Mama was out, so the only person with me this morning was Woferl. Now that he knew about my composition, and had managed to keep it from Papa, I felt safer with him nearby, someone with whom I could share the burden of a secret. He sat with me on the clavier’s bench, his elbows propped up on the keys, watching intently as I played my scale.
After I paused to turn to a different piece in my notebook, he said to me, quite abruptly, “I wish you would write more music.”
I stopped to look at him.
Woferl flipped to the second to last page of my notebook, and pointed out the few measures I’d written. “You never finished this one,” he said.
All I could hear was my father’s voice in my head, and the words he’d spoken to Mama over dinner yesterday.Nannerl makes an excellent companion for Woferl. Together their fame is twice what it could be. Can you imagine the spectacle we could create if one day Nannerl performed one of Woferl’s compositions?
Mama had listened and nodded. Of course, it would be preposterous to suggest that I could compose my own pieces.
In truth, I was an excellent companion. But I would be nothing more than a performer for my brother’s compositions. If I wanted immortality, it would not come from my writing. The words hung weighted around my neck. Composition was for men. It was an obvious rule. What would others think of my father if they knew I composed behind his back? That he could not even control hisown daughter? What kind of girl shamed her father by secretly doing a man’s work?
The image of my compositions burning in the fire flashed before me, the thought of my father’s stern eyes... I had seen Papa toss letters in a rage into the stove, remembered watching the embers light the edges of those papers. The memory made me wince. Even seeing my little tune exposed here on the page was making my heart quicken. I glanced nervously toward the door, half expecting Papa to step in at this very moment, and then turned to a different menuett.
“I can’t,” I replied to Woferl.
He frowned. “Why not?” he asked.
“I’m afraid to.”
“But don’t you want to?”
“Of course, but it is different with me.”
“Music is music. The source of it does not matter so much.”
I sighed. “Woferl,” I chided him, and he had the grace to give me a guilty look. “I cannot do what you do. It is something you will never ever understand.”
He pouted at me in frustration. His tongue had sharpened when it came to composition.Everyone fancies himself a musician,he’d complained to me.No one respects the soul of it.I’d seen him turn Papa’s face red with embarrassment when he once scoffed at the skills of a local noble who had given composition, in his words,a whirl.
Charlatan,Woferl had called him to his face. I would have been reprimanded harshly for saying such a thing to a nobleman, but Papa just chuckled about it later.
My brother did not reply again. Instead, he hurried off, and I returned to my lessons.
Minutes later, he returned with a quill and inkwell.
“Woferl!” I exclaimed, pausing in my playing. But he did not apologize. Instead, he adjusted the writing instruments and pointed the quill’s feather in my direction.
I began to tremble at the sight of it. This was not Woferl at work. This was God taunting me, tempting me to write again. Or, perhaps, it was Hyacinth, his will bubbling up from my brother’s sweet eyes. Was I hearing the words of the princeling on Woferl’s lips?
“Will you do it?” he whispered eagerly to me.
“Woferl, this is Papa’s,” I said. “How will we explain that it is not in its place?”
Woferl simply closed the notebook and gestured to a loose sheet propped against the clavier stand. “I have started to write,” he said. “Papa will know the ink is here because I use it daily. How would he know about you?”
I felt my cheeks grow warm at the thought. “But, Woferl,” I protested. “Where will I write mine? I cannot continue to compose in my notebook. Sooner or later Papa will see, and that will be the end of it.”
“Write on loose sheets,” he said. “Then you can fold them up and hide them in our bedroom.”
My music, my measures, each one painstakingly written, curling into ash in the fire. The fear lingered, holding me back. But my brother’s eyes were still on me, and with them, I felt the ache again to write, his encouragement pushing me forward.
If Papa discovered I was composing, he might burn my work as he burned the letters that upset him.
But he couldn’t do that if he never found it.
Woferl finally shrugged, impatient with my long hesitation,and wandered off to continue his own compositions. I stayed at the bench and stared at the quill in silence, thinking. Ink dripping down the side of the well had touched the clavier stand, staining the fibers of the blank parchment.
