1636- the Flight of the Nightingale

by David Carrico

  They broke into a rendition of “My Bonnie Lass She Smelleth.” Johann had to bite the knuckle of his forefinger to keep from bursting out in wild laughter as they progressed through the verses detailing both the beauties and the shortcomings of the lass. When they hit the line about her sounding like a crow, he nearly drew blood trying to suppress his guffaws. As it was, at least one or two moans escaped him, which drew some sidelong looks from some of the servants.

  The song was finished in a few minutes, and he sagged in relief. Marla returned to the piano keyboard, and the next couple of songs passed in a blur while he regained his composure. He straightened up and paid attention, though, when Marla said, “This is the next to the last song of the evening. It’s a superb song, with a rich reputation in the up-time. ‘Hotel California,’ two three four.”

  What followed was a tour de force of syncopated rhythmic piano work, impassioned violin playing, especially in the long extended coda, and Marla’s surgically tuned voice bending tones and placing lyrics as if they were gemstones in a matrix. Despite himself, Johann was caught up in it, hunching forward and rocking back and forth as the currents of the song ebbed and flowed. When the coda died away, he was almost limp.

  Marla stood again. “For the final piece, we are going to do something a bit different, perhaps more than you expected. Since one of the program events coming up in the next few days will be the ballet Swan Lake, we thought we would present one of the dancers doing something for you tonight. It won’t be ballet, and it will be rather different. Please give us a moment to prepare.” She looked toward the side door and nodded. A veritable procession responded to her nod.

  First came a couple of male servants carrying a rolled-up carpet, which they took to the far side of the piano, set it down, and unrolled it. It extended far enough that Johann gained an insight as to why there weren’t more chairs in the room.

  Those two men were followed by four very brawny men who were lugging in what appeared to be…a slab of metal? It was perhaps four feet wide by six or eight feet long, and from the way they were straining with it had to be very heavy, which meant it was thicker than he had at first assumed it would be. They carried it very carefully over to the carpet, lowered one edge down with great care to rest on the carpet just inside the front edge of the carpet itself, then lowered the back edge of the metal plate to rest on the carpet. There was a final soft thump as it settled into place.

  The men exited, and Staci reentered the room. Johann hadn’t even noticed she’d left. Her steps were very loud—much louder than normal, and she was followed by a musician Johann hadn’t seen before, carrying a viola da gamba. Two of the others stepped forward, holding flutes, to cluster behind Marla while Staci moved to stand behind the metal plate.

  “This is a style of dancing you’ve not seen before,” Marla said. “It’s called tap dancing, for reasons that will be very evident in just a few moments. The song is “Take Five,” and I give you premier dancer Anastasia Matowski.”

  Marla sat down and without further ado began playing a very unsettling rhythm, very syncopated; a pattern that repeated over and over. As she did so, Johann’s attention was drawn to Staci reaching to the left side of her waist, unfastening something, and swirling her skirt off to reveal her legs clothed in black hose that progressed to where they disappeared under an extremely brief garment which clad the bottom of her torso. It was as if her legs were nude, but painted black. He could hardly grasp what he was seeing.

  By now the viola da gamba player had joined in, and was providing a ground of plucked notes over which Marla was now elaborating a bit. Johann finally pinned down what was unsettling him about the music: the meter was not two, or three, or four—it was five! No one wrote in five, but this song had been.

  That conundrum solved, his mind immediately fixated on the other thing that was unsettling him—Staci—just as the flutes joined the performance, which was apparently Staci’s cue to move.

  Her petite figure erupted into an outpouring of rhythmic clicking from the shoes she was wearing on the metal plate. The sound was almost overpowering. In the back of his mind, Johann was astonished to hear that she was tapping her feet in very complex patterns that still fit into and flowed with the five meter, adding to the complexity of the music and making a true multisensory experience, one that he had never even considered was possible.

  That astonishment lasted but a moment, though, for in the next moment Johann saw every man in his field of view tense up. The seated guests all twitched, heads turned toward Staci, and to a man they leaned forward at least a little bit. He glanced quickly at the servants who stood to one side of him by the tables, and saw the same tension in them, the same slight shift in posture. And there was no evading what they were all focused on, to a man.

  Fräulein Staci Matowski dancing—but such dance—legs flashing, moving, kicking, swinging out from side to side, from front to back—legs so nearly nude that one could see the cords of muscle in them as she moved. There was no question what the others were fixated on.

  For all that the back of Johann’s mind was growing increasingly uncomfortable with what he saw, the front of it was so wrapped up in visual presentation of the dance, in the movement of Staci’s body—in the sensuality of it—that his mind was overloaded. He felt as if his skull should be bulging, like a wineskin that had been overfilled.

  The song finally came to an end. Johann knew that it couldn’t have lasted more than a few minutes, but it had felt to him as if it had lasted forever, with Staci up before the audience capering around and displaying herself. When Marla stood, the audience applauded, some louder than others. Johann, head spinning, slipped out the door of the great room.

  Johann didn’t know what to think. He didn’t know how to feel. He wasn’t numb, but he felt as if he couldn’t move, respond, act. After a long moment, he wandered down the hall toward the front door to the school, wavering as he did so, bumping into first one wall and then the other until he finally walked through the doorway and down the steps to the street.

  Outside, in the night air, the coolness seemed to help slow down the currents of his mind, reduce the churning of his thought. Johann stared straight up to see the spangling of stars on the black velvet of the sky. No moon was visible yet. But as his thoughts slowed down and returned to some sort of order under the starlight, something darker began to form, to grow in him.

  “Johann! There you are!”

  Staci’s voice sounded behind him as the door to the school opened, and the musicians all exited in a throng. Staci skipped down the steps ahead of them and almost bounced over to Johann and placed a hand on his arm. “Did you see me dance? What did you think?”

  Johann shook her hand off and took a step back. Her smile disappeared into shock as her mouth dropped open. Before she could say anything, the darkness found its outlet.

  “How could you?” Johann demanded in a hard tone that nonetheless shook. “How could you put yourself on display like that? You were practically naked, dancing like Salome in front of all those people, those men.” He heard his voice become vicious, and at just that moment he didn’t really care. “I thought you were an artist. I thought you danced for joy, for beauty, not for tawdry lascivious lust. You…you little hypocrite.”

  Johann was surprised to find that his hands were fisted, clenched at his sides, as his breath poured in and out of him in torrents. At least the pressure inside was gone. But then he saw Staci’s face. Tears flowed in slow procession down her cheeks, her eyes looked bruised in the lamplight from the lamps by the door, and her cheeks looked sunken. She looked like a starveling, someone famine-struck, and it dawned on him that he had just taken from her the nourishment of her soul.

  The tableau was still. Johann, Staci, and the musicians behind her all stood motionless for a long moment. Then Staci sighed.

  “I’m…sorry you feel that way,” she said in a very quiet, almost dead tone. “You need to find your girlfriend somewhere else, I guess. Don’
t bother calling.” She turned, took two steps, then turned back. “Oh, and I wouldn’t shave my legs for you if you were the last man on Earth.”

  She turned again, head high, and walked down the street. The musicians all flowed around Johann, avoiding contact with him, although Marla’s fulminating glance should have left him as a pile of charred bones in the street.

  Johann stood in the dark, alone, empty.

  Toccata

  Magdeburg

  August 1635

  “Pipe production?”

  Johann Bach was having another meeting at the Green Horse tavern, this time with his brothers. He looked at his younger brother Heinrich, who was still his connection to the whitesmith Luder who was producing the pipes for their organ project.

  “Four hundred ninety-seven produced, voiced, tuned, and passed,” Heinrich said with a certain note of pride. “That is over three hundred more than we had a month ago. Plus there are another twenty-nine ready for tuning, and at least a dozen in various stages of production.”

  Johann stared at his brother. “How did Master Luder manage that?”

  Heinrich grinned. “The owner of the rolling mill contacted him and offered him a really good rate for them to roll out the sheet tin. Even after paying for that it saved him so much time that he and his journeymen and the one associated smith who has remained committed to him have been able to focus on cutting and forming the pipes. They’ve caught up with the schedule, and expect to be ahead of it by the end of the month.”

  “Excellent.” Johann turned to his other brother, Christoph. “And how is the construction going?”

  “The wind-chests are done, and all the pipes between them have been fitted and tested. The console appears to be ready,” was the reply. “The cabinet part has been ready for weeks, and Herr Braun from Bledsoe and Riebeck says that the keyboards and the sliders and trackers are as ready as they will be until there are some pipes installed and he can do the final testing.”

  Johann turned back to Heinrich. “How many ranks of pipes has Master Luder completed?”

  “At least four of the deeper-register ranks,” was the reply. “The treble and mid-voice ranks, it may take a couple of weeks for the first of them to be ready. I’ll tell him he needs to shift to producing full ranks rather than all pipes of a size. That may slow things down a bit.”

  “If it does,” Johann responded, “it does. We have to be able to start testing the complete ranks and making any final tuning adjustments.”

  “Right,” Heinrich said. He made a note on his clipboard. “He did thank me yet again for the steel rules and precision-measuring calipers.”

  Johann shrugged. “He needed them to do his best work; we could get them from Grantville wholesale. Helps him, helps us.”

  He closed his folder. “Stay on top of things,” Johann said as he pushed back from the table. “I am going to go practice. You know where to find me if you need me.”

  With that, he left them without a backwards glance. His brothers watched him leave, then turned to face each other. They shook their heads in unison.

  “I do not know what is going on in his head,” Christoph said as he took a drink out of his mug. “I mean, I thought he was all ready to wed Fräulein Staci. I thought they were about ready to sign the nuptial agreement.”

  “Ja,” Heinrich said. “Me, too. I expected to be told to get my best suit cleaned and be ready to stand with him in church just any day now, and then…”

  “Then all of a sudden it is all off,” Christoph said. “And he turns into a golem.”

  “Ja,” Heinrich said. “I mean, I have never seen him like this before. I have never seen him react to a disappointment like this. It is like his heart has been ripped out of him, or something.”

  Christoph shook his head. “The bad thing is, I was starting to get to know Fräulein Staci’s sister Melanie, from working around her and working with her on getting the blower going for the main wind-chest. Then whatever happened, happened, and now she will barely even talk to me.”

  “He will not tell us what occurred between them,” Heinrich said. “It must have been pretty bad, though. He was never like this before, even when that strumpet Madeline Hoffmeier rejected his suit and married the butcher’s son instead.”

  “Well, as to that one, I think even Johann realized pretty soon thereafter that he had actually escaped hell on Earth by the skin on the back of his neck,” Christoph replied. “Even Mama did not like her, and you know how she was about getting him married soon.”

  “True.” Heinrich took a pull at the beer in his own mug. “Have you been able to find out exactly what happened yet?”

  “No.” Christoph drained his mug and thumped it back on the table. “Fräulein Melanie will not talk to me, and I do not know anyone else to ask. Well, Frau Marla, maybe, but since she is one of Fräulein Staci’s closest friends, that might not be a good idea.”

  Heinrich followed suit by finishing off the beer in his own mug. “Utter truth there, brother. From what I have seen, if there is one person in Magdeburg I do not want angry at me, that would be Marla Linder.”

  “From your mouth to God’s ear, Heinz,” Christoph laughed.

  The two of them stood and left the tavern together, headed back to their respective work.

  * * *

  Marla Linder beckoned to Casey Stevenson in the hallway of the townhouse which currently housed the Duchess Elisabeth Sofie Secondary School for Girls. A flood of students had just washed by them as the classes completed for the day and the girls whose families lived in Magdeburg headed for home. The girls who were boarding at the school were now moving past them in the opposite direction, headed for the stairs to the upper levels.

  “How’s Staci doing?” Marla asked quietly.

  Casey shook her head. “She won’t talk about it, but I don’t think she’s doing so hot. It’s kind of bad that this happened right after I got married and moved out. I think she does okay during the day, because the girls and the teaching keeps her busy and she doesn’t think about it much. But at night, she’s alone. I’d bet she spends a lot of nights crying.

  Marla shook her head. “Not good.”

  “Yeah.” Casey nodded in response. “She was so skeptical of Bach at first…she really tried hard to not fall for him.”

  “I remember,” Marla said. “We talked about it when she felt like she was heading that direction.”

  “He was so serious, so constant, so attentive to her.” Casey shook her head again. “She really thought Bach was going to be the man for her. After all the years of jocks and nerds hitting on her, she thought he was the one who could understand her.”

  Marla’s expression turned to one that qualified as grim and bordered on sinister. “He’s lucky I haven’t turned Gunther Achterhof loose on him to massage his kneecaps with a six-pound hammer. Or even better, arrange for a double orchiectomy.” A hint of an evil grin touched her face for a moment.

  “Staci wouldn’t like that,” Casey said with a reluctant smile. “And although I certainly sympathize with your feelings, it wouldn’t be quite fair.”

  “Fair?” Marla snorted. “What’s fair got to do with it? The man basically abused Staci in front of all of us.”

  “Not abused,” Casey said. “Not intentionally, anyway. Bach’s from small towns, his background is in the church, and whatever dancing he’d seen in the past, it certainly wasn’t anything like what Staci was doing that night. And you have to admit that her outfit didn’t leave much to the imagination, at least from the waist on down. So it had to have been somewhat of a shock to him.”

  “Are you taking Bach’s side?” Marla demanded.

  “No!” Casey said. “But I can kind of see why it happened.”

  “Well…” Marla drawled reluctantly. “Okay.” She reached out and slapped Casey on the upper arm.

  “Hey! What was that for?”

  “For making me see the other side. I hate it when people do that to me.” She gave an exaggerate
d sigh. “Okay, so Bach may not be the most evil villain in the history of mankind…although as far as I’m concerned, the jury is still out on that…but he’s not the issue. What are we going to do for Staci?”

  “I think we need to schedule a girls’ night out.”

  Marla smiled. “Right. Can you make it tomorrow night?”

  Casey’s brow furrowed as she thought. “I think so. Carl’s really tied up with a major project developing, so he probably won’t even notice I’m gone. Why?”

  “It just so happens that Brendan Murphy is trying out his new stand-up comedy routine at the Green Horse tomorrow. You and I and Staci and Melanie can go sit in on that. That work?”

  Casey was grinning. “Yeah, that works. We’ll take her out, keep her talking and laughing, and maybe when she gets back to her room she’ll have enough of a buzz from beer and wine or brandy that she’ll just collapse and get a solid night’s sleep. I think that would help her as much as anything.”

  “Okay,” Marla said. “You get word to Melanie and see if she can come. After classes are over tomorrow.”

  “Yes,” Casey agreed. “I’ll double-check with Lady Beth to make sure none of us are on evening desk duty tomorrow as well.”

  “Good thought,” Marla said. “We don’t want to get tripped up by that, either.”

  “Tomorrow evening, then,” Casey said.

  “Yep.”

  * * *

  Johann opened the music and set it on the stand of the clavier, then sat before it and placed his hands on the keys. After a moment he began, fingers moving through the opening phrases of the “Little” Fugue in G minor by the never-to-be-seen-in-this-universe Johann Sebastian Bach, purported and now theoretical grandson of his younger brother Christoph, who at this point in history was unmarried and had no descendants of his body at all.