Chapter 15

Chapter Fifteen

He observed them for three days.

For those three days he remained an outsider, silently studying them, learning their habits and quirks, their customs and personalities. Only then would he have enough data to make informed decisions.

Evie was unaware of this arrangement. She had, quite suddenly, decided to visit a friend in the country.

"I haven't seen Pippa since we were children," she explained. "Besides, now that you have finally found Catherine, I imagine you'll be quite busy with her. Something tells me it's best if I stay out of the way."

He set down his pen with a frown. "Pippa? The wild farm girl who convinced you to jump from the barn roof into a haystack? You broke your leg."

Evie grinned. "I did not. I merely sprained my ankle. She wasn't a farm girl; she was just visiting her uncle's farm. Her father is a famous mathematician and natural philosopher."

"And why is she in Austria now?" he asked .

"Because she lives here. She returned to Austria before the war broke out. We've only recently been able to write to each other again. Since I would dearly love to see her, we agreed I'd visit."

He nodded. "Very well. You'll need to take along a companion. I believe Mortimer has already found someone suitable."

She pulled a face. "Very well, if you insist."

Evie had left several days before he moved into the Arenheim home. It was better that way. Much as he loved her, he needed her out of the way to have the time and space to sort out his affairs and his feelings.

After three days of observation, he discovered that certain things remained constant in this tumultuous household, and one of them was music.

Music woke him up and music lulled him to sleep.

It was the sound of the pianoforte, masterfully played, that would wake him at dawn. Catherine—that was, Lena—practised regularly for three hours.

Then, as she rose from the pianoforte, the sound of the viola took over as Mona practised in the drawing room for the rest of the morning. Meanwhile, the boys had gone to school; the older one to university. In the afternoon, the sounds of their violin and flute scales filled the house as they practised.

The Arenheims broke their fast early, with a rather strange drink they called coffee, but which turned out to contain not a single coffee bean but dried, roasted, and ground chicory roots. Lena boiled it in a copper pot to a bitter, earthy brew, and added milk and sugar. She served it with the hard, dark bread that the peasants ate, which was strangely aromatic and did not taste at all bad with butter and jam.

Lunch was a simple vegetable stew with the leftover bread.

Dinner was either dumplings or pancakes, or some other sweet Bohemian dish whose pronunciation he hadn't yet mastered. It was some kind of baked doughy substance with apricot jam in it, served with vanilla sauce. It wasn't bad, but, well, sweet. He'd never had so many sweet dinners in his entire life. He ate every crumb without complaining because Lena had made it with her own hands.

Lena was constantly in demand.

She was the heart of the house, the emotional centre. The mother.

He'd seen how Hector burst into the room, sobbing, and she'd picked him up and he'd clung to her as if he were but a toddler, and she'd carried him around the room, making soothing noises as he sobbed forth his story. He'd been feeding a stray puppy in the street that had insisted on following him unnoticed and it had got under the wheels of a carriage. Hector had held the little animal in his arms as it died. "It's all my fault," Hecki wept. "I killed it."

Lena had comforted him until his sobs subsided, and he hiccuped into her lap. Then he'd gone with Les, to give it an honourable burial. A few moments later, the mournful sound of Les's violin filled the room as he played a requiem.

Mona, too, had burst into tears, when, after many hours of practice, she couldn't get a certain passage right, and Lena had sat beside her, rubbing her shoulder and reassuring her that she was still as talented as ever.

Even Theo had burst into the drawing room one evening, just when he was penning answers to some letters that Mortimer had brought him, stalked over to Lena who was darning everyone's socks, dropped to his knees and burst into loud, uncontrollable sobs. He, the adult, had transformed into a child in a matter of seconds.

"I want to die." Theo buried his head in her lap.

"Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear," Lena murmured.

After much urging, he choked out, "She doesn't love me."

Lena listened to him patiently as he sobbed forth the entire sorry story. Something about a blacksmith's daughter named Rosalie whom he'd loved forever, thinking his affections were returned, only for it to turn out she was merely trifling with him. "She says I'm as poor as a church mouse and not g-g-good enough for her because she wants something better. Ultimately, she can't l-l-love me."

Lena sighed deeply. "Oh Theo. I am so sorry."

She really was quite remarkable, the Duke concluded. Instead of ranting about the girl's personality and how awful she was for rejecting Theo, she merely listened to the boy quietly, as if she understood his pain.

"I feel so stupid and ashamed," Theo confessed.

"Oh, Theo. Never be ashamed of love."

"Even if it is a stupid, unrequited love?"

"Theo. Love is never stupid," she'd insisted. "Especially when it is unrequited. Because then the heart has to gather all its strength to love even more so it can let go. Even if it feels like your heart is breaking, you'll have loved the noblest love of all. One day, you'll find the right person who will be able to love you back equally."

She might as well have driven a dagger into his soul with those words.

Theo had sobbed even harder. "I can't let go, Mama. I simply can't. I don't want to. I won't!"

Julius had squirmed in his chair as an unwilling eavesdropper, grappling with his own dark emotions, understanding the sentiments only too well.

He found himself consumed by something akin to envy. He wished he could also let go, and sob and cry and bury his head in Lena's lap, like Theo had. Maybe she would rub his shoulders, as she was doing now, and hug him.

Dash it all.

He made an unsteady movement with his hand, nearly oversetting the inkwell.

In general, there was too much hugging and crying and laughing and fighting and an excess of freely exhibited emotion to which he was quite unaccustomed. He was in uncharted territory.

Then there were other people who thought it was their right to interfere in their family affairs.

That neighbour, for one. Karl Bauer and his wife, Emma.

Karl, had, at first, peered at him suspiciously through two small, narrow eyes. "Who are you?" They'd been in the front garden, and he'd suddenly appeared at the other side of the fence, his arms on his hips, a pipe in his mouth.

"This is, um…" Lena had looked at Julius helplessly. They hadn't agreed on a story to tell outsiders about why he was here.

"Julius Stafford-Hill," he introduced himself. "A friend of the family."

The man stood in front of him with his legs firmly planted apart and his shoulders squared, assessing him from top to bottom. He crossed his arms. "English?"

"Yes."

"Why is he here?" he asked Lena, his eyes never leaving the Duke's.

"Well…because of the Congress, of course. He's also a friend of Simon's," she added.

Karl's suspicious expression softened, giving way to a broad smile. "In that case, welcome. Any friend of Simon's is also my friend." He extended a calloused, beefy hand and after a moment's hesitation, Julius took it. The man's grip was crushing, and Julius fought the urge to pull away.

"Care for a pipe?" Karl asked, holding out his own. Julius stared at the discoloured, roughly carved pipe with a chewed-up mouthpiece. He wistfully thought of his elegant briar pipe resting in a silver pipe dish on his desk back at his residence. He forced a smile and accepted it.

"Good tobacco," he commented after a slow draw. It was true; it was a surprisingly rich and potent blend.

Karl nodded approvingly. They stood side by side by the fence, passing the pipe back and forth between them in silence .

"Not much progress with the Congress, one hears," Karl said suddenly between puffs. "What with Talleyrand insisting on a place at the table with the Big Four. Has Metternich agreed yet?"

Julius's brows shot up. "Things aren't that simple."

"They never are."

"At the rate it's going, I predict the Congress will drag on much longer than anyone anticipated," Karl said.

"Possibly." Julius was surprised at the sharpness of Karl's observations. For a simple farmer who tended a vineyard and sold cheap cider at the market, Karl's observations were unexpectedly astute and revealed a far deeper understanding than most Congress delegates.

Karl Bauer, it turned out, was keeping an eye on the Arenheims. He provided them with fruit and vegetables, performed random repairs in the house whenever necessary, and his wife frequently cooked for the entire family. He looked unkempt and wore dirt-speckled clothes, but he was surprisingly conversant on politics and current affairs, expressing a sharp intellect that belied his humble background. This Karl was not to be underestimated, and Julius reluctantly admitted that there was more to the man than met the eye.

In the end, they parted on friendly terms.

Then there was this other fellow, Adam Klein, a musician who claimed to have studied under Beethoven himself. He played alongside them in their performances, completing their quartet as the fourth member. Like Karl, Adam Klein had met him with suspicion when they first met, his gaze sizing him up warily. Lena's firm introduction of Julius as a friend of Simon's, and a temporary guest in their home, left Klein no choice but to grudgingly tolerate his presence.

Lena, on the other hand, mothered everyone, including the neighbours, the stray dog Bello, the bird in the tree called Fips, and any beggar child who happened to wander by.

Once, he even caught her mothering him when she put a hand on his forehead to check his temperature. When he looked up in surprise, she withdrew her hand, blushing wildly. "You haven't said a word all day, so I wondered if you were ill. I can't have anyone ill in my house, because then we'll all fall ill, and Theo will insist on doctoring us, and then he'll get ill himself." She tended to ramble when she was embarrassed, and it appeared that she was often embarrassed in his company.

As if she didn't know how to behave in his presence when they were alone.

He regretted now that he'd answered her question in the affirmative. When she'd asked him if they had been in love….

He'd lied.