The Brahms Deception

by Louise Marley

  “Why isn’t she awake?”

  “No one knows.”

  “The layering—it was so violent, being thrown out that way. I wonder if she—she might really be lost.”

  “Dr. Braunstein wants to talk to you, as soon as you’re feeling stronger.”

  “I feel fine,” he said. He pushed his plate away. “I can speak to her now.”

  “Now is not a good time, I think, Kris. I had to sedate Mrs. Bannister. She was hysterical. And Mr. Bannister has been shouting at Dr. Braunstein for hours.”

  “Really?”

  A brief smile touched Chiara’s lips. “Oh, yes. It is very loud. We made them move to the reception room.”

  “Poor Bronwyn.”

  “It is very bad for her.”

  “Chiara . . .” Kristian paused, not sure he even wanted to ask. She raised her eyebrows, waiting. “Do you think I should tell her?”

  “Do you mean Mrs. Bannister?”

  “Yes.”

  “You would tell her what Frederica did?”

  “I don’t know.” He looked down at the metal counter. His face was reflected back at him, and he noticed with surprise that it looked normal to him, his own face, his own shock of hair. “I need a haircut,” he said.

  “What?”

  He blinked, and looked up at her. “Oh. What was I saying? I lost track.”

  “You were wondering if you should tell Mrs. Bannister what you saw Frederica do.”

  “I don’t think she would believe me,” he said. “Would you believe something like that about your own child?”

  Chiara put out her hand and took his. “I think you know what is best to do, Kristian. In your heart, you know. You’re a good man. You will do the right thing.”

  He turned his hand over to hold hers, and he found himself smiling. “Thank you. That helps.”

  “I think you do not want to hurt Mrs. Bannister.”

  “She’s already so hurt. It won’t help to tell her her daughter tried to—” He shook his head. It was too hard to put into words. “Frederica should be awake,” he repeated. “Everything should be fine now.”

  “You seem very sure.”

  He met her eyes, and hoped that his were as frank and clear as hers. “I am,” he said. “I am very, very sure.”

  “Well, then. That is the end of it.” She released his hand, and pushed the plate toward him again. “Eat, please. You need some calories.”

  He took an olive from the dish, but as he looked at it, it transformed into one of the olives in the kitchen at Casa Agosto. He saw the cook slicing sausage with a big knife, but then she, too, changed. Was she Chiara? Clara? Catherine. The world shifted around him, flickering from Casa Agosto, to the kitchen, to Columbus Avenue in New York, to the apartment in Boston, then to Casa Agosto again. He closed his eyes, trying to make it all go away.

  He heard Chiara’s voice, calling his name, but he also heard Clara’s, calling out to Hannes in distress. He heard Erika’s, asking what had become of the song about a girl on a swing. He heard Catherine’s, laughing over the piano at Angelo’s. He couldn’t sort out which to answer, so he didn’t try.

  He got up from his stool, meaning to leave the kitchen, but he couldn’t find the door. He thought he sank onto a chair, but it turned out to be the cold linoleum. He put his back against a wall, or perhaps it was a cabinet. It could have been the refrigerator. He couldn’t tell. He reached out to someone, grasping her around the waist, and he didn’t know if it was Chiara in her jeans or Clara in her corset. Fearful he would be sick again, he didn’t dare open his eyes to the kaleidoscope of days spinning through his head.

  He felt, after an indeterminate time, the prick of a needle in the muscle of his arm, and then, blessedly, he felt nothing at all.

  Clara trembled as she stepped down from the cart, nearly falling into Hannes’s arms. She hastily pulled on her bonnet, though it was crushed nearly beyond recognition. She adjusted the veil. The sun was hot on the shoulders of her traveling suit, and she smoothed her gloves to protect her hands. The air was full of the perfume of the nearby flower market. In the distance, the campanile with its lacy fretwork of stone rose into a clear blue sky. It was all unbearably sweet to see and to feel and to smell. She was alive again. The demon was gone. It had left terrible memories behind, but perhaps in time those would fade. Seeing her children would help. Returning to her music would strengthen her. She could hardly wait to reach her own piano, to begin work on the concerts scheduled for the autumn.

  She wanted to talk to Hannes, to explain to him, to ask—to ask what?

  There was no time. Their trains would be leaving soon, so soon. Hannes would be off to Hamburg, and she would be on her way to Berlin. She didn’t know when they might meet again.

  Claudio unloaded their small bits of luggage. While his dear little donkey slurped water from a trough outside the station, Claudio fetched a rolling cart and piled her hatbox and portmanteau and valise onto it. He rested Hannes’s music case on top, then led the way into the shadowed interior of the station. Clara and Hannes followed, side by side, but not touching.

  They had not spoken a word since—since it happened. She didn’t know if he understood. Indeed, she hardly understood herself. There was no time to explain herself, to make him understand that it had not been she who had behaved in such a disgraceful manner, that she would never have done the things the demon did....

  Hannes might not believe her, in any case. She wished she knew what legacy the demon might have left behind. Hannes was looking at her so strangely, as if it were she who were the alien, instead of the awful being that had stolen a week of her life. She glanced up at him from beneath her thick veil. His eyes were shadowed beneath the brim of his hat, and his full lower lip protruded in that way it did when he was worried about something. He walked slowly, almost as if his legs hurt.

  They left Claudio with the luggage cart, and approached the ticket window. There was a little queue, but instead of joining it, Hannes took her arm and pulled her aside a little way, where a marble pillar blocked them from the jostling crowds. She welcomed the cool stone at her back, steadying her, supporting her. The trembling of her hands began to ease, and the thudding of her heart to slow.

  He looked at her, but his gaze was guarded and his face stiff. “What ticket shall I buy for you, Clara?” he said in a low tone.

  “What do you mean, Hannes?”

  His hand under her arm tightened, pinching her skin. She put her hand over his, and loosened his fingers. “Hannes, what is it?”

  “You said . . . you insisted that—”

  Clara released his hand. She lifted her veil and folded it back over the brim of her bonnet so she could look up into his face and let him see her own. “Something happened,” she breathed. “I don’t know how to explain to you, dearest Hannes, but—”

  “Just tell me,” he said again. His jaw was set, his eyes cold. “What ticket shall I buy?”

  “Why, I must go to Berlin, of course. The children are expecting me. Marie—”

  His eyes widened. “Berlin? Not Hamburg, with me?”

  She shrank back a little, watching his face change. “Hannes! No, my dearest. You know I cannot! I have engagements to fulfill—Leipzig and Kassel. And the children—”

  The change in his face, in his eyes, was miraculous. He seemed to look younger, all at once, as if ten years of worry dropped away from him. He caught her two hands in his, and brought them to his lips. He covered the fingers with kisses, then bent and kissed her forehead, a lingering touch that made tears start in her eyes. “What happened to us, mein Engel?” he whispered hoarsely. “You were so strange I hardly knew you! You were set upon coming with me to Hamburg, abandoning the children, your concerts—I didn’t know what to think. And then I—as we were leaving Castagno, something . . . something happened to me. Something awful, so that I . . . I lost control of myself, as if I were—mein Gott, Clara, as if I were possessed!”

  “Oh, no, dearest Hannes! Y
ou did not have a demon, also?”

  He clutched at her hands so hard her fingers ached. “A demon?”

  “I have felt as you describe for these seven days, Hannes. I thought it was a judgment from God, for coming away with you this way. I thought it would kill me. Indeed, it tried to do so. But something came to my aid, some other—some other spirit, I suppose! I can’t know, but it was like an angel had come to rescue me!” She closed her eyes against the hot tears that filled them and spilled over her cheeks. “Hannes, I was so afraid! And so alone!”

  He brushed her tears away. His hand was shaking, too. “A spirit,” he said softly. “I suppose it must have been. It did not try to kill me. I don’t think it meant to hurt me, indeed, only to—to borrow me.”

  “Oh, Hannes! I’m so sorry about everything!”

  “No, no, meine Schatz. It was not your fault. Not your fault.”

  He took her in his arms, and held her gently. The crushed hat fell to one side, and she let it go. She thought she would leave it right there, on the marble floor of the Pisa train station.

  She rested her cheek against his chest, and sighed. “This will not come again, my dearest,” she murmured. “I cannot risk it.”

  He held her a little tighter. “I know,” he said. His voice rumbled in his chest, vibrating against her cheekbone. She could have stayed that way, in his embrace, for a very long time.

  But time was her enemy. It had always been so. Her time with Robert had been all too short, and she had never had an abundance of time to spend with her children. She had little time enough even to spend with herself, much less trying to find another space of time to be alone with Hannes. There was no point in lamenting it. It was her life. At least, since the visit of the spirit who had saved her, it was her own life again.

  Reluctantly, but firmly, she extricated herself from Hannes’s embrace. Her throat ached, but her tears had dried, and her voice was steady. “Will you secure my ticket, please, dearest Hannes? I’m ready to go home.”

  When Kristian swam up from his drugged sleep to a tenuous consciousness, for a moment he thought he was still confused. He heard Chiara’s voice, but she was speaking to someone else, someone familiar. That couldn’t be. She was in Boston. He was in Castagno still, unless he had lost even more time.

  He stirred, and opened his eyes. “Rik!” he said. He meant it to be an exclamation, but it was more of a gasp. His throat was painfully dry.

  Erika was at his bedside in a moment, turning her wheelchair so she could reach his hand. “Kris, thank God! I didn’t think you were ever going to wake up!”

  “What—how did you get here?” He blinked, trying to clear his blurry vision.

  Chiara came to stand beside Erika’s wheelchair. She bent forward, too, to take a closer look at him. In his cloudy vision their two heads nearly blended together, the fair and the dark. He rubbed his eyes, and tried to swallow.

  Erika said, in her familiar, clear voice, “How I got here was in an airplane, of course, silly.”

  “But—by yourself?”

  “Airlines can manage wheelchairs, you know. And Dr. Belfiore met me in Pisa.”

  “The money . . . ,” Kristian said.

  Erika clicked her tongue, and it was such a familiar, comforting sound that Kristian almost laughed. “I called the Remote Research offices, and informed them they were buying me a ticket.”

  Now he did laugh. “That worked? Wow, Rik. You’re a force to be reckoned with.”

  “That I am,” she said firmly. “And I’m going to take you home. I made Dr. Gregson agree to a business-class ticket, so you’ll be comfortable.”

  Chiara said, “How are you feeling now, Kristian? Stronger?”

  “Absolutely.” He pushed himself up in the bed. “I want to get up.”

  When he stood up, though, his head spun, and he sank back down. Chiara brought him a glass of water, which he drank in one swift gulp. “I need that walk,” he said.

  She smiled, but as his vision cleared he saw she was worried. “That was more than twenty-four hours ago, Kristian.”

  He grinned at her. “I still need it.”

  His cockiness faded, though, when he found himself outside, with no memory of having dressed or come down the stairs. The three of them were moving slowly down the lane into the village. The air was cool and damp, but the sky was clear. Kristian took a noisy breath, and Chiara said, “What is it?”

  He didn’t want to admit how bad the time lag was. He started to shake his head, and then realized Erika was walking, her cane in one hand, the other hand braced on Chiara’s shoulder. “Rik! Don’t you need your chair? I would have thought, with the flight, and the time change—”

  She grinned at him with the same bravado he had used on Chiara not so long ago. “I told you, Mother. I’m fine.”

  He appealed to Chiara. “She overdoes it,” he said. “But she won’t let me help her.”

  Chiara’s dark eyes flashed up at him, and he had to grit his teeth to stop from seeing Clara Schumann’s eyes instead. “Erika will tell you if she needs help,” Chiara said. “Would you want to be dependent on someone whenever you wanted to move?”

  As I was on Brahms.

  He didn’t know if he said that aloud. He blinked, and found them all standing in front of Casa Agosto. He must have lost at least ten minutes as they walked. There was movement in the narrow house now and a light on in the little front room. He wondered what they used it for. He wished he knew what had become of the fortepiano.

  Chiara was saying, “This is the house Kristian visited, in 1861.”

  “Is it the same, Kris?” Erika asked.

  “No,” he said. “There was an old olive tree with very wide branches, and a painted bench. A low stone wall, and roses everywhere . . .” He felt a wave of nostalgia for the house as it had been, for the charming picture Clara Schumann made when she was seated at the fortepiano, playing from Brahms’s manuscript. That moment was as real to him as this one, and it unsettled him. He wondered if he would ever again have his feet securely planted in his own century.

  Chiara said, “There will be roses in the spring.”

  He said, “The scent of them was in everything.”

  Erika cast him a startled look. “The scent? You couldn’t smell it, could you? I thought you could only look and listen. Like watching television!”

  Chiara raised her eyebrows, watching him. “Where were you, Kristian? When you pushed Frederica out of the transfer?”

  He hesitated, and Erika said to Chiara, “Is he losing time again?”

  He said, “No, I’m not.” And to Chiara, “I think you’ve guessed.” She raised her eyebrows in a cryptic expression. “You think I did something awful,” he said.

  “No, no, Kristian, of course I do not.” She lifted her hands in that supremely Italian gesture. “What else could you do?”

  20

  Kristian and Erika stood beside the pillars in the entrance to the transfer clinic, and watched as Frederica Bannister was carried out on a stretcher to the waiting ambulance. Her mother hovered over her. The transfer cap and the wires and tubes of the transfer cot had been removed and replaced with others. Chiara gave instructions to the medical staff. Max would fly with Frederica and her parents in a chartered plane. Chiara had made arrangements for the supplies he would need and spoken at length with the airport to make certain everything was there and ready to be brought on board.

  They stood beside Erika’s wheelchair, but she wasn’t using it. She hadn’t needed it since the first day of her arrival, which she considered a triumph. It meant, she said, that she could travel wherever she wanted to. She was leaning on her cane, but lightly, her other hand resting on the chair. “Mrs. Bannister looks terrible,” she said.

  It was true. Bronwyn Bannister had grown even thinner and paler, and the skin of her face crinkled like paper when she spoke.

  Kristian said, “Chiara tried to help her.”

  “Nothing can help, Kris. She’s lost her daug
hter.”

  “She could wake up one day.”

  “Do you think so?”

  He shrugged. “I just don’t know, Rik. She was a very unhappy girl, I’m afraid. I’m not sure she wants to wake up.” Or that she can find her way back.

  Erika made a small gesture, indicating the elaborate and clearly expensive preparations for moving Frederica. “With all of those advantages? Why should she be so unhappy?”

  “Money can’t buy what she needed,” Kristian said. He stepped back as the stretcher was carried down the steps. He could see that Bronwyn had done her best. She had brushed her daughter’s hair back and tied it with a girlish pink ribbon. She had washed her, put some sort of cream on her face, clipped her fingernails. She had managed to get fresh clothes on her, a sweater and slacks and thick socks. The socks in particular made Kristian sad. Bronwyn was trying, as best she could, to make her daughter comfortable, to protect her. It was all so pointless, and so pitiful.

  Frederica, where are you? He would never know now. It was eerie, seeing her so still. She had done something terrible, but she had been intensely alive in 1861. He couldn’t help remembering, over and over, that ghastly moment when he had thrust her out of Clara Schumann’s body. He would never recall it without a feeling of revulsion.

  Had there been anything else he could have done? He didn’t know. He supposed he would always wonder.

  He gritted his teeth, and thrust the memory aside. He was learning to train his focus on his surroundings, to resist the time lag that made the scene flicker and shift around him. He had lost a lot of time over the past three days.

  He felt Erika watching him, and he grinned at her. “I’m fine,” he said. “I’m right here.”

  With some fuss and a lot of Italian conversation, the stretcher was stowed safely in the ambulance, and Bronwyn Bannister, looking as frail as a bundle of sticks tied together, was helped in to sit beside her daughter. The drivers and Max took their places, and then had to wait for Frederick Bannister to come out.

  He came, at last, with Lillian Braunstein and Elliott beside him. Elliott cast Kristian a speaking glance, and Kristian shrugged. Tension lay like a cloud over both Bannister and Braunstein, and cast its shadow onto those around them. Elliott paused at the top of the steps to hold out his hand to Kristian.