Vienna Nocturne (11 page)

Anna floated in for breakfast one morning, looking pale, while Mrs. Storace was staring out the window with an open book in her lap. Her daughter fiddled with the breakfast things.

“You look ill, Anna,” Mrs. Storace observed. “And you don’t eat.”

“Mama,” Anna said. There was a moment’s silence. Then her face crumpled. “Mama, I have something I must tell you.”

Quietly and slowly she related her story. She would not identify the father. She would only say that he must not know and that he would never have married her. But it was easy enough to guess. The buffo. The Italian snake.

“You’ve ruined us,” Mrs. Storace whispered.

She stared at her daughter. Then she got up and began to pace, each word like the lash of a whip. “Either we must flee, throw ourselves at the mercy of some sisters of charity, or you must marry. If the world finds you for the whore you are,” she said steadily and sharply, “it will be the end of everything. All your joys, your balls
and princes, your pretty jewels. You stupid child. Either we must conceal you or
you must marry
.” She slammed the book on the table, the noise like a thunder crack. Anna sobbed loudly and covered her face in her hands.

“Listen to me,” said Mrs. Storace, pacing. “There is a gentleman in town who knew your father. An Irish violinist, a virtuoso. He wrote me last week. He mentioned you. A virtuoso and a widower. We shall ask him to tea and you shall be your most charming and pray God he saves you. Do you hear me? And you will send that Lidia away tonight. I won’t have a woman who has sold your honor living under my roof.”

“But Lidia did nothing—”

“Whatever she did,” snarled Mrs. Storace, “or did not do, she did not do her duty.” And taking up her book, which she clutched like an armor, she returned to her seat, while her daughter wept, and began to read again.

Benucci had recently returned from his engagement in Florence. He peered at the woman—nearly as tall as he, with a baleful look in her eye.

“You,” he said. “I remember you from Venice. I thought you didn’t like me.”

Lidia sniffed. “You were correct.”

He thought of Anna. He felt guilty over her but could not decide how to fix it. Whenever he saw her, there seemed nothing to be done.

“You are welcome here,” he said at last. “For a time. For the sake of your mistress.”

“Kind of you, sir,” said Lidia tightly, and pushed past him. It was not her intention to poison Benucci but it gave her satisfaction to know the possibility was there.

Sunday afternoon found Mrs. Storace reading Richardson’s
Pamela
in the downstairs suite of the three-story house the emperor had provided for them. It was the beginning of August, a rainy day and cold. The lapdogs, Bonbon and Fichout, snored before a fire. The room was dark. Anna had no performances at the Burgtheater for the next several weeks, not until they revived
The Barber of Seville
in September.

The maid came and announced a John Abraham Fisher. Anna’s dogs, rousing themselves for the stranger, paced over to sniff at his dusty shoes. “Good afternoon,” he announced in a mild Irish accent. “This is an honor beyond my deserts, a sight for sore eyes, to be in the presence of good English ladies who are also lovers of music.” He looked in a lively way between them.

“Good sir,” Mrs. Storace interposed. “You are most welcome. Please let me introduce you to my daughter.”

“Charmed, Miss Storace.”

He was a tall man, heavyset, with a mass of wavy blondish hair that collected in side-whiskers on his wide, blunt cheeks and gave his face the broad, formidable aspect of a lion. The impression was not of elegance but of power. Anna felt acutely the pressure of his gaze and glanced nervously at the fireplace.

“Ah,” he said with a smile, “forgive me if I am staring—I never have been justified in calling myself a gentleman—but the last I saw you, Miss Storace, you were a little girl. You won’t remember me. I only sat in the audience that night, though I knew your mother and your father from my days with the orchestra at Marylebone.”

“You have a prodigiously clear memory, sir,” Mrs. Storace said primly. “When I read your line about my old plum cakes I thought, ‘Now here is a true friend from those long-ago days.’ ”

Fisher, who had continued to let his eyes linger on Anna, suddenly turned all his forcefulness upon Mrs. Storace to say in his bright, lilting voice, “
Remember
your plum cakes, Mistress Storace? How could I forget them? I swear to you I never tasted better in all my worldly travels.”

“Mr. Fisher. You are too kind. So many memories you bring back to me.”

“Madam,” he said gravely, “would it not be now so evidently beneath your station and did I not suspect this good city of having a shortage of plums, I should ask you to bake me some of those cakes this instant, that I might experience once more that peerless, plummy, buttery-sweet rapture.”

“Thank you, sir. You are poetical.”

“It really is quite extraordinary,” Fisher murmured, turning to Anna, “how quickly the girl has become a lady. When I saw you sing all those years ago, I said to myself I should never forget it, and forget it have I not. I said to myself here was a young girl who was yet a kindred spirit—I felt it, I knew it, because of the way you made music. We have an affinity, I thought. We are kindred in song.”

His eyes were an arrestingly pale blue; one felt caught in them as if held by a knife’s point. His cheeks were reddened as if by wind or frost. His dress was fine, his age perhaps forty or forty-five. “You don’t believe me,” he continued with a rueful smile. He looked down at his interlacing hands. They didn’t look like violinist’s hands. They were broad and thick. “And I’m afraid I’m being too forward. But it is the truth, and I must speak it when I see you so grown, Miss Storace, so beyond what I remember, and become so fulfilled in your music, as I knew you would be!”

It was the baby, perhaps, that made her feel sick. But she could never tell Benucci about the baby. She would rather die. If she told
him, he might want to marry her, and then for the rest of his life he would hate and resent her, as her mother had hated and resented her father. But if he did not want to marry her, if he scorned her, her shame would reach to the very depths. So she could not tell him. That way was closed. She was too afraid, and too proud. The secret was like a rotten quail’s egg, webbed with cracks, which she must carry inside her mouth. Her tongue pressed it against the back of her throat and saliva collected around it, and at every motion the shell threatened to burst all its putrefying liquids. She must paste her lips in bandages.

“I was going to congratulate you that night,” continued Fisher, “after you sang Cupid, but you were surrounded with friends and my late wife was tired and wished us to go directly home. So it’s her fault, you see, that you’ve now no memory of me and must take only my word that I have recalled and admired you ever since that day. Such a felicity, to find the Storace ladies here in a city where I expected to find nobody!”

“Why did you come, then?” asked Anna.

He sipped his tea. “I’ve been seeking something.”

“And you think you’ll find it here in Vienna?”

“Perhaps I already have.”

Anna set down her teacup abruptly and called to the two dogs, who lifted their heads and came to her. “There,” she said to them, “aren’t you my only darlings?” The dogs, their faces rubbed this way and that in her hands, wagged their tails and looked at her with vague curiosity. “Are you fond of dogs, Mr. Fisher? I love them.” She dragged one of the poor creatures into her lap. “My singing teacher had wonderful puppies like these. Sometimes I do think they are better than people. They’re simpler than we are. They give their love wholeheartedly. They are never inconstant or changeable.”

“Admirable qualities in beast or man,” said Fisher.

“They’re just like babies—they are wholly dependent on their master. As are we poor females, some might say!”

“Oh, no, indeed,” laughed Fisher. “You will not draw me there, Miss Storace, comparing dogs to ladies.”

“I had a cat once in Naples,” Anna said. “Do you remember, Mama? It was a stray. One day it ran away. It never cared for me—I knew it then. So I didn’t grieve for it—didn’t even look for where it had gone.”

“It must have been crushed to death under some carriage wheels,” said Mrs. Storace. “Or been eaten by a wild beast.”

“I hope it was,” said Anna. “The wretched creature.”

“But you’re mistaken, my dear, that you didn’t grieve,” said her mother. “I don’t know why you say such things. You were brokenhearted. You wouldn’t eat, you wouldn’t sing.”

“Well,” said Anna softly and sternly, “it is a hard thing when an object of tender affection does not come back to you.”

Fisher cleared his throat and leaned forward. “I hope to have the honor of playing for you, Miss Storace, so that you may see my real strengths. I’m not a man of words. Do you like the violin?”

She forced herself to meet his eyes, and saw him smile. “It’s my favorite instrument.”

He nodded. “I knew it would be.”

“Did you? And how? From seeing me when I was a child? Did you hear me sing and see clear into my soul?”

He raised his brows and nodded evenly. “I believed I did. You were just a girl. But I felt I knew you, almost as I knew myself.”

“Nonsense,” Anna said briskly. “You never did anything of the kind. You’re making it all up.”

But he would not relent. “I thought you were like me, yes. In your
musical
soul.”

She sighed. “Then you were mistaken. I do sometimes think my soul the most tuneless in all the universe. Please don’t offend yours with comparisons to mine.”

“I think the opposite is true,” said Fisher. “You are too modest.”

Anna pushed her dog away. “You haven’t heard me sing yet, Mr.
Fisher. For all either of us knows I may have reached my height when last you saw me.”

“I’ve heard marvelous accounts of your singing,” Fisher said. “I don’t doubt them. I can hear your singing even now, behind your most musical speech.”

“I’m not that child,” she said severely. She brushed at her skirts. “You shall make me angry in a moment.”

“Anna,” said her mother.

“But you are,” said Fisher.

“Sir, I am not.”

She stood and he rose with her. He was tall.

“Good-bye, Mr. Fisher. We wish you joy of Vienna.”

He seemed surprised. “I see. You’re angry.” He glanced at Mrs. Storace and gave her a reassuring smile. “Well, we shall meet again, I hope, when you are more agreeable. Farewell, for now, Miss Storace.”

“If you lose him,” her mother remarked bitterly, later, “there will be no help for you.”

Anna stared into the middle distance. She felt so ill she wanted to lie down. “Oh, Mama. He has no wish to be lost.”