The Musician's Daughter (17 page)

I was glad of the wrap when I emerged into the pale dawn light.

“Theresa!” I heard Mirela call my name as I was about to climb into the back of Stefan’s cart. She approached me so fast I barely had time to turn before she had flung her arms around me and started covering my face with kisses.

“You look terrible! What has happened?” Mirela asked, smoothing my hair away from my face and shaking her head.

“I was stuck in a sewer,” I said.

“I thought you were going to the assembly rooms last evening!”

I could not help laughing. “It seems my uncle may have had his own plans for me.”

“Tell me.”

“I can’t say right now. But I’ll explain everything sometime, I promise. In the meantime, I have to find Toby.”

“Thank the gods you are safe. But who is Toby?”

“My brother. He’s only eight, and he disappeared from the ball last night.” By now we had made our way to Stefan’s wagon. “I must leave.”

“I shall go with you.”

Without giving me a chance to protest, Mirela took my hand, and soon we were both huddled in the back of the wagon. Apparently Stefan delivered his obliging nanny goat’s milk to some of the grand houses in Vienna every morning just after dawn. As we rattled through the woods and onto the sleepy roads that would lead us to the city, Mirela kept up a more or less constant stream of chatter. I didn’t mind. Her voice had a melodious quality that reminded me of church bells pealing on Easter morning.

“Danior has been teaching me to play the fiddle. You are a musician, too, no? Like your poor papa. Everyone has been talking about it. So sad that he is gone.” Her round, brown eyes softened with sympathy.

“What do you know about what happened to him?” I asked.

She sighed. “No more than you, I imagine. Danior said they found him by the river. He was a very kind man, of course. When I was very small he made me a wooden whistle.”

It struck me as odd to have this girl I barely knew tell me things about my own father. Papa had been well-liked among the Gypsies, apparently. Yet none of them had been able to tell me anything. And here was Mirela, clearly implying that my father’s visits to the camp had been going on for several years. There was so much I wanted to ask, but suddenly I was afraid. What if I found out things about Papa that made him seem different from the way I remembered him? What if I found that he cared for people I had never known, spread his affections out far and wide so that there hadn’t been so much for us? Once I started thinking, I found I had too many questions, and so I settled on only one small thing.

I grasped the chain around my neck to pull the medallion out from its hiding place. “You have to tell me,” I said, “what does this mean?”

CHAPTER 20

M
irela took the medallion in her hand and gazed at it as if she were trying to read the future in her palm. “It is a curious thing,” she murmured at last, “to touch history. Looking into the past is very much like seeing the ages to come.” She looked up, keeping hold of the medallion. “Your papa said it belonged to a great Hungarian general who had protected the poor people on an estate from an evil lord, more than a hundred years ago.”

“How did my father come to possess it?”

“He said it was given to him,” Mirela answered, “in thanks for something he had done. He never said what. He has so many good deeds in his Book of Life.”

“Book of Life?”

“The Book of Life is very important. At least, to me it is. Every time something big happens, or I make a decision to do something that I know will change who I am from that time on, it is written in a book that the angels keep. At the end of my life, I will be made to read my book before I am allowed to rest forever. Of course, I can’t really read it now, but when I die, it will be a miracle and the words will speak to me. Depending on what I have done while I lived, my book will make me happy or sad.”

“What about the ending?” I asked, my mind up in the clouds somewhere, imagining St. Cecilia holding my book, which when I thought about it was probably full of instances where I had acted in my own interest. Until now, perhaps.

“You see, that is the most frightening part! When I come to the end of the book, I will find out if I shall spend eternity in heaven with the gods, or in hell with all the evil people who have ever lived.”

We sat in silence for a while. The milk buckets clanged together with every bump. The thin ice that had sealed yesterday’s puddles cracked beneath the wagon’s wheels. Somewhere a cock cleared its throat into the cold morning, and crows cawed bitterly.

Mirela let go of the medallion and placed her hand over mine. Her fingers were very delicate, which surprised me since I imagined she had to work hard around the camp. “I am afraid that when I stole the necklace from you, a bad mark was written in my book. But it was only a little one. Danior had spoken of the medallion and said he longed to have it returned to our people, so that it would not fall into unfriendly hands. We thought it was in Zoltán’s possession, not knowing that he had given it into your father’s keeping. When I saw you wearing it, I thought I was doing a great favor to my people to take it from you. You see, it became a symbol for all those who are oppressed, the serfs and the Gypsies. It’s only a small disc of gold, not of great value—Maya wears more gold on her wrists when she dances—but it gives hope, so long as we have it to remind ourselves that we have powerful friends.”

“I forgive you,” I said. “I knew nothing about it, except that my father had it when he died.”

“Then we are friends?” she said, her face lit up by a broad smile.

I nodded. She threw her arms around my neck. By now we had reached the farms on the edge of the city, and a few laborers were trudging through the snow to cowsheds for the milking. They looked up at us curiously as we passed. Mirela’s passionate gestures were a little embarrassing to me, but despite our differences, I truly liked her. She released my neck and held my hand from then on, pointing out silly things along the way. She saw signs in everything: the shape of the clouds, the timing of a bird’s cry, how often the horse that drew the wagon shook his head, and where the bits of foam from his mouth landed. She made me feel as if I went through life not noticing anything at all. She taught me a simple Gypsy song, a lullaby, in that strange language I had heard the Romany people speaking. She said she knew hundreds of songs and would teach them all to me if I wanted.

“I don’t sing very well, but when I have a violin or a viola again, I would like to play your songs,” I said.

“Ah, that is what your papa did. And sometimes he brought that older man, the one who works for the prince.”

“My godfather? Kapellmeister Haydn?”

“Yes, that is him. I liked him.”

I noticed that we had reached the Marienhilferstrasse. Suddenly the thought of Toby and of the danger I had faced the night before broke afresh into my mind. Mirela’s stories had lulled me, but now it was time to act again. “I must leave you here,” I said, turning to ask the milkman to stop his horse.

“Take care, Theresa,” Mirela said, her face clouding over. “Do not take so many risks. We are friends forever, and forever can be a long time—or a short one.”

I kissed her on the cheek before hopping down from the wagon, and watched her waving at me as the Gypsy milkman drove on toward his deliveries in the city center.

Although I would have preferred to speak with Zoltán and get his help in finding Toby, it was probably for the best that the cart’s path took me to Haydn’s apartment on Marienhilferstrasse. The maid almost shut the door in my face thinking I was a beggar, until I spoke and assured her that I was Theresa Schurman, the maestro’s goddaughter.

Haydn took one look at me and ordered me to go to his wife’s dressing room to bathe. “She’s not there anyway. Stayed the night with her cousin.”

I knew—and I could tell by his expression he knew that I knew—that she had very likely spent the night with a lover, not her “cousin.”

“Please, Godfather, I must speak with you. Toby is gone, and I don’t know where he is.” I told him quickly about my adventure in my uncle’s cellar, and my trip through the sewers.

“Perhaps he is safe at home. You go and freshen up then join me for some breakfast, and I will send someone to your house to see if he is there. He could have walked back from the assembly rooms. The distance is not far.”

I knew what he said was possible, but after everything else that had befallen me, I hardly dared hope the explanation was so simple.

The use of Madame Haydn’s scented dressing room, a hot bath in a copper tub, and a clean shift and simple dress did much to soothe me after my adventurous night. The maid also removed the splinter from my hand—which turned out not to be so very bad—and bound up the wound. Once I had refreshed myself, I joined my godfather for a simple meal. Between mouthfuls of fresh sausage and warm bread I tried to answer his questions as best I could.

“If Toby is not there, my mother will be worried,” I said, imagining what bad effect such a concern might have on her in her delicate state.

“Do not be alarmed,” my godfather said, “I sent for Zoltán. He will know just what to say.”

For a moment I was lost in thought, thinking back over the scenes of the night before and wondering if I missed some clue that would solve the mystery of my brother’s disappearance. I didn’t notice that Haydn had gone quiet and cleared his throat politely.

“I hesitate to add to your worries,” he began, once I had finished my breakfast, “but I find myself in more urgent need than ever of your help. Perhaps if you are not too tired you could spend an extra hour with me today?”

“Of course, Godfather,” I said. “But have you not thought about seeing a doctor who might be able to fix your eyes? There is an operation now, I have heard. Mama and Greta were talking about it a few months ago. They can uncloud your vision.”

The maestro grimaced. “And what if they fail?”

I could not answer him. And I also knew the surgery would be very painful, from everything my mother had said. The idea of someone cutting into one’s eye—I didn’t know if I could persuade myself to do it. But there was so much at stake.

“I must deliver three symphonies and four string quartets to Artaria by the day after tomorrow if I am to honor the contract I signed, as well as creating new works every day for the prince. You have already helped me with a quartet and a symphony, but as you see, it’s not quite enough. And next week he expects an opera, which will mean assembling it from scattered bits, and replacing the substitute arias with something original.”

I knew about the practice of taking popular arias with only the words changed and inserting them into a new opera, so the audience could have something familiar to hum and the diva could show off with something she knew well. But I saw that in this instance it made it more difficult for Haydn to furnish an entirely original opera. Indeed, I did not see how we could finish half that amount without spending most of the next two days working—and he had rehearsals and performances, and I had to find Toby and put a stop to my uncle’s activities—with only a vague grasp of exactly what they were.

We got immediately to work. I did my best to concentrate despite the worries that threatened to overwhelm me at every moment, reminding myself that there was nothing more I could do until Zoltán was made acquainted with everything that had passed the night before. Zoltán had previously said my uncle bribed the other members of the council so that things would go the way the nobles in Hungary wished. Where did the councilor get his money? Were the nobles themselves so wealthy? I became convinced that there was more concealed behind my uncle’s remarkable affluence that I did not know about. He was a clever businessman, so my mother had told me, a merchant who traded in goods that everyone needed—wheat for flour and oil for lamps. But would cleverness be enough to account for his rise to such heights of influence, without a hereditary title and lands?

When the doorbell tinkled around noon, my mind had wandered so far from my surroundings that I jumped and sent a blot of ink from the tip of my pen over the page, spoiling the last quarter-hour’s work. “I’ll copy it out again. It won’t take a moment!” I said.

I started scribbling quickly. Within a short time, I heard Zoltán’s solid, determined footsteps approaching. He entered the room without knocking.

“Your brother is not at home,” he said, mercifully dispensing with formalities.

I felt a peculiar sensation of something flowing through my veins. I could not tell if it was scorching heat or ice. Toby was not at home. My worst fears were confirmed. “What did you say to my mother?” I asked, barely able to speak above a whisper.

“I told her you had both spent the night at your uncle’s. She appeared content with that explanation.”

I wondered how much longer we could keep her ignorant of what was passing outside her bedroom, in a world where she thought her children were safe. “Do you have any idea where Toby … he’s so young …” I could not form the words.