The Brahms Deception Page 14

  Triumphantly, nearly giddy with fresh confidence, she began to play with more confidence. Hannes nodded, saying, “Good. Good.”

  And then a mistake. The opening movement was lovely and lyrical, even in this early form. He would tinker with it, she knew, but this was the year it had been conceived and developed. The melodies, in the piano part, in the violin, were graceful and vitally romantic. Despite the strangeness of everything, she was moved by the music, enchanted anew by the idea that she was seeing his creation in its early stages.

  Frederica forgot herself. Her memory began to serve up notes that weren’t on the page, to fill in half-completed phrases, musical ideas that were only in her memory—her memory from a century and a half in the future. Her fingers lingered over the triplets, delighted in the two-against-three rhythm she had worked so hard on. She didn’t notice they were only rudimentary as yet in the manuscript. She was seeing them in her mind’s eye, as she had practiced them. When she found herself playing a chord he had not yet written, which was not there even in outline, her fingers faltered. She lifted her hands, an icy fear sinking through her chest and into her belly. What if he found out? What if he knew?

  But he said, lightly, “Oh, wait. Wait just a moment. I like that, Clara,” and reached past her with his pen to ink in the outline of the chord. He splattered his cuff in the process, but paid no attention. “There,” he said, smiling, “there it is. What a good idea. Play it again, will you?”

  She smiled back at him, but as she touched the keys of the fortepiano again she wondered. Was this a violation of the time line? Would something change—even something small—because she played something he had not yet composed?

  She began to play it again from the beginning, taking care to play what was actually written. She told herself it didn’t matter. If something changed, who would know? If the music changed for her—and for Brahms—it would change for everyone. Surely when the chord was written would not matter. If anything, she had merely hastened the completion of the piece, enhanced its chances of success.

  He put his arm around her waist, leaving her hands and arms free to play. His flesh was warm, his body solid and strong beside her. She shivered with pleasure in both the music and his presence. She was wrong to worry. Nothing mattered but this. She would savor it, the closeness of Brahms beside her, the music rising from the beautiful old instrument. She would not think about what she had done, would not torment herself with second thoughts.

  She reached the end of the first movement. Brahms took his arm from around her waist and stretched his hand out to turn the page.

  A sudden vertigo made her head spin violently. Her heart gave a painful lurch, cramping in her chest as if it would stop beating altogether. She tried to cry out, but she had no breath. She clutched at Hannes’s arm with fingers that had no strength. The room tilted, and the bench of the fortepiano slid away beneath her. She found herself falling backward, her hands groping, useless and lost. She heard Hannes call her name, but the roaring of blood in her head drowned his voice.

  No! No!

  It was no use. She lost her hold. She was outside again, hovering above the fortepiano, formless, powerless. Helplessly, she gazed down on the limp form of Clara Schumann.

  Hannes bent over her, gathering her slight body into his arms. Frederica clung to the fortepiano for dear life. She felt pulled, stretched, as if someone cruel and strong had taken hold of her ankles and someone equally cruel was tugging on her wrists. It was like being caught in an undertow, buffeted by waves of merciless power. She would be swept away in another moment, dragged out of this world as if she were a disobedient dog!

  She knew what they had done. They had used the pulse. They had shot an electromagnetic burst into her brain without her permission, without the slightest thought for the risk to her mind or her body. They didn’t care about her at all! They meant to force her to do what they wanted, no matter what injury it might cause.

  If they thought they could control her, they were mistaken. No one—no one—could dictate to Frederica Bannister. Not her father, not her mother, not her teachers or her advisers. She had never tolerated such domination, and she would not begin now.

  She had to find a way to resist. She had to be stronger than they were.

  She cast about for a way to stabilize herself, even while she felt the force of the pulse blurring her perception, rocking her brain. God, if she could only rip off the damned cap!

  But she couldn’t. At this moment, there was nothing physical she could do. She needed something else.

  Hannes was lifting Clara now, carrying her to the wing chair. He called, “Nuncia! Nuncia!”

  The cook came running in, wiping her wet hands on her apron. She exclaimed, “O, la signora!” and bent over Clara’s still form.

  Clara looked deadly pale. Frederica began to fear she had stopped breathing. If she died—if the pulse killed Clara—she would have to go back! She would hardly want to live in the body of a middle-aged cook!

  Clara’s arms were limp, her hands trailing to the floor. Her head fell to one side, as nerveless as if her neck were broken. The sight filled Frederica with fury. Already she had begun to feel that was her body, that what happened to it was meant to hurt her.

  How dare they? How thoughtless and selfish could they be, trying to wrest from her the one prize she craved, the first real experience of her life?

  She cudgeled her brain for a way to hold on. She spun from one side of the fortepiano to the other, searching.

  Her eye fell on the manuscript.

  She fixed her attention on it. There were differences there, details of the music no one had ever seen, because he had rewritten it, revised it, dropped some notes and added others. She flew to it, and hovered before it, focusing with all her might on one of the chords she knew had not survived in later versions. That chord didn’t fit in her own time. In their time. It belonged only to this one.

  She filled her field of vision with the scrawled notation, sang it in her mind. She closed out everything else, ignoring the wrench of the reversal, the distraught voice of poor Hannes calling Clara’s name. She did her best to become that chord, to the exclusion of everything that was herself, her history, her personality, even the driving need that had brought her here.

  Frederica no longer felt the tick of seconds, the passage of minutes. She vibrated with the sound of that chord, immersed herself in its frequencies. She was not Frederica, nor was she Clara. She was not the mapping of herself held in the transfer clinic. She was the chord, that chord that had not survived into her own time. She became the essence of it, the specific and characteristic vibration that belonged only in 1861, that would be gone by the next year. She felt the thrum of it as if she were the body of a cello, her strings singing beneath the bow.

  It no longer mattered what they did, what they tried to do to her. She would never give in. They couldn’t force her! She would not leave until she was ready.

  After this, in fact, she might choose not to leave at all.

  Kristian, horrified, hung back from the scene around the transfer cot. The readouts above Frederica’s head danced and flashed. Her blood pressure, her temperature, the map of her brain waves shot this way and that, as if an electrical problem had disrupted every wire, every tube, every program. Her body convulsed, limbs twisting, hands and feet rigid. Her face contorted until it was unrecognizable.

  Kristian, helplessly watching, muttered, “Oh, my God.”

  Chiara ordered, “Max! The sedative!”

  Max leaped forward, a syringe ready in his hand. Chiara tried to steady Frederica’s arm, but he had trouble fitting the needle to the Y-port of her IV. It seemed to take forever, while she thrashed this way and that, shivering and shuddering with seizure.

  “Hold her!” Max cried. “Someone!”

  Kristian stepped forward to seize Frederica’s ankles, but still her body quaked. Her legs thrashed beneath his hands.

  Elliott muttered, “Jesus Christ.”
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  Max, the emptied syringe in his hand, said, “Can you stabilize the cap?”

  Elliott was at the computer, tapping keys, glancing up at the readout. “Goddammit,” he said. “I don’t know whether to try to put her back, or bring her here.”

  Chiara said, “It is too late. Do nothing now.”

  Kristian could see it had been wise not to call the Bannisters to witness this. Frederica’s body, which had lain as still as a corpse for days, went on jerking and quivering as the jagged electrical impulses from her brain fired her muscles and nerves.

  “Maybe a muscle relaxant . . . ,” Max began.

  Chiara said sharply, “No! We have caused enough trouble. We must wait, and watch.”

  Elliott stepped back from the computer keyboard, and gazed helplessly at the screen above it. “I have to call Chicago.”

  “Go ahead,” Max said. “Tell them what happened, and don’t hold back.” His mouth was set in a hard line that looked foreign to his cheerful face. He took Kristian’s place at Frederica’s feet, pressing down on her ankles to stop the spasms of her legs. Chiara stayed by her head, gripping her wrists. Frederica’s features twisted, her mouth stretching. She gasped like a fish out of water.

  “God,” Elliott muttered, “I wish she’d stop that.”

  Kristian stared at Frederica, too, but he didn’t see the unprepossessing face of a girl from Chicago. He saw the beautiful features of Clara Schumann, distorted by suffering, and none of it of her own making. Poor Clara, buffeted and tortured by forces she could never understand. What was happening to her as Frederica fought them?

  Kristian had no doubt at all that Frederica was fighting. Max and Chiara saw a seizure. Elliott saw a technical problem. But he, Kristian, saw a battle joined, and in this struggle Clara Schumann had no champion but himself.

  Clara’s heart clutched, its beating ragged. The darkness that had enveloped her for hours grew thicker and heavier. Even the demon seemed to have abandoned her, left her limbs nerveless, her eyes blind. After that first terrible pain, like a boulder crushing her chest, there was nothing. No awareness, no hearing, no feeling. She could not draw breath. She could not sense Hannes. She wanted to cry out for her children, for her beloved Marie, but even that seemed beyond her power.

  Her sin, it seemed, had been greater than she thought. She ceased struggling, and slipped into oblivion.

  Long minutes passed before Frederica’s legs and arms and face ceased convulsing. Chiara had finally sent Max for a crash cart, but with a sigh of “Grazie al cielo!” she saw she would not have to use it. Frederica’s thrashing limbs stilled, her face calmed, and the erratic readings above her head smoothed and steadied, bit by bit. Max sat next to the cot, his head in his hands. Chiara rearranged Frederica’s tumbled blanket and checked her catheter and her IV, straightening tubes that had been jostled. She gently lifted Frederica’s head to replace the pillow that had gotten pushed to one side. As Chiara tried to smooth the tangle of her hair beneath the transfer cap, Kristian caught a good look at her face. Her lips were pinched, her brow furrowed. She was as worried as Max.

  Kristian said, “Send me back. Let’s hurry, before the Bannisters come down.”

  Elliott had the phone in his hand, and he held it out in mute appeal.

  “I don’t give a damn about Braunstein,” Kristian said roughly. “Or Gregson, either. Imagine what would have happened if Bannister had watched that!”

  Max lifted his head. “Kris is right,” he said. “We should just do it. Let’s send him back for the next day. We’ll use the same settings we did the first time.”

  When Frederica recognized me. “Perfect,” Kristian said.

  He started toward the second transfer cot, already unbuttoning his sleeves and rolling them up above his elbows. He sat down, kicked off his shoes, adjusted the pillow. He was reaching for the blanket to pull it over himself when the phone in Elliott’s hand rang.

  “Don’t answer it!” Kristian pleaded, but he was too late.

  Elliott spoke into the phone, then cradled it against his chest as he looked at the others. “They’re sending someone else,” he said. “Another researcher.”

  “No!” Kristian said.

  Elliott gave a sorrowful shrug. “Yes. We’re supposed to wait until he gets here.”

  “But we can—”

  Elliott shook his head, and put the phone back to his ear. He spoke some responses, then broke the connection. “We don’t have any choice, Kris.”

  “You do have a choice. You can send me back now, before this other person arrives.”

  “We can’t do that,” Elliott said. “Not against Braunstein’s orders.”

  “Sorry, Kris,” Max said, and Kristian gave him a reproachful glance.

  For a long moment he lay where he was, staring up at the ceiling, trying to control the temper flaring in his chest. His hands shook with adrenaline as he thrust away the blanket and pushed himself up. Chiara stood beside Frederica’s cot, hugging herself, watching him. He avoided Elliott’s eyes, Max’s, even Chiara’s, as he stalked away from the cot and out of the transfer room.

  Not until he reached the porch did he allow himself to let out the breath he was holding and whisper his curses into the night air.

  10

  Frederica slowly, gingerly, allowed the chord to fade from her mind. Her heart had ceased its painful spasms, and the world righted itself around her as the vertigo subsided. She could still hear the sound of the music she had concentrated on. Indeed, it seemed to resonate in her skull, as if by the strength of her imagination she had brought it all the way into reality.

  Daddy always said she was the most strong-minded person he had ever met. He smiled as he said it, of course. He was proud of it, proud of her strength of purpose, her determination to get what she wanted. He had remarked once that he thought his daughter might be nearly as ruthless as he was himself. She could almost laugh at that now. Even he would be shocked at how ruthless she could be.

  She opened herself to the world around her once again, but cautiously, warily. She had no way to judge how much time had passed. She felt in control again, but it was too soon to know if there might be residual problems. She imagined them huddling around her, back in the transfer clinic, worrying over what harm they might have done, lamenting their foolishness in using the pulse when they didn’t know what it might do. Let them agonize over it! It served them right.

  She released her hold on the music, and turned to see what was happening. Clara still lay on the chair, her head falling back against the arm, her legs dangling over the edge. She lay unmoving, pale as ice. Hannes knelt beside her, chafing her wrists. As Frederica watched, Nuncia bent over Clara to hold a little bottle of smelling salts beneath her nose.

  Clara drew a shuddering breath, and her eyelids flickered. Frederica moved toward her suddenly, propelled by a feeling of urgency.

  There was no time to lose! If Clara woke, if she found herself once more in control of . . . of their body—

  Frederica couldn’t take time to consider the irony of that thought. She thrust herself forward, past Hannes, past the cook’s outstretched arm. She sank back into the body with a movement now familiar to her, and she took control one more time.

  The sharp ammonia scent of the smelling salts stung her nose, and she gasped. Her eyelids fluttered open, and she saw the whiskered chin of Nuncia just above her. Her hands were cold, but Hannes’s hands were warm and strong, cradling them. The brocade of the wing chair was cool and smooth beneath her.

  Hannes breathed, “Gott sei Dank!”

  She was back. And Clara’s feeble protests were no more than the distant squeaks of a mouse scratching at a wall.

  Nuncia lifted the smelling salts away. “Clara!” Hannes exclaimed. “What happened?”

  Frederica raised one pretty white hand to her forehead. “I—I hardly know, Hannes. One moment I was feeling fine, and the next—why, I suppose I fainted after all. How strange that is!”

  He put an
arm around her, and helped her to sit up, while Nuncia arranged a cushion at her back. “We had better call a doctor,” he said worriedly.

  “No, don’t call anyone,” she said. “I will be perfectly fine. I was just a little overtired, I think.” She gave him a tremulous smile. “I suppose I overdid things yesterday, Hannes. I—it was excessive, perhaps.”

  His frown smoothed, and his eyes softened. Softly, he said, “Perhaps so, mein Engel. Perhaps we should not . . . not be so—”

  She put her fingers to his lips. “Don’t say it,” she whispered. “We have so little time. It’s only that I’m not used to it.”

  He caught her hand to his lips, and kissed her fingers.

  Nuncia said, “Si sente meglio, no?”

  Hannes looked blank, and Frederica chuckled. “Yes,” she said in German, for his sake, though it was Nuncia’s turn to look blank. She smiled. “I feel much better. And rather hungry. Ho fame.” The cook, nodding, dropped the bottle of smelling salts into her apron pocket, and bustled away toward the kitchen.

  Frederica, feeling strong now, energized, started to rise from the chair. Hannes pressed her down, saying, “No, no. Rest a little.”

  She smiled up at him. “Whatever this was, Hannes, it has passed. I feel certain it will not come again.” She stood up, and straightened her skirts. She caught the loose strands of her hair and tucked them back into their combs, then reached out a hand to him where he still knelt beside the chair. The morning sun slanted through the branches of the olive tree, filling the salon with pale gold light. “Come,” she said, with perfect confidence. “A little stroll in the garden. All I need is a bit of fresh air.”