"That is a very tactful description of my disability, Mother. And altogether true. Were you to sing one of these pieces"—his finger, longer and more slender, but nearly the same size as Mother Hildegarde's, tapped the parchment with a soft rustling noise—"I could not tell it from the Kyrie Eleison or from ‘La Dame fait bien'—except by the words," he added, with a grin.
Now it was Mother Hildegarde's turn to laugh.
"Indeed, Monsieur Fraser," she said. "Well, at least you listen to the words!" She took the sheaf of papers into her hands, riffling the tops. I could see the faint swelling of her throat above the tight band of her wimple as she read, as though she was singing silently to herself, and one large foot twitched slightly, keeping time.
Jamie sat very still upon his stool, good hand folded over the crooked one on his knee, watching her. The slanted blue eyes were intent, and he paid no attention to the ongoing noise from the depths of the Hôpital behind him. Patients cried out, orderlies and nuns shouted back and forth, family members shrieked in sorrow or dismay, and the muted clang of metal instruments echoed off the ancient stones of the building, but neither Jamie nor Mother Hildegarde moved.
At last she lowered the pages, peering at him over the tops. Her eyes were sparkling, and she looked suddenly like a young girl.
"I think you are right!" she said. "I cannot take time to think it over carefully just now"—she glanced toward the doorway, momentarily darkened by the form of an orderly dashing past with a large sack of lint—"but there is something odd here." She tapped the pages on the desk, straightening them into an orderly stack.
"How extraordinary," she said.
"Be that as it may, Mother—can you, with your gift, discern what this particular pattern is? It would be difficult; I have reason to suppose that it is a cipher, and that the language of the message is English, though the text of the songs is in German."
Mother Hildegarde uttered a small grunt of surprise.
"English? You are sure?"
Jamie shook his head. "Not sure, no, but I think so. For one reason, there is the country of origin; the songs were sent from England."
"Well, Monsieur," she said, arching one eyebrow. "Your wife speaks English, does she not? And I imagine that you would be willing to sacrifice her company to assist me in performing this endeavor for you?"
Jamie eyed her, the half-smile on his face the mirror image of hers. He glanced down at his feet, where Bouton's whiskers quivered with the ghost of a growl.
"I'll make ye a bargain, Mother," he said. "If your wee dog doesna bite me in the arse on the way out, you can have my wife."
And so, that evening, instead of returning home to Jared's house in the Rue Tremoulins, I took supper with the sisters of the Couvent des Anges at their long refectory table, and then retired for the evening's work to Mother Hildegarde's private rooms.
There were three rooms in the Superior's suite. The outer one was furnished as a sitting room, with a fair degree of richness. This, after all, was where she must often receive official visitors. The second room was something of a shock, simply because I wasn't expecting it. At first, I had the impression that there was nothing in the small room but a large harpsichord, made of gleaming, polished walnut, and decorated with small, hand-painted flowers sprouting from a twisting vine that ran along the sounding board above glowing ebony keys.
On second look, I saw a few other bits of furniture in the room, including a set of bookshelves that ran the length of one wall, stuffed with works on musicology and hand-stitched manuscripts much like the one Mother Hildegarde now laid on the harpsichord's rack.
She motioned me to a chair placed before a small secretary against one wall.
"You will find blank paper and ink there, milady. Now, let us see what this little piece of music may tell us."
The music was written on heavy parchment, the lines of the staves cleanly ruled across the page. The notes themselves, the clef signs, rests, and accidentals, were all drawn with considerable care; this was plainly a final clean copy, not a draft or a hastily scribbled tune. Across the top of the page was the title "Lied des Landes." A Song of the Country.
"The title, you see, suggests something simple, like a volkslied," Mother Hildegarde said, pointing one long, bony forefinger at the page. "And yet the form of the composition is something quite different. Can you read music at sight?" The big right hand, large-knuckled and short-nailed, descended on the keys with an impossibly delicate touch.
Leaning over Mother Hildegarde's black-clad shoulder, I sang the first three lines of the piece, making the best I could of the German pronunciation. Then she stopped playing, and twisted to look up at me.
"That is the basic melody. It then repeats itself in variations—but such variations! You know, I have seen some things reminiscent of this. By a little old German named Bach; he sends me things now and again—" She waved carelessly at the shelf of manuscripts. "He calls them ‘Inventions,' and they're really quite clever; playing off the variations in two or three melodic lines simultaneously. This"—she pursed her lips at the ‘Lied' before us—"is like a clumsy imitation of one of his things. In fact, I would swear that.…" Muttering to herself, she pushed back the walnut bench and went to the shelf, running a finger rapidly down the rows of manuscripts.
She found what she was looking for, and returned to the bench with three bound pieces of music.
"Here are the Bach pieces. They're fairly old, I haven't looked at them in several years. Still, I'm almost sure…" She lapsed into silence, flipping quickly through the pages of the Bach scripts on her knee, one at a time, glancing back now and then at the "Lied" on the rack.
"Ha!" she let out a cry of triumph, and held out one of the Bach pieces to me. "See there?"
The paper was titled "Goldberg Variations," in a crabbed, smeared hand. I touched the paper with some awe, swallowed hard, and looked back at the "Lied." It took only a moment's comparison to see what she meant.
"You're right, it's the same!" I said. "A note different here and there, but basically it's exactly the same as the original theme of the Bach piece. How very peculiar!"
"Isn't it?" she said, in tones of deep satisfaction. "Now, why is this anonymous composer stealing melodies and treating them in such an odd fashion?"
This was clearly a rhetorical question, and I didn't bother with an answer, but asked one of my own.
"Is Bach's music much in vogue these days, Mother?" I certainly hadn't heard any at the musical salons I attended.
"No," she said, shaking her head as she peered at the music. "Herr Bach is not well known in France; I believe he had some small popularity in Germany and in Austria fifteen or twenty years ago, but even there his music is not performed much publicly. I am afraid his music is not the sort to endure; clever, but no heart. Hmph. Now, see here?" The blunt forefinger tapped here, and here, and here, turning pages rapidly.
"He has repeated the same melody—almost—but changed the key each time. I think this is perhaps what attracted your husband's notice; it is obvious even to someone who doesn't read music, because of the changing signatures—the note tonique."
It was; each key change was marked by a double vertical line followed by a new treble clef sign and the signature of sharps or flats.
"Five key changes in such a short piece," she said, tapping the last one again for emphasis. "And changes that make no sense at all, in terms of music. Look, the basic line is precisely the same, yet we move from the key of two flats, which is B-flat major, to A-major, with three sharps. Stranger yet, now he goes to a signature of two sharps, and yet he uses the G-sharp accidental!"
"How very peculiar," I said. Adding a G-sharp accidental to the section in D-major had the effect of making the musical line identical with the A-major section. In other words, there was no reason whatsoever to have changed the key signature.
"I don't know German," I said. "Can you read the words, Mother?"
She nodded, the folds of her black veil rustling with the movement, small eyes intent on the manuscript.
"What truly execrable lyrics!" she murmured to herself. "Not that one expects great poetry from Germans in general, but really…still—" She broke off with a shake of her veil. "We must assume that if your husband is correct in assuming this to be a cipher of some sort, that the message lies embedded in these words. They may therefore not be of great import in themselves."
"What does it say?" I asked.
" ‘My shepherdess frolics with her lambs among the verdant hills,' " she read. "Horrible grammar, though of course liberties are often taken in writing songs, if the lyricist insists upon the lines rhyming, which they nearly always do if it is a love song."
"You know a lot about love songs?" I asked curiously. Full of surprises tonight, was Mother Hildegarde.
"Any piece of good music is in essence a love song," she replied matter-of-factly. "But as for what you mean—yes, I have seen a great many. When I was a young girl"—she flashed her large white teeth in a smile, acknowledging the difficulty of imagining her as a child—"I was something of a prodigy, you understand. I could play from memory anything I heard, and I wrote my first composition at the age of seven." She gestured at the harpsichord, the rich veneer shining with polish.