Mozart's Last Aria Part 15

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 Ma.s.s 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 amba.s.sador, 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 a.s.sault," 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 Ma.s.s."

"We'll return for the Eucharist. I a.s.sure 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 G.o.dless man secure his place in heaven. His ghost will wander among us, seeking revenge."

"G.o.dless?" 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 pa.s.sing 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 amba.s.sador 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 G.o.d," 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 p.a.w.n."

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 prost.i.tutes 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 pa.s.sed. 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 wh.o.r.es' skulls.

Chapter 21.

At 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 a.s.sumed 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 pa.s.s 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. "n.o.body'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?"