The Queen of the Night

by Alexander Chee

  I knew her sapphire, then; I was sure it had been Eugénie’s. There on her brow a fortune enough to set us up for the rest of our days, though it would appear not to have been enough to rescue Eugénie after all.

  We were to have stayed for a fortnight. He had expected to audition other singers, to speak to animal trainers, to meet the orchestra. Instead, we were told we could return the next day.

  Who’d have thought the Russians were paupers now, he said, once we were at sea again.

  She spent all their money on that sapphire, I said. I should have had you trip her and I’d have snatched it.

  The Prussians, he said. Are they so rich?

  They are, I said, melancholy to think of it.

  It’s said she’s a beauty, he said, of the Empress. What did you think?

  I liked the sapphire, I said. What did you think?

  I liked the sapphire, too, he said.

  §

  An opera too expensive for the Russian Empress attracted a great deal of talk; and gossip, sometimes kind, found the composer and his soprano lover returned to Paris the more famous for their defeat in Saint Petersburg, complete with great reviews: My performance of the arias was said to have been astonishing. And wasn’t this likely be the last role to which I would consent?

  Aristafeo had taken rooms at Brown’s on our return from Russia, down the hall from my own so as to be closer to me. I listened from within my bed as he read these reports to me, and while I tried to be as amused as he seemed to be, I wondered who had spied on us and how they had traveled back more quickly than we.

  He did not wonder. Instead, as he set the papers down, he was all confidence, convincing me of the soundness of his new plan to stage the opera in London after my run in I Masnadieri—with the Empress’s dismissal, we were free of the Baroness’s last favor to him. And so we made the rounds of the British theaters for a week, giving our presentation, and I let go of my curiosity as to our enemies. Our next new future seemed possible, after all, and now our little spy in Russia wouldn’t matter. There was a new lightness to that week, the one I had waited for. But these theaters all eventually rejected the opera as well, in the same spirit as the Russian Empress, complaining of the costs, of having to clean after manure, of animal smells, questions of where the animals could be stabled. All of this was published in the gossip columns with speculation that the failure of the opera to find a home was perhaps related to my voice’s famous curse, and I thought again of that day in Rouen when I entered the Baroness’s château, the garden covered in her deathless roses. The circle of chairs in her ballroom full of opera’s most powerful men.

  I knew she could turn them toward him; I knew she could turn them against him.

  The wind out of the forest in Rouen that never stops, the chairs turning and turning, for and against, for and against. That wind had reached all the way to the Russian Empress, no doubt the author of her rejection before we had even arrived. And that rejection would be the least of it.

  A letter came from Verdi asking me to withdraw from I Masnadieri. The resultant scandal in Paris over my curtsy to Eugénie meant there was an unreasonably hostile atmosphere to me there, and so the production was endangered financially, and did I understand?

  At first I did not—the production was to be here in London, not in Paris, but then I did understand all too well. Aristafeo’s Baroness had reached even Verdi.

  I wrote back to Verdi and told him that of course I would withdraw from I Masnadieri and offered to withdraw from Un Ballo in Maschera as well. When this letter was ready to send, I called for Doro to send it, and when she did not appear, unlike her, I checked her room.

  I found it empty of even her things.

  Only a note waited on the empty vanity, addressed to me. The Castiglione insignia was pressed into the red wax seal.

  I see you are in London, having found a way to grovel to that woman still. I am writing to say I reviewed our agreement and have taken my price. Our business is now concluded.

  To be sure, never return to Paris again.

  Nicchia

  The curse now the least of my troubles.

  Ten

  I STOOD VERY STILL in Doro’s room, the note in front of me.

  I had wondered who Doro had worked for before the tenor hired her, but, of course, Doro could only have belonged all this time to the Comtesse, much as I had. An agent in the tenor’s household, bound there as well.

  All those years I had wondered as to the four hundred, the Italian assassins waiting for the Emperor to fail in his devotion to their cause—Doro could only have been one.

  Doro, then, good, kind Doro, who always had the answers no matter the question, giver of cards and gin, on her way from the hotel to the train, the train to the ferry, most likely at that instant on a boat back to Paris, the little metal flask in her bags. She would soon be in that apartment on the Place Vendôme, all the windows sealed in black, watching as the Comtesse lit her candles in order to examine her newest gift. I knew how long the trip could take; I had perhaps three days at best before the Paris police would begin their hunt for me, and this was provided they had not already begun.

  When the earth opens up under your feet, be like a seed. Fall down; wait for the rain.

  Everything you lose you get back.

  The fortune-teller’s words mocked me almost as much as the Comtesse’s.

  I felt myself dropping, again and again, into that curtsy before the Empress, the skirt of my gown rushing up at me as I kept falling, falling all the way into the underworld, falling down into the darkness.

  If only I had worn a veil that night . . . but I had not. I had wanted a night where he could look at my face in public and not first frown.

  That sly pickpocket, love, who will ask you to let down your guard and make a mark of you to the world. What finds you next will take everything and leave nothing.

  I resisted the urge to run down into the street, to shriek Doro’s name, to try to follow her and catch her. I knew she was gone; she was surer than I. She always had been. I ran back to my rooms instead.

  §

  Aristafeo waited there, looking up, faintly cross as I entered. You’re not ready for dinner, he said. What’s wrong?

  My maid has left me, I said.

  Ring for one from the hotel, he said, as if that would be all of it.

  Maids left you, after all, all the time.

  I did as he said, and a hotel maid arrived, clucking her disapproval as I explained mine had left suddenly. Did she steal from you? this new maid asked me, and I nearly laughed to think of the answer. She then asked me if I would need her to go through my things with her to be sure they were all there. I found I was afraid of maids now and told her I would do it myself.

  I dressed instead, in yet another elaborate mourning costume, this one with a black feather ruff, the bodice shining with black beads, a black fur cuff for the cold, black ostrich shoes that gleamed so that my feet were like that of some even stranger bird, hoping to make myself brave; but this costume was nothing, and as I sat before Aristafeo at dinner, I still felt myself falling, the speed quickening, and the wind of that passage and its growing hush of fear were such that I could not make out what Aristafeo was saying to me, not until he asked, Are you listening? What is troubling you? And I knew I would need to speak to him.

  He raised an eyebrow.

  The maid still? The Italian one, Doro, the one you’ve had all this time?

  Yes, I said. We were close.

  Advertise the position at once. I am trying to speak to you of something quite serious, he said. You must write to the Paris police. The papers say they are searching for you, hoping to ask you questions.

  So, I thought. There would be less time than I’d hoped.

  Here I am, I said. Will they come to London?

  The Paris papers publish stories on the murder each day. The police patrols along the Seine have doubled as they search for what is now believed to be a savage band of killers. T
hey have questioned his mistresses, his household staff, and now they search for you. He nodded his head as he said this, as if toasting me.

  His mistresses. This amused me. Of course there would be many.

  You smile, he said. Why?

  How do they say he was he killed? I asked. For I knew I should ask.

  Someone slit his throat and then set him on fire, he said, and then they tossed him in the Seine. When the police found him, they only knew him by a letter in his coat’s pocket, his address there. It was dry enough to read.

  He paused here. The newspapers say it was from you.

  I never wrote to him in advance, I said, but even as I said it, I knew the note was my own, accepting him, telling him to meet me that night. The meeting he had abandoned for the duel I had kept him from fighting.

  Worn over his heart.

  Aristafeo picked up his glass, and looked deeply into the wine inside, and then added, I would have given him a better death; I would have shot him just the once. This was what I told the police when they questioned me.

  I said nothing, for there was nothing to say to this.

  They told me they found his money on him—he had not been robbed. Who would kill him and take only his life?

  So he was killed by a rich man, I said. Someone who wouldn’t think to rob him. He had many enemies, and only a very few of them needed his money.

  You must write to the police, he said.

  Of course, I said. Of course.

  It can perhaps wait until we return to Paris, for we must find a theater there now. But you could write in advance that you will come and answer questions.

  And here it was. I could not go back to Paris. Already our little dream of a life here in London was dead.

  Of course, I said, instead. I will write to them. I’m not the killer. If I’d wanted to be rid of him, I would have married him.

  The joke was wrong even as I said it, as the silence after it told me. We finished the dinner this way, quietly, alone again with what I could not say and what he would not ask.

  I would not go back to Paris, and I would not write this letter, and I think he knew this also.

  I’ve upset you, Aristafeo said finally, setting his fork and knife down, and patting his mouth with his napkin.

  No, I said. I came to dinner upset; I am much the same.

  Do I have your word you will write the police and clear your name? he asked.

  Yes, I said. I will explain how I was en route to Milan.

  Any witnesses? he asked.

  My maid, I said. The one who left. But perhaps they can find her.

  He asked the waiter for our bill and waited for it to be brought, unable to look at me.

  I was like the cat pretending it had not swallowed the bird or, really, the bird who had swallowed the cat and was now too heavy to fly away. He was tired of these lies and so was I, but still I could not tell him the truth.

  §

  After dinner, as we ascended the stairs, he told me he would be leaving Brown’s for cheaper rooms until our return to Paris. He went down the hall, and I waited for him after I had undressed; when he did not appear at my door as was his habit, I went to him, letting myself in after he did not answer my knock.

  I nearly feared he had already left, but when I let myself into his suite with the spare key he’d given me, I found him asleep, the smell of brandy sweet in the air, rising off him.

  I sat in the chair beside the bed, and as my eyes adjusted to the dark, I remembered the way his music sprang up from under my fingertips that day in my own Paris music room, it was like the visit from his ghost I had never had.

  All because he was alive, of course.

  And yet while that ghost had never visited me over the years, his phantom had never left my side.

  There had never been a place for that impossible life born all those years ago in that kiss. All those years he had worked in secret in that woman’s château to prepare a glorious future for us, he had been so sure it was only waiting for us to step into it. What was increasingly clear, however, was that the ground behind us was vanishing as quickly as the ground in front of us was refusing to appear. And the sacrifice I had made to the gods out of the tenor, it would not be enough.

  It seemed the gods would take this, too.

  I would not be questioned, I knew. There would be no mercy. Yes, the brute who had killed the tenor was surely a monster. No clean death, no; there was no honor to it; but I had wanted to do more than kill him. I had not wanted honor. I had wanted to remove him from this world. I had made myself that monster with my long tongue of flame burning through the night to chase him from this life. Burning, it seemed, even my voice.

  Or the pétrole was not to blame. Or I had sung too much this season. Perhaps my adventure outside my Fach as the Queen of the Night had truly changed my fate, if for the worse—my voice breaking on it like so many others had.

  I was sure Aristafeo heard it; the voice now lacked the liquid quality it once had. He had never said if he ever wondered whether the rejections were due in part to this, but I had. There had been no cracks since the one in Carmen, and I could hide the loss some in vibrato, but the voice’s little failures terrified me for the way they signaled this other end I knew was near, an end I knew he would hear approaching. I could pretend for a while it was due to fatigue after a heavy season, that the voice could heal with rest, but only for a while.

  Without my voice, I would soon be only that hated thing, an eccentric courtesan in her twilight. I was pretty enough still; I always had been. But any true beauty I had was here in my throat—all those gentlemen admirers had taught me that, looking at me as if the one thing they could not see were right before them. Once it was gone, even if I had murdered no one, I knew what the Comtesse knew, what Eugénie knew, what Cora Pearl surely knew—what we all sought to forget.

  In this world, some time long ago, far past anyone’s remembering, women as a kind had done something so terrible, so awful, so fantastically cruel that they and their daughters and their daughters’ daughters were forever beyond forgiveness until the end of time—unforgiven, distrusted, enslaved, made to suffer for the least offenses committed against any man. What was remembered were the terms of our survival as a class: We were to be docile, beautiful, uncomplaining, pure, and failing that, at the least useful. In return, we might be allowed something like a long life. But if we were not any of these things, by a man’s reckoning, or if perchance we violated their sense of that pact, we would have no protection whatsoever and were to be treated worse than any wild dog or lame horse.

  A woman murderer, she would be treated the worst of these. I could not be caught.

  If the loss of my voice was the only price I paid for killing the man who had made me a singer, I might still be a fortunate woman. But it wouldn’t be nearly enough to be fortunate this way at all.

  I could wake him, I knew. I could ask why he had not come to me that night. He would protest, insist it was only drink and tiredness. I had been waiting for him to say he needed to go back to Paris to placate the Baroness—I had thought he would slip away, run from his failure, and mine, and return to her, beg her forgiveness. I never wanted to hear him say it and preferred, if he was to leave me, that he did so without explanation or even a good-bye. Now he had mentioned Paris tonight, and here he was, in his room and not mine. A first, tiny departure.

  I forgave Aristafeo then for knowing the truth I would not tell him and for being driven to drink by it. I forgave him for not being able to make me confess. I forgave him for giving up, for his intention to leave me. I leaned down and kissed him lightly in case either he or I left before I could kiss him again. And then I returned to my own rooms for such sleep as I could find, where I stayed half a fortnight without leaving.

  And so we find ourselves near the end of my tale.

  Eleven

  MORE LETTERS CAME. One from Verdi, saying he accepted my offer of withdrawing from both operas and that it was very kind of
me. Not one but two letters from Pauline as well, desolate at the news of the tenor’s death—The papers say he was set on fire and then drowned! What monster could do this?—and upset that I had not accepted a grieving call from her, turned away by my maid. Why would she not tell me you were away? I have not told the men the news of the murder, she said. They are not well enough.

  My heart ached to think of this.

  There was a note from Euphrosyne as well. If you leave me once more without saying good-bye, never come to look for me again.

  She knew. And if they knew to find me here, the police would as well.

  I wrote back with some little lies. I wrote to Euphrosyne and assured her I would be back soon. I wrote to Pauline and apologized, telling her I would see her on my return. I wrote to Verdi and asked him to forgive me—this was sincere.

  I had written meanwhile to Lucy to inquire as to the sale of my things and to see to the money being sent to me. A letter came from the concierge instead to say the apartment was empty, ready for a new tenant, and would I like to let it or sell? She had my address from the letter to Lucy, which had waited unopened, arriving after she had left. It never reached her.

  This pleased me somehow, despite my shock, and I laughed. I had never suspected that at the end Lucy would steal everything down to the forks. That she would put any bandit to shame. I laughed as it was what I had wanted, for every remnant of that life to vanish as if it had never been. I wanted the past to die to me, to let me go; I wanted the relief of vanishing. And with the tenor dead, I might really escape this time, unlike the others. But this was the moment to steal away.

  Instead, I stayed in bed, seeing only Aristafeo when he chose to come for short visits neither of us could quite endure. Each day I thought on how I had meant to leave at once, and to my amazement, I could not bring myself to do so. There seemed to be nowhere to go. Each hour made the need for a departure more urgent, but each hour also made departure feel the more impossible.