Mozart's Last Aria (8 page)
T
he morning light sparkled on the old, warped glass of the windows and shone through a gap in the curtain around my bed. The sunshine was silver, like the pure light that emanates from a saint in a vision. Silver like Baron van Swieten’s coat. I stretched my arms above my head and kicked off the heavy winter covers. The excitement of my performance at the Academy still warmed me.
Lenerl tied the curtains to the bedpost and curtsied. “
Guten Morgen
, madame.”
I sat up and pulled my knees close to my chest under my nightdress. “Morning, my dear.”
“You were very excited when you came back last night, I must say, madame. The concert must’ve been wonderful.”
“It was a night I’ve dreamed of for so long. I suppose I’d given up hope that anything like that would ever happen to me.”
The girl grinned and held up my dressing gown. “You couldn’t even get a sentence out. You danced into bed like you were dreaming.”
I stepped into my slippers and let her wrap me.
Lenerl poured a hot chocolate from the breakfast tray at the dresser. I tasted it with such pleasure that I shuddered.
“I shall perform again today, Lenerl,” I said. “For the Society of Associated Cavaliers.”
“Very fine gentlemen, no doubt, madame. You’re making the most of Vienna.”
I heard a shadow of disapproval in the girl’s voice. She was simple and religious, and she would have expected me to spend the week on my knees beside Wolfgang’s grave. But I was in no mood to discipline her. “There’s a lot for me to accomplish here,” I said.
Heavy clogs ascended the stairs. A knock at the door. Lenerl eased it back with care, so that I shouldn’t be seen undressed. She held out her hand, red with housework, received a letter, and brought it to me.
I recognized the crest impressed in the wax seal. I had seen it on Baron van Swieten’s coach as I walked to Magdalena Hofdemel’s home. I caught my bottom lip between my teeth.
The baron’s letter confirmed that I should play for his Associated Cavaliers that afternoon. He requested that I join him for lunch first. He had something in particular he wished to share with me alone, he wrote. His language was formal and impersonal, but it excited in me an enthusiasm I knew to be unseemly.
“Give me my writing case,” I said. “I have to reply right away. Then you may dress me for a lunch with the baron.”
Lenerl unscrewed the lid of a pot of ink. On the edge of the dresser I wrote a brief note to the baron accepting his invitation.
“Imagine, lunch with a baron, madame. Have you met him before?”
“I encountered him last night at the Academy.”
“A baron. No wonder you were so dreamy when you came back here.”
“Don’t think I’m so impressed by the title of a baron, my girl,” I said. “I’ve performed at the keyboard for kings and empresses.”
Her head inclined a touch. I saw she was thinking that playing the piano and taking lunch were two different things. I sealed the note and found a few kreuzers in my purse.
“Take this downstairs. Have the landlord send a boy to the Imperial Library to deliver it.”
Lenerl curtsied and left.
I stroked my hair where it fell blond across my collarbone. With both hands I lifted it so that it sat above my head.
I wanted to be on my way to the baron now. I reached for the bag in which Lenerl had packed ribbons for my hair, and I pushed aside the breakfast tray. My stomach was tremulous and excited. I had no more appetite for chocolate.
Before I set down the bag of ribbons, I noticed another letter on the dresser. It had been concealed beneath the tray. In the small, jagged characters of my husband’s handwriting, it was addressed to me.
I cut it open with my thumb. Berchtold must have written it less than two days after I left for it to have arrived so soon. I read the first line, but I was too distracted to take in its meaning. I chose for the moment not to examine why that might be. I started once again at the beginning.
My dear lady,
Madame, I trust you have arrived in good health in Vienna and that you have paid your respects to the widow of your brother. You may be sure that your children and mine desire your swift return and await you in a state of noisy agitation that is most disturbing to my office and duties. I very much hope your initial purpose in traveling to Vienna has been swiftly disposed of. Such things as murder, of course, occur among the disreputable elements of Viennese society, but I trust you have uncovered a more natural explanation for your brother’s passing.
The vivacity with which I had awoken drained away. In the mirror on the dresser, my expression was sheepish, like a catechism pupil scolded by a nun.
Your son
, the letter went on,
doesn’t neglect his studies at the piano, though I have noticed that his childish playing is somewhat enervating when my offended ears are not later compensated with the greater skills at the keyboard of his mother.
I imagined little Leopold at the piano and smiled to think that my husband suffered the boy’s music with my own performances in mind. That he recalled with pleasure the times when I played for him was as close to intimacy as he would allow himself to come in writing.
The door opened and Lenerl entered. “The boy’s on his way to the baron, madame,” she said.
I looked down at my husband’s letter with a shock of remorse for the pleasure I had taken in the baron’s attention. I thought of my religion and the vows I had made before God. I had always been devoted to Our Savior and the Virgin Mother. On Good Fridays I made a tour of Salzburg’s churches, praying in more than a dozen of them and climbing the steps to St. Kajetan’s on my knees.
Lenerl stared at the letter in my hand. Her face tightened with guilt.
“Sorry, madame, I forgot all about that letter. It came last night,” she said. “You returned so late and you were in such fine spirits. I didn’t want to spoil things.”
“Why should this letter have spoiled my mood?”
“Well, it’s from—you know.” She wrung her apron in her hands. “Isn’t it? From him?”
Servants had been a trouble to me all my life. My dear father always said I was too harsh on them. Perhaps it was so, but I couldn’t allow this affront to pass. I widened my eyes and pursed my lips to deliver a rebuke. Then I saw her eyes tearing, and I pitied her.
But for some chance, it might’ve been me quaking before a displeased mistress. When Wolfgang left Salzburg for Vienna, I had collapsed into an emotional confusion and taken to my bed in tears. With my brother gone, I had feared I’d have no one to support me, if my father passed away. Papa used to say that a woman left alone would be forced to enter domestic service. I wouldn’t have been a lady’s maid like Lenerl, but even as a child’s governess I’d have been miserable. I liked it little enough when compelled to care for my stepchildren. My character wasn’t given to servitude. My father knew that and was anxious about it until he found a husband for me.
I folded the letter and made my voice forgiving. “My clothes, Lenerl.”
She went to my traveling chest.
“The mauve dress with the lace over the bodice,” I said.
“Of course, madame.”
I slipped my husband’s letter into my writing case. Later I’d write to him of my invitation to the baron’s Society of Associated Cavaliers. Berchtold would be pleased that I was received by a high imperial official. He needn’t know that I hoped to learn more from Swieten about Wolfgang’s last days, nor that an emotion I preferred not to name moved in me when I first saw the baron outside the Collalto Palace.
Lenerl laid out the dress on my bed. She took my underwear from the drawer. The bones in my corset rattled when she held it up. I slipped off my nightgown and let her wrap the stays around me.
“Have you seen a little of Vienna while I’ve been making my visits?” I said.
She tightened the laces. I breathed out and she pulled them harder.
“I had a little walk up to the cathedral, madame,” she said. “To pray there for my mother’s soul. Such a place.”
“You like Vienna?”
She took the dress from the bed and lifted it over my head. “It’s got a bit more going for it than St. Gilgen, madame.” Over my shoulder, she caught my eye in the mirror. She lowered her eyes to the laces at the back of my dress. “No barons back home, either.”
She was right. No one in my village was like Baron van Swieten.
I
entered Library Square past the field-green façade of the Palffy Palace, where Wolfgang had often played for his aristocratic sponsors. I whispered a prayer for my brother and hummed one of his arias.
Across the broad square, the monumental limestone of the Imperial Library shone in the crisp midday sunlight. My pulse sharpened, the old kick of excitement that used to come over me as a child whenever I entered a palace. I whistled Wolfgang’s aria through my teeth.
The porter directed me to an alabaster staircase whose windows enhanced the golden light of the day, rather than filtering it. As I climbed, I didn’t merely leave behind the dirt and noise of the streets. I ascended to a place where it seemed everything might be illuminated.
At the head of the stairs, a door of polished chestnut opened onto a breathtaking hall. Oak bookcases rose in two decks, high over the cream marble floor. Roman numerals in gold leaf designated their place in the library’s catalogue. Thick ivory-colored pillars reached up to a bright fresco on the ceiling.
A librarian came down a stepladder with a pile of volumes under his arm. I asked him to lead me to Baron van Swieten. He shoved at the shelves behind his ladder. A segment of the bookcase pivoted, opening into a hidden room big enough for little more than a single desk.
The baron perched on the windowsill with a manuscript across his lap.
“Madame de Mozart.” Laying the manuscript on the desk with care, he dismissed the librarian. “Thank you, Strafinger.”
He wore a black frock coat with mother-of-pearl buttons and an embroidered blue vest. He dropped into a bow, my hand to his lips.
I glanced at the open manuscript. His eyes followed mine, and he smiled.
“Parchment. A map of the Roman emperor’s postal system. Look here.” He stepped to his desk and beckoned for me to come close. “See there, the tip of Italy. Here is Serbia, Albania, Greece.”
The map was as long as my arm. Its irregular edges were a deep brown with age. “How old is it?”
“It was copied sometime around the fifth century.”
I caught the scent of dry sweat that adheres to parchment.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” he said.
“Truly.”
“Beyond beautiful, really. Stunning.” He gestured toward the door. “Let me show you something else.”
From a desk in the library’s main hall, he pulled out a wide, shallow drawer. “As a native of Salzburg and a musician, you’ll enjoy this.”
I looked down on a page of primitive musical notation, the red lines of the stave marked with crosses for the notes. A Latin text ran beneath the music.
“Can you read it? Look.” The baron sang through the first line in a breathy baritone. “One of the privileges of heading the library is that no one may tell me to be quiet. This is the story of the death of St. Benedict. It’s intended to be sung as part of the church liturgy. It was copied in your hometown six hundred years ago.”
“Astonishing.”
The baron beamed like a proud parent. Absently he spun a globe almost as tall as me that charted the constellations. “Astonishing, yes. But also outdated and of little use to a musician today.”
“I suppose so.”
“Unlike Wolfgang’s music. He’ll still be full of life to musicians born six hundred years from now.”
The thought of Wolfgang’s work seemed to fill the baron with energy. He swung his arms wide, catching his elbow on the stepladder. His librarian, on the highest step, grabbed a column for balance. Swieten glanced up at the startled man and moved along the hall.
Under the grand fresco of the central cupola, he held his hands behind his back and spoke toward the polished marble of the floor.
“Had I known you were coming to Vienna, I would’ve delayed the funeral, madame,” he said.
“Please don’t apologize. I understand that you organized and paid for the rites. I feel only gratitude to you, sir.”
“You know the current custom—it was a simple funeral. An ordinary grave which will be plowed over in ten years to save space.”
“Of course.”
“It’s a little inhuman, perhaps,” he said, “but the spirit of the departed is more important than his bones, don’t you think?”
“Surely.”
He brought his hands in front of his chest as though in prayer. “I would have you know, madame, that I examined Wolfgang’s body before his doctors took it away to the cathedral for his funeral service.”
My fingers grew numb and cold, as if Wolfgang’s ghost reached out from Swieten’s palm to grip them now.
“My father was physician to the Empress Maria Theresia,” Swieten said. “Ever since my birth I’ve been surrounded by men of science. I still keep up with the latest research. In medicine, too. So I consulted a doctor in whom I have some confidence. I told him I had . . . doubts about your brother’s death.”
I seemed to suffocate with tension, as though the bones in my corset drew tighter over my ribs. “What did he tell you?”
The baron stared into the sunlight that shimmered through the high windows. “He disagreed with the diagnosis given by Wolfgang’s doctor.”
I turned from him to hide the excitement and apprehension in my face. “But Wolfgang’s doctor discovered a rash on the skin that confirmed the cause of death as a fever.”
“That same doctor opened Wolfgang’s veins to try to cure him, as if we still lived in medieval times. He ascribed Wolfgang’s sickness to an excess of black bile and phlegm.” The baron slapped his hands together. “The man is a fool.”
“Then what killed my brother?”
Swieten stroked his neck. “The doctor I consulted also attended Wolfgang at the end. His name’s Sallaba. I respect his research.”
“It was he who differed as to the diagnosis?”
“It was.”
Swieten hadn’t been the only one of Wolfgang’s friends to doubt the cause of death. Yet while the others were terrified of the truth, the baron had sought it out. His love for my brother and his belief in justice drew me to him more strongly even than the sympathy he had shown for my nervousness at the Academy the previous night.
He went to a stone spiral of stairs. I followed him up to a gallery along the second level of bookshelves. Behind a pink marble bust of an old emperor with a long flowing wig and empty eyes, he waited for me. Below us, the library was silent, except for the pacing of Strafinger as he replaced some volumes from a trolley.
“Early in the year, when Maestro Haydn departed to give some concerts in London,” Swieten whispered, “Wolfgang embraced him and said that he feared they would never see each other again. Haydn’s getting on a bit. I assumed at the time that Wolfgang meant the journey or the effects of the London rain might kill the old fellow. I now think I misread his comment.”
“You believe
Wolfgang
expected to be the one to die?”
Swieten grasped the base of the bust. His fingernails whitened with the force of his hold. He drew a heavy volume in light brown leather from the nearest shelf. He leafed through the book, turned it toward me, and jabbed at the page with his finger. “
Acqua toffana
.”
The poison Wolfgang believed had been administered to him.
The Italian text described a poison developed by a Sicilian lady named Signora Toffana in the sixteenth century. She sold it to women who wished to dispose of their husbands without leaving traces.
“A blend of arsenic, deadly nightshade, and lead,” Swieten said. “It’s colorless and has no taste when mixed with water.”
I glanced down the page. The symptoms of the poison were hallucinations and delusions, agitation and obsession with death, stomach pains, failure of the kidneys, swelling, and— I came to a halt. “Skin rashes.”
Swieten bit at his lip. “Each of those symptoms was manifested in Wolfgang.”
“Delusions?”
“He saw enemies everywhere. When I came upon him in the street not long ago, he lifted a finger to his lips to quiet me, looking around as though someone dangerous were tracking him.” Swieten took back the book. “But perhaps it was no delusion.”
“Wolfgang’s letters to me never mentioned that he was threatened by anyone.”
“Vienna has changed in the last few years, madame. Years when—you’ll forgive me for mentioning it—you and Wolfgang weren’t in touch. Viennese artists used to be free to express themselves. People conversed without restraint, even about politics.”
“But now?”
At the end of the gallery a door opened. A page in a red jerkin stepped through. “Lunch is ready, my lord,” he said.
Swieten slipped the book back into its shelf. “These days nobody can afford to make a mistake.”
I followed him along the gallery. As the page shut the door behind me, I thought I caught the sound of whispering in the library. I paused, but I heard nothing more. I decided it had been merely the brushing of my skirts against the bookshelves.