The Brahms Deception Read online

  She was the only pianist she knew who always performed from memory. It was a habit she had developed when she was small, when her father insisted she learn her music by ear, and the habit had persisted. Now, if she needed the score she felt hampered by it, as if it interfered with the realization of the music. She always felt that it inhibited her performance. Sometimes she worried about forgetting, about getting lost, but still she couldn’t bring herself to perform solo works with a score in front of her.

  Her father came down when she had played the Mozart once through. He made her play it again, stopping her often to correct a phrase, to suggest a dynamic, to change a fingering. When they were finished at last, the big clock over the reception desk told her it was past eleven. “Papa, when is our luncheon date? I’m starving.”

  He scowled at her. He had not recovered his good humor, though she had so dutifully followed his direction. “It’s at one o’clock. Why can’t you wait to eat?”

  “Just a roll, Papa. Something. I haven’t eaten since supper before the concert, and I’m hungry!”

  “An hour and a half. Discipline yourself!”

  “Papa, I’ll pay for it myself. Give me some of the money from last night’s ticket sales.”

  “No. That goes into bonds, and to pay for your dress and your hotel room.”

  Clara stood up, stiff with resentment. “And for your hotel room, Papa. Your suit of clothes, to say nothing of your supper!”

  He narrowed his eyes at her. “Control yourself, daughter. No one likes a young lady who behaves like a shrew.”

  She shut the lid of the piano with slightly more force than necessary. “What would you do if I didn’t play?” she demanded.

  At that he laughed. “Didn’t play? What would you do if you didn’t play?”

  She spun away from him, and stalked up the stairs to their room. She slammed the door of her bedroom, and threw herself across her bed. She had to change, she knew, and put up her hair. Her stomach grumbled, and she pounded her pillow with her fist. He made her furious, but he was right. She would die if she couldn’t play. She didn’t know how Friedrich knew that, but he did, and he made the most of it. It served his purposes perfectly.

  She was, and went on being, Friedrich’s primary source of income. As she grew older, he sometimes gave her a little money after a concert. Once, uncharacteristically, he presented her with a gold chain. Another time he gave her a locket with his portrait inside. Sometimes he allowed her to keep a few of the gifts presented to her, rather than selling them for the money they would bring. She earned, she knew, a good deal of money. She saw very little of it.

  When Robert Schumann came to stay with the Wiecks in order to study with Friedrich, he was appalled at the way Clara was treated by her father. He made no secret of it. He was the first person in her life to come to her defense, to object to her father’s domineering ways, to try to ease her path a little. She was enchanted by having such a champion. By the time she was fifteen, she was thoroughly and hopelessly in love with Robert Schumann and convinced life was not worth living if she could not marry him.

  She had been so innocent when she married Robert, so sure that now, at last, she would be her own woman. Should she have known better? She was twenty on the day they married, and Robert was nine years older. Should she have seen, in those tempestuous months before their wedding, how troubled he was, how tortured by thoughts of failure? That he loved her there was no doubt. That he needed her—far more than she needed him—was the painful lesson she had yet to learn. On a lovely September morning, standing in the Schönefeld Church in Leipzig in her pretty wedding gown with the boned bodice and fitted sleeves, with their mutual friends around them, she had been certain as only a young woman can be that her prayers had been answered. Her dreams had come true. Even the rift with her father—who refused to sanction the marriage or to attend the ceremony—could not dim her joy on that day, nor in the happy months to follow.

  It was later, when there were babies to care for and household expenses to manage, that she learned she was far more capable than her husband. She was more practical, and more organized. Soon she also learned that she was, sadly, more stable.

  She had been about to leave for a concert tour of five cities. Robert had a concert of his own, the premiere of the Concerto in A minor, and could not accompany her. Her friend Emilie List was to go along as chaperone. Clara had been relieved to know that Robert would be at home to watch over little Marie and Elise and the infant Julie.

  Clara and Emilie were on the point of leaving for the train station when Robert clutched at his head and exclaimed, “Clara, Clara! You cannot go! With this premiere coming up, and the rehearsals—I need you here! You cannot leave me now. The solitude will drive me past my endurance!”

  She had not slept well the night before for worrying about Julie, who had another of her colds, and for continuously mulling over lists of what needed to be done. She was exhausted, and the journey had not yet begun. She and Emilie were on the doorstep, their farewells said, their wraps secured against the February chill. Their luggage was already in the carriage. Emilie started down the walk toward it. Clara was tying on her hat. Her music and her programs were in a case at her feet.

  Later she would berate herself for her impatience, but at that moment, with the children banging about upstairs and Emilie calling to her to hurry, she spoke without thinking. “Oh, Robert, what can you mean? You are hardly solitary! You have three children, a housekeeper, and a nurse in the house!”

  His eyes filled with tears, and his full lips trembled. Those same lips that had once filled her with such longing now looked like those of a weeping child, and the thought made her heart contract in her chest. “It is not the same, Clara,” he said. “What good are the children when I am under such pressure? The orchestra—”

  “Robert, I went with you to the rehearsal three days ago! The conductor understands your music, and the pianist has it well in hand. It’s going to be a great success, I know it!”

  He stood before her in the hall of their little house in Leipzig, trembling like a frightened child. “Clara, you don’t know . . . the thoughts that spin around in my head, the despair I feel—”

  She had clutched at the sleeve of his dressing gown. It was after eleven, and he had not yet dressed, while she . . .

  But it did no good to think of that. She took him in her arms, and held him to her bosom as if he were one of the children. “Robert, my dearest,” she murmured. “If I do not keep my engagements, how will we pay our expenses? There is the coal bill not yet paid, and the doctor for Julie. There is food to buy, and oil for your lamp. We will have to pay the copyist for the concerto, because the orchestra refused to do it.”

  He sobbed against her shoulder. “Clara, I cannot get this A out of my head. It’s there when I sleep, it’s there when I wake! It will drive me mad!”

  It was, she understood eventually, the first real sign of the tragedy to come. He had been complaining of hearing a persistent A, even when there was no music playing. It tormented him, distracting him when he was trying to compose, interfering when he was trying to play. Sometimes he accused her of humming it as she moved around the house, or of stressing it on the piano when she practiced. For this trouble she had no remedy.

  Emilie called her again. One of the children, probably poor little Julie, wailed from abovestairs, her screams penetrating to the street. The carriage driver rattled his reins, and looked impatiently up at the open door of the house. Clara, with a firmness born of necessity, pushed Robert to arm’s length.

  “Dearest Robert,” she said. “You must try to be calm, for the children’s sake. What will they think if they see you so upset?”

  He dashed at his eyes with the heel of his hand, and pulled a handkerchief from the pocket of his dressing gown. He mopped his face with it, and when he looked up he had at least banished his tears. “I suppose—I suppose you must go, my dear,” he said.

  “Of course I must,” she
said. “And now, or Emilie and I will miss our train, and have to sit up all the night in the coach.”

  “I—I do apologize, Clara. If you knew the things I see, that haunt my dreams—”

  “Yes, Robert,” she said, casting an anxious eye at the carriage. Emilie had gotten in, and was anxiously leaning forward to look out the open door. “Yes, I know, my darling. Why don’t you call Johannes, and have a drink with him tonight? He always has such a calming influence on you.”

  “Yes, yes, I will.” She saw the effort he made, pulling himself upright, thrusting the handkerchief into his pocket, bending to kiss her cheek. “Write to me the moment you arrive, Clara,” he said in a choked voice. “Write to me every day.”

  “Of course, dearest,” she said, as soothingly as she could. “I always do.”

  Moments later she made her escape. She tossed her case of music into the carriage, and jumped up on her own, without waiting for the driver to help her. She heard Julie sobbing from the upstairs windows even as she closed the door of the carriage. Robert, apparently oblivious to the baby crying above his head, stood leaning against the doorjamb to watch Clara leave. He waved to her, and blew her a kiss.

  She lifted her gloved hand in farewell. She could not bring herself to return the kiss. Fatigue and resentment warred in her breast, and the moment the horses started off she leaned back against the hard seat of the carriage and closed her eyes.

  “Is Robert all right?” Emilie asked.

  Clara’s heart ached for her children. Her arms yearned to hold little Julie close against the constant fevers and chills that plagued her so. Clara’s concert date loomed, with the thousand details that would have to be attended to—the programs, the tickets, the posters, the tuning of the instrument, the collection of fees, negotiations with the management of the concert hall. How was she to have room for Robert’s ailments, too?

  She answered Emilie without opening her eyes. “I don’t know. I can only hope he is.”

  Kristian sat with the Bannisters long enough to irritate Frederick Bannister, then excused himself. He went to the big, empty kitchen and sat at the counter for a long time, staring at a box of something called Glaxy Flakes and wondering if it was worth eating. His eyes burned with sleeplessness, but they had felt dry for so long now it had begun to feel normal. He closed them, and pressed the heels of his hands to his eyelids. How long had it been since he slept more than four or five hours at a stretch? Not since his second day here, he thought. He was having trouble keeping track of days. And nights.

  He didn’t know how long he sat there that way. He startled when Chiara pushed open the door and came in, rubbing her eyes like a sleepy child. Her hair was more tumbled than usual, if that was possible, and her eyelids were a bit swollen. “Good morning,” she said, yawning.

  “Good morning. Did you sleep well?”

  “I did. Did you?”

  He blinked at her. He wanted to answer immediately, but a little space of time passed, like a transmission delay, before the words came. “A bit.” When he blinked again, it felt as if his eyelids didn’t move in synchrony.

  Chiara’s gaze sharpened. “Are you all right?”

  He tried to grin. “Sure.” He got to his feet. “I’ll make you some coffee.”

  “Bene.” She walked past him to the Sub-Zero. She brought out a paper-wrapped package of prosciutto and cheese, and held it up for him to see. “Too late for breakfast, I think.”

  They fell into a rhythm, he putting together a fresh pot of coffee, Chiara slicing bread and cheese and peeling paper-thin slices of prosciutto to layer on them. He brought her a cup of coffee while she was working, and she smiled her thanks. They moved around each other with ease, and he thought it was nice to feel she was a friend, that they were comfortable together.

  He thought he had just sat down at the counter with his coffee cup when he looked up and realized she had already set a plate in front of him. She was halfway through her own panino, but she had set it down and was regarding him with a professional air. He realized with a sinking heart that he had lost several minutes.

  She put her chin on her hand. “You do not like it?”

  He took an enormous bite of the panino. When he had chewed and swallowed, he said, “It’s wonderful.”

  “I think you are time-lagged, but you are hiding it.”

  “I’m okay. Really.” The good food seemed to steady him, and he took another bite. She had placed a glass of water near his plate, and he drank from it.

  “Tell me about time lag,” she said. “This was not in the material I was given.”

  “They didn’t give you any information on it?” he said, frowning. “They should have.”

  “Yes,” she said, with asperity. “I learned of this only when you came.”

  “I suppose because they didn’t think it would be an issue,” he said halfheartedly. “Since Frederica would only have transferred once, perhaps twice, and the second time after she had rested.”

  “I think they do not like people to know it is possible.”

  He grinned, and took another bite of the sandwich.

  She persisted. “Others have experienced it?”

  He swallowed, and set the sandwich down. “It happened to the second remote researcher, who went to France in the seventeenth century. It was the first time they were aware of it. He went back three times, and then for days afterward he had trouble with time sequences. Conversations, sleep cycles, sequential actions—all disrupted.”

  “This is very bad, then, Kristian. You should consider this risk.”

  He shrugged. “I have. I promise you.” He took another sip of water. “But I don’t know how we’re going to get Frederica back if they don’t let me help.”

  “You do not think this Dr. Braunstein can do it?”

  “Dr. Braunstein doesn’t have any idea what’s really happened.” He nearly choked when he realized what he’d said.

  “What? What has happened?”

  Kristian put his glass down. “Chiara . . . I don’t want to . . . that is—it’s all so complicated.”

  “There is something else, then.”

  He gave her a helpless glance. His hand moved involuntarily toward the half-finished panino, then toward the water. In the end, he dropped it into his lap. “I need to sleep,” he said.

  “Why did you get up? You should have stayed in bed all day.”

  “I heard the Vespa. I couldn’t go back to sleep.”

  “I will bring you something. But eat first, Kris.”

  “I don’t want them to find out,” he blurted.

  “Find out what?” Her dark eyes glistened with sympathy. Just so, he thought, had she looked at Bronwyn Bannister. And would look at Clara, if she had the chance. As he had done, as he would do again, if only . . .

  “Kris? Kris!”

  He jumped, and took a sudden breath. Chiara was at his shoulder, her hand on his arm. But she had been seated across from him, surely, just when he—

  “Bed,” she said firmly. She tugged on his arm. There was strength in that small hand, confidence in those short, spatulate fingers. “I think it is said, ‘Doctor’s orders.’ ”

  “Yes,” he muttered, staggering to his feet. “It is said, ‘Doctor’s orders.’ ” He gave the panino a regretful glance. “It’s good, Chiara. Really.”

  “I will wrap it for you. Now come.”

  He was aware of leaning on her slight shoulder as they made a slow progress out of the kitchen and down the long hall. Then, it seemed he blinked once and he was in the bed with the flowered quilt drawn over him and the shades drawn. Chiara bent over him with a paper cup of water and a tablet. He swallowed the tablet, drank all the water, and laid his head on the pillow.

  As Chiara flicked off the light, he said blearily, “I really don’t think I’ll be able to—” He was asleep before she closed the door.

  He was dreaming of Clara Schumann when he heard the Fiat return, its wheel spitting gravel as it swung into the parking
lot. He threw off the covers and hurried to the bathroom to wash his face and shake off the heavy sleep Chiara’s sedative had given him. Maybe it was the drug, he thought, that had given him such awful visions of Clara—she had become a ghost, like his mother, hovering beside the French windows of Casa Agosto. He had been a ghost, too, but though he spoke to Clara, she wouldn’t answer. He had tried to touch her, but his hands had gone right through her. He wanted to give her back her own body, but without one of his own he was useless. It was a relief to wake up, to escape the nightmare images.

  He threw on his clothes again, ran a brush through his hair, and hurried down the stairs just in time to see Lillian Braunstein come in the front door.

  Braunstein hadn’t changed in the six months since he’d seen her. Her gray hair was pinned into a knot at the back of her head. She wore slacks and a matching jacket, and just as he remembered, her chin and nose were blunt and forceful. Elliott was behind her, lugging a large suitcase. Max came to meet them, and Chiara stood in the doorway of the transfer room, her arms folded. Chiara looked angry, Kristian thought. He liked that.

  He slowed his own steps to a dignified pace, and came to a halt at the foot of the stairs. Braunstein, looking up from greeting Max, caught sight of him. “You’re still here, Mr. North.”

  “Yup.”

  Her eyes narrowed at his terse response, but she turned her face away. “Where is she?” she asked Max.

  “This way.” Max winked at Kristian as he led Braunstein down the corridor. Elliott followed them, and introduced Chiara. Chiara shook hands with Braunstein, and they all trooped into the transfer room. Kristian went to the door, and stood watching as Lillian Braunstein greeted the Bannisters. The whole group stood in a circle around Frederica’s cot. Everyone except Braunstein gazed somberly down at her. Lillian Braunstein’s gaze was on the bank of equipment on the wall.