Free The Brahms Deception by Louise Marley Page A

by a thick-trunked olive tree. Roses drooped over the wall, and long, thin curtains belled charmingly in the breeze. He wished he could feel it. He could have stood there for ages, gazing at the aproned woman, the kitchen garden, the vista of hills and fields. It didn’t seem possible this woman had been gone for more than a century. In this moment, at this point on the continuum, she was more alive than he was himself.
    But they had given him only an hour. He had to move quickly to try to discover what had become of Frederica Bannister. Before he moved, he assessed the house and garden to mark the perimeter. He didn’t want to make the same mistake as the researcher who had visited the Continental Congress. In his eagerness to follow Franklin to a secret meeting he had moved beyond the zone, and been jarred instantly out of the transfer. He had persuaded the tech to send him right back, and had suffered serious time lag afterward, though it was not as bad as it was for the researcher who had gone to Versailles three times.
    The researcher who had transferred to Dallas in 1963 had described the sensation of movement in the past as being like dream motion, finding yourself where you wanted to be—or avoiding where you didn’t—without conscious volition. Another researcher, from Magna Carta, reported that it was like driving a car, steering yourself this way and that.
    Kristian didn’t want to think of driving a car, or of dreaming. Instead, he tried simply taking a step. It worked for him, in sensation if not in fact. He drifted forward a stride’s length, then another. When he reached the stone wall with its crown of roses, he imagined jumping over it, lifting his feet high enough to miss the blooms on top of the neatly set stones. Effortlessly, he sailed above it. He could have stayed in the air if he wanted to, and that was tempting. Instead, he brought himself to ground, liking the impression of walking on the grass. He wished he could actually walk on it. He longed to smell the roses, greet the aproned woman, sniff the herbs she was weeding.
    He grinned at her, and waved, though of course she had no idea he was there. He turned himself toward the front door of Casa Agosto. He had only to think of going in and he was through, poised in the foyer. To his left was a charming little salon, carpeted in some rough fabric over a wooden floor. Its tall windows stood open to the summer air. To his right, a long stone-flagged kitchen stretched into dimness. He glimpsed an enormous black woodstove and a stone sink. Ahead of him, a narrow set of worn stairs with a simple banister led to the second story.
    Kristian moved to his left, into the salon. When he spied the fortepiano, he almost lost his concentration again. Juilliard had a reproduction instrument, but he had never seen the real thing outside of a museum. He caught his breath at the grace and delicacy of it. It was square, in the Viennese style, not the English. It could even possibly be a Stein, although that would make it at least fifty years old in 1861. It had six legs carved with leaves and vines, a rosewood veneer, and a parchment nameplate. He floated closer, his fingers itching to touch the keys, to hear the tone of the leather-bound hammers striking its slender strings.
    And there was music on the stand, a manuscript! He moved closer. Was it Brahms who had been composing here at this lovely old instrument? No! His breath caught, and he supposed, on the cot in the clinic, that his heart rate jumped again.
    He would not want to worry Chiara and the others, but his heart must beat faster! This was her notation. Her manuscript. He recognized it from the facsimiles he had spent so much time with, and he found himself reaching toward it, trying to touch the pages she had written in her own graceful hand.
    Clara Schumann! She must have sent one of her compositions to her young friend Brahms. It was a little song, with the text written out in her