As Josef prepared for his departure with Master Antonius and François, Mother insisted I keep to my rooms and “recuperate.”
“You deserve a rest, my dear,” she said. “You’ve worked so long to take care of us; let us now look after you.”
I’m not ill! I tried to say, but it was no use. The harder I searched for everyone’s missing memories of my sister, the more convinced they were that reason had abandoned me.
It was not my mind that had broken.
Or was it?
Käthe was gone, but she was more than gone; she had never existed. All traces of her were wiped completely from our lives and nothing remained, not even a strand of her golden hair. No dried wildflowers from the meadow. No ribbons. No lace. Nothing. She had simply never been.
Your eyes will remain open.
My eyes were open, but they could no longer trust what they saw, for it was not what they remembered.
One morning I awoke to find the klavier from Josef’s rooms had been moved to mine.
“Who put that there?” I asked Hans. “How did you move it without my hearing?”
Hans frowned. “The klavier has always stood in your room, Liesl.”
“No,” I said. “No, it has not. How could it? Josef and I practiced in his rooms upon it.”
“You and Josef always practiced on the fortepiano downstairs,” Hans said. His tone was patient, but his eyes were worried. “This is your own personal klavier, Liesl. See?” He pointed to a stack of music laid across the lid, with notes scrawled in my hand.
“But I never—” I picked up the notes. It looked to be the start of a composition, one I could not recall ever having written. I lightly tapped out the melody on the keyboard. Major seventh, my notes said.
The memory of a stolen moment before my brother’s audition returned to me. A little something to hold your promise, he’d said. Major seventh, of course that’s what you start with.
But was it a true memory, or a false one? Had I already begun writing this before our conversation? Or was this yet another dream I had wished into existence?
Hans placed his hands on my shoulders and guided me to the bench. His touch was intimate, but my mind recoiled. He was not mine. He had never been mine.
“Here, Liesl,” he said gently. “Play. Compose. I know how much your music brings you solace.”
Liesl. Had I always been thus? I thought I could remember the words Fräulein and Elisabeth upon his lips, a distance so vast it could only be bridged by awkwardness.
“Hans—Hansl.” The endearment tasted strange upon my tongue.
“Yes?” His gaze was tender, and wrong. Hans had never looked at me this way, never regarded me as anything but a sister.
“Nothing,” I said at last. “Nothing.”
* * *
I had awoken into a new world, a new life. Reality had snapped in half: truth on one side, lies on the other. But which was which? I struggled to match its jagged edges, but the pieces did not fit.
My “convalescence” kept me confined to my room, where I could do little else but compose. My attempts to leave my confinement, to find Josef, to find Constanze, to run to the Goblin Grove, were all met with kind but firm rebuttals. The Goblin King had said he would not make it easy. I had expected inhuman tasks, supernatural quests, epic battles to bar my path, but what I had not expected was plain, ordinary human compassion. Rest, dear, was their repeated refrain. Rest.
And I … I could not help but be seduced.
It was easy, so damnably easy, to sit at the klavier and let the world outside continue with its twisted regularity. So easy to tinker upon the ivory keys and let my mind take flight, to turn my confusion and longing and unsettled desires into music. So easy to compose … and forget.
This was the way life should have been.
This was the way life had always been.
The scrap of melancholy, the promise I had begun for Josef, grew into a mournful little bagatelle. I had decided on the key designation and tempo—A minor and common time—but try as I might, the rest of the piece would not fall comfortably into place.
The melody and themes were the easiest to write, and were therefore laid to paper first. Then came the work of figuring out chord progressions and subordinate harmonies, for which I relied heavily on the klavier. I was not Josef; I could not pull them from my head, but I could notate which sounded—no, felt—right to me.
After a while, I abandoned writing down my thoughts one phrase at a time and let myself play without pause. I improvised, I experimented, I wandered. Papa said real composers worked within the strictures set upon them, but I wanted to be free. I would shape the world to fit the music in my soul.
I had never composed something solely on my own before; Sepperl usually sat on the bench with me, correcting my mistakes in structure and theory. The music of Bach, Handel, and Haydn had been composed from the mind; I composed from the heart. I was not Mozart, infused with divine inspiration; I was Maria Elisabeth Ingeborg Vogler, mortal and fallible.
A shadow cut the light seeping in from beneath my door.
I immediately stopped playing.
“Who’s there?”
There was no response, but the light, shuffling footsteps gave her away.
Constanze.
“What is it?” I repeated.
The footsteps faltered, then stopped. A cold knot of dread formed in my stomach, and I was a child again, caught with my hand in the sugar. Music was an indulgence, and too much sweet would spoil me. I had other tasks, other chores, other duties to attend to.