His daughter is playing the piano. Schubert. He can hear it even out here in the garden. The music lilts and lifts, pleasant in the golden afternoon, completely at odds with the black weight in his heart.
He wonders if he should go in and ask her to play something else. But it's a point of pride with her: all of her favorite composers are Austrian.
Footsteps crunch on the path behind him. He half-turns and sees his wife approaching.
He came out here to be alone; he realizes, now, that he wants her company more. He holds out his hand, and she takes it. Her fingers are warm and strong in his, callused by work, by life.
He wonders if his touch is as cold as he imagines. He wonders if he can blame it all on the chill of early spring.
"Bad news, then?" she asks. A breeze flutters the budding leaves on the trees and lifts her blonde hair.
"Yes," he says, heavy. "I would think so."
Five years he's been waiting for this, if not longer. And it still came as a shock.
He pulls the slip of telegraph paper from his pocket. She unfolds it and reads.
"Bloody barking hell," she says. She looks up from the telegraph, anger and worry for him writ clear on her face, and abruptly he needs to pull her close. Needs to put his arms around her. Needs her arms around him.
The world he was born into, kaiserlich und königlich, vanished half a lifetime ago – dismantled, stripped for parts, rebuilt in new and strange configurations. He knows; he was there. But somehow he never expected to lose the pieces that were left.
Anschluss.
One small word. Polite. Politic. Innocuous.
Devastating.
"I'm sorry," she says.
He holds her more tightly. Thinks of the millions of innocents now within the grasp of the world's new evil, many of them willingly. Many of them welcoming the wolf across their thresholds. His frozen heart aches for the people he will always think of as his responsibility – the people he left, the people he cannot save from themselves.
"I'm sorry for them," he says. "And I'm relieved -" his voice catches, roughens "- relieved that the children aren't there."
She studies him for a moment, then stretches up to drop a kiss on his mouth. Lightly, she says, "Aye. Just remember who argued for London, and who for Vienna."
He smiles at this ghost of an old disagreement, knowing she's brought it up deliberately, not minding the diversion. "I thought you argued for Glasgow."
"Close enough."
He takes a breath. Leans against his wife, his strength, his comrade-in-arms. They'll face this coming storm together, as they've faced so much else.
Inside the house, one of his sons shouts something; his daughter shouts back. The Schubert piece stops abruptly.
The last note lingers.
.
.
.
.
Note: I didn't ever intend to do a second part to "before the storm", but this idea was so close to that one, I thought I'd take the path of least resistance.
It's worth saying that both of Franz Ferdinand's real sons were sent to Dachau for being outspokenly anti-Hitler.
