CHAPTER 1: A SENSIBLE GIRL
"Next!"
At last! Maria had been standing in the slow-moving registration line for an hour, at least. Any longer, and she'd miss the midday meal back at the boardinghouse, where an enormous pile of needlework also awaited her.
"Name?" the gray-haired woman with the harried manner didn't bother to look up.
"Maria Rainier. I'm here to register for the fall term."
"Rainier. Rainier. Did you say Rainier? I don't see it here."
"R-A-I-N-I-E-R," Maria tapped her foot impatiently. "I'm going into my final year here."
"I'm sorry," the woman said, although when she looked up at last, she didn't look sorry at all. "I'm telling you that your name does not appear on the list of students. Which means a problem with your bill. You'll have to inquire of the bursar."
"And I am telling you that there is no problem," Maria said. "I sent my share of the fees in last week, and together with my scholarship-"
"The line for the bursar is over there," the woman said wearily, waving Maria off toward the far end of the room. "Next!"
OoOoO
It was another two hours before Maria descended from the packed bus and began the long climb uphill through Vienna's crowded streets, to the boardinghouse. The humid late-August air clung unpleasantly to her skin, and the long braid hanging down her back grew damp and heavy with sweat. She had already missed dinner, which was included in her rent, and she knew without checking, that her wallet held not even a spare dollar for something to tide her over until the morning. Not that she had much of an appetite, not after the devastating news that she had lost her scholarship at the college.
Her first two years in Vienna had gone according to plan, but now, without the scholarship, she could not return to school in the fall for the third and final year required to complete her degree. The gentleman in the bursar's office had been sympathetic when he delivered the news, but sympathy was a wasted emotion, as far as Maria was concerned. She had barely managed to pay her share of her school fees as it was, by taking in embroidery, although she found it tedious, and teaching piano to a half-dozen local children, which she found similarly intolerable.
She could hear Lolly's voice in her ears: "You have such a lovely voice, Maria, and the music lessons pay well. Why don't you become a music teacher instead? Don't you like children?"
Lolly, her boardinghouse roommate, was studying to be a music teacher and was the closest thing Maria had had to a friend since her mother's death a half-dozen years earlier. The two girls couldn't have been more different, and Maria struggled to offer Lolly an explanation: "Well, yes, I like children fine, Lolly. But honestly, I give piano lessons to make money. What I really want is to become a bookkeeper." Which must have sounded terribly dull, Maria knew. But having survived the last miserable years of her youth, when she'd been sent to live with a mean-tempered uncle on a failing farm outside of far-away Salzburg, bookkeeping represented stability and independence. It was one of the few paths a young woman could pursue, one you could count on without relying either on a man or the vagaries of the weather.
What she did not try to explain to Lolly, because she barely understood it herself, was that the worst thing about giving piano lessons was the sound of music itself. Maria had never known her father, and her memories of her mother were all set to music: lullabies, folksongs on the guitar, the music of the Mass. Although she found the sound of music unsettling, Maria gave piano lessons because it was the practical thing for her to do.
She'd been so lost in her thoughts that she had failed to notice the dark clouds rolling in overhead, or even the low rumble of thunder. She was still three blocks from the boardinghouse when the late-summer skies opened up, drenching her with rain. By the time Maria trudged into the foyer, her clothes were soaked, and her only pair of shoes was making distressing squelching sounds.
"Maria! Where have you been?" Lolly came bouncing down the stairs, blond curls flying. "I have so much to tell you! And" she lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper, "I know it's against the rules, but I smuggled a ham sandwich from the dining room for you."
"Thanks," Maria said. "And I have something to tell you too, about my scholarship."
"Fraulein Rainier!" From the landing above, the manager's booming voice filled the stairwell. "You've got a telegram."
"That's got to be a mistake." Maria hastily crammed the ham sandwich into the pocket of her skirt. "Who would send me a telegram?"
"You'd better hope it's about money," the man said sourly, handing her the bright-yellow envelope. "Your rent was due yesterday."
Once in their room, Maria dropped the telegram on the bureau, kicked off her wet shoes and dug into her pocket for the sandwich, now unappealingly soggy, but still better than nothing. "Change in plans, she explained between bites, "I've lost my scholarship. So I won't be going back to school this term."
"Oh, no, Maria!" Lolly's brown eyes went wide with pity, and she leaned in to offer a hug. Lolly was a great giver of hugs, and Maria usually managed to tolerate being enveloped in the girl's plush embrace, but today, she wasn't in the mood for it.
"Nothing to be done about it," Maria turned away with a shrug. "I've got to make myself a new plan. Find a job that pays more than embroidery, one that pays my expenses here and lets me save for school for next term."
"Wait a minute! I have a brilliant idea! You see, my big news is that I've got a new job," Lolly said, "and if you wanted-"
"Please! No more embroidery!" Maria groaned, gesturing at the pile of unfinished work that blanketed the big armchair in the corner.
"No, as a waitress, at a bar called the Crow's Nest."
"You're a barmaid, Lolly?"
"It's a perfectly decent place. The owner, Herr Winkler, is a sweet older gentleman. The fatherly sort, you know? His wife works there, and his son too. And the customers are nice as well. Today was my very first day, and I made twenty shillings!" Lolly said proudly, scooping a handful of wrinkled bills out of her pocket.
"Did you say twenty shillings?"
"M-hm. You know, it was awfully busy tonight. They could use another girl, Maria. You should come to work at the Crow's Nest! It's decent money, and you get Sundays off. They even feed you a good meal before they open."
"I don't know," Maria said doubtfully. "A mountain girl becoming a barmaid?" When she glanced at herself in the mirror, she caught sight of the bright yellow telegram where she had tossed it into the bureau. She tore open the envelope and read the brief message once, twice, three times, and even then, she wasn't sure she believed the words on the page.
"Maria? What is it? Bad news?"
"It's my uncle," Maria said slowly. "He's dead."
OoOoO
She watched the bus until it followed the sharp curve in the road and disappeared, along with the noisy grinding of gears and the cloud of exhaust that trailed behind. With that last connection to her life in Vienna temporarily severed, Maria hauled her carpetbag over her shoulder and began to climb the unpaved path that would take her the rest of the way to Dusterbach.
Dusterbach, a dreary place, high up in the mountains above Salzburg. Dusterbach, named after a brook that had long ago shrunk down to a muddy trickle. Dusterbach, the place where she had lived quite another life, one she had hoped to leave behind for good.
It was an arduous hike, and her progress was slow. It didn't help that she was exhausted, having been up before dawn to catch the bus from Vienna to Salzburg. Hard to believe that as a girl, she had raced up and down these mountainsides without a care. And she'd done it barefoot, Maria thought ruefully, feeling every pebble in the road through the soles of her city shoes. She hadn't expected to miss Vienna quite so much: the crowds of people, the smells, the shops staffed by haughty clerks, and even the traffic. It had been a long time since she'd been somewhere so silent. Well, not silent, really, for up here, there was the buzz of insects and the rustle of squirrels and rabbits in the underbrush.
Midway to Dusterbach, she stopped to rest, letting her carpetbag drop with a thud. Throwing her arm across her forehead to block the glare of the midafternoon sun, she turned to survey the mountainside below her. There were the green meadows where she'd romped as a girl, and the patches of fragrant pine forest. And there was the city of Salzburg itself, set like a jewel in the valley far below: the ribbon of the Salzach, crisscrossed by bridges; the Hohensalzburg fortress, the Mirabell palace and gardens, and the red onion-shaped dome of Nonnberg Abbey.
A wisp of a breeze rustled the trees and revived Maria's flagging spirits. Dusterbach lay less than a kilometer ahead, and within minutes, the memories began to crowd in on her from every side: the school building that now lay in ruins, the ramshackle building that served as post office, general store and jail all at once, the cemetery and then, finally, the church with the one-room parsonage leaning up against it. She hardly had time to knock before the door flew open.
"Maria!"
Father Leo had been Maria's sole source of comfort and encouragement during her last wretched years in Dusterbach. And he hadn't changed a bit, from his halo of white hair to his stooped demeanor, to his wrinkled rosy cheeks. The old man's face lit up for only a moment before, crestfallen, he said, "I'm sorry, Maria dear, but you're too late to pay your respects. We had to go ahead and bury him yesterday. The heat, you know."
"I got here as soon as I could, Father," Maria lied. "It took me a few days to borrow money for a bus ticket and to find someone to do my work."
The truth was, it had taken no time for Lolly, with her newly fat purse, to loan Maria bus fare and agree to do some extra sewing. Maria had delayed her trip to Dusterbach until she was absolutely certain that her uncle was six feet underground, where he belonged. She was only here to find out what she needed to know from Father Leo, and then she'd be on her way back to Vienna, where she belonged.
"I imagine that it probably didn't help that he paid you no respect when he was alive," Father observed with a sad shake of the head. "Now, why don't you come in?" He urged her into the shabby space. Maria looked around the place that had become her refuge after her mother's death, noting fondly that nothing had changed: there was the bad religious art on the walls, the fresh sprig of edelweiss always kept in a jam jar on the windowsill, the battered guitar hiding in a corner. "You sit right there at the table, and I'll put on some water for tea. And I'm sure I've got some biscuits around here somewhere. Why, just look at you," the old man stepped back to size her up. "Quite the city girl, are you?"
"Only someone who had never seen a real city girl would say that," Maria rolled her eyes.
"You look well," Father said approvingly, leaning forward in his chair. "Tell me all about life in Vienna."
Maria had been so focused on her life plan that she had sampled almost nothing of Vienna's rich cultural life, but she tried to oblige him with stories about her professors and life in the boardinghouse.
"Now how long has it been?" Father dipped a biscuit in his tea.
"Two years, almost exactly. I left right after I got the letter about the scholarship. And about the scholarship, Father-"
"And when you are finished with school?"
"I'll get a bookkeeping job, Father. That's the whole idea. I'll be able to support myself and I won't have to depend on anyone for anything. Which is why I-"
"How old are you now, Maria?"
"I just turned nineteen, Father. Now about-"
"Have you got a boyfriend, then?"
"Father!"
"It's not easy, being a young girl on her own in a city like Vienna. Who's watching out for you?"
"I watch out for myself, Father. And speaking of that," Maria plunged in before he could interrupt her again. "I've lost my scholarship. I have one more year at college, and without the scholarship, I don't have enough to live on, let alone my school fees or books, or anything else. But with Uncle gone, I was thinking, and I was wondering-"
"Wondering what?" Father Leo offered her the biscuit plate, but she waved it away.
"If he left any money. Or if the farm is worth anything and could be sold."
"Money?" Father Leo looked at her blankly. "Maria, your uncle didn't have a shilling to his name. It was a miracle that managed to keep you more or less fed and clothed."
"But the farm?"
"That farm isn't worth the taxes he owed on it, dear heart. I had to pay for the casket myself. If it's money you're after, you've wasted a trip."
Maria felt her heart sink all the way down to her toes.
"Perhaps this scholarship trouble is a blessing in disguise, though. Bookkeeping is all well and good, Maria, but is this really the life you were meant to live? You ought to find yourself a husband. A family of your own would settle you. Soften some of those sharp edges."
"What do you mean, sharp edges? I'm the same as I ever was."
"Not really," he shook his head. "When your mother died, it was like most of the joy just drained out of you. And look at you now after two years in Vienna. You are all business! The only thing left of the girl I know is the braid. What happened to your smile? Why, I remember when your parents first brought you to Dusterbach. Even as a baby, you had the sweetest way of smiling out at the world. And then when you were older, you always had a kind word for everyone. Running all over the place, with your braids flying behind. And singing! Always singing. You probably don't remember, but you used to spy on the sisters at Nonnberg, singing on their way to Vespers, and you would say that you wanted to become one of them someday."
Maria hadn't been inside a church since the day she left Dusterbach, a fact she thought it best to keep to herself. Instead, "I don't have time for any boyfriend nonsense," she told him. "And I don't want a husband, or anyone else, telling me what to do. And anyway, I don't see your wife anywhere around here!" It was probably not a proper remark to make to a priest, but she didn't much care.
"I serve God in my own way, Maria," Father said mildly. "But the love between a man and woman is holy too. You have a great capacity to love. You just haven't got a family to share it with."
"I had a family," Maria said stiffly.
"What with your father taken from you when you were just a baby, and your mother when you were – what, twelve or thirteen? Just the age when a girl needs her mother the most. And your uncle - oh, I know he didn't hit you, but cruel words and neglect can do nearly as much damage to a young girl. No wonder you seek security above everything else! But is being a - what did you say? A bookkeeper? Is that truly God's will for you?"
By now, Maria was barely listening. Her mind was crowded with memories of her uncle shouting in anger, telling her that she was no use to anyone, leaving her alone for days on end with nothing to eat. After her mother had died and she was sent to live with him, it hadn't taken very long for her thoughts to turn to the wide world outside of Dusterbach where she might be safer than in her own home, and for her plan for college and a secure job to take shape. Like Father Leo's faith for him, Maria's plan had become part of her.
It was too late to return to Vienna, so Maria accepted Father Leo's offer of his quarters, while he made himself comfortable in the church next door. But sleep refused to find her, pushed away by the bitter thoughts that filled her mind.
Maria rarely indulged in self-pity, because it didn't change anything, but tonight she felt the weight of accumulated hardship. Why had she bothered to waste time and money on a return to Dusterbach? What could she possibly have been thinking: that her fortunes would magically be reversed? She ought to have known better. Good fortune doesn't waste her smiles on penniless orphans.
Her dream of security and independence would have to be put on hold, at least for now, while she found a job that supported her, with enough left over to save for next year's fees. Father Leo had promised to pray for her, but Maria was, above all else, a sensible girl. Practical. She wasn't waiting for any miracles.
There had been a time when Father Leo had known her better than anyone. He hadn't changed a bit, which must mean that she had, just as he had said. The carefree girl Father had known, like everything else about Dusterbach, was lost to the past.
OoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOo
Welcome to my new story! A little nervous about this one because I haven't quite got the ending worked out. And AU can get awfully farfetched. Please leave me a review! Don't own, it's all for love.