by Carrie Lofty
“Take your revenge, then. Humiliate me.”
“I should, by walking off this stage. That man can have your money!”
“You cannot. The violin is already in your hand.” He leaned nearer, ensuring that even Stüderl would not hear. “And you are having too much fun.”
Before Mathilda had the opportunity to act on her volatile mood, Arie retreated to the safety of his piano bench. Instead of a tirade or physical violence, his prodigy attacked him with a violin interpretation of the same improvisation he had just produced. She twisted and swayed, imitating the initial parade of notes from the mirrored motif. The melody and counterpoint in tempo rubato followed, as well as the percussive assault on the harmonics of music.
Beyond the technical accomplishment of her performance, reconstructing a singular instance of music that no one should have heard again, her passion stirred Arie to an intense alertness. During any improvisation, while the mechanisms of his brain worked toward sudden invention, he sensed the rightness of his work, but he was never able to indulge in listening to the whole of his accomplishment.
As Mathilda revisited his improvisation, returning that musical gift to him, Arie heard darkness and imagination. He heard radiance and brilliance. In his music.
Unbelievable.
Before Mathilda concluded that miraculous echo, Arie joined her. At the pianoforte, he added color and depth to her instrument’s high soprano, accompanying her to the delicious world of discovery and trust he had conjured for them alone. Darkness and light battled. An armada of fears threatened to overwhelm any brightness or hope they fashioned. He declared his intentions and opened his heart through music, fearing the worst but yearning unconditionally.
Perhaps she heard his declaration and became frightened. Maybe she reached the limit of her expertise or stamina. Whatever the reason, Mathilda dragged her bow across the strings and produced an unruly screech, stopping her performance cold. Arie, not missing a beat, concluded the recital with a silly little parody of “La Marseillaise,” the French anthem.
Their audience, silenced and amazed, erupted into laughter and a riot of unrestrained applause. Mathilda bowed graciously before stepping aside and presenting Arie as their champion.
He accepted the praise hurled at him from all corners of the room, just as he halfheartedly accepted Mathilda’s admission of defeat. He would not ask whether her dissonant screech had been intentional. For the moment, she had acquiesced.
She moved to descend from the stage but stopped and turned. How differently she regarded him now. Her expression sparked with a luminous combination of wonder and heady excitement, robbing Arie of any awareness other than her.
Alone, he would have pushed impatient fingers into the pile of curls, dragging her flush against his body and kissing her with all the senseless passion she provoked. He would have enticed and cajoled with his lips, his teeth, begging her to join him at the brink of desperate madness—the very place she seemed willing to abandon him, still wanting.
But in that teeming, smoky public house, he could only devour her with his eyes, seeking to unravel the mystery of his fascination. He did not fight the impulses but reveled in those sensations, so new and thrilling to his forlorn soul. Whether she read the radical tumult of his emotions, he could not know. She merely returned his wide-eyed expression with a calmness he envied. And feared.
Perhaps he was alone after all, alone in a one-sided attraction.
“You earned your money, Maestro,” she said. Arie could barely hear her over continued applause and happy, drunken conversations. “But you can owe me a complimentary lesson.”
He grinned. Sudden relief forced a pent-up breath to tear from his lungs.
Dreaded memories, the strain of his financial difficulties, and the pressures of competition collapsed. The thrill of a capital performance overran every malicious thought. The mischievous curve of her lips withered his worries to nothingness.
“Tuesday afternoon, then,” he said.
A plea and a command, both.
CHAPTER TEN
Like enduring the bright dawn sunshine after a night spent imbibing strong spirits, Mathilda awoke to the terrible aftermath of her performance. Klara transformed into an awed simpleton, staring and then fleeing at the conclusion of her duties. Oliver offered a rigid bow when she passed him in the hallway. His formality muddled what had been a comfortable, uncomplicated relationship. Herr Bruegel, the cook, and a dozen other servants refused simple conversation.
When Mathilda entered the dining room to break her fast, Ingrid and Venner’s hushed words ceased. Two serving girls tittered and fled down the stairs to the kitchen.
“Guten Morgen,” Ingrid said too brightly.
Venner regarded her curiously, candidly. “Your performance was a surprise, Frau Heidel.”
This from a man determined to let all of Salzburg know of his disinterest in the arts. She nodded, dumbfounded by his stiff, formal declaration and altered demeanor. That he seemed to dismiss the topic altogether, spreading preserves on a slice of bread, comforted her only a little.
Ingrid watched her with worshipful eyes. “Did you sleep well, dearest?”
“Fine.”
In truth, she had endured wretched nightmares borne of fearful scenarios and doubts. Haunted by the snippets of talk, she dreamed a deluge of repetitive questions and mean-spirited accusations. Either she aspired to more than she was born to be, or she perpetrated an elaborate hoax. That terrifying world dubbed her a pretender and a fraud.
In dreams, she could not escape the budding paranoia stalking her through the Venner residence, in the market and along the streets of her birthplace. Like the discussion she had just interrupted between Ingrid and her husband, conversations ended when Mathilda entered a room. Stares pinned to her. She became the subject of unchecked gossip. Word of her debut produced a sudden musical celebrity where a quiet, respected widow had once breathed.
She awoke to find her nightmares fully realized. No one and nothing remained the same. Her anger with Arie swelled over the following days, becoming a single-minded purpose.
On Fasnacht, the Tuesday of her lesson and the day before Lent, she resolved to avoid those compact rooms on Getreidegasse. She would not obey his pleading command. She wanted to reverse the endless stream of time and undo the damage her performance had wrought on an otherwise orderly life. She preferred the previous year of restlessness, boredom and regrets to her new status as an oddity.
Yet her surging disgust and a deeper, more frightening magnetism propelled her to his residence.
Arie answered his door nonchalantly, and his casual disregard nearly snapped Mathilda’s control in half. She wanted to slap him. She wished desperately to hate him, but fury and memories stole her capacity for thought or action. The sight of his face and his distressed hair cleared a new avenue of resentment for her to travel, because no matter the repercussions, she had loved every second of her performance.
When she recalled those transcendent moments—those few minutes when she had stood with her splendid idol before hundreds of expectant people—her body had tingled with a riotous energy. Although every face had fallen away the moment she raised the bow, leaving only the sound of her music and Arie’s manipulation of that sad old pianoforte, she had been deeply aware of performing for their eager audience. Being subjected to their scrutiny and expectation had heightened the thrill and the need to perform to the very limit of her abilities. She should have been intimidated, but the rightness of her place on stage stole her breath.
Memories of those precious instants briefly assuaged her grief. But that magic belonged to the past. Mathilda was a pariah, and her gentlemanly idol was a mere man—a smirking, infuriating man.
Sitting beside Arie on her customary stool, she held the bow like a saw, clumsy and destructive. Every pull of that tool across the violin’s strings loosed a dissonant pain.
“You seem distracted,” he said blandly.
She could have spit in his face. Frust
rated with his apparent amnesia or intentional disregard, Mathilda wanted to hurl the bow and unleash the crazy, terrorizing panic to mark the end of her old life.
Yet he remained calm. No apology. No explanation.
While Ingrid, Venner, Oliver and every other soul in the city seemed to treat her differently, deferentially, Arie held fast to the professional demeanor he had adopted weeks before. The intimacy they shared across the expanse of the alehouse, however tacitly and swiftly, had burned away, exhausting the enchantment and power of their performance. He sat casually on his stool, waiting for her to continue the sight-reading exercise.
“I wonder if your admirers would be quite as appreciative, Maestro, if they knew how frightened you are of them.”
He stiffened, registering a trace of surprised pain. “We promised to dispense with insults.”
“I lied.” Her taunt, attacking the anxiety he barely masked, produced more shame than satisfaction. Vengeful tears threatened. “You deserve all I can throw after what you did to me.”
“But you returned.”
Mathilda shot to her feet and thrust the violin at his face. “To rail at you, not for more practice!”
“Then rail.” He freed her hands of the instrument and returned it to its case. “I am waiting.”
“Stop being calm!”
“Why?” Arie rose to meet her. A mere breath whispered between them. “I am not the angered one. Your hands can no longer torture the violin, so be cross with me.”
Blood raced circuits through her body and burned the skin at her temples. Tears spilled without inhibition. The arrogant tilt of his smile and the shield of his sarcasm faded, replaced by a kindred sympathy, catching her unaware. That unsettling sensation of knowing him, of seeing the real man, returned.
Mathilda slumped onto her stool, defenseless and defeated. Because Arie De Voss represented every forbidden impulse and secret dream she had ever possessed, the capacity to hate him was as foreign to her as his native tongue. To hate him was to hate herself.
Whispering, she asked, “Do you have any idea what I have endured? People I have known my entire life are like strangers. You had no right.”
Arie knelt and took her hands. She flinched. He held fast. The dull winter sunshine spreading through the western windows haloed his face.
“You enjoyed our show, I think.”
Mathilda shook her head, denying that kernel of truth. Her will to fight faded, but she needed him to understand the damage he had wrought. “You believe I enjoyed being hauled in front of hundreds of my countrymen to perform like an exhibition freak?”
“You are not a freak. You are…are—”
“What?”
“Miraculous,” he breathed.
“People have a history of misinterpreting miracles. Women have been burned as witches for less than I did Friday.”
Confusion marred the composer’s sharp brow. “But you were wonderful.”
“No, don’t distract me.” She snapped her hands out of his grasp. “I’ve never behaved in a manner that solicits idle talk. After Jürgen was killed, well-wishers besieged me with curious glances. They pitied me. They asked endless questions and offered well-intentioned help. I grew sick and weary of the attention. The talk subsided eventually, but now…”
She stopped short of revealing the deep roots of her desire for an inconspicuous life. The extraordinary circumstances of her parents’ marriage ensured that she had been, since the hour of her birth, the subject of scandal. No one privy to the tale of her parents’ sad romance or the grim details of her mother’s suicide believed Mathilda’s destiny would be anything less than tragic.
Her decision to marry the respected Dr. Heidel had been the solution to a childhood lived within a haze of scrutiny. At Jürgen’s side, she had garnered a measure of the respectability and acceptance that hard work and unadventurous living had failed to secure. She had craved an ordinary life, and in a handful of winter weeks, culminating in her impromptu violin debut, she shattered any such illusion.
And she had brought it on herself.
Arie walked the few steps to his kitchen and returned with a tumbler of sherry. He pressed the glass into her numb fingers and she glanced at the alcohol. He remained standing, his hands empty. She had not seen him take a drink in weeks.
“People will always watch and talk,” he said.
Mathilda sniffed her glass. The hairs inside her nose stood on end. The tender flesh within the walls of her lungs burned when she inhaled those stabbing fumes. She grimaced. And she drank. The burning rush of liquid offered a distraction from the hurt encasing her heart.
She cleared her throat, refusing to cough. “You can be blasé because you are famous.”
He chuckled, his deep blue eyes overflowing with a resigned belief in his shortcomings. “And I handle fame very well, you think?”
“No, you’re miserable. Why am I even trying to make you understand this?”
“Because I know what you are disliking.” He moved away and sat at his small pianoforte. Above it a pair of six-pane leaded windows overlooked Getreidegasse and welcomed what little sunshine the day offered. Languid fingers pressed a few ivory keys, but Arie’s gaze remained trained on her. “The curious glances on you when you walk. The whispers. The doubts. I know these things.”
“I hardly mind the talk if I’m well regarded. I do mind feeling they’re wide of the mark.”
“Tell me.”
The melody beneath his fingers defined and sharpened. In her mind, Mathilda unconsciously played with his array of notes, just as she had once toyed with her Fraiskette. She found herself guessing the next chord, the next harmony, anticipating his lazy handiwork in advance of its creation. She felt him plucking secrets from her brain and holding them to the light, forcing her to share. He became her hypnotist.
“I fear that if they look too closely, people will see my flaws.” She took the last gulp of sherry into her mouth. The acidic burn flowed into her blood. “But if they don’t see the flaws, they won’t know who I am.”
He arched his left eyebrow. “Shall we compare flaws, Mathilda?”
“No. I want to forget the entire ordeal.”
“As you wish. But nothing has changed. Within these walls, we write our rules.”
On the heels of his promise, Arie hunched over the keyboard and pounded a radical, mischievous scherzo into being.
Mathilda shivered. An odd sense of unease crawled along her skin. His music echoed the wild bacchanalia of sound he had created at the alehouse competition. The music hardly resembled any of his early works, and its experimental power urged her to take up the violin. She responded to his unspoken invitation.
They played. They dueled. They fought.
And Arie yielded.
With a sudden thud of his fists against the keys, he raised his head and tossed Mathilda a bright, careless smile. Her bow screeched across the violin strings again, not out of frustration but in surprised wonder. He became an entirely different man when he smiled, still taking her by breathless surprise.
“See? Our own rules.”
She exhaled. “Good.”
His smile died, transforming his expression into a picture of befuddled curiosity. “Except I want to know why. Why did you let me win on Friday?”
“I did not.”
“You did.”
Mathilda shrugged, lowering the violin from her chin. The intensity of his regard affected her like the touch of skin to skin.
How could she explain those last, sweet, dangerous moments of their impromptu duet? On stage, standing with her back turned to the piano, she had not seen his face. Yet his music had teased her with relentless invitations, asking her to join him where speech and thought were clumsy, even useless. She had acquiesced to their intimate connection.
Excitement warred with guilt. Need and shame had dueled. And a profound sense of inadequacy had inundated her. What if she had turned to see his face? What if the intimacy she heard in his compositi
on proved the desolate fantasy of a lonely, confused woman?
Rather than finding the strength to turn and learn the truth, she had retreated.
And in his studio, beneath his eyes, she retreated again. “You won,” she said. “Our performance was merely an encore gone on too long.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
A tense, suspended calm stretched between them.
Arie watched Mathilda, wanting to deny the creeping finality in her simple declaration. For reasons at which he could only guess, she fled whenever possible, denying and hiding from what he plainly understood. Her talent. His attraction.
Having given up the chance to kiss her, he would suffer for his ambition.
And he was bored. He had behaved himself for weeks, confronting daily the anxieties keeping him prisoner. His newest students would not recognize the Dutchman who had arrived in Salzburg the previous summer. But reforming a half-decade’s worth of bad habits took time. The effort to remain starched and mannered was exhausting.
In the push to smooth his rough edges, Arie had learned that his most taxing chore centered on Mathilda. He had contented himself with retaining her as a pupil, seeing her each Wednesday afternoon, but her brave, phenomenal performance on Friday evening heightened his unfamiliar hunger.
He could control his thoughts. The bare nape of her neck, however, teased him to lustful distraction. Frustration milled his nerves to powder.
Arie was no saint, no bastion of patience. His symphony had stalled, a half-formed catastrophe. He wanted a woman who, until a few minutes ago, stood prepared to assault him. And no matter the transformations he forced on his unruly character, he remained unworthy of her misplaced regard. In the weeks to come, he would finish his symphony, perhaps attaining a measure of the forgiveness and genuine, hard-earned recognition he craved. In the meantime, he remained a discouraged fraud.
His struggles erupted. “This is Vasteloavend. What do you call it?”
“Call what?”
“Vasteloavend. This night before Lent.”
“Fasnacht.”
“Fasnacht.” He shuffled sideways from behind the piano bench. “Tomorrow we will be good parishioners and make sacrifices. But we should celebrate tonight, not sit here to argue.”