Mozart's Last Aria Part 14

When 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 s.n.a.t.c.hed 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. Embarra.s.sed 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 embarra.s.sment. She bent over the billiard table, made another carom, and moved into position for the next shot even before the b.a.l.l.s were still.

"Eight hundred ducats is poor return for the amount Wolfgang spent on his trip to Prussia," she said.

The b.a.l.l.s 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 pa.s.sing 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 b.u.t.t 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 rea.s.sure 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 G.o.d. I didn't pause to consider which violation would be more dangerous in Vienna.

When Wolfgang was young, he had been so naive 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 d.a.m.ned 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 b.u.t.tons. 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 t.i.tle 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.

Chapter 20.

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 Ma.s.s.

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 s.p.a.ces 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 pa.s.sed 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 grat.i.tude for the Lord bringing us out of another night.

I closed my eyes, thanked G.o.d 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 amba.s.sador doing at your brother's apartment last night?" he said.