The Kingdom of Back(32)

At first, he coughed a little at night, nothing much, only enough to wake me for a moment. Shortly after, his skin began to look paler than it usually did. One morning I went to the clavier and found Woferl sound asleep by the windowsill, his breath forming a circle of fog against the glass. The tiny wound on his thumb still had not disappeared, and the skin around it was flushed and pink, hot to the touch. He did not even wake when I shook him. It was only when I began to play that he finally sat up and looked around, dazed.

“Oh, Nannerl, it’s you,” he said when he saw me. Then he turned, his eyes far away, and touched the window’s glass with his small fingers. “Hyacinth was outside.”

I looked down at the street, half expecting to see the princeling’s familiar smile. But nothing was there. The hairs on my arms rose. Perhaps Hyacinth was appearing to Woferl alone, as he sometimes did to me. What did he want with him?

At first, my parents did not dwell on Woferl’s bout of sickness. Children tended to catch illnesses, especially in these cooler months, and Woferl had always been a frail child.

But the illness lingered. It worsened. His dark eyes turned bright with fever, and his delicate skin gleamed with sweat and angry, red bumps.

Papa did not sleep on the first few nights that Woferl’s rash broke out. He sat in our bedchamber and looked on with a grim face as Mama patted my brother’s forehead with a damp cloth. As the illness hung on, he began to pace.

“I have had to cancel a performance already,” he said in a low voice to my mother. “Soon we will cancel a second, and for the Postmaster-General Count Wenzel Paar, no less.”

“The count can wait.” There was an edge to Mama’s voice tonight. “Woferl will recover before you know it, and you can resume your schedule.”

Papa frowned. “The archbishop has already cut my salary. Four hundred gulden! How is a family to live on four hundred gulden a year? We can’t afford to cancel a third.”

“Well, you will just have to wait, won’t you?” Mama answered.

Papa turned away from her in a huff. As he passed me, he paused. “If Woferl is not well by next week,” he said, “you will have to perform alone.”

“Yes, Papa,” I replied. If he was upset enough to raise his voice at my mother, then I did not dare add to it. Alone. It was a frightening thought, performing without my brother. But somewhere deep inside me, a voice also stirred to life.

The attention will be yours alone.

I joined Mama in Woferl’s bedchamber, for I could not sleep either, and watched my brother toss and turn with fever. When she would at last fall asleep in exhaustion and Woferl would wake up, I would hold his hand and tell him more stories to keep him from crying.

Finally, one night, my mother and father left to seek out a doctor for help. I alone remained beside Woferl, turning my pendant in my hand as if to give my brother good fortune.

When he woke to see me at his side, he squinted and began to cry. “My skin burns, Nannerl,” he murmured. His hands reached up to scratch, but I forced them back down. He protested weakly. “My knees and elbows hurt.”

His joints were swollen. I could see the rounded look of them. It was such a pitiful sight that I squeezed his hand and tried to give him a smile. “It will all pass soon,” I reassured him as I wiped his tears away. “And you’ll be back in front of your clavier. I promise.”

He looked away and toward the window. “Do you think Hyacinth is watching us right now?” Woferl asked.

Hyacinth again. I felt a chill. Why was he in Woferl’s thoughts so much these days? I tried to think back to the dream I’d once had. The night flower. The witch. Hadn’t Hyacinth given Woferl something? The scar on his thumb had finally faded, but I found myself touching the spot where it had been, trying to remember. The back of my neck prickled, as if someone else might be in the room with us.

Did Hyacinth know that Woferl would fall ill? The thought so unsettled me that I immediately dismissed it.

It was possible, I suppose. But perhaps, more likely, Woferl’s fever had been brought on by wind and rain.

“I don’t know,” I finally said to my brother. He turned toward me, eager to be distracted, and I obliged. “Maybe he is sitting somewhere in the kingdom’s forests right now, perched high on the roots of a tree, watching us through a round mirror.”

“Do you think he is sad, like me?” Woferl said.

“Very sad,” I replied, and reached out to stroke his damp hair. “When Hyacinth weeps, his tears form puddles at the bottom of the trees. This is how the drowning pools form.”

“Maybe he isn’t in the forest anymore,” Woferl said, “but going somewhere else that we haven’t seen. A castle in the hills.” He burst into a fit of coughs that brought tears to his eyes.

“Yes, a castle in the hills,” I said. “Perhaps this was his old home, the palace where the princeling once lived.”

Woferl nodded, grumpy. “What happened to him? It must have been very tragic.”

Tragic. Woferl’s words reminded me of the look I’d seen on Hyacinth’s face in the trinket shop’s grotto, a moment of sadness that was there and then gone. What had happened to the princeling in his past?

“There is a river that surrounds all sides of the hill,” I went on as I pondered, “and the grass at the very bottom near the water is lush and green, but the grass higher up is dry and dying, for it hasn’t rained in months. Hyacinth has to swim across the river to reach the castle, but because he cannot swim, he can only sit on the banks and yearn for his lost home.”