Many thanks to those of you who have reviewed or followed this story. The plot really gets underway in this chapter. There's also a little reference in here that I'm curious to see if anyone will catch.
Chapter 1
Eavesdropping
"You must never come to dinner on time."
Maria first noticed it during dinner, on her first night at the von Trapp house. She had just laid as much guilt as she could on the children for the frog in her pocket, and then she sat back and waited for it to sink in. Marta was the first one to break, wiping her eyes and sniffling piteously over her plate. Captain von Trapp sighed with obvious annoyance and asked, "What is the matter, Marta?"
But Maria paid closer attention to Liesl's reaction. Liesl noticed her sister's tears before their father did. As soon as Marta started sniffling, Liesl spotted eating and stared across the table at her, her face full of the concern that the Captain's lacked. It seemed obvious to Maria that she wanted to comfort Marta, but not in front of their father.
The other children broke down in tears soon after Marta did. It was like watching dominoes topple over, one after the other. Maria continued eating dinner and pretended not to notice, but she watched them closely out of the corner of her eye. She had suspected before she'd even arrived here that these children were troublemakers of some sort – why else would the Captain have such a difficult time retaining a governess, and why else would the Reverend Mother evade the question? – but now, she felt almost certain that there was much more to them than simply causing trouble. She felt certain that there was much more to them than met the eye.
Her suspicions were confirmed later that same night, after the thunderstorm. After the Captain burst into her room, ordered the children back to bed, and brushed off her requests for new sewing material, Maria was in her room, pacing the floor and fuming at that man – so stubborn, so impossible – when suddenly, the most marvelous idea came to her. "There'll be new drapes for the windows," Frau Schmidt had said. If there were to be new ones, then she could make playclothes for the children out of these curtains!
Maria immediately unfastened the curtains from their rods, pulled them down, and spread them flat across the floor and the bed. She couldn't do much without a sewing machine and specific measurements of the children, but she did have her measuring tape and scissors, and so she made some basic cuts and measurements, singing softly to herself as she worked, for singing had always made even the hardest work easier for her. A song will move the job along, her grandmother used to say when she was a little girl.
"With each step I am more certain, everything will turn out fine." The upholstery of the curtains was coarser than proper fabric, but Maria felt confident that she could manage sewing it. Excited and energized by the idea, she would've kept working late into the night, had she not been distracted by faint noises of someone moving about.
Maria opened the door of her room and peered up and down the hall. As the governess, she had been given a room quite near the nursery and the children's bedrooms; looking down the hall now, she could see a light on beneath the closed door of the nursery, occasionally interspersed with shadows. But the children should all be asleep by now; what were they doing up in the nursery?
She didn't mean to eavesdrop, but as she approached the nursery door, she heard her own name, and it froze her. They were talking about her!
"Well, I don't care if we let Maria stay," Friedrich was saying, in the same trying-to-convince himself voice that he had used for We just wanted to make sure that you weren't scared. "I mean, the younger ones did seem to like her... but I don't care either way."
"I just don't know," Liesl answered. Her words were slower and more thoughtful, and as she went on, Maria could hear her real confusion over what to do. "Maria seems so... different, doesn't she? She doesn't seem like the others. She let us all come into her room, and she sang us that song, but..." Liesl fell silent and sighed, obviously conflicted.
Maria held her breath and leaned in towards the closed nursery door. But what?
"But you remember what happened the last time we didn't try getting rid of a governess?" Liesl asked. "You remember what happened the last time we decided to let one stay?"
What happened? Maria wanted to know so badly that she had to press one hand over her mouth to keep from asking out loud. Had the children had a bad experience with one of their previous governesses? Was that when they had started playing their awful tricks? She was dying to find out, but she didn't, for Friedrich never answered his sister's questions. But it was clear that whatever had happened, it hadn't been good, and they both remembered it very well.
"Well, we'll discuss what to do about Maria at the next meeting," Liesl said briskly, in a changing-the-subject tone, and this made Maria curious, too. Meeting? What meeting? But before she could wonder about it, Liesl went on. "I wonder why Gretl went to her room during the thunderstorm. She and Marta should've already been asleep by the time it started getting loud."
"Well, maybe it woke them," Friedrich suggested.
"Or maybe they were still awake. Brigitta better not having been reading to them from those ghost stories again. I told her I would take those books away if she didn't stop that. Whose turn was it to put them to bed tonight?"
"Um, Louisa's, I think. I meant to check and make sure they were asleep, but I forgot. I had to spend the evening dealing with Kurt and his stomach. Did you know he's taken to sneaking snacks out of the kitchen and hiding them under his bed? I told him if he kept it up, our room would be crawling with bugs soon."
"Hmm... did that get him to stop?"
"Well, ah, no," Friedrich admitted, a little guiltily. "I don't actually want him to stop. I just want him to cut back, at least until the winter." There was a pause, and Liesl must have glared at him, because he added defensively, "Well, I like having snacks in our room. And besides, we won't have to worry about bugs in the winter – the cold kills them all off."
Liesl and Friedrich said goodnight to each other and went to bed soon after that, but Maria stayed there in the dark, empty hallway for some time, thinking. She thought about the horrid brats who put a toad in her pocket and a pinecone on her chair. She thought about the affection-starved children who'd been frightened by a thunderstorm and comforted by her singing. And she thought about the conversation that she'd just overheard. Yes, there was so much more to these children than she'd first realized. They could be awful, they be dear, and they could be surprisingly mature, too. Most older siblings didn't put the younger ones to bed, or check on them while they slept, or make sure that they kept their rooms clean. It sounded as if Liesl and Friedrich acted more like parents than like a big sister and brother, and Maria got the impression that this had been the case for some time.
Maria returned to her room and began to fold up the curtains that she'd left spread across her bed. Tomorrow morning, after their father left for Vienna, she would tell the children her plan of making playclothes for them out of the old curtains. Her earlier nervousness wasn't completely gone; after all, she'd just overheard Liesl and Friedrich discussing the the idea of still getting rid of her, and neither one of them had actually decided against it. Maria was certain that the children could all go back to their horrid behavior as easily as flipping a light switch. She had only won a battle by singing to them during the thunderstorm. She hadn't won the war.
But still, she went to bed with a renewed confidence beating excitedly in her chest. There was so much more to learn about these children, so much more than met the eye. She couldn't wait to see what she would discover about them next.
