leaned slightly against the dark window of a shoemaker’s shop, and Constanze slowly became aware that Sophie was staring at her. “Constanze Weber,” Sophie said, as if she had been asleep and just awoken. “How could I speak of myself! I had forgotten before I felt so sick. I saw you go downstairs with Johann Schantz, and your face when you came up again. Your lip looked odd, your upper lip. It still does. Did he bite it? Tell me, tell me.”
“Oh God, do you think others saw it, too?” Constanze whispered, fingers to her lip. “No one will notice at home, will they? I’ll tell you, but you must swear on your hope of salvation that you’ll tell no one. He kissed me; he touched me. There was another me suddenly, wanting to get out, and he knew it. It was there when we arrived; it’s been there for months. I felt as if I wanted to fling off everything, abandon the way I’ve been all my life and be something else. But I’ve known for a time that I love him.” The last was spoken with sudden, solemn dignity as she gazed indifferently at a carriage and its horses trotting neatly through the streets. “Yes, for a long time.”
Sophie cried, “I knew there was something! But Stanzi, he’s married.”
“Yes, he is, but don’t you understand that I didn’t care? I didn’t care about anything, except when I ran upstairs I was suddenly afraid of ending like Aloysia, and having to marry. And yet what does it matter if we have love?”
They were walking, and stopping, and Sophie stumbled and clutched her. As they came down the street that opened into Petersplatz, a priest out walking his little dog nodded at them. Sophie took several deep breaths, looking ahead of her, her narrow face gaining that sudden maturity that always amazed Constanze. “I think,” Sophie murmured, “that we should go upstairs as quietly as possible, and talk about all this in the morning. Don’t cry; I can see you’re about to. I’ll try not to be sick on the stairs. Oh, my head spins so!”
In the darkness, they slipped off their shoes, mounted the stairs inside the boardinghouse by touch, and slept soundly until the middle of the next morning.
They had hardly risen when they heard their mother’s voice from below. She was likely shouting at a boarder for letting a candle overturn and drop wax on the carpet, but dimly they heard their own names. Josefa was gone already. They ran out onto the landing and looked down the stairs at their mother’s red face.
“I met Frau Alfonso at the market early this morning,” she cried. “You allowed a strange man to measure your legs? And drank so much wine that Frau Alfonso said you both behaved very loosely, that you plied her husband with more of it. Bad girls, bad, like your sisters. It is your father’s blood, not mine—your rash father who gave you no sense, only music!”
Sophie leaned over the banister and called down, “It was only a game.”
“Both of you will land where your sisters are and never marry, especially you, Mademoiselle Constanze. Your name will be as black as theirs.”
Constanze stood speechless. What did her mother know? It seemed she was always trying to scoop her hand into Constanze’s heart, trying to pull out private thoughts, crumble them, throw them away. “We never ... ,” she murmured at last, but more words would not come.
The girls ran back to their room, closing the door against the furious voice that rose up the stairs and likely carried under the door to any boarder who had not yet left for his work. Sophie barricaded the door with her own thin body, her normally placid face distorted with feeling. “Don’t give in to Mother,” she cried. “Don’t retreat; don’t let her take your laughter away. She will if she can, you know.” Yet Constanze felt all the passion and longing of last night close up within her and then wilt and blow away. She felt her face turn as plain and severe as those of her spinster aunts.
“Be still, Sophie,” she whispered.
But Sophie ran around the bed after her, shouting, “We had such a lovely evening. Why must she object to happiness? What does it matter what you did? Henri will come for you. He’s meant to; that’s why he ran after us. He’ll take you away from this place.” For the first time they stared