The only way to save him from that fate was to leave here before it came true. If this was what I feared it was, he should never come, never walk out of that forest; it was too dangerous. If there was a way to warn him that he should not come for me should his circumstances ever conspire . . . But this was the madness I spoke of before—I knew it even as I thought of it—even if I knew how to reach him, it would be a madwoman’s letter. He would not believe it. He might even try to come here to convince me it was not true and thus bring it all to fruition.
Where, to that end, would a letter find him? Where did he reside, and was he safe or in danger, a captive like me? If our little moment in the night had made me so valuable, he, under the direct caresses of the Empress, would have become much more so. Did she keep him in an apartment the way the tenor kept me or was there a golden cage, brought from palace to palace, in secret? Or a cave beneath Compiègne guarded by assassins? He was almost certainly a kept man or a prisoner, or both, and whichever was true, he would not be at the Bal Mabille come spring no matter what I hoped—his days of playing for whatever they paid were behind him. I knew from the Majeurs-Plaisirs of a house much like ours nearby, full entirely of men, and their clientele also almost entirely men, though it was said a few wealthy women availed themselves of them as well. I had never once tried to imagine this, but now I did, the composer at a piano in a salon, playing and waiting, amid laughter and champagne . . .
But the Empress would never risk such a thing, she in a domino on some velvet chaise looking on as others drank merrily around them both. She would never do this. His quarters were likely even more mysterious than any of this, and the more hidden.
There was only the very slightest chance he was still free. And if he would be there in Paris, at the Mabille come spring, the dream of our reunion would likely conclude with my being caught by the Comtesse’s agents, or the Emperor’s, or the Empress’s; and if any of them had not found him before this, I would lead them to him just by going to him.
How stupid I’d been to dream of it.
This world is not made for us to be together came the thought.
More ordinary ways of losing him intruded. I could lose him to another woman, or I had already lost him, or I was only a bit of fun in the garden to him; and all of this was only some ridiculous fever dream—the dream of a prisoner. All of the scenarios I imagined, extraordinary and ordinary both, ended with us apart.
The wind blew even harder as these scenes proceeded in front of my mind’s eye. I have gone mad, I told myself, this final self-betrayal, unforeseen and bitter—more bitter than the others. But as the wind surged, that sense of madness ebbed, and what returned was the very real feeling of the outline of that god’s hand, as if the wind were the very heel of that hand pressed to my face.
I was not mad.
If I can be with him, let me be with him, I said, into the fingers of the wind. Make me your plaything; do as you will. But do not give me all of this and not him as well. Do not make him the price I must pay; I will not pay it.
I waited, fearful for a moment, as if I might hear a response. And how would I refuse? I wondered to myself. I knew only that I would. And I knew only one way that I could. This little game would end if this Leonora died before her lover’s capture.
I will not pay it, I said again. I will pay some other price.
As if in answer, one last monstrous gust of wind blew so that the fire behind me was snuffed and I nearly let the windows go, but then it left as suddenly, leaving the air strangely still. Frightened, I shut the windows and fastened them. I made to close the shutters as the sun went behind the mountains, the sky darkening all at once like a lamp blown out, and as I did, the fire in the grate returned to light the room so that the view outside was obscured by my reflection, looking much as I had that day at the train station in Compiègne.
I have told you that I kept the general’s coat from that fateful journey because it suited me, and it did; and I have said I kept it because it was warm, and it was. But there was another reason, of course, one I was only faintly aware of myself until I saw myself reflected here—I’d kept it because it reminded me of him. This was the coat I’d worn that evening when my escape brought me to him, the night I’d decided the only path back to him led away from him first. It seemed lucky to keep it, as if wearing it had a magic that could help me find my way to him again—as if it could keep us both safe until he could take it from my shoulders again. That night, when he’d leapt out of the woods and landed in front of me, he could have landed anywhere, anywhere at all, but instead, he was there, as was I, and I could not have made my way there dressed any other way. When I wore this coat, I felt confident the spell survived, confident of moving to his side like some slow arrow shot through the dark by Cupid himself, that tiny marksman. I would find him, I would; I just needed to be patient and wait.
I touched the window’s glass with my hand.
I could still feel those threads I was sure connected us, heavy in the growing night, hidden there. I could still feel their pull.
The nocturne I thought of as his began then, the music threading its way up from below in the salon. I recognized this with a shock and went out into the hall and halfway down the stairs before I saw, through the curving archway, Pauline, still at the piano, her slender neck pale in the dark.
Pauline who, as I could see, loved this nocturne, too—she played it with an absorption that my own listening sought to match even as I stood by the door full of fear.
What sign was this, amid my other signs and portents—was this a cruelty, as it seemed to me at first—mocking me and my fears—or a doom, my strange god’s way of saying there could be no bargain, or the opposite—a parley, even a mercy? A promise? I stayed in the doorway and listened, for there was nowhere to be until she was finished; and slowly, note by note, the tumult ended, the spell broke, and all thoughts of meanings, signs, and omens left until there remained only her and the goodness of her, a charm against these fears, and the nocturne.
And him. He was there, just for a moment, an apparition in the air before me as surely as if he’d stepped from a carriage in the drive. The sound of the remaining grape leaves rattling above us in the wind. His face silver in the moonlight, his finger as he touched my lips. And then gone.
How will I survive this? I asked myself. To come all this way had taken so much from me.
The pleasure of eavesdropping on a musician, Pauline said then, is in how there’s a performance possible sometimes when you believe no one is listening, one that should be offered to the world and yet may never be because it vanishes once the musician is aware of a listener.
She said this without raising her head. She had known I was there.
The sense of bravery and purpose I felt that night returned to me, and I met her gaze confidently as she closed the piano and stood to face me, smiling.
And yet this is what we must summon to ourselves as we play or sing. We must bring that out. Hello, my new friend, she said. Is everything well?
I nodded. Never better, I said. What is that you were playing just now? I asked.
A lovely form of music called a nocturne, she said. Named for the night. It seemed appropriate to play it just now as the night begins to fall. What did you think of it?
I thought so. It’s . . . I think it’s one of the finest pieces of music I’ve ever heard, I said.
You know it! I think so, too. It was written by a very good friend of mine, a composer by the name of Chopin. He was not at his best in concerts; it drove his fans to despair. You had to catch him unawares, she said, and waved her hand at me. A surprise audience but hidden, and so I have many fond memories of sitting outside a music room as he played alone. I think this is the best way one can listen to Chopin, as you did just now. We have guests arriving in an hour, will you be ready?
Yes, I said.
I noticed he brought you here without a maid but with all those trunks! My own is quite busy, I’m afraid, but I wi
ll find someone to assist you.
Thank you, I said, and returned to my room to wait, where I stood by the window, looking out into the dark garden again.
What luck, what luck it was that had put me here, a welcome guest in their celebrated company. And yet the one feeling stranger to me than being unable to rescue myself from an unlocked room was my growing sense, as I listened to her, that I did not want to be rescued—not from this. The menace I’d previously ascribed to her and whatever this school of hers would be was gone, and in its place was the feeling that I did not want to leave, perhaps ever. As Pauline returned to her careful vocalizes, and I heard the sure-footed power in her voice as it ran its paces, I recognized that her voice had some of the timbre and qualities of my own—a sense of recognition I’d not had previously. Before I’d had even a single lesson with her, I knew, now that I was here, I would do well not to leave her side, not until I was finished learning everything she could teach me. I’d never met a woman like Pauline and had met her at a time when I feared not one woman like her existed in all the world. In some way I had never known how to express, I’d feared I would have to become the first of my kind, whatever my kind was, should I be allowed to survive—that which history has never seen before. Instead, here Pauline lived; she had done what I feared I would have to do and now lived as the most liberated woman I’d ever met in a world she’d sung into existence with a voice much like my own. And whether or not she could teach me to sing with this strange voice of mine, I wanted to learn how to be like her as much as possible, and so I did not feel like a captive now. I felt saved. To leave would mean leaving this education undone.
Yes, I could stay until after tonight, or I could stay until the spring. Or I could stay until she was done with me. I knew already what I would choose.
For now, the price was the performance I was to take up again, waiting for me in the trunks by the dressing room; I had a few more moments before the tenor roused himself and it would begin again. I poured water into the washbasin at the table and began to gently wash my face with a cloth. The strange pity I’d felt earlier for the tenor returned—and while it was strange to think of him as the innocent in this, he was; and the more I did think of him this way, the more that pity began to change, though I was not yet aware of it or what it meant.
Pity, which, it should be said, is the ambassador of love. And it grows only from a position of power. And I did feel powerful, at last, as I sat, shook out my hair, and, with a fine new hairbrush found waiting among my parcels in that first trunk, began to brush my hair flat. I felt as powerful as if I’d already escaped into my heart’s desire.
One day I would leave him, and I would not explain. Whether I left with a summons to go at once to the Emperor’s side or because I’d earned my eventual freedom, either way I knew I would leave and he would never know, and he could never know, this was among the conditions. And if I did my best, he, in turn, would protect me and more. He would need to believe on waking what he believed as he slept there across the hall, and he would need to believe it constantly, so that he would never see the moment when it came. There should be no falseness to it, I told myself, as I prepared to put my hair back up.
What I did next, I would do every night after. Whenever you think of the one, think of the other, I told myself. This is how you will survive. And so I built a secret second heart inside my heart, a little theater full with my memories of my real love, such as they were—a gilded cage for him made of this music, the torch in the night, the music room in a palace. All of it would be hidden at the center of the other heart, the one I’d always had, now an alias as surely as the name I had given the world. There was a secret door, of course, hidden by a view of chestnut trees gold with autumn in the afternoon sun.
I recalled the two of them as they were that night at the ball when they performed together, when I watched, hidden, until the Princess Metternich scared me away. My true love and my false one. If I could see that memory each time I saw the tenor, I could smile as I ought to, touch his neck as I ought to; I would behave entirely like the lover he believed was here, and I would travel safely to my true love on the other side of these days before me.
Wherever the Empress still kept him, this was his home with me.
§
The garden was dark now, the night too dark to see anything more from the window. A knock came at the door, and so I set down my brush and opened it.
I was not the first cocotte to arrive. There were at least three others, my classmates, and all beautiful, if differently, and more beautiful than I, or so it seemed to me that first day. They appeared in my doorway, haughty like cats and arranged by color, from dark to light, brunette, lighter brunette, and blond, and introduced themselves. They were Natalya, Firéne, and Maxine, Russian, Hungarian, and French, respectively. They resembled one another, dressed alike in simple dark jackets, skirts of wool tweed, and plain white blouses. No visible crinolines. Sensible dark leather shoes peeped from under their hems.
I was a flare of color in front of them while they were like a tidy squadron.
We openly stared at one another at first. I had supposed there would be other students, but I didn’t yet expect them.
Mademoiselle, Natalya, the brunette, said, Madame Viardot sent us to introduce ourselves and to see if you needed any assistance. She saw you came without a maid, and her own is quite busy with preparations for tonight. At this, they half curtsied together, and I half curtsied back. Natalya, I noticed, held a tray with the tea.
Thank you, I said. Please, call me Lilliet. Come in.
Natalya and Firéne entered but Maxine lingered in the door. You look as if you came for the casinos, Maxine said. What an exquisite toilette. May I ask where it is from?
Félix, I said.
Your father sends you to Félix? He must be very rich. Are you from Paris, then?
I suppose I am, I said, cautious. For I could tell I was entirely unprepared for this interview. The tenor was so incurious, he had never asked me questions of this kind, had never sought to know me because he felt he knew me at once—I was for him that love with the power of a prophecy. And he was so sure, he’d never bothered to see who he had captured under the cloak of his fantasy.
But then, I could be said to be incurious, too, as to my captor. Perhaps they would be incurious also, I hoped. They then proved they were not.
I am from Paris, Maxine said. And I’ve never been to Félix; my family refused me when I asked. Are these all Félix? She gestured to the trunks as we made our way back to the dressing room. Your father sent you from Paris and to Félix for clothes first? What family are you from?
I am an orphan, I said, attempting to begin here by telling at least one truth.
Ah. An heiress, then. What is your Fach? Natalya is a mezzo, Firéne, a spinto. I am a coloratura. What of you?
A Falcon.
Falcon?
Tragic, I said. But with more strength in the top notes, I’m told.
Of course, Maxine said. Our orphan. You were born to it. Tragedy belongs to you.
She said this watching my eyes as if she were testing the edge of a blade on me. And so I made sure not to flinch.
We were conducting our conversation in French—the Viardots were quite German in many ways after their time here, I would soon see, but this colony of theirs was a French colony, if a tiny one—and so I had used the word orpheline just now. I’d never described myself this way to anyone and found I liked the word—orpheline sounded to me like something mystical and small, like an enchanted cat.
In the years that would follow this day, when asked questions of this kind about my family, I would tell the story I began to tell that day of a family in Lucerne struck down by misfortune. My being sent to Paris to be raised there by an aunt. I tried to make it sound as terrible and vague as possible, as I did that day, and to use this word I liked, orpheline, almost a new name.
Behind me, Natalya and Firéne had already begun examining the contents o
f my trunks so I went and joined them to see if I could prevent them from discovering something unwelcome. Natalya was holding a pair of my cancan shoes up with a smile.
Have you made your debut? Natalya asked. And in what role?
Not yet, I said, though I have been in Paris, training privately. Perhaps to debut as Lucia.
I glimpsed what could only be my perfume bottle’s case and brought it up, setting it on my dressing table.
Eau du Lubin? Maxine said, and came closer.
I opened the leather enclosure and took out the bottle, quickly brushing my neck and ears with it and then my throat before I replaced it as if I hadn’t noticed her interest.
This? I then said to her. Yes.
I’d not mixed much with her kind previously. She was the first I was to meet of a kind of Frenchwoman of the haute bourgeoisie, constantly aware of her social class and yours. She was quite the opposite of incurious, and her interest was not the beginning of a friendship but more of a measuring. She was the sort of woman whose husband would go to the Majeurs-Plaisirs to be away from her before and after marriage. She and I would not usually meet, and so we did not know how to speak to each other when we did.
Who performs tonight? I asked.
We do, they said, in unison.
They began to speak to me of who would be there, and why, who knew whom, who could provide what for you vis-à-vis an entrée into this or that salon and so on; the salon gossip of Baden-Baden, but also of Berlin, and of Paris, and even of Saint Petersburg. Giulia Grisi was coming, I was told, a famous soprano in retirement on her way to Berlin from her home in Florence. Brahms was to be there, he was working on a song Pauline was to debut. Royal titles were mentioned, meaningless to me. Through the talk, I noticed that they were not so very alike in appearance, not at all, but rather the similarity came from an attitude inside, the faintest sense of some indomitable will; each was animated by the belief that they mattered and that their futures would matter as well.
The Queen of the Night Page 29
