City of Lost Dreams

FORTY-FOUR

It was a white Christmas in Prague. Sarah looked out the window of Lobkowicz Palace and watched as snow silently blanketed the red roofs of the city. The black tongue of the Vltava was barely visible, tram lines erased, cars buried. Nothing moved in the streets below her. The twenty-first century had been brought to a halt in its tracks, and the world she gazed upon was the same world seen from this window over the centuries.

She could see a lot if she wanted to. But mostly she was practicing controlling her ability to see the past. Especially when the future was so interesting.

Sarah finally shut her laptop and picked up her hot mug of svarene víno, having fired off the last of her applications for music conductor internships. She was considering some intriguing places, though she had decided against Vienna. Berlin, though. Also Paris, Siena, and London. An interesting new program in Istanbul. Well, wherever she ended up, she knew that standing in front of an orchestra, hearing each instrument individually and at the same time as part of a whole that was so much greater than the sum of its parts—that was where she was meant to be.

But right now she was meant to be here. The museum was closed for the day, and Max had set a long table in the Balcony Room, where they had gathered to eat, drink, and watch the storm. He had rolled the piano in from the Music Room, and Pollina was alternating between the Messiah and hilariously elaborate renditions of “Frosty the Snowman.” Beneath the piano, a puppy—a rescue from the shelter on Pujmanové who might grow up to be a large terrier or, Jose joked, a grizzly bear—batted a tennis ball at Pols’s feet. Pollina tapped it back to her. She had named her Natasha, in honor of Boris.

Nico, in an apron embroidered with the alchemical symbol for poison, was refusing Jose’s offer of help in removing a giant roast goose from the oven. “I wanted the more traditional swan,” he teased, surveying it for doneness, “but at the public gardens Moritz wasn’t quick enough. Pass the powdered bezoar, would you—I want to give this bird some zing.”

To spare the delicate sensibilities of the mortals’ feelings on rats-in-the-kitchen, Hermes remained hidden in Nico’s apron pocket, fortified by a peppermint drop.

Oksana was mashing the potatoes and talking about arranging a troika ride for later in the day. Sarah had no idea where they would get three horses, not to mention a troika, but had no doubt it would happen, if Oksana were in charge.

Harriet Hunter had not reappeared. She was perhaps celebrating Christmas with Charles Dickens or Napoléon. Or her mother.

Bettina Müller’s body had been transported back to Austria and buried in Vienna’s Central Cemetery not far from that of Ludwig Boltzmann, a Viennese physicist who’d studied the visible properties of matter, also a suicide. The city’s cafés were full of gossip about the deadly love triangle she had been part of. Her lab was now occupied by a delightful chemist, Alessandro reported. Sarah was fairly sure what “delightful” was a euphemism for, and that Alessandro was not having a solo buon Natale.

She’d had a postcard of Apollo from Renato and Thomas, who were spending the holidays together at a beach house on the Greek island of Symi.

Marie-Franz’s card said she had begun her book on Mesmer and was looking forward to the ball season getting into full swing. She did not plan to have fat injected into her soles in order to waltz all night: Strauss will keep me dancing on air, she wrote.

The grave of Elizabeth Weston remained empty, as it had been for four hundred years.

The von Hohenlohe brothers’ castle had been seized by the state as part of a criminal investigation into corporate espionage and afterward would be undergoing renovations. Archduke Ferdinand’s Kunstkammer was scheduled to open in the summer to the general public. The newly restored castle would no doubt be one of Innsbruck’s most fascinating attractions. Philippine Welser’s De re coquinaria had been moved to the Austrian National Library in Vienna, where scholars would have easy access to it. Gottfried von Hohenlohe had confessed to stealing Bettina Müller’s laptop on behalf of his brother, Heinrich. Heinrich’s company denied all knowledge of Heinrich’s activities. His role in the deaths of Nina Fischer, Gerhard Schmitt, and Felix Dorfmeister was under quiet investigation, but he had been jailed and publicly excoriated for setting fire to the stables of the Spanish Riding School. For saving the horses, Gottfried had been pardoned of all crimes. A recent Internet poll had named him “Austria’s Sexiest Man Alive.”

On an anonymous tip, the police had raided a house just outside of Kutná Hora and found a trove of stolen objects, most of them dusty old apothecaries’ jars that, having been returned to the museums whence they’d come, were once more interred on basement shelves. Since the museums’ curators hadn’t actually noticed they were missing, they also didn’t notice that some of them were not returned.

Moritz, gnawing on a bone under the table, had to move as Sarah’s and Max’s ankles entwined.

After dinner, Pollina played the overture of her new opera, The Golden Fleece. It was a story of ambition and compassion and heroism and sacrifice. Transgression and redemption. Wisdom and folly. And love. And death.

It was a story of life.