Aloysia had just finished unwinding the rags from her hair, and one never knew just how they would hang until that was done. Would the thick curls at the back of the neck be crooked? No, they were perfect, much better than last night. But she had been lovely enough then; her father and others had said it. “Such a delicious girl,” she could hear one of the men murmuring after she had concluded her aria at the palace. The way one or two of them looked at her! Not that they interested her very much, but they were, as her mother said, possibilities, their names to be added to a list in a little book, discussed over many hours of coffee. It was a leather-bound book tooled in flowers that her mother kept hidden in secret places (lastly behind the flour canister), which none of them had ever been allowed to look in or touch. Last night, however, Aloysia had been given permission for the first time to come to the kitchen and list a few men who had heard her sing. Most she could only describe; she did not exactly know their names. She also did not know if they were already married.

Some years ago, when Josefa had first started to have a shape beneath her chemise, her mother had gathered her two older daughters together and had begun to discuss the subject of marriage with them. To be an old maid was a terrible thing: no fate could be worse than that. To be unchosen was horrid! Was not even death preferable? They could not begin, their mother said, to think of their futures too soon. Now and then a girl trained to music could eke out a precarious existence. The occasional woman wrote for her bread, or was a clever dressmaker, but even with these things her true goal was to marry as well as she could. Aloysia remembered that evening in the kitchen, both girls sitting close to their mother, listening to her every word.

At first the names of suitors were modest prospects: printers, a furniture upholsterer with a small workshop, a schoolmaster. Then two years later Frau Caecilia Weber had looked at her newly blooming second child and, smacking her lips gently, observed, “An old school friend of mine has a daughter without dowry who has just married a Count, and she is not nearly as beautiful as you. Oh no, my sweet, not nearly as lovely. If such a blessing could occur, you could have all the pretty things you deserve, my Aloysia, my own little flea.” That was the day everything changed. It was a spring day, and she had run up the steps with her nose buried in sprigs of linden blossoms. She could hear her mother’s voice. “I know how you long for fine things, my Aloysia.”

Today on her way back from delivering a pile of copied music, she stood for a long time in front of a French dressmaker’s shop window, where she could make out, behind the small panes, a length of pale pink brocade. Pressing her forehead against the cold glass, Aloysia almost felt her soul leave her body and wind itself in the cloth. She so wanted first a dress from that cloth, and then another in milkmaid style made of the finest white muslin, with a wide, pale pink silk sash that would tie around her waist and bow so extravagantly at the small of her back that the ends would flutter down the skirt. She had seen a drawing of such a dress worn in the court of France.

“Aloysia, are you coming? Have you polished the candle sconces? It is Thursday, you know!”

Why must the world stop for Thursdays? Must they all be rallied weekly to this running about so, tidying the parlor, finding enough candles, always making sacrifices when no one in particular ever came, whereas last night at the Elector’s palace there had been the women with little dark beauty marks shaped like stars or moons. How could Josefa laugh at it? They had fought about it this morning while studying a new duet. And didn’t it matter to Josefa that she was nineteen and not yet betrothed? Just like the younger ones, who never gave it a thought.

“Aloysia!” called her sisters and mother.

At least she could wear her pink silk hose, embroidered at the ankle with small scarlet flowers, which her father had bought her the first time she sang in public. If by chance her skirt pulled up an inch or so above her shoes, Leutgeb would notice. The blustering horn player was in love with her, and, though his name had never been mentioned by her mother, she found that when he looked at her, her body grew warm all over.

But now, rummaging through boxes and under the bed, she could not find the embroidered hose. Dropping to her knees, she searched the bottom of the wardrobe, hurling things out. “Someone borrowed them, likely,” she muttered. “Will I ever have anything not borrowed, remade, or lent?”

Blessed saints, could it be true? There, stuffed under the shoes, wrapped in canvas, was the fan cousin Alfonso’s wife had given her, which Josefa had begged to borrow again last night, because she said she could not sing without a fan. Obviously, after they had finished singing, Josefa had hidden it somewhere because it was broken. From under it, Aloysia pulled out the hose with the flowers, splattered with street muck.

She leapt up in her shift and petticoat and rushed into the hall where she collided with Josefa, who was carrying table draping. “You farmer’s daughter—you ruined it, you mauled it, look!” She opened the fan with its silk portrait of Venice, gesturing at the few cracked slats. “You ruin everything, everything! There’s a split in the Grand Canal. I don’t know who brought you into this family, Josefa Weber, what ugly gypsy brought you in his cart and sold you for two kreuzers, but you’re here to ruin my life, and I wish to the Blessed Virgin we could sell you back again.”

“I never broke the fan; you stuffed it away yourself,” cried Josefa, throwing down the linen. “You hid it under the shoes so you wouldn’t have to share it anymore, and that broke it. What’s a fan supposed to do under twenty shoes?”

Aloysia slapped her, and Josefa took her by the hair and pulled her a few feet down the hall. The harder Aloysia tried to shake her off, the more her elder sister continued to drag her toward the parlor by the curls. Aloysia shrieked, her piercing, light voice ringing from room to room, and was about to dig her teeth into her sister’s arm when their father, half shaven, his bare chest dusted with gray hair, rushed toward them shouting, “Josy, let go!”

Thrown off suddenly, Aloysia stumbled against a parlor chair and a pile of music. “You did take it; you did!” she sobbed. “And now you made me scream, and I’ve hurt my voice, you ugly bitch. You can’t wait for me to hurt my voice, can you?” Her hands flew to her ragged hair and aching head, and tears spilled from her blue eyes. Her voice was shaking. “And you’ve ruined the curl. I won’t come out of our room tonight; that’s it. I have no voice; it’s gone, it’s gone.”

Sophie, who had heard the shouting from the kitchen, bolted out like a weed driven by wind; seeing her father already held the girls apart, she retrieved the fan from under the table. “Oh, Aly,” she murmured, stammering a little as she did when there was a quarrel, “look, it’s only two slats that need replacing. Why must you go into such passions for things that can be mended, things that are inconsequential?” She fished for her wrinkled handkerchief and wiped Aloysia’s face.

Aloysia sobbed, “There’s a tiny tear in the silk; it goes all the way from the canal to the base of San Marco.”

“I’ll take it to the second floor to Hoffman; he repairs fans and umbrellas. He’ll do us a favor since I found his lost dog. Don’t cry. Hush, hush, darling,” pleaded Sophie, just as Constanze also rushed from the kitchen holding her father’s ironed shirt like a banner, its arms floating behind.

“Girls!” she commanded. “Mama says you must all be quiet or she’ll come with her wooden spoon and then the cakes will never be finished! Look at the mantel clock; it’s nearly seven, and people will be arriving in ten minutes. Not one of us is dressed. Papa, here’s your shirt. You have soap on your nose. What will people think of us? It will be all over Mannheim.”

But Aloysia stood stubbornly by the chair. “The fan isn’t inconsequential ,” she sobbed, the balled handkerchief in her hand. “It’s inconsequential to all of you because you don’t care. Some of us might care, some of us might want to be at our best. Mon Dieu, c’est terrible! And the stockings are filthy; Stanzi, you promised to wash them after I wore them last time when I gave you ten kreuzers of my singing money. None of you care about me, and I haven’t any hose. I couldn’t find any.”

“There’s some in the kitchen. Be still: Mama says.”

“Oh, her spoon, of course!” Aloysia cried. “Does she think we are children to threaten with a spoon? I earned fifteen silver florins last night and pay for the bread on the table, and she thinks I’m no more than a child!” And she rushed off without a glance at Josefa, who, with an angry shrug, marched off to retrieve the table linen from the hall floor.

Now alone for the moment, Sophie stood by the window, untying her apron and looking down at the approaching evening. Her heart still beat fast from the quarrel. Few carriages passed. Squinting hard, she saw the shapes of what looked like two men walking toward the street door of their house; it was all she could make out with her nearsightedness, but when they opened the front door below, she cried, “Someone’s come early; Stanzi, help me!”

From the kitchen her mother called out threats, prayers, and directions. The gingerbread was not ready. Constanze hurried out with her dress half fastened, her fingers lacing as fast as they could, and began to light the candles. Aloysia emerged fully dressed. I have never belonged in this family, she thought severely, suppressing her last sob.

Still, she felt simultaneously the old pride that had brought them all through much. They were the daughters of the musician Fridolin Weber, from a family of Webers. It was Thursday, and, as her father once told her, tickling her and rubbing his unshaven face against hers, on this night in this house, no one is unhappy. So she moved closer to her sisters, and they all stood as one, hands touching, smelling of clean brushed clothes perfumed with lavender, hair drawn plainly back for two younger girls, still curled for Aloysia, and pushed under a cap for Josefa, who had stayed too late at the book shop and had not had time to fuss.

Constanze in her plain dark dress looked at the door.

Sophie unlatched it.

Leutgeb strode forward to kiss the hands of the girls; by his side was the smaller Mozart, large, kind eyes looking about at all of them. In his bass voice, Leutgeb boomed, “We’re too early, but perhaps we’ll be forgiven when you see the nice cakes and wine we have for you.”

Sophie rushed forward to look at the basket placed on the table. “Oh, chocolate cake with cherries,” she cried, jumping up and down a little. “And sweet wine ... Father loves sweet wine.” Her freckled face brimmed with gratitude as she squinted at both musicians.

From her parents’ bedchamber, she heard her father curse in the name of Saint Elizabeth as he dropped something on the floor. He would bend, groaning, to pick it up, his back curving. Her mother was still in the kitchen banging pots, wiping off dishes.

Mozart held a narrow paper portfolio in both his arms. “I’ve brought something as well,” he said.

“What, more cakes?” asked Sophie.

“No, not cakes. A challenge. I am come to set a challenge for Mademoiselle Aloysia.”

“What? What?” cried the girls all at once, clamoring about him, but he shook his head. Suddenly he was not shy at all; instead, his face was full of mischief. “But you’ll have to wait a time until all the guests come.”

Within the half hour the room was crowded, a pupil of their father’s had arrived, and a church musician, then a few members of a horn band, followed by dear Heinemann and Alfonso with violin and cello, as always, by their sides. The younger girls ran back to find extra wineglasses and plates, and the cake was set among the music, the glazed cherries nestled among the chocolate thick as fine velvet. Sophie gazed at all with relief as the guests consumed the cake and her father grew visibly merrier. And at last there was their parents’ oldest friend, honest Uncle Thorwart, whom they had known from childhood; this heavy man who panted from the stairs winked at them. He had brought from the best chocolatier in town a painted wood box of chocolates, likely filled with sweet nuts, drops of blackberry liqueur, and marzipan, whose sugared-almond taste lingered for hours on the tongue. It was a generous box of at least four layers. If the guests mostly addressed themselves to their mother’s gingerbread with cream and the several additional bottles of wine that remained, there would be enough chocolate to enjoy in secret later on.

Thorwart, meticulously dressed, placed his ringed hand over his heart. “Those stairs! My breath! Girls, come kiss your old uncle.”

The room’s configuration changed: chairs were rearranged, people moved about. Mozart had taken his place at the clavier and drew several pages of music from his portfolio. Fridolin demanded quiet, and the parlor became so still that the only sounds were the crackling fire in the fireplace and the rousing November wind outside the window.

“Now,” Mozart said, “I present a challenge to Mademoiselle Aloysia in the presence of her family. Mademoiselle, I heard you say last night in the carriage that you can read all music at sight. Very well! I’ve written this song for you from a text by Metastasio, and if you can read it straight off without an error, you may have it. If not, I tear it up.”

A flurry of voices rose up, a few hands drawing her closer. “Amusing; he’s likely made it difficult. Aloysia, stand behind him to see the notes clearly. The light’s poor; who’ll hold the candle?”

For a moment Aloysia could not remember the boast she had made coming home in the carriage, expansive with her success and the quickly drunk wine, and flush with the odd sensuality of sitting almost knee to knee with this intense young man who had ridden in the gondolas of the Venetian canals. Whatever it had been, now she had to make good on it, or be shamed that she had not been taught music well enough.

Mozart adjusted the music so she could see it better, then he beckoned for Sophie, who held a candle for her sister, to step closer.

He played the first bars.

Aloysia sang the opening line of the recitative in a small, tremulous voice, as if she had never sung before anyone, but by the tender melodic line of the andante sostenuto, encouraged by the nods of the others, who saw she had made no mistakes so far, she began to gain courage.

She knew music; she had heard it as she was curled within the womb and after she lay swaddled in her cradle. By the first gentle spill of sixteenth notes and the sustained high Bb that followed shortly after, she felt those about her stir with admiration, and her voice took on an authority of its own. Forgetting everything but the music before her, she sprang into the allegro agitato. Her voice opened like a heart in love, and she became one with the notes. Dresses, cake, muddy hose fell away as insignificant. She sang as if she had never sung before. She stood erect, one hand at her side almost imperceptibly beating time. The song returned to the first tempo, and her silvery voice rose in glittering scale to the high Eb. Mozart’s hands on the keys flashed, lifting her up. She was not reading the song; she became it.

When the last trill rang out to the dark corners of the room, beyond the piles of old music and the empty wineglasses, she stood poised, startled and motionless. “The purity of that voice,” someone said. For a moment she had been in another world. Vaguely, she felt her hand taken and someone’s dry kiss above it. She withdrew it distractedly, as if someone had mistakenly taken up something that belonged to her. There was a strange desire to cry. Could the song be over? Could it have ended and left her?

Everyone was clapping; Sophie’s arm was about her waist.

The words with their melody repeated themselves in her mind; she moved her lips, drawing a little close to the clavier as if she would begin again.

Mozart stood up clapping as well, but she looked at him as if he were a stranger. What had he to do with this moment? What was she thinking? The notes were his. Still, without her voice, weren’t they but dry marks? Yet how could it be? She stood confused. Was it his song? Or was it hers?

“Mademoiselle,” he said, “you’ve won the wager. The song’s yours. I’ll orchestrate it so that you can sing it in concert, and all who hear it will be as amazed as we are here today.”

She felt a moment’s fierce tenderness for him. He looked at her. For a moment nothing was ordinary, and she reached for his warm hand. Oh, she thought, come with me. Yet they were pressed in on all sides, and there was her father being the dear fool, calling in a loud voice for the best three remaining bottles of wine to be dusted off and brought at once. How could he think of wine at this moment?

With that the music stopped within her, and she knew herself to be only a sixteen-year-old girl in a stuffy parlor. Could she have so quickly lost the mystery of those moments and the happiness of the singer when she becomes the song and touches eternity? But family and guests were all pressing about them, candles tilted and dripping wax. “Mind the candle,” Josefa cried, receiving the wine bottles from her father.

Now she was being hugged by all, aware of how intensely a few of the men looked at her, even Thorwart, who was called uncle by the girls even though he wasn’t really a blood relative. There was the self-contained composer, his left hand still resting soundlessly on the keys, also looking steadily at her. If she embraced him, she would regain the moment. Slip away, her eyes said; slip away and come with me. Come with me, dear Wolfgang Mozart. Her heart was beating very fast.

She left the room as a string trio began, escaping to the unmade beds and scattered clothing of her shared bedroom, even closing the door a little, but not all, so that she might hear the composer’s footsteps following her down the hall. The door from the parlor creaked softly, and she opened hers. In the shadow she saw a man walking softly under the portraits of long-dead Weber ancestors posing in their horrible dull garments.

She lightly ran forward the few steps and felt her hands caught by another’s; they were not Mozart’s supple hands, but wider, meaty ones. It was Leutgeb who had followed her. “Do you know what happens to kisses not given?” he said softly, looming above her. “They become sorrow, like words never spoken. You are the most beautiful girl in the world, and your voice is like that of an angel.”

Lifting her face, she allowed him to kiss her mouth. And as he kissed her, she felt all the magnificence of the song return.

Some minutes later she straightened her dress and slipped back into the parlor, where the second movement of the string trio had just begun. She could see her father’s good head nodding as he played his violin.

Josefa remembered peering over the cradle at the very tiny fragile child who, anxious relatives muttered, hovered between life and death. For weeks following Aloysia’s birth Josefa had stumbled over kneeling aunts whispering over their rosary beads. The child lived, and, from shortly after that time, everything changed.

Josefa had been the darling of her parents for three and a half brief years of life as an only child. Later, even after it seemed Aloysia would live, it was Josefa who was the first to read, the first to have a music lesson, the first to sing to aunts and grand-mothers as she stood on a chair and was held steady by her adoring mother, and then, dressed in her childish best, the first to sing to her father’s musical friends on Thursdays. Suddenly, though, there was another songbird, a higher, lighter, purer voice, yanking at her dress as she sang, almost pulling her from the chair. At the age of seven Josefa had had enough; she pushed her sister down ten minutes before guests arrived, and had then been slapped for it. Friends who had first lifted Josefa into their arms now exclaimed playfully at her weight, and they lifted tiny Aloysia instead. The younger girl darted like a sparrow; she was more appealing. And yet Josefa loved her small sister as something finer and sweeter than she could ever be. Hadn’t there been that day at the menagerie so long ago to prove it forever?

The tiger, behind the slats of its wood, wheeled cage, was old and lethargic. Josefa and Aloysia had approached the cage hand in hand, each drawn by the other’s courage to go forward. Were they six and nearly three? Aloysia wore a little crushed bonnet, and the few feet to the heavy wood cage seemed very long as they pulled each other closer. Then the beast roared. He rose, glaring at them, and swiped one paw through the bars. Aloysia stood petrified, some inches away from the great curving claws; someone was shouting, but before the large keeper could reach them, Josefa yanked her baby sister’s limp arm and pulled her away so fast that Aloysia tumbled in the dust. Josefa was shaking so hard she had to lean against the wall. Still trembling, she picked up her sobbing sister and dusted her off. Was it minutes, hours, before their parents found them? “Why didn’t you protect your little sister?” her mother had cried later. “You know you have to take care of her; how could you let her go so close?” Her father’s voice had replied angrily, “It’s not the girl’s fault, Caecilia; she saved her.” Josefa still recalled the sensation of his mustache against her cheek as he knelt and held her close.

Now, years later, she sat on the landing outside her family’s apartment, trying to keep her tears within. She could hear that the trio was done, that now someone accompanied a violin. Then everyone called for a duet, and the cry went up, “But where’s Josefa? Where’s our Josefa?” That was her father’s voice calling, “Where’s my girl?”

The door creaked open, and Sophie emerged, blinking, onto the landing. “Josy?” she murmured.

From the shadows the eldest sister held her breath. The love in the smallest sister’s voice sounded again. Josefa could not bear to hear Sophie’s questioning plea and leapt to her feet. “I was too warm inside,” she said. “That’s why I left.”

Inside she crossed, smiling, to Aloysia. The sisters each wound an arm about the other’s waist and, lifting their faces, sang purely and truly as if nothing had occurred at all: as if one had not been fondled in a dark hall under the small dour portraits of their ancestors, and the other had not fled to the stairs to confront her unhappiness. Their voices rose in thirds to the top notes, glistening off the low flames of the candles and echoing about the empty wine bottles. Then another magical evening came to a close, and the guests reluctantly began to depart.

“Don’t eat them all.”

“I only had six.”

“Oh, how can you all be such pigs!” Aloysia said. “You’ll be fat and won’t have fashionable figures, no matter how tightly you lace your corsets!”

Laughter burst out, quickly followed by a sharp admonition from their mother in the next room. Father had a headache; Mother was taking care of him. Then Constanze turned to her smaller sister and whispered, “They’re almost asleep; don’t wake them. Sophie, did you manage to steal it?”

Wiping her fingers on the quilt, Sophie reached under the bed and, with a crooked smile, drew out from under her pile of clothes the leather-tooled book of suitors.

Aloysia sat straight up in horror. “You shouldn’t have taken that,” she whispered sharply. “You know Mother doesn’t want us to touch it.” She put the coffee cup carefully on the dresser and reached for the book, but Sophie rolled away.

Constanze said, “Why shouldn’t she touch it? You did the other night. I saw you.”

“It was the first time she said I could enter possibilities, and I looked at only the one page. Where did you find it tonight? She moved it; I looked. Well, I did look.”

“Why, to enter that horn blower’s name?” whispered Josefa. “Sophie found it under the flour barrel.”

“You’re not supposed to open it! There are things in it that are private! It’s Mother’s.”

“I am going to open it!” Sophie said. “Shh! Be quiet! We’ll just look at it tonight, and I’ll tiptoe and put it back. It’s her plans for our futures, and we have a right to know her plans.”

Sophie, Constanze, and Aloysia gathered closer, Aloysia with some confusion in her face, the same expression she had been wearing ever since disappearing down the hall earlier that evening. Her lower lip, thrust forward, gave her a look between childish and arrogance, and she cast a resentful look at Josefa, who sat with arms folded.

Sophie turned the pages carefully, holding the candle close. A bit of glowing wick flew off and landed on a page, and she pressed it out with her fingers and rubbed at the mark. It had been several days since Constanze and Sophie made plans to steal the book this very evening. “It is our futures,” Constanze had said. Josefa had sworn to have nothing to do with the plan, and even now she sat a little apart, rubbing her big bare feet with their large toes and looking disapproving. Her dark hair fell uncurled down her back to her waist, making her inquisitive face seem even longer.

The early pages were crammed with sketches of dresses that had been fashionable twenty years before, and a number of old family recipes. A curious printed invitation to a ball fell out, along with some bit of fabric. They turned the pages more rapidly now, past family accounts meticulously kept and then abandoned, until they reached the names of possible suitors; then they looked mischievously at one another. The first of these pages listed the names of tradesmen, the names of their fathers, and their approximate yearly income.

“Oh, these are from some time ago,” Constanze whispered. “Look, the ink’s faded. Will you all be still? Look, here’s Weidman. I remember him, but he’s married now and has three sons. Here’s Lorenz Holsbauer: something odd happened to him. I think they made him go for a soldier; he was in some kind of scandal.”

“How do you know?” Josefa asked, moving closer to look over her sister’s shoulder.

“I notice things. You don’t. You’re always reading philosophy or Rousseau.”

“I notice what’s important, not nonsense. Don’t let the wax drip! When were these written? I wasn’t even twelve years old. Matthias Aldgasser. Oh, dear God, Matthias! He became a priest, had to, because he preferred ... don’t listen, Sophie. He preferred—”

“What did he prefer?” the youngest girl cried, bouncing on the mattress.

“Hush, or we’ll stuff a pillow over your face. He was ... there was a scandal. Never mind; it would corrupt you to know.”

“I’m already corrupted having stolen the book,” Sophie said. “I’ll have to make my confession and do penance, say at least a full rosary on my knees on the stone church floor. Don’t push, Aloysia.”

“I’m not,” Aloysia whispered. “I don’t think we should be looking at this at all. You could bunch a shawl under your knees, Sophie. And since when are you interested, Mademoiselle Maria Josefa?”

Still they turned more pages. “Ah, this list is more recent,” Josefa said. The rest of their small room was now in shadow, with the shapes of their hanging dresses and hats like the ghosts of their lives watching over them. Josefa glanced toward the mirror, where she could see only the reflections of their dark faces and the sputtering light of the candle.

Constanze pulled the quilt over her knees. “Even if they are more recent, half these men are married already. The decent ones are snatched from the shelves as fast as fresh bread in the market, and the ones left we wouldn’t want to rub bare feet with under a quilt.”

“They’d be rubbing something more than that!” Josefa whispered with a smile. “Sophie, did you eat the very last marzipan chocolate?”

“Will you be still?” Constanze ran her finger down a few more pages. “Why, now it becomes fantastical!” she murmured seriously. “Look here. Here’re her plans for you, Aloysia; your name’s on the top of the page. Here’s the name of a Swedish baron. She can’t be serious. Where does she get such ideas? Sweden’s very cold in winter, and they say the days are only a few hours long. You wouldn’t be able to borrow things from us, Aly, if you lived so far away.”

Aloysia wound her curls around her fingers. “I wouldn’t need to borrow anything if I married a baron. And it’s not as if she got the name from a book she read. The Baron visited here some months ago; he may have been at the court concert last night as well, but I couldn’t see everyone’s face when I was concentrating on the sixteenth notes in the duet. And Mama described him only once, rather vaguely. Did you steal this book just to tease me? Perhaps you don’t care what you do, but I care very much! I’d have all the dresses I wanted then, all of them!”

“And what about Monsieur Horn Player Leutgeb, Mademoiselle Go-Hide-in-the-Dark?”

Aloysia pulled the book away so suddenly they heard the page tear, and all four looked down at it in horror. Constanze rummaged in a box under the bed until she found some paste, and they mended it as neatly as they could, heads together, fingers smoothing the page as if it were a holy relic.

Aloysia’s eyes shone with tears again even as they finished. “Never mind,” she said. “I’ll tell her I ripped it accidentally. Or maybe she won’t notice. Put it back under the barrel carefully. Leutgeb’s nothing to me. I don’t like everyone knowing my thoughts; you can’t know them anyway. You couldn’t understand them. You’re not me. You haven’t my reasons. And I will marry well, and you’ll be fortunate if I let you visit me!”

She withdrew under her quilt, turning away from them a little, and did not look up when Constanze came back from returning the book to the kitchen. Though she closed the door as quietly as possible, her bare feet creaked the boards.

“Safely back?” one girl whispered.

Constanze nodded grimly. “Is there a chocolate with sweet chestnut paste?” she asked, her long loose hair falling over the box like a benediction. “The candle won’t last but a minute more.”

“There it goes!”

They all watched as it sputtered once; the wick slowly fell over into the last puddle of wax, glowed briefly, and died. The room smelled of waxy smoke and sweet chestnuts. In the smoky darkness, the paper in the candy box rustled as the girls rummaged.

“Papa says Herr Heinemann’s teeth are blackened from too much sugar,” Sophie whispered with her mouth full. “And Uncle Thorwart ate the whole top layer. He’s getting awfully fat; he wears those English coats and will have to have a larger one made. Ah, it’s cold outside. Can you feel the wind creeping under the sill?”

Constanze pulled her quilt closer. “Listen,” she whispered even more softly. “Don’t go to sleep yet. I almost forgot. This is terrible and sad! When I ran down the stairs before to say good-night to Cousin Alfonso, I saw the tailor’s daughter, whom we haven’t seen in weeks, and now I know why. She’s with child for certain. She couldn’t hide it.”

Aloysia now crawled closer to the others. “What? Without the blessing of the Church and the sacrament of marriage? We must thank God we were not brought up to do such things and bring terrible shame on our family.”

Now they could see a little by the moonlight through the curtainless window. Huddled together, their wool nightgowns pulled down to cover their toes, they grew serious over the plight of the tailor’s daughter. What a terrible thing! Every good girl knew that she must withhold until certain conditions, financial and social, were met. Flirtation was allowed, of course, even a passionate kiss on the lips on rare occasions. (The others felt Aloysia stiffen.) In empty alleys, in cloakrooms of great houses, near any room with a soft, inviting bed, however, vigilance must be upheld.

There were stories of too many glasses of good wine drunk, girls half dazed, an unremembered night but for a petticoat stained with blood that would not wash out. (The first spilled blood of unmarried virgins did not wash out. Their mother had always assured them of that, and their aunts had nodded solemnly and sworn it by heaven.)

Sophie blew her nose and wound her rosary in her fingers.

“How did Papa meet Mama exactly?” she asked eagerly. “Both our aunts have a different story. It was a love match though, Mama said. I think they ran away. Aunt Elizabeth says her parents were against it. They were rich, and Papa was poor but full of prospects.”

“I thought Mama’s family lost their money when she was ten.”

“No indeed, seventeen.”

“I’ll ask her.”

“She’ll tell you something different every time.”

“Oh, shut up! We were speaking of marriages in general.”

With voices even lower, the conversation turned to sanctified marriage, and they sat more erect in the darkness. They told one another the stories of courtships and marriages: marriages of wealthy women and the elegance of their dresses, marriages of scrub girls, marriages betrayed and reconciled; of fidelity and infidelity, great dowries, large settlements, and true love, which was the rarest thing of all. Exhausted by so many marriages, they fell asleep one by one, until only Sophie and Josefa remained awake, now lying in heaps under blankets on their two close beds, faces almost touching, whispering.

Sophie said, “You could have sung that song at sight, Josy.”

“Yes; when he writes another, I will.”

“I like Mozart; he has a nice smile. I thought he would follow Aly down the hall, but he didn’t. I wonder why he didn’t. Maybe he’s in love with someone else. Maybe it’s you. Does she love Leutgeb, do you think? He and she were behind the hall door for the whole first movement of the trio, so perhaps she does. And what will Mama say to that?”

“Oh, really, I don’t care. Such nonsense.”

“I noticed something about the book. The first several pages have been cut out—the early writing.”

“More nonsense. Good night.”

Sophie lay awake for a time. She turned her head slightly to look at her sisters, sleeping this way and that, embracing pillows, curling in lumps under quilts, a hand with bitten fingernails dangling near the iron headboard. What was it like to be in love?

But the future was too complicated. There were things to be done in the morning: hose to be hung to dry, shirts to be ironed, and that all to one purpose. Under her breath she said her nightly prayer, which she and Constanze shared, that they might all remain together and that nothing would ever divide them. The pink flowered hose would be washed; the fan would be mended. She looked about the shadowy room at their garments thrown this way and that, their petticoats flung across the one chair, everything hazy in her nearsightedness. She put out her hand to touch her sisters, reassuring herself of their presence, protecting them.

In the marital bedroom, breeches and shirt draped also where they could find space, Fridolin Weber and his wife lay in bed, still talking softly. He wore a wet cold cloth over his forehead to remedy another of his frequent headaches. “Ah, your Thursdays,” Caecilia Weber said affectionately, for their old friend Thorwart had come with many bottles of wine to replace the ones they had drunk, and Aloysia had sung like an angel from heaven.

Still, she added sternly, “I must speak to Aloysia tomorrow. I saw Leutgeb follow her. I have my plans for her. Don’t smile, Fridolin. Thorwart moves in high circles and will help us. He’ll find some good prospects. I swear before a year more turns, someone with an old family name will marry our girl. One can’t have these matters arranged too soon before some other more unworthy girl gets the best opportunity.”

“You’re not thinking of the Prince of England, I hope?”

“You jest with me, Fridolin.”

“You fill her head with too many things, my dear. I want only her happiness. She’s very gifted, but rash.” Fridolin handed her the wet cloth, which she again dipped in water and wrung out. “Perhaps one of our girls will marry Mozart. I like that young man, my wife. I like him very much indeed.”

“Yes, he has a kind nature,” answered Caecilia. “But he doesn’t know how to get on in the world. Thorwart doubts he’ll do well in Mannheim; he’s hoping to be commissioned for an opera, but the wrong people are against him, and he wants to have the position of vice kapellmeister for the court but may not. He has enemies.”

“Why does he have enemies?”

“Because he doesn’t know how to manage people; people don’t know what to think of him. He doesn’t fit in. Thorwart tells me that. But we can’t consider him as a suitor. He has promised not to think of marriage until he succeeds. I heard him say so.”

“Let’s hope that won’t be a long time, for his sake. I know how eager young men are! But my love, Josefa left us for a time tonight. I thought the quarrel was made up, and then she left us. Do you know why?”

“Oh, she falls into dark moods and sulks! You know she never listens to me. Yes, she despises me for all I’ve done for her. She’s my eldest, the most dependable but the least to be trusted. She distorts stories to suit herself, then changes them the next day. The same unfortunate characteristic of my dearest sister Elizabeth. I don’t know if she herself knows truth from lies, and she’s so tall and ungainly. I dare not tell anyone the size of her feet. I have begged our shoemaker not to reveal it. Perhaps she will have to sing for a living, for it’s unlikely she’ll find a husband at all.”

“God will provide, as He always has. Will you pinch out the candle, dear? I’m quite tired, and have lessons to give in the morning.” He kissed his wife’s fragrant cheek, touched her full breast under the wool nightdress, then, with much tenderness, took her in his arms.