Wintersong(17)

I cleared my throat, and Josef flinched. He immediately busied himself with his violin, his cheeks flaming, unable to meet Fran?ois’s gaze. The youth had a slight, bashful smile about his face.

My brother managed to regain his composure, and nodded at Fran?ois, setting the tempo with his bow. The two began to play, and a hush fell over the room.

To the untrained ear, it might have been hard to distinguish Josef’s—or even Fran?ois’s—playing from any other professional musician. They hit all their notes with precision and clarity, their phrasing impeccable. But if you knew my brother as I did, or even if you loved music at all, you could feel the intelligence, the intent, behind his performance. He interpreted what was written into something almost like speech, as if he could wring words and sentences from the notes and phrases.

But the majority of the assembled guests were not trained in music, and shortly after the two started playing, the low buzz of conversation arose once more. Most returned to their food and drink, keeping their voices down to a respectful murmur. A polite few kept their attention focused on Josef and Fran?ois: Master Antonius, my family, and Hans. But I spied another in a darkened corner of the room, and my heart stopped.

It was the Goblin King.

He sat among us, brazen and bare-faced, inconspicuously dressed in leather trousers and a roughspun woolen coat. Yet it was difficult to miss his unusual height, his slender physique, his strange coloring, so starkly different from the rest of us stocky, dark-haired peasants. The Goblin King caught my eye. His gaze reached right through me, touching some private core deep within me no one else could see. His lips twisted to one side, a sardonic smile.

His presence scratched that itch in my mind, that niggling sense of something lost. And then it all returned to me in a rush of fear: spindly fingers and bloody fruit, my sister in a red cloak in a winter wood, a forgotten conversation among the alders. Suddenly, it was just the two of us, suspended in a moment. Time, like memory, was just another one of his toys.

I was torn. I wanted to confront him. I wanted to ignore him. But I was afraid to approach the Goblin King, afraid to acknowledge his existence. To confront him was to make him real, and I wanted to keep him my beautiful, indulgent secret.

“Yes, yes,” Master Antonius murmured, nodding approvingly.

The moment burst, and the sounds of Josef’s and Fran?ois’s playing returned to me, beautiful and pure.

“Very impressive. Very impressive indeed.”

My hopes lifted. Master Antonius wore a smug, self-congratulatory expression on his face.

“Fran?ois is quite a specimen, no?”

Disgust roiled through me. Specimen. This was the man into whose hands we were entrusting Josef’s career.

“Astonishing,” Master Antonius continued in a conspiratorial whisper, sotto voce, to my father. “I picked him up as a babe from a traveler from Saint-Domingue. His mother was a slave back in Hispaniola, and his father some no-account sailor. Not a shred of musical ability between the two of them, and look at him now! Proof that if you get them young, you can train these Negroids like any other person.”

I was going to be sick. Of all people, the old virtuoso should know that music was God’s gift to man. Music, and a soul. Skills could be taught, but talent could not. Fran?ois’s fingers flew over the keyboard with ease, and the proof of his soul lay in his playing, more human than Master Antonius.

I could not bear to watch any longer. Unbidden, my eyes went to the darkened corner where I had last seen the Goblin King, but there was no one there. Perhaps I had imagined him after all.

Two more movements in the sonata to go, but I could see that Master Antonius had already made up his mind. No one could deny Josef’s skill, but there was something missing from the notes, something special, something more.

Papa made a mistake, I thought. Haydn was too cerebral for my brother; Josef would have been better served by Vivaldi, as I had suggested. Vivaldi was a violinist; he had known of the instrument’s capabilities and wrote for them. Josef knew this. I knew this. Papa had known this too, once.

The main hall was overly warm now, stuffed with bodies comfortably digesting their Kraut, Wurst, und Bier. Josef and Fran?ois played on, oblivious to everything but the joy of each other’s performance. I noted how they responded to each other’s cues: the sway of my brother’s body, the tilt of Fran?ois’s shoulders, they played like lovers who knew every nuance of the other’s sighs. Tears started in my eyes.

Polite applause rose from the assembly as the movement wound to a close. Josef and Fran?ois smiled at each other, a glow of joy bathing both their faces. Papa clapped like a fiend, but Master Antonius hid a bored yawn behind his hand.

“Very good, very good,” the old virtuoso said to Josef. “You are quite talented, young man. You will go far with the right teacher.”

My brother’s face fell. Josef was na?ve, not blind, and he knew exactly what Master Antonius hadn’t offered along with his congratulations: an apprenticeship.

“Yes, sir.” His blue eyes shimmered in the firelight. “My thanks for the opportunity to play for you.”

The sight of my brother’s unshed tears was the last straw. “And just who is the right teacher, maestro?” My voice cut through the chatter and applause like a scythe. “Who could possibly take Josef on as a pupil if not you?”

A hush fell over the room. I felt the astonished stares like daggers at my back, but I ignored them. Master Antonius’s eyes sharpened as they focused on me.