“Drink, drink,” the Countess urged. “Drink and we shall begin.”
Seeing no other way to avoid being rude, we both downed our sherry and returned the glasses to the tray. Josef coughed, his face reddening.
“Fra-Fran?ois,” he choked out, but our hostess did not appear to hear him. She held her arm out to her husband, who took it in his grip and helped her limp downstairs.
Josef and I watched them go.
“Well,” he said after a moment. “Shall we?” He absentmindedly scratched his neck, as though the sherry he had drunk could be rubbed away. It was then I noticed the scarlet poppy pinned to the lapel of his costume.
“Sepperl,” I said, pointing to the flower. “What is this?”
“Hmmm?” He dropped his arm and glanced down at his lapel. “Oh. The Countess gave it to me. ‘For faith,’ she said.”
My hand reached up to touch the wilted poppy tucked behind my own ear. I hadn’t lost it in the labyrinth.
“Sepp,” I whispered. “What have we gotten ourselves into?”
It was a long while before he answered. “You tell me, Liesl,” he said. His eyes were hard beneath his black domino mask. “After all, isn’t this what you’ve always wanted?”
DER ERLK?NIG’S OWN
the parlor downstairs was small, more like the vestry of a church than receiving room. It looked a bit like a sacristy as well, the walls lined with dark wood panels resembling a choir and the granite floor covered with a tapestried Persian rug. The acoustics were strange in the space, both echoing and muffled at once, and I thought again it was an odd place for a professed lover of music like the Count to hold an impromptu concert.
The Count and Countess were already comfortably seated on plush red velvet chairs on opposite sides of the room from each other when Josef and I entered. The harpsichord lay between them, and they looked like guardian deities to a musical underworld. Neither had removed their masks; the Countess as Frau Perchta in her swan’s feathers, the Count as Der Tod in his death’s-head guise. Mirrors and opposites: black and white, night and day, save for the poppies pinned to their clothing like a drop of blood.
“Welcome,” the Countess said. “Make yourselves comfortable. Once you feel sufficiently warmed up, we can bring the other guests in for the performance.”
“And my sister?” I asked. “Fran?ois?”
The Count smiled. “I’m sure they shall come in with the others.”
His wife gestured to the harpsichord. “Your kingdom awaits, my children.”
My brother and I exchanged glances before making our way to the instrument. My brother set his case down and took out his violin while I sat down at the harpsichord. I lifted my hands to black and ivory keys, the inverse of all the other keyboards I had played before. The major keys were black, the minor white, and for a stomach-churning moment, I thought that I had forgotten how to play. The inverted colors gave me a sense of vertigo, making me unsure of my fingering and even the notes.
“Liesl?” Josef held his bow poised over his strings, ready to tune his violin.
Shaking off my disorientation, I found my place. I played a few chords; old as it was, the harpsichord had been relatively well cared for, the plucking mechanism smooth, the strings in tune. Josef nodded to me as I played G, D, A, and E, repeatedly plunking the notes until Josef had tuned his violin to me. Then he diligently ran through his exercises: scales, thirds, fourths, fifths, repeating rounds of musical phrases to warm up his hands.
I did the same on the harpsichord, trying to acquaint myself not only with an entirely new instrument, but to reacquaint myself with the attitude of playing for performance and not in private. I had long since stopped the agility drills and exercises Papa had made us do every day, and my fingers felt thick and leaden.
“Are you ready?” The Countess watched us with avid interest, but the Count’s attention seemed elsewhere. For someone who had been so keen to bring me here—to Vienna, to his very home—because of my music, he evinced remarkably little interest in our playing. I had initially taken his bumbling eccentricity for charm or possibly the product of a laudanum-addled mind, but my feelings about my patron quickly returned to their initial dread.
“If you please,” I said a trifle sheepishly. “I left a folio of sheet music upstairs with my cloak and other things. If someone could—”
Another red-clad servant entered the room before I could even finish my thought, carrying my leather-bound folio on a silver platter. My dread deepened. The room, my hosts, the entire house made for an eerie company, and the strange sameness of the liveried members of the house contributed to this growing sense of unreality.
I thanked the servant with a tight smile, and opened the folio to sort through the pages until I found Der Erlk?nig. I tried to ignore the press of the Countess’s eyes upon my skin. There was something about her scrutiny that went beyond mere curiosity; there was a sort of hunger or desire that pulsed from her like waves of perfume, and it made me both ashamed and excited at once.
I settled the pages of the score on the music stand of the harpsichord and sat back down upon the bench. I looked to Josef, who was silently running his hands along the neck of his violin, practicing his fingering in an almost perfunctory manner. This casual indifference toward performance struck me more than his coldness toward me; Josef was sensitive and shy. Or at least, he was once.
“Shall we call your guests, Your Illustriousness?” he asked in a dull voice.
The Countess smiled, leaning back in her chair. “I was rather hoping you would indulge us both with a private rendition of Der Erlk?nig, Herr Vogler,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind.”
Josef shrugged, but gave a quick, polite bow. “As you wish, my lady.”
He settled his instrument against his shoulder, his bow in hand loose by his side, and raised his gaze to mine, waiting for me to join him. A low, insistent throb pulsed at the base of my skull, and I regretted not having a bite to eat upstairs at one of the myriad banquet tables. I felt as though I had swallowed gravel, but I smiled at my brother, and nodded. He straightened his back and rested his chin against his violin, while I poised my hands over the keyboard, awaiting his cue. Josef gave me the tempo, counting us in with the bounce of his bow, and the two of us began to play Der Erlk?nig.
The sound of the harpsichord was initially jarring when paired with the violin. The plectra plunked and plucked, the strings shivered and did not resound, and the piece took on an ominous overtone that was not normally present when played on a more modern instrument. I tried to find my footing in the midst of this new aural sensation, trying to focus on the notes and not the sound. I was distracted by a sudden desire to experiment, to improvise. To play. To frolic and gambol and race within the music the way the Goblin King and I had done when I was a child. I shook my head and tried to focus on my brother instead, to listen, to follow, to support.