City of Lost Dreams: A Novel

by Magnus Flyte

  “A fun Hapsburg.” Sarah smiled.

  “Yes, he loved learning, and collecting art and scientific specimens. He even welcomed unfortunate people with deformities—dwarfs, giants, hunchbacks, a family covered with hair—whom others at the time considered touched by the devil. He also fell deeply in love with Philippine, as you know, who was a commoner from Augsburg. I will show you their portraits. It was a politically disastrous marriage, and Ferdinand and Philippine’s children would never be recognized. Hence Ferdinand’s desire to hide his wife away from the court in Vienna.”

  “So you’re not the first owner to bring an inappropriate commoner here?”

  Gottfried frowned and nodded as he used one of his vast number of keys to open another creaking gate. Sarah followed him under yet another arch and into the most spectacular interior courtyard she had ever seen. All four walls surrounding her were sgraffitoed with hundreds of elaborate trompe l’oeil figures in an endless two-dimensional parade.

  “Many of these figures have not been identified,” said Gottfried. “But there are the nine Muses. There are the Worthies. The story of Odysseus is here. And here, my favorite: the Virtues. Faith, Hope, Charity, Justice, Prudence, Fortitude, Temperance, and . . .”

  Sarah didn’t mind being tested. She was good at tests.

  “Divine Wisdom. I like that the artist gave her a dog.”

  “Ferdinand was also deeply interested in alchemy,” said Gottfried. “So it’s possible that these drawings have some alchemical significance. When he died, Rudolf took most of his uncle’s Kunstkammer and absorbed it into his own. Some of the things were later recovered, or bought back, by members of my family.”

  Sarah studied the etchings. One figure especially caught her eye. A woman, standing on top of a star. In one hand she held a book, in the other a stylus of some kind.

  “That is possibly a portrait of Philippine,” said Gottfried.

  Sarah traced the figure of Philippine, surprised at how much the image moved her.

  “She looks very powerful,” she said. “Usually sixteenth-century women are just shown praying, or reading a Bible and looking sort of defeated.”

  “Indeed. Her medicinal garden is back up in there.” Gottfried pointed toward another wing of the castle. “Some of her plants survive to this day. Her book is in the family’s private library. I will have to find the key.”

  Sarah saw that to the left of the Philippine portrait, the wall was studded with holes.

  “Bullet holes.” Gottfried nodded. “For a while, the Schloss was used as an army barracks. There are a number of bullet holes, all over the estate.”

  Gottfried took her hand and she followed him through a doorway into a small and simply fitted-out kitchen, which she guessed belonged to the caretaker. He set out a loaf of bread, a salami, and a hunk of cheese. From a stenciled cabinet he produced a bottle of wine, which he decorked by hitting the bottle with a knife.

  “The salami is wild boar,” said Gottfried. “I shot it myself.”

  Sarah decided Gottfried’s online dating handle would be “Teutonic Throwback.” She set down Ares’ cage and he hopped around inside it, sniffing. Gottfried cut Sarah a slice of the salami. His knife went through the dense meat as if it were warm butter.

  “Now you would like to see the book?” Gottfried asked after they had eaten. “Or should we make love first? Love first, I think.” He stuck his knife in the wall and reached for her. Ares shrieked.

  “I suggest we leave your little rodent friend here with some cheese and water,” said Gottfried, a little later. He stood and opened the door. Sarah walked through, feeling a trifle dizzy.

  • • •

  “I am distressed that none of these keys work,” said Gottfried in frustration outside a locked storeroom on the third floor of the castle. Sarah had caught glimpses of cavernous rooms, furniture shrouded with dust cloths, as they climbed what had been a beautiful stone staircase, now chipped and a bit crumbly. “I’m sorry, Sarah,” Gottfried said at last. “The caretaker is visiting his daughter today. I’m afraid I will have to run down to her house to get his set of keys. I hope you do not mind the delay. We will find the book. In the meantime I will let you into Ferdinand’s Wunderkammer. I think you will be much surprised and it will give me pleasure to have you see it.”

  Sarah followed Gottfried back down and across the courtyard to another whitewashed building, this one with a beautiful wooden balcony, now sagging and in need of repairs, and not-quite-symmetrical gabled windows in peculiar shapes. He told her it had been built by Ferdinand specifically to house his collections.

  Here, one or two modern improvements had been added. There was an alarm system, the lights in the barnlike second-floor gallery were on timers, and the rug running down the central hallway of the first floor looked new. The rooms were lined with rows of glass cases as well as freestanding exhibits. It was utterly silent.

  “It is all displayed exactly as Ferdinand left it,” said Gottfried. “Except for this terrible rug my brother purchased. And we have updated the alarm system. The original was very . . . grisly.”

  Don’t ask, thought Sarah.

  There seemed to be a great number of objects. The space was filled, top to ceiling. “Not to pry, but you can’t sell a few pieces and keep the castle?” she wondered.

  “We are prohibited by law from breaking up the collection. Nothing can legally leave Austria,” Gottfried said. “But there is not enough money. If we sell, we have failed. We will have lost everything. I would not survive this shame. No. It cannot . . . It is a thing I cannot . . .”

  Gottfried’s jaw was white with tension. He grabbed her hand and held it for a moment, hard. When he spoke again his tone was courteous and correct, but he did not meet her eye. He was, she thought, deeply embarrassed.

  “Sarah, I will be back in a little while. Please feel free to examine anything you like. I do not have to tell you to be careful with my family’s treasures. I trust you.”

  He left.

  The wood floor creaked under her feet, and it was very cold. Though when she reached out to touch the thick, stuccoed wall, she found it warm to the touch. Interesting. It was fun to try to decipher what was in the cases without the benefit of a museum brochure, though here and there items were identified by small yellowed cards. The collection seemed to be sorted according to materials, such as coral, stone, gold, or wood, rather than type of object.

  Sarah passed delicate corals carved into realistic models of mountains, a strange undersea coral crucifixion scene, and a coral chess set. Ferdinand was apparently a big fan of coral.

  She’d be back in Prague the following day. Back with Pollina. She would see Max, too.

  Would it be easier to see him with Harriet, now that she had enjoyed a dalliance with Gottfried?

  Sarah passed a case that contained a miscellany of objects made from varying materials: a coconut goblet, a snake bracelet, a rhino horn mug, an ostrich egg, and a skeleton made of pear wood. Chosen for their oddness? For their beauty? For some legend attached to them?

  Ferdinand had also collected musical instruments. Sarah paused in front of an eight-foot-long wooden alpenhorn, the local equivalent of the didgeridoo, and stared at a dragon-shaped Tartolte, another ancient wind instrument. This one was seemingly played by blowing into the dragon’s tail. She became consumed by a desire to try it out. Well, why not? Gottfried said she could examine things. And wasn’t that the advantage of a private collection? You could play with the stuff.

  The tone was louder than she imagined, and pure. It reverberated through her. She remembered Marie-Franz saying “We don’t just hear music, we feel it.” That wasn’t poetry, it was science. She ran her fingers over the strings of a lute with nine inlaid alternating stripes of ebony and ivory and listened to the dusty twang. She looked at a bagpipe and an olifant, a wind instrument made from an elephant’s tusk that was (fortunately for elephants) quite rare. Sarah had only seen one in books, and she’d read of it in Song
of Roland, in which Roland, a warrior in Charlemagne’s army, blows an olifant and dies. When Sarah blew into it now, she thought she caught a brief image of the African plains the horn’s original owner had once roamed, then felt a millisecond of intense pain, all over her body. It came and went so quickly she almost didn’t consciously register it, but the instrument had left her with a terrible taste in her mouth. Like something rotten.

  She came next to an inlaid wooden case, like a piano, but much smaller. She touched the keys, but no sound came out. This object had a small card taped to its side: When you the hit keys, clappers will play glass bells (now missing). One of its kind.

  A precursor to Mesmer’s missing armonica? She wished the glass bells were still inside. She headed deeper into the hall, where the light barely penetrated.

  Her phone beeped as she stopped in front of the next case. A text from Gottfried. I am delayed in Innsbruck. Many apologies. Will return as soon as I can.

  Don’t worry, she sent back. I’m perfectly happy.

  Sarah looked around. She felt deep in her pocket, for the thing that was still there. It was a risk, but it was time to take risks.

  Now? Yes. Now.

  She smiled and took the object from her pocket. Yes, it was a risk. But Philippine had created her cures here at the Schloss. Sarah could read about them in the book, or she could watch them happen herself. And so she ingested the rest of the Westonia, and waited for the magic to begin.

  THIRTY

  Sarah was looking at the Golden Fleece. She had gotten used to seeing the emblem on every third painting or façade in Vienna. And here it was, bouncing off a man’s chest right in front of her. Sarah peered at the limp golden lamb emblem hanging from a chain against the black doublet, then peered into the man’s face. This was undoubtedly Ferdinand.

  She recognized the close-cropped reddish hair and beard. And the Hapsburg chin. Holy shit, they weren’t kidding about the chin. The man’s whole visage was exaggeratedly carved, almost cartoonlike with its large eyes, dented forehead, and hooked nose. And yet, there was something appealing about him, too, something powerful. He was playing a small flute: the Doppel-unuchenflöten, basically an early form of the kazoo. Now she could see that Ferdinand was surrounded by a group of courtiers, who were all playing similar instruments. They were giggling and laughing as they did, deliberately making their instruments honk and squeak and . . . yeah, they were making fart noises.

  Sarah felt a flush of rage. She had saved this last bit of the drug, hoarded it, when it really belonged to Nico. She had not taken it when she was in Heiligenstadt, where she could have seen Beethoven at one of the most critical moments in his career. Not taken it back to Boston, where she could have seen her own father, lost to her for so many years. She had saved it for when she thought it would help Pols, but all she was getting was asinine men making flatulence jokes?

  Her heartbeat was accelerating. The outlines of other people, other times, were beginning to form all around her in the hallway. A girl, hugely pregnant, buckled to her knees in front of Sarah. The girl’s hair was covered in a scarf, and her long, heavy dress was blue and rust colored. No, not rust colored. That was blood, soaking through the girl’s skirt as she began to gasp and scream in hoarse, high-pitched shrieks. She saw a man and a woman, dressed in rich brocade and silks, though the man’s breeches were open, and the woman’s sumptuous gown was shoved up around her hips, a stockinged leg waving in the air, a silk shoe dangling half off as she squirmed underneath him. The man had one hand firmly clamped over her mouth. To stifle her cries of ecstasy? Cries of panic? It was so vivid, too vivid. Sarah could smell their sex. The rhythmic thumping and sliding and gnashing of their bodies and choked groans and cries were thunderous. Sarah clung to the wall, forcing herself to stand. Men in military uniforms now surrounded her on all sides. She remembered Gottfried telling her that the Schloss had been used at one point as a military barracks. These men were struggling to hold someone down, urging him to be calm, to be brave. They were shouting, half laughing, very drunk. Bloody. “I will have to take the leg,” someone said. “Or he will die.” Sarah saw a man, jacket off, sleeves rolled up, shirt stained in bile and blood, lifting a saw. The patient began to shriek. And the sounds coming from his mouth were remarkably similar to those of the bleeding pregnant woman and the copulating woman in brocade and silk. And the sound of the saw cutting through bone was like the sound of Ferdinand’s flute, which was also like the sound of the copulating man. They had formed a chorus, through time.

  This was history. Fear, pain, pleasure, music. Sex and death. The big death. The little death. This was what it looked like. What it sounded like.

  There had to be music here, real music. She needed to be calm. Sarah shut her eyes and covered her nose in order to listen better.

  At first all she could hear were the same macabre layers of shrieking and groaning, but eventually she found it. A light, twanging sound. A lute. A lute being plucked, not quite tunefully. Sarah began to grope toward it, feeling her way against the actual walls with her eyes tightly screwed shut so as not to be distracted by the bodies hurling themselves in her path. She was stumbling, blindly, into fields of energy, which seared her nerves and made her dizzy with confusion. She ran straight into a suit of armor that felt very much like it existed in the present day and Sarah found herself doing an absurd polka with the armor, crashing down the hall, trying to disentangle herself. At last she reached a set of stairs and she stumbled up them as her knightly dance partner clattered to the floor, chivalry thwarted, if not absolutely dead.

  The sound of the lute was louder now, as she wove around passing phantoms crackling with emotion: lust, fear, lust, fear. And then, quite suddenly, a burst of pure joy. Sarah stared down at a thin adolescent boy, who was in turn staring at a single beam of sunlight coming from a narrow casement window above them. He held his hand out in front of him, caressing the light with his slight fingers as if he were stroking a cat. He was dressed in the formal court dress of the mid-eighteenth century, his fine hair caught back with a ribbon, his thin cheeks marked lightly with what looked like smallpox scars. His hand paused in the air, he smiled with deep satisfaction, then turned and ran down the stairs, out of Sarah’s sight. Her heart was racing.

  Mozart.

  She was pretty sure she had just seen Mozart. Age thirteen or so, probably on the way to or from one of the family trips to Italy. He was about the same age as Pollina was now. Pollina would never see her own hand held in front of her face, but Sarah had seen the girl, in a Boston apartment crowded with dusty antique furniture, step into a shaft of sunlight from one of the deep bay windows. And Pols had felt the sun on her face and she smiled with the same kind of secret joy. Held her own thin hand up in front of her face, conducting the music in her head. This, too, was history. Not just lust and fear, but exaltation. Creation. Genius. Pols had the flame of genius within her. A flame as deep and dazzling and mysterious as the one that burned in the young man who had just walked past Sarah on the stair, two hundred and fifty years or one second earlier. There was something here that would help Pollina. There had to be. She had to find it. What was her own life, her own contrail of energy? Was this not her gift? She was being given now, in this moment, a chance to use those perceptions within her that had been strengthened. She could call forth from the melee the individual voices she needed to hear. Like a conductor, as Pols had said.

  Sarah let the last of her resistance to the drug fall away from her. She closed her eyes, breathed deeply, and stretched out her mind, feeling it unravel from the center of her forehead like spools of unfurling ribbons.

  The galleon. What was the powder that Philippine had put in the galleon?

  • • •

  “Gently,” said a voice, just above her. Sarah opened her eyes. A man stood on the stair, dressed in black with sleeves slashed with red satin. Not Ferdinand, though bearing a slight resemblance to him. One of his sons? The outlines of his figure were hazy, fading into the
air. A second man, dressed somewhat more simply though still elegantly, shifted something large and gleaming in his hands.

  The Spanish galleon. Sharp and solid and gold.

  Good, she thought. I can focus.

  Sarah followed the two men up the stairs and into a large, high-ceilinged room lined with books and cabinets containing corals and other minerals. Globes and astrolabes stood on small tables. Maps covered a long refectory table. A fire burned at one end of the room, which was otherwise lit by candles. Sarah watched as the man carrying the galleon set it gently upon the long table, then, with a deferential murmur, withdrew.

  “I am sorry but I cannot help you.” The man in black and red turned to a figure by the window Sarah hadn’t noticed before. A slim young woman, wearing a heavy black coat with a furred hood. There was something about her, something familiar. The young woman moved gracefully, swaying slightly, toward the table.

  “I was told that the emperor gave it to you.” The woman’s voice, too, was soft, though Sarah could feel an undertone of acidity.

  “I am sorry, Lady Elizabeth.”

  “Do you mock me?” the woman replied with a small smile, softening her voice. “By calling me this?”

  “Surely you are used to hearing your name coupled with titles? You are the tenth Muse, Westonia, the Virgo Angla. Perhaps I do you a dishonor to call you less.”

  Sarah watched Elizabeth Jane Weston receive these tributes with a melancholy flutter of her hand. What was Elizabeth Weston’s connection to the galleon?

  “I am a daughter, above all else,” she said. “A daughter who must beg for the things that were stolen from her father’s house in the dead of night by your emperor’s men.”