The Kingdom of Back(57)

Later that same night, Papa came to see me in my bedroom. I thought he should have looked happier, for the princess had paid him well for my music. Instead his eyes appeared hollow, his brow furrowed. He came in with a hunched back and settled himself down in the chair next to my bed, and took one of my hands in his. I could barely feel it through my haze of fever, but I remembered how cold his skin was.

“You must be brave, Nannerl,” he said. “I know your fever must give you much suffering.”

I tried to focus on Papa’s face, but my vision blurred and worsened my headache. “Am I dying?” I said. A part of me even hoped, bitterly, that it was true, if only to see whether my father would wince.

Papa continued to hold my hand. “The princess sends her sympathy and well wishes. She told me she will pray for you. Woferl tells me repeatedly that you will get well soon. He tells me he has seen to it.” He smiled at the thought, and then shifted, somehow uncomfortable. I wondered idly if the chair hurt his back. After a moment, he spoke again. “I do not like to see you in such a state,” he said, more softly this time. “I’ve grown used to Woferl’s bouts with sickness, but I am not used to you . . .”

The part of me that was my father’s daughter wanted, in spite of everything, to tell him I would be all right, to not worry. But I only lay there and looked at him, unwilling to give him this relief, wishing I could cause him even more pain.

He looked at me for a long time, studying my face. I wondered if he would say anything to me about what had happened, if he would finally acknowledge it. I waited, watching the room grow hazy and sharp and then hazy again, struggling to focus on my father’s expressions.

He prepared to say something, then spoke as if he had changed his mind. “Woferl has said to me many times that he wants to stay by you. Why have you not asked for him?”

I did not speak. What was there to say? My father had taken my music and handed it to my brother, yet I was the cruel one who did not ask for him.

“Do not be angry with him, Nannerl,” Papa said. His eyes were solemn, but not stern. I thought that he even pitied me a little—or perhaps he meant the pity for Woferl. “He loves you and worries very much about you.”

When I still did not speak, my father had the grace to look down, embarrassed. After a while, he finally rose and left, shaking his head and muttering something under his breath that I could not hear.

I started to weep. I wept in earnest, silently and bitterly, unable to hold back my grief any longer. I could not stop. My tears formed rivulets down the sides of my face, wetting my cheeks and my ears, soaking my already damp hair. They spilled onto the pillows, forming dark circles.

He tells you to play, so you play. He tells you to curtsy, so you curtsy. He tells you what you are meant to do and what you are meant not to do, so you do and you do not do. He tells you not to be angry, so you smile, you turn your eyes down, you are quiet and do exactly as he says in the hopes that this is what he wants, and then one night you realize that you have given him so much of yourself that you are nothing but the curtsy and the smile and the quiet. That you are nothing.



* * *





Days passed, then weeks. We left The Hague for Lille, even though it took all my strength just to sit up. I could feel myself slipping away. My breathing became raspier, my coughs more frequent, as if I could not lift a terrible stone from inside my chest. I could see the knuckles and bones of my fingers very easily now. Woferl would stand and wait by my bedroom door, looking on with large, tragic eyes. Mama wept several times when she came to sit with me. She held my hand, speaking so much to me that sometimes I did not have the energy to understand it all.

“Be brave, Nannerl,” she would say, just like Papa. I did not know until later that she meant for me to be brave in the face of death. My parents had already arranged a date for the priest to read me my last rites.

Finally, two weeks later, when I had truly started to believe that I would die without seeing Hyacinth again, he came to me.

I did not recognize him at first. My bedroom had grown very dim, for the candle had burned low and the darkness had crept up to it. I’d become used to seeing the hooded figures floating outside my window. I saw them now, their shapes creating moving shadows on the wall. In the corner of the room grew patches of mushrooms and vines, red and poisonous.

I blinked sweat out of my eyes. Tonight the shadows had real weight to them, like living things. It took me a long time to realize that one of these shadows was Hyacinth.

He did not look like how I remembered him. His once-pale skin and spikes had bled as white as the color of dead birch in winter, and his blue eyes had turned gold. He was even taller than when I saw him at the chateau. His figure loomed over me, and when he smiled, his mouth grew so large and frightening that I wanted to close my eyes. He had sharper teeth now too, thousands of needles lined up in a row. I could barely see his pupils anymore—the gold color was so pale that it blended in with the whites of his eyes.

Even though he frightened me, his face remained as smooth and beautiful as it had always looked.

“What a state you are in, Fr?ulein,” he said. His voice sounded different, filled with rasps, although still wild and haunting. “Did you call out to me because you missed me?”

I felt too weak to lift my head. My lungs heaved and I burst into a fit of coughing. When he sauntered over to the edge of my bed, I simply stared at him and concentrated on breathing.