The Queen of the Night

by Alexander Chee

  This, I understood at once, was what the costume mistress had referred to—a woman who, in a single toilette, had silenced the street with awe—and from her dress, silk enough to cover an opera stage hung from her waist.

  As she crossed the street, she stopped, picked her train up gently—in a gesture I would one day imitate exactly—and continued.

  She walked with a steady stride and did not meet the eyes of a single onlooker, looking past us all—a dark bird of myth, her wings having fallen from her back, these feathers at her neck and brow some last remnant, her transformation into a mortal woman nearly complete.

  I knew I would remember this sight forever. For all of us who ever saw the Comtesse in her glory, we all remembered our first time. She was one of the great beauties of Paris.

  If I had known everything that was to come, I might have fled, run back to the show, and continued on, away from Paris, never to return. But it is too soon to speak more of this.

  Instead, I will tell you of how the omnibus arrived with its flag for the station, just as the costume mistress had said. I stepped up, feeling I had learned a lesson about how women dress in Paris, and paid my fare, dreaming of how one day I’d be as fine a lady as the one I’d just seen once I had been reunited with my mother’s family in Lucerne.

  §

  My first mission to the Gare de l’Est was both easy and unfruitful. I could not read many of the signs at the terminal. Finally, I went to the window of the ticket counter. I was told to go to the Gare du Nord.

  At the Gare du Nord I looked for and found the ticket counter and checked the cost of passage to the city of Lucerne. I had nearly enough. I closed my glove over the slip of paper on which the ticket clerk had written the amount and moved through the station, the doves adrift in the beams of light falling in through the windows and the rush of the crowds around me. By the time I returned to the street, I felt as if a wind were slowly lifting me and soon I would be in that far city in the mountains.

  The owner liked to boast of how I didn’t own a stitch of clothing that wasn’t one of his costumes, and it was nearly true for most, but not for me. Only the buckskin was his. He’d forgotten the rest of the clothes were my own. He always showed a thick set of teeth when he laughed at this joke, and he enjoyed this joke many times, in as many ways as he could find, reminding me constantly how I belonged to him. I soon hated the sight of those teeth. When I returned to the tent city with my plan nearly complete, he saw me in my borrowed attire. He was soon laughing again at me.

  Where did you steal that? he asked.

  I ran past him without stopping.

  It should be buffalo skin, he said. Settler’s Daughter, not the farm wife. Go and get ready, the show is in an hour.

  Paris was lit by gaslights at night, turning the night skies purple, like a bruise—the nights there didn’t feel like night to me, but instead like some permanent dusk, as if the sun had caught on something just after setting and wouldn’t go all the way down. This evening, I knew, was the special presentation for the Emperor and the visiting royalty of the collected nations, perhaps the most important show I would ever sing, but this meant little to me. Thoughts of the trip to come distracted me. The trains for Lucerne were new and crowded, and gleamed with fresh paint.

  I wondered if my family would know me.

  As I waited in the center of the ring, the chalk on my hands fresh, the lights down low, the arcade was lit partly by the city outside, light coming through the glass windows of the Exposition building. I could make out the figures of the Emperor and the Empress, still see the glow of leather, the flash of gems.

  I considered choosing the Emperor to be the one married to me by the clowns.

  Tonight I was to launch into the air and sing from a trapeze as the horses ran the edge of the ring below. I heard the crank of the winch above me and reached for the bar of the swing, which I found with ease.

  Mesdames et messeurs . . .

  The crowd cheered as I rose into the air in my buckskin, the trapeze pulling me up until I could see as I sang the far edges of the city, enough to imagine myself in the train pulling away into this night the color of a wound.

  When I returned to the ground, the crowd was unusually still. No one was singing along. An eerie quiet edged the rise and fall of my voice as I wandered, looking for a young man to choose, and the clowns, when I found one at last, watched me with terrified eyes. The crowd still roared at the end, but I stood through it with a thudding heart. The roaring quieted then, and young men in uniform entered the ring, as formal as if they were there to arrest me.

  The circus master nodded, however, in a gesture to me to indicate I was not in danger.

  I was brought in front of the Emperor and the Empress, the light disguise of their dominoes no disguise at all—these masks were like crowns. I curtsied as best I could. He withdrew from his pocket that rose brooch and, to my surprise, placed it in my hand.

  I knew what they were despite never having seen one—So these are rubies, I remember thinking—so much more expensive than anything I’d ever owned in my life.

  I looked down, afraid to meet his eyes, whispering only a quick Merci, mon Empereur, and as I backed away, my hand closed over the astonishing gift. The audience laughed at how I had spoken to him—I was not yet his subject. He smiled, seeming not at all angry that I had not used the formalities.

  I rubbed the flower in my hand. There was nowhere it would be safe from thieves in the circus, but it was more than enough to sell for my fare. I sprinted back to the ring to continue the show, sure of my departure at last.

  §

  The next morning, from the edge of our tents, I could see clothes hanging to dry in the distance. One was a red silk satin gown. It whipped in the wind like the flag of some other, better country.

  Here, clearly, were the clothes of a grand lady. But more important, here was the dress of Rose Red, the dress she would wear as she refused to marry, the dress I had been singing my way to all that time.

  I was sure I’d sung the dress into existence, like the brooch. I was sure this all belonged to me.

  It was perfect, I decided, for me to wear to Lucerne.

  I rolled up my bedroll and tied my money and brooch inside it. I kissed the circus matron as she slept, threw my parcel over ahead of me, and leapt the fence. I left my costumes there, the pistols in their holsters, with a note, saying, You were right. So long and thanks.

  I walked toward the clothes as if in a dream, dressed in just a pinafore and my mother’s old raccoon coat, my stiletto strapped to the outside of my knee. The colored silks, dresses, petticoats, and corsets moved on their lines as if in separate winds. I felt like I had when I was a girl and wore my mother’s coat in her room when she was out in the field. Like this was a game and I was pretending at being a grand lady somewhere far away.

  The laundry that day belonged to a courtesan, I’m sure. Her silks and satins were hypnotic even when left out to dry. I ran my hands over the one gown I’d followed all this way, made from red silk satin. I slid it off the line, held it to my waist, and then stepped into it and left for the Gare du Nord.

  §

  This was where Simonet’s novel began.

  The package had arrived the day after my dinner with the Verdis. I opened it to find he had inscribed it.

  To Lilliet Berne,

  It’s amazing to think of, isn’t it? Where she went after she left. Where did she go? May we conjure it together!

  I am yours,

  Frédéric Simonet

  Act II

  The Cave of Queens and Courtesans

  One

  WHERE DID SHE GO?

  Here she is in the Bois, then, in the red dress she stole to go to Lucerne.

  She is rubbing her foot. She looks to be a grisette with a stone in her shoe, rubbing her foot. Or she is in her Tuileries uniform, the cheap-looking dark dress, the wooden shoes. She is working at the Tuileries, taking the air. Or the dress is something she bough
t from a junk dealer, a dead woman’s dress most likely, it is all she has right now. But soon, so many more.

  Soon a gentleman will draw up in a carriage. This is often why she rubs her feet here by the road. It feels good: she is tired from walking. But the bare foot is also her little flag.

  The foot is soft and pale, and clean. It has to be clean.

  Sometimes, as she rubs it, she is cleaning it. The gentlemen who love her feet, they often do not touch the rest of her, and this is a mercy. One day she will wander the Bois, stripping the bark from the trees to eat. But for now, she is here.

  In The Aeneid, we find a forest grove in the underworld devoted to those who died from love. Aeneas enters and walks past Dido, and in this way learns she killed herself when he left her to continue the quest that had led him there; the smoke he saw when he looked back was her pyre.

  I couldn’t remember if she knew he would travel there to see his father again, if she knew this was the one way she could be there, to see him once more. But I think she did.

  The underworld is not a place for the living, and those who try to enter are, until they leave, in terrible peril. They are asked to have a very pure heart. The only living girl to ever leave was made to return half the year for eternity, married off to the King of Hell, as she had eaten something there before she left.

  I would joke that the entrance was in Paris, in the Bois, until I was nearly sure of it, and then I never made the joke again. But let us say it is there, for the sake of argument, or the story, or what have you. Say it is there and now come in.

  Two

  IN MY ROLE as Marguerite, I was much closer to the girl I’d been when I left the Cajun Maidens than in any role I’d played previously.

  It was not angels who’d saved me then, however, but the Cave of Queens and Courtesans.

  Each night of Faust was a reminder.

  As I put on my prison bonnet for Marguerite’s Act V mad scene, I remembered, like a low hum, the sound of Saint-Lazare. Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick, tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick. Again and again, on and on, the sound of women and girls in the cells, tapping our bare fingers, a machine made of women and iron bars, and misery, of course. Sometimes the guards would come and tell us all to be silent, threatening to break our fingers, especially if at some point we all began to tap together as one; mostly they allowed it, for if they did not, some other, worse sound, say, like wailing, would come.

  If we kept the tapping soft, just soft enough, it was there, we could hear it, and they didn’t mind.

  Often, there was still wailing.

  There was nothing to do, no occupation to keep us busy other than keeping the mice, lice, and spiders at bay as best we could. The food was repulsive to consider and ended hunger bowl by disgusting bowl. And yet its arrival was still welcome; it relieved the tedium.

  There was the spoon, the bowl, the terrible porridge or stew to scrape out.

  Was it worse to starve or to eat it, always this was the question.

  Was it worse to stay or to leave and return to the street?

  Was it worse to stay or be bought? And leave to submit to the hands of the purchaser and his wants, the little favors and would-you-pleases and do-this-nows, which you were sure you could do forever instead of this, but your willingness would not matter: you would do it until the one who’d bought you was done with you, when you would return here, no matter your vows, to the bars and the bowl and the spoon, with the memory of who you’d been when you left, when you’d thought the bowl and spoon were never to be seen again. How foolish you were, how silly and small you were: you, you’d thought you were done.

  But the bowl, the spoon, they knew they would see you again.

  There’s a story told of my voice that says it was bought from a witch, the result of an occult surgery. I am said to treat it nightly with arcane oils and ointments, my real voice in a box on the witch’s mantel.

  If you lift the lid, apparently, you can hear it saying everything I can’t say with this voice, the voice that sings. The witch’s bargain is that I cannot perform normal speech.

  I never corrected this.

  I like to imagine myself returning to the witch to bargain again. Pulling aside my scarf, a door there cut along my throat opening like a clock. I raise the box to my throat, and out comes something small and fierce. It hops in my hand like a little bird.

  What would it say?

  The real answer to where my voice came from is as ordinary as all of life. In Paris, in the winter, the chestnut trees in the Bois drop their nuts and the poorest gather them and roast them in fires on the street corners. The smell of them to me is the smell of the Paris winter coming. Wrapped in old newspapers, the corners folded back, the chestnuts steam in a neat pile, their split backs curling open.

  I wanted to eat and so I learned to sing. I the same as the woman who on a winter afternoon roasts chestnuts from the Bois de Boulogne and sells them so she can buy her dinner. It took more than a witch to make a singer out of me. And if it was a gift from God that made me this way, it was the gift He gave us all, called hunger.

  Three

  THE NOVEL STAYED on my desk, some strange new artifact. I kept opening it and reading the first page of the chapter on my arrival in Paris and then closing it, unable to read further.

  Instead, I would lie down, so as not to run through the bookshops with a torch, burning them all.

  I needed to read it, to see what was in it, and yet I could not go past the first page without my thoughts running to who it could be behind this. Simonet still seemed innocent. I still believed he did not know I was the girl singer who so enchanted him. But that did not mean the situation was innocent, only him.

  And if the curse was true, I feared that even reading the novel might somehow make her invented fate my own.

  It was not much bigger than my thumb, this little ruby rose pin. I could still see it, the jewels so deeply red, my hand closing around it as the Emperor gave it to me. Almost more than I feared anyone who would tell of its secrets, I feared it itself—it had always been bad luck for me. It glowed now, rising in the Paris night from where it still lived, apparently, at the center of my life again, like a tiny midnight sun, tiny and yet enormous, and in its light, a story only I could see.

  Or, at least, so I had hoped until now.

  There were only three people in Paris who knew of the rose’s time with me and the secrets I’d want to keep. It had taken me to each of them in turn, once I had accepted it from the Emperor’s hand. The first still loved me but had betrayed me, the second had once owned me. The third, I would say, never thought of me at all. Or so I hoped.

  She was the most dangerous of them all.

  There was once a fourth, but he was dead. I had watched him die; he had given his life for me. And until the day Simonet approached me at the bal, I believed the flower, if not the story, was still with him.

  I had left that ruby flower with him.

  Not one of the living had any reason to tell this story, and the dead man never would. We had reached our various accommodations and agreements. But if the story had been told, this could only mean something had changed, a mistake had been made or a balance of power shifted. If so, this novel was then either a sign or a signal. And, sign or signal, it was a threat.

  When I went down to the bookstalls along the Seine at last, I bought three copies, wrapped one for each of my old friends, determined to give them one and see just what they said.

  I began my search with the one who loved me.

  You should always begin there, I think. The secret hurt, long nurtured, never brought to light, until it has grown lethal in the dark and the smile of friendship is all that is left to hang there like a lure.

  §

  She was my one sincere friend in Paris. Euphrosyne, known to most as the Marquise de Lambert now. She ran a salon on Mondays that she named Les Petits Lundis, after the Empress Eugénie’s salon evening of the same name—she was obsessed w
ith the Empress. Her husband, who almost never attended, she referred to as l’Empereur. She’d had herself painted as the Empress dressed as Marie Antoinette—just as the Empress had. I knew almost nothing about her husband except that he was exceedingly rich and he kept her in style, devotedly, in a beautiful hôtel in the sixth arrondissement by the Luxembourg Gardens.

  I had sung there on occasion, and it was one of my few diversions, one of the few salons I ever consented to attend.

  When I say I suspected Euphrosyne, I mean it was quite possible she knew Simonet well and that the salon I’d heard him at was hers. I expected no treachery from her, except that perhaps Simonet had been her lover and she had said too much. I could imagine him in her bed, writing down everything she said of me, the story not quite her story of me, but his crude drawing of what she knew of me embellished.

  The next available Monday, I went and presented myself, was admitted, and waited to be received by her in her reception hall. All seemed to be as it had always been. The hall was still made of white marble and sparely decorated with classical sculptures. When she ran to me, embracing me and kissing me, dressed in some new beautiful lilac chiffon gown, her shoulders bare except for a collar of diamonds, she was a vision, as beautiful as she had always been. I said as much, and complimented her on the gown. She winked at me and said, You. You’ll need your compliments. Come with me, you terrible girl, you have something to tell me, and she then pulled me from the gathering crowd into her empty library.

  I have heard you are getting married! she said, as she shut the door. I cannot believe you, that I had to hear it this way from someone else. Who is it? Is it really the tenor at the Paris Opera?