City of Lost Dreams (31 page)

FORTY-TWO

T
hey stood in a garden, at twilight. A large and formal garden, laid out in the Rococo style with paths of low and perfectly tended shrubberies, ornamental trees, and languid flowers, statues of tastefully draped nymphs and fauns and benign deities. In the center, a fountain splashed gently into a large, round marble basin. Sarah turned, and the door they had entered was gone. All she could see was a gazebo on a low hill.

Sarah looked at Pollina, who seemed to be dressed now in a pink and dark blue striped dress, caught up like an opera curtain in front and showing a frill of petticoats. Her hair hung in limp ringlets. Sarah raised her hands to her own head, which felt oddly heavy. She discovered she was wearing lemon-colored gloves, and some kind of plumed hat, perched up high on a tower of her hair, which was itself piled over some kind of cushion. The pins were sticking into her scalp. The tips of her gloves came away from her hair with traces of white powder. The bodice of her gown was cut low, although covered demurely with a froth of chiffon. She was wearing a corset, and something around her hips, which padded out her gown to the sides.

A gentle glissando of musical notes caught her ear. An armonica. Sarah took Pollina by the hand and followed the sound, down a swept gravel path through a grove of yew trees. This was what she had in her desperation hoped for when she had taken them through the fourth door. This was the garden of Landstrasse number 261—“a miniature Versailles” on the banks of the Danube—the home of Franz Anton Mesmer.

Vienna, and, judging from the clothing, Vienna somewhere around 1780.

Pollina, silent, clutched Sarah’s hand very hard. Her breathing was shallow and she was trembling.

As they neared the mansion, a footman in a powdered wig approached them on the path. Although he seemed somewhat startled to find them there, when Sarah gestured to Pols and inquired if Herr Mesmer might be disturbed—a matter of some urgency—he nodded and, after a quick but searching look at the shivering girl, invited them to follow him to the house.

Halfway down the path, Pollina, who had pressed herself against Sarah’s skirts and was taking small steps, began to shake so badly she could no longer walk, and Sarah, fighting the stiffness of her garments, tried to pick her up.

“Please,” she begged the footman. “Please, we must hurry.”

The footman nodded and swiftly scooped Pollina, too weak to protest, into his own arms. They began to half run, the footman shouting out an order to a housemaid as they entered the mansion. To Sarah’s intense relief, the footman led them toward the sound of the armonica, eventually calling to another footman, who threw open the doors of a large room.

In a blur, Sarah took in a frieze of plasterwork on a ceiling above delicately tinted paintings of garden scenes, enormous gilt mirrors, a central glass chandelier, and a series of wall sconces; small carved chairs and loveseats padded in rose and green velvet; a pianoforte, and yes, an armonica, and a man leaning over it. The footman set Pollina gently onto a settee, although once there the girl seemed to revive and sat up very straight, though still trembling.

Franz Anton Mesmer came forward, moving with deliberation. Clearly they were not the first visitors to simply appear on the doorstep, asking for the doctor’s help. Mesmer listened with great attention to Sarah’s garbled introductions.

“We’ve come from . . . from Prague,” Sarah said. “I need . . . I beg you . . . to look at . . . at my daughter. She is very ill.”

Mesmer dismissed the footman and—moving with almost irritating slowness—drew a chair near to the settee where Pollina perched. He took the girl’s hand and studied her intently. His own hands, large and steady, felt Pollina’s pulse, tested the movement of her joints, tilted the girl’s chin up and down, and then lifted her eyelids. Pollina sat back and covered her eyes protectively, pushing Mesmer away.

“Don’t touch them,” she hissed.

Mesmer sat back and considered her for several minutes.

“No,” he said at last. “I will not.”

“It’s
not
my eyes,” said Pols. “It is something else. I am taking medicine. But I can’t make it work.”

Again Mesmer seemed to consider this for a long time before he spoke.

“Why?” he asked. “Why can’t you?”

Pols shook her head. She began to cry. Mesmer began to stroke the tears from her face, then lightly touched her neck, her narrow chest, her arms and hands, her legs.

“The thing that is wrong. It is everywhere,” he said.

“Yes,” Pollina said. “It is everywhere.”

“Do you wish it to be gone?”

“Of course.”

“Truly?”

“I can’t,” said Pollina. “It is a part of me now.”

“You are afraid”—Mesmer pressed his hand against her heart—“that if you let this medicine work upon you, you will lose your blindness. And you will see.”

Sarah drew in her breath. She had not realized Pollina had been thinking this.

“I don’t want to see,” Pollina said.

“You do not want to see the stars?”

“I will lose their music.”

“You do not know this.”

“I feel it,” said Pols. “I am afraid.”

“I understand.”

“I would rather die,” said Pols, starting to shake again. “I would rather die.” Her body bent forward, wrenched with a terrible fit of coughing.

Of course, thought Sarah. Pollina was not afraid of dying. She was afraid of living and losing her music. Music was her vision.

No one had been able to understand why the medicine that should have stopped her disease had failed. Especially when Pols was so strong, had such an iron will.

An iron will strong enough to stop the medicine.

Mesmer began stroking the air above the girl, and when Pols at last ceased coughing, he began taking very deep breaths.

“Follow my breath,” he said.

“I can’t,” she gasped. “I can’t breathe that way. It’s too deep.”

“Listen to me,” said Mesmer. “You will never see in this world. That will never change. But the rest can change. The rest
will
change. You must let it. You must know it. Come. Listen.”

He rose from his chair and took Pollina’s hands, guiding her to a position in front of the armonica. And then he began to play, touching the glasses softly while looking at the girl.

He played for a long time. Sarah, whose eyes were at first also intently focused on Pollina, began to feel herself sliding into a kind of lucid dream. She saw the little girl before her and did not see her. She saw Mesmer playing, and she did not see him. She saw Philippine Welser, and Beethoven, and her father. She saw Max, and Nico.

I, too, have to let myself change
.

For a moment, Sarah saw herself. As she had been, as she was, as she could be.

Mesmer stopped playing.

Was it over? Was Pollina cured?

The girl coughed and Sarah felt her heart plunge.

But then Pollina smiled. She touched her chest, proudly. The door to the salon opened. Sarah saw a young man with powdered hair tied in a ribbon stride into the room.

Mozart.

He was a little older than when Sarah had seen him at the
Schloss
in Innsbruck, but still crackling with energy, still alight with life and music and dreams of what was still before him.

Pollina turned to the young man and began speaking to him. Mozart laughed and gestured to the piano. Mozart and Pollina sat themselves on the bench. Pollina touched the keys. She began to play the beginning of Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 9.

“It’s
very
good,” Pollina said, patting Mozart on the arm.

“Thank you,” said Mozart.

Pollina’s hands hovered above the keyboard for a moment and then she smiled. She improvised for a few minutes. Sarah recognized a playful rendition of the overture from Mozart’s opera
The Magic Flute
. An opera Mozart wouldn’t begin writing until near the end of his short life, still a decade away.

“I like that,” said Mozart, when she finished. “Is it your own composition?”

Pollina shrugged.

“You can have it,” she said solemnly. “Clean it up a bit. I am working on something else. An opera.”

“Ah,” said Mozart. “I would like to hear it. When you are finished.”

Pollina smiled.

“Okay,” she said, in English. “Cool.” This made Mozart giggle. They shook hands.

“Sarah,” said Pols, “we can go now.” She held out her hands and Sarah moved forward and took them.

FORTY-THREE

S
arah opened her eyes. She was standing with Pollina in the Star Summer Palace. Elizabeth Weston was once again a cloaked corpse in the corner. Max and Nico had stopped playing the armonica. They appeared to be frozen. Sarah looked down. The sands of the hourglass were sinking into the stone floor.

“I think we have a few minutes,” Pollina said. “If you want to talk.”

“How are you feeling?”

“Well, I’m not going to start shouting ‘I am going to live! Live, I tell you!’” Pols snorted. “But I’m hungry.”

“Did that all just really happen?”

“I think so.”

“That was nice of you,” said Sarah. “To give Mozart
The Magic Flute
.”

“I borrow from him all the time,” said Pols. “It seemed fair.” She waved a hand toward where Elizabeth lay. “I’m not sorry she’s dead. But I will pray for her.”

“I suppose the security guard will wake up in a few hours and think she broke in and killed herself. Which she did. I’m glad Nico’s still here, though.”

“I think it will change things for him.” Pols smiled. “Having the choice to live or not. It’s very powerful.”

“Also, he has an immortal friend now,” said Sarah. “Wait till you meet Hermes.”

“If Nico sticks around,” Pols said grandly, “I shall dedicate my opera to him.”

“You might want to include Max in the dedication. He’ll probably be the one paying for it.”

“Max will be disappointed we didn’t find the Fleece,” said Pollina.

Sarah thought of the fifth door. She knew what was behind it. And why Philippine had made Ferdinand put it there. “Maybe not.”

“Maybe not,” agreed Pollina.

“I think I’m going to switch career paths. Something happened to me, too, back with Mesmer. I saw myself . . . I saw what I could be. I’ll have to go back to school.”

“You’re not thinking of becoming a doctor like Mesmer, are you?” Pols frowned. “Your nose is too sensitive. You’d spend half the time puking.”

“Not a doctor,” Sarah promised. “Music, of course.”

“Music? Play professionally, you mean?” Pols smiled. “I can tell you right now that you understand music better than anyone else I know but you are only a very fine violinist and a really good pianist. There
are
better out there. Maybe you could get work in a decent orchestra. I might be able to find you a job.”

“Not play professionally exactly.”

“Let’s have it.”

“You know what I mean. You’re just teasing me.”

“I want,” Pols said, “to hear you say it.”

“There really,” Sarah said, feeling almost shy, “aren’t enough women conductors. Of orchestras, I mean.”

“Well, I assumed you didn’t mean trains.”

“Is it in my stars, do you think?”

The last of the sand slipped away into the stone floor and Max and Nico turned, blinking, to where Sarah and Pollina stood.

“Yes,” whispered Pols. “Brava, Sarah. Brava.”

FORTY-FOUR

I
t was a white Christmas in Prague. Sarah looked out the window of Lobkowicz Palace and watched as snow silently blanketed the red roofs of the city. The black tongue of the Vltava was barely visible, tram lines erased, cars buried. Nothing moved in the streets below her. The twenty-first century had been brought to a halt in its tracks, and the world she gazed upon was the same world seen from this window over the centuries.

She could see a lot if she wanted to. But mostly she was practicing controlling her ability to see the past. Especially when the future was so interesting.

Sarah finally shut her laptop and picked up her hot mug of
svarene víno
, having fired off the last of her applications for music conductor internships. She was considering some intriguing places, though she had decided against Vienna. Berlin, though. Also Paris, Siena, and London. An interesting new program in Istanbul. Well, wherever she ended up, she knew that standing in front of an orchestra, hearing each instrument individually and at the same time as part of a whole that was so much greater than the sum of its parts—that was where she was meant to be.

But right now she was meant to be here. The museum was closed for the day, and Max had set a long table in the Balcony Room, where they had gathered to eat, drink, and watch the storm. He had rolled the piano in from the Music Room, and Pollina was alternating between the
Messiah
and hilariously elaborate renditions of “Frosty the Snowman.” Beneath the piano, a puppy—a rescue from the shelter on Pujmanové who might grow up to be a large terrier or, Jose joked, a grizzly bear—batted a tennis ball at Pols’s feet. Pollina tapped it back to her. She had named her Natasha, in honor of Boris.

Nico, in an apron embroidered with the alchemical symbol for poison, was refusing Jose’s offer of help in removing a giant roast goose from the oven. “I wanted the more traditional swan,” he teased, surveying it for doneness, “but at the public gardens Moritz wasn’t quick enough. Pass the powdered bezoar, would you—I want to give this bird some zing.”

To spare the delicate sensibilities of the mortals’ feelings on rats-in-the-kitchen, Hermes remained hidden in Nico’s apron pocket, fortified by a peppermint drop.

Oksana was mashing the potatoes and talking about arranging a troika ride for later in the day. Sarah had no idea where they would get three horses, not to mention a troika, but had no doubt it would happen, if Oksana were in charge.

Harriet Hunter had not reappeared. She was perhaps celebrating Christmas with Charles Dickens or Napoléon. Or her mother.

Bettina Müller’s body had been transported back to Austria and buried in Vienna’s Central Cemetery not far from that of Ludwig Boltzmann, a Viennese physicist who’d studied the visible properties of matter, also a suicide. The city’s cafés were full of gossip about the deadly love triangle she had been part of. Her lab was now occupied by a delightful chemist, Alessandro reported. Sarah was fairly sure what “delightful” was a euphemism for, and that Alessandro was not having a solo
buon Natale
.

She’d had a postcard of Apollo from Renato and Thomas, who were spending the holidays together at a beach house on the Greek island of Symi.

Marie-Franz’s card said she had begun her book on Mesmer and was looking forward to the ball season getting into full swing. She did not plan to have fat injected into her soles in order to waltz all night:
Strauss will keep me dancing on air,
she wrote.

The grave of Elizabeth Weston remained empty, as it had been for four hundred years.

The von Hohenlohe brothers’ castle had been seized by the state as part of a criminal investigation into corporate espionage and afterward would be undergoing renovations. Archduke Ferdinand’s
Kunstkammer
was scheduled to open in the summer to the general public. The newly restored castle would no doubt be one of Innsbruck’s most fascinating attractions. Philippine Welser’s
De re coquinaria
had been moved to the Austrian National Library in Vienna, where scholars would have easy access to it. Gottfried von Hohenlohe had confessed to stealing Bettina Müller’s laptop on behalf of his brother, Heinrich. Heinrich’s company denied all knowledge of Heinrich’s activities. His role in the deaths of Nina Fischer, Gerhard Schmitt, and Felix Dorfmeister was under quiet investigation, but he had been jailed and publicly excoriated for setting fire to the stables of the Spanish Riding School. For saving the horses, Gottfried had been pardoned of all crimes. A recent Internet poll had named him “Austria’s Sexiest Man Alive.”

On an anonymous tip, the police had raided a house just outside of Kutná Hora and found a trove of stolen objects, most of them dusty old apothecaries’ jars that, having been returned to the museums whence they’d come, were once more interred on basement shelves. Since the museums’ curators hadn’t actually noticed they were missing, they also didn’t notice that some of them were not returned.

Moritz, gnawing on a bone under the table, had to move as Sarah’s and Max’s ankles entwined.

After dinner, Pollina played the overture of her new opera,
The Golden Fleece
. It was a story of ambition and compassion and heroism and sacrifice. Transgression and redemption. Wisdom and folly. And love. And death.

It was a story of life.