“But be wary of what you wish for,” he went on. “Wishes have a habit of surprising their makers.”
I closed my eyes and swallowed hard. The cold crept farther up my arms and to my shoulders.
When I opened my eyes again, he was gone.
I looked around in bewilderment at his sudden absence. I was alone in this strange grotto, my notebook still sitting on the clavier’s stand. With a burst of panic, I grabbed the notebook before it could disappear again, and then I sprang from the bench and turned back toward the tunnel. I called out for Woferl, but only silence greeted me. My stomach turned. He must still be in the main shop—I had to go back to him. Sebastian must have come for us by now.
“Woferl!” I shouted, running faster as I went. “Woferl, answer me! Where are you?”
And then, just as abruptly as I’d entered the grotto, I stepped through the door and stumbled right back into the shop.
Everything looked unchanged from when I’d left it, the hazy air golden under the sun, the shop’s shelves stacked heavy withtrinkets. But the tremor of whispers and music no longer lingered in the air. It was replaced instead with the smell of aged wood, the bustle of everyday life outside the shop’s walls. I stood still for a moment, trying to regain my sense of place.
Woferl looked over from where he was loitering near the windows. “There you are,” he said.
I rubbed my eyes and glanced behind me. The tunnel had vanished, leaving behind nothing more than a tiny closet overflowing with empty crates.
Perhaps the dust in the shop had made me sleepy, and my mind had woven for me a web of illusion. The ice-cold burn of the clavier’s keys, Hyacinth’s glowing blue eyes...
“Are you all right?” Woferl asked, his eyes turned up at me in concern. “You look pale.”
I shook my head. “I’m fine,” I answered.
His eyes darted next to the notebook I clutched in my hand. “Oh! You’ve found it!” he exclaimed.
I blinked again, still surprised to be holding it. Had it been in my hand seconds ago?Wasit all truly a dream?
“Was it the boy?” he asked rapidly. “Did you see him again?”
Sebastian came to my rescue before I had to answer. He ducked his head out from below the baker’s signpost, caught sight of us, and nodded. “Fräulein. Young Master. We have prolonged this trip enough.”
Woferl let the question drop as his attention turned momentarily to coaxing a sweet from Sebastian’s pockets, and I gratefully let him go. My mind lingered on his questions, though, so that the rest of the trip home passed in a fog.
Everything about the grotto seemed so distant once I was back in the familiarity of the Getreidegasse. But even if it hadbeen a dream, it was a dream that persisted, the same world that kept returning to me day after day, year after year.
As Woferl pranced around Sebastian trying to make him laugh and give him another candy, I looked back down at my notebook. My fingers closed tightly against the pages. I had left our apartment without it and would return with it right here in my hand.
The music in the princeling Hyacinth’s voice still played in my mind. It was possible that the grotto was a part of this continuous dream... or, perhaps, it was also possible that everything was real.
By morning, Papa had already spoken to Herr Schachtner about Woferl’s newly discovered talent. Not a few months afterward, as if the princeling had sent them himself, letters began to arrive from Vienna. The royal court wanted to hear us perform.
THEROADTOVIENNA
We waited until the worst of winter had passed before Papa began preparations for our first trip. The cold days dragged by one after the other. Outside, the Christmas snow fell. The Bear and the Witch and the Giant roamed the Getreidegasse and children ran squealing from them in delight. Sometimes as I watched from the window, I thought I caught a glimpse of Hyacinth walking with the wild bunch, his blue eyes flashing up toward me. Then he would disappear, leaving me to think I must have imagined it all.
During those short winter days, Papa sat at the clavier with Woferl for hours, praising his swift memory and his accuracy, clapping whenever my brother finished memorizing another piece or added his own flourishes to a measure. Woferl hardly needed his instruction. One day, I came into the music room to see my brother holding Papa’s violin, his shoulder barely big enough forthe instrument. He was not only teaching himself the strings, plucking each one and figuring out the correct notes as he went—butinventinga tune. He was already composing.
I’d heard my father call other musicians prodigies before, but they were men in their teens and twenties. My brother was just a child. I stood frozen in place as I watched him. His eyes stayed closed, and his fingers fluttered as if in a trance.
With me, too, our father turned more serious, extending my lessons, noting my every mistake and nodding in approval each time I played flawlessly. I savored every moment of his attention. Even when I wasn’t at the clavier, I sat with my notebook in my lap, poring over the pages in search of whatever magic Hyacinth had cast on it.
I could see no visible change in the pages, but somethinghadchanged. I could feel the tingle of it in my fingertips whenever I brushed the paper.
On a day when the spring thaw dripped from the trees, Woferl and I stood outside the arched entrance to our building and watched Sebastian and our coachman drag trunks of clothing across the cobblestones, throwing them unceremoniously into our carriage’s boot. Mama chatted with Papa as they worked. I could see her unfolding and refolding her arms in barely disguised anxiety. She did not want to leave home.
Their Majesties Emperor Francis I and Empress Maria Theresa.I kept my hands folded in my skirts and repeated their names silently.Vienna’s royal court.Mama had said that kings and queens are remembered. Perhaps being remembered by royalty was the same.
Beside me, Woferl shifted his weight from one foot to the other, trying in vain to keep his excitement subdued. His eyeswere bright with anticipation this morning, and his brown ringlets brushed past flushed cheeks.
