The Noble Ladies' Orphanage

Chapter 9

Claudia couldn't stand the wailing any longer. She covered her ears with her gloved hands and fled to the sitting room in the east wing, as far away from her mother's bedroom as she could get. The curtains had not been opened today, which suited her mood perfectly. She chose the settee on the furthest wall, curled up on it, and cried.

"Father, why did you have to go?" she whispered. "Why? Why? Why?" After the sobs ceased to shake her, she lay silently and listened. Quiet steps padded upstairs above her. The maids were probably cleaning her room. She could no longer hear her mother's wails, and she breathed deeply a sigh of relief.

Claudia heard a quiet knock on the tall sitting room door and sat up, rubbing her swollen eyes. "Claudia, are you in there?" came the voice of her sister.

"Yes," Claudia said. "You may come in."

The door opened cautiously, and Claudia's sister Maria walked in, closed the door quietly behind her, and made her way across the dark room. She sat down next to Claudia.

"Mother's quiet now. You can come out if you want to," Maria said, sitting down beside her sister.

"That was horrible," Claudia said. "Why does she have to wail like that? It can't possibly help anything, can it? It just makes me feel like the sky is falling down. It sounds like the end of the world."

"I know what you mean," Maria said. Maria pushed a stray strand of hair away from Claudia's face, and Claudia could see that her older sister had been crying, too.

"I could hardly stand it at the funeral yesterday," Claudia said. "All those people talking about Father as if he had saved the world. But the war's not over, and here we are, stuck here among all these Czechs—these Czechs who killed Father. I just want to go home to Vienna, but how can we go home now?"

Maria put her arm around Claudia and a single tear raced down her hot cheeks.

"I mean, it's not fair," Claudia continued. "When we came to Moravia three years ago we were told that we would only be here a year. Remember Otto's family? They were here for only one year, and then they got to go back to Vienna. But we stayed because Father was made a Captain, but then he had to go to Prague because of the Czech uprisings there. If we had gotten to go back with Otto's family, Father would still be alive." Then she added with a whimper, "It's not fair."

"You're right," Maria said. "It's not fair."

"Is mother asleep?" Claudia asked.

"Yes," Maria said.

"How did you get her to sleep?"

"I tucked her in bed and pulled the drapes closed," Maria said.

The girls sat in the dark room absorbed in their own thoughts. Maria pictured her mother's face as she drifted off to sleep, her severe countenance slowly softening into a child's visage. Claudia thought of the last time she'd seen her father in this very room. She'd been playing the harpsichord while he wrote a letter at the desk against the wall. At the end of her song he'd said, "Please, keep playing. My mind works better when accompanied by your music." She looked at the writing desk and imagined him there, his balding head bowed over the paper as his pen scratched in bursts. The church bell rang outside—twelve slow dongs.

"Eleven o'clock," Claudia said. "It's so annoying! Why can't they just tell us what time it really is?"

Maria stood up, stretched, and walked to one of the tall windows. She peeked through the curtains and felt blinded by the sunny day. "Can you believe that the sun still shines?" Maria said softly.

"Did you say something?" Claudia asked.

"No, it's nothing," Maria said.

Claudia threw the curtain open and light splashed into the room. Maria's image of her father at the desk disappeared with the light. It was just an empty chair, and no shadow haunted the smooth, polished surface of the wood.