The Kingdom of Back(31)

“I can’t,” I replied to Woferl.

He frowned. “Why not?” he asked.

“I’m afraid to.”

“But don’t you want to?”

“Of course, but it is different with me.”

“Music is music. The source of it does not matter so much.”

I sighed. “Woferl,” I chided him, and he had the grace to give me a guilty look. “I cannot do what you do. It is something you will never ever understand.”

He pouted at me in frustration. His tongue had sharpened when it came to composition. Everyone fancies himself a musician, he’d complained to me. No one respects the soul of it. I’d seen him turn Papa’s face red with embarrassment when he once scoffed at the skills of a local noble who had given composition, in his words, a whirl.

Charlatan, Woferl had called him to his face. I would have been reprimanded harshly for saying such a thing to a nobleman, but Papa just chuckled about it later.

My brother did not reply again. Instead, he hurried off, and I returned to my lessons.

Minutes later, he returned with a quill and inkwell.

“Woferl!” I exclaimed, pausing in my playing. But he did not apologize. Instead, he adjusted the writing instruments and pointed the quill’s feather in my direction.

I began to tremble at the sight of it. This was not Woferl at work. This was God taunting me, tempting me to write again. Or, perhaps, it was Hyacinth, his will bubbling up from my brother’s sweet eyes. Was I hearing the words of the princeling on Woferl’s lips?

“Will you do it?” he whispered eagerly to me.

“Woferl, this is Papa’s,” I said. “How will we explain that it is not in its place?”

Woferl simply closed the notebook and gestured to a loose sheet propped against the clavier stand. “I have started to write,” he said. “Papa will know the ink is here because I use it daily. How would he know about you?”

I felt my cheeks grow warm at the thought. “But, Woferl,” I protested. “Where will I write mine? I cannot continue to compose in my notebook. Sooner or later Papa will see, and that will be the end of it.”

“Write on loose sheets,” he said. “Then you can fold them up and hide them in our bedroom.”

My music, my measures, each one painstakingly written, curling into ash in the fire. The fear lingered, holding me back. But my brother’s eyes were still on me, and with them, I felt the ache again to write, his encouragement pushing me forward.

If Papa discovered I was composing, he might burn my work as he burned the letters that upset him.

But he couldn’t do that if he never found it.

Woferl finally shrugged, impatient with my long hesitation, and wandered off to continue his own compositions. I stayed at the bench and stared at the quill in silence, thinking. Ink dripping down the side of the well had touched the clavier stand, staining the fibers of the blank parchment.



* * *





In the mornings I would find the quill and inkwell on the stand, along with the smudged pages of music that Woferl had composed the afternoon before. Papa saw them in the evenings and would show them to me in a merry temper, as if I did not know what they sounded like.

Woferl was right. Our father had no reason to think that I would also compose. Every morning, when he was not at home and Mama had left for errands, when only Woferl and I were in the music room, I would take the folded sheet of music from the bottom of my bedroom drawers and add measures to it.

My pages were not as clean as Woferl’s. Under Papa’s watchful guidance, Woferl wrote more than I did. He composed so quickly, in fact, that he produced stacks of paper at the end of every day. Mama was constantly sending Sebastian out to buy more sheets. When I looked at my brother’s pages, I would marvel at how sparse his changes were, how much of it already seemed fully formed in his head.

My thoughts shifted more. I would write entire lines and then cross them out. I would take a measure of music and then flip the harmony to see how it worked. I would go over and over a page before I finally produced a finished copy of it. At the end of the day, my work would bleed with ink, a mess of moving thoughts that, to me, told a story of how the music came to be. I would run a hand over the dried notes and hear the early drafts in my head. My heart would keep time with the rise and fall of the melody. In those moments, the room around me faded away. My surroundings changed into a secret world of sound and peace. I would stir out of that dream of creation with tears in my eyes.

Woferl often watched me write. Sometimes he asked me questions, but mostly he sat beside me in silence, his chin propped in his hands as I worked. When he wrote his pieces, I could hear traces of my own style filtering into his, like milk curling into tea.

Woferl’s handwriting, childish though it was, looked very much like our father’s with its coiled tails. Mine, untrained and unrefined, did not. From what my brother shared with me about his lessons with Papa, I learned the proper format for recording my work. Eventually, my writing began to look as polished as my brother’s, nearly identical to his hand.

In case Papa discovered the sheets of music in my drawer, he could assume that they belonged to Woferl. And I would be spared.



* * *





Then, several weeks after my dream of the night flower, Woferl fell ill.