Free A Song for Summer by Eva Ibbotson

it's Beethoven I'm going to talk about. Only not all of his life--the part of it that happened in Heiligenstadt when he was thirty years old."
    He cleared his throat, and once again he looked at the back of the hall, his gaze, which had something frantic about it, fixed on the man who stood unmoving beside Ellen.
    "Heiligenstadt is a village outside Vienna. It's pretty with linden trees and brooks and all that, but that wasn't why Beethoven went there. He went because he didn't want to be
    seen; he wanted to hide. He was terrified and wretched and trying to escape from the world. He was going deaf, you see, and it was there that he finally gave up hope that the doctors would be able to cure him.
    "It's awful to read about the things he did to try and heal himself," Leon went on. "He poured yellow goo into his ears, he syringed them, he swallowed every kind of patent medicine, he stuck in hearing aids like torture instruments, but nothing made any difference. So he decided to die."
    Leon paused and rubbed his nose with the back of his hand. No handkerchief, thought Ellen, blaming herself, and her heart smote her at the emotion generated by this unprepossessing boy.
    "But he didn't," said Leon. "He didn't kill himself," and he threw that too intense, slightly hysterical look towards the place where Marek stood. "He wrote a thing called The Heiligenstadt Testament, which is famous. He started by telling people to be good and love one another and all that, but the part that matters is what he wrote about art. He said if you have a talent you had to use it to go further in to life and not escape from it. I'll read that bit to you."
    He took a book from the top of the piano and first in English, then in German, read the words with which the unhappy composer had reconsecrated himself to music and to life.
    "So you see," said Leon fiercely. "You see ..." and Ellen saw Bennet turn his head, frowning, to follow Leon's gaze as it travelled yet again to Marek, still standing with folded arms beside the door. "You have to go on. Beethoven went back to Vienna and he wrote another seven symphonies and the violin concerto and Fidelio. He wrote dozens more string quartets and the Missa Solemnis and the Hammerklavier
    ... All right he was grumpy and bad-tempered, he hammered pianos to death and the people who came to see him fell over his unemptied chamber pots, but he never gave up. And when he died, all the schools in Vienna were closed. Every single school was closed so that the children could go to the funeral. Our school would have been closed," said Leon, as if that clinched the matter.
    He had finished his speech. Sniffing once more, pushing back his hair, he walked over to the radiogram.
    "I'm going to play a bit of the
    Ninth Symphony to end up with. At least
    I am if the blasted gramophone works," he said, descending from the heights.
    But as the triumphant strains of The Ode to Joy rang out across the hall, Ellen felt a momentary draught beside her.
    The man at whom this strange assembly had been directed, was gone.
    It was Ellen's habit to get up early and make her way round the grounds before anyone else was up. The lake was at its loveliest then; the mist rising from the water; the birds beginning to stir.
    But as she wandered, she garnered. Into a trug she kept for the purpose, she put the yo-yos she found tangled in fuchsia bushes, the roller skates left dangerously on the steps, the dew-sodden exercise books and half-knitted khaki balaclavas which (had they ever been finished) would have much reduced the chances of the International Brigade in their fight against Franco.
    On the morning after Leon's disquieting assembly, having collected a broken kite, a pair of braces and a damaged banana, she made her way towards the well in the cobbled courtyard behind the castle, to dredge up a gym shoe which she had noticed the night before.
    But there was someone else who valued the peace of the early morning. Marek did not sleep in the