Fatal Inheritance (13 page)

Rose poked my arm. It was the very piece that her professor had mentioned! The small boy slid into the performance with a theme so wistful that it brought to mind images of infinite sadness and nostalgia, interrupted once or twice by strident chords indicative of a sudden spurt of rage. Just as I was allowing myself to be lulled by the spirit of this part, he launched into something quite different; a kind of dance of Puckish sprites which leapt and laughed without a stop as though they were rushing all over the room. After a few minutes of this, the air was suddenly filled with wrenching chords, like sobs torn from the very entrails, ending with a tragic weeping. Then began the real madness, accompanied by the gentle touch of the woman at the piano, whose role, essentially a series of soft chords, served to accentuate the wild peculiarity of the violin music, which now soared and dived, slowed and rushed forth again, leapt and above all trilled – lengthening the whole notion of trill from the usual pretty ornament to a terrifying, unending cackle of diabolical laughter, twisting agilely in and out of the realm which links beauty and madness. It ended with a single note repeated manically again and again to distraction – and then the burst of a grand farewell.

Rose and I began spontaneously to clap, and heaped praise upon the young artist. Rising, we then thanked the professor for having given us the opportunity to hear this extraordinary student, and asked if there might be a moment when he could see us privately. He seemed quite pleased and gave us an appointment in his office upstairs for six o’clock. Closing the door behind us, we emerged into the grey, chilly day and bent our steps towards a nearby tea room. My excitement had been stimulated to fever pitch by the wait, but even more so by the music itself, which was obsessional, possessing. I hurried Rose inside and ordered tea, and we set to discussing the events of the day.

‘Do you think Mrs Cavendish was really adopted, or did she just tell Sebastian that in order to console him?’ Rose asked.

‘Oh, I think it must be true. I can’t imagine that anyone would invent a thing like that. There would be plenty of other ways of learning to deal with Sebastian’s feelings, and this one might become rather a burden in the end, what with his hinting it but not feeling right about saying it openly.’

‘That’s true. It would be a very odd thing to invent. But you do see why I still think it might be possible?’

‘No. Tell me.’

‘Why, it’s because of what Professor Pezze said about Sebastian’s resemblance to Joseph Krieger. I wouldn’t believe it from anyone else, perhaps, but with him – it would be the first time I ever put even one syllable he pronounced in doubt. He knows and feels music right through every fibre of his body. It would be astonishing if he were wrong about this.’

‘Well,’ I said thoughtfully, ‘but he did know beforehand that Krieger was the grandfather – it’s not as though he deduced it just from seeing Sebastian play. So perhaps he had a prejudice in his mind.’

‘You don’t know Professor Pezze. It’s simply inconceivable that he could imagine some musical relationship that doesn’t really exist!’

‘Sebastian – the grandson and yet not the grandson,’ I said, and suddenly a great flash of light burst blindingly into my mind! ‘I have an idea, Rose! Perhaps Sebastian was not actually his mother’s son, after all! Perhaps he, too, was adopted! Maybe his real mother was Lydia K – and maybe she really was Krieger’s own daughter!’

So excited was I by this seemingly incredible discovery that I could hardly breathe. I tried to remember exactly what Dr Bernstein had written about Lydia K. She had left Basel when she was 24 years old, and it was in the summer of 1874.

‘Exactly how old was Sebastian?’ I asked Rose.

‘He was twenty-four.’

‘So he would have been twenty-five this year; he must have been born in 1875. That would be the reason why she never returned to Basel! It’s possible, it’s very possible. It would explain so much!’

‘You mean that you think that the Kriegers might have adopted Mrs Cavendish even if they had a daughter of their own? Why would they do that?’

‘There could be any number of reasons. Perhaps close friends of theirs died and left an orphan child behind. Rose, I believe we are getting closer to the truth. Just think! Here’s Sebastian, denying outright that he can have inherited anything from his grandfather, and certain that he’s right, because he knows that his mother is an adopted child. Yet people keep mentioning it, perhaps people like Professor Pezze, people he trusts, so he can’t help but be puzzled somewhere deep inside. On that evening in Zürich, he unexpectedly receives indications that his mother might have had a sister whom he resembles remarkably and whose existence was completely hidden from him. Do you not think he might jump to the conclusion that the mysterious Lydia could be his real mother – and also the real daughter of his grandparents? I can imagine that such an idea would send him rushing to try to discover the truth!’

‘Oh, Vanessa, it all hangs together – it’s very possible!’ she cried. ‘If only we could find out more.’

‘Well, perhaps we will. Hopefully, we will be leafing through Prosper Sainton’s papers in less than an hour.’

‘Hum. We’d probably better be prepared for disappointment,’ she warned wisely. Who knows what Professor Wessely might have done with his old papers – who knows if he even actually really kept them, or whether they might not be somewhere unavailable, like in his far-off home in Hungary. And even if we find them, who knows whether they contain anything more than remarks about music – or boring information like “Saw J.K. today” – or even worse, no information about Joseph Krieger at all!’

‘Stop, stop! We must be optimistic!’ I answered firmly, calling the waitress over to pay for our tea.

‘All right, we shall be.’ She stood up and gave her head a little shake. ‘But Vanessa, there’s still something I don’t understand. If this new idea is right, then Sebastian couldn’t have discovered anything dreadful about his mother’s true parents. I mean about Mrs Cavendish’s true parents. What I mean is, if he realised she wasn’t his real mother, then no matter who they were, it wouldn’t matter to him. Not in terms of the “cursed inheritance”, at any rate.’

‘No, that’s true,’ I agreed. ‘This would change all of that. If we’re right, it was Lydia K he was concerned with.’

‘Still, though. Even if our theory is true, no matter how angry he might have been to discover that his mother had hidden it all from him, I simply can’t see why he should kill himself over it!’

‘The “cursed inheritance”,’ I said. ‘I wonder if somehow, he found out something terrible about Lydia herself. I wonder what happened to Lydia? If her sister adopted her baby, it could be that she died—’

‘—or went raving mad! Could that be it?’

‘It could. And yet, even if she did—’

‘—no matter how dreadfully, it still doesn’t seem like a reason for Sebastian to take his own life! It doesn’t, Vanessa. No matter what happened to her, it doesn’t. Does it?’

‘No,’ I admitted. ‘No, it doesn’t. There’s still a lot we don’t know.’

Unspoken words remained in the air as we gathered up our things and left.

When we arrived at the eminent music teacher’s office at six o’clock precisely, we found his door standing welcomingly open. He was inside, bent over a musical score in the company of the small boy we had heard earlier, and they were studying it together with animation. Professor Wessely looked up as we entered, waved us to some leather chairs, and packed the boy off, carrying the music and his violin, to go and practise it by himself.

‘I am so glad that you have come,’ he said. ‘Young Wolfe is an exceptional child. I believe that he may be the greatest talent I have ever seen among my students; perhaps the greatest that the Royal Academy has ever seen. You heard his playing. It is astounding for a boy of ten. With proper teaching and nurturing, I believe there is no limit that he may not surpass.’

Rose and I glanced at each other, slightly surprised.

‘He is quite wonderful,’ she agreed. ‘We are really delighted to have had the opportunity to hear him play. Now, what we—’

‘The search for some kind of financial support is not easy,’ the professor went on firmly. ‘People are not used to such cases nowadays. But this is something really special. When I was a child in Hungary, there, at that time, there were children who were able to work and learn like this child. I do not say they necessarily possessed the same gift. I myself, for instance, realised as I grew up that my vocation was to be a teacher; that passing on to students the wonderful secrets of technical accomplishments and the splendid approach to musical interpretation that I had learnt from the best of the Hungarian teachers, laden with all of their traditions, was my true destiny in life, and not to play solo upon the grand stages of Europe. But the devotion, the inspiration, the effort I devoted to the violin as a child – these have all but disappeared in our modern time. Young Wolfe is the first child I have seen of the young generation to possess this kind of depth. It would be impossible to choose a more worthy object of aid and support.’

He paused expectantly, but we did not know what to say in the face of what was turning out to be quite an embarrassing misunderstanding. Apparently the professor had been expecting possible sponsors to come and hear his prodigy, and had taken us for them. This was unfortunate, as neither Rose nor I commanded the kind of finances that could cover the support of a young child over a period of years, however deserving.

‘Wolfe comes from South Africa,’ Professor Wessely said, deciding to pursue his effort in the face of our silence, ‘and he arrived in this country on the recommendation of his teacher there, who wrote a letter to me explaining that no teacher in the country could do justice to a talent of this magnitude. He has come with his mother, leaving father and siblings behind. But the mother is not sure that she should stay; helping this gifted youngster deprives the others of a mother, but returning to them would leave this one nearly in the situation of an orphan, although of course I would look after him as much as time would allow me to do so. In the meantime, however, they have barely enough money to survive. That is why it is so important to find some person who will accept to offer the gift of a scholarship. I believe that that person will be gratified, in just a few years, by seeing young Wolfe Wolfinsohn become the name of one of the legendary violinists of the new century.’

I sat calculating a number of possible but unsatisfactory remarks in my mind and discarding them all. But Rose began to speak, and I realised as I listened that she had had a stroke of genius which might just turn out to be of benefit to everyone, as well as satisfying our immediate purposes.

‘Unfortunately, we ourselves are not in a situation to be able to provide the amount of financial help that Wolfe would need,’ she said kindly, ‘but the reason we are here is because we are acquainted with someone who is in such a situation, and who, we believe, seeks an opportunity to do some good in the musical world, having recently undergone a terrible loss. I am speaking of Mrs Cavendish, the mother of Sebastian Cavendish. You know about him, I presume?’

‘Mrs Cavendish! Of course I know of the terrible tragedy,’ he replied. ‘The poor woman. Is it possible that she can be thinking of helping others at a time like this? That would be very courageous of her, indeed.’

‘It is something of a consolation, or perhaps, I should better say, a manner of actively expressing her grief,’ said Rose smoothly. ‘It is not something she is determined upon yet, merely a vague idea, and, as you can imagine, she is not in a state to search out the possibilities for herself. You are acquainted with her?’

‘I am not, although I have seen her more than once, at the recitals and auditions here,’ he replied. ‘Naturally, I knew her son and even coached him in the occasional chamber music group when he was a student. A phenomenal talent, although not so astonishing an early-bloomer as Wolfe, and perhaps more brash than deep in a certain manner. But that is merely according to my taste and my tradition. Sebastian is a great loss to the future of British violin playing, there is no doubt about that. I will write to Mrs Cavendish.’

I paused at this, wondering whether our inventions might not end up by getting us into trouble, but it was impossible to back off now. And even if she disliked the idea, I could not imagine Mrs Cavendish answer the professor’s request otherwise but courteously. ‘There is another thing,’ I gabbled, in a hasty desire to steer the conversation away from scholarships. ‘You probably know that Mrs Cavendish’s father was the late Joseph Krieger.’

‘Yes, I have heard that,’ he assented, his interest aroused.

‘Well, having lost her father as a very young child, she has always been interested in learning anything she could about him, and now, at this dreadful time, it seems she has vaguely had the idea of beginning to write his biography.’

Rose glanced at me quickly, then added,

‘It would be a way of remembering family ties, and those who have passed away.’

‘I quite understand,’ he said, looking as though he didn’t, which was perfectly natural, given the hasty and haphazard nature of our inventions. I quickly handed him Professor Mackenzie’s note.

‘The Director told us that you may have quite a lot of interesting information about Joseph Krieger in your possession,’ I explained, ‘amongst the private papers of Prosper Sainton. He remembers that they used to be friends, and then quarrelled.’

‘I have heard that Joseph Krieger quarrelled with everyone,’ he murmured. ‘It would not make much of a topic for biographical writing.’

‘But he had a family, many important acquaintances in the musical world, and innumerable concerts and interesting encounters and experiences,’ I improvised. ‘Professor Mackenzie thinks that Prosper Sainton may have written about these things during the period of their friendship.’

‘It is possible,’ he said. ‘I have not read much of his private papers, I must tell you honestly, because they are mostly written in French. From the little I have seen, they may be historically quite interesting. It has been one of my long-standing projects to find a French student to properly read and classify them for the Archives of the Academy. Do you read French?’ Upon our both nodding breathlessly, he pulled out his watch, glanced at it, and said,

‘I must go and teach for one hour now. An extra lesson for a student who has not been working well lately. I would not wish the documents to leave my office. May I entrust you with them here until my return?’

We assented with alacrity, almost unable to believe our luck, as he opened the cupboard directly behind him and extracted two large piles of disordered notebooks and papers. Much of the heap consisted of annotated musical scores and exercises. He swiftly separated those out and put them back, leaving us with a large quantity of yellowed envelopes addressed in the scratchy copper-plate of fifty years ago, and more than a dozen notebooks covered with writing in a crabbed but legible hand.

The moment the door had closed behind him, Rose took up a handful of papers and said,

‘Well – our first worry has melted into thin air. Now we just have to hope that Monsieur Sainton was a terrific gossip at heart!’ And she set to examining the letters in the envelopes with a great speed that was no doubt due more to the three or four summers she had spent at chamber music festivals in the mountains of France than to the rudiments of French grammar that I had dutifully inculcated into her as a child. Not to mention the helpful fact that, unlike the diaries, at least half of the letters were actually written in a language we both spoke fluently.

I took up the notebooks, and soon found that as I became used to the old Frenchman’s handwriting, the speed of my ability to spell out his words increased. I put aside everything concerned with the years following Joseph Krieger’s death, and concentrated on the earlier ones, going through them from the year 1844, in which Prosper Sainton had first arrived in England. I saw immediately that the diaries were a wonderful place to look for information. He wrote in their pages no more than once or twice each month, but when he did, he described concerts, encounters and anecdotes in a breezy and amusing tone which made me suspect that he was perhaps doing it with a view to writing his memoirs one day. And a fascinating book they would have made. The names of musicians and composers, familiar and unfamiliar, filled the pages as he followed their careers: he had known Berlioz, Alkan, Chopin, Mazas, Liszt while at the Paris Conservatoire, and followed their careers all through the years, attending their concerts in London and playing their orchestral music. He described leading his orchestra in the position of concertmaster through innumerable concerts, of which the most unforgettable, he wrote with an eager hand, was an extraordinary performance of Beethoven’s violin concerto conducted by none other than the great Mendelssohn himself, and performed by a boy of twelve whose name, Joseph Joachim, returned repeatedly in the pages of the diary. I searched in vain, however, for a mention of Joseph Krieger.

Rose was the first to make a find.

‘Vanessa, Vanessa, quick, look!’

I jumped out of my seat and read over her shoulder a short note written in English, in a bold handwriting whose pointed letters denoted a German origin. The note mentioned that the author had been invited to a luncheon and had heard that Mr Sainton was also to be there. ‘It will be a good opportunity for us to discuss the questions you raised the other day,’ it read. I turned over the sheet to read the back, and my eye fell upon the signature.

‘Joseph Krieger!’

‘Yes – isn’t it eerie? We’ve heard so much about him, and now we have something concrete: a letter from his very own hand! Look at the date; August 1848. So we know they knew each other then. Perhaps you could skip directly to there in the diaries.’

The notebooks for 1844, 1845 and 1846 having proved disappointing, I followed the hint, took up the one from 1848, and was rewarded almost at once. In that year, Joseph Krieger had played a large part in the life of Prosper Sainton. Sainton had left the Royal Italian Opera to lead an orchestra known as the Queen’s Band, and he desired to consolidate the reputation of the Queen’s Band by organising a series of concerts presenting the most prestigious soloists of Europe. The invitations closest to his heart, the ones he took care of personally, concerned the violinists, and detailed descriptions of his correspondence and negotiations with them filled a generous portion of the diary’s pages. While they mainly sought the great soloists from the continent – Henri Vieuxtemps from Belgium, Joseph Joachim from Germany – London did provide Joseph Krieger, who was persuaded, once, twice and then a third time to perform with the orchestra, playing some of the most splendid concertos in the world, and invariably astounding the audience by following them up with encore pieces played with a virtuosity that had not been seen since the days of Paganini! Sainton spoke of the lion’s head violin and of Krieger’s hands and his long and exceptionally flexible fingers. I showed the passage to Rose.

‘They sound exactly like Sebastian’s hands,’ she said, looking up at me.

Soon after the beginning of 1848, it became obvious that Sainton was courting Krieger, professionally speaking, and their contacts were increasingly frequent. Sainton managed to be at many a social event where Krieger was invited as well, and even became acquainted with the ephemeral figure of Mrs Krieger, a thin, sad, pale woman (
‘maigre, triste et pâle’
), as he wrote, who seemed ‘lost when not standing at her husband’s side, and nervous when she was’.

A few weeks farther on in the diary, I read something which made me sit up.

‘As we played for a moment with our host’s delightful three-year-old daughter,’ I read, ‘Mrs Krieger’s eyes filled with tears, which began to run down her cheeks. I felt quite embarrassed (‘
gêné
’) and yet very sympathetic, and she explained to me that she, also, had once had a daughter, named Xanthe, who had been very ill and died in the countryside where she had been sent to get well. Controlling her weeping with difficulty, she told me that she longed for children to love and care for. But she cannot be much under fifty, and will surely never have another. It is very sad.’

I went on and on, with Rose now reading over my shoulder, and it was in the entries for the month of September that we suddenly struck gold.

‘All musical London is buzzing with the rumour that Joseph Krieger and his wife have adopted two small orphans. In my opinion, it is his wife’s desire alone, but it was good of him to comply with her wishes.’

And in December, giving an account of one of the carefully organised concerts with the Queen’s Band, complete with a description of Joseph Krieger’s flabbergasting rendition of Mozart’s fifth violin concerto (
‘he played the so-called Turkish chromatic passages in the final movement with a lascivious daring that could leave no doubt as to his interpretation, if the question may still be asked about
Mozart’s intentions’
), he recounted seeing Mrs Krieger after the concert and asking after the children.
‘She seems a different woman,’
he wrote,
‘still nervous, tense and shy, certainly, but stronger. The little girls have given her a new purpose in life. I am glad for her, because she is a good woman, and deserves this happiness.’