by Magnus Flyte
She would go through this door. She would join her body with Philippine’s and she would know how to make the cure for Pollina. Or she would force Philippine to help her. To help her truly this time. Philippine would not refuse her.
“But it is my time,” she heard Philippine say. “It is simply my time. I am ready. I have had my last dream.”
“What was it?” Ferdinand curled his large frame around his wife’s, and pulled her head onto his chest. “Tell me your dream.”
“A mother’s wish was denied, but she suffers no more,” said Philippine. “A giant has been given a choice. And now someone who is loved can be helped. But the journey to that is not finished. I have no answers for her. She must find them herself.”
“Ah, my dear . . . I don’t understand.”
But I do, thought Sarah, slumping against the door, the strength going out of her limbs. She had to crawl toward the next door. Drag herself up to look through the keyhole.
• • •
Sarah cried out.
It was her father.
• • •
She thought she had forgotten what he really looked like; that the original had long been replaced by photographs in her memory; that she could not really recall his particular scent, or the feel of his arms, or his laugh, or the color of his eyes.
But she could. It was too painful to remember. And too dear to forget.
Her dad was seated in the old green tweed armchair that had been “his” chair in their old house, the house they had sold after his death. On the table next to him was a bowl of walnuts, a cup of tea, and a transistor radio, the one he carried about with him in the garage, tuned to the classical station. He was listening now to Itzhak Perlman playing Beethoven. Dad loved walnuts, loved the violin, loved Beethoven, loved that green chair. If he was sitting in that green chair then it meant he had finished work for the day, which meant it was late, because he worked so hard, all day, and his hands were so callused, and he never got enough rest, enough sleep, enough of the pleasures in life, because he was working, and saving, saving for her, for her music lessons, and her education, saving for a day in his future when he could sit in his green chair and maybe listen to Sarah on the radio, and that day would never come because he had been killed in a car crash and all the music had stopped for him on that day. And somewhere in her, too, the music had stopped. Not the music of others, but her own music. She had never stopped studying music but she had stopped wanting to perform it, or write it. For whom would she write, if not for her father?
Sarah, kneeling by the keyhole, drew in a ragged sob. She could open this door, and she could kneel at her father’s feet and feel his rough hands in her hair. She could hear him say that he loved her, but, more important, she could say it to him.
I love you, Dad. Dad, I love you.
If she opened the door now, would she be a child again? Would she be able to change time? Stop him from driving on February fifth, when the roads were so icy? Save him?
Everything would be different. Everything.
“Sarah?”
It was Pollina. Pollina who was struggling to sit up, to stand. For a moment, Sarah could only watch her. How could she leave her father? How could she make this choice? And then Pollina stretched out a hand, feebly, and moved blindly toward her, flailing and unsteady.
Sarah knew Pollina would not say “Help me.”
And so Sarah staggered to her feet and grabbed Pollina by the hand and crashed through the fourth door.
FORTY-TWO
They 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
Sarah 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
It 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.