Then Papa came bustling down the street, his eyes squinting in the cold wind, and Woferl’s stare broke. He turned and ran to Papa, gave him an affectionate smile, and tugged on his pockets to see if he had brought any sweets. I watched them carefully. When Papa nodded at me, I smiled back and asked him about his meeting.

“It went well enough,” he told me. “We will perform for the court.”

But his face seemed tired, his shoulders hunched. I knew immediately that it meant he did not expect us to be paid much for our private concert, that the king must be tightening his purse strings. My heart dropped at the disappointment in my father’s voice. England was costing us more than we could earn.

Despite the tempest of my thoughts, I brought myself to nod in response. “I’m glad, Papa,” I replied. My eyes darted down to my brother. I held my breath, waiting for the moment when he would speak.

But the moment did not come. Instead, Woferl sucked on a piece of candy and hummed under his breath a tune from another world.

* * *

That night, I dreamed about Johann. He and I sat together under the old ivy wall of an English cottage’s garden, right next to the door that led out into the countryside. The moon was unusually bright, perfectly halved, and Johann’s face was completely lit by its light. From this close angle, he seemed to be the loveliest boy in all Europe.

“Are you happy, Nannerl?” he asked. “Do you like the path that your life has taken?”

“I don’t know,” I replied. My eyes darted away from his and came to focus instead on the sapphire silhouettes of trees in the distance. A part of me expected Hyacinth to appear, but he never did. I held my blue pendant in my hands, and my thumbs rubbed idly across its glassy surface. When I lifted my fingers and moved them through the air, everything rippled with light. Music played wherever I tapped. The grasses billowed around us in an undulating sea.

Here, this place, this dream, belonged to me.

I turned to him. “Are you happy? Do you dream of traveling to a different place in the world?”

Johann leaned toward me until his lips touched my cheek. “We do the best we can.” Then he looked past the ivy wall and pointed toward the stars. “If I see you again, and if you see me,” he said, “let’s run away and marry on a white shore. Let’s go to Greece, to Asia and the Americas, where you can perform for any audience you desire. They will love you so. You never need to hide away your music again. Will you come with me, if you see me again? Will you promise me that?”

And all I could say was yes, my heart aching with desire for this world that was mine. I woke with the word still dancing on my tongue.

My hand was clutching my pendant tightly. For a long moment, I lay awake, letting my fingers run against the glass surface. Then I sighed against my pillow, glanced at where Woferl was breathing evenly in his sleep, and rolled over to hold the pendant up to the moonlight.

Something seemed different about it.

I squinted, frowning now, and held it closer. Then a silent cry escaped from me. I dropped the pendant into my lap.

I wanted to shake Woferl awake, but all I could do was stare down at this charm that I had remembered to be a smooth, transparent blue.

Its surface had cracked into a thousand slivers.

HYACINTH’S REVENGE

Several days later, Papa became gravely ill.

At first, he complained of chills, a weary back, and a sore throat, something he waved away as a passing irritation. The next day, he had doubled over on his bed with his hands clutched over his stomach, and Mama and Sebastian had to send for a doctor. Fever settled over him in a heated cloud.

Woferl and I continued our clavier lessons alone, as quietly as we could. I kept my thoughts to myself and did not dare to share them with my brother. My shattered pendant stayed in the bottom of my dresser.

Woferl never mentioned my moment with Johann. My father never found out.

He blamed his illness on the English weather, the fog, and the rain. Without his making arrangements and setting up meetings, several more of our performances were canceled. We were forced to dig into the money we’d earned in Germany. This only deepened Papa’s frustration, which in turn seemed to worsen his state.

I found myself lingering outside my parents’ bedchamber, watching my mother wringing out a towel to place on my father’s head. I would stare at his pale, sickly face and silently will him back to health. My brother, still reluctant to talk to me, would quietly ask me how Papa was doing. I never knew what to say. Our practice sessions felt strange without his shadow towering beside us.

After several weeks of little progress and performance cancellations, Mama finally moved us to the English countryside outside of London, to a small Georgian house on Ebury Row, so that Papa could recover in peace. The house was plain but spacious, and when we first arrived there I looked out of the carriage window to admire the pastures and estates.

On our first day, Mama requested our clavier be pushed to a corner and covered with a sheet of cloth. We were not to play while our father stayed ill.

This did not stop Woferl from composing music. I saw him working at night, jotting down measures into the music notebook that Papa had given him after our Frankfurt tour.

One afternoon, I found Woferl hunched over his writing desk overlooking the garden and approached him. He did not speak, but his eyes darted up at me, and I noticed the shift of his little body as he turned himself unconsciously toward me.

“May I see what you’ve written?” I offered.

Woferl did not look up. His hand continued to scribble a fluid line of notes on the page. “After I’ve finished,” he said at last. “I am nearly done with my symphony.”

It was a response. My heart lifted slightly at that. He had not spoken to me like this since the incident at the château. Perhaps Papa’s illness has finally softened the grudge between us.

I waited. When Woferl finished his page and turned to a new sheet, I tried again. “Tomorrow I am going to explore around the house, and walk in the garden. Will you come with me?”

Woferl said nothing. I looked over his shoulder this time, so that I could see the measures he wrote out. The symphony was light and fluid, with the same liveliness I remembered from its first pages, which I had seen some time ago. I read my way silently down the page, picturing the harmony in my mind. My eyes settled on the last measure Woferl had written down.

It was a chord, three notes played together with no separations. “That does not belong,” I said automatically, without thinking.

Woferl frowned. I saw his eyes jump to the same chord, even though I had not pointed anything out.

“You’re right,” he replied. “It doesn’t quite fit.”