The Brahms Deception Page 23

  He jumped to his feet, and the stool slid behind him. He only just caught it before it clattered to the floor. “What do you know about my temper?” he demanded.

  She stood up, too, but more slowly. She was almost as tall as he was, and her eyes were hard. “I know Juilliard kicked you out after you threw a tantrum in the dean’s office.”

  “Why do you know that?”

  “We had to track you down to ask you to come here. We thought you were still in school. A shame you walked out on your doctoral program.”

  “Not your concern.”

  “I need your report, Mr. North. There’s going to be a lawsuit, a big one. I will need you to explain what happened, to make certain the Remote Research Foundation isn’t held responsible.”

  “Forget it.” He spun away from her, and stalked to the door. With his hand on the knob he said, “You convinced me I had won the transfer, and then you snatched it away without a word of warning. You think I haven’t noticed you and Bannister are on a first-name basis, and that Bronwyn Bannister keeps saying it should have been me on that bloody transfer cot?”

  “I’m sorry about that. Gregson and I both are. Life is hard, and scholarly research is a competitive field.”

  “Competitive? What does that have to do with it? I’d already won the transfer.”

  “Come on, Mr. North. You’re a big boy now. You need to be realistic. Research takes money, and influence. There’s a move in Congress to stop our work, and we need a strong position to counteract it.”

  “It’s not about Congress. It’s about money.”

  “Well, it’s both.” She shrugged. “The transfer process takes a lot of money.”

  “Sure it does. That doesn’t mean transfer chances should be for sale.”

  Her lips pursed. “Doesn’t it?”

  “What if there’s a good reason to go to Congress? You’re messing around with things no one understands yet. Using the Bannisters to do an end run around legislation—”

  She started around the table toward him. “No one’s doing that,” she snapped. “I need you to—”

  “You need? Who gives a rat’s ass?”

  “Mr. North—” She stopped where she was, and a flash of uncertainty crossed her face. He could read her thought, her realization that she had no power over him. None whatsoever.

  He gave a grim chuckle. “You sent Frederica Bannister because her father donates a lot of money to you and your Foundation. All the work I put in, all the effort of all of us who were trying for the chance, didn’t matter. Now that’s coldhearted. And frankly, I don’t owe you a goddamn thing.” He slammed through the door, and out into the corridor.

  He couldn’t go back into the transfer room, not now. He couldn’t face Bronwyn’s hopeful face, Max’s and Elliott’s curious ones, Bannister’s angry and frustrated one. In two minutes, he supposed, they would all hear Braunstein’s version of the argument, but he couldn’t help that. He couldn’t help wondering if he should have told Braunstein everything, but how would it make a difference? She would care nothing for Clara Schumann. He could hear her saying, “She’s been dead a hundred years. It hardly matters now.”

  But it did matter. It mattered very much indeed to Clara.

  And to him.

  He headed for the front door, and stamped past the guard and out through the parking lot, turning toward the narrow street that ran between the twelve houses of Castagno. He heard Erika in his head, saying it wouldn’t help to be telling everyone off, but it was too late. He’d done it now. Again. He’d be lucky if they didn’t put his duffel bag out on the porch before he got back.

  He slowed his steps, and walked more slowly as he followed the winding little street through the village. A period of weak sunshine had brought out the clotheslines, and they stretched between the houses, bright colors rippling in the morning breeze. Elderly men and women sat on chairs in their tiny gardens or in doorways, and they nodded to Kristian as he passed. He lifted his hand, and said, “Buon giorno.” He walked on until he reached Casa Agosto.

  Chiara had said there was a family living there, but he didn’t see any signs of life. Perhaps they were away. The tiny garden had changed so much since 1861 that if he didn’t know for certain that this was the right house—clearly marked on its plaque—he would think he had made a mistake. The French windows had been closed up, and the low wall had become a high one enclosing a tiny patio hung with flower baskets and lined with pots of petunias and geraniums. There was another gate, but this one was six feet tall, and padlocked. He leaned his back to the wall, and let his head fall against it. The breeze cooled his hot cheeks, and the sun was gentle on his closed eyelids.

  There had been so many cataclysms in his life in the past year that this most recent one shouldn’t surprise him. There had been the ugly scene in the dean’s office, and before that the final argument with Catherine that ended with her walking away from him across a busy New York street, her long dark hair lifting in the wind, all the farewell he was going to get. He had lost his chance to accompany her at the master class with Octavia Voss, and he had lost his chance to accompany Catherine’s graduate recital.

  He had called his adviser, but his calls were refused. He had sent Catherine a note of apology from Boston. She never answered.

  He needed to do something good, something to take the foul taste of failure from his mouth. He turned, and gazed in frustration at the curtained windows of Casa Agosto. He wished with all his heart he could go in, go back, and rescue Clara Schumann.

  Frederica forced herself to be patient. She allowed the day to pass, spending her time reading in the wing chair, or pretending to write a letter. Lillian disappeared after an hour of flitting here and there through the house and garden. No one else appeared, just as Frederica had expected. She kept a careful distance from Hannes, and by evening he seemed to have become his normal self. When they went to bed, he took her into his arms. “Three days left,” he whispered, as he caressed her. “It’s almost over. It doesn’t seem possible.”

  Frederica had made herself put on the long white nightgown with its high neck and frilled long sleeves, but as she curled herself against him she wished she had left it off. It all took so long, the kisses and caresses, the gentle persuasion, the slow progression toward what she really wanted.

  It seemed Hannes was reluctant to take the nightdress all the way off. She wondered if it was, in his view, indecent for her to be unclothed. Perhaps it was not considered ladylike. The stupidity of it made her seethe. It was expected, evidently, that she would be swathed in fabric from neck to ankles, an illusion of modesty. It was sheer pretense, when they both knew what they were about to do, but he was apparently content to push the nightdress up over her thighs so it bunched around her waist and hips.

  She hated that. It prevented her breasts from touching his bare chest, her belly from feeling his own flat, lean one. Why should it be that he could come to bed naked and ready and she had to endure these yards and yards of material? She wriggled a little closer to him, under him. She tried to hold back, to let him lead her as he was clearly used to doing, but she felt she would go mad with urgency.

  She twined her arms around his neck, and buried her face in the smooth skin of his throat, just beneath his chin. She felt his pulse beat against her forehead, and she nearly cried out with impatience. He touched her so tentatively, so slowly. She wanted him to hurry, hurry, hurry! She was more than ready. She was desperate.

  When he lifted himself above her at last, she put her hands on his hips, and rose to meet him, unable to wait another moment. He gasped, “Gott im Himmel!!” as she pulled him into her, wrapped her calves around his thighs, drove him deeper than he had ever gone before.

  Oh, God, it was ecstasy! Her body throbbed so that she shook with it. Heat rose from their linked bodies, a fire of need, and she threw the sheet back to let the cool air from the open window bathe them. The iron bed frame rocked beneath them, and the headboard creaked against the wall. It
didn’t matter. There was no one in the house, no one to hear when she cried out, a guttural, animal cry that sprang from deep in her throat.

  She clung to him for moments afterward, unwilling to lose him, to be separate once again. He shivered as gooseflesh rose on his back and shoulders, and she groped for the sheet to cover him, trying to hold him at the same time, though he had begun to pull away.

  When she was forced, at last, to let him go, she lay back on the pillow, panting, pushing at her tumbled hair.

  “Clara,” he said, with something strange in his voice. “Clara, what’s come over you?”

  She looked up at him from beneath her hands. Moonlight streamed through the window. She could see his features, the full underlip, the vividly blue eyes, as clearly as she might in sunlight. She could read the expression on his face, and it was a look of real shock.

  She was still trembling in the aftermath of desire. She felt, deep within, the flicker of Clara’s protest, and it wore her patience right through. She cried angrily, “I don’t know what you mean! Is this not what you want? What you’ve always wanted?”

  His eyes widened, and she caught her breath. She had made a mistake, snapping at him that way. Nineteenth-century ladies didn’t speak like that, not even in bed. She should have remembered. She should have known better.

  She rolled away from him, seizing the pillow with both hands, burying her face in it. In a voice muffled by goose down, she said, “I’m sorry! I’m sorry, Hannes! It’s just that . . . we have only three days, and I—I can hardly think for wondering if we will ever be together again.”

  “Oh, Clara,” he said softly. He stroked her shoulder, and finding the nightgown still gathered around her waist, he began to tug it down over her legs. “Meine Schatz. It’s hard to part, I know. But think of the children—how much they want to see you.”

  The thought of Clara’s children made Frederica’s head pound with resentment. The children! Their mother was never at home, in any case! She was off touring half the time, leaving them in Marie’s care, in the nurse’s.

  This was her time, her opportunity. She would not give up even a moment of it for a pack of brats she had never met!

  Deep within her, beneath the shroud she kept pressed over the life force of Clara Schumann, she sensed Clara’s helpless sorrow.

  Leave me alone. She flung the thought at her, furious and resentful. You’ve had your chance. Now leave me alone!

  The next morning, Frederica knew it was time to make her decision. Hannes would expect her, three days hence, to climb up into Claudio’s little donkey cart and ride to the train station in Pistoia, to return to the children in Berlin. She couldn’t do it, of course. She didn’t dare try to meet Clara’s children. She wouldn’t be able to tell one from the other. She had to think this all through. She had to make some other plan.

  It was hard. There were so many factors to consider, so many complications, and it was difficult to concentrate with Clara distracting her. It was time, indeed, to settle that problem.

  Frederica could hardly breathe when the thought finally came to her. She was seated at the table in the sunny kitchen, with a cup of Nuncia’s thick coffee and a fresh cornetto carried up from the village bakery. She stared at the pastry, hardly seeing it. Her mind thrilled to the idea, the final resolution of her problem. It was the perfect answer.

  She could do it. She would do it with reluctance, face it as an unpleasant but necessary task. Life was full of such tasks, after all. Shrinking from this one would only prolong the problem. Without Clara to trouble her, she could turn all her energies to learning how to live this new life. The concerts and compositions, she knew, were beyond her abilities, but the rest of it—oh, not the children, that was asking too much—but Hannes, and society, and the pleasures of being a wealthy and beautiful woman in a civilized century, these she could enjoy.

  He would ask her to accompany him, surely. Now that their relationship was secure—now that he had taken her to his bed, sworn his love to her—he would take her with him on his concert tours. He would ask her help in his studio. She could work with him on his manuscripts, help to edit, give suggestions. She knew more about his music than he did, after all! She knew the final versions, the changes he would consider, the improvements he would make. Not that she could ever tell him . . . but she would show him, over time. She would make herself indispensable. And she would deny him nothing.

  When Hannes turned to the fortepiano and opened the pages of the quartet once again, she tripped up the stairs to fetch her bonnet. There were three in the wardrobe, waiting on the upper shelf. She chose one in silver-gray satin with narrow white ribbons and a matching bavolette. She had put on the gray dress over the corset and the charcoal underskirt. She still had trouble with the corset, and she could see the uses for a lady’s maid. She had figured out that if she tied most of the ribbons before she wriggled into it, then tied the last of them by twisting this way and that in front of the mirror, she could do a creditable job. It was much nicer taking it off than putting it on, but she didn’t dare go without it. She didn’t want to shock Hannes any further.

  At least she had figured out the order of all these undergarments. Underdrawers, chemise, corset, crinoline, underskirt, gown. They were heavy and confining and hard to keep clean, but she would have to accept them. Wearing such clothes would be a high price to pay for living in the nineteenth century, but she would simply have to bear it.

  She inspected herself in the mirror, once she had tied on the bonnet. Everything looked right to her. When she went down the stairs, Hannes glanced up from his music and smiled, giving her confidence. “You’re going out, meine Schatz? Do you want me to escort you?”

  “Oh, no, Hannes,” she said. “I can walk into the village, surely, without causing a scandal. I’m going to post a letter.”

  “You should take your parasol,” he said absently. “The sun is bright this morning.”

  His attention had already returned to his music before she unfurled the parasol waiting inside the door and stepped out into the brilliant sunshine. As she walked to the garden gate, the notes of the second movement of the quartet trailed after her. She paused, one hand on the scrolled iron, and wished that this moment, in this place, could last forever. She wished she could stay here, in this narrow little house, in this narrow little village, with nothing to worry about but what to eat for dinner and nothing to do but listen to Hannes’s music and make love to him every night.

  It could not be, of course. There were obstacles ahead. She might wish to stay here forever, but Hannes would not. He could not.

  She lifted her chin, and set her teeth in that way her father had always said meant trouble for everyone around her. It was probably a very un-Clara expression, but the challenges she faced were infinitely more complicated than any Clara had dealt with. Everyone thought Clara such a tragic figure, but what did she know of the complexities of modern life, the standards by which women were judged in the harsh world of the twenty-first century? Clara had borne her tragedies, it was true. But she had lived her life as a prodigy and a beauty, a woman admired and desired wherever she went.

  No, Clara would never have been strong enough to do what Frederica had done. That was obvious, surely, by the ease with which Frederica had won their battles.

  It wasn’t over yet, but it soon would be. She, Frederica, would need every ounce of the toughness her father admired and her mother deplored, but she would have what she wanted.

  She pushed open the gate, and walked through.

  She turned right, toward the postbox set into the wall of the tiny shop opposite Casa Settembre. Nuncia had told her where to find it. She had the letter in her hand, a letter she had painstakingly copied over and over, imitating Clara’s handwriting, practicing until she thought it was nearly perfect. The letter was addressed to Clara’s agents, in response to one of the letters that had been lying unanswered on the writing desk. It announced the cancellation of all Clara Schumann’s upcoming c
oncerts.

  As she walked down the narrow lane, she touched her lips with her tongue, still tasting the strong coffee Nuncia had brewed. She took a breath, and felt the restricting pressure of the corset on her ribs and stomach. Her long skirts trailed on the dirty cobblestones, and she knew she would have to learn how to clean them, how to clean her soft shoes, how to live as a woman of a different century.

  That didn’t matter now. What mattered was this letter, written on Clara’s embossed stationery, addressed with the proper pen dipped into the proper inkwell. Every detail of her life was going to be perfect, as soon as she took the final step.

  Clara sensed the decisiveness in the demon as it put its foot—her foot—outside the garden of Casa Agosto. She had lain as quietly as she could for a whole day now, watching, waiting. She had endured the demon’s wantonness of the nighttime hours, had tried to blunt her senses to the excess of lust. She huddled into a corner beneath the shroud of darkness the demon had laid over her. She was the little girl in the cupboard once again, hiding from someone bigger and stronger. She lay still, pretending submission, and prayed for her chance.

  This might be it. She sensed the demon’s preoccupation. She knew there was a letter, and she knew what it said, because as the demon copied the words over and over it murmured them aloud. That letter was going to destroy her future. She couldn’t let it go on its way. It would dismantle the career she had been building since she was nine years old. She would have to fight against this with all her strength.

  She crouched in her corner, wary as an unwanted kitten, and waited.

  The demon reached the postbox. It reached up with its hand, ready to drop the letter in. There was no time to lose. The critical moment was at hand, the climax of the battle between them. The demon was about to destroy her music as well as her life.

  Clara gathered all her energy. She meant to burst forth, all at once, hoping that the element of surprise would help her. She would draw on every strength she had. Her love for Marie, and all the children. Her love for her music. Her love for Robert’s memory, and her love even for Hannes, because although he had been unfaithful to her, he had not known it. He was all unaware that it was a demon that seized him so wildly, that drained him of all restraint. The stakes were far greater than one small song, burned to cinders in the garden. Her very life was at stake.