The Kingdom of Back(15)
“Are you all right?” Woferl asked, his eyes turned up at me in concern. “You look pale.”
I shook my head. “I’m fine,” I answered.
His eyes darted next to the notebook I clutched in my hand. “Oh! You’ve found it!” he exclaimed.
I blinked again, still surprised to be holding it. Had it been in my hand seconds ago? Was it all truly a dream?
“Was it the boy?” he asked rapidly. “Did you see him again?”
Sebastian came to my rescue before I had to answer. He ducked his head out from below the baker’s signpost, caught sight of us, and nodded. “Fr?ulein. Young Master. We have prolonged this trip enough.”
Woferl let the question drop as his attention turned momentarily to coaxing a sweet from Sebastian’s pockets, and I gratefully let him go. My mind lingered on his questions, though, so that the rest of the trip home passed in a fog.
Everything about the grotto seemed so distant once I was back in the familiarity of the Getreidegasse. But even if it had been a dream, it was a dream that persisted, the same world that kept returning to me day after day, year after year.
As Woferl pranced around Sebastian trying to make him laugh and give him another candy, I looked back down at my notebook. My fingers closed tightly against the pages. I had left our apartment without it and would return with it right here in my hand.
The music in the princeling Hyacinth’s voice still played in my mind. It was possible that the grotto was a part of this continuous dream . . . or, perhaps, it was also possible that everything was real.
* * *
By morning, Papa had already spoken to Herr Schachtner about Woferl’s newly discovered talent. Not a few months afterward, as if the princeling had sent them himself, letters began to arrive from Vienna. The royal court wanted to hear us perform.
THE ROAD TO VIENNA
We waited until the worst of winter had passed before Papa began preparations for our first trip. The cold days dragged by one after the other. Outside, the Christmas snow fell. The Bear and the Witch and the Giant roamed the Getreidegasse and children ran squealing from them in delight. Sometimes as I watched from the window, I thought I caught a glimpse of Hyacinth walking with the wild bunch, his blue eyes flashing up toward me. Then he would disappear, leaving me to think I must have imagined it all.
During those short winter days, Papa sat at the clavier with Woferl for hours, praising his swift memory and his accuracy, clapping whenever my brother finished memorizing another piece or added his own flourishes to a measure. Woferl hardly needed his instruction. One day, I came into the music room to see my brother holding Papa’s violin, his shoulder barely big enough for the instrument. He was not only teaching himself the strings, plucking each one and figuring out the correct notes as he went—but inventing a tune. He was already composing.
I’d heard my father call other musicians prodigies before, but they were men in their teens and twenties. My brother was just a child. I stood frozen in place as I watched him. His eyes stayed closed, and his fingers fluttered as if in a trance.
With me, too, our father turned more serious, extending my lessons, noting my every mistake and nodding in approval each time I played flawlessly. I savored every moment of his attention. Even when I wasn’t at the clavier, I sat with my notebook in my lap, poring over the pages in search of whatever magic Hyacinth had cast on it.
I could see no visible change in the pages, but something had changed. I could feel the tingle of it in my fingertips whenever I brushed the paper.
On a day when the spring thaw dripped from the trees, Woferl and I stood outside the arched entrance to our building and watched Sebastian and our coachman drag trunks of clothing across the cobblestones, throwing them unceremoniously into our carriage’s boot. Mama chatted with Papa as they worked. I could see her unfolding and refolding her arms in barely disguised anxiety. She did not want to leave home.
Their Majesties Emperor Francis I and Empress Maria Theresa. I kept my hands folded in my skirts and repeated their names silently. Vienna’s royal court. Mama had said that kings and queens are remembered. Perhaps being remembered by royalty was the same.
Beside me, Woferl shifted his weight from one foot to the other, trying in vain to keep his excitement subdued. His eyes were bright with anticipation this morning, and his brown ringlets brushed past flushed cheeks.
“What are we going to do for two weeks in a carriage?” he asked me.
I leaned down toward him and raised my eyebrow. “Having no clavier on the road does not mean you can get into mischief. Papa and Mama will not have it, do you hear?”
Woferl pouted, and I patted his head. “We will find something to pass the time. The countryside will look beautiful, and soon you will get your instruments back.”
“Will they have an ear for music, do you think?” he asked me curiously. “The emperor and empress?”
I smiled at his boldness. “Best not ask that question at court, Woferl.”
He tucked his hand into mine and leaned against me. I noted how much thinner and stretched out his fingers already felt. The softness of his youth was rapidly disappearing from his tiny hands. “Herr Schachtner said the emperor likes a spectacle,” he said.
And a spectacle they would get. Woferl’s improvement on the clavier only quickened with each passing week. Papa had to commission a tiny violin for him. Before Woferl, it was unheard of for a child his age to play the violin at his level. That quality of instrument simply did not exist in the shops. Our names now regularly circulated the Getreidegasse, whispers on the tongues of the curious and skeptical that Herr Leopold Mozart’s two children were in fact both musical prodigies. They would say my name first, because I had played for longer. But they saved Woferl’s name for last, because he was so young.