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for the last day’s journey into Old Winsen Town. And the Peeps too would load their many wagons with harvest goods and ride behind their friends to the festival, where the Pipers would find a bandstand to play and the Peeps would find their stall in the farmer’s market. Along the way, Johannes and Radulf would usually walk together, some distance out ahead of the slow-moving wagon train. They’d fiddle with their pipes — the kind for smoking, not playing — and exchange tobaccos. They’d talk about which giant pumpkin Agathe Peep had selected this year to enter into the judging, and which little lamb young Esmerault believed had the best chance of winning the grand palm. Or they’d talk about how Father Johannes had two sons while Father Radulf had too many daughters, and maybe it isn’t entirely too early to start thinking about the future. Every year the particulars of their conversation would change, but unknown to either man the subject was ever the same — how they were good and true friends and would always remain so.

NOW, ON THE COUNTRY ROAD, bordered on both sides by the dusky trees of the Schwarzwald, the endless Transylvanian Black Forest that blanketed the entire continent of the Hesse, Peter Piper lay silent but awake in his bunk in the back of the caravan and thought about what the coming night might portend. His parents were dozing in their great bed which took up the entire front of the compartment. His father’s quiet snoring was rhythmic and comforting, like a metronome. Max wasn’t in the caravan’s cabin, which was crowded with everything they owned in all the world, but that wasn’t unusual these days. He’d grown oddly sullen and ever more insistent on privacy of late. His father told him this was because Max was fourteen now, on the threshold of becoming a man, and it was a time in life when every young man begins to ponder his place in the world. Max was no doubt sleeping outside, up on top, sprawled across the baggage tied up there, or maybe stretched out in the front of the wagon, on the driver’s bench. It was their family custom in the cool of the afternoon to take a nap, so that they could stay awake longer into the night. A musician’s day typically begins when the workdays of all others have ended.

Peter shifted and squirmed in his bed and couldn’t sleep, partly because he’d outgrown the small bunk. He’d turned ten this year and had experienced a surprising spurt of growth. Now he could no longer quite fit into the cozy little space tucked under the polished legs of Mother’s xylophone, where he’d always fit so snugly in years past. This was becoming a problem, but it wasn’t the real reason sleep eluded him. He was thinking about the amazing dinner to come, and the treats and the gifts that would follow. He thought about the large and roly-poly Mr. Peep, who turned bright colors when he laughed, which was often, and who always treated him kindly, even though the squire was an important man of wealth, while Peter was merely the penniless son of a traveling minstrel. He thought about the gigantic estate, where they would spend the night in lavishly appointed guestrooms, one of which, astonishingly, Peter would get all to himself. And besides the main house, there were all of the other buildings and the endless expanse of land, full of dogs and animals and other people — people who never changed from one day to the next and one town to the next — and a home that never moved, but stayed in one place all of the time. Always there. Always reliable. Always home. But most of all Peter thought about the youngest Peep daughter.

She was eight, or maybe nine years old by now; practically of an age with him. She’d been christened Esmerault at birth, but no one ever called her that, because, from the first day Mr. Peep had lovingly dubbed her Father’s Little Rainbow, which had caught on with Mother Peep and the five older sisters and the informal extended family of hired hands. Later they’d shortened it to the more manageable Rainbow, and later again just to Bo. So, though Esmerault might have been her given name,