came and sat beside me, his great soft wings almost pushing me out of my place. He smelled of lemonade. He was naked to the waist and rather beautiful, and I tried not to look at him, because I felt rather too moved. He sat there for a while talking of this and that, and then he said, “You must go home and make the marriage between your sister and Amadeus.” I couldn’t recall who Amadeus was at first, because we have never called him that, but it’s his middle name, right? The “A” he puts when he signs his music (and he prefers Amadé, he told me once). So it seems if you are being so silly, I must come home.
I am rather glad to do so, to tell you the truth, because I find after testing my vocation that I prefer to love God in the world and not behind cloister walls, and besides, I don’t mind flirting. I like conversation on the true meaning of life with friends and wine and people playing music in a comfortable room, and my ideal is just what I had as a little girl, and I can’t have it here. I don’t ever intend to marry because I am more virtuous when chaste, but I intend you to marry him, so I can have what I want for you and we can have our Thursdays again. So I am packing my things. Two of our nuns are traveling to Vienna, and I am coming with them.
Please don’t tell me that anything has happened to my cat.
Constanze wrote back eagerly, using one of her father’s pens.
Dearest Sophie,
You are welcome, welcome, welcome. I read your letter with tears of joy. I want you to come here, and we’ll always be together, but I can’t marry Mozart. I’ll be thirty and old before we get his father’s consent. You must stop trying to arrange all our lives, but do come back.
The cat is well and has six new kittens, which, as Josefa would say, must mean that she has been very well indeed, and enjoying the life of Vienna.
Love always,
Your sister C.
Sophie swept home dragging her one modest leather portmanteau, pins falling from her untidy hair, and rushed up the stairs on her thin legs. She kissed the cat, was pleased that Constanze had watered the plants in the garden and in the hall, and went at once to see Father Paul, who confirmed her decision that her vocation was in the world and not behind convent walls. She found her favorite old straw hat and pinned flowers on it, wearing it over her pale freckled face with her spectacles. “I’ll dedicate myself to good works,” she said. She made a list that first night of the most pressing of them: find more boarders, persuade Mother to eat less noodles and cake, and burn that ridiculous book of suitors.
The next morning, after she had lain in bed talking until ten with her sister, she got up and began to tie on her petticoat. “Come on,” she said. “You’re not marrying Mozart’s father, and Mozart’s jealous of anyone you’ve ever smiled at only because he loves you. Go and tell him that you’re at least friends again with him. I’ll walk with you. Wear your straw hat ... wait, I’ll pin flowers on yours as well. ”
They walked over in their flower-printed dresses and large straw hats. “Now, go up,” Sophie said when they arrived at his rooms; they saw the concierge out front eating dark bread and sausage. “I’ll wait here. When you come down, we can all have a lemonade.”
Constanze walked up the stairs, her hand lingering on the banister. She could hear the fortepiano that Mozart had ordered on credit from Stein, Johann Schantz’s competitor in the instrument business, and she stood for a moment in the open doorway watching him play, gazing at his fingers, which seemed hardly to touch the keys.
“Constanze,” he said, looking up; then, after a long moment, he added, as if nothing difficult had ever passed between them, “Come look at this aria for the maid Blondchen from my opera. Will you sing it for me?”
“I don’t sing very well. And I didn’t know there will still be an opera.”
“There will be,” he said grimly. “And I’ll give all the fortune that I’ll ever have if you’ll sing this aria for me.” She came closer, and he caught her fingers and pulled her down to the bench