The Kingdom of Back(68)

I nodded. My father tightened his lips in approval, and then he rose from his chair with a single motion. I rose with him, watching him move out of the candlelight and back into the shadows of his bedchamber. When he disappeared, I turned away.

I had not bothered to ask if my name would appear next to Woferl’s on the oratorio’s title.



* * *





    My father locked Woferl and I together in the music room the following morning, with nothing but fresh sheets of paper and quills and ink, and our clavier. We were not to leave until nighttime.

In a way, I was relieved. Hyacinth had always been able to find his way to us, but somehow, trapped in this room, I felt like even he might be unable to unlock a door that my father had secured himself. And even though Woferl and I still hung in an uneasy place, at least here we could speak only with music.

It was the original secret we shared between us, the ability to hear a world that others could not.

Woferl said little about why we were working together, but he seemed relieved too by my presence. He sat beside me at the clavier stand, his body turned unconsciously toward mine as he settled on a tune, the key, and the tempo. He sang part of the harmony to me, so that I would know what he wanted, and then he started to write out the first violin lines. Woferl had become faster at composing, if not for his growing experience then for the stress that Papa placed on him. He wrote in a nonstop fury, until he had completed three lines of continuous music, and then he paused. He looked at me and pointed out the phrases as he hummed.

I watched his thin hands at work. He was very pale this morning, and his dark lashes stood out against the white skin. “We’ll start with arpeggios,” he said to me. His hands floated across the paper. “Slow, and then grand, with other strings below it.” He paused to scribble more notes below the ones he’d already written. “With an undercurrent of notes, to fill out the harmony.”

“A flute,” I said, after I watched him write out the second violins. “To carry your melody above the strings.”

He nodded without looking at me. The music had already taken away his focus on anything else.

I went on, writing the lines for the flute and the horns. As I did, I noticed a shift in our styles, where his flowing melody met the abrupt sounds of my harmony. It was a subtle difference, so small that those unfamiliar with our work might never know.

Woferl would, though. He could distinguish what we wrote even when others could not.

I stared at the parchment. It was as if I were looking at a ghost of myself on the page. I was here, the harmony said.

When I started writing again, I did not change my style. I let it stay mine, the flutes and the horns. Every flourish, every trill and arpeggio. It was distinctly different from Woferl’s work, but to me, it still matched the piece, made it whole. And perhaps no one would ever recognize my hand in this, no one would clap for me when it was performed—but my brother would see it, know it for what it was. So would my father.

Papa will tell me to fix it, I thought. This piece was not my own to do what I wanted.

But I left it anyway.

Woferl paused from his work on the strings to read over what I had written. I peered at him from the corner of my eye, wondering if he would tell me to change it too, if our father’s voice would come out of his throat.

I knew he saw the shift in our styles. But a beat of time passed, and he said nothing.

Finally, he sighed. “Oh, Nannerl,” he said.

It was not an exclamation of exhaustion or exasperation. Nor was it some desperate attempt for him to win me back, empty praise in the hopes of an affectionate response, or even some trick from Hyacinth with words laced in cunning. In his voice, I heard a yearning that reminded me of our younger days, when he would sit in the morning sun and lean his head against my shoulder, watching in wonder while I played. It was love for what I’d written. When I looked more closely at him, I could see tears at the corners of his eyes as he read my music over and over, as if playing it repeatedly in his head.

He didn’t look at me, so he couldn’t see the softness that came briefly over my face, the small smile that touched my lips.

He nodded at the measures, then bent his head again and continued on without a word. I felt the burden on my chest, there for so long since my illness, shift, turn lighter. His dark hair had grown into a longer tail tied at the nape of his neck. His feet still dangled a short distance above the floor, as they had when he was a child. As I stared at him, I felt a certain pity for this little creature, caught by a different limb in the same snare as me.

“Nannerl?” he said after a while.

I paused in my writing to look at him. “Yes?” I said.

He hesitated, then spoke again. “Thank you.”

For helping me, was the part of his sentence that remained unspoken. In that moment, I thought he might address what happened with my sonatas. I halted in my work to look at him, my heart quickening, waiting for him to say it. Would he? The seconds dragged on. I realized that I was hoping he would, so that we could bring this ugly scar between us out into the open.

Woferl’s shoulders seemed weighed down. He wrote a few more measures in silence before he spoke. “I saw Hyacinth last night, in my dream,” he said softly.

I hadn’t heard Woferl mention the kingdom in months. Even hearing his name on my brother’s lips seemed to chill the air. “What did he want?” I asked.