapprove. Embarrassed points of color rose on her cheeks.
I turned my back to the table, pushed out my backside, and blew a raspberry. “Bagatelle,” I cried. We hugged, giggling.
Constanze lined up her next shot, but before she struck the ball she dropped her cue onto the table. “What am I to do, sister?” She folded her hands over her face and sobbed.
It was as though there had never been a happy embrace between us. Now that she was miserable, I found I couldn’t touch her. I had cried as hard as this when she married my brother, knowing that I would have to be my father’s nursemaid in his old age. I hardened myself to her grief, because it recalled my own.
“Debts. Only debts,” she cried. “That’s all he left me.”
“You have eight hundred ducats to keep you from the poorhouse.” I heard the lack of sympathy strangling my voice. “It’s clear Wolfgang must’ve made a wonderful impression on his visit to the Prussian court.”
She sniffled and rubbed at her eyes.
“I mean, for him to command such a sum from the king there,” I said. Back to the subject of Berlin. Just when I had started to relax.
Resentment crossed Constanze’s face. The color rose on her cheeks again, but this time it was not from embarrassment. She bent over the billiard table, made another carom, and moved into position for the next shot even before the balls were still.
“Eight hundred ducats is poor return for the amount Wolfgang spent on his trip to Prussia,” she said.
The balls clicked and she lined up another shot.
“All the Prussians gave him when he was alive was a gold snuffbox. With the king’s crest on it.” This time, it was she who made the sound of passing gas with her pursed lips. There was no humor to it.
She scratched chalk onto the end of her cue to give it grip on the ball. Concentrating on the table, she sucked her upper lip and was silent.
The easy mood was gone, so I ventured a question. “Did Wolfgang find no other way of profiting from the trip?”
Constanze missed her shot and cursed under her breath.
I bent to the table and played. My ball clipped the red and rolled aimlessly off the banks. It came to a halt with the slightest kiss against Constanze’s ball.
“A lucky shot,” I said.
Constanze let her head drop. “I suspected another woman.”
I rested the butt of my cue on the floor and reached for her arm.
She shrugged away my consoling touch and looked into the courtyard. She spoke as though she were whispering to the darkest corners of the stable below, addressing shapes which might barely be seen. “He dallied in Prague and then in Leipzig on the way to Berlin. I believe he was detained by a—a lady.”
“I can’t agree.”
She waved away my objection. “Disappointment always cast him into a black mood. He said he had been promised a post in Berlin. He found no employment there. Yet he wasn’t dejected. He returned to Vienna as cheerful as ever I saw him.”
I sought to reassure Constanze without telling her what I knew of Wolfgang’s mission. “If he was happy, then he must’ve accomplished something else. Something that made him contented or hopeful.”
Constanze cursed under her breath. “Take your shot, sister.”
The cue slipped over my knuckles and skewed my ball wide of its target. It was a nervous shot, shaking with the secret that I struggled to keep. I glanced at her, but she hadn’t noticed. She examined the chalk on the tip of her stick.
“When he traveled, he always sent me letters with his news. He wrote almost nothing to me while he was on that trip,” she said. Her ball chipped against the others and she watched it bounce off the cushions. “Something was going on, I know it.”
I took this as confirmation of what Lichnowsky had told me. Wolfgang went to Berlin with no intention of securing a position at the court. He had returned with his mission accomplished, whatever it was, and had been happy for that.
That didn’t mean Constanze was incorrect about the other woman. I thought of the scars on Magdalena Hofdemel’s face, given by a jealous husband. I considered that Wolfgang might have fallen into sin on more than one occasion. But I preferred to believe that he had hidden a less wicked truth from his wife, one based on a pledge to his Masonic brothers rather than to a secret lover. He might have offended his emperor, but I still hoped he hadn’t wronged his God. I didn’t pause to consider which violation would be more dangerous in Vienna.
When Wolfgang was young, he had been so naïve that he was often unable to fathom the jealousy and intrigue of others. I wondered if he had learned deception in the imperial capital, fawning and flattering in aristocratic salons. Was his mission to Berlin so important that he would allow his wife to suspect adultery, rather than reveal the truth to her?
“Believe me, Constanze, I know this can’t be true. It surely wasn’t adultery which delayed him in Berlin.”
My sister-in-law laid her cue on the table. I saw that she took the indecision in my voice for disapproval.
“If he was unfaithful, you’d blame me, wouldn’t you?” she snapped. “It’d be my fault for being a bad wife.”
I retreated a step from the force of her anger.
“You never liked me. You and your father.” Her hands were fists at her sides. “You shunned me when we visited Salzburg after the wedding and you ignored your only brother throughout the last, difficult years of his life.”
“I’ve wronged you, I know, but—”
She pulled the purse from her sleeve and threw it onto the billiard table. “I saw how you looked at me when Jacobi gave me this money. If the king of Prussia’s buying, I’m selling. That’s the legacy your brother left me. You think I care too much for money? Let me remind you that you refused to share your father’s bequest with Wolfgang.”
“It was Papa’s will—”
“And who cared more about cash than that wicked old miser?”
I started to speak, to tell her that my father had only wanted to protect me from poverty. But I knew it wasn’t true. I shut my mouth and lowered my eyes. My father’s denial of Wolfgang’s inheritance had been the spite of an old man who felt rejected by his brilliant son.
Constanze went into Wolfgang’s study and rattled back the lid of the roll-top desk.
I came to the door. Behind me, the maid whispered for Karl to follow her to the kitchen. In his crib, little Wolfgang grizzled.
When she turned from the desk, Constanze’s black curls fell across her face. She brandished a single sheet of paper and came toward me, pushing her chin forward. “Look at this. The inventory of his estate. That damned billiard table is the most valuable possession he left to me.”
I scanned the penciled columns of numbers and the scribbled descriptions of every object in the apartment.
“More valuable than anything—except his scores,” she said. “You understand me?”
I blinked and nodded.
“He could’ve made a lot more money than he did,” she said. “He charged six ducats a month for lessons, but he only took a few pupils because he preferred to be composing.”
Six ducats was a tremendous fee even for a famous musician like Wolfgang. I wondered again how Magdalena’s husband, the court clerk, had paid for such an extravagance.
“Did I ever complain that he should compose less and teach more, for the sake of money? Never. Not me.” Constanze shoved the inventory into my hands and pushed past me.
She bent over a chest at her bedside and pulled out a few jackets and breeches, tossing them onto the divan. She pressed a red frock coat to her, and she sobbed.
“He wore this at the premieres of his operas. At all his most important concerts.” She ran her hand over the fabric and played with one of the buttons. It was mother-of-pearl with a red stone at its center. “A gift from the Baroness Thun. He loved it.”
I held her arm and guided her to the bed. Laying her down, I folded the covers over her. She rolled toward the wall, spent with the desperation of bereavement and poverty. I stroked the hair at the nape of her neck. Then I returned the red coat to the chest.
In the doorway, the maid stood with her ruddy hands on Karl’s shoulders. The boy watched his mother’s shivering back.
“Bedtime, little Karl,” I said.
The maid rocked the baby’s cradle, while Karl undressed.
I went into Wolfgang’s studio.
In the candlelight, I looked over his bookshelves. Full of memories. I picked a book of Metastasio’s librettos from the shelf and touched my finger along the title page. The Turin edition of the famous court poet’s works, in a set of nine volumes. It had been a gift from Count Firmian in Milan after Wolfgang played for him. My brother had been fourteen years old.
I sat in an armchair by the window, unfolded a blanket over my legs, and set the book in my lap.
Outside, players were leaving the court on Ball Lane after a late-night game of
jeu de paume
. They bade their boisterous farewells, with their shoulders hunched against the chill.
The street emptied. The darkness in the doorways rippled and shifted, as though it were a lingering thief buffeted by the wind.
The keyboard of Wolfgang’s piano was blue in the moonlight. I shut the lid over the keys and went to sleep.
I
awoke before dawn, stiff and cold in the armchair, my hand locked in a claw around Metastasio’s book. I trembled to see the night lingering outside. It hid the men who had tried to kill me and it shrouded the vicious secrets of Vienna that Prince Lichnowsky had warned me of.
I rolled my neck and told myself not to be afraid of the coming day. At this very window, Wolfgang must have yearned to see a new morning begin, pleading with the Lord to let it come, as he felt the poison work its destruction on him. He was close to me always now, whether in the light of day or in the furtive, threatening night. I decided to welcome the dawn and to pray for his soul at early Mass.
Gathering my cloak and gloves, I crept toward the door. The clock on Wolfgang’s desk showed five-thirty. Constanze sprawled across her bed with the dog curled beneath her arm.
Karl sat up in his nightshirt. His dark eyes were sad, his face as pale as the glimmers of moonlight outside. I put a finger to my lips and went through the kitchen, past the sleeping maid, and out into the freezing end of the night.
At St. Stephen’s, my candle flickered away into the vaults of the ceiling, beyond the ornate copper lanterns hanging from their long chains. I had grown accustomed to the intimate village church at home in St. Gilgen. The unlit spaces high above me in the cathedral felt heavy and crushing.
I took my place in the shivering crowd of worshippers. Dropping a little wax onto the back of the pew before me, I jabbed the end of the candle into it so that it’d stand.
The clergymen passed down the aisle singing a Latin antiphon and swinging incense on a jangling chain. Two of them helped the oldest priest to his knees, so that he might reverence before the altar, and then they lifted him into a chair. They draped him in his vestments, and he announced the name of the Trinity. His thin voice proclaimed our gratitude for the Lord bringing us out of another night.
I closed my eyes, thanked God for saving me from my attackers, and prayed for Gieseke’s safety.
The priest sprinkled holy water on the air before him. In Greek, we asked Our Lord for His mercy three times:
Kyrie, eleison. Kyrie, eleison. Kyrie, eleison.
“The Kyrie was, I thought, the most impressive part of Maestro Mozart’s Requiem.”
Shadows obscured the face of the man who spoke to me from the aisle. I stared at him in confusion.
He removed his hat, laid it on the bench, and sat beside me. With a gentle touch of his periwig to be sure it sat straight, Count Pergen turned his secretive smile on me. His eye wept a little from the cold wind outside. A tear traced over the broken veins in his cheek.
I was as surprised to find that his eyes could cry, even if only from the cold, as I was to see him at my side.
“The performance of the Requiem at St. Michael’s was superb,” he said.
The congregation sang the Gloria. Pergen’s voice was a sharp baritone, though not unpleasant. He stared at the crucifix above the altar with a trace of suffering on his face, as though he knew the agony of that execution.
When the hymn was done, Pergen lifted an eyebrow and smiled. “What was the Prussian ambassador doing at your brother’s apartment last night?” he said.
I looked at him with eyes wide. He flicked his wrist as though it were not worth explaining how he knew such a thing.
“You followed me here?” I said.
“I come to early Mass every day. I have a healthy fear of Our Lord, and anyway I sleep little. Nonetheless, I usually sit in a pew at the front. You’re correct that it’s not by coincidence that I find myself in this humbler seating this morning.” He held out his palm. “You were about to tell me of the Prussian ambassador, madame?”
I found my throat dry and I coughed. “He was buying some of Wolfgang’s scores.”
“Only his scores? Nothing else?”
“What else could there be?”
“Dear lady, your brother’s pranks and his silly laugh may have fooled some people into thinking of him as a harmless buffoon. But it’s my job to know a man’s true self. Your brother’s intellect was considerable. Sadly it led him to absorb an unfortunate philosophy and to keep dangerous friends.” Pergen pinched the bridge of his nose as though his sinuses ached. “Why were
you
there, at your sister’s home?”
“For safety.”
A lady in the next pew turned to stare down the chatterers behind her. Pergen leaned toward his candle so that she might see his face. She swallowed hard and returned her gaze to the missal in her hands.
“So you took refuge at your brother’s house. Do continue.” The count let his head drop to the side. A question.
“From an assault,” I said. “An attempt against my life and the life of a gentleman after we left Baron van Swieten’s salon at the Imperial Library.”
Pergen showed no perturbation at the news of the attack.
I saw that his closed mouth was a tactic, forcing me to fill the gaps. Only the guilty fear silence, but I was compelled to run on. “I was with Herr Gieseke. I fled and now I have no idea what became of the poor man.”
“Gieseke? The actor? No doubt it wasn’t his first brawl of the day,” Pergen said.
We responded to the choir’s chorus of Alleluia.
“Did you know Gieseke wrote some of the text for
The Magic Flute
?” he said.
“But Herr Schikaneder—”
“Wrote the first draft. Your brother edited it. Then Gieseke added some verses.”
The count leered, satisfied that he had shocked me. I thought of Gieseke’s fear, Schikaneder’s warning for him to restrain his tongue, the knife in the twilight as it descended. I had believed it was aimed at me, but perhaps Gieseke had broken a Masonic bond of secrecy and was sentenced to death.
As Wolfgang had been.
The priest started his sermon. Pergen stood and held his elbow out for me. “The monsignor’s homilies are less than instructive, madame. Will you accompany me?”
“I came to hear Mass.”
“We’ll return for the Eucharist. I assure you I have things to tell you that have more bearing on your salvation than this priest’s sermon.”
He took me to the quiet transept and into the baptismal chapel. I shielded the flame of my candle with my hand. The dawn showed only its first, thin glow, white on the water of the font.
“Your brother, madame, tried to make himself a friend of the Prussians,” Pergen said. “That was against the wishes of our emperor.”
My features registered astonishment, but not at Wolfgang’s actions. Did this man know everyone’s secrets in their entirety?
Pergen bent over the font. The light reflected off the water, shadowing his face. “Your nephews and nieces were all baptized right here, you know.” Gaunt and gray, his skin was wrinkled less by age than by the lack of fat that softens cheeks and chin. The lines deepened into a grim smile, as though he were crumbling to shards like shattered terra-cotta. “Including the ones who died.”
I crossed myself and whispered a prayer for Wolfgang’s lost children and for my little Babette, who had been taken from me. I pulled my cloak closer.
“Do you not sense their ghosts here?” His eyes scanned the shadows, and his hand gripped hard at the rim of the font. “I see them in the holy water, washing themselves. But nothing can cleanse the diseases that took them from us.”
I was quite still. It seemed that to him I was less present than the ghosts of the babies crowded around the font. He spoke to himself, or perhaps to the spirits of the lost children.
“You can’t wash away a death, even with the blessing of the pope himself,” he whispered. “Neither can a funeral for a godless man secure his place in heaven. His ghost will wander among us, seeking revenge.”
“Godless?” The candle flickered in my trembling hands.
He looked about him with momentary urgency. Did he feel the same touch now as I had done when I sat at Wolfgang’s piano, icy and light against my hand and across the back of my neck? A ghostly presence.
“Do you suggest that my brother—?”
“His funeral was in the Chapel of the Cross, on the other side of the church.” His thin smile glimmered and he appeared to return to the world. The ghosts had left him. “I doubt that there has ever been such a gathering of atheists in our venerable cathedral.”
I was shocked. “Sir, please.”
“Masons, the lot of them. Men who wish to undermine our entire society.”
“I’m sure they only wished to mark the passing of a wonderful musician.”
“They gathered to wish him on his way to the place they call ‘the Grand Lodge Above.’ Even Heaven must bow down to the rule of these Masons, it seems. They’re gripped with a mania to overthrow our government.” He slapped the sandstone rim of the font. “They wish to put themselves in power, a secret elite to govern us all in
their
interests.”
“Wolfgang loved the Empire.” Only as I spoke these words did I realize how much I had started to question them. “I’m sure of it.”
Pergen raised his chin. He seemed to perceive my doubt. He waited, like a schoolteacher before a hesitant pupil.
I tried to justify what I had discovered of Wolfgang’s final months, as much for my own benefit as for Pergen. “How could the Masons be committed to the overthrow of the government? Their membership includes prominent aristocrats.”
“Who better to dream of power than men already close to it? Do you know what they call the secret knowledge they guard among themselves? The Royal Art. What royalty? A few misguided aristocrats, yes, but otherwise tradesmen, merchants, musicians, and actors.” Pergen crooked his arm once more and led me out of the chapel. “Your brother was a member of a Masonic lodge of the Rosicrucian type.”
I struggled to remember what Gieseke had said of the Rosy Cross. I recalled the number eighteen and its connection to Wolfgang’s death. I had no idea what lay behind the numbers. “I’m unfamiliar with such things.”
“The Prussian king is a member of that kind of lodge. Did you know that?” Pergen laid his fingers upon my wrist as though he might measure a lie in my pulse. “Have you read through your brother’s compositions for Masonic meetings?”
“I haven’t seen them.”
“One of them was called ‘You, Our New Leaders.’ As if our emperor isn’t leader enough for us.”
“I’m sure it must’ve been a poetic image. About moral or spiritual leadership, not real power.” In spite of myself, I was shocked. With all I had learned of Wolfgang’s connections in Vienna, I was forced to consider that he might’ve been a danger to the state.
We returned to our pew as those at the front of the congregation received Communion.
“Your friend Baron van Swieten was our ambassador to Berlin some years ago,” Pergen whispered.
My candle spilled wax onto my hand. I winced.
“He joined a Berlin lodge of Masons. He became very close to the Prussian royal family. One of their princesses was rather taken with him.”
My jealousy was as sharp as the sting of the hot wax. I struggled to set it aside. What Pergen told me of Wolfgang was confusing enough. I couldn’t allow a sinful attraction to the baron to distract me from my purpose.
“Surely you don’t suspect him. The baron is appointed by our emperor, as are you,” I said. “His apartments are in the palace.”
“What did I just say about men close to power?” Pergen stood aside for me. “Swieten is the head of censorship for our emperor, yet he allows many dangerous books to be published.”
I went up the aisle. As I received the host on my tongue, Pergen knelt beside me. The priest proffered another disc of bread. The count licked it into his mouth like a lizard catching a fly.
The deacon mumbled that the Communion wine was the blood of a man. It was as cold as ice. Pergen shut his eyes as he sipped it.
Signing the cross, the old priest bade us go in peace.
“Thanks be to God,” I mumbled with the other congregants.
Pergen followed me along the aisle to the door.
“Don’t be fooled by Maestro Mozart’s friends, madame,” he said. “It’s a Viennese tradition to criticize a man while he’s alive, only to laud him once he’s dead.”
“I believe that’s a universal trait.”
“How cynical, dear lady.”
“Not cynical. Forgiving.”
“Here they call such criticism ‘graveyard courtesy.’ You may wonder why your brother had such financial trouble while he lived, when all his companions were rich men. Naturally it’s because they’re much better friends to the memory of a poor sainted fellow who died young than they were to a real, live composer with a family to feed. Whatever he believed, Maestro Mozart was a pawn.”
Pergen stopped in the main entrance of the cathedral. “He has been sacrificed,” he said. “I’m sure you want to know by whom.”
“Do I?”
“You’ve come a long way in the midwinter, if all you aimed to do was watch men like Gieseke brawl.”
In the square outside the cathedral, a constable drove a line of prostitutes to sweep the cobbles. A raw wind rustled their thin skirts. Their heads had been shaved in punishment for their lewd trade. They brushed the manure and vegetable leaves across the ground with their brooms, shaking in the cold, their scalps bloodied by the careless shearing at the police barracks.
The first traders lay their baskets on the ground, where the harlots had passed. Pergen snapped his fingers at a woman selling almond candy. She deposited a little sack in his hand with a humble bend of the knee, reaching up to accept his coin without raising her eyes. He put a piece between his back teeth and crunched into it. A white trace of adulterated sugar smeared the corner of his lip. He licked it away with a bloodless tongue and strolled to his carriage.
The dawn striped the low clouds purple, as though they were bruised by the rooftops. The sky promised rain sharp enough to cut me like the pale skin of the whores’ skulls.