The Brahms Deception Read online

  Frederica hissed, “Stop! Leave me alone!” but it seemed her opponent was not yet vanquished. When Clara’s efforts did not subside, Frederica clicked her tongue and jumped up from the bench of the fortepiano. She seized the manuscript sheets, saying aloud, “Stop! Stop, or I will burn them!”

  She found herself trembling with the effort to hold Clara at bay, to maintain her own position. She had been lulled into thinking this would be easy, that her greater strength and knowledge gave her irresistible power. At this moment, she shook under Clara’s assault, and it made her head spin.

  On the mantelpiece stood a box of long safety matches. She seized it, and bundled it with the music. With uneven steps, stumbling and sliding, she blundered into the little hallway and out into the garden. She had to keep one hand on the wall in order not to lose her balance. She paused once, gasping for breath. It was not, she thought, that Clara was more insistent, but that she, distracted by the music, had allowed herself to be vulnerable. She gritted her teeth, and staggered toward the olive tree, where she sank onto the painted bench in a pool of gray muslin.

  Clara battered her from within. Frederica forgot herself under the strain, and uttered a curse in English. “I will destroy it,” she hissed to Clara. “Be still, or I will burn it!” She spilled the pages onto the bench and fumbled for one of the safety matches. Its stem was thick, hard to grasp. She managed it at last, and held the box in her other hand, poised to strike the match against the red phosphorus strip on the side of the box.

  Clara persisted. Frederica’s head swam, and she clenched her teeth against the vertigo that blurred her vision and turned her stomach.

  Behind her she heard the door open, and Hannes’s voice, full of concern, called, “Clara? Where are you?”

  Frederica could hardly breathe for sickness. She cursed Clara under her breath, but she wouldn’t give in. “I’ll do it,” she swore. “Stop, or I’ll do it.”

  Clara still struggled, and Frederica feared Hannes would come out and find her sick again. With a sudden movement, she scraped the match against the box, and it burst into flame. She caught up the pages of the song, and held the burning match to a corner. The foolscap smoked and curled. The burn spread upward, a black line that moved across the staves of music like a line of soldiers marching across a field. The notes disappeared before the onslaught, charring one by one, each a little death.

  The top page burned first, and Frederica let it drop from her fingers. Flakes of ash floated away on the breeze. The second page burned more quickly, and the third, which was still half-blank, burst into a smoky flame, so that Frederica had to let it drop to the grass.

  “Clara! What are you doing?” Hannes was beside her. He reached for the burning pages, but they were too hot for him to pick up. He pressed his foot on them to stop the tiny flame still feeding on the final sheet of Clara’s little Lied.

  “What have you done?” he said. “Why did you burn this? It was charming!”

  For a long, perilous moment Frederica could not speak. No German would come to her mind. She was fully occupied in resisting Clara’s rebellion, in keeping her head and her stomach in place. She knew her silence must seem strange, but she didn’t dare open her mouth.

  Hannes knelt beside her, the half-burned fragment of the final page in his hand. He held it out, asking gently, “Why, Clara? Why did you do this? Weren’t you going to dedicate this song to Marie?”

  She could only shake her head and battle for control. Her fingers and toes felt numb, as if they no longer belonged to her. She was looking right at Hannes, but she saw him as if through a fog. She felt Clara within, yearning toward him, reaching upward. She gasped for air, and pushed against her, forcing her down and away.

  Hannes, crouching on the grass, sat back on his heels, waiting for her to recover from what he must have thought was a bout of hysteria. It gave her time, and she needed it.

  She was still stronger than Clara. She was determined. And she was, she suspected, far more ruthless. In the end, the victory was hers. The skirmish came to an end. Clara fell back, defeated. Frederica regained her balance, her breath. She was in control again. Her German returned to her, and she sighed.

  She said, looking at the ash of Clara’s song drifting across the grass, “It was not a good piece, Hannes. There was no strength in it. No substance.”

  “You always say that. It is never true.”

  “Women cannot compose,” she said. This much she remembered from the marriage diaries of Clara and Robert, this protestation of weakness on Clara’s part. “We have no real strength of our own.”

  Hannes made an impatient noise, and stood up. He turned to look down over the valley, his hands thrust angrily into the pockets of his trousers. “I thought, Clara,” he said, “that we were done with such talk.” The line of his jaw was harder than she had seen it, and his voice was harsh. “When we spoke in Hamburg, you—”

  Frederica knew she had made an error. She jumped up, dropping the box of matches in her haste. It was still open, and the long matchsticks spilled across the grass. “Oh, I am sorry, Hannes!” she exclaimed. She put her hand on his sleeve, and turned him to face her. “I am so sorry! I doubted myself for a moment. I felt such weakness, I despaired of the little song!”

  His eyes softened, and the tension in his jaw eased. Gently, he said, “Go and write it again, Clara. Now. While you still remember it.”

  A chill swept through Frederica. She would never be able to do it. She had played it through several times, and she might be able to recall a few chords, perhaps most of the melody, but she couldn’t re-create the song from her memory. Or from her imagination. She had no such talent, and she would never be able to recall the words.

  She couldn’t think of a thing to say to him. Her lips parted and her breath hastened, but there was nothing. She decided it would be better not to speak at all. Instead, she moved close to him, pressing her breasts against him, slipping her hands beneath his jacket to encircle his lean waist with her arms and draw his body as close to hers as she could. She tilted up her chin to look into his eyes, to reach up for his kiss.

  He gazed down at her, but his eyes were shadowed and his lips didn’t curve in the eager way she had come to expect. He didn’t kiss her. He even pulled away a little, and his voice was cool when he spoke. “If you are not going to use the fortepiano, Liebchen, then I am. I want to work on the quartet.”

  Frederica, stricken, released him. He brushed her cheek with his fingers. “Perhaps you should stay here for a time, take a bit of air. Calm yourself.” A moment later he was gone. She heard the rustle of manuscript paper and the first light notes of the second movement of the quartet. She stood where she was, her hands pressed together under her chin.

  Deep inside her, she felt Clara once again, feebly shifting, seeking, probing for the light. Frederica’s heart thudded with a surge of rage. It was Clara’s fault this had happened, Clara’s fault she had had to burn the song and upset Hannes. She couldn’t live this way, constantly alert, constantly in danger.

  She should put an end to Clara’s resistance once and for all.

  13

  Clara knew the song was gone. She felt it in her heart as a small, sharp loss of something that could never be replaced. Although the demon had parroted her own words, protesting that women could never be truly regarded as composers, the truth was that she had said it only to assuage Robert’s fragile ego. She said many such things, trying to heal that inexplicable lack of confidence he so often suffered. Despite the brilliance of his work and the warm reception his compositions received, he doubted himself and his abilities with an intensity that frightened her.

  Clara knew from bitter experience that an idea, once it had escaped, could not be called back. Too many such ideas had escaped from her, flown away while she was distracted by children, by the demands of running her home, of placating Robert, of her own practice and performance schedule. This idea—this precious little Lied—had come while she had nothing to wor
ry about beyond discussing dinner with Nuncia, or whether to walk down for the post. Hannes was so much less demanding than Robert. He was sure of himself, confident in his work. He had faith in his own compositions and an unshakable belief in his own future, which lay so bright and full before him.

  “Das Mädchen auf einer Schaukel” had been born on her third morning in Casa Agosto. She was seated alone at the fortepiano. Hannes had been in his bath. Nuncia, smiling but silent, had left a cup of coffee at her elbow, set upon a folded napkin. She had murmured her thanks, but as the first part of the melody leaped into her mind fully formed the coffee cooled in its cup, forgotten. It was a pretty little tune, so simple and straightforward that it was almost a folk melody, just a lyrical twist of notes. It was, as she had told Hannes, inspired by a poem she had loved as a girl. She had felt so free, so unencumbered, that the piece had flowed from her almost without effort. The harmonies were full of her natural melancholy, but also of the sweetness of girlhood, of play, of the irrational joy sometimes experienced by the very young, and too soon lost to age and disappointment.

  Her mother had read the poem to her from a tiny, age-worn book. “This book was mine when I was your age,” her mother had said as she opened it, careful of the cracked spine and dry, yellowed pages.

  Clara had been four years old. She didn’t yet speak, and she knew her mother was worried about her. She talked to Clara as much as she could, asked her questions, read to her, anything to get her to talk. Clara wanted to speak, in fact. She wanted to answer her mother. The words were in her mind and she could read them on the page, even at that tender age, but something held her back, some block, as if there were a padlock on her tongue and no one could find the key.

  Her father thought he had the key, of course. His response, as it was to every other challenge, was to give orders, command action. He made her learn music at the piano by heart and play it back for him. If she was slow to learn, he switched the backs of her hands with his baton. If she made a mistake, he made her start again at the beginning, no matter how long the piece nor how close she was to the end. She had a distinct memory of sitting on the stool of the piano and reaching up to the keys. If the bench was high enough for her hands to be level with the keyboard, her feet couldn’t reach the pedals, and so she stretched in both directions in order to play to his satisfaction. She remembered the feel of the keys under her fingers, the action of the pedals beneath her small toes, and her father rapping time on the music with that baton she hated. The ivory of the piano keys was cool against her skin, the metal of the pedals cold on her feet, but the tears that poured down her cheeks were hot and wet, and they dripped onto the bodice of her dress, marking the delicate fabric.

  When he released her at last, her mother would come and snatch her up from the piano stool as if rescuing her from a fire. She would sob into her mother’s shoulder as her father ranted about her shortcomings, and her mother’s. It had become unbearable for Clara’s mother, in time, and she had divorced Friedrich. But before that happened, every night there was an hour in which Clara could be a child and Marianne could be her mother. It was in those hours that Marianne read the poem to her little daughter, and Clara learned it by heart and never forgot it, the way a song learned when one is very young stays in one’s mind forever. It was a naïve rhyme, but there was something about the image that beguiled four-year-old Clara. It seemed to her it must be a wonderful thing to do, to swing, to fly above the world like a bird.

  THE GIRL ON THE SWING

  The wind is warm beneath my feet,

  The sky so blue beyond my tree,

  My little apron white as snow,

  My little slippers blue below.

  How I love to fly alone,

  The swing for my wings,

  the sky for my home.

  Down I go, but I do not stay,

  Up again, as high as I may.

  Voices call, but I do not hear,

  A little bird in the sky so clear,

  Down and up, and up and down,

  A little lark in a silken gown.

  It was hardly profound. There must be a dozen such, in every language. But when Clara thought of it, she heard her mother’s voice again and remembered those long-ago evenings when she could be a child.

  Those times had passed all too swiftly. She did, in the end, begin to speak. Her father took her away from Marianne, and Clara was not to see her mother again for a very long time. Clara’s young life became one of work and study and discipline. She had never been allowed to be the little lark in a silken gown.

  “Das Mädchen auf einer Schaukel” was the wistful ballad of a girlhood she had never experienced. It hurt to lose it.

  She had fought for it with all her might. It seemed to her the demon was somewhat weaker today. Was the demon distracted? Did that weaken its clutch on Clara’s soul? For a time Clara experienced a surge of hope, and it energized her. She drove herself upward, like a swimmer striving for the surface, searching for something she could grasp, some part of herself she could recover and hold.

  She had heard the demon’s threats, and she knew the song was held forfeit, a ransom to force her to submit. She loved the little song and she wished she could keep it, but when it seemed, for such a brief time, that she might have her life back, she threw herself into the fray. It was a sacrifice she had to make.

  It was, evidently, not enough. Though she battled mightily, she was overpowered. The song was burned to ash. She heard Hannes protesting, ordering the demon to re-create the piece. It horrified her to learn that the demon was not constrained to obey even Hannes. And if Hannes could not command the demon, how could she, weak and damaged as she was, hope to do so?

  Hope had flickered anew when she realized that the demon was trying to entice Hannes. It pressed itself against him in a way she, Clara, would never do. It was undignified. It was wanton. It even seemed, to Clara, obscene. The demon was trying to arouse Hannes, arouse him in a way that Clara had no need to do. For the briefest of moments, her heart fluttered with something like gratitude, but then . . .

  Then she heard the demon’s thought, and it terrified her. The demon meant to kill her, and Clara didn’t know if there was anything she could do to prevent it. She trembled, thinking she was in danger of losing her life once and for all.

  Clara’s life had never actually belonged to her. It had always belonged to someone else, beginning with her father.

  Friedrich Wieck had taught her to play the piano, for which she would always be grateful. He had propelled her into the spotlight, so that she was known as a concert artist when she was just barely old enough to know what that really meant. She didn’t object to the hours of practicing. She loved the audiences, and the music delighted her. Her career allowed her to meet some of the greatest artists of her time, Paganini and Goethe and Mendelssohn and—when she was only nine—the romantic young musician Robert Schumann.

  But Friedrich had not only banned Clara’s mother and her nursemaid from her life. He allowed her no dolls, no playmates, no distractions. She worked all day, played concerts at night, and woke in the morning to do it all again. She was, in every way, his creation. When she was twelve, she learned just how completely her life and her career belonged to him.

  She played a concert at one of the minor houses, in a small city outside Berlin. Friedrich had collected the ticket money himself, standing at the door of the recital hall while her audience poured in. He had programmed the music, blending popular composers with the ones she preferred, Bach and Beethoven. He had selected her dress of white silk, with a high waist and the mouton sleeves, a gown that made her look fragile and slender and even younger than her years. She played three encores. The concert did not come to an end until nearly eleven, after which her presence was requested at a reception. She did not reach her bed until one in the morning, after carefully hanging her dress so the wrinkles would fall out and rinsing her white stockings and her perspiration-soaked chemise in the washbasin of their hotel roo
m.

  She was deeply asleep when Friedrich knocked sharply on her door. She startled, and tried to open her eyes. Her lids were so heavy she could hardly lift them. She rolled on her side, clutching her pillow to her face against the gray morning light. Her voice scraped in her throat. “What is it, Papa?”

  “Get up!” he commanded. “We are having lunch with the impresario, and you must practice the Mozart first.”

  Clara groaned, and rose up above her pillow enough to see the little clock on the mantelpiece. The sun had not even risen above the roofs of the city. “Papa, it’s only just six o’clock!”

  “Get up!”

  “Papa—I’m so tired. Can’t I sleep a little longer?”

  There was a brief silence outside her door, and she knew, with a sinking in her heart and stomach, that he was getting angry, that his face was darkening, his shoulders rising, and his chin jutting in that way that warned everyone around him of an imminent explosion. He said, “Who do you think you are? Queen Clara? There is work to be done! You can’t languish all day in bed.”

  “Papa, I’m not languishing,” she said. “I’m resting.” But it did no good, and she had known it wouldn’t.

  An hour later, as she began her warm-ups on the dismal piano in the lobby of the hotel, she saw families walking through to the restaurant. The smell of fresh coffee, frying meat, and newly baked bread floated out to her. Friedrich had allowed her a cup of chocolate, but he had said there was no point in buying breakfast when they would have an ample lunch paid for by the impresario. She ran her scales, closing her burning eyes to moisten them. When she was ready, she arranged the Mozart on the music stand. She would use the score to practice, but as soon as possible she would lay it aside.