The Kingdom of Back(19)

It took me a moment to realize that I was no longer playing my menuett, but the tune I’d seen strewn across our carriage’s path in the forest.

I stopped abruptly. My eyes fluttered open. A sudden longing seized me then, and I looked over to the quill that Woferl had set on the edge of the clavier’s stand, ready for him to compose.

My heart tightened with fear and confusion.

Composition was a man’s realm. Everyone knew this. It was the world of Herr Handel and Herr Bach, of my father and the kapellmeisters of Europe. It was the world Woferl was already discovering. I had never questioned this rule before I’d heard the kingdom in my dreams or the princeling’s perfect voice. Composition was not my place, and my father had never hinted otherwise.

So why could I not look away from the quill atop the clavier?

I heard the music in my mind, the song from the kingdom that shifted the longer I dwelled on it. My throat turned dry, and my hands trembled. When Hyacinth had told me that he would help me, was this his intent? To give me this desire?

Papa would not approve, if he saw me. What would he do? Take away my notebook, perhaps. He might even ban me from future performances and let Woferl go alone. But most likely of all, he would destroy my composition as punishment for my disobedience. A daughter who went around her father’s lessons, who stepped into a realm that he never gave her permission to enter? He would be embarrassed at my brashness and angry at my rebellion. I imagined him tossing the music into the stove, both of us watching the delicate paper curl into ash.

To create something, only to see it destroyed. The thought of that risk stabbed the sharpest at me. I tore my gaze from the quill, almost ready to abandon it.

But the melody from the forest lingered in my ears, beautiful and alluring, coaxing me forward. I felt the ache of it with the same intensity as the night of my first dream, when I’d woken with my hand outstretched, wanting to be a part of that world. The rain tapped a muffled rhythm against the roof, the pulse right before a song.

What would Hyacinth say? The glimmer in his eyes told me he would urge me on. And Woferl? He would clap his hands in delight and ask to hear the melody. Slowly, slowly, the threat of my father’s punishment began to fade against the steady desire to write it down.

Finally, with one bold gesture, I took up the quill and dipped it into the inkwell. My hands reached up as if of their own accord toward my notebook. I turned the pages until I’d nearly reached the end, and then I stopped on a blank page that no one would think to look at.

For a moment, I hesitated. I am done with it, Hyacinth had told me when he’d returned the notebook. Use it as your path back to me.

What had he done to it? The blank page seemed unremarkable. Yet the longer I stared, the more I felt it staring back at me, as if the princeling had touched his fingers to the paper and soaked his otherworldly being into the fibers. He was watching me, waiting.

Tell me what you want, he had said.

So I began to write.

The room was silent, save for the scratching of quill against parchment and the roar of the music in my mind. The strokes of my ink shook slightly against the page, but I forced myself to steady. The palms of my hands turned clammy with sweat. It wouldn’t be long before I would hear someone coming back up the steps to our room.

But I couldn’t stop. A wild joy rushed underneath my blanket of fear. This moment was fleeting—and mine.

The melody from the carriage path looked back at me from the paper, suddenly made into reality. I continued, writing as quickly and quietly as I could, nurturing the little tune, knowing that at any moment I would hear someone coming back up the steps to our room. When I finally put the quill down and ran my finger across the page to see if the ink had dried, I noticed how warm the paper felt. My breaths came shallow and rapid.

I hurriedly replaced the quill, then closed my notebook carefully so that it would not flip open to my page. My heart beat wildly at the thrill of this secret. The air, the light, something shifted in the room. It was as if the princeling were watching me through the paper that connected us.

I had never disobeyed my father before. From now on, there would forever be my life before this moment, and my life after.

By the time Mama came back upstairs with Woferl, I had returned to my usual lessons. They listened to me play for a while. From the corner of my eye, I could see Woferl’s large grin, as if he could not contain his joy, and my mother’s face, a calm canvas, even as she smiled and nodded along to my playing. On the floor beside her, Woferl fidgeted as he hunched over his papers, scribbling.

I felt as if he already knew about my secret, that he would jump up at any moment, flip through my notebook’s blank pages, and expose my little tune to the light. I could hear his familiar laugh in my head. But he remained beside my mother. I continued to play. Long moments passed.

Finally, when I finished and Woferl took his turn at the clavier, Papa returned home with a rumpled powdered wig and a whirlwind of words, hardly able to contain his excitement. “Anna,” he said breathlessly, gesturing to my mother. I looked up from where I sat on my bed. Only my brother continued to play, as if lost to his surroundings.

Mama laughed. “You look flustered, Leopold.”

“Word has spread throughout the city,” Papa replied. I could not remember his eyes ever looking so reflective. “On the streets, in the palace square. Everyone wants to hear more about our arrival. They call the children miracles. We are being talked about everywhere.”