“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.

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.