Mozart's Last Aria Part 26

"You saw me suffer a fit at Gieseke's funeral. The falling sickness. It was a frequent affliction, until I learned to play Wolfgang's music."

"His compositions are very calming to me, too."

"More than calming. They're better than any physician's medicine. Without them it's as though I'm a madwoman."

She trembled. I wondered if she was about to succ.u.mb to another fit, but it was only the wind shivering her.

"To protect you against this sickness," I said, "your husband paid for the expensive services of a famous composer as your music teacher?"

"The maestro respected my talent," Magdalena said. "He invited me into his company more and more, because he valued my musical ability. It didn't matter to him that I was a woman. But Franz became jealous. He believed I was having an affair with Wolfgang."

"I've heard that rumor. But please let me speak. I've come from the palace where-"

"That's why Franz agreed to work for Count Pergen."

I stared through the veil at the gashes on her desperate face.

"My husband was an agent for the police minister. He poisoned Wolfgang during a meeting of their Masonic Brotherhood." She plucked a leaf from a lilac bush behind the grave, rubbed it with her thumb, and let it drop. "For this treachery he received payment from Pergen."

The lavish apartment where I first met her, I thought, paid for with secret bribes.

"How do you know this?" I said. "How can you be sure?"

"After Wolfgang died, Franz gloated. He told me he had taken revenge for my infidelity. He felt he had triumphed."

"Then he attacked you?"

"No. I told him that he was mistaken. I had been the maestro's pupil and nothing more. He didn't want to hear it, but I insisted. He saw what he had done. He cried out that he had been duped. That he had murdered a genius."

"Duped? By whom?"

"He asked me to forgive him." She sobbed. "That's all he asked."

"But you refused?"

"How could I excuse such a terrible thing? He destroyed the greatest gift G.o.d ever gave to mankind. He obliterated all the unwritten music Wolfgang would've created."

"So he decided to kill you and to end his own life."

"He went wild. He slashed me. Then he cut his own throat. I watched him die." She pointed along the row of graves. "He's buried over there, but I haven't stood before his tomb as I stand here now. I must do penance for the part I played in the maestro's death."

I wondered if Franz Hofdemel had given signs of his jealousy. Perhaps she might've persuaded him earlier of her innocence. She must've been so drawn to Wolfgang's astonishing gifts that they blinded her to the simple needs of her husband. Now she repented.

Blindness, penitence.

I stepped closer to her. "It was you."

She frowned.

"Of course," I said. "The riddle Wolfgang wrote at the end of one of his last sonatas. 'She repents her blindness as she is always penitent. At the keyboard her notes run riot like demons cast out. I will be with her as a brother in the halls of Paradise, at her side as always I've been, though not as my father intended.' "

Magdalena shook her head. "Me?"

"Penitent, as Maria Magdalena is always portrayed. You shared her name. In the Holy Bible she was possessed, but Jesus cast the demons out of her. Wolfgang did the same thing for you, soothing your fits with music. He chose you to be at his side as Jesus chose Maria Magdalena. He did it despite the disapproval of his apostles-his brothers."

"A riddle?"

"Scribbled on a ma.n.u.script. Listen, 'At her side as always I've been, though not as my father intended.' Not as the wife our father would've wanted for him, but as an equal companion in his new Masonic lodge."

"A Mason? Me?"

"Wolfgang intended to start a new lodge that would admit women, on the basis of special character and talent. You said he valued your talent as a pianist. You were to be the one who would join him in his new venture."

Magdalena laid a hand over her breast and stared at the heavy, damp earth on Wolfgang's grave.

"Your husband couldn't grant himself absolution," I said. "Perhaps now that you know how Wolfgang felt about you, you can at least forgive yourself."

She turned to me. Her scars were black beneath the veil. "Madame, I don't agree. About the riddle."

"But you must see?"

"I do," she said. "Surely it refers to you."

She went along the line of graves, past the spot where her husband was buried.

I watched her descend the path to the graveyard gate. The muscles of my face hung as if stricken with some wasting disease. The wind rustled the lilac bush. I turned my back against the cold gust and gazed at Wolfgang's grave. He had written the riddle at the end of a sonata dedicated to me, to "my Nannerl."

" 'I will be with her as a brother in the halls of Paradise,' " I whispered, " 'at her side as always I've been, though not as my father intended.' "

What had my father intended? For me to marry a provincial official who provided a comfortable home. But not for me to display my accomplishment as a pianist, to earn a living by my music. That was what Wolfgang had wanted. He had seen how it grieved me that I was ignored while he took all the accolades. He had wanted me to have what he had.

We had been apart so long, it seemed impossible that he had been so concerned with me at the end. Yet now it struck me that Constanze, Fraulein von Paradies, and Magdalena Hofdemel had told me Wolfgang often spoke of my talents, up until his final days. I recalled how I had walked home from early Ma.s.s in the snow, before I learned of his death. I had wondered whether the same snow fell on him so far away. All that time we had thought ourselves estranged, yet we were bonded to each other as if we shared the same soul.

I wiped away a tear. It seemed to freeze on my fingertip.

Wolfgang's new lodge had been for me. A magic kingdom of music and love and equality, like the ones we invented for each other on those long, playful coach rides when we were children. My brother and me, our talents complementing each other but not competing. Together in our Grotto.

The wind caught the parchment on Wolfgang's cross. Its edges stuttered against the wood. I kissed my finger, and laid it over his name.

Chapter 36.

At early Ma.s.s I feared my spirit would burst from my body and run howling out of the cathedral. For once my fervor wasn't for my dead brother. My supplications for his soul were at an end.

When I left St. Stephen's, the Danube fog m.u.f.fled the wheels of my carriage and dampened my skin like a loveless kiss. At the Imperial Library, the footman told me Baron van Swieten was at the Estates House on Herren Lane, where the government ministries had their offices. I ordered my driver to take me there.

A workman balanced on the top rung of his stepladder, polishing a lantern in the entrance. He came down from the steps and touched his brow in deference to me. The light swung above him like a hanged man. I told my coachman to wait in the courtyard with Lenerl, and I went to the stairs.

A slim, tall man sauntered onto the landing above me. He paused before a statue of a cla.s.sical Greek maiden stretching out of an alcove. He tipped his wide-brimmed English hat to her like a gallant strolling in the Augarten, and laughed at his jest. When he descended the stairs, his shoes tapped on the marble as though he were dancing.

He looked like Prince Lichnowsky. But his bearing was so carefree that I couldn't believe this was the stiff, nervous man I knew. He had pa.s.sed by me before I realized that it was, indeed, he.

"Guten Morgen, my prince," I said.

Lichnowsky's mouth, usually so constrained, widened in an uninhibited smile. I was reminded of the relief and triumph on the faces of my stepsons when they expected a beating for some misdemeanor but escaped with a scolding. He touched the head of his cane to his hat in greeting. The ring on his little finger bore a cameo of the emperor's profile.

"Heavens, I'd never have known it was you, Madame de Mozart. What've you done to your hair?" he said. "I've not seen you in a bonnet before. You've had rather a severe trim, haven't you?"

"This style accords better with my true personality. As I hope does the smile I'm seeing on your face for the first time."

He laughed, raising his arms wide. A joyous welcome for the whole world.

"What business brings you here, my prince?"

He leaned against the white marble wall. "I came to see a friend. To congratulate him on his elevation. There's a new police minister, as I believe you know." He winked.

I thought of Pergen whimpering at my feet. What had Lichnowsky to do with the Police Ministry?

His exuberant mood made me curious. He was transformed from the wretch Fraulein von Paradies overheard cowering before the Prussian amba.s.sador less than two days before. I can't go on, she had heard him say. Pergen knows. I pictured his expression when he had told me about the murderer broken on the wheel in the city square: furious and impotent, like someone finding himself trapped. It occurred to me that he had been under a threat of some sort-a threat which had been lifted when Pergen lost his post.

"I know of Count Pergen's dismissal," I said. "I was unaware he had been replaced."

What could've endangered Lichnowsky while Pergen was in power?

The prince smirked. The easy grin of a practiced liar rewarded for his deception.

Deception. Reward. The substance of his lie was as evident to me as the teeth in his broad smile. "The mission to Berlin with Wolfgang wasn't on behalf of your Masonic lodge," I said. "You went as a secret agent."

"An agent?" he snickered. "For whom?"

"Not Austria, because the mission caused you to fear Pergen."

"Why on earth would you think I fear-?"

"You worked for the Prussians. But Pergen found out." Why else would Lichnowsky have needed to tell the Prussian amba.s.sador that Pergen knows? Paradies had overheard a visit from a spy to his master.

The prince leered. "You should limit your improvisations to the piano, madame. I've nothing to worry about, in any case."

"The new police minister may be your friend. But no matter who fills that position, a Prussian agent will be his enemy."

"Do I look like a man afraid?"

I hesitated. Could I be wrong about him?

"Well, do I?" he said.

I shook my head, puzzled. "You worked for the Prussians. Yet you don't fear the Austrians."

He rubbed his thumb along his lip. "Which can only mean-? Madame?"

With a shock, I understood how he had escaped danger. "You must be in the pay of our imperial secret police, too. A double agent."

His smile broadened.

"Where does your loyalty truly lie?" I said. "With Prussia? Or Austria?"

"Who commanded Wolfgang's loyalty?"

"My brother was no spy."

"That's not what I meant. He refused to be a musical servant to the Archbishop of Salzburg all those years ago. He came to Vienna to be independent. He'd spin out a tune for anyone who paid him."

I saw his meaning. Lichnowsky maneuvered between Prussia and Austria to his own advantage. He served no master. But I resisted his comparison. "Wolfgang's loyalty was to music."

"Tell that to poor Franz Hofdemel."

Magdalena. As he died, her husband realized he'd been duped into believing in her infidelity with Wolfgang. "That wicked rumor was of your making," I said.

"Hofdemel was quick-tempered, easy to provoke. He trusted Wolfgang as a brother. Anyone could see he'd turn violent if that bond was violated."

The same lodge. Hofdemel and Gieseke, Wolfgang and Lichnowsky. All the dead, and this one living man connecting them to Pergen, who had confessed before me to Wolfgang's murder.

The prince's eyes didn't belong to the prisoner broken on the wheel after all. They were blank and s.a.d.i.s.tic, like the executioner smashing the bones of the condemned man.

"You made Hofdemel believe that my brother carried on an affair with Magdalena," I said. "So the jealous fool poisoned Wolfgang."

Pergen had given the order for Wolfgang to die. But Lichnowsky had carried it out.

I stumbled on the steps and reached out to steady myself. I was in the presence of the man who truly had devised my brother's death.

Lichnowsky came toward me, his cane clicking against the marble steps. "Madame Berchtold, you're faint," he said.

My married name was like a taunt on his lips. He spoke it with heavy emphasis, as though he wished to tell me that the death of Mozart was no concern of mine, for whom years ago the maestro had ceased to be family.

He was wrong. Lichnowsky hadn't seen me in the red frock coat at the palace.

I was Mozart.

My stomach stung as though the poison that killed my brother burned through my innards. I pushed away the hand the prince offered in support.

The handwritten page in my pocket seemed to pulse against my hip. My brother's idea for a new Masonic lodge. "The Grotto."