No less shocked than Mitch at first, Harry now appeared to welcome the prospect. “Swell,” he said. “I suppose I’d better learn how to spell Hoitsma if we’re going to add it to the firm name.”
“On that score, actually,” Sedge put in, “keeping my family name in there would make for rather a mouthful—and, without a Wakeham active in the firm, it wouldn’t make much sense. You’ll get to make the call, of course, Harry, old boy, but Piet here and I have been thinking that Cubbage & Emery has a nice ring to it—if no one has any serious objection.”
Clara, for one, did not. Although pleased, she was reserved about expressing it when Mitch phoned with the news. Her father had in fact called beforehand to test her reaction and to ask whether Mitch would likely embrace or resent the whole idea. “I’d hate him to feel this is being foisted on him or that he’ll be in any way beholden to us,” Piet told her. His intention, he said, was to divide the Hoitsma half of the company into three equal shares held by Mitch, Clara, and himself—“so I’ll be governed by your two votes if there’s ever a dispute.” When she relayed her father’s assurances, Mitch said he was flattered but asked to sleep on it all.
Before the evening was out, Lolly Cubbage phoned Clara and reported breathlessly, “It’s a done deal, kiddo—I’ve let Harry know. He was fussing that he had to be sure there was no downside to it and that Mitch wouldn’t become even more uppity. But deep down—he actually has a deep down, though you wouldn’t think so to look at him—Harry’s really thrilled. And he knows that Mitch saved his bacon in this Tell fiasco. Oh, I think it’s all fantabulous, darling!”
The prospect of an even more entangling alliance with Lolly Cubbage did not excite Clara. But the woman had her virtues, and her failings could be addressed over time.
“Me, too.”
“It’ll be a blast—trust me. Oh, now here’s a little piece of news that’ll amuse you no end, partner. Remember that St. John outfit you brought over to Berlin for Hilde Reinsdorf to cheer her up after Emil’s death? Well, she shipped it back to me—just like she did with the one I got her at Bendel’s for our dinner party. There was a little note with it, saying that under the circumstances, it seemed wrong for her to keep it. A class act, right?”
“For a world-class forger.”
“Oh, don’t be so picky—her husband made her do it, the brute. Anyway, I phoned her, and we got to talking. She’s anxious to get away from Berlin—and she’s been thinking about taking up painting again. So I said what about coming over here, and we’d get her started with a commission to paint a mural in our dining room? I mean she’s really gifted, right? A mural would work beautifully in there, and we could even let her stay over in the second maid’s room while she’s working for us. She said thanks very much and she’d think about it.”
“Lovely,” said Clara. “But you may want to run the idea past Harry. He may—”
“True,” said Lolly. “But it’s not as if she and Emil intended to do us injury—exactly.”
“I don’t think we’ll ever know what they really intended,” Clara corrected her. “At any rate, if she shows up on your doorstep, I’d keep my checkbook out of sight if I were you and lock up all the silverware.”
She and Mitch slept poorly that night.
At 2:37 a.m., Mitch whispered, “I hear you brain whirring—wanna share?”
“I was thinking about Hilde sending us the edelweiss painting. Maybe it was her way of confessing—she must have known we’d turn it over sooner or later and find the staff lines and figure it all out.”
“And why would she have done that?”
“Because she knew they had done something very wicked—”
“And what exactly is it they did?” Mitch asked.
“I’m not sure exactly. Either Emil laid hands on something sacred, believing he was rescuing it from oblivion, or he made it up out of whole cloth. Either way, she went along with it—and shouldn’t have—any more than he shouldn’t have—”
“But maybe she didn’t really buy that.”
“Unless,” he said, rolling over to face her, “Scherzie put them both up to the whole shebang—with three growls and a tail wag?” He leaned in and kissed her. “Now give it a rest, bunny.”
At 3:52 a.m., Clara whispered, “I hear you thinking—wanna share?”
“I’ve been wondering if we really want to own half an auction house, even a swell one.”
“It’s not an antisocial activity, and it beats hustling hedge fund shares all day—”
“Yes, but it’s not really all that ennobling an occupation.”
“What’s ennobling—shooting an apple off your kid’s head to save your country?”
“No, that’s just stupid—your kid’s more important than your country.”
“So what’s noble, then?” she asked.
“Healing the sick, lifting the needy, transmitting wisdom, creating beauty…”
She tucked her head beside his. “You’re back to wanting to save the world.”
Mitch snorted. “Someone should think about it.”
They fell quiet for a minute; then Clara asked, “Couldn’t we think about it while living in London? Harry may want to move you there to run things—Daddy would probably just be a figurehead. I know my parents would be thrilled if we came over. But you’d have to want it.”
“I suppose there are worse places to be. But they sure talk funny.”
“Would you want a child of yours to be brought up a Brit—hypothetically?”
“A child of mine—would that be the same as a child of ours?”
“For argument’s sake.”
“What brings that up?”
“Nothing much except, well, I wasn’t going to say just yet. You know—about what the White Rabbit ran around shouting in Alice in Wonderland—”
Mitch thought for a moment, then smiled hugely enough to light up the dark. “You’re late—for a very important date?”
Clara matched his smile and rolled over into his arms.
“Four weeks,” she said, “It could be a skip or something—though I never do—” They embraced fiercely, without words, until she said, “A lot could still go wrong—I mean even if I am, nothing’s ever certain—”
“So I’ve heard.”
Clara mused for a minute or two. Then she said, “If it’s a boy, we would call him Ludwig. He’d probably be the only one in his class—”
“And an endearing memento of our great misadventure—unless we called him Emil—or Ansel—or Nina if it’s a girl.”
They fell silent for a time. Finally Clara said, “I still feel sorry for Nina—she didn’t deserve to be treated like that.”
“Sweetie—it was all made up—remember?”
“I wonder—”
“Go to sleep.”
“Easy for you to say.”
Coda
Emil Reinsdorf had been in his grave for two years, ten months, and thirteen days when Rolfe Riker, thought by many to be his successor as the foremost living authority on Beethoven, arrived late on that Sunday evening in the Moravian town of Olmütz in the Czech Republic. Professor of musicology at the University of Salzburg and lately turned fifty, Riker was blessed with an engaging manner, a questing intellect, and brooding good looks. He had come during a sabbatical semester that he was devoting to research for a book on the relationship of the Hapsburg Imperial Court to the great musicians of the classical and Romantic movements, 1750 to 1850.
Earlier, Riker had devoted several years to examining the archives of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna, the richest repository of materials for his subject. Expecting far fewer gleanings at the ecclesiastical library for the Archbishopric of Olmütz, he had allotted himself five days to look through the papers of Rudolph, Archduke of Austria, brother of Emperor Franz I, and Cardinal of Olmütz from 1820 until his de
ath in 1831, four years after his revered maestro, the commoner Beethoven, had died. It was their link that had drawn Riker there.
Although Rudolph’s papers filled many shelves, most of them, of course, were concerned with religious matters. Only five of the large boxes, according to the archival register, contained personal papers, mostly correspondence; the last box held what the register identified as “Music Manuscripts,” which Dr. Riker assumed to be compositions written by Rudolph in his younger days. He began working on a Monday morning in a small, cell-like room just off the diocesan library. In the first box of Rudolph’s personal papers he found a matted, cellophane-covered engraving of the archduke in his Cardinal’s robes. Riker studied the face intently. Its expression was rather less vacuous than one might have expected to encounter in a prominent member of the Hapsburg court, the professor decided. Instead of folly, arrogance, and condescension, the young Cardinal wore a look of quizzical irony, as if in recognition that his high birth was, as all births, accidental and far from divinely ordained. The brow was high and smooth, the eyes dark and searching, the mouth pouting like a child’s, and the light hair oddly parted in the middle and cascading in curls that hid his ears.
But then Riker, who had been a member of the panel of experts assembled to appraise the William Tell Symphony briefly attributed to Beethoven, was hardly surprised, for he knew a lot about the unorthodox prince, a silent rebel against the lockstep regimen of the royal court and possessor of an artist’s sensitive soul. Beethoven himself had taught Rudolph to play the pianoforte and the rudiments of musical composition. The young, frail pupil was so gifted that, given a brief melodic line by his maestro, he turned it into a work known to musicologists as “Forty Variations on a Theme,” which Beethoven called “masterly.” Such praise from anyone else in the composer’s circumstances—namely, financial dependency on the archduke—might have been suspect; from Beethoven, contemptuous of designing flattery, it was surely honest.
This keen mutual regard continued to flower even in the years after Rudolph attained the spiritual dignity of membership in Il Collegio di Cardinali, as their correspondence reflected. Mostly, Cardinal Rudolph’s exchanges with Beethoven, held in a separate file of five boxes, were banal, dealing with matters of health, weather, and news of mutual acquaintances. For Dr. Riker, the correspondence was disappointingly dull, and by Wednesday afternoon he had completed looking through all but the last portion of the fourth box and the final box. At his hotel he phoned his wife, hoping to tell her he expected to finish up a day early and would return home the next evening if he could make the right train connections. She failed to answer the phone, however, so Dr. Riker decided that, rather than leaving a voice-mail message, he would surprise her by his early homecoming.
After the archives of the Olmütz archdiocese had been closed to credentialed outsiders that Wednesday, Sister Maria Immaculata of the Holy Order of St. Barthelm attended to her custodial duties. In this case, the chore required only a few moments of sweeping up and replacement on the archive shelves of the five boxes of long-dead Cardinal Rudolph’s dealings with Beethoven that the handsome professor from Salzburg had been examining.
It seemed foolish to have to refile the boxes each evening since the scholar would requisition them anew first thing the next morning, but regulations, Sister Maria told herself, were regulations. And so once again, as she had done the two previous nights, she lugged the heavy boxes, one by one, back to the shelves in the rear and darkest sector of the library. The fifth and final box, marked with the roman numeral “V” next to the identification label, was remarkably light, she had noticed earlier in the week—indeed, it felt almost empty, she thought thankfully, placing it at the end of the row beside the other four boxes. But it alone, she observed, was not labeled with an Arabic numeral.
Curiosity got the better of her this evening, and so she lifted the lid of the fifth box and found inside just a single envelope. The nun glanced about her to be certain that no one else was in the room, then removed the envelope and withdrew the two sheets of vellum inside. At first she found the handwriting hard to decipher by the light of the single bare bulb mounted high on the wall behind her. But soon she saw from its heading that it was a letter, bearing the Cardinal’s seal, dated 23 July 1823, and addressed to a “Msgr. A. Wetzel, First Archivist, Ecclesiastical Library, Archdiocese of Ulmütz.” Peering intently through her thick eyeglasses, she read:
Father Anton, my esteemed colleague in Christ:
I am recently in receipt of a letter from my devoted Maestro B., who kindly enclosed a copy of his new sonata in C minor with the advice it is dedicated to me—yet another honor from this soul of genius, sent to test my humility—and the further intelligence that he is adding three new movements to the glorious Missa with which he marked my ordination & will be forwarding a copy of that addition as well. We must find a place of safekeeping for these texts, given their historical value. Perhaps you will also be interested to learn that the maestro is but a few weeks shy of completing a new symphony, his ninth & the first in many years—truly splendid news for all lovers of his matchless artistry.
I was less delighted with the rest of B.’s letter and the receipt of the two volumes attached to it, which I am hereby committing into your care. For you to grasp their import, I must relate some personal history before I took the cloth. As archduke of the realm & attendant at the court of my brother, His Imperial Majesty, I studied privately with the maestro and joined with several others to provide an annual sum for his sustenance. My gift to him was a form of compensation for all he taught me about the joys of music. In time I began to compose under his tutelage, & we often discussed his own current work.
In this connection I learned he had once been asked to participate in a production by our state theatre of the dramatist Schiller’s play dealing with Wm. Tell & the Swiss uprising against our imperial troops then ruling their land. Removed as I had chosen to become from the court’s political currents, I nonetheless counseled B. that his involvement with such an undertaking would likely displease my brother, due to the playwright’s notorious republican leanings. “But I share them, as you well know,” B. replied, and I was forced to point out that for him to announce as much by composing even the incidental music for the staging would doom all his hopes for official honors in our capital & he had best seek asylum in another land. Given his ardor, I had my minions see to it that the Schiller production was cancelled, never revealing my intervention, of course.
Imagine my distress, then, when I learned from him some years later that he was quietly at work on a full-dress opera based upon Schiller’s Tell. At first I took this for a subterranean act of social defiance, a gesture in which he was practiced. Later he advised me that he had set the work to one side—a source of genuine relief to me, not least because opera was not a musical form much suited to his genius. But still later he confided that he had taken up the Tell task anew, this time in an innovative form he called a “dramatic symphony,” interweaving instrumental and vocal music but with the stress on the former. I thought the notion foolhardy until he sent me a copy of the first movement. I was enthralled by the charm & sincerity of the work, which he pursued, he assured me, fitfully at best & in privacy lest it be misunderstood as subversive to our court. Perhaps at some future time, if it came to fruition, he said he might try to have it performed abroad, in London or Paris possibly (or even Zurich, he added in mirth), so as not to shame either of us in His Imperial Majesty’s eyes.
I heard no further from him on this matter and thought it most prudent not to inquire after it—until yesterday. His letter, which he recommended I destroy as a precaution for all concerned, said that he had progressed as far as his powers would allow on the Tell symphony, which he had dropped some time back in order to concentrate on his new “Chorale” symphony, which suffered from no political overtones and was now happily nearing completion. In the past, he reminded me, I had been kind enough to
hold for safekeeping in my vault at Schoenbrun palace other manuscripts of his. But given the peculiar sensitivity of the Tell, which he now feared he would never manage to refine as it needed, his choice was to destroy the sketchbooks, which he had not the heart to do, or to deliver them into my hands for safety inside a cloistered precinct. Perhaps he would someday summon the will & energy to resume the effort, but he thought it doubtful. “Let posterity judge its worth, if any,” he added and begged forgiveness for so burdening me with the chore.
Do me the kindness, then, faithful Anton, of placing these two volumes, rather the worse for wear as they are, in a dry, dark place known only to you and me, until further notice. This authorization from me ought, I think, to be placed with the books. Go with God.
The letter was signed, “Rudolph, Prince and Cardinal.”
Sister Maria Immaculata, unacquainted with the identity of the individuals discussed in the Cardinal’s memorandum, nevertheless found it of interest—but hardly worthy of a box entirely its own. Whatever had happened to the two volumes originally accompanying it, she could not imagine; things just naturally got lost over time or, she heard, stolen. Wishing to be respectful but not wasteful, she inserted Rudolph’s directive to the ecclesiastical librarian at the very front of the fourth full box of correspondence on the shelf next to it and brought the now entirely empty box with the “V” on it to the counter presided over by Father Rafael, the chief filing clerk, for disposal the next day.
In the morning, Father Rafael asked the nun where the empty box had come from, and she explained it was the final one of the five that the professor from Salzburg had been examining all week. The priest wondered how she knew it was the fifth box in the series, and Sister Maria pointed to the “V” next to the label identifying the box as part of Cardinal Rudolph’s Beethoven correspondence. “But our boxes,” the chief clerk explained to her, “all carry Arabic numbers. The ‘V’ is the abbreviation we have always used for ‘Verboten’—such a box is closed for inspection without permission of our archbishop or Cardinal. The professor would have needed to apply for access to go through it. But if, as you say, it was empty, no need for him to—”
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