Shadowsong (Wintersong #2)(25)
And accepted.
It was late in the afternoon when the coach from Bavaria drew through the city gates and later still when two sisters stood before a set of apartments off Stephansplatz, near Vienna’s great cathedral at the heart of the city. The dark-haired one shivered in her red cloak as she stood outside, but not from the unseasonable spring chill. She was watching—waiting—in the darkened doorway for blue eyes, blond hair, and a shy, sweet smile. She was waiting for a little boy. She was waiting for her brother.
But the brother that emerged was not the child Liesl remembered. At sixteen, he could not properly be called a boy any longer. Josef had come into his full height, towering a head taller than both his sisters. Yet neither was he fully grown, for his chin was still bare, his limbs still gawky and gangly with unexpected growth. He was both a man and a child, and neither.
For a moment, Liesl and Josef stared at each other, doing nothing, saying nothing.
And then they broke.
She opened her arms and he ran into her embrace, just as they had when they were young and each other’s shelter from their father’s worst excesses. When they listened to scary stories at their grandmother’s knee. When the world was too much for them, and not enough.
“Liesl,” he murmured.
“Sepp,” she whispered.
The tears that fell from each other’s cheeks were warm and tasted of joy. They were together. They were home.
“Oh my goodness, Josef, how you’ve grown!” the fair-haired sister exclaimed.
Josef startled, surprised to see her. “What are you doing here, K?the?”
He did not see the spasm of hurt that crossed her face. “Didn’t Liesl tell you?” K?the huffed. “We’ve come to join you in Vienna!”
“Join me?” Josef turned his blue-eyed gaze to his sister, eyes that were paler and icier than Liesl remembered. “You’re not—you’re not here to take me home?”
“Home?” K?the said incredulously. “But we are home now.”
The coachman had unloaded their things and driven away, leaving the makeshift family with nowhere to go but through the threshold and up the stairs to their new domicile. Fran?ois and the landlady emerged from the shadows to help K?the carry their belongings to the two-room apartments on the second floor. First the landlady, then Fran?ois, then K?the disappeared through the doorway, leaving Liesl and Josef on the street together, but alone.
“Home,” the blond boy said in a remote voice.
“Home,” the dark-haired sister echoed softly.
It was a long time before either of them spoke. She had traveled hundreds of miles—through forests and woods, over mountains and plains—to be with him, yet the distance between them had grown.
“Sepperl,” she began, then stopped. She did not know what to say.
“Liesl,” he said coldly. There was nothing to be said.
And then the fair-haired boy turned around and vanished into the darkness of their new life without another word, leaving his sister to finally understand—to know—that she had spent miles upon miles upon miles running down the wrong road.
EVER MINE
Why this deep grief, where necessity speaks?
—LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN, the Immortal Beloved letters
STRANGE PROCLIVITIES
it all began with an invitation.
“Message for you, Fr?ulein.” Frau Messer accosted me at the door as I returned from Naschmarkt with the week’s groceries in tow. “Looks like it’s another one from your”—her lips twitched—“mysterious benefactor.”
It wasn’t often our landlady emerged from her hidey-hole on the ground floor, but nothing flushed city folk from their dens faster than the possibility of good gossip. Any bit of information about our anonymous patron was too delicious a morsel for her to ignore.
“Thank you, ma’am,” I said politely. I reached for the letter, but she held it just beyond reach. Frau Messner was not tall; she was a short, stout woman with sharp features that brought to mind a plump, well-fed ferret, but I could not retrieve my message without stepping in closer than I was comfortable.
“’Twas brought over by a liveried servant this time.” Her beady eyes darted from the letter to my face and back again, inviting me—taunting me—to say more. “Queer little fellow. Small as a child, dressed in red with his white wig all tufty ’bout his head like dandelion fluff.”
I gave her a tight smile. “Was he?”
“Not many noble families in Vienna outfit their liveries in red,” she mused. “But fewer still mark their correspondence with the sign of the poppy.” Frau Messner held the letter up before me, where I could clearly see the image of the flower pressed into the wax seal. “Your benefactor is quite unusual, Fr?ulein. I understand better now how you came across your good fortune in the city.”
I stiffened. I had been in the city long enough to know that luck was merely power in another guise. While I had not expected our lives to be easy, what I hadn’t expected was just how dependent we would be on another’s kindness, another’s whim. The apartments in which we lived were already leased in our names when we arrived, introductions and invitations to influential members of society penned and received, lines of credit established with shopkeepers, every need anticipated, arranged, and attended to. Our rude and rustic ways were already the subject of much ridicule, but what we could not be forgiven for was our good fortune. Our luck had little to do with success, and everything to do with access.