Cinderella Six Feet Under (10 page)

Oooooo
, the thousands of people in the audience breathed.
Ahhhhh
.

Ophelia glanced at Colifichet. He looked mighty pleased with himself. The apprentice Pierre rested his chin in his hand, elbow on the railing, frowning. The prince and the count were helping themselves to more brandy.

The music swirled and the fairy godmother transformed rats, mice, and lizards into footmen, a coachman, and horses. With a last wave of the wand, sky-high violin trills, and a poof of fake smoke, Cinderella's rags fell away to reveal a gorgeous ball gown.

Ophelia started. “Professor, pass me the opera glasses, would you?”

He passed them.

Ophelia leaned forward and peered through the glasses. “Good gracious,” she whispered. “It's the same gown Sybille was wearing. Yes, the same gown exactly, except shorter. Same ivory tulle, same embroidery.”

Penrose spoke in low tones, so the other men in the box wouldn't hear. “Whoever made the girl's gown must have seen that costume. Are you certain it's identical?”

“Fair certain, but perhaps we ought to go backstage after the ballerina changes and have a closer look.”

They waited. The act dragged on. Ophelia tapped her throbbing toes. At last, Cinderella appeared onstage once again in her raggedy costume.

“Let's go,” Ophelia whispered.

“Please excuse us,” Penrose murmured to Prince Rupprecht. “My cousin requires a bit of air.”

Prince Rupprecht nodded without taking his eyes from his gold opera glasses. The Count de Griffe sent Ophelia an ardent glance as she and Penrose slipped by.

O
phelia found the backstage entrance handily, through a door around the corner from the lobby.

Backstage, no one paid them any mind. Tight stairs and meandering corridors brought them to the busy rooms adjacent to the stage. The music sounded muffled. Dancers chatted or stretched. Men in shirtsleeves rushed about, moving bits of scenery. Ophelia led the way through tables covered with stage properties and into a corridor lined with doors. Each door had a brass nameplate.

“The dressing rooms,” Ophelia said. “What was the prima ballerina's name?” She stopped before a door at the end of the corridor, just before a corner. “The one dancing the role of Cinderella.”

Penrose drew the programme from his breast pocket and scanned it. “Polina Petrov.”

“That's what I thought. Look.” Ophelia tapped the nameplate on the door:
Polina Petrov,
étoile
. She looked left and right. The corridor was, for the moment, empty. For good measure, she looked around the corner.

Her breath caught. She nipped back around the corner. “Austorga!” she whispered. “Prue's stepsister. What is
she
doing back here?”

“Indeed. She is, presumably, a young lady of gentle breeding.”

Ophelia nodded. Well-bred ladies never ventured backstage. Well-bred
gents
, certainly, but not the ladies.

Ophelia looked around the corner again. Many paces away, Austorga was speaking to a thin, elegantly dressed woman of about forty years, with striking black eyebrows and a pointy nose. The woman appeared to be annoyed, and Austorga was getting worked up.

“Can you hear what they're saying?” Ophelia asked.

“No. And we might consider hurrying if you wish to investigate that costume before the end of the second act.”

They darted inside Polina Petrov's dressing room and shut the door.

Polina Petrov's dressing room was catawampus and smelled of greasepaint and talcum powder. Gas globe lamps hissed softly on either side of the dressing table mirror. Jars of face powder, hairbrushes, curling tongs, and rouge were scattered across the top. A sagging divan overflowed with garments, and a folding screen concealed a corner of the room.

Penrose held a battered ballet slipper up by its ribbon. “Good lord, this smells like my brother's basset hound.”

Ophelia went straight to the garment rack. She pulled out one of the costumes. “Here it is. Yes. It's exactly like the one Sybille was wearing in the garden. Sybille's was longer, and not quite as—as decorated-looking, I suppose.” She touched the silver and gold embroidery on the skirt.

“What could she have been mixed up in?” Penrose said. “Playing at Cinderella. Why?”

“What if she was some sort of understudy for the role in the ballet? Or what if she wished, for some mad reason, to
be
Cinderella? Wait a moment.” Ophelia frowned. “I know why this costume looks more decorated—it's the bodice. Sybille's bodice was much simpler, just plain, ivory-colored silk. It hadn't got
this
thing on it.” She ran her fingertips over a large, triangle-shaped panel on the front of the bodice. The panel sparkled with crystal beaded flowers stitched on with gold thread.

“A stomacher.”

Ophelia glanced up at Penrose. She'd heard a faint note of excitement in his tone. “That's right. A stomacher. In the Varieties, we always had them on our Shakespeare costumes. Old-fashioned, they are.”

“In the Charles Perrault version of ‘Cinderella,'” Penrose said slowly, “the elder wicked stepsister wears red velvet with French trimming, and the younger a gold-flowered cloak and a diamond stomacher.”

“But this isn't the stepsister's costume.”

“True. But the more pressing concern is, if Miss Pinet's gown was identical to this costume, with the exception of the stomacher—and you're certain they are identical?”

“Positively.”

“—then the question is: what happened to the stomacher on Miss Pinet's gown?”

“I know what's happening here, Professor, and I can't say I fancy it.”

“I cannot fathom what you mean.”

“Your eyes have that glow about them. Tell me what's so intriguing to you about the notion of a stomacher.”

“You'll laugh.”

“What of it?”

“Very well. It came to my attention, when reading a rare first edition of Charles Perrault's ‘Cendrillon'—he's the chap from the seventeenth century who penned many of these well-known French fairy tales—”

“Cooked them up, you mean.”

“Not precisely. More, well, committed them to paper and ink, shall we say. At any rate, although the standard versions of the tale assign the diamond stomacher to one of Cinderella's stepsisters, in that rare first edition, Cinderella
herself
wore the stomacher when she attended the prince's ball.”

“What are you angling at? That whoever designed this costume somehow had read that version of the tale?”

“Does it not appear to be the case? Although I have, in all my years of scholarship, never met anyone else who has encountered that version of the tale. The volume was in a forgotten box in a storeroom of a library at the Sorbonne—a university here in Paris. It looked to have been untouched for decades. Although, it
was
a few years ago that I myself examined it.”

When the professor started rambling about universities and old books, Ophelia felt like a sinking stone. It was easier to make light of his fairy tale obsession. Then the mean little voice in the back of her head couldn't say,
He's too fine for the likes of you
.

“There is more,” Penrose said. “According to that version of the tale, Hôtel Malbert was Cinderella's home—her father's home, where she lived with her stepmother and stepsisters before she married. Her father was a Marquis de la Roque-Fabliau. The current marquis Malbert, and the Misses Eglantine and Austorga, are direct descendants of a son borne by Cinderella's stepmother, so they count both the wicked stepmother and Cinderella's father among their forebears.”

Ophelia burst out laughing.

“Laugh all you wish. It is historical fact. Cinderella's name was Isabeau d'Amboise. She married a minor prince and lived in his château in the Loire Valley for the rest of her days. I have visited her grave.”

“No, no, it's only, well, if you
met
the Misses Malbert, you'd reckon they were simply your garden variety wicked stepsisters with nothing else mixed in.”

Ophelia and Penrose inspected the costume. Its stitches were so tiny a mouse might've made them. Inside of the bodice they found a white label with embroidered words:

Maison Fayette

Couturière

Rue de la Paix

Paris

Ophelia pointed to the word
Couturière.
“What is a—?”

“Dressmaker—a rather grand one, not simply a person who stitches. A designer of garments, really, along the lines of the famed Charles Worth.”

“Now that I think of it—Madame Fayette is the lady who designed the ball gowns for Miss Eglantine and Miss Austorga.”

“Do you suspect there is a connection?”

“Probably not. I've been told that every Paris debutante worth her salt is having her gown for Prince Rupprecht's ball made by Madame Fayette. The funny thing is, this is just a theater costume, so why was it made by some fancy dressmaker? Most theaters have their own costume masters and mistresses and they sew all the costumes right inside the theater. This is so finely made, too. It needn't to be so fine. No one in the audience could tell the difference—they're too far away. And dancers tend to perspire right through their costumes. The gaslights up there are hot. This delicate gown's not going to last a fortnight.”

A woman spoke loudly in French, in the corridor. Ophelia and Penrose locked eyes. The voice was just outside.

Penrose grabbed Ophelia's hand and pulled her behind the folding screen. They crouched. Ophelia's buoyant crinoline and skirts nearly knocked Penrose sideways.

The door creaked open.

The silk panels of the folding screen were old and stained, and there was a rip in one. Ophelia squinted through the rip.

She saw a lady's legs clad in white dancing stockings. Polina Petrov, most likely. She bent before the dressing table and poked around in a drawer, muttering to herself in Russian.

*   *   *

Housewifery, it turned
out, was a tedious business. Maybe that's why Ma had never taken a shine to it.

Beatrice had gone off again, leaving Prue to watch an iron cauldron of water. When it boiled it would help take the burned food bits off the dinner pots. Beatrice's cooking made a lot of burned bits.

Prue crouched on a stool at the hearth, gazing into the twinkling cinders. Her eyelids drooped.

A thud on the kitchen door made her eyes fly open.

Another thud.

Just to be on the safe side, Prue picked up a heavy stone pestle as she passed the table.

When she cracked the door, the first thing she saw was a wide expanse of scarlet cloth, white ruffles, brass buttons. Her gaze roved up—
way
up—to the face.

“Oh.” Prue's shoulders sagged. “It's you. I near didn't recognize you in that getup. What're you doing, going to a fancy-dress ball?”

It was the ogrelike feller from that afternoon. His smile was, if not exactly
kind
, leastways the first smile Prue had been given all day.

“Would you come with me, miss?” he said.

“Why, no.” Behind the door, she hefted the pestle in her hand. “I got work to do, mister. What's it you want? Beatrice? Because she's off somewhere.”

“No indeed, not Beatrice. My lord and lady wish to speak with you.”

“Me?” Prue edged the door closed.

The man put out a hand and stopped the door. “I must insist.”

“No, siree.” Prue shoved the door harder. “What do some lord and lady want
me
for? I'm just a—a nobody. Ain't even from around here. I'm from New York. You got me mixed up with somebody else.”

She was fair certain she knew who she'd been mixed up with: her dead sister. Sybille.

“There has been no mistake.” The man butted the door wide with a big, scarlet satin knee. Prue staggered back and plopped down hard on her rump. Pain shot up her spine. The door crashed against the inside wall and the stone pestle rolled away.

Before Prue could take a breath, the ogre slung her over his shoulder. She tried to scream but just like in a nightmare, nothing came out.

*   *   *

The Russian ballerina
continued to rummage about her dressing room, searching for something. Miss Flax watched her through the rip in the folding screen. Gabriel, for his part, watched Miss Flax. He was unable to tear his eyes away from a small section of the side of her neck where her smooth skin met her elaborately twisted hair.

What would it be like to kiss that spot?

The ballerina slammed a drawer and padded out of the dressing room.

“Miss Flax,” Gabriel said.

She turned her head.

They were still crouched behind the screen. Miss Flax's capacious skirts oozed around them, and her obviously padded bodice was lopsided. Quite absurd. He must put an end to this,
all
of this, before he forgot himself. There was the impropriety of it, of course, and the question of Miss Flax's innocence. And then there was the matter of
impossibility
.

“Miss Flax, I . . .” Gabriel paused. “I wished to tell you that, during these weeks past, I did think of you. I thought of you more than I wish to admit, and although I am not certain
why
I—”

“Well, we really ought to go.” Miss Flax struggled to her feet.

“No, please. I must finish.” Gabriel stood. He was surprised by the coolness of his own voice as he said, “I feel it is only right that I tell you, I have an understanding of sorts with a young lady in England.” An understanding
of sorts
was accurate. He had never in fact proposed to Miss Banks, although the thought had clearly crossed Miss Banks's mind on several occasions.

“How pleasant for you,” Miss Flax said. “I reckon she is a most wondrous young lady indeed to have won your esteem. Is she a duchess? A countess, maybe?”

“Miss Ivy Banks is not a noblewoman, although she comes from a very good family.”

“Oh, right. Good family. Those are simply
indispensable
, I hear. I suppose she's as lovely as—what do they say?—as the sunrise.”

“Miss Banks is quite a beautiful young lady, yes, but more importantly, she is very well-educated. She reads Latin and Greek, not to mention being fluent in Italian, German, and French. She is working her way through translating an ancient manuscript for me.”

“How clever.”

The translating bit was a stretch. Ivy had elbowed her way into Gabriel's study one day and demanded a way to, as she put it,
help
.