“absolutely not,” Constanze said, thumping the floor with her cane. “I forbid it!”
We were all gathered in the kitchens after supper. Mother was washing up after the guests while K?the threw together a quick meal of sp?tzle and fried onions for the rest of us. Josef’s letter lay open and face up on the table, the source of my salvation and my grandmother’s strife.
Master Antonius is dead. I am in Vienna. Come quickly.
Come quickly. My brother’s words lay stark and simple on the page, but neither Constanze nor I could agree upon their meaning. I believed it was a summons. My grandmother believed otherwise.
“Forbid what?” I retorted. “Replying to Josef?”
“Indulging your brother in this nonsense!” Constanze pointed an accusing, emphatic finger at the letter on the table between us before sweeping her arm in a wild, vague gesture toward the dark outside, the unknown beyond our doorstep. “This . . . this musical folly!”
“Nonsense?” Mother asked sharply, pausing in scrubbing out the pots and pans. “What nonsense, Constanze? His career, you mean?”
Last year, my brother left behind the world he had known to follow his dreams—our dreams—of becoming a world-class violinist. While running the inn had been our family’s bread and butter for generations, music had ever and always been our manna. Papa was once a court musician in Salzburg, where he met Mother, who was then a singer in a troupe. But that had been before Papa’s profligate and prodigal ways chased him back to the backwoods of Bavaria. Josef was the best and brightest of us, the most educated, the most disciplined, the most talented, and he had done what the rest of us had not or could not: he had escaped.
“None of your business,” Constanze snapped at her daughter-in-law. “Keep that sharp, shrewish nose out of matters about which you know nothing.”
“It is too my business.” Mother’s nostrils flared. Cool, calm, and collected had ever been her way, but our grandmother knew how best to get under her skin. “Josef is my son.”
“He is Der Erlk?nig’s own,” Constanze muttered, her dark eyes alight with feverish faith. “And none of yours.”
Mother rolled her eyes and resumed the washing up. “Enough with the goblins and gobbledygook, you old hag. Josef is too old for fairy tales and hokum.”
“Tell that to that one!” Constanze leveled her gnarled finger at me, and I felt the force of her fervor like a bolt to the chest. “She believes. She knows. She carries the imprint of the Goblin King’s touch upon her soul.”
A frisson of unease skittered up my spine, icy fingertips skimming my skin. I said nothing, but felt K?the’s curious glance upon my face. Once she might have scoffed along with Mother at our grandmother’s superstitious babble, but my sister was changed.
I was changed.
“We must think of Josef’s future,” I said quietly. “What he needs.”
But what did my brother need? The post had only just come the day before, but already I had read his reply into thinness, the letter turned fragile with my unasked and unanswered questions. Come quickly. What did he mean? To join him? How? Why?
“What Josef needs,” Constanze said, “is to come home.”
“And just what is there for my son to come home to?” Mother asked, angrily attacking old rust stains on a dented pot.
K?the and I exchanged glances, but kept our hands busy and our mouths shut.
“Nothing, that’s what,” she continued bitterly. “Nothing but a long, slow trek to the poorhouse.” She set down the scrubbing brush with a sudden clang, pinching the bridge of her nose with a soapy hand. The furrow between her brows had come and gone, come and gone ever since Papa’s death, digging in deeper and deeper with each passing day.
“And leave Josef to fend for himself?” I asked. “What is he going to do so far away and without friends?”
Mother bit her lip. “What would you have us do?”
I had no answer. We did not have the funds to either send ourselves or to bring him home.
She shook her head. “No,” she said decisively. “It’s better that Josef stay in Vienna. Try his luck and make his mark on the world as God intended.”
“It doesn’t matter what God intends,” Constanze said darkly, “but what the old laws demand. Cheat them of their sacrifice, and we all pay the price. The Hunt comes, and brings with them death, doom, and destruction.”
A sudden hiss of pain. I looked up in alarm to see K?the suck at her knuckles where she had accidentally cut herself with the knife. She quickly resumed cooking dinner, but her hands trembled as she sliced wet dough for noodles. I rose to my feet and took over making sp?tzle from my sister as she gratefully moved to frying the onions.
Mother made a disgusted noise. “Not this again.” She and Constanze had been at each other’s throats for as long as I could remember, the sound of their bickering as familiar as the sound of Josef practicing his scales. Not even Papa had been able to make peace between them, for he always deferred to his mother even as he preferred to side with his wife. “If I weren’t already certain of your comfortable perch in Hell, thou haranguing harpy, I would pray for your eternal soul.”
Constanze banged her hand on the table, making the letter—and the rest of us—jump. “Can’t you see it is Josef’s soul I am trying to save?” she shouted, spittle flying from her lips.
We were taken aback. Despite her irritable and irascible nature, Constanze rarely lost her temper. She was, in her own way, as consistent and reliable as a metronome, ticking back and forth between contempt and disdain. Our grandmother was fearsome, not fearful.
Then my brother’s voice returned to me. I was born here. I was meant to die here.
I sloppily dumped the noodles into the pot, splashing myself with scalding hot water. Unbidden, the image of coal black eyes in a sharp-featured face rose up from the depths of memory.
“Girl,” Constanze rasped, fixing her dark eyes on me. “You know what he is.”
I said nothing. The burble of boiling water and the sizzle of sautéing onions were the only sounds in the kitchen as K?the and I finished cooking.
“What?” Mother asked. “What do you mean?”
K?the glanced at me sidelong, but I merely strained the sp?tzle and tossed the noodles into the skillet with the onions.
“What on earth are you talking about?” Mother demanded. She turned to me. “Liesl?”
I beckoned to K?the to bring me the plates and began serving supper.
“Well?” Constanze smirked. “What say you, girlie?”
You know what he is.
I thought of the careless wishes I had made into the dark as a child—for beauty, for validation, for praise—but none had been as fervent or as desperate as the one I had made when I heard my brother crying feebly into the night. K?the, Josef, and I had all been stricken with scarlatina when we were young. K?the and I were small children, but Josef had been but a baby. The worst had passed for my sister and me, but my brother emerged from the illness a different child.