The Kingdom of Back Read online

  “Nannerl, what in the world are you both doing down here?” She shivered, her breath rising in a cloud. “Have you lost your senses?”

  I started to explain what we had seen. But when I pointed up to where our windows were, where the boy had thrown himself down to the streets—I saw that the glass panes had returned to their normal state. Nothing was broken.

  My words died on my lips. Even Woferl stayed quiet.

  “I’m sorry, Mama,” I finally said. “We were dreaming.”

  Our mother looked from me to my brother, then back again. The hint of a smile danced on her lips before it disappeared again behind her frown. There was a question in her eyes, something curious beyond her stern gaze that wondered what could really have brought us out here.

  After a pause, Mama shook her head and held out a hand to each of us. We took them, and she began to lead us back up the stairs. “The very idea,” she murmured, frowning at how cold our hands felt in her warm ones. “I’d not thought you capable of such mischief, Nannerl. Rushing out here with your brother in the darkest hour of night. And in this cold! Thank goodness your father sleeps so heavily, otherwise he’d never let you hear the end of this.”

  I looked up at her. “Didn’t you hear the crash in the music room, Mama?” I asked.

  Our mother raised a slender eyebrow. “Nothing of the sort.”

  I fell silent again. As we stepped back inside our building, I saw the trinket shop at the end of the Getreidegasse from the corner of my eye. The boy’s final words lingered. I wondered what would happen if I met him there.

  When I looked at Woferl, he looked ready to say something to Mama—but after a while, his mouth relaxed into a line and he turned his face down. The matter was dropped.

  THE PRINCELING IN THE GROTTO

  Papa discovered that my notebook was missing the next morning.

  He did not shout when he became upset. Instead, his voice would turn quiet like a storm on the horizon, so soft that I’d have to strain to hear what he was saying.

  Careless. You are so careless, Nannerl.

  Each of his words lashed at me. I bore it and kept my head turned down, my eyes focused on the embroidery of our rug. It was a hunting scene of three brothers riding in the sun-dappled clearing of a forest, their hounds forever frozen in the throes of tearing a doe to pieces.

  “Well?” my father asked. “What do you have to say for yourself, now that we must buy you a new notebook?”

  I counted the number of hounds and horses as I tried to still my thoughts. “I’m sorry, Papa,” I replied.

  “Sorry,” he echoed me in disbelief, then shook his head and looked away.

  Beside him, Mama glanced quickly at us and cleared her throat. “They are still children, Leopold,” she said, putting a comforting hand on our father’s arm. “You are a grown man, and yet how many times have I scolded you about your misplaced quills and your lost spectacles?”

  Papa just scowled. “Young ladies should be more responsible,” he said, looking back at me again. “How will you care for a husband if you cannot even care for your belongings?”

  The word burrowed into my mind. A husband, a husband, it repeated in a whisper that quickly evolved into a roar. You will be forgotten, it said. I watched as my mother smoothed my father’s sleeve. One day, you will disappear.

  I did not know how to defend myself. How does a daughter explain such a thing to her father? Even I could not be sure anymore what had happened. Sleep had already fogged the memory of last night. Could someone really have been in our home, standing by the clavier? Who had drawn us out into the street?

  No, my father must have been right. I simply misplaced it. Last night was a dream, nothing more. And yet I kept staring at the rug, studying the doe’s wide eyes as my mother coaxed Papa with soft words.

  Then, as my father resumed his scolding of me, Woferl rose from the dining table. He went up to the clavier, pulled himself onto the bench, and placed his hands on the keys.

  “Don’t be angry, Papa,” he said over his little shoulder. “I can remember the pages. Then we can write them down again.”

  Of course he could not. Of course this was just another one of his whims. I stood there and almost wanted to smile at his strange attempt to defend me, for trying to turn our father’s shadow away from where I stood.

  Papa’s eyes softened in amusement. “Can you, now?” he said.

  Woferl’s expression stayed serious. He turned back around on the bench and started to play.

  At first, he struck the wrong note, and hit a few more strays before he shook his head and paused. The piece was supposed to be a menuett in C. I saw him frown, knew that the same thought had just crossed his mind, and watched him start over.

  This time, Woferl hit the right note. Then another and another and another. One of his fingers slipped, but that was the last mistake. He managed to make it through sixteen measures, all correct, of the menuett, and though his rhythm was off because he had to think about each measure, he remembered all of it.

  My father stared at him, all signs of his earlier tirade completely vanished. I looked at my brother in disbelief. None of us dared move a muscle, as if what we’d witnessed was only a figment of our minds, and that if we disturbed this moment, Woferl’s playing would have never happened at all.

  My brother was barely old enough to read. What he just did was impossible.

  I looked at our father. His smile had disappeared, but his eyes had turned very bright. He said nothing. He needed not to, for even then, I could see in his mind the thought that lit his face.

  This was the song of God he yearned for, emerging from the small hands of his son.

  My affection for Woferl wavered then, and suddenly I felt that cold twinge return to my chest. The same one I’d felt as I’d let him play on the clavier beside me, when he’d remembered what I played so easily. It had taken me a week to remember the same piece! Surely, he could not have memorized so much in such a short amount of time. I wondered, suddenly, if Woferl could have been the one who hid away my notebook.

  My brother climbed off the bench and looked at me. There was only curiosity in his gaze, that perpetually innocent smile on his face. He was waiting for me to compliment his playing. I hesitated, unsure of what I might say.

  * * *

  Several minutes later, Papa hurried out of our flat on his way to Herr Schachtner’s home. He was in such an eager mood that he had to return to grab his hat, which he’d completely forgotten.

  I stayed quiet as Woferl and I prepared to accompany Sebastian down to the Getreidegasse for bread and meat. My brother hummed the tune under his breath while I helped him into his coat. When I listened closely, I could tell that he knew far more of the piece than he’d played.

  “When did you learn the first page?” I finally asked him as we stepped out of our building and into the street. It was a brisk, busy morning, full of the music of carriages and conversations.

  Woferl made me lean over to hear his reply, so that I walked awkwardly with my body tilted sideways. “When we saw the flowers.” He kept his eyes on Sebastian’s back. “When they were growing on the first page. Did you like it?” he added in a hopeful voice.

  This couldn’t be the answer, and I was so humored that I laughed. The edelweiss in my notebook had been a daydream. “You mean, you remembered the notes from yesterday?”

  “Yes.”

  “Just from the few moments I kept the page open?”

  Woferl seemed puzzled by my shock. “Yes,” he said again.

  I looked at him again. “Woferl,” I said, “you could not possibly have remembered the entire piece from our session. How could you? It was too long. Now, tell me the truth, Woferl—I won’t tell anyone if you don’t want me to. Did you take my notebook and hide it somewhere?”

  He shook his head, sending his curls bouncing. “It was
not too long,” he insisted. His eyes turned up to me in frustration. “I don’t need to take your notebook to remember the music.”

  What Woferl said could not possibly be true. He must have practiced at another time, when no one else was around. Even if he hadn’t taken my notebook, he must have stolen peeks at it when I wasn’t looking. But his words were so sincere, so absent of his usual mischief, that I knew he wasn’t lying.

  He huffed. His breath floated up in the air and faded away. “Besides,” he said, “we both know who stole it.”

  I thought again of the fireflies that had floated in the darkness of our apartment, then the midnight dream of the boy in the music room. He had spoken so clearly to me. I’d seen him tuck my notebook under his arm and throw himself from our window against a silhouette forest. Even Woferl remembered.

  The skin on my neck prickled. Last night was, of course, nonsense. But this time I did not laugh at the thought.

  “You are very talented, Woferl,” I said to him after a long pause.

  It was what he had been waiting all morning for me to say, and he brightened right away, forgetting all his frustration with our talk. His hand tightened in mine. My other hand rubbed at the glass pendant in the pocket of my petticoat. Acknowledging my brother’s playing frightened me less than the thought of last night being anything more than a dream.

  The Getreidegasse was still wet today from a cleaning, and the air hung heavy with the smell of soups, carriages, horses, and smoke. Hohensalzburg Fortress towered over the city’s baroque roofs, a faded vision today behind a veil of fog. Farther down, where the streets met the banks of the Salzach, we could hear the splash of water from the butchers hunched behind their shops, cleaning freshly culled livestock in the river. Everything bustled with the familiar and the ordinary. Woferl and I blew our warm breaths up toward the sky and watched them turn into puffs of steam. The clouds looked gray, warnings of snow. Several ladies passed us with their faces partially obscured behind bonnets and sashes. One of them carried at her hip a fine, pink-cheeked boy swaddled in cloth.

  I watched her and tried to picture myself doing the same, hoisting a child in my arms and following a faceless husband down these uneven sidewalks. Perhaps the weight of carrying a child would damage my delicate fingers, turning my music coarse and unrefined.

  We reached the bakery. Sebastian ducked his head under the wrought-iron sign, greeted the baker affectionately, and disappeared inside. While he did, I turned my attention to the end of the street, squinting through the morning haze to where the trinket shop stood. I half expected to see a shadowy figure standing there already, a tall, willowy creature with his glowing blue eyes, my notebook tucked under his arm.

  “Let’s go,” I whispered to Woferl, tugging his hand. He needed no encouragement, and slipped out of my grasp to go skipping toward the shop, his shoes squeaking against the street.

  The trinket shop was a familiar sight. Woferl and I liked to stop here often and admire the strange collections of figurines behind its windowpanes. Sometimes we would make up stories about each one, how happy or sad they might feel, how old they were. Herr Colas, the elderly glassmaker who owned the shop, would humor us by playing along. Some of the trinkets were thousands of years old, he’d say, and once belonged to the faeries.

  Woferl blew air at the window and left a circle of fog on it. The circle began shrinking right away.

  “Woferl,” I scolded, frowning at him. He stared back with big eyes.

  “Do you see the boy in there?” he whispered, as if afraid to be overheard.

  I bent down to study the trinkets. Some had colors painted on, deep-red dishes and gold-trimmed butterflies, blue glass pendants like my own, crosses, the Virgin Mary. Others had no color at all. They were simply glass, reflecting the colors around them, reminiscent of the faery lights we had seen in our flat. My gaze shifted from them to the shop beyond.

  “I don’t see anyone,” I replied, looking back to the trinkets.

  Then something scarlet caught my eye. I turned to look toward it and noticed a tiny sculpture I’d never seen before.

  “Woferl,” I breathed, pulling him closer to me. I pointed through the windowpane. “Look.”

  The trinket was of three perfect, white edelweiss, frozen in porcelain, their centers golden, their velvet petals gleaming in the light. One of the flowers had a missing streak of white paint.

  My memory flooded with the image of the flower from my music notebook.

  “Do you like this one, Fräulein?”

  We both jumped, startled. Herr Colas stood near the shop’s door, squinting down at Woferl and me. Thin white bandages wrapped around his hand that clutched the doorframe. As he peered at us, I could see the deep pockmarks on his face crinkled up into slants. I sometimes wondered how he looked before the smallpox ravaged his skin, if he had ever been young and smooth-faced.

  I pinched Woferl’s arm before he could say anything, and then I curtsied to Herr Colas. “Good morning, Herr,” I said. “The trinket is very pretty.”

  He smiled and waved us forward with his bandaged hand. “Come, come, children,” he said. “Come out of the cold and have a look around.” He glanced at me. “You’ve grown taller since I last saw you, Fräulein. Your father has nothing but praise for your musical talents. I hear all the gossip, you know. The young girl with an ear like a court musician!” He gestured to my fingers, now covered in my gloves.

  The Herr might know the gossip in the streets, but he’d never heard the barbed words my father said in our home, or seen the disappointment in his eyes. Papa would never belittle my skills in public. After all, that would embarrass him. Still, the Herr’s words warmed me, and I found myself blushing, murmuring my thanks.

  “Where is this trinket from, Herr Colas?” Woferl piped up as we stepped inside, his eyes locked on where the porcelain edelweiss sculpture sat in the window display.

  The old shopkeeper scratched the loose skin under his chin. “Vienna, I believe.” He leaned down to give us both a conspiratorial grin. In the light, one of his eyes flashed and I thought I caught a glint of blue. He wagged a finger not at the trinket, but at the windowpane, and I thought again of the strange boy shattering our window into a thousand pieces. “Who knows, though, really? Perhaps it’s not from our world at all.”

  My skin prickled at his words. I wanted to ask him what he meant, but he had already left us alone to our wandering and returned muttering to his little desk in the shop’s corner.

  The shop looked hazy, the light filtering in from the windows illuminating the dust in the air. Shelves of trinkets were everywhere, music boxes in painted porcelain and strange creatures frozen in yellowing ivory, their lips twisted into humanlike grins. The stale scent of age permeated the room. While Woferl wandered off to a corner decorated with wind chimes, my eyes shifted to a dark corner of the shop hidden behind shelves and boxes. A thin ribbon of light cut through the shadows there. A door.

  “Herr Colas,” I called out politely. “Are there more trinkets in your back room?”

  He didn’t answer. All I could hear was the faint sound of humming.

  My attention returned to the door. The humming seemed familiar now, a voice so perfectly tuned that it pulled at my chest, inviting me closer. My feet started moving of their own accord. I knew I shouldn’t have been back there without Herr Colas’s permission, and a small part of me wanted to step away—but as I drew closer, my fear faded away into nothing until I found myself standing right in front of the door.

  The humming voice came from within, beautiful and coaxing.

  I pushed the door with slow, steady hands and stepped inside.

  At first, I saw nothing. Darkness. The door edged open without a sound, and I felt a touch of cool air. It smelled different from the air outside, not of winter and spices or of stale antiques, but of something green and alive.

  I stepped ont
o moss, the dampness of it soaking the bottom hem of my petticoat. A faint glow gathered at my feet, a quivering mist of faery lights, skittish in their movements. The darkness crept away as I continued forward, until I could see the ground clearly without bending over, and I realized for the first time that I was walking inside a tunnel—the walls dripped with moss and green ivy, baby ferns and tiny rivulets of water. Strange fruits hung from the ivy trails, wet and bright blue and as plump as bird eggs, their shapes like musical notes. Eating one was surely a quick invitation to be poisoned, but in that moment, I felt such a surge of want tingling on my tongue that I reached out, unable to stop myself, and plucked a single fruit free of its stem. My movement jerked the ivy forward and then quickly back. Drops of water rained down from the vines in a shower.

  I popped the fruit into my mouth and bit down until its skin burst. Sugar and citrus and some otherworldly spice flooded my mouth. I closed my eyes, savoring the flavor of it.

  I reached to take another and my fingers sank into the soft vegetation. One of them brushed past something familiar—a soft, velvet surface. I looked at where my hand had been.

  A patch of edelweiss was growing against the wall, their velvet petals glistening with dew, and when I blinked, several more popped out from the wall’s moss to hang sideways, their buds drooping toward the floor.

  It was impossible, truly, to see a flower of the mountains in a place like this. But nothing about this place seemed real at all.

  A few notes of music caught my attention. I turned instinctively toward the sound, seeking it out. It came from farther down, where the tunnel ended in a circle of light, playing like a secret insulated from the rest of the world. My heart ached for it. Music from my notebook? I picked up my skirts and quickened my steps. Ahead of me, the tunnel began to widen, sloping higher until it opened abruptly into a circular cove.