The parlor was filled with flowers.
Ludwika sank down onto one of the plush sofas, looking at everything without really seeing it. The curtains had been drawn for the first time in months, and outside the early Paris snowflakes were coating the world white and reflecting pale, shimmering moonlight into the shadowed corners of the dark room. It fell across lily petals and poppy stems, and illuminated unopened letters filled with the condolences of strangers she had never met.
She needed to send thank-you letters back.
Then there was the matter of organizing the funeral, and the rent that had yet to be paid, and the autopsy she still had to arrange. So much to do except—
Except she felt dead inside, utterly incapable of doing the many things that were left to the living after their loved ones passed on. She had sent her youngest daughter to stay with a close friend of Fryderyk's in the hopes that the poor girl could find some reprieve, and her husband had left them both alone in France without so much as a proper good-bye. The one person in the world she could have shared her secret burdens with was lying in the next room, covered by a thin sheet and a blanket of roses, and it was for his sake that she was there, alone in the parlor, trying to believe that strength enough to carry on was something she possessed.
Strength. It was a thing Fryderyk had been gifted with, though not many would believe it, and although she wanted to honor his memory all Ludwika could think of was how frightening her brother had been the last time she'd seen him, so small and thin and pale and shaking as he clung to the rest of life. What would be there when she looked down to see what death was doing, what death had finally done? What would be left of the beautiful boy she'd loved?
And how could she keep going after that?
Ludwika squeezed her eyes shut, trying to push the thoughts away. It was useless to dwell on such things; Fryderyk was gone, now, and the living had no place with the dead.
She stood slowly, her eyes on the floor, and then stopped short as a piano chord, delicate and hauntingly soft, went trembling through apartment floor. She tuned to face the door. There was only one other person there, and surely she would have enough mind not to play his beloved instrument—not while the wound was still so fresh.
Ludwika moved toward the sound, pausing a moment to put her ear against the door. It was silent except for low tick of the grandfather clock, but as she put her hand on the knob suddenly a woman's voice rang out, sweet and high and clear in the early morning air.
She pushed the door open and stopped there, her breath taken away. Delphina stood at the high arched window, blonde hair pinned back and blue dress glittering in the light of the candles as she sang, and Ludwika could hear a melody underlying the words although the keys of the piano were still.
She took one halting step forward and saw Delphina clasp her hands together in prayer or grief, her breast heaving with the effort of the song. Her white face was streaked with tears, but her eyes were dry and wide as she looked out through the window to where the western mountains were alight with the soft, spiraling shadows of the stars.
Ludwika's own heart twisted as she remembered Fryderyk's request—How beautiful it is... my God, how very beautiful! And it was, it was beautiful to witness how his friend stood straight and proud before the window with tears straining her voice and staining her eyes as she sang for a man she loved and whom she would never see again.
And there... there was her brother, lying in the bed as she had suspected and surrounded by flowers of every kind, asleep in a garden of roses. He looked beautiful, eerily so, lying there amongst the petals, his dark hair scattered across the ivory pillows that supported his head. He looked like an angel, a real, gorgeously imperfect sort of angel, and there was a look of peace upon his features which, hours earlier, she would have given anything to see. Someone had folded his hands upon the coverlet, the long fingers twined together as if he were simply resting before another performance. The still-burning candlelight danced across him, and for just a moment Ludwika believed she could see his chest stir.
There was no breath, she knew, but something in her heart found peace in the idea— perhaps he was breathing, passing through to the land where they might all meet again one day. And she wondered for a moment if he'd been scared, if it was frightening to pass through worlds in such a way, though they had done the best they could to ease him from the fragility of the crumbling earth-clay. The rest would be up to Father and Emilia and all the others who had gone before, and she prayed that they had helped him through with gentle smiles and strong shoulders, kind hands extended for him to take. She prayed he had been brave. She prayed that if he had realized, somewhere in amongst the delirium, his inalterable fate, he had found within himself the strength to confront the truth and to do whatever his soul needed done.
Ludwika took a step towards the bed, Delphina's sweet, operatic voice still ringing through the apartment—
Lì dove ogni cosa è il paradiso...
se una sol preghiera arriverà risveglia la vita.
She knelt down beside him and pressed her face into the blankets, eyes squeezed shut against the the darkness and the tears that threatened to overwhelm her. She had never felt grief like this before, never felt her heart so broken before, and even while she cried into the sheets of a dead man she was listening to the song that filled the room.
Her Italian had always been a little broken, in the same way that Fryderyk, after all these years of living in Paris, had still spoken broken French. But she knew enough, at least, and the parts of her that could still think were translating the lyrics into a language she could understand.
They were beautiful, indeed.
She wept in silence as Delphina sang, her sweet, operatic voice full of unspoken emotion and unshed tears as she opened her arms wide and closed her eyes, holding the last note on a single breath. There was no crescendo finale, no sweeping, overreaching swell of music to announce her final words; there was, simply, a beautiful woman's voice trembling over the final measure as she struggled not to cry.
As the last of the echoes started to fade away Ludwika finally looked up, the world soft and blurred and heavy with the emptiness in her chest. Delphina was exactly where she had been, her arms still held up as if she were afraid that everything would become real again the moment she dared to move.
And move they would, Ludwika realized, because that was what life was about—breathing and beating and loving and crying and moving, even when it seemed impossible to continue on any further. And Fryderyk... her dear, sweet brother could finally rest, untroubled by the dreams of the past and nightmares of the future that had plagued him for so many years. He could finally be at peace.
She stood up slowly, careful not to step on the skirts that swished around her, and looked down at the body on the bed. Fryderyk was gone. His music, though—the deepest, softest, parts of his fragile soul—that would live on without him. That would live on forever.
She bent down to kiss his forehead and smiled a little as her tears dripped down onto his cheeks, the candlelight catching and bending the damp streaks until he looked almost otherworldly, a creature not meant for the sorrows of this tiny, mortal existence. Against his cold skin she mouthed a prayer, a fragment of the song, and more tears spilled down until his eyes and lips shimmered like an angel come to earth. She prayed for his soul, the black and white thing left there in paper and piano keys, and for his tender heart that never quite recovered from the scars it had been dealt, and for herself and her life, and for the loss of her brother and her best friend.
She whispered all of this against his skin, wondering if her kisses could reach him up there as Delphina's song echoed still through her tired head.
There where everything is heaven...
if just one prayer can reach you, it will awaken life.