The Queen of the Night

by Alexander Chee

  She set down her cards.

  Thank you, I said to her. She withdrew the bottle of gin she kept and poured us each a glass. I had been waiting for it, afraid to ask for it, and drank deeply. She refilled my glass, clucking. I hope they have gin in London, I said, and she laughed at me, and then we played on.

  Eight

  I WENT TO LONDON dressed in black, like a crow, a bird of death. Even my jewels had to be black except for those emeralds, which I could wear because they were his, at least according to Doro. If anyone should ask, it will look like devotion, she said. And if anyone asks as to the ring, she added, pointing at Aristafeo’s ring, tell them it was a gift from him as well.

  She reasoned that this would be enough to placate Aristafeo while I was in mourning for another man. I did not believe it would, but I resolved to try.

  On arrival, I checked into a lavish suite at Brown’s Hotel to console myself. I gave them a name I invented on the spot, Peloux Martineau, a somewhat lugubrious name that I forgot instantly so that each time the staff used it to speak to me and deliver the newspaper I’d ordered, they would have to repeat themselves until I remembered, embarrassing them and myself both. I was out of practice.

  The newspaper was my vigil, my widow’s walk. I bought the Times each day as Aristafeo was to take out an advertisement in the paper when he arrived, saying he had lost a falcon and giving instructions for the return of the bird “if it was found.” He would give an address and I would write to him there. There was no way for me to get a message to him any longer—and I was in London as we’d agreed, just earlier than we’d agreed.

  It was strange to be able to speak English to everyone. I found the words difficult to remember and my accent uncertain, much the way my French had been ten years before.

  The first task at hand was consuming. Doro was busy instructing me on how to shop for my mourning toilettes—I kept nearly calling them costumes—and so we began at once.

  I had always liked black, but only when I chose it. Not like this. I resented the way the foyer to this new life would be decked in black. All to hide his blood. Even in death, it seemed, I would dress for him. Even in death I would make false names because of him, would deny my lover because of him. And, of course, the color would be black. The black madness I knew so well from him now poured over my whole life in a flood after his death. I had killed him hoping to free myself of it and of him, to save the little world I hoped to make without him, only to discover there was no corner of it where he did not reach. The blow I had struck rang still, the rays of it spreading, and now I would see if what was left without him could hold. But as I donned the new black dresses I would spend the year in, I knew there was every chance that destroying him was as likely to destroy me.

  After several days of such shopping, I found myself in front of a window to a store that seemed to sell only Chinese things. I had been to a milliner nearby, examining black hats and toques, black-jet hair combs, and any number of veils. I was rebelling, drawn to any color, first the beautiful gold thread and then the jewel colors in the satins, and so I stepped inside.

  I found myself before a case of coins, Chinese coins, curious to me because of their square centers.

  You want to see how they work? the proprietress asked, and drew the case out of the vitrine. She put them in her hand and shook them so they jingled lightly. She was Chinese also, with a whiskey voice, her skin white like a mushroom, the wrinkles on her face ridged like the veins of leaves. She had spent her life before this in the sun and was, I could see, much older than I had thought at first. Her silver hair she wore tight in a bun where it sat like a tin cap.

  If it’s a coin, I know how it works, I said.

  She laughed. I will show you, she said.

  She lit a piece of incense, handed me the coins, and directed me on how to shake and throw them like dice, six times. She counted out whatever this measures, and in ink drew a character much like I could see on the coins. She looked at it long and hard, and this is what she said to me: When the earth opens up under your feet, be like a seed. Fall down; wait for the rain.

  Wait for the rain, I repeated.

  Yes. Rain is coming, she said. Everything you lose you get back. She folded the paper into my hand and pressed it shut.

  It would be the first time, I said, as I pocketed it. I thanked her, offered to pay her, which she accepted.

  Back out on the streets of London, each person passing me appeared like the shape of a Fate, and the feeling didn’t leave me until I shut the door to my hotel suite, alone with Doro and the British cook she’d hired for me, there with supper ready.

  I asked the new cook if she believed the fortunes of fortune-tellers when she set my plate down.

  I’ll show you your future, milady, she said, and then she smiled as she pointed at the plate.

  §

  When Aristafeo came at last, I nearly shouted when I read the ad; I had almost given up.

  Here is your lost falcon, I wrote, and included a card from Brown’s. He came the next evening to take me to dinner and met me with a cab at the hotel.

  I suppose I thought he would expect me in mourning dress. His eyes lost some of their light when he saw me. I was dressed in an evening cloak trimmed in black mink over my black dinner gown, a black hat covered in black feathers, a trim little veil. I had even bought black furs, anxious to at least enjoy myself.

  Must you, he said, as he took my arm and led me from the lobby.

  I must, I said. Six months, a year.

  Even the veil? he asked, as he sat beside me.

  Yes, I said.

  It’s like looking at him every day, he said.

  Yes it is, I said. For me as well. I took the veil off then, and as I did, I made sure he saw the ring.

  That’s better, he said, and then he kissed me chastely, as if we were being watched.

  By the end of the first evening, we were restored to each other. Soon we were making plans for our trip to Saint Petersburg and our audience there. He spoke of how Un Ballo in Maschera was being performed there at the Royal Opera, and we agreed we should see it. He said he would make the arrangements so we could write to the Verdis of it as we left for Russia.

  §

  A single item consumed me, however, more important than any of these mourning clothes.

  The flask.

  I could think of nothing else other than how to get it back.

  Every singer knows to be careful of her dressing table; it is its own kind of stage, an intimate one. Most of her secrets appear there. Admirers often sought to give gifts so they would be displayed and thus warn off another suitor. And if you wanted to make someone jealous, you left out something they would not recognize—you could even buy it for yourself.

  This tiny bottle, it was the size of my death if I did not get it back; I knew it. But having disavowed the flask, I couldn’t think of how to ask for it. Doro was never not in the room when I was there. She found London odd and a little dull, she said, when I offered to give her a day off.

  How funny to think it so, she said to me, when she told me this. I had expected more of London.

  I had expected more also. I’d imagined finding a house in London where Aristafeo and I would be alone at last, no reminders of our life previous except each other. I dreamt of a simpler life, one where I would sell my jewels, furnishings, gowns, all down to the last trinket. Everything would be new.

  Instead, I had left nothing behind, it seemed. Or, at least, not what I had hoped to lose. As Doro wrote to Lucy to tell her to sell my things, I thought of the fortune-teller telling me I would get everything back. I only hoped she meant the flask.

  Nine

  AS THE VEIL had bothered Aristafeo so much, I left it off when I dressed for the opera the next evening and had even assured myself I would not be recognized. Mourning only mattered if you were known to those watching. But the London audience outside the Royal Opera, to my surprise, recognized me immediately as we exited our cab. The lo
w mutter came: Is it her? Is it her? It is, it is, and then La Générale, and just as someone might have come forward to introduce himself, just as I felt that flush of something like pride at being recognized, Aristafeo ran to speak with an acquaintance of his, leaving me alone with the public gathering around me.

  We were the guests of his friends in their box. I wore a jet silk velvet gown cinched to the waist and black velvet gloves beaded with jet, this to set off the tenor’s emeralds. Their color was the rich green that is called poison green—why, I have never known.

  Poison, in my experience, is always hidden; it seems to me we never know its color.

  As the murmur of the crowd grew, another elegant carriage drew up to the entrance. This one adorned with the unmistakable insignia of the French Empress-in-exile, now simply known as Eugénie de Montijo.

  She had come for the Royal Opera the same as we, she now a somewhat extraordinary resident of London’s suburbs. Her driver leapt down, knocked out the footstool, and opened her door. I glimpsed her looking off to the side as if she waited for something more than this to summon her from the depths of the carriage.

  She stood, still a regal beauty. She wore black as well, though she was no longer officially in mourning—the Prince Imperial’s death had been three years before, in summer, and with him had gone the hope of a restoration. France had meanwhile shouldered on, as if the imperial return she’d hoped for were out of the question and the Empire and the excesses of it and the excesses of its fall were all the sorts of sins democratic elections could atone for in the Third Republic. The papers were still full of discussions of imperial excess, even now. And everywhere, still, was the ostentatious false piety regarding luxury.

  Which is to say, it was easier to wear these emeralds in London.

  I stood there, full of my old longing to run to her, to make her smile again as she had once smiled at me. It would have only frightened and confused her, though. What’s more, I wanted to be sure she did not recognize me as she stood uncertainly in the cold night air and stepped down from the carriage. While I am sure there is a way to greet one’s ruler in a foreign land, I did not know it, and so instead, with a suddenness that surprised me, I dropped into my old servant’s curtsy and threw myself at her feet, my face pressed into my skirt.

  The London crowd, momentarily stunned by my appearance and then hers—her celebrity, her air of tragedy and fallen empire, her hair white since the Emperor’s death and illuminating her still-fragile beauty—reacted with shocked silence.

  I’m told she paused to smile down at me with affection, as the reports all said later.

  It was not the manner of this curtsy to look up.

  The British newspapers reported the French singer Lilliet Berne, the famous Falcon soprano who never spoke in order to protect her voice, greeted her Empress-in-exile with the full grand curtsy that night. The grand curtsy was very different, though, performed at the balls the Empress had once thrown, done when one was presented to her. That curtsy was performed by sinking noiselessly to the floor and pressing one’s face into the skirt of your gown as you held it out to the sides, so that the woman performing it resembled a bloom that had fallen on its face. You then rose up again and dipped, your face tipped down, your head, and, what’s more, your hair never above the height of her eyes, before you sailed on, making room for the next lady coming in behind you.

  But this was not what I had done.

  The newspaper’s writer also assumed her smile was a memory of having heard me sing, but I wonder if she ever had or if she remembered something else if she did, in fact, smile: her New Year’s balls, the Tuileries, the dances at Compiègne. Or perhaps it was simply the pleasure of seeing the emeralds along my neck, reminding her of her own—my taste in emeralds came from handling hers. It is almost certain to me she did not recognize the girl who’d once cared for her furs and put away her jewels, the one who had packed her for Compiègne, waiting for her to ring all those times in the back stairs of her palaces, running to her at once at the sound of her bell. Until she ran away.

  The girl who also had so foully betrayed her, in other words. And if she did recognize me, it may be she smiled for seeing that girl bow to her one more time. For, of course, she had seen my neck the most of all.

  Afterward, as Aristafeo rejoined me, after she had moved on, we toasted our luck in avoiding recognition by ordering champagne in our box. He laughed at how something as simple as a bow or curtsy could disguise one. I felt sure the evil I’d feared coming for us had passed over us now. And that this luck of ours had come about because we were together finally.

  And so we toasted a long life together, full of this luck.

  We could see her in the distance. Her white halo of hair in the royal box across from ours glowed in the gaslight, she the guest of the Queen, of course, her opera glasses flashing or, mostly, turning to an unseen friend to make remarks on what was certainly not the opera.

  I had not wanted to see her again in Aristafeo’s company; after all that had transpired, it seemed too much. Now, though, I could think of it all more easily. Still, the moment in Aristafeo’s library when I lifted the musket returned. The memory of her scent, the sight of her nightgown. Her bracelets on the table.

  The ruby rose from the Emperor that I’d set down beside them.

  I understood finally something I had never understood before then. The Emperor wore no ruby flowers. My ruby token, it had been from her.

  The Emperor, the Comtesse, the Empress. Their loneliness had made a back passage through all their lives, and I had spent so much of my life there. It was fitting, it seemed to me, that I should see her here like this.

  For theirs had been my loneliness, too.

  I should have known her for the omen she had to be, there in the dark. It was fitting that I should see her right before this departure. She in her exile some sign of my own to come. The Comtesse having hunted us both here. But I did not.

  Instead, I wondered if she had known the way I was used against her or if I was only a secret between the Emperor and the Comtesse, a counter in the secret battle they had waged. I would never know. Those were always the terms.

  And then the opera began, and we watched as Amelia, the soprano lead, searched the execution grounds for an herb of forgetfulness, eager to rid herself of the memory of sinful passion. I had the thought I always had at this point in the opera: How young she must be to think an herb could take something like this memory away.

  §

  In the paper the next day, the item of our meeting ran with a caricature of us, THE EMPRESS AND HER GéNéRALE.

  The item read: At last night’s performance of Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera, the attendees outside were greeted to another performance, that of Paris’s own La Générale, Lilliet Berne, greeting her Empress-in-exile Eugénie with that most proper French curtsy, bringing a smile to her face and gasps from the crowd around her. No doubt the sight of her subject-in-exile giving her this honor warmed Eugénie’s heart.

  We were drawn with doll’s bodies and the enormous outsized heads of dolls. Her crown was drawn askew, of course, giving her the appearance of being confused or drunk. And I, I appeared to be the picture of servility, my general’s coat drawn over my gown despite my having left it at home; I wore it only when I wanted to be recognized.

  The item soon made it to Paris, where it was repeated in the French papers with the same caricature and a great deal of public outrage. I should not, as a patriot, have greeted her this way, to do so was to declare oneself still her subject. Was I a monarchist? And so on. And what’s more, speculation ran as to why I was there at all, as I was thought until then to still be in Paris, in mourning for the tenor.

  This was not the beginning of our good luck, then, but the long shadow’s first fall. It was not where we thought it would be, and so we did not see it for what it was.

  §

  We left for Russia the next morning. From the Empress-in-exile we then went for an audience with a
nother, reigning under a near permanent midnight at the end of the Baltic Sea in her palace of crystal and mirrors. Our trip was long but urgent—if we waited any longer the sea ice would soon make the trip impossible.

  At first, I thought the Russian Empress had sensed that the opera was not precisely for her, much less her son, in the way any woman who’s become an empress can tell these things. She was a patroness of the arts with a sapphire the size of an infant’s face in her crown. And the face of a child herself. She was a beautiful woman, Maria Feodorovna, but with large sad eyes. She looked as if she were the fisherman’s wife whose husband had caught the magic fish and the jewel of wishing, the one she uses to wish herself a palace—and finds herself lonelier than she thought.

  During our audience, I watched my reflection in her sapphire as I sang for her the opera’s major arias in the mirrored recital room of her frightening palace. I knew not to look directly at an empress’s eyes, and so I looked instead into the sapphire.

  A peculiar hunger, that for sapphires. I wanted to reach out and pluck it from her brow, to press it against my cheek.

  I forgot myself only once and looked down to see her terrified eyes look back. I pitied her what I saw in those eyes. My song never broke. I swept my eyes down farther as if this were only a part of the dramatic gesture.

  At the conclusion, she was polite, but she rejected the opera commission, declaring it, with its cast of animals and circus freaks, too expensive to produce on the stage anywhere in Europe.

  Perhaps the Prussians can afford this, she said, with a dark look at us both. With their war duties.

  I tried not to laugh at this, for how clearly it was a lie. The opera had been written precisely to anticipate the extravagance of a young Russian prince’s celebration. The animals alone wouldn’t have cost more than the jewels on one of her slippers that day. As she pronounced against it, I listened as if I were very far away. I watched as Aristafeo accepted her decision politely, for she was an intelligent woman somewhere under the enormous gems.