the breath away of all who saw her; it bewitched them. Even in those days she didn’t truly understand it.”
“Tell me about your journey to Vienna.”
“Dreadful. The roads were snowy, and I was feverish. Josefa was stony and wouldn’t say a word the whole way.”
He leaned forward, the tip of his pen glistening with blue ink. “Josefa. My father heard her sing once. Did Mozart ever write anything for her?”
“Yes, some songs and a great opera role years after.”
“Of course, now I recall. His German singspiel, Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute, we call it in England), full of dark and good forces. She sang the evil Queen. That’s what my father heard her sing when he was a student in Vienna for a time, and he never forgot it. He said she had such passion.”
“You may want to see something,” I said. “Bring me that box there. Be careful. I have always meant to have the lining replaced. In it you’ll find a silver locket; you see I am telling you true things. Yes, you may touch it.”
My guest had wiped his fingers on his handkerchief before taking up the locket. “So this was hers!” he exclaimed, weighing it in the palm of his hand. “And what curious engraving.” He looked at it more closely, turning to the window. “Quite worn. I can’t make out the initials. May I?” I nodded, and he opened the clasp and bent over two strands of hair, touching them with the tip of one finger. “So this is her hair and ...”
“It’s her hair, yes.”
“But the other strand is her lover’s, of course. The man by the bookstall.”
“Perhaps not.”
His eyes widened. “Then whose is it, pray?”
I lifted my hand a little to indicate the bell on the table beside him. “Ring for my landlady to bring us coffee,” I said. “I think I’d like to have a large sweet cup now, Monsieur Novello. Do ring the bell.”
He had been listening so carefully to my words that he had forgotten, and now he apologized and rang the bell several times.
As the last tone ceased to reverberate, I said, “You know, when we were girls still at home together, we supposed we knew everything there was to know about one another. Now that I’m old and alone, I wonder at times about the things I didn’t know. Here’s my landlady’s step in the hall. There are so many stories to be told, and if we meet enough hours, you shall hear most of them, and perhaps understand a little more of what you have come to find.”
PART THREE
Vienna and Aloysia, 1780
Aloysia’s debut at the Burgtheater came within a week of their arrival, but she knew her role already, for she had memorized it in Munich, even with all the difficulties within the family and the hasty packing and the sending of Christmas greetings to many relatives. The two maternal aunts sent a good piece of lace that they must have saved from their girlhood for Aloysia’s costumes, for she would have to supply her own. Their father’s brother predicted ruin in this new venture; the sisters tore up his letter.
Now in the center of the stage before a painted forest backdrop, Aloysia began her first aria, wearing a blue dress embroidered with silk butterflies and opened over an embroidered petticoat. At her feet were rows of shaded candles to light the scene. Some people talked through the whole aria, then quieted to listen to her improvised cadenza. The orchestra had ceased to play; the first violinist conducting from his seat waited as her highest notes mounted through the theater. Some members of the audience sat back, sighed. A few leaned forward.
After, in the winter air, with hundreds of carriages jostling to leave the premises, and the shadow of the churches and the magnificent stone houses with their sloped roofs and mansard windows all about them, Aloysia rushed into the arms of her sisters and mother. Constanze had brought her one pink silk rose. Alfonso took them all to an elegant supper café, where he predicted the rise of a great prima donna.
Returning home late, the sisters pulled on their white wool sleeping gowns in the large, empty, creaking old house they had rented, and shut themselves in the capacious bedroom on the fourth floor; they had slept together for so long they had not yet decided to sleep apart. Their mother took a room two floors below them. Aloysia lay among her sisters, her soft arm