ROMANCE IN C MAJOR
A light shone down upon me. I opened my eyes, and for a moment I was lost, unsure of where I was. I shaded my hand; a mirror—a silver-backed mirror—hung above the Goblin King’s bed, showing me a scene of an unfamiliar town.
The town was small, sitting beneath a tall peak I did not recognize. Perched atop the summit was an abbey, the cloisters overlooking the town, a priest looking down his nose at the penitent masses. My mirror showed me the Goblin Grove, my sacred space. I wondered if this was the Goblin King’s.
The sun was high overhead in the world above. My husband slept soundly beside me, his breathing soft and even. We had fallen asleep resting against each other, but during the night we had drifted apart, founding our separate kingdoms on opposite sides of his bed. Our borders were delineated by a pile of bedclothes. We had touched each other in the most intimate ways possible, but neither of us could bear the other’s closeness. Not yet.
There was nothing visible of the Goblin King but a mess of tangled hair and a bare shoulder peeking out from beneath the blankets. I was naked, I was sore, and between my thighs was a mess of blood. I suddenly wanted nothing more than to be away from here, back in my own chambers, clean and alone. The memory of what we had done the night before returned to me, and a pleasant burn spread through my loins. But with the pleasure came a wash of pain. I needed to be alone, recollect my thoughts, and center myself.
Slowly, carefully, I slid out of bed and began to clean myself up. The Goblin King did not stir, lost to the waking world. He slept blissfully, like a babe after a long night of crying, and I remembered the feel of his tears against my skin. I couldn’t face him, not after he had shed those tears and stained my soul. I had touched him, known him, seen every last bit of him, and it was his tears that brought me shame.
“I wish I were back in the retiring room,” I said softly to the waiting air.
And there I was, back beside the klavier in the retiring room. My legs wobbled, bringing me crashing to my knees. Distantly, I registered the pain, but everything was muted, muffled.
My wedding night. My true wedding night.
The world was changed somehow. I was changed. The Goblin King had walked into the tidy room of my life and upended its contents. I was left picking up the pieces, struggling to fit them back together into some semblance of what I had known before. My life was divided into two neat and perfect halves: Before and After.
Liesl. Elisabeth. I had been Liesl until the moment we gathered each other in our arms, when I granted the Goblin King mercy as he absolved me of my shame. I had emerged from the other side of our tryst a different woman: no longer Liesl, but Elisabeth. I tested the edges of this new identity, slipping it on, seeing how it fit.
The retiring room looked different by the light of day. The large mirrors hung on one side lent the illusion of enormous windows, sunshine from the world above streaming through them. I saw a fortress on a hill high above a river, a bright red-and-white flag fluttering in the breeze. Salzburg. Snow still piled in drifts, but along the Salzach River, the palest hint of green shimmered among the trees. The first hint of spring. I smiled.
I sat at the klavier, hands poised over the keyboard. Then I paused. A great weight had been lifted from me, my soul cleared of a corrupting shame. But the freedom frightened me, and I did not know how to proceed. So I played a few chords, inversions of major C, before expanding them out into arpeggios. Safe. Sure.
From inversions and arpeggios to scales. I ran through every key, falling into the mindless movement like a meditation. Like a prayer. My mind began to reorder itself, to fold its memories and thoughts back into their proper drawers, neat and tidy and clean. Once my fingers were sufficiently limbered up, I took my wedding gown from its rack beside the instrument and laid it across the hood of the klavier. I was ready to move forward at last.
No more halfhearted noodling. No more careless scribbling. I would take my music, rough and unpolished, and turn it into something worthwhile.
I set to composing.
Picking up a quill and dipping it in ink, I marked down the basic melody as swiftly as I could onto a fresh sheet of paper. I also added the notes I had made about ideas for supporting accompaniment, time signatures, et al. Once I was certain I had collected all my thoughts from my wedding gown, I let it fall to the floor. The dress had served its purpose.
I did not know about Haydn or Mozart or Gluck or Handel or any of the other composers whose names I had studied, whose pieces I had played as a child, but music did not flow from my mind like dictation from God. It was said Mozart never made fair copies of his work, that no foul papers existed, for it was all perfect from his mind to the page.
Not so for Maria Elisabeth Ingeborg Vogler. Each note, each phrase, each chord was an agony of labor, to be revised again and again. I relied on the klavier to tell me which note I wanted, to figure out which inversion I needed. I was not Josef, to have this store of knowledge readily accessible; I had to test and sound out everything I heard in my head.
I loved it. This work was mine, and mine alone.
Ink spattered my fingers and the keys of the klavier, but I was oblivious to everything, even the scratch of the quill against paper. I heard only the music in my mind. For once there was nothing of Josef, nothing of Papa, nothing of the sour voice within that sounded like judgment, like fear. There was nothing but this, nothing but music and me, me, me.
There was another presence in the room.
I had been working for nearly an hour or so, but it was only in the past few minutes that I had noticed another person in the retiring room with me. His presence slowly seeped into my consciousness, emerging from the depths of my thoughts like a dream. I had been unable to untangle my sense of self from my sense of the Goblin King. I lifted my head.