“Goodbye,” I said. I did not turn around. “Farewell.”
I half expected, half hoped I would feel a ghostly hand upon my shoulder as I left, as I stepped foot from the Goblin Grove. But as it had been when I left the Underground, there was no touch, no half-whispered plea to stay. I couldn’t help but look for him anyway, my Goblin King. I gasped, my hand going to the ring I no longer wore at my throat. I could not be sure, but I thought I saw a tall, dark figure standing among the trees, watching me as I walked away.
Then I blinked and the figure was gone. Perhaps he had never been there, my madness made manifest from the mournful yearning of my muddled mind. I turned away and walked back home, toward my future, toward the mundane.
I almost made it to the inn before the tears fell.
late one morning, in early spring, a coach bearing passengers en route to Vienna arrived at an inn in Bavaria.
Two girls waited hand in hand to join them, one dark, one fair. Their clothes were simple, their belongings few, and though one was pretty and the other plain, they had the look of sisters. They bore mirrored expressions of hope and hollowness, like two halves of a whole. The passengers shuffled and grumbled, groaned and shifted, making room for the girls—one plump, one thin. The sisters took each other’s hands as the dark-haired one stared straight ahead, unwilling to acknowledge the demons only she could see.
Meanwhile, over the mountains and a country away, two boys—one dark, one fair—walked the streets of Vienna side by side, en route from one home in the gutter to another in a finer part of the city. A footman dressed in poppy red had been dispatched to ferry their belongings to their new apartments, but their only possession was a single, slightly battered violin. Passersby shifted and shuffled, avoided and averted their gaze from the sight of the boys’ hands intertwined—one black, one white.
The dark-skinned boy knew that luck did not smile upon those of his color or class, and distrusted the sudden good fortune that brought a green-eyed woman to the house of L’Odalisque, searching for him and his beloved. The woman had come bearing gifts: an offer of patronage and a letter written in a hand unfamiliar to Fran?ois, but precious to his fair-haired companion.
I am honored by your faith in my work and humbly accept your generous offer. Please convey all my love and affection to my brother, Herr Vogler. I implore you reassure him that his family have not abandoned him, just as his ever-loving sister prays that he has not forgotten her.
Yours most gratefully,
Composer of Der Erlk?nig
Fran?ois did not trust the green-eyed woman. He had learned long ago that nothing came without a price. But Josef still had faith, still believed in fairy tales and hope, magic and miracles. Josef took the letter.
And accepted.
It was late in the afternoon when the coach from Bavaria drew through the city gates and later still when two sisters stood before a set of apartments off Stephansplatz, near Vienna’s great cathedral at the heart of the city. The dark-haired one shivered in her red cloak as she stood outside, but not from the unseasonable spring chill. She was watching—waiting—in the darkened doorway for blue eyes, blond hair, and a shy, sweet smile. She was waiting for a little boy. She was waiting for her brother.
But the brother that emerged was not the child Liesl remembered. At sixteen, he could not properly be called a boy any longer. Josef had come into his full height, towering a head taller than both his sisters. Yet neither was he fully grown, for his chin was still bare, his limbs still gawky and gangly with unexpected growth. He was both a man and a child, and neither.
For a moment, Liesl and Josef stared at each other, doing nothing, saying nothing.
And then they broke.
She opened her arms and he ran into her embrace, just as they had when they were young and each other’s shelter from their father’s worst excesses. When they listened to scary stories at their grandmother’s knee. When the world was too much for them, and not enough.
“Liesl,” he murmured.
“Sepp,” she whispered.
The tears that fell from each other’s cheeks were warm and tasted of joy. They were together. They were home.
“Oh my goodness, Josef, how you’ve grown!” the fair-haired sister exclaimed.
Josef startled, surprised to see her. “What are you doing here, K?the?”
He did not see the spasm of hurt that crossed her face. “Didn’t Liesl tell you?” K?the huffed. “We’ve come to join you in Vienna!”
“Join me?” Josef turned his blue-eyed gaze to his sister, eyes that were paler and icier than Liesl remembered. “You’re not—you’re not here to take me home?”
“Home?” K?the said incredulously. “But we are home now.”
The coachman had unloaded their things and driven away, leaving the makeshift family with nowhere to go but through the threshold and up the stairs to their new domicile. Fran?ois and the landlady emerged from the shadows to help K?the carry their belongings to the two-room apartments on the second floor. First the landlady, then Fran?ois, then K?the disappeared through the doorway, leaving Liesl and Josef on the street together, but alone.
“Home,” the blond boy said in a remote voice.
“Home,” the dark-haired sister echoed softly.
It was a long time before either of them spoke. She had traveled hundreds of miles—through forests and woods, over mountains and plains—to be with him, yet the distance between them had grown.
“Sepperl,” she began, then stopped. She did not know what to say.
“Liesl,” he said coldly. There was nothing to be said.
And then the fair-haired boy turned around and vanished into the darkness of their new life without another word, leaving his sister to finally understand—to know—that she had spent miles upon miles upon miles running down the wrong road.
EVER MINE
Why this deep grief, where necessity speaks?
—LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN, the Immortal Beloved letters
STRANGE PROCLIVITIES
it all began with an invitation.
“Message for you, Fr?ulein.” Frau Messer accosted me at the door as I returned from Naschmarkt with the week’s groceries in tow. “Looks like it’s another one from your”—her lips twitched—“mysterious benefactor.”
It wasn’t often our landlady emerged from her hidey-hole on the ground floor, but nothing flushed city folk from their dens faster than the possibility of good gossip. Any bit of information about our anonymous patron was too delicious a morsel for her to ignore.