The Queen of the Night

by Alexander Chee

  Are you so afraid to leave her now? I asked. I gathered my dress to me. If you won’t, please, get me back so I may at least leave this place. I pulled away from him.

  He remained standing there, looking down to his feet.

  The rain fell softly again as we stood there, neither of us moving. In some way, our refusal to act or speak allowed us to be at rest with each other again.

  What hold does he have over you? he asked me again, as he had at the ball.

  You, I said. If I will marry him, he lets you live.

  He laughed. What then?

  I let my head rest on his chest.

  Leave with me, I said. If not today, soon. Leave with me and I will create the role. But not here. London, Saint Petersburg, Rome. Anywhere but here. If I leave, you must also.

  Are you mine, then? he asked.

  Yes, I said. I knew it as soon as I gave the ring back. And you, are you mine? What of this? And her? I waved at the woods.

  He took the ring from his pocket and slid it back on my hand and pulled the tenor’s ring off, handing it to me.

  Yes, he said. I’m yours. I will always be grateful to her, he said. Because of her, I was able to grow strong enough here to find you. But I’m yours, always yours.

  §

  I saw the old friends, as the tenor had put it—he and the Baroness—emerging from the house as we approached.

  She had already dressed for dinner.

  I dismounted and Aristafeo ran off and returned with a black blanket warmed at a fire. Behind him came men carrying hot-water bottles. When I slid the blanket over my shoulders, I could smell his verveine and something else, of neither Rouen nor Paris. Him. His own blanket then? I wondered.

  He looked down and to the side as I wrapped it around myself.

  A pity, the Baroness said, as she walked toward me. Your dress! I will pay for it.

  I shook my head, for it felt like bad luck to take any money from her in light of what I had just taken.

  She relented a little and allowed me to undress in one of her apartments with the help of her maids, who clucked over the ruins of the dress and prepared a hot bath for me. When I was warm and dry, they dressed me in a muslin shift and wrapped me in hot blankets again.

  Her carriage would take us home.

  From inside it, as the driver’s whip cracked, I did not look at her or Aristafeo as we left, or at the tenor, who prattled on as to the party and the Baroness, saying, I’m ashamed to say it was some sort of audition. I’m very sorry, I was not told, not until after, when she bragged to me of it.

  The tenor was changed. He was speaking as if to someone else in the cab. Your composer apparently told her he needed to hear you without the costumes and the lights, he said. To which she said, Then she will come and sing for us, and if she must, she’ll appear naked.

  He laughed. Now look at you!

  I laughed as well, but my thoughts were of Aristafeo now. The tenor had not noticed I was sitting there waiting for him to turn to me, to acknowledge me. He was only speaking, saying things he thought I would want to hear. Something in all of this had frightened him and now it frightened me as well.

  By the time we were in Paris, he seemed himself again, but I was not. I could feel the seal of the life I had led until that afternoon press back over me, insistent, asking that I return to it, and to the little prison hidden within it, where there was no room for Aristafeo, no room even for me. Here was the door to it, the door of the apartment on the avenue de l’Opéra, the place I had thought I could keep somehow and not also keep all that had come with it. I entered the apartment to the shocked exclamations of Doro and Lucy, who undressed me and made horrified faces at the dress’s condition as I unpacked it from the bundle of its ruins while they tried to set me in my own bath. I refused it, though, and asked for a fire and gin.

  When they left me, I saw, as if for the first time, the dove-gray walls of the place—I had thought I was so different from the Comtesse. I had found her living crypt pitiable; I had not seen my own.

  If she had buried herself alive there, I was entombed within my own life as well. She had, perhaps, taught me even this.

  What was my own, though, was the plan we had begun. I would finish Carmen and he would finish the opera, and then he would suggest a plan.

  I will take care of it, he had said. I know how long you have waited, wait just a little longer. I will send you a message next week. Wait for my word.

  §

  Perhaps the very last person I expected to see a week later then was the Baroness, and so I was incredulous when Doro brought me her card and I insisted she at once show her in.

  May I speak to you in private? she asked, as she sat.

  Of course, I said, ringing the bell and telling Doro and Lucy we would not take tea.

  Monsieur Cadiz has challenged our tenor friend to a duel, pistols at dawn in Rouen the morning after Carmen concludes, she said.

  When was this challenge issued, I asked, and for what?

  When you were in Rouen, of course, she said. As we rode into the woods, he reached over and struck the tenor with his riding gloves and issued the challenge there in front of witnesses.

  The strangeness of the tenor in the carriage. Aristafeo’s assurance he would take care of it.

  By the time he came to me in the woods, this had all happened.

  It is to the death, she said.

  Why are you here? I asked.

  I am here . . . to beg you to end this. Yes, that is what we can call it. I am here to beg you, I who have never begged, not once. She said it coolly, levelly, her eyes averted at first.

  He cannot fire a pistol quickly, she said, as she turned back to me. Not as an uninjured man would. For this reason, he never accompanies me on the hunts with weapons. He only rides. He will . . . he will die.

  Does he have no second? I asked.

  He will accept none. It is for your honor, she said. He is insisting, insisting he will prevail again.

  Again? I asked.

  Again, she said. He was the lover sent away after the duel with my late husband.

  And he was also then . . .

  The very same. I arranged for him to receive the Prix de Rome, she said. And so he was the lover I sent away, and the new one as well, on his return. Easy enough. No one had met him before that except the police. I couldn’t introduce him before.

  What would you have of me? What brings you here? I asked. For I could not understand why she was not angrier, why she had come at all—it was an insult to her.

  The duel is for the honor of your hand in marriage, she said. If you accept the tenor, it will be off. Accept the tenor and spare his life.

  The tenor has not proposed to me, I said.

  He has not but we both know he means to, she said. Please, I beg of you. Accept the tenor and spare Aristafeo’s life. I beg this of you. He will die.

  She leaned forward. My husband was no match for him. I could have shot my husband. Your tenor friend is a former officer who has seen combat in Africa, has killed in battle. He will not hesitate the same as an aging aristocrat once did. Aristafeo will die.

  She stood and pulled on her gloves. No, she said, I cannot marry again—this is true. He will never be my husband. But I do love him. I love his music. As I think you also do. And I have a hope of saving him, she said, and it begins here, asking this of you.

  Good day, I said.

  She left, showing herself out.

  §

  Name the hour you will accept, the tenor had asked.

  So I did.

  Three nights before the closing night, backstage at his dressing room, his door opened and Maxine exited angrily, coldly, as he laughed behind her.

  As he came to his door to close it, he saw me standing there, having witnessed the scene, and gave me a little wave as though I were a child, as he smiled and closed the door.

  I hesitated, then knocked on his closed door, and he opened it, a questioning look in his eye.


  I have something important to tell you, I said. I am naming the hour. Dine with me after our final performance?

  I’ll reserve a private room at the Café Anglais, he said.

  §

  A note came at last from Aristafeo via the oboist. He mentioned nothing of the duel; he only suggested a plan: that I leave at once after my last performance in Carmen and wait for him in Milan, and if he was delayed, to go to visit the Verdis in Italy in Sant’Agata. Their home there had recently been finished, and they could now have visitors. We could go together and receive their blessing, he said. We should leave after my final Carmen performance.

  I imagined myself waiting in Milan for him, thinking he might be dead or receiving news of his death. The Verdi plan sounded to me like his sending me to the place I would go to be comforted for his loss.

  I wrote back to Aristafeo and agreed, placing yet another note in the oboist’s hand before the curtain rose that night.

  And then after the performance, I dressed in my finest new gown and waited for the tenor in the green room, wearing his emeralds.

  He did not come.

  His habit by now was to go with Maxine to her apartments after the performance and spend the evening. It was my guess that he would end their affair on the night of the last performance, given his instinct for cruelty. What I had not expected is that he would leave me to wait for him.

  I waited just past an hour before asking one of the stagehands if he had seen the tenor leave, and when the answer was yes, I returned to my dressing room and put myself in my usual disguise and left as well.

  I went first to the Café Anglais. When I held out his card, indicating I was to be brought to him, they said he was not there, so sorry, they had not expected him.

  It was then I knew. He would not risk bargaining with me, not anymore. He meant to do this, to kill Aristafeo and be done. Perhaps he had guessed my reason for accepting. Perhaps he even planned to return to accept me only after killing him.

  After Maxine’s, he would return to his apartment and prepare for his duel in the morning.

  I had done almost everything in my power to prevent the duel. There was only one thing more to do. My only path opened up in the night.

  §

  His own apartment was near her home, close enough that he would walk along the Seine and take the air. I waited along the passage.

  I sat sitting so only my bare foot showed in the light—my old signal, though I had never used it with him. I didn’t want him to know me. And in the dark, with my different silhouette, the wig, at a distance, when he smiled at me and I made for him to follow me, he did not know me and followed me down under the bridge where it was possible to sneak in an assignation.

  Dark Night, Queen of Silence, protector of thieves, the sleep of the world that covers over the shame of whores, she protected me in that instant and delivered him to me. But even as she did, she put me under her spell.

  I suspect it is her price.

  He pulled me to him. I wrapped my arms around him, and when he came close enough to see my eyes, even as he stared now that he knew me, I did not hesitate. I sank my poisoned barb into his neck and pulled it so that it cut the vein at his throat.

  The heart is a difficult target, Priscilla had said so long ago. I did not have my knife, so I used this last gift of Eugène’s, a barb filled with prussic acid, the one he had asked me to use if captured.

  I had been captured. But I did not want to die.

  His blood sprayed wide and he stepped back, coughing, and as he did so, he gathered his hands to his neck to try to hold the blood in just as I’d been taught to expect. I’d jumped back as well. His eyes were wild with rage and despair, his breath ragged and steaming the air. He had the choice of lunging for me and choking on his blood or holding it in with his hands.

  I was sure killing him was not enough to keep us safe. He needed to vanish, to never be found. And I, I had come prepared to do this. I was possessed, a daughter of the Night, a Fury—Alecto, who fans the spark.

  Ere it dawns the second time, the whole game I’ll shiver.

  I took a breath, struck a match, and as the flame guttered alight, sipped the pétrole into my mouth quickly from a flask at my side and then blew gently above the match. A cloud of flame moved out from my lips, lighting the underside of the bridge. He shrank back, choking as his blood filled his throat, smoke rising on his hair.

  Here we were; it was always going to be to the death between us.

  With my second breath, I stepped closer; the fire blew out across to him in a sheet, and when he saw the flames, he lifted his hands to protect his face. Blood flew from his throat into the fire burning now on his shoulder. Still he struggled; he was a powerful man. He charged for me.

  I stepped back, and this time he slapped at my hand. The pétrole splashed across us both. I leapt up onto the banks, and he slipped on the slick. As he fell, he leapt from his fall toward the Seine in a halting dive.

  The river put out the fire, but the poison had stiffened his limbs finally, and he went under.

  I wanted to run, but instead I had the presence of mind to pick up my flask off the ground and hide under the bridge, watching the water until I was satisfied the tenor would not return from the river.

  I do not know how long I stayed staring at the dark Seine. Only when the dawn came did I make my way home past the faltering swells and cocottes emerging from their last assignations.

  At home again, I sat in front of a fire I’d built up high. In a few hours I would begin to prepare to leave for Milan. I would give Lucy and Doro their notices. I would prepare to sell the apartment and everything within it. But for now, I sat in front of the fire, naked, and as the flames leapt, the emeralds showed me him burning in the night, staggering toward me, his arms raised, his voice gone. Falling into the Seine, out of the world, away from me, again and again.

  I’d sell them, too.

  It was done. Nothing of his could stay. I had defeated my curse. I had always thought he would be my doom, and instead I’d been his. There would be no duel in the garden. Leonora had killed the Count. Aristafeo would wait on the hill for him and wonder. And live to come to me, mine again at last.

  Seven

  IN MILAN, I had accepted the invitation of a prince to make use of an apartment in his ancient Milanese palazzo. This was a gesture of thanks, he said when he offered it, for a performance of mine he’d attended in Rome, of Aida. He reassured me he would never intrude on me and this was true: He never did. His staff, in fact, worked according to the same instructions as my Paris staff, at Doro’s impeccable direction and yet more invisibly, as if I were attended by magical servants. I had a feeling of being even more alone than I had in years.

  It was there I waited to see if I would be joined.

  I had left Paris without having received any further word from Aristafeo. Here was where I was to wait for him, to pretend to be surprised when he returned with word the tenor had not shown for their duel.

  The quiet in the wing of the Milanese palace that I occupied was such that I spent much of that first evening following the sound of what turned out to be a wandering dove inhabiting a lonely ballroom, rising and descending in and out of a beam of light that came in through the crystal windows lining the ceiling. As it leapt, blue feathers glowed from underneath, as if from a lamp hidden under its wings.

  I wondered if it had hatched there in the dark ballroom or if it had flown in and become lost. Or if, perhaps, it was some lover under a spell, doomed by a sorceress to stay there forever.

  This Milanese prince had not invited me for being lonely. He asked only that I dine with him once, an invitation I accepted gladly, and there I was introduced to his wife, as stylish as a Parisienne, but more voluptuous, warmer, and more generous. She was a dark-haired beauty with the large, firm breasts of a mermaid and a dolphin’s appetite. She came to dinner in a chic gown of exceptional black silk satin and velvet set off by a collar of rubies and diamonds. She seemed
aware of her beauty in the manner of someone with something she is determined you should enjoy. Their two daughters and one son, also at dinner, all took after her, all beautiful and proud of their beauty.

  She did not seem to my mind a conventional Milanese, but rather something more southern his line had dipped itself in.

  They smiled when I thanked him, and I thought of how rare real affection was in noble families.

  He stroked the bottom of his wine goblet. You’re very welcome, he said. The rooms are so numerous there are inhabitants entirely unknown to me.

  An odd stillness stole in when he said this, as if his family and servants watched their own secrets move in the air for that moment. The inhabitants were known to him is what this said; this his way of telling us all this was so.

  All palaces of this size usually hid at least a mistress or more, perhaps even the children of the mistresses, some his, some not, all of these in apartments alongside the others’. Perhaps even one of the young footmen who’d helped me with my trunks was his bastard from some woman half remembered, who now patched his wife’s linens.

  I’ve met one, I announced. And then told the story of the dove, which made them laugh.

  I returned to my apartment after the dinner by carriage, driven across to the other side of the estate. That night, as I waited, unable to sleep, I went farther in my explorations. I walked with an oil lamp through more grand rooms covered in the frescoes of nymphs, satyrs, gods, and goddesses typical to the apartments of royals of the age. The furnishings covered in muslin made the rooms seem like the ghosts of still other rooms, and here and there in the dark flashed a bit of gilt and crystal. The mirrors were shrouded.

  The echoes of my footsteps in the marbled halls were all that kept me company. Only when I paused could I hear the silence return, filling in my footsteps behind me.

  I found a music room, with paintings of Apollo and his lyre, of Pan and his flute. It was a contest between them for Pan’s flute, made from the canes of a reed that was once a nymph whom Pan had pursued. She’d changed into a reed in order to escape, and he found her, cutting and then binding her to make what was left of her into this instrument that plays at his will.