giovanni Antonius Rossi was dead. Plague or poison, the Viennese weren’t sure which, but when the old virtuoso’s pupil and servant were found missing, they suspected the latter. But the body was untouched when the Baroness’s valet discovered him—his golden-buckled shoes still on his feet, his silver fob-watch still in his pocket, his jeweled rings still pinching the base of his gnarled and weathered fingers. No thieves they, those two boys, but their absence was damning, for if they had nothing to do with their master’s death, then why disappear?
The city guards came for the body, to be borne away and dumped in an unmarked grave like all the rest. The Viennese no longer buried their dead within city limits for fear of spreading disease, and highborn and low, rich and poor, moldered together in common. No party followed the funereal wagon that left the city gates down the road to St. Mark’s Cemetery, for although Master Antonius had been a famous virtuoso in life, he was just another poor musician in death.
From darkened alleyways, François watched the sad pine box grow smaller in the distance. When he came to dress the old man and found a body instead, he knew he would have to make himself scarce. He had seen what happened to other men his color once their masters died under mysterious circumstances. They were not around to tell their side of the tale. The youth knew his skin would make him a target, just as he knew his master’s death would be the cause of his doom.
François had known this day would come ever since he was torn from his Maman’s arms and thrust like so much baggage onto the ship that bore him away from Saint-Domingue to France. No shelter, no security would ever be his, not when he was the only black pearl among a dozen ordinary ones. So he went to ground after Master Antonius’s death, vanishing into the foxholes where he could blend in with the shadows and dregs of the underworld. And so he would have stayed with the madams and mistresses of the brothels and pleasure dens were it not for his one weakness: his heart.
He had always known that Josef was not meant for his world. The trading of flesh and favors, the crass, the carnal, the dirty, the vulgar: such things made his companion wilt and wither, but it was more than a distaste for the common and the low. The love François bore for the other boy was sweet and tender, hot and fierce all at once, but Josef never evinced anything more than a polite disinterest in such affairs. François knew that Josef’s love for him was more metaphysical than physical. He understood that their bond was not of the body, but of the mind and of the soul.
It was what made their treatment at the hands of their former master so unbearable. So when François found Josef that fateful morning, standing over the body of their teacher with a glazed expression on his face, he held no blame, only fear in his heart.
In the immediate aftermath of their flight from Vienna above, François and Josef took shelter with L’Odalisque, one of the grand dames of the underworld. Unlike several of the girls in her employ, she was not a Turk, but peddled fantasies of the Orient with cheap silk and opium. There were many things François regretted about staying with L’Odalisque, but it was the laudanum he regretted most.
Josef had always been delicate, different, dreamy. He was moody and melancholy, and François had learned to temper those tempests with patience and compassion, but the girls of L’Odalisque were not so caring. Most were lost in an opium haze, their dilated eyes large and lustrous, their language lush, their movements languid. When they first arrived at L’Odalisque’s, Josef had been quiet and withdrawn, but as the days, weeks, and months went on, François watched the blue of his beloved’s eyes slowly become swallowed by the black of dreams and delirium.
He tried hiding the bottles of laudanum. He took over managing L’Odalisque’s ledgers, painstakingly accounting for each trip to the apothecary, the doctor, the midwife. He never saw a single drop of the opium tincture cross Josef’s lips, but the blond boy grew hazier and more distant by the day, speaking in cryptic riddles, half-finished thoughts, words twisting in upon themselves like a labyrinth, mise en abyme.
At first François thought it was his imperfect grasp of German that was the source of his confusion. The girls of L’Odalisque often spoke of a tall, elegant stranger who approached them in their poppy-laced stupor.
“What is the tall, elegant stranger?” François asked.
The dark and the danger, the fear and the fury, they would reply. He rides with horse and with hound, but beware! It is madness to stare into his eyes.
And so François believed it was merely a fanciful turn of phrase for laudanum dreams, until one day, they found Josef standing over the body of the youngest girl, Antoinette. She had been discovered dead in her room, lips blue, and a silver slash on her throat.
The tall, elegant stranger! the others cried. The stranger strikes again!
But Antoinette had not been a lover of the poppy. Not for her was the endless sleep of one more sip, one more taste, one last oblivion.
“Who is this stranger?” François demanded of Martina, Antoinette’s best friend in the house. “What does he look like?”
“He looks like me,” Josef said dreamily. “I look in the mirror and the tall, elegant stranger is me.”
It was then that François knew his beloved had gone where he could not follow. He thought of the promise he had made Josef’s sister in another time, another life.
Take care of him.
I will.
And he would.
Later that night, he stole paper, ink, and Josef’s prints of the suite known as Der Erlkönig, scribbled with notes and markings in the blond boy’s inimitable, unpracticed hand.
“I’m sorry, mon coeur,” François whispered. “Je suis désolé.”
Slowly, carefully, he lifted letters and rearranged them into a plea for help.
Master Antonius is dead. I am in Vienna. Come quickly.
François hoped his beloved’s sister would come soon.
He could no longer do this alone.