Lukas repeated the torture of a greeting, his smile feeling as brittle as Mère’s ancient china. “I am sorry we were not introduced then. It would have been a pleasure in Rome as surely as it is now.”
They sounded like the right words to his ears. But they felt wrong on his tongue. Rome . . . Rome had been five months ago, the start of his tour. When the only guilt to claw his chest had been over leaving so soon after his father’s death. When he had been able to assure himself that his mother and sister would do quite well without him, as they had always done. When Père’s final words to him had seemed simple and impossible to fail at. When life had just been music and balls and beautiful women and sipping the finest wine.
When fame had been a blessing instead of a death sentence if he dared to go home.
The first Miss Davies linked her arm through her sister’s. They both looked to be around his age, somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty years. Neither was what one would call a great beauty, though both were fair enough of face. Except that they looked as though they would prefer a quiet garden to a boisterous practice room. Why, then, had they come?
“Daisy and I were hoping to catch you today, Mr. De Wilde. You and Mr. Bellamy will join us for dinner tomorrow, will you not? We worried that perhaps we sent the invitation round to the wrong hotel, as we had not got a response from you. You are at the Belle Vue Royal, are you not? Or perhaps the Richmond?”
Yet another claw of the villainous guilt. Though to be sure, he was surprised Jules hadn’t responded for both of them. “Forgive me.” He forced his face into an expression of sheepish apology. “I have been recovering from a slight malady and neglecting my correspondence—I did not yet see this invitation or I can assure you I would have responded.” With his regrets.
“With happy acceptance.” Jules edged forward, his smile not looking the slightest bit forced. “It would be our honor, Miss Davies. We owe you much.”
“Nonsense.” Miss Davies shooed that away, but her smile had lost a bit of its reserve. “It is our honor to host such esteemed musicians. We pray that your presence will help enrich the culture of our dear principality.”
Daisy nodded. “Our direction is in the invitation. We very much look forward to it.”
“And you’ll get to meet Miss Forsythe.” The first Miss Davies sent her sister a pointed look. “She’s only just arrived or we would have brought her round today.”
“Yes, that’s right. She was weary from the travel, but tomorrow she’ll be right as rain.” The second Miss Davies nodded. “She’s a school chum. I’m sure you’ll both enjoy meeting her.”
Had he met them in Rome, the invitation and introductions would have been welcome. More acquaintances, more patrons, more of the wealthy elite to line his pockets and guarantee that he got to spend his life doing what he loved.
He gripped the handle of his violin case with his good hand and barely kept his smile in place through the timpani beating of his pulse down his arm. He let Jules deliver the expected answer about looking forward to meeting their friend.
Perhaps by morning his mind would be clear and he’d be able to think of an excuse to miss the dinner. Or perhaps his friend would bully him along as he’d bullied him to England and then to Wales, and he would sit down at an extravagant table that he would once have appreciated and make conversation that he would once have enjoyed and pretend he was happy to be there when all he wanted was to go home.
The ladies moved off to greet someone else. Jules nudged him toward the door, leaning close. His words were in low French. “Do not spurn them. Their resources got us out of Belgium. They could be useful in getting you back in. Have you considered that?”
Sunlight assaulted Lukas when he stepped out into the warm afternoon. He squinted against it, not realizing until that moment that the pain had moved up his neck, too, and lodged in his head. “I do not trust their resources.”
Jules shook his head, incredulity darkening his eyes to twin shadows. “Why would you not?”
Because V knew more than he should have. Because the very memory of him made nameless terror course down his back. Perhaps the medication had heightened his reaction, but even so. Lukas wasn’t about to accept help that obligated him to what that man no doubt intended. He would not trade one tyranny of his family for another—he would find them freedom. And if that meant scrimping and saving every pence he earned until he could do it alone, then he would.
They turned to the left, toward where their hotel lay a few blocks away, along the Marine Terrace with what was probably a splendid view of Cardigan Bay, if he could bring himself to note it.
Lukas’s feet went no farther. A young lady stood in his path. Or not in it, exactly—he could have passed her by without incident. But she wasn’t walking like most of the people on the streets of Aberystwyth. She wasn’t chatting with a companion or in a bustle to get wherever it was she was going. She didn’t have the look of one of the university’s female students, with books in hand. She was just standing there, her dress white and simple and fashionable and hanging perfectly on a slender frame. Her hair, straight and apparently so silky that pins would not contain it, slipped here and there from beneath her hat.
But it was the look on her face that arrested him. She stood there surveying the building from which he’d just emerged as if seeing the girders and beams and foundation behind the façade. Dissecting every stone and board. Making some account that he could not fathom.
His breath fisted in his chest. That was how Margot always looked at things. As if she saw what normal eyes could not.
“Lukas?”
“I just need a moment.” He could blame it on the pain behind his eyes, down his neck, feasting on his shoulder, and that was what Jules would think it. He would let him. It gave him a moment to catch his breath and lean against the iron railing that separated the orchestra hall from the street. A moment to clear Margot from his eyes. To watch this stranger until he convinced himself she was nothing like his sister.
She was a decade older, for starters. Her hair was lighter. Her lips weren’t moving in silent murmurs that, if one could hear them, would be but a collection of numbers. She didn’t stand in that too-still way that Margot sometimes did, when the world within her head was so much louder than the world without.
But still, there was something there. Something more intense than the average person.
His perusal must have been less subtle than usual. The woman turned his way and swept that dissecting gaze over him. From head down to feet, back up, and arrowing in on his screaming shoulder for one quick, all-seeing moment. Then her eyes locked with his and she quirked a brow that said, I dare you.
Though what she was daring him to do he couldn’t have said. Had they been in a drawing room instead of on a street, had he swept her with that gaze first, the look may have been an invitation.
It wasn’t.
Jules chuckled beside him. “You are the one usually looking at women like that, not the other way around. Though I do not know why you are bothering—she is not your type. She is barely even pretty.”
Wasn’t she? Lukas blinked, but still he could not see her eyes so much as the way they were looking at him. He could not see her face so much as the challenge on it.
“Not to mention that she is hardly turning to a puddle as your conquests usually do.” Jules nudged him in his good arm. “You must be off your game, mon ami.”
He had no interest in the game just now anyway. Beautiful women—or not beautiful women—could wait until he had Mère and Margot out of Belgium. Until he could lift his bow without wincing. Until the world wasn’t quite so upside down, backward, and inside out.
Still. When she just blinked at him and turned away, as if he were nothing but an insect she had decided to ignore rather than swat, pride bullied its way through the pain. Women might not all turn to a puddle as Jules liked to tease, but they never just dismissed him so quickly.
Maybe she was married.
A
thought that lasted all of a second, until the Misses Davies stepped back outside and one of them said, “Miss Forsythe! I thought you were resting.”
The intensity snapped clear of the woman’s eyes, replaced with an easy light and a quick smile. She was a different girl entirely as she shifted her stance and moved toward his patronesses, one all light and breezy and what one would expect of a wealthy school chum. Not like Margot at all.
She motioned toward the street and spoke in a voice full of stiff English syllables. “Walking seemed preferable after being on the train. I paused when I saw your car.”
Jules nudged him again. “We had better either be introduced or leave. Hovering here is rude.”
He nodded. Turned. And walked away with as large a stride as his arm, his friend, and their instrument cases could manage. Tomorrow would be soon enough to be introduced to Miss Forsythe.
Tomorrow they would see which Miss Forsythe she chose to be—the one who was what one expected, or the one who saw beneath the flesh to the bones of a thing.
Tomorrow he would decide which one he wanted to see.
Today he would take a bit of that medicine the doctor had given him and fall into blessed oblivion until it was time to pretend again that he was well.
Three
Brussels, Belgium
Margot stood at the window as she had been doing for the last sixty-two minutes. The streets were far too empty for the middle of a business day. And those out upon them were all wrong. German uniforms instead of neat suits with crisp ties. German shouts instead of Flemish or French. German soldiers with their ridiculous march, like they were made of iron and could not bend their knees.
A few boys had made fun of that march—and had been arrested.
Margot’s nostrils flared. That made thirty people she knew personally who had been arrested. Thirty. Eighteen had been released, but the other twelve . . . Eight were sent to Germany. Four were awaiting trial.
She gave them a seven percent chance of emerging from that trial with their lives. And that was probably optimistic.
“Margot, come away from the window,” Maman said for the eighth time.
Margot did not so much as twitch. She hated Brussels, had always hated Brussels. And it was worse now, when they could not even live in their own house. Too dangerous, Maman had said. They were blessed that they had fallen in with old Madame Dumont along the road on that long, terrible walk here from Louvain. That she had offered them a place to stay when it became clear they could not go to their own house—not with the Germans swarming through it.
But it was unfamiliar. Margot hated the unfamiliar. She hated this house belonging to Madame Dumont, where her room was upstairs rather than down. She hated this city, with its too many buildings and too many lungs all trying to breathe the same air. She hated that she couldn’t even say her full name anymore, lest German ears hear it.
She wanted to go home, back to Louvain. But there was nothing left of their town. Not that mattered. Her chest hurt when she thought about the number of books destroyed when they burned the library. Paintings too, and other art she couldn’t even count.
But the books. The books.
Papa would have wept had he seen those precious collections going up in flames. If he had witnessed the clouds of smoke choking the air, choking them all. It would have broken his heart.
Perhaps it had been a kindness on God’s part to take him when He had.
Her fingers curled around the faded velvet of the curtains. “He’s coming.”
“He is an hour early. I suppose it is good you didn’t come away from the window.” Maman’s black skirts rustled as she stood. She would be putting away all evidence of how they’d spent their day—the few books of Papa’s they’d dragged here with them would go back into hiding, along with the letter Maman had been writing to one of her old friends from Louvain—and her knitting would come out.
Margot should help. But her fingers wouldn’t uncurl from the velvet. And her gaze wouldn’t leave the figure striding down the street.
She knew, intellectually, that she was supposed to love her enemies. God said so, and He was the one authority figure she felt compelled to listen to—the one authority figure she knew without question deserved her respect. Who never talked down to her. Who outsmarted her. God told her to love Generalleutnant Wolfgang Gottlieb. To pray for him. To fast for him.
She would rather spit in his eye. Which was so typical a response of a fourteen-year-old girl that it shamed her. She wasn’t typical in anything else. She wouldn’t be here either.
Even if she did want to add a kick to his shins just for spite. Though doing so would no doubt land her in jail. Other girls her age had been arrested for supposedly desecrating German corpses. As if any of them really went so near a dead body to poke it in the eye.
Though Margot wouldn’t blame them for wanting to do so.
“Margot! Now come away from the window. I have your scarf out.”
She hated knitting nearly as much as she hated the officer striding toward this house as if it were his. Maman was determined she know how to do the things a young lady should know how to do, but the needles felt so awkward in her fingers.
Turning away from the bleak scene outside the window, she released the curtain and tried to ignore the hollow feeling in her stomach. Food, Maman said, would be getting scarce soon. They and Madame Dumont had agreed to ration what they had left. Otherwise they’d be forced to rely on the good graces of Gottlieb just to eat.
And they were not going to rely on the good graces of Gottlieb.
Their aging hostess had retired for an afternoon nap, leaving the two of them in her cozy upstairs parlor where they’d taken to spending most of their days. Margot sat in the chair beside Maman’s, made her posture perfectly imitate her mother’s. But she felt like a marionette, not a proper girl. No matter how perfectly she mimicked the curve of Maman’s neck or the way she held her arms, she could not make her fingers do what they should. They wanted a pencil, not knitting needles. She picked up the length of red wool that she was supposed to be turning into a scarf for Lukas.
Lukas would wear whatever she made him—but he would be more than a little embarrassed to wear this thing in its current state.
“Your pattern isn’t turning out right, mon chouchou.”
Maman was a master at pointing out the obvious. “I know.” Intellectually, she loved the patterns in knitting. So long as it was in someone else’s knitting. “I lost count.”
Maman’s breath was eighty percent exasperation and twenty percent amusement. “You can go on for hours about logarithms and algorithms, but you cannot count two-three-two?”
“I got distracted.” She’d been musing about whether they could work a secret code into knitting somehow. A letter assigned to every stitch. A for a knit, B for a purl, C for a yarn over, D for a make-one-left. She’d come up with a whole alphabet. . . but was no good at actually telling what she’d done just by looking at the finished product. Someone else could, perhaps. Someone who had years of experience with knitting.
If she were trying to get a secret message to her grandmother, she’d be set.
As it was, her scarf now had holes from those Cs and was uneven from the Ds, and she was going to have to rip out the last three rows and do them over. Correctly.
She hated knitting.
From the open window came the dreaded clomp of Gottlieb’s polished black boots. With each footfall, Maman sat a little straighter, her arms went a little stiffer.
Margot clenched her teeth together. They wouldn’t be in this mess if her mother looked like her friend Claudette’s dowdy matron. Gottlieb would have taken one look at her and decided to find his lodgings elsewhere. He was one of the highest ranking men in Brussels and could have demanded any of the grand houses he wanted—it was pure bad luck that brought him to their door.
Bad luck and Maman’s beauty. With that thick dark hair and those striking brown eyes and perfect features that Lu
kas had inherited—it was really no wonder that Gottlieb had followed them home and demanded lodgings. He was just a puppy nipping about Maman’s heels for attention, that was all.
A puppy with the power of life and death in his hands. And a pistol at his hip. And thousands of men willing to do his bidding.
Suddenly she didn’t like puppies either.
“You just pulled out five rows instead of three, Margot. Pay attention.”
She was paying attention. The front door had opened, and already four steps had fallen on the stairs. He was coming up, toward them, rather than going straight to his room downstairs. And he was coming quickly—more quickly than usual. It usually took him ten full seconds to march his way up to the landing. Now he reached it in six. Another six and—
The door swung open with such force that it smacked into the bookshelf behind it. Maman jumped and splayed a hand over her chest.
Margot didn’t flinch. She focused her gaze on the row of woolen loops needing to be caught by her needle again and refused to acknowledge Gottlieb with even a glance.
Maman stood, and it wasn’t fear coming off her in waves. It was the particular kind of fury that Margot knew best—that which came from a blatant disruption to the peace her mother loved. “Generalleutnant! My mother and I have opened our home to you—you will pay me the respect of not destroying the furnishings my grandfather handcrafted, or you will find your lodgings elsewhere!”
Now Margot had to glance up. Would the puppy pout?
No. The puppy snarled. “Your mother, is it? Very strange, Fräu Dumont—if that is your name. I have just had the opportunity to glance through the city records and have found that your mother has no children. No son that you were supposedly married to.” He swept his gaze down her black dress. “It does beg the question then, does it not, of whose death you mourn?”
A Song Unheard Page 3