“I…” Johann paused. How could he say what he felt? “I want her to be whole. I want her to be well…no, beyond well. I want her to be radiant, to be brilliant, to shine above the firmament. I want her life to be a fountain of joy, where she blesses all those around her. I want her to live a life that marks a boundary point in history, so that in the future people divide time into Before Anastasia and After Anastasia. I want her to dance before the very throne of God, to hear ‘Well done, thou good and faithful servant.’ I want…” His voice tapered off, but the yearning ache remained. He wondered where the words had come from, how they had poured through his lips. But having said them, he couldn’t take them back; nor would he, if he could, for they were indeed the desire of his heart.
After a moment, Frau Mary stirred. “Well, if that’s not love, I think it will do until the real thing comes along. But you didn’t say anything about your place in all that.”
“I have forfeited the place that might have been mine,” Johann murmured. “Any place I receive will be due to grace and mercy on her part. But whether I have a place or not, that is what I desire.”
“Well enough,” Frau Mary said as she straightened up from the wall. “Let me think about this, Johann.” He noted the change of address with an internal surge of happiness. It meant her perception of him had changed. “It may take me a while to think of a way to bring it about without it being a forced meeting, but I believe I can manage that. In the meantime, you focus on your organ and your playing, all right?”
“As you say, Frau Simpson.”
“Call me Mary, Johann.”
“Frau Mary.”
She shook her head with a bit of a smile. “Germans. Always so formal.”
Johann shrugged. What could he say? And even among Germans, he was always one for the formality.
Frau Mary passed by Johann. “Notes done, Lady Beth?” she said as she approached her companion.
Lady Beth patted her portfolio. “Done and tucked away.”
Frau Mary looked at her watch. “Hmm. Looks like we may have kept Horst waiting for a few minutes.” She looked around. “Good day to you, meine Herren.”
“Good day, Frau Simpson,” the three Bachs chorused back. They followed her back into the foyer and out through the main doors onto the portico. Horst was indeed waiting for his passengers, and as soon as they walked through the doors he hopped down from the driver’s seat with his little stool. Placing the stool and opening the door to the seating compartment, he beamed a large smile toward them.
A moment later, the ladies were seated and Horst was shaking the reins and clucking at his team to get them moving. As the cab moved off, Frau Mary looked their direction and waved a hand. All three of them raised a hand in response, and then the cab was out on the street and out of sight.
“Well, that seemed to go well,” Christoph said with a sidelong look at Johann.
“Yes, it did, did it not?” Johann knew he was smiling. He couldn’t help himself. And truthfully, he didn’t care. For the first time in weeks, he felt a cautious optimism. Whistling the theme to Old Bach’s Contrapunctus no. 1, he turned and headed back into the opera hall. As long as he was here, he might as well get some more practice in.
Christoph and Heinrich looked at each other behind him. Neither said a word, but after a moment they shared a shrug.
October 8, 1635
Late in the afternoon three days later, Johann was again seated at the opera house organ console when Heinrich hustled in. “Johann! Have you heard?”
“Heard what?” Johann said, not looking up from the Passacaglia sheet music.
“Frau Marla lost her baby! She went into labor last night after the concert, and the babe was stillborn this morning.”
Johann froze for a moment, then laid down his pencil and dismounted from the organ bench. “Mein Gott. That poor woman,” he murmured.
Should he go to the house, offer his condolences?
The mental answer was swift: No. His presence would undoubtedly not be welcome.
“We must add them to our prayers, Heinrich,” Johann said. He looked at his brother. “Which, of course, means that you should make some.”
“For this, I will pray,” Heinrich said. “No one deserves this.”
“Indeed.”
October 9, 1635
Johann turned over the envelope that was addressed to “Johann Bach, Christoph Bach, and Heinrich Bach.” He opened it and drew forth a card.
“What is it?” Christoph asked from the other side of the table.
“An invitation to a funeral.”
“Funeral? Oh…” Heinrich realized what it had to be.
“For the funeral of Frau Marla’s child. A daughter: Alison Wilhelmina Sylwester.”
“When?” Christoph again.
“Tomorrow; midmorning.”
“And?”
Johann knew the question that was being asked. “I will not intrude, but I will be there.”
“And I.” Christoph nodded.
Heinrich said nothing, just added a nod.
“That poor woman,” Johann murmured.
October 10, 1635
The brothers Bach were standing on the outskirts of the gathering across the open grave from the family. Johann could see the family group clearly. Franz Sylwester looked haggard; hair and beard somewhat rumpled, red-rimmed eyes over a drawn face. Marla Linder, if possible, looked even worse, with her hair hanging limp around a lifeless expression centered on dead eyes. Her lips were drawn tight, looking as if they were as hard as forged metal.
There was an up-timer standing beside Franz whom Johann assumed was Marla’s brother-in-law Byron Chieske, the one who had been so instrumental in getting the Magdeburg Polizei in operation so quickly, and more importantly, had helped lead them into becoming a surprisingly effective organization. The man looked like a warrior, Johann decided: lean hard body, large strong square hands, and a face that for all it was now cast in lines of sorrow also showed ingrained lines of strength and authority. All in all, a man Johann would not want to cross. And now he understood Sergeant Peltzer a bit better, for this was the man he reported to.
Staci Matowski stood beside Marla. Dressed in black trousers and jacket over a simple white blouse, she was a sober figure. For all that her eyes were red-rimmed as well, even at the distance Johann was standing she radiated strength.
Behind them stood Mary Simpson and Lady Beth Haygood at the head of a phalanx of up-timers. Every up-timer in Magdeburg appeared to have come to the funeral.
Johann was somewhat surprised at first that the funeral was not being conducted in a church; but then he realized that the Lutheran church did not consider a stillborn child as being a soul bound for heaven, so they would not allow burial in one of the church cemeteries, and most likely would even refuse to allow a requiem mass to be performed. So they were standing at a graveside in a public cemetery, and the man standing at the head of the small grave was an up-timer. He had been speaking for several minutes, words of comfort, readings from scripture, a prayer. Now he was coming to an end.
Closing his Bible and holding it in both arms against his chest, the speaker said, “In the end, we all return to whence we came, and we all come into God’s hands. Alison simply made that journey rather sooner than we will. We must trust that the God who said ‘Suffer the little children to come unto me’ will know His own and receive Alison as such. Let that be our prayer. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, amen.”
“Amen,” Johann chorused with everyone else. He heard his brothers’ voices in echo around him.
He stared once more at Marla and Franz, and he saw Franz tending to his stricken wife, gently guiding her steps away from the end of a dream, all the while his own loss and his own pain shrieked from his eyes. I want that, Johann thought. Not the pain, but to be that kind of man. I want to be that. And almost his own heart broke at the thought of how close he had come to that possibility, and how it had come to slip through his fi
ngers.
As the crowd around them began to disperse and the figures before him began to thin out, Johann became aware that Staci was looking at him.
* * *
Staci was about to turn and follow her bereaved friends, when a bit of motion caught her eye, and she looked over to see Johann Bach across the way, staring not at her, but at Marla and Franz. His face had an expression that was…not grieved…not sober…in some weird way almost seemed to be yearning. She tilted her head as she considered him. He looked a bit thinner; not gaunt, but perhaps a bit wan. Her mouth quirked. It was appropriate, since much the same could probably be said of her.
His head turned and suddenly he was looking at her. After a moment, he reached a hand up to settle his hat, then he brought the hand down to rest on his breast as he gave a slow nod that she was certain was for her and no other. In the next moment, he had turned and was leaving, followed by his brothers.
* * *
The rest of the month of October passed very quickly, between the work to get as much of the organ assembled as possible and trying to get the music ready to perform.
It was a week or so after the funeral that Johann had to ask for more of Frau Lady Beth’s time.
“What’s up, Johann?” She had followed Frau Mary’s lead in relenting a bit in how she related to Bach.
Johann took a chair, following the wave of her hand. “I may need to correct an unfortunate impression.”
“How so?”
“The organ will not be completed by the December fifteenth concert. Oh, we will have much of it done,” he hastened to add as a large frown crossed her face. “Much more than I was able to play in the ‘demo’ earlier. But it will not be the full complement of pipes.”
“Why not?” The frown had eased, but Lady Beth could not be said to be looking happy or joyful.
“Because the original plan was to have it completed in the spring of next year at the earliest,” Johann replied.
“Oh,” Lady Beth said as she sat back in her chair. After a moment’s thought, she said, “You’re right. That’s what the schedule said. Well, that’s a bust. How’d we lose track of that?”
Johann shrugged. “I have spoken with Master Luder, and even with replacing the stolen pipes he will still be a bit ahead of the original schedule.”
“But not enough to make up that kind of time,” Lady Beth predicted.
“Alas, no. It will be some time well after the first of the new year before he has all of the remaining pipes manufactured.”
“And then you and your brothers have to install them.”
“And then we have to install them, and do a final tuning, and make all the final little adjustments—what Herr Carl calls ‘the tweaks.’”
“Got it.” Lady Beth sat forward again. “Mary will be very disappointed that the concert’s not going to happen.”
“Oh, we can do the concert,” Johann said. Lady Beth shot him a suspicious glance. “We will not have the full range of tonalities and voices, but we can do the concert. What we have done and what we will add in the next few weeks is more than many church organs have today. It is just not everything it will have when it is completed.”
“But it’s enough to perform everything?”
Johann nodded.
“Then why are you here trying to scare me to death?” Lady Beth semi-growled, but Johann was not affected by that at all, because the smile on her face belied her words.
“So that if you heard one of us talking like we would still be working on the organ in March you would not panic.” Johann grinned.
“Smart aleck.” Lady Beth pointed a finger at him. “You are beginning to think too much like an up-timer.”
“God forbid!” Johann said with just a frisson of real horror. She laughed.
Johann set his hands on his knees, ready to get to his feet, but paused when Lady Beth motioned him down. “Hang on a moment,” she said. “I have something here for you. Came in today’s mail.”
She reached behind her and picked up a large brown envelope from the table there, then pushed it across her desk to Johann. He picked it up and looked at her. “Go ahead,” she said. “Open it up. I don’t have a clue what’s in it—just that it came from Grantville.”
Johann examined the front of it. The initials GMT were written in the upper right corner with a Grantville address below that. That didn’t mean anything to him, so he lifted a letter opener off of Lady Beth’s desk and opened the envelope up across one of the short ends. The opener went back on the desk, and Johann reached into the envelope and pulled out a sheaf of white paper.
“Music!” he exclaimed. He pulled a hand-scrawled note page out from under the paper clip holding everything together, and made his way through the American English. “Ah, I see. The Grantville Music Trust,” he picked up the envelope and waved it, “before they got the recording notated they found a copy of an organ arrangement of ‘Komm, süsser Tod’ in the music library at the Methodist church, so they copied that and here it is.” He held it up.
“Great,” Lady Beth said. “Guess I know what you’ll be doing now.”
Johann looked at the pages in anticipation.
“Indeed.”
November 1635
Johann’s work intensified after that. Having an additional piece of music to learn and take to the level of performance he wanted it all to be at took more time out of an already fragmented schedule than he had anticipated it would. For all that the new song was not a bravura technical show piece, it was longer than the three organ chorales he already had in his program list, and one of them was still pretty new to him as well.
With the performance less than two months away, Johann had no choice but to reduce his supervision of Christoph and Heinrich’s work to not much more than a periodic review. Short periods, of course—he wouldn’t leave them unsupervised for extended periods—but instead of daily meetings he only followed up with them twice a week, and the discussions were very short.
The rest of the time, if it was light outside, Johann was at a keyboard practicing. Most of the time he could work at the organ console in the opera hall, but that was still an active construction site, so there were times he just couldn’t use it: If the power was off, the wind-chest fan wouldn’t blow; if the carpenters were applying varnish to any woodwork the fumes would seep everywhere; or occasionally there would just be so much noise that he couldn’t concentrate. So on those occasions he might be at a church, or sometimes back at the Royal Academy of Music.
And so it was on an early November day he was approaching the academy’s door when it opened and Franz Sylwester exited the building, followed by most of his and Marla’s immediate circle of performer friends. Johann stopped, and said, “Herr Sylwester.”
Franz stopped and looked at him. The young dirigent still looked very worn, despite the passage of almost a month since the event of the miscarriage. His face was drawn, his eyes were sunken, and there was no spark in his gaze. From what little Johann had heard of how Marla was doing, that was not surprising.
“Herr Bach,” Franz responded.
“I realize that I am not exactly persona grata to your family, but I just want to extend my deepest condolences over what has happened and to tell you that you and your wife and your daughter are in my prayers.”
With that, Johann gave a short bow, then stepped to one side to allow the others to pass.
Franz took a deep breath, then said, “Thank you, Herr Bach. I appreciate your consideration and compassion. I could only wish…” With that, he quit talking, waved a hand to one side, and moved on.
Johann turned to watch him go. “That poor man,” he murmured.
“Indeed,” Johann heard from beside him. He turned and saw that one of Franz’s companions stood there, a short stocky man with a bushy beard.
He racked his brain. “Hermann…forgive me…”
“Katzberg. No reason to apologize for not remembering a name that was shouted at you once in a crowded noisy tav
ern. And that was well said. On their behalf, thank you.”
Johann shrugged. “Words. All I can offer, especially since I am not acceptable company otherwise.”
Hermann looked up at Johann with a tilted head. “Maybe so, but a kind and gracious word can be balm for a man’s wounded soul, especially from an unexpected direction. If that is what is in your heart, Herr Bach, be patient. Things will resolve.”
“As you say, maybe so,” Johann said with a sigh. “Maybe so. But the waiting is hard.”
Hermann clapped a hand on Johann’s upper arm. “You are a good man, Bach. It will happen.”
And with that, he nodded and broke into a trot to catch up with his friends.
* * *
“Johann!” Heinrich burst into the main seating floor of the opera hall from the doors at the back. “Johann!” he called out as he ran down the stepped floor toward the orchestra pit.
“What?” Johann took his hands off the manuals and looked over his shoulder.
“Someone broke into Master Luder’s forge last night and stole some pipes.”
By the time Heinrich finished the sentence, Johann had turned off the wind-chest fan switch and was on his feet headed for the steps out of the pit. “Come,” he said as he brushed by Heinrich.
Once they were outside, Johann said, “What do you know?”
“He said he had eight smaller pipes completed and four roughed in when he locked the forge up last night, but when he opened up this morning the four smallest finished pipes were gone.”
“Only four? And the smallest?”
“Ja,” Heinrich replied breathlessly, trying to keep pace with his older brother.
“That makes no sense,” Johann muttered.
“That’s what Master Luder said, only louder and with more blasphemy.”
“Someone who steals pipes usually does so for the metal to melt down to either sell or reuse. So the larger pipes are what would be taken, like last time.”
1636- the Flight of the Nightingale Page 32