Free The Brahms Deception by Louise Marley Page B

own hand beneath the staves. “Das Mädchen auf einer Schaukel.” “The Girl on a Swing.” He knew this song! It wouldn’t be published for some years, but Catherine had sung it as an encore for her senior recital. He wished he could see behind it, find a letter, some note or comment or request that would tell him something no historian had yet discovered.
    He had tried, as he studied Clara’s music, to imagine what her own playing must have been like. She must have been a stunning performer, even as a small girl, when she caused the great Goethe to say that she “played with the strength of six boys.” She concertized for more than sixty years, to rapturous audiences. Even at the age of seventy, surely an advanced age for her century, the critics had praised her. Stockhausen had written that her playing had “the stamp of a divine summons.”
    Looking at her manuscript, Kristian regretted once again that he had been forced to give up his first dissertation topic. She fascinated him. It seemed impossible that here, in Castagno, he would be reminded of his lost passion.
    Reluctantly, Kristian turned away from the fortepiano and the alluring foolscap pages. He moved to the window, where the gauze curtains fluttered, and looked out over the village. Clothes hung from lines strung between houses, and roses flourished everywhere, along with sunflowers and geraniums and lilies. An old man in a black coat and trousers ambled down the cobbled lane, leaning on a cane. A dog taking shade in a doorway rose as he passed, wagging its stub of tail. The man bent to pat it before he hobbled on. A trio of boys in short pants came boiling out of one of the houses. They chased one another down the lane, shouting something in Italian that Kristian couldn’t catch. The old man flattened himself against the side of a building as they raced by him. He admonished them in a gravelly voice as he resumed his slow progress.
    Kristian smiled at this tableau, wishing he could follow the boys, listen to what they said to one another, see the expression on the old man’s face. They were too far away. The perimeter wouldn’t extend much past the garden of Casa Agosto. He would have to restrict himself to the house, the lawn, perhaps a step or two past the stone wall.
    It was no different for Frederica. She couldn’t have gone beyond the zone. She had to be somewhere in Casa Agosto or its garden.
    Kristian looked into the kitchen, on the other side of the little hallway. He inspected every corner, looking behind the stove, up at the cracked and stained ceiling, down beneath a stack of copper pots and nested baskets. Frederica, where are you? The pressure of time passing drove him back toward the foyer. He would have to look upstairs, check the balcony, make a circuit of the garden. There would be a privy somewhere. She would have no need of it, of course, but he would look.
    Kristian stopped where he was when he heard voices from the stairwell. One was deep, a man’s. Was it Brahms? The other was a treble voice, light and clear in timbre. Could the woman in the printed apron have come in from the garden, moved past him without him noticing? Or perhaps there was a maid. But Brahms, at last!
    Kristian backed into the little salon, past the fortepiano, and halted beside the French windows. He heard one heavy step, one light. Instinctively, he hid himself behind the curtains. The wooden stairs creaked. There was a hearty jaw-cracking yawn as someone stretched, someone who must have just risen from bed. Kristian tensed behind his meager haven of white gauze. He forgot Frederica, the transfer clinic, and everything else in the thrill of this moment, this suspended instant before his first, long-delayed glimpse of Johannes Brahms.
    But it was not the Master who appeared, who stepped down from the last stair and passed through the foyer into the kitchen. It was a woman, slender and sad looking, with thick