do not impute me in this. All other allegations are spurious as well.” He raised his heavy chin defiantly and straightened his coat with a firm tug. “I am, and will always be, a gentleman.”
The sound of two boarders laughing in the hall reached them; Josefa still clutched the back of a chair as if she would keel over without it. “Then who is my father?” she cried. “Who did you go with that night, Mother?”
Maria Caecilia sank down into a chair, covering her face with her hands. When she looked up, she seemed to have aged several years. Looking over at the bowl of onions, she said bleakly, “I was just seventeen, and I knew nothing. You must understand this. Your father was a soldier in the service of the empire. It didn’t happen that night but a few nights following. I was not myself since the first time I saw him; he was so strong, so handsome with his mustache, like the stories my sister and I would tell one another. His coat buttons shone. Like you, he was tall.” She reached out for an onion and cradled it in her hands. “I gave myself to him, and I would have married him, but he was sent away with his regiment. My letters went unanswered; my heart broke. I returned to Fridolin Weber, who was a good man. He knew; I confessed it to him. He was more forgiving than you, my girl, more so than you have ever been.”
Maria Caecilia began to peel away the first fragile onion skins, a tear running down her cheek. “Yes, he knew you weren’t his, Josefa, but he loved you the same as if you were, maybe more. And he married me anyway because he loved me so.”
Josefa closed her eyes. If she could have left the room she would have, but she knew she did not have the strength to go. Her mother’s voice came broken and accusing across the table that stood between them. “You girls!” Maria Caecilia said. “Do any of you know what it’s like to lose your beauty forever, to be fat and old and ridiculous, to go to sleep each night alone, to be no one’s love, no one’s little cabbage? To struggle to keep food on the table and yet be the butt of jokes to your daughters, to be nothing but stupid? I was once as young and beautiful as any of you. As beautiful as Aloysia or you—”
“I can’t bear it,” Josefa cried. For one brief moment, she had wanted to go to her mother and console her but was so horrified she fled. She ran stumbling, weeping, pushing past the astonished boarders who were talking in the hallway. Her hair streamed loose down her back as she rushed into the streets of Vienna. She ran past the shops and wagons, not knowing where she was going.
After some minutes she turned and hurried blindly to Petersplatz. Father Paul, just coming from confession, was taking off his stole. “Josefa Weber,” he said, smiling at her so that his beaked nose wrinkled. “We heard you were in Prague. Sophie tells me all about your letters. Has the opera season ended? Why have you come home? Why, you’ve been weeping! What on earth is the matter? You’re not in trouble are you, dear girl?”
“Where’s my sister?” “Sophie is working with some of the nuns in the orphanage two houses down. I’m so glad she returned; we don’t know what we would do without her! But what can be the trouble?”
Without answering, Josefa ran to the large building down the street, where she was met at once with the sound of infants and little children tumbling around in the hall. She ran into a room where she saw a few wet nurses feeding babies, then rushed up the steps to a schoolroom, where there was hanging a portrait of Christ and the children.
Sophie had been teaching the alphabet to a group of children sitting at one long table. At the sight of her sister, she stood up and almost fell over a chair to reach her, crying, “Oh darling, what are you doing here?”
“I need to speak with you.”
“When did you arrive? Why did you leave Prague? Oh, I’m so glad! Wait, I’ll send the little ones across the way to Sister Maria Elisa. There, pets ... my sister’s come!” The five children looked back curiously as Sophie shepherded them out. Then, closing the door, she