The Kingdom of Back(41)

When I slowly stirred out of my sleep the next morning, Woferl was already awake.

I turned against my pillow to see my brother’s eyes open, tentatively studying the ceiling. For a moment, I watched him. The sobs of the ogre still seemed to tremble in the air around me. I wondered whether Woferl could hear him, but he said nothing. In fact, he looked dazed, as if he had spent his night tossing and turning.

When he saw me looking at him, he reached out and squeezed my arm with his little hand. “Am I awake?” he said to me in an urgent whisper.

His question made me blink. I pushed his curls away from his forehead. His skin was not hot, but his eyes seemed fever-bright, as if he was still not entirely here. “Yes, Woferl, of course,” I reassured him, and put an arm around his shoulders. “Why are you trembling?”

He didn’t say. Instead, he scooted closer to me and wrapped his arms around my waist. There he stayed for a quiet moment, slowly coming out of whatever dream must have had him in its throes.

I wanted to ask him if he had dreamed of Hyacinth, and I wondered whether I should tell him about my dream. But he seemed so quiet this morning that I didn’t have the heart to frighten him with stories of an ogre. In the air, the sobs from another world still echoed, along with the whispers of a princeling.

Let’s keep it between us, Fr?ulein.

So I let the silence linger until Woferl finally straightened, recovered, and crawled out of bed.

“It is time for me to write,” he said as he went. His voice had shifted from one of frightened urgency to determined focus. His fingers were already in motion, as if resting against clavier keys. “I’ve thought of the perfect introduction for my sonata.”

I watched him go. Underneath my pillow, my pendant felt cold and unused. Something stirred in the base of my chest, a strange, ominous rhythm. I could not shake the feeling that there was something in all of this that I didn’t quite understand. That there was something Hyacinth was not telling me.



* * *





When summer arrived and Salzburg finally shook the cold from her fingertips, Woferl had recovered enough so that Papa could have us resume our tours. This time he had no plans for us to hurry back home after only a couple of months. We would head to Germany, then to France and England and perhaps more, if we were successful. It was a trip that could stretch for years.

When I asked Mama how long we would be gone, she only smiled reassuringly at me and patted my cheek. “You will have an excellent time on these adventures, Nannerl,” she said. “Aren’t you looking forward to it?”

“I am,” I replied. And I was. My bones had grown restless, and my music ached to be heard again.

But the same nagging feeling I’d had the morning after my dream of the ogre still lingered with me. Hyacinth had not appeared to me again since then, weeks ago. I wrote my music and waited for him. Beside me, Woferl composed reams and reams of new work. He would hand them to Papa, would beam as my father beamed. I’d look on, and then hide my music in my drawer.

Woferl did not ask me about Hyacinth. So I began to wonder if the princeling was appearing separately to Woferl. Would he do such a thing? Was Hyacinth only my guardian, or did he have others to whom he made secret promises?

There was also another reason for my uneasiness. My monthly courses had arrived.

The first time it happened was at a Wasserburg inn, and the blood had startled me so much that I wept. Mama tried to console me, helping me change out of my stained petticoat and undergarments, sending a maid out into Wasserburg to buy new clothes. She fussed over me and brushed my hair, helped me bathe, did not comment on the fish I let sit on my dinner plate, and sang to me in bed.

“The pain will pass in several days,” she told me. “Don’t be afraid. I am delighted for you.”

I liked to see my mother happy, so I smiled for her. “I’m not afraid, Mama,” I said. Neither of us talked about how I could no longer pretend I was anything but a girl slowly becoming a woman, that it was a reminder of my dwindling years performing before the public.

By the time we left for the small town of Biberich, I’d begun to notice small changes in my body. When Mama helped me dress in the mornings, the lacing of my clothes cut my breath shorter than usual. The inner bone of the bodice pressed harder against my breasts. My cheekbones looked more pronounced, and something about my face made my eyes look larger than I remembered them, dark ponds set in snow. I had also grown taller. Mama had to fix my dresses twice in the course of six months.

My father’s past words stayed with me. The older we were, the less magnificent we seemed. The approach of my eighteenth birthday, the end of my years as a child prodigy, suddenly seemed very close.

We traveled through the summer, stopping throughout Germany at Biberich, and then Wiesbaden, and then Kostheim. Our days became a blur of inns. The Three Moors. The Golden Wheel. The Giant. The Red House. Spectators would crowd into the inns’ main rooms, jostling one another in order to see us. We performed at palaces whenever we secured an invitation. Newspaper headlines followed us as we went. The Mozart children will perform tonight, they’d always say. Look how young they are. Look at their skill.

Our travels continued and at some point, I could no longer remember which town we had come from or even which we were currently staying in. At night, I lay awake in bed and tried to imagine what our trip looked like from the clouds in the Kingdom of Back, whether we resembled the tiny villages in the snow or the troops rippling across the battlefield. I wondered what flaws the kingdom’s mirrored world showed about us.