Prima Donna
Page 40
I met his gaze. “I know what I am.”
“So do I,” he said softly. “That is, I know what you were, Bina. I know what I was too. Shall we just accept it and move on?”
I wanted to cry with relief and hope. “Yes. Oh yes.”
He took me in his arms then, and kissed me and whispered that he loved me, and I let myself dissolve against him. I climbed into the narrow warmth of my own bed beside him, and he held me close that way he used to and I felt his lips against my hair and his breath in my ear and saw the future laid out before me the way it should be, the way we would make it, and I was not afraid.
CHAPTER 28
I twisted, trying to see my whole body in the tiny mirror—impossible. The pale blue silk I wore shimmered in the sunlight coming through the windows of Johnny’s bedroom. I had not felt silk against my skin for four and a half years, and I could not keep from smoothing it, touching it, even though the roughness of my fingers snagged upon it.
“I can’t see,” I complained, twisting again in an attempt to see the bustle with its lace-edged train. “Damn Johnny for a cheap bastard. Why hasn’t he a proper mirror?”
“It looks perfect,” Charlotte assured me, adjusting the fall of lace over the bodice. “You’re beautiful.”
“My hair is wretched. Look at it: it’s striped.”
“I’ll agree with you about that,” Gideon said from where he sat at the table, watching. “We might have to do something about it before we get to New York.”
“I look like a skunk.”
Charlotte laughed. She glanced at Gideon. “Is she always this way before a show?”
“Nothing but nerves,” he said. He rose and stepped over to me, leaning to kiss my bare shoulder above the cascade of lace. “Charlotte’s right. You’re perfect.”
“You are going to play for me?” I asked him for the twentieth time. “You’re certain?”
“Of course.”
“Billy ain’t even here,” Charlotte assured me. “Johnny’s told him to stay out of the Palace the next four nights.”
“Two nights too many,” Gideon said dryly. “There aren’t enough people in this town to warrant it.”
“You’re just angry because he won’t give up the percentages,” I said.
“He’s a shrewd businessman, I’ll say that for him.”
“Johnny never met a dollar he didn’t like.”
“I’m going out,” Charlotte said. “I want to get my seat. Hell, even the city founders came. The Yeslers and Mr. Denny too.”
I felt the jump of nerves in my stomach. “I had an invitation from Sarah Yesler for tea tomorrow.”
Charlotte laughed. “Ain’t you the favorite now?”
She kissed me lightly on the cheek and whispered good luck and then she slipped out the door. When she was gone, Gideon reached into his pocket and pulled something out.
It was the brooch. Sapphires and a pearl moon. Nine diamonds. “Will you wear this tonight?” he asked me, and I took it from him with a smile. I held it for a moment in my hand.
“You’ll have to add another diamond.”
“Five of them,” he corrected. “When we can afford it again.”
I mused, “Five of them. You’ll have to have some of the sapphires removed. Soon it’ll be nothing but diamonds.”
“That’s my intention,” he said. He kissed me again. “Are you ready?”
I went still, listening. I heard the crowd, the hushed talk so different from a usual night at the Palace. Downstairs, I knew, were not the usual miners and lumbermen, but what passed for high society in Seattle, who had scrambled all over themselves to buy tickets for tonight’s performance. There were reporters there too.
I swallowed. “Very well then. Let’s go.”
He held out his arm and I took it, and then he led me from Johnny’s bedroom and down the hallway, past the boxes, which contained not whores tonight, but chairs set up specially, and the best of society who were more than willing to ignore the chaises shoved to the back for the illusion of exclusivity. It was no Academy of Music, but it would serve. I smiled as we went past them and down the stairs. Johnny had taken out the tables and lined the Palace with chairs, and there was hardly room to move.
Someone hissed, “Here she is,” and then the whisper was taken up. I saw their heads turn as they followed us along the aisle to the stairs that led to the orchestra loge and the stage. I felt the panic, as familiar as the rain, and at the bottom of the steps, Gideon paused. He kissed my forehead and rubbed the spot with his thumb, and then he smiled and said, “In boca al lupo,” and the nervousness went away. I watched him climb the stairs to the loge, two at a time. I heard the scrape of the piano bench as he pulled it out, and then I took a deep breath and went onto the stage.
The crowd went silent. I felt their eyes on me as I moved to the center of the proscenium, that hushed anticipation I loved. I could not live without it. It astounded me that I had ever tried.
The piano began. The opening bars, beautiful, sublime. I looked out over the crowd.
And then the moment was mine, and I seized it. I seized it with joy and triumph. I sang, and my voice flew from my head and my heart, illuminating the shadows in this building that had been my refuge for the last four years, and my soul went with it, spreading to the hearts and minds that lay open before me, un til the gift I gave them circled back to become the one I gave myself, the voice I thought I’d lost forever, my own song for the angels.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many thanks to my editor, Suzanne O’Neill, whose comments on this manuscript were both insightful and inspiring, and Heather Proulx, Dyana Messina, and everyone else at Crown/ Three Rivers Press for your enthusiasm and support. As always, I am forever grateful for the efforts of Kim Witherspoon, Julie Schilder, Mairead Duffy, and the rest of the staff at Inkwell Management. I’d also like to thank Kitsap Regional Library, for supplying me with a weekly dose of opera (much to my children’s dismay), as well as for providing access to the historical New York Times, and the Seattle Public Library and the University of Washington Library for their incredible online resources. And, as always, I owe a great debt to Kany, Maggie, and Cleo, for their patience, understanding, and love.
ALSO BY MEGAN CHANCE
Sometimes truth is the greatest illusion of all.
THE SPIRITUALIST (A Novel)
$14.95 paper (Canada: $16.95) / ISBN 978-0-307-40611-8
ON A COLD January morning in 1856, Evelyn Atherton’s husband is found murdered after attending an exclusive séance. Caught in a perilous game in which she is equal player and pawn, predator and victim, Evie finds there is no one to trust, perhaps not even herself. As her powerful in-laws build a case against her, and with time running out, Evie must face the real ghosts of her past if she is to have any hope of avoiding the hangman.
THREE RIVERS PRESS • NEW YORK
Available from Three Rivers Press wherever books are sold
www.crownpublishing.com
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2009 by Megan Chance
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Three Rivers Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
Three Rivers Press and the Tugboat design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Chance, Megan.
Prima donna: a novel / Megan Chance. — 1st trade paperback ed.
p. cm.
1. Singers—Fiction. 2. Brothels—Fiction. 3. Seattle (Wash.)—
History—19th century—Fiction. 4. Psychological fiction. I. Title.
PS3553.H2663P75 2009
813′.54—dc22 2009018553<
br />
eISBN: 978-0-307-46102-5
v3.0