Wintersong(23)

My “convalescence” kept me confined to my room, where I could do little else but compose. My attempts to leave my confinement, to find Josef, to find Constanze, to run to the Goblin Grove, were all met with kind but firm rebuttals. The Goblin King had said he would not make it easy. I had expected inhuman tasks, supernatural quests, epic battles to bar my path, but what I had not expected was plain, ordinary human compassion. Rest, dear, was their repeated refrain. Rest.

And I … I could not help but be seduced.

It was easy, so damnably easy, to sit at the klavier and let the world outside continue with its twisted regularity. So easy to tinker upon the ivory keys and let my mind take flight, to turn my confusion and longing and unsettled desires into music. So easy to compose … and forget.

This was the way life should have been.

This was the way life had always been.

The scrap of melancholy, the promise I had begun for Josef, grew into a mournful little bagatelle. I had decided on the key designation and tempo—A minor and common time—but try as I might, the rest of the piece would not fall comfortably into place.

The melody and themes were the easiest to write, and were therefore laid to paper first. Then came the work of figuring out chord progressions and subordinate harmonies, for which I relied heavily on the klavier. I was not Josef; I could not pull them from my head, but I could notate which sounded—no, felt—right to me.

After a while, I abandoned writing down my thoughts one phrase at a time and let myself play without pause. I improvised, I experimented, I wandered. Papa said real composers worked within the strictures set upon them, but I wanted to be free. I would shape the world to fit the music in my soul.

I had never composed something solely on my own before; Sepperl usually sat on the bench with me, correcting my mistakes in structure and theory. The music of Bach, Handel, and Haydn had been composed from the mind; I composed from the heart. I was not Mozart, infused with divine inspiration; I was Maria Elisabeth Ingeborg Vogler, mortal and fallible.

A shadow cut the light seeping in from beneath my door.

I immediately stopped playing.

“Who’s there?”

There was no response, but the light, shuffling footsteps gave her away.

Constanze.

“What is it?” I repeated.

The footsteps faltered, then stopped. A cold knot of dread formed in my stomach, and I was a child again, caught with my hand in the sugar. Music was an indulgence, and too much sweet would spoil me. I had other tasks, other chores, other duties to attend to.

K?the.

For a moment, there was utter clarity. I rose from the bench and ran to the door. Constanze kept faith with Der Erlk?nig. Constanze would remember.

But …

I thought of my grandmother pouring salt along the windowsills. I thought of her leaving a tin of milk and a slice of cake out each harvesttide. I thought of her strange and eccentric oddities, more ritual than religion, and thought of Mother’s exasperated grumblings, Hans’s pitying looks, the villagers’ scornful gazes. Constanze kept faith with the Goblin King, and what had her faith availed her?

Nothing.

I glanced about my room, at the klavier in the center, at the dinner tray Mother had set on a low table beside it, at the sachet of dried, sweet herbs from Hans.

Time to compose. Favors from the handsomest man in the village. No shame, no judgment upon who I was, and what I loved. It was only the very beginnings of all the things I had ever wished for, and the possibility of happiness—real happiness—stretched out before me, a fork in the road.

What had my lack of faith availed me?

Everything.

Suddenly the clarity was gone.

We stood on either side of the threshold, my grandmother and I, each waiting for the other to cross.





A PRETTY LIE

As the days passed, it was harder and harder to keep hold of my resolve, my convictions, my sanity. Too often I would turn a corner expecting to see a flash of gold or hear the echo of a tinkling laugh. The memory of K?the in these halls was fading fast, leaving nothing but dust motes in the fading light. Perhaps I had never had a sister. Perhaps I was mad. Perhaps my reason had, in fact, abandoned me.

Sepperl, Sepperl, what should I do?

But if reason had abandoned me, then so had my beloved baby brother. More often than not, Josef was to be found with Fran?ois, the two of them conversing in a mix of French, German, Italian, and music. Master Antonius was anxious to leave, but an unseasonably early ice storm had stopped all travel for a few more days. But the old virtuoso had more to worry about than a few impassable roads; French soldiers crawled our countryside like an infestation of roaches, and the troubling rumors of impending war hung over our heads.

I shouldn’t have been jealous. I had promised I wouldn’t be jealous. But envy ate me up inside anyway. I saw how Josef’s eyes sparkled whenever he beheld Fran?ois, how the dark-skinned youth smiled in return. My brother was leaving me behind in more ways than one. Like K?the and Hans, like Mother and Papa, Josef was stepping into a world that seemed forever barred to me.

The future sparkled ahead of Josef, a shining city at the end of a long road. His life stretched out ahead of him, exciting and unknown, whereas mine began and ended here, at the inn. With Josef gone, who would listen to my music? Who would listen to me?

I thought of Hans and his sweet, chaste gestures toward me. I imagined stifled giggles, shared and private jests, basso continuo and treble improvisation. I dreamed of fleeting touches, sloppy kisses, whispered breaths and pants in the dark of the night when we thought no one could hear. I wished for love, the ethereal and the physical, the sacred and the profane, and wondered when I, like my brother, like my sister, would cross that threshold into knowledge from innocence.