by Morgan Rice
“Very well,” he said to the ticket seller. “Two tickets, please.”
The joy on Kaia’s face as he came out, brandishing them, made it worth it. Even if this was just about her being entranced by this place, rather than anything real, it was worth it just for that look.
Pinsley couldn’t see what else it could be about, when there was no way Kaia could pick out one theatre from all the other spots in the city.
“What is it about this place?” he asked her, as he escorted Kaia into the foyer of the theatre, where a parquetry floor was so well trodden that it had started to wear smooth, and fliers on the walls advertised future performances. They left their bags at the coat check, although Pinsley kept his great coat on the basis that it had his pistol, his warrant card and his truncheon in its various pockets.
Kaia looked a little uncomfortable. “If I tell you the truth, you won’t believe me.”
“Tell me anyway,” he said.
“I can feel that there’s something wrong here,” Kaia replied. “I can feel that there are shadows here, or have been. It’s not as strong as it was with the chapel but it’s still… you see, you don’t believe me.”
“Would I have bought tickets to get us in there if I didn’t believe that you could do something?” Pinsley pointed out. He’d seen her send thugs flying in London. There was something going on here that he couldn’t quite comprehend. It was just that he wasn’t ready to buy into the whole business of shadows and strange feelings just yet.
As he and Kaia waited, people started to gather in the foyer with them. Pinsley could see then that the ticket seller hadn’t been lying about being down to his last few tickets, because it seemed that the theatre was going to be packed. He could also see just how underdressed he and Kaia were in comparison to some of them. The men and women there had come in their most formal clothes, the men dressed in sharp dark suits and frock coats, the women in gowns that made all this clearly as much about being seen as about what they would see there.
There was an excited edge to the crowd, with people whispering back and forth to one another. This seemed like one moment when playing the part of the ignorant foreigner might be useful, so Pinsley walked up to one of the men, an older man in a suit that looked as if it still had dust on it from not being used for a while, and cleared his throat, preparing his most formal French.
“It’s a little busier here than I had imagined when my ward wanted to see a play,” he said to the man.
“But of course it is,” the man exclaimed, talking animatedly with his hands. “What do you expect after everything that has happened?”
“After what has happened?” Pinsley asked. “Forgive me, but I only arrived in the city today.”
“Ah, the English,” the other man said. “They think that they rule the world, but they do not even hear the most important things!”
He more or less ignored Pinsley then, turning back to a conversation with his companions.
“…and I am telling you that Comte is barely a philosopher at all! What is this ‘sociology’ of his?”
“I’m sorry to interrupt again,” Pinsley said, trying to remain polite. “But what did happen? Was it just a fine performance, or-”
“A performance indeed,” the older man said. “They say that the part of Juliet was played most beautifully. But if you think that is why so many people are here, then you are foolish, Englishman, and I have no time to converse with foolish people, when I have important discussions to continue!”
He turned back to his friends, and this time it seemed clear that he wasn’t going to brook any more interruptions. That was one of the downsides of being somewhere like Paris: if this had been London, Pinsley could have tried to use his position as an inspector to get information, but here, people could simply ignore him. He found the difference galling.
“What is it?” Kaia asked, coming up to Pinsley’s side. “What’s going on? There’s something happening, isn’t there?”
She sounded eager for vindication, but Pinsley didn’t have anything to tell her, not yet.
“It seems that people are particularly eager to be here this evening, that’s all,” Pinsley said, not willing to concede more than that when he didn’t have all the relevant information. “I will try to find out more.”
He went up to another man, a fat man with a glass of wine already in his hand, trying the same tactic as before, of playing on his ignorance of what was happening.
“Excuse me,” he said, trying to make sure that his French had less of an accent to it this time. “But there seems to be a lot of excitement around this evening. I was wondering if you could explain…”
“You don’t know?” the man said. He turned to a man in another corner of the room, looking slightly offended as he did so. “Phillipe, there is an Englishman here who does not know what happened, and yet he somehow has tickets! Can you believe that? When Justine said that she and Albert could not get them?”
He wandered off towards his friend, apparently either forgetting that Pinsley was there or not caring. The inspector could feel his frustration growing, moment by moment. Clearly something had happened here, and clearly it was something big, if so many people had come because of it, but he still had no way of knowing what.
“That one sounded pretty animated by it all,” Kaia said.
“I think he was just upset by the idea of me asking him questions,” Pinsley said. “I will have to find another approach.”
He stopped in the middle of the floor, straining his ears, trying to pick up snippets of conversation while he thought. His greatest strength lay in the ability to reason through problems, not in running around playing catch up, trying to persuade strangers to tell him what he wanted. So he would think.
“…poor girl…”
“…eclairs at de Garique’s patisserie are wonderful…”
“…and after such a perfect performance too…”
“…possibility of another blockade…”
“…second lead they have lost in a week…”
The hardest part of it was working out what fit with what else. It was like some puzzle where one had to put the pieces in the right order, or perhaps like gluing the fragments of an ostrich egg back together for a display cabinet, only this puzzle had been jumbled up with a collection of random other pieces.
Slowly, Pinsley started to take those pieces to see which fit with which others. He put the information together, and when he did so, it was all he could do to contain a gasp of shock. No, it couldn’t be…
He went up to a woman who was dressed relatively plainly compared to some of the others there, as if she found such ostentation rather gauche. There was no polite way to broach a subject such as this, so he came out and asked it without preamble.
“Excuse me,” he said. “My ward and I bought tickets for an evening at the theatre, but the conversations here… am I right in thinking that a young woman was killed?”
The woman gave him a look of disapproval, but then seemed to relent. “Not just killed, she was murdered. They say she was strangled in her own dressing room. It only makes all of this more disgusting.”
“All of what?” Pinsley prompted.
“All if this,” the woman said, with a gesture towards the other theatre goers. “I bought my ticket because I had heard that the play was good. Now, this circus of people wants to be here so that they can say they were where a gruesome murder took place. Perhaps where they hope another will. After all, the original Juliet is missing. It is why the poor girl who was killed was playing her at all.”
“And the show is continuing?” Pinsley said. In London, he would have shut it down while he and the constables climbed all over the theatre, looking for answers. Apparently, they did things differently in Paris.
“They are making noises of ‘oh, the show must go on,’” the woman said. “But we all know that the director is rubbing his hands together in glee, because now these ghouls…” she waved another hand at the people
around her “…will pay any price to be here. You say that you are here with your ward? Is that her, the young lady there?”
“Yes,” Pinsley said.
“Then if you have any sense, you will take her out of here. It is… what do you English say? Not a suitable place for a young woman.”
“Perhaps I will,” Pinsley agreed. “Thank you.”
He returned to Kaia, trying to think of what he would say to her. All of this was a lot to take in, and not just because of the shock of hearing that someone had been murdered here, in this place. That was a tragedy, but the police inspector in Pinsley, and the former soldier, could no longer be shocked simply by news of a death.
No, what was shocking was that Kaia had brought him here. Somehow, she had found a spot in Paris where a murder had occurred, just the night before. Put together with what he’d seen of her sending people flying, and Pinsley simply didn’t know what to think. Every iota of reason he possessed said that this should not have been possible, but here they were, and to dismiss it as a simple coincidence seemed utterly unreasonable in its own right.
“What did you find out?” Kaia asked.
Pinsley considered what to tell her. He supposed that he owed her an answer, yet to tell her about the murder now would mean that she would want to become embroiled in all of this. No, the situation was too complex for all of that, at least for now. Pinsley needed to know more, both about what was going on and about this strange talent of Kaia’s, before he revealed the truth to her.
“I haven’t found out enough yet to piece together what’s happening,” he said, because it was even true, as far as it went. He wanted to know more before he committed to anything.
“So now what do we do?” Kaia asked.
That part was straightforward enough, at least, even though a part of Pinsley was whirling with questions.
“We watch the play.”
CHAPTER TEN
Kaia could only stare in disbelief as she and the inspector walked into the theatre. She knew that she should be spending her time focusing on the sensation of the shadows, trying to locate them somewhere within the theatre, yet there were too many things here to distract her, too many things that drew her eye no matter how much she tried to focus.
There were the people. So many people, all dressed as elaborately as anyone she’d seen. The closest thing Kaia could think of to compare to it was when she and the other girls had walked down from the orphanage to the local church every Sunday, into a room full of people dressed in their Sunday best.
This went way beyond Sunday best, though, with the men wearing a variety of formal wear that made the inspector’s long coat look shabby by comparison. The women couldn’t all be wealthy or noble, yet they wore elegant gowns in every color of the rainbow, along with stoles or shawls, and most of them wearing jewelry that seemed to glitter by the light of the theatre’s lamps.
Compared to that, Kaia felt completely under-dressed. Her dress was a lilac one that Lottie had given to her, and she had a shawl at least, but compared to everything in this room, she was bedraggled.
Even compared to the theatre, she didn’t feel decorated enough. As she and the inspector found their seats within the main auditorium, Kaia’s eyes roved over the statuary that covered every corner. It was shaped as everything from elegant flowers to complex gargoyles staring down at the stage as if they were there to rate the performance. The walls were painted in deep, rich reds, and there was gold leaf on the decorations above the doors. How could anyone hope to compete with all that, especially her?
The seats sloped down towards the stage, so that Kaia could see over the heads of those in front of her all the way to where the curtains there stood closed. The stage seemed huge from here, like a giant window ready to reveal another world.
Kaia took her seat, and eventually the lights around her dimmed, leaving only those that lit the stage to see by. The curtains opened, what appeared to be a city street, and young men dressed in what appeared to be old fashioned tunics and hose. She could feel the tension of the silence as the play began.
Kaia couldn’t understand any of the words, since the whole thing was in French. That should have been enough to put her off, yet as the young men started arguing, leading to a brawl, she found that it didn’t matter. She still understood the ideas of what was happening, still saw the emotion of it, even if the language was lost to her.
Now a young woman came onto the stage along with a couple of other actresses, and Kaia understood that this was meant to be Juliet. The girl was lovely looking, with pleasant, open features and the lithe grace of a dancer, but she also looked nervous, as if she wasn’t used to the role.
Maybe that was how all actors looked when they first came on stage, though. Kaia didn’t know; she had never seen a play before. The closest she had gotten to any of this in her life was playing make believe with some of the younger girls at the orphanage, and even then they’d had to be quiet so that Mrs Garrow wouldn’t hear.
This was nothing like that. Kaia could feel a connection to the actions of these people pretending their roles in a way she wouldn’t have thought possible. The young man playing Romeo was a picture of brash action, but also romance, and Kaia felt her heart going out to him and Juliet as he hid beneath her balcony window, listening to her profess her love. The fact that she could tell what was happening despite not understanding a word of it was almost as spectacular as the scene itself.
Kaia felt her emotions rising and falling with the play, with joy and fear, sorrow and laughter all pulled from her just from the way the actors moved and the situations they were in. She tried to imagine what it would be like being able to do that, and now she was thinking about what it would be like to be up there, on the stage.
Kaia could imagine it: her, in a fabulous costume, striding across the boards of the stage, delivering her lines to packed rooms full of rapt, watching people who had come from all over London, or Paris, or the world. They would listen to her, and she would find a way to move them, so that they wept when they were meant to weep, and smiled with joy when they were meant to be happy.
She imagined herself at the center of the stage, delivering the last lines of a play, then standing there as the audience broke into a standing ovation. She imagined flowers raining down on the stage, or people calling out her name.
Kaia had never felt the kind of joy she experienced watching the play, the kind that came from, just for an hour or two, experiencing a life where she was not an orphan trapped at the center of some dangerous game featuring deadly shadows. It was a joy that made her wish that she could be up there, be a famous actress, known everywhere and respected by even the kind of well-off people who came to watch plays like this.
Kaia sat there and kept watching, dreaming all the time that it was her up there acting the part of Juliet, not wanting the play to end.
*
Plays had never been Pinsley’s thing. He would always rather listen to the music of Beethoven or Chopin than watch drama unfold on a stage. The music of the great composers had a kind of mathematical precision to it, where each performance seemed like an attempt to get to some greater truth of the piece, while even the greatest plays seemed simply like people pretending.
A part of Pinsley’s mind insisted that such pretending was inherently suspect. In a logical, rational world, things should be what they were, and not seek to feign being something else. A section of painted scenery should not pretend that it was a villa wall, nor should a play written in English, translated and performed by the French, try to say that all there had magically been transported to Verona.
Of course, Pinsley understood that such things were the whole point of plays, but that little, rational voice was there, nonetheless, critiquing the play to him as it went. The costumes did not reflect what the latest antiquarian works suggested about the time. The characters behaved in ways that had no logic to them.
Of course, he knew that he was using such a retreat into logic to make
up for what he’d just learned, trying to pick at the rational holes in the world because Kaia had done the impossible by leading him here, to a place where there had been a murder. He was falling back on that sense of the world as a great mechanism with immutable rules because what had just happened seemed to break all those rules. Pinsley felt unsteady, as if the world were shaking underneath him; but no, that was just the applause for the interval.
Pinsley looked over at Kaia. She was obviously enjoying all of this far more than he was, the joy on her face unmistakable. Pinsley found himself wondering what it must be like for a girl like her, and realized with a start that this was probably the first time she had been able to see any entertainment more sophisticated than a street performer’s Punch and Judy show.
If Pinsley couldn’t take pleasure in the play itself, there was plenty to be had in Kaia’s reaction to it. If he had seen far too much of the world for his liking, Kaia was seeing it all for the first time, with the kind of innocence that could only come from youth. He watched her clapping her hands together with joy, and there was nothing forced or false about that movement. It made the fakery of the rest of it at least a little more bearable.
“You’re enjoying yourself?” Pinsley asked her, wanting to be sure.
Kaia nodded vigorously in response. “I know I should be watching for shadows, but this… no one told me that the theatre was like this. It’s like the whole of the world distilled down onto one small stage.”
Complete with all its petty rivalries, inaccuracies and flaws, if Pinsley knew anything about theatre from London’s productions. He didn’t say that, though, because he didn’t want to spoil Kaia’s experience. He could see how much all of this meant to her, and it was probably the purest reaction in the whole crowd when everyone else there was present to see what would become of the performance after the murder the day before. It was even the reason that he had stayed.
