The Earl of Gloria leaned back in his private box, away from the see-and-be-seen crowd, and let cascades of music wash over the serene darkness behind his closed eyes.
Sixty-four was not old, these days. It didn’t look old, on a man blessed with perfect health, magnificent bone structure, and excellent skin. What matter, that he’d let his hair turn to silver instead of dyeing it back to its youthful gold? No dye could match that shade, anyway. Best to be dignified, accept the colour changes in his wardrobe: hot pink and warm turquoise abandoned for deep strong crimsons, mysterious storm-dark purples, icy blue. Winter, instead of Summer.
But at the moment, sixty-four felt old.
Such fire, such passion! The nineteen-year-old violinist – barely more than a girl – had such searing life within her, that the rapt audience should have squirmed with envy. For all the things they might have dreamed and never done. For all the promise spread before her like a feast, which they could only savour by proxy.
Dorian Red Gloria felt only love, and a bittersweet regret rendered, by the years, as familiar as a friend.
Earlier in the week, he’d deftly broken into the young woman’s hotel room and left behind a long, slim box. All without a trace – just because he didn’t dare the wilder escapades of his youth, didn’t mean he wasn’t able. And he was still Eroica, the legendary thief Interpol had never caught.
He had not lingered to see if the violinist had accepted or rejected the new bow. Dark wood, the best bowstrings money and underworld contacts could arrange, the cunning inlaid gem of grey-green jade – the bow had been created for her, both her identity and his carefully-screened from the makers. Even if the paparazzi traced the gift, the trail went no further.
Dorian was grateful this lovely girl didn’t stir him as Klaus had, that he’d never been tempted into an introduction or even a written explanation. It would have been simply wrong. They were two different stories, set in two different times.
It had been thus, for over a dozen years. Since the moment at a stuffy diplomatic party, when a German aristocrat proudly showed off his girl-child’s musical gifts and waifish beauty. Dorian remembered candles and Christmas trees, a piano like some huge open-jawed black beast, and a tiny figure in white lace and ruffles sitting confidently at the bench. He couldn’t even remember what she’d played, perhaps some airy melody from Mozart. But the light on short, sleek dark hair had stopped Dorian’s breath in his throat. And when the child’s eyes had looked out at her audience, the gray-green shimmer had told Dorian all he needed to know.
Klaus had had cousins. Though this child didn’t bear the name, the stamp of Tyrian Persimmon’s features told anyone who looked closely that she was an Eberbach.
Now, at nineteen, she was beauty fulfilled, calm maturity beyond her years, and tempered innocence that had nothing to do with ignorance. There had been unsuitable suitors – neither her father’s efforts nor Dorian’s own shadowy guardianship could prevent it. But she made it clear to those who wanted her that the music, and her family, came first.
A ruddy-haired young man sat with her parents in the first row. Dorian approved of this one, as much for the honest love shining in the youth’s eyes as for the flawless background check. When she could, the violinist smiled back at her young man, and laughter made her music all the richer.
Dorian opened his eyes, daring for the first time this evening to focus his opal and gold opera glasses on the violinist.
Yes! She used the new bow.
But then, she had accepted all of his anonymous gifts, even when her parents had feared a stalker. She hadn’t. Some part of her knew and understood the rules of their interaction. No direct contact between them. No words spoken, relayed, or written. He didn’t push, and she didn’t seek. Eroica’s knives and cunning had needed to defend her only once from kidnappers, before the Cartel quietly relayed the word that this one was not to be hindered or hurt.
That debt had cost Dorian much, but he was glad to pay it.
She must never need to know how to clean and load a gun in total silence, and shoot it with deadly accuracy. How to stalk, infiltrate, interrogate, and kill in a dozen swift ways. How to live in a bleak and joyless world made up of only duty and honour. How to keep one’s teeth shut on secrets – the inner music unsuspected by anyone else, and the love suspected but never proven by its object.
How to die alone, sequestered in a private hospital, over the course of just two months.
No, she would not have to know any of that. Only love, and life, and music.
Her sobbing, triumphant violin sent tears leaking down the Earl’s nearly-unlined cheeks. He’d never heard this particular score played before. Programme notes, when consulted, only mentioned the encore as an untitled, unfinished piece composed by a distant cousin of the incomparable musician herself.
The original score was a yellowed notebook Dorian had found hidden in the records at the Major’s hospital. Dorian suspected the dying man had bribed a nurse to guard it after he couldn’t, to place it where heirs couldn’t discover it. But where, perhaps, one determined and obsessed thief might?
No one would ever know.
Such emotion, in those notes! Like the wax imprint of sound-waves on antique records, they preserved the mind-set of a man long dead: Dorian heard rage and shame, at a miserable, self-inflicted death that fell morally just short of suicide and cowardice. Pride, for jobs
efficiently and correctly done, a life dedicated to serving country and justice. Bewilderment, that pride and honour were not enough. Dorian thought he heard love innate to the music, deeper even than the violinist’s joy.
The halting melody he associated with a love-theme took over everything else in the music, swelled to an epiphany that left nearly everyone in the audience teary-eyed – and stopped, abruptly silent, in the middle of a measure.
Just where it stopped in the frail old notebook. Where the neat marks of the pen wavered like a seismograph charting an earth tremor, then arced away in a meaningless scrawl. Dorian didn’t know, but he suspected that had been the final moment of Klaus von dem Eberbach’s conscious life.
She hadn’t finished it. He was glad. She was the only person in the world with the right to end it, to make the music better and complete. But she’d known enough to leave it, the unfinished epitaph to an incomplete life.
She would write her own masterpieces, Dorian knew. And they’d be legendary – all her own, her story, not some lost cousin’s.
Amid the thundering applause that came after nearly a minute of stunned silence, the Earl of Gloria slumped back into his chair. Breathless, his own soft cry lost in the noise, unafraid and smiling at the total irony of the moment.
Sixty-four, it seemed, was precisely old enough.
finis