in his breath. He frowned and looked away, his eyes focusing on one of the gilded mirrors across the room.
She looked as well, and saw them both reflected. For a moment she, too, caught her breath, her fingers moving to her throat. What she saw in the mirror was not the Johann Franz Thorwart of today, a man in his late forties, but the man he had been: the round-faced university boy, the one she felt rather than saw in the dark of the courtyard so many years ago. She had been seventeen. After all these years, she could still hear the sound of her petticoats as she hurried toward him in the dark. She remembered how a shiver had rushed down her back when she took his hand and how he drew her into that dark doorway.
Now, as they both gazed into the mirror, above the heads of the other patrons, she felt his hand move across the table and take hers, rubbing her fingertips slightly as if trying to read them. And she heard his husky voice as he leaned forward. “That month in Zell when you were seventeen.”
She looked at their hands together on the table and didn’t pull it away. “Please don’t, Johann.”
“You asked me if I was melancholy today, and yes, I am. I work so hard I don’t allow myself to feel it, then I go home, where I must bear silence. Only your happy household has made it possible for me—that and my work. Caecilia, my dearest. You were seventeen when I came back from university because my father was ill. You were going to be married in two months. That evening you came across the courtyard singing, and I went out to you. Do you remember? I heard your petticoats and your footsteps; you were lighter than the breeze. I begged you that day not to marry my friend Fridolin. I told you you’d be poor. I told you, Caecilia! That most beautiful evening when you came across the yard under the hanging wash to me! Did Fridolin ever suspect, ever ask you ... the uncertainty about—”
“Enough, enough,” she whispered. “Johann, you agreed never to mention that night. I’m a respectable widow; I was a respectable married woman. No scandal can be uttered about me. I spoke foolish words to my Josefa once when in grief, and I’ve always regretted it. I would never speak further about it. She wouldn’t forgive me if she knew the truth. Keep your agreement; you’re a gentleman. I have valued you for that above everything. You are a gentleman.”
Thorwart gazed at her from under his heavy eyebrows, then looked away, flustered, trying to bring back the man of business. From her reticule she took a tiny mirror and patted her face with some powder. He edged the tier of cakes toward her. “Have another.”
“I couldn’t.” Her eyes had filled with angry tears. “What has life made of me? I do my best under the circumstances.”
“One day she’ll have to know, Caecilia.”
“And when that day is right, I’ll tell her. Now, let’s pretend we didn’t think of those old things. Tell me about Mozart’s prospects. That is the least you can do.”
He bowed his head and cleared his throat. “Within several months, perhaps sooner, I’m told on good authority, the Emperor Francis Joseph is likely to award him some sinecure, kapellmeister of this or that, and with that everyone will want his music. In addition, there’s still a chance he may be given the commission for the opera in the autumn to celebrate the visit of the Russian Prince. If both of those events occur, he will at once be in demand everywhere. Every mother in Vienna will be sitting her unmarried beautiful daughter in the front row of his concerts to smile at him during the interval; he’ll be brought down by the first pretty face. And you, old friend, will have lost your opportunity.” »
Sitting very straight with noticeable dignity, her back no longer touching the chair, Maria Caecilia said, “Then here’s my plan. I’ll settle on this before my poor little one gets in great trouble in her innocence, and hold out for someone finer for Constanze when she tires of her cellist. I need, I ought, to separate those two girls, you know. They’re too close. One puts silly ideas in the other’s head, and the other gives it back again until it passes for truth. There, my mind’s settled. Sophie will marry