Vienna Nocturne (14 page)

It was not a wide bench, more like a broad stool. The fullness of her skirt overbounded it and puffed into his lap. They sat shoulder to shoulder. Now and then his roving foot, as he played, brushed against her own. She made no move to stand—seemed, indeed, unusually still. She was a girl who was always turning and shimmering and sashaying. But her expression now held the same bland
emptiness that was so often presented to him by his courtiers and servants.

He had spent many hours now observing Anna in the opera theater; allowing her performances, as it were, to seduce and conquer him from the stage. No wonder a certain portion of that feeling might carry into this room. His foot found hers once more, slid against it, and this time she did not move away. So simple a change and yet what a stirring it gave him, what a feeling of anticipation, of suspension in time.

He lifted his hands from the keys and dropped them into his lap. The rings—a signet for his office, a ruby from his mother, a few others whose provenance he could not recall—felt heavy and languishing on his fingers. Her skirts, overflowing, caught beneath his hands in his lap and he pretended not to notice. Her small foot remained flush and coconspiring with his own. The sensation of touch traveled in small pleasant shocks up his leg and into his gut and brain. The fabric of her dress was pleasing, a green satin, like forest leaves, and he smoothed it absently against his thigh.

“You are happy with your husband?” he asked in a quiet voice.

She stirred and turned her head; her foot did not move. “You flatter me too much, Your Excellency, to worry about my happiness.”

“I’ve heard he has a temper.”

“He is Irish, Your Excellency. And I have a temper of my own.”

“Do you?” Joseph countered with amusement, twisting a little to face her—a movement that increased, rather than diminished, the seeking pressure of his foot. “Then I’ve never seen it. You have always seemed the picture of tractability.”

“I would not dare to show my temper before the emperor.”

“Dear God!” Joseph exclaimed. “And do I not try to make everyone treat me just as any other man?”

“That would succeed only if you were like any other man.”

Joseph frowned. “I am, I swear to you—more than you realize.”

She gazed long at him. “My brother would do your court much honor, sir.”

Joseph sniffed and turned back to the music with a feeling of irritation. “I have too many composers wanting my attention already. There are only so many operas one can sponsor in a year.”

“As a favor to me,” she said.

Her hands had been folded in her lap. Now, as if of its own accord, one of them moved to rest on his knee, his knee that was covered by her own skirts.

“A favor?” he laughed. “I see marriage has made you grow bold, Madam Fisher. What have I done to owe you a favor?”

She retrieved her hand, still with the same steady smile. “Nothing, sir. It would be a personal favor, a kindness I could never repay, greater than anything I could hope for.”

“You love your brother so much?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said, unhesitating.

“Can’t he come here himself to court my favors?”

“He can’t leave England without a commission.” And suddenly she seemed close to tears. Perhaps the man was harsh with her, Joseph thought—her husband, the big Irishman. Why she’d married the fellow was impossible to say. She was a charming girl and bright.

A knock at the door announced the emperor’s mid-morning cup of chocolate. He extricated himself from Anna to sit and drink it at his desk. There was only one cup on the tray, the attendant not having been told that the emperor had a guest. Joseph sipped the thick, bitter liquid and sighed with pleasure. “Would you like a taste?” he asked. “Rude of me to partake without you. Come here and have a drop.”

“Oh, I couldn’t possibly,” she murmured. But her face, he thought, held a kind of longing.

“Think of it as an imperial decree,” he said with a poised smile, “to give me peace of mind as your host. You wouldn’t want to compromise my peace of mind.”

With a blush of modesty she rose and came to stand before him, her swelling bosom level with his formidable Hapsburg nose. “Come sit,” he said.

She might have drawn up another chair—might indeed have left the room—but with a simple acquiescent movement she knelt before him, her skirts spreading about her, one hand balanced lightly on the arm of his chair. Joseph, who under normal circumstances would have disliked sharing his chocolate with anyone, found himself moved to a most unusual degree by this new view and prospect. He took up the teacup with its precious cargo and offered it to her parted lips. She steadied and guided the cup with her hand. He did not let go. His finger, just below the rim of the vessel, touched her lip and chin.

“Is it not exquisite?” he asked.

“Heaven on earth,” she said. She did not move to recover from her supplicating posture, and he was glad of that. He had been lonely, truly, almost his entire life. Both his marriages—arranged, of course—had been deeply unhappy and blessedly short. His only child, a daughter, had perished before her eighth birthday. He was not the great breeder that his mother had been; not anything like her, in fact.

He stirred the chocolate with the tiny spoon and sipped again. He could sense the touch of her lips on the fragile cup, reverberating there like the sympathetic vibrations of a stringed instrument.

“Your brother may write an opera for my people,” he said. “Tell him to come in the spring. One does not want one’s prima buffa in a melancholy humor.”

She smiled and dropped her eyes. “Thank you, Your Excellency. He will do you much honor, I swear it.”

“Then let him not arrive too soon.”

She waited a moment, as if expecting him to request something more of her, but he sent her away. He wished to finish his chocolate in peace, each taste a kiss, while the pleasant residual
warmth of toying with her still sighed and faded in his belly. As for making Madame Fisher debase herself, even so slightly, to achieve her purpose—well, he wouldn’t have wanted her to think she had him at her beck and call, considering how much he paid her.

Mozart and his wife had returned from Salzburg shortly after Anna’s wedding, but she had not seen much of him since then. A few days after the meeting with the emperor, she wrote to ask if she could visit him. She said she wanted to sing her aria from
The Disappointed Husband
. A frail excuse: they had done the aria enough already. But she loved singing with Mozart—she felt, sometimes, it was the best part of her life. He propelled her along in the most natural way, while still listening and responding to her. He made her feel a better singer than she was.

He wrote back immediately and asked her to come over that afternoon.

After they had finished the aria he asked, “You’re well? In good health?”

She bit her lip. Perhaps she looked unwell. It was true that she had slept poorly. The baby made her feel sick. But she was only three months gone, certainly not four; it did not show. “Quite well, though this dusty air, you know—gives me some low humors.”

“My wife sometimes takes the air at Baden-Baden; perhaps you would like it. Perhaps it would be a respite from town. Refreshing.”

“I couldn’t get away,” she exclaimed. “I’m positively trapped here with all these concerts and parties and obligations. When I was a little girl and very taken with myself, my mother—who is strict and always has been—used to spank me and remind me that the world didn’t revolve around my rear end. But now if I were to step out of it everything would fall apart—the operas, my husband—”

Mozart fidgeted with his foot. “Perhaps you could give them a chance to try getting on without you. Husbands need very little when it comes down to it.”

“I love my husband too much,” she said.

With a grimace that was almost a smile he rubbed vigorously at the top of his keyboard. “That’s not what I’ve heard.”

Her breath caught. “No?” she said. “What have you heard?”

“That he’s a boor.”

She stared at him a moment and then twirled away to coo at his pet starling, which he’d raised from a chick. It could sing like an angel. “What nonsense. I swear I’ve never been so happy in my life. Really I quite like boors. They show one off so well.”

“For God’s sake!” he cried.

She flinched, then schooled her expression into a kind of determined mildness. “My dear Herr Mozart,” she said, turning to him, “I believe you are jealous of my husband.”

He shook his head in frustration. “You’re acting as though you’re on a stage.”

“If I didn’t put on airs,” she said, in a light, high voice, “you wouldn’t like me.”

“I liked you the moment I saw you,” he said. “Do not pretend, madame, to know what I do and do not like.”

“You were half drunk. Remember?” She leaned playfully at the window and said in a blithe voice, “It’s true my husband has a temper,
I mean with others, but he’s quite tame, really. He adores me as no one else.”

“Why are you talking like this?” he asked. He frowned like a schoolboy being subjected to a great injustice. “Don’t you know I’m the only one here and I don’t care? Talk like yourself, for God’s sake—as you are, as you are. You’re talking in buckets of piss, is what you’re doing. My God, you’re the most adorable girl I ever laid eyes on. You’re the smartest, next to my sister. You’ve the world at your feet. You have my friendship and high esteem. We live in a civil society with rights and laws.”

“Furthermore,” she said, “I’m perfectly fine.”

“They say he treats you roughly.”

“Then they’re vicious liars.” She stared at him, and then, still smiling, looked at her hands. She saw that her fingers were shaking, and pressed them together. It did not do to let one’s fingers shake in public. “Once,” she amended, “he slapped me—once in some silly argument. It was my fault as much as his. But after it happened he was wracked, you see. He could not forgive himself. So that’s all over now. Now we’re very dull. Really it’s extraordinary how these rumors blow up.”

Mozart turned red. “I’d kill him.”

“Oh, don’t say that!” she exclaimed. “Please don’t. Then you’d have to kill yourself, too, and I’d have to drink some poison and collapse on both your bodies. Then what would become of your wife and child? Believe me. You must believe me. If you don’t, I shan’t be able to see you ever again, and wouldn’t that be sad?”

She remembered that night, only a few weeks ago, before he’d left for Salzburg, when he had played variations on her aria. How he had upturned the pattern of his mind across the keys. She remembered how he had kissed her in the garden, as though her kiss had been all he desired. “If you had wanted to save me,” she continued, “you should have said so before. It’s quite too late now. The best thing is for us all to be as happy as we can.”

Just then Constanze came into the room in a happy flurry. Her
cheeks glowed. For a moment it seemed she did not see them there. “Oh dear! Are you not finished?”

Mozart gave Anna a sober look. “Done just this instant, my dear,” he said. “This lady sings like an angel and is so obliging she won’t have me change a note.”

“You can’t imagine, Madame Fisher,” declared Constanze, “what this man puts me through. It’s like living with a child! I don’t know how he managed before he met me.”

“Grievously,” said Mozart, laughing. “On death’s door from the time I was a boy.”

“What do you think?” Constanze asked Anna. “When I got out my key ring to open the safe box, to pay the chandler, what do you think I found?”

She held the ring up for Anna to see. Five or six keys of varying weights and sizes hung from a chain around her neck. One was tied with a red ribbon. Constanze brandished it at her husband. “
This
key, ribboned thus, I have never seen in my life—I would have recognized it as a trespasser even if some stealthy elf-in-the-night hadn’t marked it with one of my own hair ribbons.”

Mozart regarded his wife with amusement.

“And
then
,” she said, “I go into the nursery and what do I find in the bassinet? A locked chest like a pirate’s treasure. But I haven’t opened it yet because I wanted my scoundrel of a husband to be with me.”

“Haven’t opened it?” exclaimed Mozart. “My curious Constanze? As you like. It might not even fit the lock. It might be a key to something else entirely.”

Constanze looked at him a second, her mouth open, then took up her skirts and darted out of the room. Mozart went after her. Anna, after collecting her belongings, followed some distance behind.

A sweet domestic scene greeted her: Constanze on her knees by the bassinet; Mozart behind her, leaning down to see again the objects he had placed inside the trunk for her to find. They had lately welcomed into their family a baby boy, Karl, not a year after the sad
death of their first infant. The wet nurse held Karl in a chair. Inside the box was a child’s rattle with tinkling bells and a large silver locket inscribed with some private love sentiment that made Constanze dissolve. “It contains locks of our hair,” she told Anna. “Mine and Wolfgang’s, and both the babies’.” She wiped her cheeks and looked at her husband. “You crazy boy,” she said. “Did you cut my hair while I was sleeping?”