That wasn’t going anywhere.
If I hadn’t spent any significant time working on the Wedding Night Sonata since I walked away from the Underground, it was because I didn’t want to look at the monsters in my mind. Think of that spectral touch upon my hair, my cheek, my lips. That sigh across my skin. That murmur, that whisper of my name across the veil. I had been terrified of what those echoes of memory had meant. A breaking down of barriers, but between what? The veil between worlds? Or my sanity?
So I had abstained. Refrained.
I understood better then why Papa had always needed just one more drink, just one more. The temptation to open those wounds, to call upon those feelings and sensations, to indulge in the Goblin King’s presence—whether real or imagined—by working on the Wedding Night Sonata had been nearly irresistible.
I had been so, so good.
But I was so, so lonely.
It was easy—too easy—to imagine the Goblin King as my savior from sorrow. The keys of the clavichord beckoned, like the sight of laudanum to an addict. Just one taste. Just one more. Just enough to dull the pain.
I sat down and began to play.
The notes of the clavichord were dampened, for the mechanism wasn’t built to carry sound. I warmed up by running through the scales, then with a few agility exercises. My fingers were stiff, my mind fatigued. I played by rote, the music as soulless as I felt.
Practice makes perfect. I heard Papa’s voice from the past, the discipline he imposed on my brother that he could not impose upon himself. Feeling can be feigned, skill cannot.
But what was music without emotion? Without sentiment, without conviction? Notes into noise, merely tones arranged in a pleasing manner. I heard the rise and fall of pitches, the varying intervals of sound and silence as I worked, but what I did not—could not—hear was my music. I did not know where to go. I did not know what to write next.
So much of my inability to compose had been bound up in my fear of my fragile mind, but perhaps I had had it all wrong. Perhaps I was afraid I had nothing left to say. That my inspiration and my muse were buried Underground, for what was my art without Der Erlk?nig? The hours we had worked together on the Wedding Night Sonata had been some of the best and most productive of my life. What if I was the musician I was because of him?
The Underground, the Goblin Grove, and the Goblin King were all behind me. I was Elisabeth, entire, even if I was Elisabeth, alone.
It was such cold comfort.
“Be, thou, with me,” I murmured. An ache echoed in the empty chambers of my heart, returning nothing but hollow loneliness. Whatever connection I had to music, to magic, to whatever mysterious force that drove me to create was gone.
“Be, thou, with me,” I repeated. “Please.”
There was something buried deep in me, a seed, an acorn, but it was smothered, stifled, strangled. I was cut off from the sun, the loam, the woods, and the Goblin Grove that had nurtured me my entire life and I was withering in Vienna, unable to take root in foreign soil. My hand went to the place at my throat where his ring had hung, feeling its loss like a missing limb.
“Please,” I said hoarsely. “Please.”
I could rise above this. I would rise above this. This life was what I wanted. This was the culmination of all my wishes, all my desires. I just needed time. I would be myself, whole and entire, once again. I would.
I would.
But no matter how much I played, how much I called, the Goblin King did not come.
I was alone.
THE HOUSE OF MADMEN AND DREAMERS
carnival festivities in Vienna grew to a fever pitch in the week leading up to Ash Wednesday. Back home, we had celebrated Fasching the old way, with players and townsfolk donning monstrous masks to drive away the spirits of winter. Here, there seemed to be a ball or concert or three every evening, a riotous swirl of color and costume, shouts of Ahoi! and Schelle schelle! sounding late into the night. These were not the spirits of winter to be driven away until the following year; they were the idols of excess and extravagance to be purged before Lent.
On Shrove Tuesday, the night of our benefactor’s ball, Fran?ois hired us a coach to drive us to the Count’s home. Procházka House was not a Stadthaus in the city proper, but a manor on the outskirts, where haphazard human habitation gave way to tame, cultivated wilderness. It would have taken no great effort to walk the mile or so to the house, but Fran?ois told me that these things were not done. Sometimes living in Vienna felt as though I were dropped in the midst of a game where everyone but me knew the pieces, the moves, and the rules.
“Oh, I do hope we look respectable,” K?the said, fretting with her handkerchief as we drove past rolling lawns and stately homes.
Unlike the other parties hosted throughout Vienna’s fifth season, Count Procházka’s soiree required that we be attired only in black and white. An odd constraint that K?the had initially balked at, but quickly rose to the challenge. She had dressed Fran?ois and Josef in matching yet opposite costumes as Night and Day, with Fran?ois in white and gold, my brother in black and silver. Sober woolen coats, brocade waistcoats with gold and silver thread, and well-tailored breeches were paired with knee-high leather boots, simple but striking. Their masks were simple silk dominos—Josef’s patterned with stars, Fran?ois’s with a golden sunburst.
“Magnifique,” Fran?ois assured her. “Très belle, mademoiselle.”
“You are a genius,” I added.
We glanced expectantly at Josef, but he was determinedly looking out the carriage window. Sparks of irritation ignited my blood. K?the had worked her fingers to chafed calluses and her eyes to watery wrinkles to stitch us all new apparel in time for the ball, so the least we could do was congratulate her on her hard work.
“We look amazing,” I repeated, as if I could make up for our brother’s rudeness.
And we did look amazing. K?the and I were dressed as an angel and demon, but to my surprise, my sister had chosen to be the devil. She looked majestic in her gown of black velvet, her golden curls draped with black silk and lace, cleverly twisted together and pinned to resemble horns growing from her head. She had rouged her lips a bright red, and her blue eyes looked imperious from behind her black mask. For a moment, the image of moldering gowns on dress forms rose up in my mind, a polished bronze mirror reflecting an endless line of faded Goblin Queens. I swallowed.