He uncurled a singularly dirty little fist. He held a tiny, emerald-green frog. Rees stared for a moment, and let the fear and anger drain away. Then he bent down to examine the tiny prisoner.

When Helene made it to the riverbank, there were her two favorite men in the world, the smallest in water up to his thighs, and the other with river water washing about his boots, looking for all the world as if they were conducting a biology lesson. And, of course, neither of them had the faintest interest in the fact that their clothes were being ruined by river water.

"Wolfgang Amadeus!" she shrieked, sounding precisely like a fishwife down at the docks. "Get out of the water this very instant! Rees, how could you let him stand there in that brook!"

Husband and son spun about, their faces mirroring the same expression of guilt and surprise.

"I'm very sorry, dear," Rees said, scooping his son up onto his arm. "You see, Wolfie found a rather fascinating amphibian."

Helene narrowed her eyes at him. "You didn't let him pick something up from that filthy water!"

"Papa's holding it!" Wolfie piped up, as his father put him down on the bank. His mother started rapidly stripping off his wet clothing and drying him with a towel. "Look, Papa, water is coming out of the top of your boot."

Helene couldn't stay angry any longer. "So what did you find, love?"

"A frog, a tiny, tiny, tiny, frog. Papa has it in his hand so it can't hop away. I'm going to keep it in my bedroom."

Helene shook her head at her husband. "A frog in the bedroom?"

"Two frogs and a snake lived in my chambers for one entire summer. The crucial thing is to make it clear that the snake can't share his bed."

"You two are so much alike!" Helene groaned. "Look at you; your boots are ruined!"

He grinned down at her. "Your fate is to be surrounded by men who don't give a fig for fashion."

Wolfie wasn't paying attention. Still naked, with an unhappy frog clutched in his hand, he decided to make a dash for freedom, back up the lawn to where his baby sister was dozing in the shade of a huge elm tree. Naturally he wouldn't get far. He was unclothed, and his mother was always worried that he would take a chill, although he never even got the sniffles.

Boys didn't.

He trotted up the lawn naked as a peeled apple. But when he looked back to track his pursuers, his mother was locked in his father's arms, and neither of them was watching him.

He knew as well as the next person that once those two started kissing, there was no stopping them. The only thing worse was when they were sitting at the piano together. Or sitting at the piano and kissing.

So Wolfie pranced happily after a sky-blue butterfly. He was naked and meadow grass tickled his toes. He had a frog in his hand.

Could there be more joy in the world?

A Note on Waltzes, Operas and Musical Exceptions.

When I decided to create a heroine who was a musical composer, Clara Josephine Wieck Schumann, likely the foremost female composer of the nineteenth century, was the model I had in mind. Clara was born in Germany in 1819, and lived until 1896. One of her most extraordinary works was written very early in her life, a waltz for the piano: this is the piece that I have given to Helene. When she was still a teenager, Clara fell in love with a fellow musician, Robert Schumann. They married and had eight children. Yet hers was not the life of a conventional mother in the 1800s. She performed and wrote music throughout her life; she made nearly forty concert tours outside of Germany.

If Helene is unique for the Regency (she supposedly wrote her waltz just before Clara was born), Rees is equally ahead of his time. Rees's opera, The Quaker Girl, is, in fact, an Edwardian musical comedy, composed by Lionel Monckton. The lyrics were written by Adrian Moss and Percy Greenbank (including the lovely song, "Come to the Ball"). The Quaker Girl opened at the Adelphia Theater in 1910. In the early 1800s, when Rees was supposedly writing, comic opera was flourishing in England. The first so-called ballad opera was John Gay's Beggar's Opera, performed in 1728; its direct descendants were operettas by Gilbert and Sullivan. Those of you who are actual musicians must forgive my inadequate attempt to describe lives bounded by and expressed in sound. Composers seem to hear language as a series of notes; I tried to give a sense of relationships defined by lyric. My failures are all my own, but I received tremendous help in learning about the lives of eighteenth-century musicians from my marvelous research assistant, Frances Drouin, and I learned of Clara's waltz from a brilliant lecture given by Professor Sevin H. Yaraman of the Fordham University Department of Art History and Music. ^

end.