by S. Jae-Jones
“Sweet dreams, Liesl.”
* * *
I did not dream.
The following morning I awoke late. Käthe was already gone, the gowns I had finished vanished along with her. The boys too were missing, but François had left me a note stating that he and Josef had left with my sister to run errands and prepare for Carnival. The Procházkas’ black-and-white ball would be held in two weeks, and there was no time to lose.
It had been a long time since I had had any space to myself. The solitude felt strange, like an old dress I had not worn in a year. It sat oddly on my shoulders, as though I had forgotten how to fill it out, how to wear it. Back at the inn, any bit of time alone had been rare and therefore precious. I had been cautious not to spend my minutes and seconds carelessly, instead choosing to place all my waking moments by myself to that which I held so dear.
My music.
The table in the front room was a mess of papers, blunt quills, and spilled ink. I could see where my sister had spent the morning refining her ideas for our costumes for the black-and-white ball—half-finished sketches of lace and ribbons and silhouettes scribbled onto any bit of blank space—on bills of fare, torn pages from our accounting ledger, on the backs of abandoned compositions. One could trace the progression of Käthe’s thoughts from page to page, as her vision became sharper and clearer. These endless attempts at perfecting and refining were both foreign and familiar to me. I understood this process of creation and genesis. This genius.
Or I had once.
One of the first things we acquired once we were settled in our apartments was a klavier. François and I had spent days hunting through shops selling all sorts of keyboards: harpsichords, virginals, and even the newer pianofortes that seemed to be all the rage in town. We had marveled at the nuance and tonality of these modern instruments, the control in sound just the subtlest of touches could wring. I could see the longing in François’s eyes, the hunger in his strokes, but unfortunately there was no room in our apartments for a pianoforte.
In the end we decided upon a clavichord, small enough to fit in our cramped home and discreet enough not to bother the neighbors. It was not an instrument to practice performance on, but one to compose and write upon. A tool for me rather than for François, who was the better musician.
It had lain untouched ever since we purchased it.
You’ve been playing, I see.
And you haven’t been composing, I see.
I ran my hands over the keys. A fine layer of dust had already settled over the instrument, and my fingertips left questioning trails in their wake. I waited for some mood or inspiration to strike me, for the desire to play to overtake me, but there was nothing. Solitude around me and silence within me. I had not dreamed once since we came to the city. The voice inside me—my voice—was gone. No ideas. No drive. No passion. My nights were quiet. Blank. The dullness was seeping into my days.
I had thought that by leaving home—leaving him—I could escape my own inability to write.
I wonder if it’s not Vienna you are running toward, but a kingdom you are trying to outrun.
Excuses were easy to find for my lack of composing and creativity. Here in Vienna, it was easy to hide my cracks behind the everyday tumult and turmoil of city living. Eruptions of mania or melancholy could be attributed to ordinary, quotidian frustrations: the price of bread, the backsplash of an emptied chamber pot, the shouts and screams of joy, sorrow, rage, and surprise of complete strangers, the calculated indifference of casual acquaintances. I was overwhelmed by the variety of sights and sounds we encountered on the streets—musicians, artists, noblemen, beggars, cobblers, dressmakers, grocers, merchants, landlords—people of every shape, every size, every creed, every color.
But in a city of thousands, I had never been more lonely.
It wasn’t just my relationship with Josef that had grown tenuous and fragile. Käthe was by turns tender and frustrated with me, for I was a beast to be around. I trailed regrets and reproach in my wake, my moods as mercurial as quicksilver. I strained even François’s infinite patience—pleasant and productive one moment, sullen and snarling the next. I knew I was insufferable, yet my irritability was a force both beyond and beside me. Even I found my own whining exhausting at times. I vacillated between rage and despondency, furious I couldn’t force happiness on myself. I had everything I had ever wanted. I was here. In Vienna. At the start of my career.
That wasn’t going anywhere.
If I hadn’t spent any significant time working on the Wedding Night Sonata since I walked away from the Underground, it was because I didn’t want to look at the monsters in my mind. Think of that spectral touch upon my hair, my cheek, my lips. That sigh across my skin. That murmur, that whisper of my name across the veil. I had been terrified of what those echoes of memory had meant. A breaking down of barriers, but between what? The veil between worlds? Or my sanity?
So I had abstained. Refrained.
I understood better then why Papa had always needed just one more drink, just one more. The temptation to open those wounds, to call upon those feelings and sensations, to indulge in the Goblin King’s presence—whether real or imagined—by working on the Wedding Night Sonata had been nearly irresistible.
I had been so, so good.
But I was so, so lonely.
It was easy—too easy—to imagine the Goblin King as my savior from sorrow. The keys of the clavichord beckoned, like the sight of laudanum to an addict. Just one taste. Just one more. Just enough to dull the pain.
I sat down and began to play.
The notes of the clavichord were dampened, for the mechanism wasn’t built to carry sound. I warmed up by running through the scales, then with a few agility exercises. My fingers were stiff, my mind fatigued. I played by rote, the music as soulless as I felt.
Practice makes perfect. I heard Papa’s voice from the past, the discipline he imposed on my brother that he could not impose upon himself. Feeling can be feigned, skill cannot.
But what was music without emotion? Without sentiment, without conviction? Notes into noise, merely tones arranged in a pleasing manner. I heard the rise and fall of pitches, the varying intervals of sound and silence as I worked, but what I did not—could not—hear was my music. I did not know where to go. I did not know what to write next.
So much of my inability to compose had been bound up in my fear of my fragile mind, but perhaps I had had it all wrong. Perhaps I was afraid I had nothing left to say. That my inspiration and my muse were buried Underground, for what was my art without Der Erlkönig? The hours we had worked together on the Wedding Night Sonata had been some of the best and most productive of my life. What if I was the musician I was because of him?
The Underground, the Goblin Grove, and the Goblin King were all behind me. I was Elisabeth, entire, even if I was Elisabeth, alone.
It was such cold comfort.
“Be, thou, with me,” I murmured. An ache echoed in the empty chambers of my heart, returning nothing but hollow loneliness. Whatever connection I had to music, to magic, to whatever mysterious force that drove me to create was gone.
“Be, thou, with me,” I repeated. “Please.”
There was something buried deep in me, a seed, an acorn, but it was smothered, stifled, strangled. I was cut off from the sun, the loam, the woods, and the Goblin Grove that had nurtured me my entire life and I was withering in Vienna, unable to take root in foreign soil. My hand went to the place at my throat where his ring had hung, feeling its loss like a missing limb.
“Please,” I said hoarsely. “Please.”
I could rise above this. I would rise above this. This life was what I wanted. This was the culmination of all my wishes, all my desires. I just needed time. I would be myself, whole and entire, once again. I would.
I would.
But no matter how much I played, how much I called, the Goblin King did not come.
I was alone.
THE HOUSE OF MADMEN AN
D DREAMERS
carnival festivities in Vienna grew to a fever pitch in the week leading up to Ash Wednesday. Back home, we had celebrated Fasching the old way, with players and townsfolk donning monstrous masks to drive away the spirits of winter. Here, there seemed to be a ball or concert or three every evening, a riotous swirl of color and costume, shouts of Ahoi! and Schelle schelle! sounding late into the night. These were not the spirits of winter to be driven away until the following year; they were the idols of excess and extravagance to be purged before Lent.
On Shrove Tuesday, the night of our benefactor’s ball, François hired us a coach to drive us to the Count’s home. Procházka House was not a Stadthaus in the city proper, but a manor on the outskirts, where haphazard human habitation gave way to tame, cultivated wilderness. It would have taken no great effort to walk the mile or so to the house, but François told me that these things were not done. Sometimes living in Vienna felt as though I were dropped in the midst of a game where everyone but me knew the pieces, the moves, and the rules.
“Oh, I do hope we look respectable,” Käthe said, fretting with her handkerchief as we drove past rolling lawns and stately homes.
Unlike the other parties hosted throughout Vienna’s fifth season, Count Procházka’s soiree required that we be attired only in black and white. An odd constraint that Käthe had initially balked at, but quickly rose to the challenge. She had dressed François and Josef in matching yet opposite costumes as Night and Day, with François in white and gold, my brother in black and silver. Sober woolen coats, brocade waistcoats with gold and silver thread, and well-tailored breeches were paired with knee-high leather boots, simple but striking. Their masks were simple silk dominos—Josef’s patterned with stars, François’s with a golden sunburst.
“Magnifique,” François assured her. “Très belle, mademoiselle.”
“You are a genius,” I added.
We glanced expectantly at Josef, but he was determinedly looking out the carriage window. Sparks of irritation ignited my blood. Käthe had worked her fingers to chafed calluses and her eyes to watery wrinkles to stitch us all new apparel in time for the ball, so the least we could do was congratulate her on her hard work.
“We look amazing,” I repeated, as if I could make up for our brother’s rudeness.
And we did look amazing. Käthe and I were dressed as an angel and demon, but to my surprise, my sister had chosen to be the devil. She looked majestic in her gown of black velvet, her golden curls draped with black silk and lace, cleverly twisted together and pinned to resemble horns growing from her head. She had rouged her lips a bright red, and her blue eyes looked imperious from behind her black mask. For a moment, the image of moldering gowns on dress forms rose up in my mind, a polished bronze mirror reflecting an endless line of faded Goblin Queens. I swallowed.
The dress my sister had made for me was nearly innocent in its simplicity. Yards and yards of fine white muslin had made a floating, ethereal gown, while Käthe had somehow fashioned a brocade cape into the shape of folded angel wings, which grew from my shoulder blades and cascaded to the floor. She had braided gold into a crown about my head for a halo, and I carried a lyre to complete the picture. The four of us stared at each other through our dominos, our faces made strange and unfamiliar by our masks.
Tonight would be our formal introduction to Viennese high society. The invitations we all carried marked us as Count Procházka’s peers, and to say we were all a little nervous was to understate our anxiety. Käthe and I had had no real exposure to the well-heeled members of town; we were innkeeper’s daughters. Our only exposure to money was whatever coin we had managed to keep in our coffers. François had grown up among the wealthy, but he, too, had never been one of them. The color of his skin forever marked him as an outsider to the noble class, even if he had learned their manners and ways.
I looked to Josef, but he was ignoring us. He betrayed little, his expression schooled to careful indifference. It was a greater mask than the one perched upon his face, and I hated how he never took it off, not anymore.
Käthe gasped. “Look!” she said breathlessly, pointing out the window. “Procházka House!”
We all leaned outside for a better look as we pulled up the drive. Past the ivy-wound wrought-iron gates was an old manor built of gray stone, dark wood, and diamond-paned glass. It had the look of an abbey, or a castle, tall pointed arches forming the peaks and gables of its roofs. A fountain played in the courtyard, where a fish-tailed woman sat and played with water flowing from the rocks. It did not resemble any of the great houses or palaces we had passed on our way here; it looked far older, built in a different century, a different world.
A footman opened the carriage door for us as we pulled in front of the entryway. He was rather small for a footman, and there was something of a shriveled and disheveled look about him. His wig was mussed and askew, bits of white hair flying away into a puff of cloud about his head. He was old, much older than any of the other footmen I had seen around town.
“Thank you,” I said as he helped me down.
The footman returned my smile, and I tried not to recoil. His teeth were yellowed and sharp, and in the flickering torchlight, his sallow skin seemed tinged with green. “Welcome to Procházka House, Fräulein,” he said. “Home of madmen and dreamers. I hope you enjoy your stay with us.” He pulled a flower from seemingly nowhere and presented it to me with a flourish. “I think you will.”
I took the flower from his crabbed fingers. It was a common poppy. “Thank you,” I said shakily.
“Wear it,” he said. “For faith.”
Faith? It seemed an odd reason, but I tucked the bloom behind my ear to humor him. I noticed then that a few of the guests arriving for the ball were wearing scarlet flowers pinned to their lapels and gowns, bright spots of crimson blooming like splashes of blood against their black-and-white costumes. The footman bowed and I hurried to follow the rest of my family to the house, eager to extricate myself from the situation.
Madmen and dreamers. I stood in line with Käthe, Josef, François, and the other guests waiting to be received by the hosts. Behind our masks, we were all anonymous, but the press of partygoers clad in only black and white heightened the sense of surreality. It was not a parade of fantastic monsters or beautiful creatures. We were all scraps of light and darkness, and standing among them in the fading twilight made me feel as though we would all disappear at any moment.
Your patron is said to be rather eccentric, and prone to . . . strange proclivities.
Dread clenched my stomach with icy fingers. We were nearly at the door.
“Ready?” Käthe asked, squeezing my hand. The blue of her eyes was intense amidst the sea of black and white. Her nervousness was edged with excitement, while mine was limned with fear. I tried to draw strength from my sister’s gaiety, her sunshine humor, relying on them to burn away my shadows of doubt.
I smiled and returned her squeeze. I handed our invitations to the footman at the door and stepped inside, crossing the threshold from twilight into darkness. Something gritty was ground underfoot, and it was only when I glanced at my shoes that I noticed the small, white, crystalline grains.
Salt.
* * *
I didn’t know what I was expecting. Gargoyles leering at me from cramped corners, perhaps, or derelict and decrepit furniture, the glamor of decay laid over rooms and caverns as vast as the Underground. Instead, we were greeted by an enormous marble entryway, the inside of Procházka House more like the great halls and galleries of Schönbrunn Palace and other fashionable Viennese residences. The interior was so at odds with its gothic exterior that I wondered if we had entered the wrong house by mistake.
A grand staircase led up to a second floor, the ballroom doors thrown open. Beneath the curve of the stairs, a tunnel disappeared into shadow. Above us, I could hear the faint strains of a minuet above the susurrus of a crowd, the muffled shuffling of footsteps treading the boards. At the top of the s
taircase, a stone crest was mounted, showing the expanded arms of the Procházka family. A poppy was embraced by vines at the center of a quartered shield, the top left filled with a burg atop a hill, the bottom right with a melusine on a rock, her fishtail trailing in the waters of a lake, very much like the fountain outside. Above the shield, carved into marble, was their motto: HOSTIS VENIT FLORES DISCEDUNT.
A servant came by and made to collect our things as we waited with the other guests to enter the ballroom upstairs. We relinquished our cloaks and heavier garments, but Josef shook his head, holding his violin case closer to him like a child. Or a shield. I had brought my folio of music and my brother his instrument in case we were called upon to perform for the Count.
“Don’t you want to dance?” Käthe asked.
“No,” Josef said petulantly. “I do not want to dance.”
“We’re here as his guests, Josef, not his hired musicians.” She rolled her eyes. “Try and enjoy yourself, will you?”
Our brother gave an exasperated sigh and stalked off, disappearing into the crowd. François and I exchanged glances. He closed his eyes and gave a slight shake of his head. I grimaced. It was going to be a long night and we hadn’t even entered the ballroom.
We were crowded in on all sides by partygoers. The uncomfortable proximity of so many anonymous strangers was beginning to get the better of me and I flinched and twitched at the slightest touch like a skittish thing. The last time I had attended a ball, I had been surrounded by goblins and changelings, but these black-and-white-clad guests were no less frightening. In many ways, Vienna was a place far stranger and more dangerous than the Underground. I broke out into a sweat, despite the gooseflesh pimpling my skin.
“Mademoiselle?” I turned to see François offering me his arm. A corner of his lips quirked up in a sympathetic smile, and I accepted his arm with a smile of my own. He did not flinch when I tightened my grip as we entered the ballroom, my palms slick with nervousness. I was grateful for his steadiness, for the room was beginning to rock and sway like a boat upon the waves.