“And what if something were to happen to me? I can do everything that he can!” I had started to shout my words now. I no longer cared. “I can take care of our family! There are those in the audience who love me too, and who I can please. We are the same, Papa! Why do you not take me with you?”
Papa slapped me. I gasped, suddenly dizzy, and touched my cheek with my hand. “You are a selfish girl,” he said. His eyes burned me. “Go back inside. I will not tell you again. Wait for me—I will come back for you and your mother.” With that, he turned away one last time and stepped into the coach.
I watched as they pulled away. My hand stayed against my cheek. When I felt my mother touch my shoulder, I flinched and started to hurry back into the house. I ignored the looks that Herr Schmalecker and his wife gave me.
“Nannerl, darling!” Mama called out from behind me. I did not turn around.
Instead I ran up the stairs, then into my bedroom, and then to my bed, where I pulled my music notebook out from underneath my blankets. Hyacinth’s smiling face appeared in my mind. Leave him here, his whisper reminded me. It was still something I could do. The side of me that believed this surged against me, dark and tempting. The light in me struggled against it.
I needed to return to the kingdom, to undo what wrong I’d done. But it was still not too late to let Hyacinth follow through with what he needed in order to fulfill my wish. It was not too late for me. I walked to the clavier, placed the notebook on the stand, and sat down. My wish came back to me now in a terrible wave. I saw my brother’s flushed cheeks, his sleeping figure surrounded by music. I saw myself, walking down a path toward a place I could never reach.
I opened the notebook to the composition of my heart and began to play.
THE CHOSEN PATH
That night, I went to sleep in a haze of fear and grief. The music of my composition haunted my dreams. When I woke, I could still hear the measures I’d played so feverishly on the clavier, the notes hovering in the air.
How Hyacinth would come to me now, I couldn’t say. What if he had found some way to trick me again? Perhaps all he needed from me was to hear my composition. Perhaps he didn’t need me to bring Woferl to the kingdom.
Without my composition to work on, without Woferl at my side, all I could do was spend the day pacing. Awaiting word from Papa. Listening to the constant commotion in the streets. Letting my thoughts spiral deeper and deeper.
Mama and I did not attend church that Sunday. Finally, the day after, Papa came to visit us. I rushed to see him, anxious to ask about my brother, but I did not meet my father’s eyes when I reached him. I simply curtsied, and then stood with my gaze pointed down.
“Woferl has developed a cough,” he said to my mother. “It is nothing serious yet.”
A cough. My hands trembled against my dress.
“How long do we stay in Vienna?” It was always Mama’s first question.
“The emperor has not responded to my inquiries,” Papa said. He looked defeated. “The archduchess is very ill. We will leave Vienna.”
That was it, then.
We packed our things in a silent hurry, bid farewell to Herr Schmalecker and his wife, and headed into our waiting coach. When we went to the home of Papa’s friend and helped Woferl into the seat beside me, I saw that my brother’s eyes had turned so dark that they looked black.
I was in a city, Nannerl. His dream came back to me now, and I shivered at the truth of it. It was burning to the ground. The fire nipped at my skin, and the smoke blinded my eyes.
I took my brother’s hand in mine and squeezed it tightly. “How is your cough?” I asked him as we headed on our way. Behind us, I could hear the city’s cacophony of church bells and prayers and panic.
Woferl shrugged. Already, he looked suspended between here and somewhere else.
“It is just a cough,” he replied.
* * *
We left Vienna and their royal family behind us, then arrived in Olmütz, a small city on the edge of the Morava River, on a day full of rain. I sat opposite our father, although neither of us looked at the other. Papa was not a man of many words, but today he seemed even quieter than usual, and his lips stayed locked in a tight line across his face. He kept his eyes turned toward the windows. Once, when I looked away and could see him only through the corner of my vision, I thought I saw him stare at me. When I turned my eyes back to him, he had returned to his silent study of the rolling terrain.
The room at our Olmütz inn did not help Papa’s mood. When he smelled the dampness of it and saw the smoke that poured from its stove, he threw his hands up and cursed loudly. “God has punished my greed,” he muttered.
Woferl’s cough grew worse from the rain and smoke, so that he kept us awake throughout the night with his fits. I could not sleep, anyway, as the smoke forced my eyes to tear unabated.
I held my breath for much of the next day. There was no clavier here, not even separate rooms for us. I had nothing to do, nothing to distract myself. All I could think of was the music I had played, of when Hyacinth would come calling for me, and the smile in his raspy, haunting voice.
Woferl continued to cough. His black eyes watered without pause.
The next morning I awoke to the sound of our door slamming shut. My father had left.
“Where is Papa going?” I said to Mama as I sat up. Woferl was not sleeping at my side.
“Hurry and get dressed, Nannerl,” she said to me. Behind her, Woferl swayed on his feet and shivered in his clothes. “We are moving to better rooms.”
We switched to a room with less dampness and smoke, but by now it was already too late. Woferl had trouble breathing properly that evening, and by the time Sunday came and we were to attend church, Woferl had become delirious with a high fever. Mama hovered over him, distraught and teary-eyed, and Papa told her he would ask the cathedral’s dean about my brother’s condition.
I already knew what would happen, although I did not say this to my parents. Hyacinth had found his way to my brother.
The dean, an old friend of my father’s from Salzburg, sent the doctor Joseph Wolff to our inn straightaway, and confirmed that Woferl had smallpox. We moved again to the dean’s house. There, under the surveillance of Herr Wolff and my family, we watched helplessly as Woferl’s fever worsened and his eyes swelled shut with pain.
That night, I dreamed again of the clavier sitting on the dark sands of the kingdom’s shores and of Woferl’s milky, vacant eyes. I woke with tears streaking my face.
Woferl woke up crying one night, and as Mama rose from her slumber in a nearby chair and hurried to his side, he told her that he could not see. Even candlelight hurt his eyes so much that he kept them closed all the time. Red spots began to appear on his skin, slowly at first, and then more and more quickly, like a wildfire to an untouched forest. I could hardly recognize him through the smallpox rash. Whenever he burst into a fit of coughs, I thought it sounded like Hyacinth’s laughter. I would look for him at night, but he did not appear to me.