“Bettina?” Startled, I glanced at Constanze, whose dark eyes were fixed on my face with a faraway expression. “Do you see?”
I took a deep breath, trying to calm my racing mind, trying to catch up to the present moment. “See what?”
“In the corner,” she croaked. “It watches us. It watches you.”
I blinked, wondering if it were me or my grandmother who had lost the plot. I could not grasp her thoughts, could not follow, could not understand, but was Constanze alone in her tower of nonsense, or was it me?
I shook my head and glanced over my shoulder. “I see nothing.”
“Because you do not choose to see,” Constanze said. “Open your eyes, Bettina.”
I frowned. Constanze occasionally called me by my given name, Elisabeth, but more often I was merely girl or child. Never Liesl, and certainly never Bettina. I watched my grandmother carefully, wondering if she were with me, or in the midst of one of her flights of fancy.
“Well?” she harrumphed.
With a sigh, I turned to look again. But as before, the corner was empty of anything save dust, dirt, salt, and filth.
“It’s on your shoulder now,” Constanze went on, pointing to a spot by my left ear.
I swear, she grows madder by the day.
“A strange little homunculus, with hair like thistledown and a pinched expression.” She leered, a spiteful smile on her thin lips. “It doesn’t seem to like you very much.”
A chill ran down my spine, and for the briefest of moments, I felt the weight of tiny black claws on my back. Thistle.
I whirled around, but the room was still empty.
A cracked cackle came from Constanze behind me. “Now you begin to understand. You’re just like me. Beware, Bettina, beware. Heed the horn and the hound, for something wicked this way comes.”
I snatched the wash bucket from my grandmother’s hands and shoved the broom and dustpan at her. “I’m going to fetch some water from the well,” I said, trying to hide the shaking of my voice. “You had better start straightening up before I come back.”
“You can’t escape it.” A wide grin plastered itself across Constanze’s face, and a flame of recognition lit her dark, dark eyes.
“Escape what?”
“The madness,” she said simply. “The price we pay for being Der Erlk?nig’s own.”
giovanni Antonius Rossi was dead. Plague or poison, the Viennese weren’t sure which, but when the old virtuoso’s pupil and servant were found missing, they suspected the latter. But the body was untouched when the Baroness’s valet discovered him—his golden-buckled shoes still on his feet, his silver fob-watch still in his pocket, his jeweled rings still pinching the base of his gnarled and weathered fingers. No thieves they, those two boys, but their absence was damning, for if they had nothing to do with their master’s death, then why disappear?
The city guards came for the body, to be borne away and dumped in an unmarked grave like all the rest. The Viennese no longer buried their dead within city limits for fear of spreading disease, and highborn and low, rich and poor, moldered together in common. No party followed the funereal wagon that left the city gates down the road to St. Mark’s Cemetery, for although Master Antonius had been a famous virtuoso in life, he was just another poor musician in death.
From darkened alleyways, Fran?ois watched the sad pine box grow smaller in the distance. When he came to dress the old man and found a body instead, he knew he would have to make himself scarce. He had seen what happened to other men his color once their masters died under mysterious circumstances. They were not around to tell their side of the tale. The youth knew his skin would make him a target, just as he knew his master’s death would be the cause of his doom.
Fran?ois had known this day would come ever since he was torn from his Maman’s arms and thrust like so much baggage onto the ship that bore him away from Saint-Domingue to France. No shelter, no security would ever be his, not when he was the only black pearl among a dozen ordinary ones. So he went to ground after Master Antonius’s death, vanishing into the foxholes where he could blend in with the shadows and dregs of the underworld. And so he would have stayed with the madams and mistresses of the brothels and pleasure dens were it not for his one weakness: his heart.
He had always known that Josef was not meant for his world. The trading of flesh and favors, the crass, the carnal, the dirty, the vulgar: such things made his companion wilt and wither, but it was more than a distaste for the common and the low. The love Fran?ois bore for the other boy was sweet and tender, hot and fierce all at once, but Josef never evinced anything more than a polite disinterest in such affairs. Fran?ois knew that Josef’s love for him was more metaphysical than physical. He understood that their bond was not of the body, but of the mind and of the soul.
It was what made their treatment at the hands of their former master so unbearable. So when Fran?ois found Josef that fateful morning, standing over the body of their teacher with a glazed expression on his face, he held no blame, only fear in his heart.
In the immediate aftermath of their flight from Vienna above, Fran?ois and Josef took shelter with L’Odalisque, one of the grand dames of the underworld. Unlike several of the girls in her employ, she was not a Turk, but peddled fantasies of the Orient with cheap silk and opium. There were many things Fran?ois regretted about staying with L’Odalisque, but it was the laudanum he regretted most.
Josef had always been delicate, different, dreamy. He was moody and melancholy, and Fran?ois had learned to temper those tempests with patience and compassion, but the girls of L’Odalisque were not so caring. Most were lost in an opium haze, their dilated eyes large and lustrous, their language lush, their movements languid. When they first arrived at L’Odalisque’s, Josef had been quiet and withdrawn, but as the days, weeks, and months went on, Fran?ois watched the blue of his beloved’s eyes slowly become swallowed by the black of dreams and delirium.
He tried hiding the bottles of laudanum. He took over managing L’Odalisque’s ledgers, painstakingly accounting for each trip to the apothecary, the doctor, the midwife. He never saw a single drop of the opium tincture cross Josef’s lips, but the blond boy grew hazier and more distant by the day, speaking in cryptic riddles, half-finished thoughts, words twisting in upon themselves like a labyrinth, mise en abyme.
At first Fran?ois thought it was his imperfect grasp of German that was the source of his confusion. The girls of L’Odalisque often spoke of a tall, elegant stranger who approached them in their poppy-laced stupor.
“What is the tall, elegant stranger?” Fran?ois asked.