A Rather Curious Engagement (26 page)

“Right,” I said, excitedly remembering my Napoleonic history from the sudsy cable-TV movie I’d been involved in, on the romance of Napoleon and Josephine. “They say Napoleon declared that ‘only hungry people make revolutions’ so he proposed to do things that would benefit everyone—build roads, schools, reform the inheritance laws . . . People really had high hopes for Napoleon, didn’t they?”

“Quite so,” said Donaldson. “And men like Beethoven believed that a self-made man like Napoleon was just the right new, modern sort of leader who would, unlike the kings, be a defender of the ‘Rights of Man.’ Some say that Beethoven had even compared Napoleon to the greatest of the ancient Roman consuls.”

" ’Eroica’ means hero,” Jeremy said. “So it was meant for Napoleon—but it never quite came off, did it?”

“It very nearly did,” Donaldson said. “By this time, some say, plans had progressed so far forward that the French ambassador was ready to personally deliver a copy of the manuscript directly from Beethoven to Napoleon, as a gift. And people who knew and visited Beethoven at this time do claim that they saw the name ‘Bonaparte’ at the top of the manuscript.”

“So what happened?” I asked breathlessly.

“Well, unfortunately, Napoleon chose this time to declare himself emperor. The story goes that when Beethoven heard this, he was furious, declaring that now Napoleon would trample on those rights of man and become simply another tyrant. It is said that Beethoven then flew into a rage, took hold of the title page of the symphony, and tore it in two and cast it to the ground! And then he changed the name of the work to ‘Sinfonia Eroica.’ ”

“Wow,” I said.

“Wait a minute,” said Jeremy. “I’ve heard about some of this. But, Beethoven didn’t tear up the original title page. He erased the title! So violently, in fact, that it left a hole in the paper.”

“How do you know this?” I demanded, impressed.

“I’ve seen the manuscript,” Jeremy said. “It was on display in a museum in Vienna. And he wrote the new name on it instead.”

“Ah,” said Mr. Donaldson, pleased, “you are thinking of the copyist’s draft! That is the one which Beethoven erased, and made a hole in.” At my perplexed look, he added, “The copyist’s draft is a cleaner version of the original. Of course, Beethoven would also have to hand-write corrections to the copyist’s draft, because they didn’t always get it right. In fact, sometimes Beethoven got quite exasperated with such errors, and he’d write
You damned fool!
along with his corrections in the margins. What you saw, young man, was Beethoven’s handwritten corrections on a copyist’s draft.”

“Oh,” Jeremy said. “Okay.”

“Anyway, the original handwritten manuscript is called an ‘autograph’ you see, because it is written completely in the composer’s hand. Now, Beethoven was known to be quite casual about leaving the discarded pages from his ‘autographs’ hanging about his workroom—with all his scribblings and doodlings on them—all scattered about, crumpled on the floor, where anyone could walk away with them. Some people say that, in his fury over Napoleon’s audacious betrayal, Beethoven tore up the title page of his
original
draft of the ‘Eroica’ and cast it on the floor, amid all the other scraps from his manuscripts. So, we know what happened to the copyist’s draft; as you say, it ended up in a museum.”

I got that thrill of a chill at the back of my neck, and I felt a shiver of expectation.

“However, the original manuscript,” Mr. Donaldson said, leaning forward a little in his chair, even lowering his voice slightly, “the one written in Beethoven’s hand, has gone missing. Nobody knows what happened to it.”

“But,” Jeremy said dryly, “I’m sure there are theories.”

Mr. Donaldson nodded and his voice dropped lower. “What I am about to tell you is not commonly said to the general public, so please keep this under your hat. There are many rumors, of course. But the one that obsessive collectors tend to believe is this: that the female student had come to visit Beethoven that day, and that in all the fuss, she managed, unseen, to pick up a fragment of his original manuscript. And she kept it, and took it to her lover, that boy who was making the Lion aquamanile.

“The girl told her boyfriend, ‘We must keep it in a safe place,’ for she cherished Beethoven’s work and believed that the fragment would surely be of historical value some day. Someone—either the girl or one of her servants—later claimed that the young artisan put the autograph fragment into a metal tube, which he then inserted into the Lion aquamanile, through an opening in the head of the Lion which would have ordinarily been stoppered so that you could fill and refill it. But something went wrong, and the gift of the Lion was never delivered to Beethoven. That we are fairly certain of. And there the story ends.”

“Wait!” I cried. “It can’t possibly end there.”

He sat back in his chair, smiling regretfully. “Well, the girl married the man her father wanted her to. Nobody knows what became of the young man.”

“Holy smokes,” I said in a low voice. Mr. Donaldson didn’t really know what I meant; he just thought I was reacting to the story in general. But Jeremy knew what I was thinking. Maybe the Count had really found the Beethoven Lion, after all.

“What’s this Lion actually worth?” Jeremy asked. Mr. Donaldson smiled.

“Oh, it’s hard to put an exact price on these sorts of things,” Donaldson said maddeningly. “Aquamanilia can range from twenty thousand to a million euros.”

I always hate it when these guys hedge, with such a wide berth. “Could you narrow that estimate a little?” I inquired.

“Well, a lion aquamanile from this period, of this quality, could probably fetch about fifty thousand euros,” he said. I was baffled at first, because Kurt had said that the Count paid a hundred thousand euros for it. Donaldson saw my expression and said, “You see, the nineteenth-century ones are generally less valuable than the medieval ones.”

“But,” said Jeremy alertly, “if it’s the Beethoven Lion—”

“Obviously that’s another story,” Donaldson said quickly, as if the idea excited even an old hand like him. “Why, then you could be talking about one and a half million euros or more, I should think.”

I gasped. Perhaps the Count was craftier than I’d realized. He’d paid the dealer what might have appeared to be a really good profit—the price of a medieval piece for an item from a later, lesser period—when in fact the Lion could well turn out to be worth millions.

“May I ask,” Donaldson said carefully, “what has prompted your interest in this piece? Has something new come to light?”

“We’re not sure yet,” Jeremy said. “We’ll let you know if it does.”

“Please do,” Donaldson said. There was a knock at the door, and a silver-haired secretary entered, reminding Donaldson of an impending phone call. She glanced at us curiously before she left.

Jeremy rose, ready to go. Mr. Donaldson took out a business card and wrote something on the back. “Here is my private number and e-mail address,” he said. “Only whatever you do, don’t talk to the press until you’ve got it safely in your hands.”

When we left the museum and were out on the street, the lunchtime crowd was already out and about. We had planned to be long gone before lunch, but the earlier traffic jam had delayed us.

Jeremy was saying, “I’d like to get back and see how Mum is doing—” when we were interrupted by a shout from a man in a passing car, which now slowed down. It was Bertie, looking happily surprised. He hastily pulled his car to the curb, and leaned out at us, beaming.

“Good ole Jer!” he said. “I knew you’d come to my party. But you didn’t have to make a special trip to London on my account, did you? Hate to be the one to interrupt your jolly gap summer!”

Jeremy, looking a bit guilty, said, “No, no. Mum had a slight accident—nothing too bad in the end.”

Bertie, looking instantly and sincerely sympathetic, said, “Is she in hospital?”

“No, she’s home, a broken ankle.”

“Ah, too bad,” Bertie said. “Terribly fond of her. You say hallo to her for me, will you? And tell her she was the prettiest mum of all.”

I had to smile. I knew Aunt Sheila would like that, even if she waved if off. And Bertie said it with a great deal of fondness in his voice.

“Can I drop you somewhere?” Bertie inquired. Jeremy told him we had a few more errands to run nearby, and Bertie twinkled at me as if he knew that we wanted to be alone on a lovers’ stroll. “Lydia says she’s so glad Jeremy found himself a nice, old-fashioned girl,” Bertie said genially.

Coming from Lydia, I knew that wasn’t a compliment. I just looked at Jeremy.

“Gotta dash, Bertie,” Jeremy said hurriedly.

“Right. See you at the bash, then,” he said, and nodded jovially to me before he drove off.

With a sinking heart, I realized that there was now no way that we could avoid attending his party. So, I decided to earn a few brownie points, and be magnanimous, since I had no other choice.

“Well, that’s that,” I said with my own version of English stoicism. Jeremy saw right through me, of course.

“I tell you what,” Jeremy said. “I’ll clone myself, and make the clone go to the party. Then we can go back to the Riviera.”

“As long as you don’t get mixed up, and I end up with the clone instead,” I said. “How will I know the difference? Let’s see. We should make up a password, so we can always test each other and be sure. What’ll it be?”

Jeremy actually went along with this, as if considering it deeply. “How about
Temps Joyeux
?” he said. “Know what that is?”

“Of course,” I said. “It’s what Aunt Pen named her villa.” We always thought it was a funny name which sounded better in French than its literal English translation, “Happy Times.”

“Okay, that’s fine,” I said. “We can use it as a code at parties, too. It means,
May-Day. S.O.S. Help!
”

Jeremy smiled. “Okay,” he replied. “We could just put in an appearance at the party, and when you give me the signal, I’ll say we have to dash back to France.”

“Well, that’s all very well,” I said. “But, from a fashion point of view, it’s no easier to ‘put in an appearance’ than it is to stick around for the whole shebang. I still have to look good because this is the first time I’m meeting your old crowd, and you know how people are.” I was still brooding over this “old-fashioned” business.

“You always look good,” Jeremy said, as if he meant it.

“You are possibly blinded by love,” I said. “What exactly does one wear to a ‘bash’?”

Jeremy pondered this. “Somehow I never noticed,” he confessed. “Some nice top, I guess, with some nice pants. Or skirt. Nice, but not completely formal.”

I groaned. “I don’t know why I even asked,” I said.

“Actually, Mum will know,” Jeremy said. “She’s up on the latest fashion, even if she is older than us, and she knows where the younger women shop because of all her charity parties and stuff.”

Aunt Sheila, still propped up in bed but surrounded by the magazines and books we’d left her with, listened with bright, alert eyes as Jeremy told her about the party, and how I’d need something new to wear. When he finished talking, Jeremy picked up the tray of food he’d left her for lunch—and he noted with satisfaction that she’d eaten everything.

“Anything else I can get you?” he asked.

“A cup of tea would be nice, there’s a dear,” she said. But I got the feeling she was just trying to get rid of him. When he was out of earshot, she turned to me and said, “Lydia’s behind all this, isn’t she?”

“How did you know?” I asked, intrigued.

“She telephoned here night and day when you two left town,” Aunt Sheila said. “Always on one legal pretext or another, ‘needs his advice,’ that sort of thing. In fact, she telephoned one morning so early that I thought it was Jeremy with a problem, and I jumped up with my reading glasses still on, and went running to the phone to answer, and that’s when I fell, because I misjudged the step.”

“That figures,” I said. “Why does Lydia seem to wreak havoc wherever she goes? Even when she’s trying to act nice, I keep thinking she’s going to spring up and scream and attack somebody. Probably me.”

“She’s always been that way, it’s not just you,” Aunt Sheila said, not without some sympathy for both of us. She paused, then added, “I think there’s a few things you might want to know about Lydia.”

She patted the bed, and when I sat beside her, she said, “I know it’s a cliché, but Lydia had a fairly wretched childhood, even with all that privilege. We all knew her father had been a bit ‘difficult’— drinking, carousing with other women; but, when he died, Lydia and her mother found out that he’d not only kept a mistress in another part of town, but had a whole other family with her.
And
left them half the money, too. Lydia got very jaded after that, acted out and was shunted off to a very strict Swiss boarding school.”

“Oh, no,” I said. “Now I’m going to feel like a rat for disliking her.”

“Well, she can be quite destructive,” Aunt Sheila allowed, “but that also means that she ends up being her own worst enemy. She had a nervous breakdown once. It doesn’t excuse her meddling with you and Jeremy,” Aunt Shelia concluded, “but your feeling that she’s always on the verge of hysteria isn’t far off. It was a terrible tyranny for Jeremy, of course. Weak people sometimes do end up manipulating those that are healthier. I just thought you’d like to know where she’s coming from.”

“I just want to know where she’s going,” I groused.

Aunt Sheila smiled. “If Jeremy gives you any trouble,” she said, “just refer him to me and I can always send him to bed without supper.”

I smiled, but I felt faintly gloomy. Aunt Sheila and Jeremy’s friends were all from the same orbit, and they knew exactly how to interpret each other’s signals. I, on the other hand, had been raised in America, by two high-end hermits who didn’t bother much with social conventions and tribal customs. My friends were people who worked hard at top speed, like Erik, who used to joke that he’d have a nervous breakdown if only he had the time. But now, plunged into the world of privilege, I felt more than a little unsure of my footing in this rarefied atmosphere.