The Loves of Leopold Singer (6 page)

Willie Zehetner looked like he’d been getting the worst of things, but he wasn’t ready to surrender. “Otto says Napoleon is coming to kill us all!”

“Ah, Bonaparte.” Leopold was the only child of Augustin Singer, the wealthiest Lutheran in the valley. Leopold had been to Paris and Vienna, and his family owned a ship that sailed all over the world. He would know about Napoleon. “That is serious.” He put his arms around the boys’ shoulders. With the children, Marta drew closer. “Some say he is a brute to be greatly feared. Others say he is a genius, a liberator of the common man.”

“What do you say?” asked Willie.

“When he came as close as Klagenfurt, I was afraid, I won’t deny it. But then he signed the peace treaty. Still, wherever Napoleon may be, no good comes from us fighting with each other. Now why don’t you two shake hands?”

Relieved, the boys bowed to each other with mock ceremony.

Marta clapped her hands at the delightful picture, and Leopold looked at her. He didn’t stare at her eyes or lips or figure. He just smiled, friendly, including her in the fun. She had known him all her life and liked him well enough, but in that moment a window opened inside her. Some little god’s arrow flew in and pierced her heart with desire.

She imagined this morning’s kiss with a different hero.

“The lace!” Gabby pulled her back on course, chatting on about Wolfram. “I hope my father won’t make us wait until—and what is this about?” A rash of color had erupted over Marta’s throat and up to her ears. Gabby looked back at Leopold Singer and again to Marta. “I think my friend is in love!”

“Be quiet.”

“Your mother won’t like it. Everyone knows she wants Oktav Haas for her son-in-law.”

“Yes,” Marta said without enthusiasm. “Everyone knows it.”

That evening from her bedroom window, Marta watched the Haases arrive. Oktav looked up, and she quickly backed away. This morning he must have known he would be here tonight. What Gabby said was true. Marta had been vaguely disappointed in her mother’s choice but never thought to rebel against it. Now, everything had changed.

She was caught up in a kind of amazement, taken out of time and place by Oktav’s kiss and Leopold’s kind look. She had stumbled through a magical passage into a domain of Woman, with a new awareness of her power and her vulnerability. The knowledge was exciting and felt good and right and necessary to her existence.

And she understood one thing clearly. She could not bear for Oktav Haas to have her as a husband has a wife.

“Good, you’re dressed,” Mutti bustled in. “Go down and check the flowers. I want them on the server. Lena always puts them on the table and they block everyone’s view. And be sweet to Oktav tonight, Marta. He’s such a fine young man.”

Marta turned to go, but Mutti stopped her and ran a finger over Marta’s face from cheek to chin. “What is that look? Do you think you can do better? Beauty makes you proud, but you’re still no more than a draper’s daughter. You should be grateful for Oktav’s interest.”

The daffodils were indeed in the middle of the table, a riot of yellow and white and orange. Marta lifted the offending blooms, her father’s favorites.

“Hello again.” Oktav appeared in the doorway, filling it with his confidence as much as his broad frame. “Let me carry those.” He took the vase in a show of gallantry then brushed against her breast with his forearm as he leaned near. “You will be mine, you know. Our mothers both want it. What can we do?”

As if it just occurred to him to make a show of wooing her, he put down the flowers and added a softer, “As do I, very much.” She backed away, but he grabbed her hands and pulled her close. “Have you no heart?” His arrogance evaporated; he seemed truly anguished. “Have you no feeling for what a man goes through, looking at you?”

Poor Oktav. He might have sparked some sympathy if he’d left out that last bit. People did say she had no kindness in her, and maybe it was true. How could she think of others when people were always looking at her? The stares were turning her into a cold and lifeless object.

But no. She wrenched her hands from Oktav’s grasp. He was wrong. If Leopold Singer had come to dinner, she would be full of fire.

At table she pushed her food with her fork and mumbled when Mutti included her in the talk. Oktav watched her as if she were already his. “Congratulations on completing your studies, Oktav,” Mutti said. “Have you decided where you will preach?”

“Decided, ha,” said Vati. “It puzzles me why a young man would become a Lutheran clergyman in the Holy Roman Empire. Not many prospects there.”

“And in a land Voltaire said was neither holy, Roman, nor an empire.” Oktav smiled, showing off his education. “I’m happy there’s a place for me here, serving the people I care for.”

“Prospects are funny things.” Vati continued as if Oktav had said nothing. “Just today, my daughter’s prospects have become much brighter.”

For a moment, Wolfram’s chewing was the only sound.

“What can you mean, my dear?” Mutti said.

“Only that she leaves for Vienna tomorrow. I had a letter from my sister today. She has got Marta a place at the school we talked about.”

“Mr. Schonreden!”

“You are becoming a pretty dish, my girl,” Vati said. “A little time in the city at a ladies’ school will add what’s needed to serve you up to some fine young man.”

Mutti’s fork clanged against her plate. “I never needed a fancy education to please you.”

“True. But our daughter may attract a fancier suitor than you did, and I will do my duty to see she has every advantage.”

Wolfram took his attention off his dinner. “He wants to fatten her for market like a hog, eh, Mutti?” he snorted, and she snorted with him. Any other day, Marta would object to being called a hog, but tonight it seemed the funniest thing in the world.

1799, London

On Jermyn Street, Leopold Singer stopped in front of a smart white townhouse trimmed with black iron railings to examine the contraption he’d bought from a street vendor over on Piccadilly. It would likely rain before he got to The Lost Bee, and he wanted to try the thing out.

The world these days was a fascinating place for a young man of mind and means, full of inventions, discoveries, news of geographical expeditions, the latest German music and English poetry. He was in England for the first time, the new century was only months away, and he would be twenty-one in the spring.
  

Lost in the umbrella’s mystery, he didn’t see an oncoming coach pull to a stop on the narrow road; nor did the man who stepped out of the coach have a care for anybody else. The two men collided, and the Englishman dropped a fine ash cane. Leopold caught before it touched the ground.

The precious thing felt welcome in his hand, pleased to be there. He twirled the stick with unconscious delight and with a deft movement returned it to its owner who snatched it back protectively.

As if Phaeton in his mad streak across the heavens had stumbled upon Orpheus emerging from the underworld, the two men locked eyes. Leopold felt an instant, irrational dislike of the other man – and sensed that the feeling was mutual.

They would make a fine study in contrasts. The Englishman’s neat strawberry-blond hair contrasted with the Leopold’s thick and loose brown curls. The lighter man was taller, thin, and blue-eyed, with the grace of a gazelle and dressed in the tight-fitting costume of a fashionable gentleman. Leopold was dark-eyed and more muscular, with the sleek but thicker strength of a panther and careless ease in his clothing and manner.

“Welcome back to Asherinton, Sir Carey.” The butler stepped out from the townhouse. “I hope you left Lady Branch in good health?”

“The baroness was in excellent health two days ago.” Sir Carey ignored Leopold and disappeared inside without offering, or waiting for, an apology.

Leopold tucked the umbrella under his arm. So that was Sir Carey Asher, one of his father’s partners in the
Maenad.
He continued on his walk. They would be introduced tomorrow night at the Duke of Gohrum’s supper.

He should cut short his stay in England. His education had become a too-long holiday from the real world, and in truth he spent little time at his studies. Were learning his goal, he would have better chosen the university at Edinburgh. Cambridge was more likely to turn him out in the image of that dandy with the walking stick than of David Hume or Adam Smith.

He attended lectures and argued about Revolution with chaps in the coffeehouses, sided with Burke against the Jacobeans, and fancied himself a good candidate for The Lunar Society, if only he’d been born a generation earlier. But it was all less than necessary to his happiness. Enough learning! He wanted to be doing.

He’d already adapted to London circadian rhythms. He breakfasted well after noon and dined at an hour when decent Austrians were asleep in their beds. He was a tourist of both mean and splendid places. The messy, alive jumble of London architecture and pickpockets and street vendors and theaters fed his imagination with far better stuff than the lectures of his professors, and a letter from his father had made him welcome through Gohrum into good company in town and the country.

Those weeks in August at Millam Hall were best forgotten, spent almost entirely in avoiding the daughter of a viscount, Lady Delia Devilliers. He had escaped after promising to attend Gohrum’s first London supper of the year, the one tomorrow night. It was only October, but the trickle had started, soon to become the river of society flowing back for another season of cards and cotillions, fortunes made and more fortunes undone, from the stories he’d heard.

A few cool drops of light rain fell as he entered St. James Square. The duke’s residence was on the other side of the square, a stark patch in all the white marble and red brick of the neighborhood. Gohrum House was close enough to his own rooms that he could walk tomorrow, if the rain had gone. He opened the umbrella into the path of an oncoming young woman.

“Oh, mux!” What an odd curse. It clearly betrayed a lack of deference to the superior being who had poked her in the eye.

“Pardon me, miss. I am an oaf.” He tossed aside the offending machine and grabbed her arm, but a stream of brown and white eggs rolled down the folds of her skirt, breaking on the grass in slow sequence, one upon another.

Within one half hour, that confounded umbrella had involved him in two clumsy encounters.
 

“Aren’t you, now.”

Charming. But then, she’d surely have to replace the eggs, and with money she was not likely to have. He picked up the empty basket. “You must let me refill this. But first, I was just on my way for a spiced coffee. Will you share a pot with me, as some small amends?”

The gentle rumble of his voice worked its magic, and she looked at him more kindly. Her strange eyes were gray and bright like clouds in sunlight. He hoped she’d say yes.

“I assure you, ladies find The Lost Bee quite suitable.”
 

They hurried through the rain, only a Scotch mist, down Charles Street, turned a few corners, and slipped into one of London’s innumerable coffeehouses. “They know me here,” Leopold said. “It’s where the coach from Gohrumshire stops.”

She suppressed a smile. She wasn’t pretty, and she wasn’t that much of a girl, at least a few years older than Leopold. But the dash in the rain had awakened his senses. He wished he could touch her hair.

“Mr. Leopold!” The middle-aged proprietress of The Lost Bee waddled toward them through the tables. “Give us those wet things, now that’s it.”

“Good day, Mrs. Jones.” She always clucked over him like his old nurse. He’d find it irritating at home, but in cold London he welcomed the solicitous attention.

“Isn’t this the charm of a sudden shower, to take shelter in a respectable establishment like my Bee?” She frowned at the girl’s thin shawl. “Caught by Nature, as it were, and forced to spend half an hour in pleasant conversation till things let up.”

Leopold asked for his companion’s name.

“Susan, sir. Susan Gray.”

“Ah, Susan, sir,” he teased. “Susan, sir, may I present Mrs. Jones, owner of this fine establishment. Mrs. Jones, I quite literally ran into Miss Gray and destroyed her groceries, so I’ve brought her to The Lost Bee for the best spiced coffee in London and to beg you to sell me a dozen of your fine eggs to replace those I broke.”

“Half dozen,” Miss Gray said.

Mrs. Jones took the shawl and umbrella and sighed as if his troubles were her own, muttering sufficiently loud, “Mr. Leopold being kind again, taking it into his mind to address some situation. The world’s full of sorry tales.”

The Lost Bee’s tables and even the floors were clean enough so not to repel ladies of quality. There was a window table available, but Mrs. Jones led them to a quiet corner. The scent of Susan’s hair reminded Leopold of springtime at home. He felt a loss of self-control, at once alarming and delightful.

For so long that it seemed a natural fact of his life, he had judged himself smarter, bolder, kinder, and more capable than most people he met. Susan was the last sort of person he should feel equal to—a foreigner, a servant, a woman – yet he felt at ease in her company as if there were no distinction between them of rank or sex. They’d exchanged but a few words, yet he sensed that she knew him completely.