The Loves of Leopold Singer

by L. K. Rigel

  He warmed to her again.

  “Then, not ten years ago, the old Roman foundations of her temple were uncovered. The local worthies have been building this tourist attraction ever since.” She chuckled. “Now a shrine to Mammon, I suppose.”

  “Before we leave, you will see it all,” he said.

  The last day, they breakfasted on their room’s balcony as a group of players gathered on the grounds below. Amid a cacophony of instruments being tuned Leopold said, “This is a nice send-off.” He offered her a section of orange. “Whenever I have oranges and coffee, I will think of Miss Gray and the pleasures of Bath.”

  There it was. He was leaving her. He had already done so in his mind. She had expected as much, sooner or later. Oh, why could it not be later? The wedge of orange in her mouth became a flavorless lump. She studied the acrobats and musicians below. “That is how I will always think of you,” she said.

  “As a street player?”

  “As a musician. You are the man who plays while the world pays rapt attention.” She hadn’t meant to do it. She wanted only a diversion, a temporary escape from her fate. But she had fallen in love with this young man who quoted philosophers and tyrants and made sense of them all. “I don’t think of you in Europe, you know. The new century is coming. You belong in England, where your qualities are prized. Or America, perhaps.”

  “I beg your pardon, sir.” A hotel footman brought a letter on a tray. As Leopold read the message, his face drained of color.

  “My father is very ill,” he said. “I am called home.”

  He hired a private post-chaise, and they changed horses rather than stop to rest on the flight back to London. He’d already slipped away. He didn’t touch her hand or inquire after her comfort. He looked at the landscape, or at his own hands. When he slept a little, he leaned away from her into the corner. Awake, he didn’t allow even his foot to stray near hers. Well before they reached St. James Square, she asked to be let out.

  “I will have your things sent to you.” He motioned toward her bag.

  “Hm-mm.” She forced the refusal in a grunt, unable to open her mouth. She couldn’t get out of the coach soon enough.

  He stopped her. “Susan, sir.” He attempted levity now, now she was going. “I won’t ever forget our time together. I am so very glad to have known you.”

  He’d never made a declaration. Indeed, she had been the aggressor. He had treated her with respect, even kindness. He had never said the word love.

  “I will never fully understand your … generosity to me.” Odd that he had to search for the right thing to say.

  “It was necessary.” She choked on the words. “It was necessary to my happiness.”

  She understood then why he would never love her. He could not see her in his world. He might have stretched out his hand to her, and she might have taken a step up. But he did not, and so she could not. Her heart gave way at last, compressed within her chest wall, and left her breathless.

  “I nearly forgot.” He was still talking, still holding her hand. It hurt, how good his touch felt. She knew she couldn’t bear it when he let go. If only he would kiss that hand, hold it to his cheek. If only once more. He turned her palm up and placed a book in it, a beautiful leather volume by Mary Wollstonecraft. A Vindication of the Rights of Women.

  A rueful sound escaped through her nose.

  “Susan. Dear Susan. I hope you will remember me fondly. Please take this.”

  “Goodbye, Mr. Singer.” She choked the words out, barely breathing. Somehow, she got out of the coach with her bag and into the street. The clop-clop of the horses receded. She could cry now, a silent torrent of wet pain.

  Her heart, her heart. She had believed a broken heart to be a mere saying, a poet’s way of putting something. Now hers would never beat free again. Bound to him, even after parting, she searched the book’s leaves for an inscription. Surely he would not be so cruel to deny her that? A note fell, but it was not a letter. It was fifty pounds. Fifty pounds! The insult was a blunt trauma against her sorrow. Was she his whore, then? But there was an inscription after all:

  To my dear friend, Susan, sir, who taught me how dignified and noble a woman can be. Lpld S.

  But not noble enough to marry. She tucked the money into her satchel. She would need it for the apothecary.

  Typhus

  Carinthia

  “Promise me.” Leopold’s mother grabbed his hand.

  He looked up from where he knelt at her bed. She was but a faintly animated skeleton covered with bloodless skin. “Rest, Mutti.”

  She hadn’t spoken in the hours since he’d returned. An occasional gasp for air had been the only sign she still struggled against her fate. She glanced at Reverend Haas sleeping in a chair at the foot of her bed and squeezed Leopold’s hand. “You must promise.”

  “Anything, dear.”

  “You must remove yourself from your father’s English business.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Promise me!” Her grip intensified with uncanny power until he really thought she would bruise his skin. “Reverend Haas says I will not see Mr. Singer in Heaven. I could not bear it if there were no hope of you.”

  The long speech was too much. She closed her eyes and let his hand go. Her bed cap fell away, exposing a few wisps of hair that had been full and gray when he last saw her. He hadn’t quite believed it that his father was dead and his mother dying until he saw that pathetic, thin strand of white matted against his mother’s sallow skin.

  He shook Haas fully awake and put a finger in the man’s face. “A word.” When they were outside the sick room he said, “What does she mean by this? Did you say to my dying mother that her husband, whose body is not yet cold, will not be in heaven to greet her? How could even you be so cruel?”

  “I could not lie, sir.” Haas was all wounded piety.

  “Lie! My father was an exemplary man—an exemplary man!”

  “Your father is gone. You can no longer be shielded from the truth.”

  “Then do speak plainly.”

  In a tone probably meant to signify most sorry compassion, but which Leopold had always found insufferable, Haas said, “God does not allow us to coat our sins in virtue.”

  “Either you’re a fool or you think me one. Surely, God allows this daily. But what has that to do with my father?”

  “Mr. Singer built his fortune on contraband. Is that plain enough? That is the ‘English business’ your mother refers to.”

  Inconveniently, the accusation rang true. Things fell into place: the spot at Cambridge, the correspondence with an English duke, his father’s trips to Amsterdam and London. Still, selling sugar to people denied it by governments was no path to eternal pain. “You were glad enough to take my father’s tithes, and now you would send him to hell for their source. Get out.”

  “But your mother!”

  “Yes, my mother.” Leopold motioned toward the bedroom. “You will ease her conscience regarding my father’s soul. I don’t suggest you lie. I suggest you reconsider the matter.” But by the time Haas re-entered the sickroom to report his error, Mrs. Singer’s soul had already taken flight.

  That night Leopold found the dulcimer his father had taught him to play and softly pounded out a Mozart rondo. The notes vibrated through him and soothed his soul like mystical raindrops falling in an untended garden. His heart opened, and he sent the rondo into the ethereal realm to ease his parent’s transcendent journey.

  -oOo-

  Marta Schonreden walked through the village with no real purpose. She just needed to be away from the house for a while. There was no one there who might object to her walking alone; illness had rendered everyone else insensible.

  The cathedral towers reflected cold sunshine back to the cloudless sky. Along the empty streets, window boxes put out unkempt primroses in dingy primary colors. She went into the bookseller’s dark, small shop and browsed through the offerings, not really seeing the titles her finger
s traced.

  A week ago, Gabby had come to Vienna, unexpected and without Wolfram. A hug confirmed that a child was on the way, but she was not there with joyful news of a baby. There was typhus at home. Leopold Singer. The name and his face and the sound of his voice had appeared in Marta’s mind along with a sick dread. She had not forgotten him, no matter how many eligible young men her aunt and uncle introduced her to. She insisted on going home.

  Was he safe in London? On his way home? She knew from the doctor that his parents were gravely ill and word had been sent to him.

  And then just outside the bookseller’s shop she saw him on the street. All the heaviness of her world fell away. After two years, he was as familiar to her as her own breath.

  “Hello, Miss Schonreden.” He seemed distracted, but his voice was even more beautiful than her memory of it. “I see you read English?” He indicated the copy of European Magazine she carried, the April 1798 number, long past more than a year old, but something to read in English.

  She searched his expression for a sign of teasing, but he seemed genuinely interested so she said, “and French.”

  “A scholar as well as a beauty! Your parents must be proud.”

  “My mother died yesterday.”

  He whispered, “The typhus?” When she nodded, he said, “Both my parents are also gone.”

  “Oh.” She looked away from him, suddenly unsteady. “I am sorry.”

  “Are the rest of your family well?”

  “Gabby has gone to my aunt in Vienna until the baby comes. Wolfram is improving, I think. But my father...”

  Vati was alive in his bed when she’d left him, but he wouldn’t last. Marta knew she should feel the loss of Mutti, though she did not. She had seen the lifeless body, the mouth open but silent, the random twitch as rigor mortis set in. It was a thing. No spirit, no soul had fled with the last breath. It was horrible. She couldn’t watch that happen to Vati.

  “Miss Schonreden, you are unwell yourself.”

  “No, I am well.”

  “Grief-stricken, then.” It was too much. His kindness hurt more than indifference would have. The low rumble of his voice was so lovely, she could only think of the emptiness she would feel when he was gone again. “Who is with you? Let me get help.”

  “I am alone. I just had to put my mind somewhere else for half an hour. I thought reading something of the world would help. I suppose that is very selfish.”

  “Not so selfish. Very good idea, I think. It’s what I do anyway at times, so it must be a good idea! There, a smile.”

  “You are very kind.”

  You are very kind. She had learned this all-purpose phrase from her aunt. Especially when you believe someone is not being very kind, these few words will give you time to think. You need say nothing more, and it is a far better response than ‘oh,’ my dear niece.

  “Let me take you home,” Leopold said. “My carriage is just here.”

  She was too upset to refuse, and anyway she didn’t want to refuse. She didn’t care about propriety. She wanted to keep him near, to hear his voice, to feel his touch as he helped her to her seat. Suddenly they were moving and the clip-clop of the horses was clear and musical and his knee was mere inches from hers. He must be near twenty-one now. His chest was broader, and his jaw had lost the soft curve of adolescence. She turned away, sure her throat was flushed.

  At her gate, he lifted her from the carriage. He kept his hands on her waist a hairbreadth of a moment longer than necessary. His confidence and his strength seemed to infuse directly into her. Her father was a strong man, and her brother had the makings of a brute; but the elegant muscularity of Leopold Singer was a revelation.

  At once she better understood Gabby’s feelings for Wolfram, and even her mother’s crazy jealousy made a new kind of sense. She had always thought of sex in terms of a man’s lust and a woman’s power to incite that lust, but this was the other side of desire. She hadn’t caused it; she was caught up in it, in a giddy powerlessness that was both pleasure and pain.

  “Miss Schonreden.” Leopold opened the gate, his voice again working like a magician’s charm. “I hope your father and brother improve.”

  She left him, acutely aware that she walked away from life into a house of the dead and the dying. This was wrong. She was supposed to be with Leopold Singer, as surely as she was supposed to breathe and breathe again. Even Vienna was nothing next to him. But convention, duty, and the dull inevitability of mundane expectation all herded her like friendly and familiar dogs back through her father’s door.

  The Wedding Breakfast

  At the same moment in another part of the world, snow blanketed Carleson’s Peak. The valley sparkled in the afternoon sunshine and was blue-gray in the shadows. A jam of conveyances waited near Laurelwood Church. The bells rang, and a group of well-dressed people spilled, chattering, out of the chapel.

  Lady Delia had just become Her Grace, the Duchess of Gohrum, and the happy duke led her through the onlookers to his carriage. Those invited would caravan to The Branch, where the baroness was to host a wedding feast.

  Delia considered this marriage a defeat, and in the weeks after accepting Millie she’d indulged in scattered bouts of self-pity. Yet from the moment of her engagement her every circumstance had improved. Her father, who had forgotten her existence these past five years, was so pleased by the match that he started paying her allowance again. Then Millie paid her debts, cheerfully, as a wedding gift, so when he wanted to be married in the country she felt she could not refuse.

  This proved no sacrifice as the process had been pleasant in every respect. The local families admired her without artifice. And though none were at all grand, it was gratifying to be celebrated anywhere, especially not having worked to deserve it. Even in this winter weather, those charming people gathered outside the church to cheer the happy couple on.

  “Let me make you snug, my dear,” Millie spread a blanket over her lap and tucked her hands inside a fur muff. “We’ll be at Philly’s in no time.”

  This was entirely satisfying. She had lost the man she wanted. So be it; she was a duchess. How could she have thought that an undesirable thing? She was suddenly so pleased with herself, she purred, “I wonder what a bride must do to receive a kiss from her husband?”

  Millie looked as pleased as a puppy.

  Cold gruel. His kiss was soft and grateful, and all the goodwill in her trickled away. Regret clamped down like an iron maiden. When she could breathe again, she couldn’t breathe free. The rest of her life rolled out before her in a vision, like a narrow carpet running to an uninteresting vanishing point. She would be ordinary. She would be cruel. She would not respect her husband. Not all the fortune and deference bundled with Gohrum could disguise the utter lack of power in that kiss.

  Gohrum wasn’t Leopold Singer, and her chest hosted a jagged, ravaged wound where a heart could have been. Leopold could have made her happy, and she had lost him not through any mistake on her part. That whore servant of Gohrum’s had somehow bewitched him. Well, the wretch would pay. It was a shame to have to wait until May, but when Delia returned to London after her wedding trip, she would have that slut housekeeper thrown out.

  -oOo-

  Philomela Asher, Lady Branch sat between Gohrum and the sad new rector, one Reverend Doctor Jordan Devilliers, the new duchess’s youngest brother. As a rule, Philomela did not like men, her ward and Gohrum being exceptions. However, she was pleased with this one beside her.

  The scarring on his face was from a childhood pox, but it had healed well enough so that his skin merely looked rather weathered. More startling were his eyes, one blue and one green. If he would just show his good straight teeth more, she could forget the rest of the face altogether.

  “Lady Branch,” he said. “I was astonished by your generous gift.”

  “You had a pleasant ride from the church, then?” She had sent over a one-horse curricle and a young cob Carey himself had chosen.

  �
�Pleasant indeed, my lady. I am grateful.”

  “We can’t have you riding about in a curate cart. That ‘doctor’ should account for something is what I say.” In all, he was an intelligent, practical man. Not a fool. Not cruel. One could hardly believe he and the bride were brother and sister. “Here is Sir Carey,” she said. “I see he’s got Mrs. Carleson with him.”

  “That’s an interesting fashion,” Devilliers said. “Her hair.”

  “Yes, she’s an oddity. A bit serious for one so young, but I suppose she has her reasons for that as much as any woman.”

  Philomela thought Mrs. Carleson was handsome mostly because she was in such robust health, quite recovered from the cholera. She kept her hair cut to the nape of her neck. Shocking, but the baroness liked her for it. She would speak to Mrs. Carleson later and try to figure her out a little better. Carey seemed to find her worth the trouble.

  -oOo-

  “The duke’s family name is Millam.” Sir Carey took Carleson’s wife in to table. The lady had been at the Peak nearly four years, but he’d only spoken to her once while out riding. She never left Laurelwood, and he never went there. Once Carleson had his son, there was no point. He had seen her walking sometimes when he went riding, and he wondered what she was like as he wondered what any woman was like. “He was born the Marquess of Millam, so his friends always called him Millie.” He told her how the duke’s father had been killed.

  “People should not fear the progress of things.”

  “I agree, Mrs. Carleson.” She was a strange woman. Her eyes barely widened at the mention of murder. She seemed more interested in the canal-works. “But fear it they do. On that day carefree Millie became Gohrum, and along with the name the weight of the land settled upon him. He took on the project like a spiritual undertaking. Miraculously—no, I cannot say that. Due to his good governance, no other man was killed or injured, not seriously.”

  “You make me admire him.”