Die Upon a Kiss (18 page)

“Oh, the unfortunate creature!” Consuela Montero clasped her hands before her brutally-corseted bosom. “I am sure she cannot go on! How fortunate that I—”

“Get that woman out of here!” Cavallo surged to his feet like an indignant Apollo. “Get her out or I shall strip that dress from her worthless back and—”

Montero backed a step, colliding with Olympe and nearly taking the both of them over the gallery rail.

“She been poisoned, all right.” Olympia Snakebones sniffed at the remains of the soup. “Indian tobacco, smells like, and not much of it, thank God.” She took the water-pitcher from Hannibal and poured some into the spirit-kettle to heat. While she added herbs to the kettle, January took the rest of the water, added clean charcoal to it, and worked at getting it down d’Isola’s throat.

“Get out of here now,” Belaggio was saying to the rest of the cast, who showed signs of crowding into the dressing-room to further add to the confusion. “Good God, it’s already past six! Consuela . . .”

“I can go on,” d’Isola whispered. She raised her head, pushed back the sweat-black strings of hair from around her face. Her rouge stood out against skin gone ashen with shock and she groped for Cavallo’s hand.

“My dearest . . .” pleaded Belaggio.

“Don’t be silly,” said January.

“I can go on,” she insisted. “Signora . . .” She looked up at Olympe, panting with the effort not to be sick again. “There must be something that you can give me, that I can sing.”

“Cara,
you must see it is impossible. . . .”

“If that Montero whore goes on in place of Drusilla,” said Cavallo quietly, “you’ll have to look for another Basilio as well.”

“And another leader for the chorus,” added Ponte.

“Bastardos!”
hissed Belaggio.
“Froscios!”

The two men regarded him stonily, and d’Isola struggled to sit up in January’s arms.

“It’s all right.” Her brown eyes were heavy with exhaustion, but she cleared her throat, forced her voice to calm sweetness. “Thank you, my dear friends. I’ll be able to go on.” She turned to Olympe, asked in her broken French, “Will I not so?”

The voodooienne’s dark eyes held hers for a long time; then Olympe smiled. “Oh, I think so.” And in the coarse patois of the cane-fields, the mostly-African French of slaves, she added, “You do got the bristles, girl. You keep your belly tied up and you be fine.”

TEN

From his place in the orchestra—what seemed like only minutes later—January searched the audience for Incantobelli’s silvery mane. The pit was lively, the rougher spirits of the American sector shoving and jostling goodnaturedly, ready to be pleased by anything. In the boxes— divided only by partitions and not the separate curtained rooms they were in Europe—he picked out the Widow Redfern, resplendent in black velvet and diamonds and as usual in the center of her little court of hopeful bachelors. In the next box Fitzhugh Trulove danced anxious attendance on his wife, dispatching footmen right and left to fetch lemonade, negus, and coffee from the concessionaire for her and for their shy, curly-haired daughter. Dressed
en jeune fille,
her hair still down and her skirts schoolgirl-short, the girl looked all of fifteen, an age when Creole girls were all out and frequently wed: gossip said she would be sent to a finishing-school in England soon. In the meantime the sons of the great French Creole families hovered around the back of the box, proffering nosegays and sweets under Trulove’s paternal glare. Vincent Marsan, another box over, also had his daughter with him, this girl a few years younger and very much a schoolgirl. She and her mother both wore white, quite clearly to complement Marsan’s nip-waisted black coat, his three waistcoats of black, white, black again, with their diamond buttons. The narrow-skirted, skimpy-sleeved dresses were clearly old and the white suited neither of them; January saw, on the girl’s bare arm, a dark bruise just above the elbow.

“You don’t think the poor girl took the poison on purpose, do you?” Dominique appeared in the curtained demi-porte behind the orchestra in a whisper of yolk-gold silk and creamy lace. “I met Olympe on the way out—she says the girl will be quite all right. Darling, what happened? You know Liane—Marsan’s plaçée—tried to kill herself last year—not the one he murdered, but the one he has now. She begged us all not to let him know.”

January saw again the big girl’s gentle face as she fought to turn her lips from the punch Marsan forced on her.
The heart is stronger than the head. . . .

His stubbornness and frowns, these I embrace. . . .

Golden hair shimmering in the house-lights, Vincent Marsan turned abruptly to speak to his wife, and her unthinking flinch said more than any words January had ever heard.

“I don’t think so,” he told Dominique. “I don’t think it was even intended to kill her. There was very little poison in that soup, just enough to make her thoroughly sick. Which leads me to think—”

He broke off, seeing his sister’s eyes flick to another box, then dart away.

Henri Viellard entered, like a mammoth plum in his damson coat and pale-green waistcoat, with Chloë St. Chinian small and delicate in ivory satin on his arm.

“Darling, I must be off.” Dominique tapped January on the shoulder with her fan and gave him her most sparkling of smiles. “I have to see to the champagne up in my box—I’m right up there.” She pointed to the third tier of boxes above and behind them. About half of them were latticed discreetly, that the plaçées might receive their protectors between acts while everyone in the theater kept up the pretense of not knowing. Gaslight danced behind those gilded grilles as wall-jets were kindled. Shadows passed back and forth. Soft soprano laughter floated down like a dropped blossom into the noisier roar of the pit.

“I’ve ordered
dragées,”
she added conspiratorially. “Henri can’t resist them.
If
he can wrench himself away from his mother.” She did not speak Mademoiselle St. Chinian’s name. In the Viellard box, Madame Viellard was holding forth on some subject to her four daughters—who looked absurdly like one another and more absurdly like their only brother—the half-dozen ostrich-plumes in her ash-hued hair quivering like lilac-tinted palm-trees in a hurricane. “Shall I send you down some? Play well!”

And Dominique swirled away to join the ranks of the demimonde in their stuffily hot upper boxes, their world of laughter and bonbons and lamplight and feather fans. A number of the girls would be with their protectors— protectors who would, during the course of the show, circulate between the boxes of their mistresses and those of their wives in much the same fashion they skulked back and forth along the passageway between the Théâtre and the Salle. A moment later, if he listened hard, January heard his sister’s gay voice calling out greetings, laughing over the quality of the champagne available, and wailing in exaggerated apprehension over an American production of
anything. . . .

I’m with child,
Dominique had said.
And I don’t know
what to do.

Chloë St. Chinian flipped open her fan—the elaborate mother-of-pearl engagement-fan presented by young Creole gentlemen to the damsels who would be their brides—and spoke to Henri, who moved his chair a little closer to hers and gave an order to the liveried valet who had followed them into the box. The valet departed, probably in quest of the coffee and sweets being sold in the lobby. Mademoiselle St. Chinian put her tiny white-gloved hand on Henri’s wrist and blinked out over the parterre with her huge pale-blue eyes.

I’m with child. And I don’t know what to do.

Nor would she, thought January, arranging the candles on the piano’s music-rack, until it was far too late to do anything except birth the child of a man who had put her aside. For a young lady of color in quest of a new protector, a dangerous encumbrance.

For a young woman of color without a protector, a heartbreaking expense.

Every box of the three tiers was full. Candles gleamed behind those moving shadows as servants brought up chairs for people to visit during the performance. In Milan and other Italian cities, they played cards and chatted, stopping to listen only to favorite arias. Parisian audiences, January had found, were more attentive, but any performance in Paris was bound to be interrupted by the hissing, or booing, or cheering of a claque, regardless of the quality of the singing. He’d even known fashionable preachers to hire claques to murmur approvingly and nod their heads during their sermons.

So perhaps the Parisians hadn’t so much to boast of after all.

The pit, by contrast, was a shoulder-to-shoulder mob, men and women both, the smell of them thick in the air: wool too seldom washed, bear-grease pomade, sweat, spit tobacco. Trappers in buckskin elbowed trades-men in corduroy and shopgirls in flowered calicoes. Women edged among them, selling pralines, oranges, gingerbread, lemonade. Above the third tier of boxes, where the rising heat from the gasoliers collected under the ceiling, the gallery was aswim with faces, pale on the right side, dark on the left, and spotted with bright tignons like blossoms lost in shadow. An occasional, broken pea-nut hull would drift down, catching the gaslight like errant snow. The rougher patois of slaves mingled with rough English, rough Spanish, rough French. Happy voices, anticipatory laughter.

They were here to be pleased, thought January. And why not? Beauty like this was like walking in a garden of roses. If the songs had been sung in French, or in English for that matter, half these people would still only follow the action, marvel at the beauty of the sets and the ballet between acts. They came to hear music, to see love and kisses. . . .

A black man’s kisses, on a white woman’s lips?

Was that it?
he wondered. Whoever wrote that heart-shaking music, it was Belaggio who was insisting on having
Othello
performed next month. Was it really Incantobelli, maddened with this final insult, who was taking out his fury and spite on the company, on the production itself?

Or was there someone in one of those boxes—or in the gloom at the back of the gallery, where the white flicker of the auditorium’s gasoliers didn’t reach—or somewhere in the maze of catwalks among the flats and flies and the corridors and stairs leading to boxes, galleries, dressing-rooms, prop-vaults—waiting with a rifle? It wouldn’t be difficult to smuggle such a thing into the theater, despite James Caldwell’s stricture on the inhabitants of the pit leaving their weaponry at the door.
If I wanted to stop
Othello
being performed,
thought January,
it’s what I’d do.

Shoot Belaggio in the one place—the conductor’s stand—where he can’t run away.

Or, if I didn’t want to chance being convicted of shooting a white man, warn him: shoot one of the orchestra, with the implication,
You’re next.

Not a comforting thought.

“Ladies and gentlemen!” The flames on the gasoliers dimmed, the footlights brightened behind their wall of tin reflectors as Mr. Russell worked the valves of the gas-table in the wings. Resplendent in evening dress, James Caldwell stepped through the curtain with uplifted hands. “Welcome to the first season of the New Orleans Opera at the American Theater.”

Someone spit tobacco against the dark drapery that concealed the orchestra from the pit. Someone else, by the smell of it, started peeling an orange. Here near the footlights the stink of the burning gas nearly drowned out other odors, and the heat was like being trapped in a crowded room too near the hearth. Around him, January heard the rustle of music being ranged on desks, the scrape of chairs. Candles like stars. Hannibal’s stifled cough.

Murder and mayhem, and Marguerite cold and still—maybe dying . . . Hate like a malevolent ghost watching from the shadows . . .

Still, there was no moment quite like this.

“I believe we can promise you the finest performances, the most beautiful spectacles, the best and greatest singers this city has ever seen. Tonight the season will open with Mozart’s
The Marriage of Figaro. . . .”

“I wanna kiss the bride!” trumpeted a voice from the pit.

“Friday night we will present
The Mute Girl of Portici,
a stirring drama of love and liberty. . . .”

Fitzhugh Trulove leapt to his feet and applauded madly, nearly falling over the rail of his stage-side box. To judge by her expression, Anne Trulove was considering pushing him. Caldwell beamed. January thought about John Davis opening the same opera on the following night at his own theater to half-filled boxes and a pocketful of debts.

“. . . La Dame Blanche,
followed by Rossini’s master-piece
Cinderella.
Then we will have a new opera, the United States premiere of Lorenzo Belaggio’s
Othello,
a most masterful tragedy based upon the work of Mr. William Shakespeare, and the season will conclude with von Weber’s astounding work
The Magical Marksman.”

More applause.
Just what we need,
thought January:
someone on-stage with a rifle.
In the Viellard box, Chloë St. Chinian fanned herself, looking bored. Henri cast a glance up at the latticed boxes opposite and above, reflected footlights making hard gold squares of the lenses of his spectacles, a fireburst of the stickpin in his cravat.

“And now, ladies and gentlemen, the moment you’ve all been waiting for:
The Marriage of Figaro
!”

“Betcha Figaro’s been waitin’ harder’n us!”

Had Drusilla d’Isola not spent most of the afternoon vomiting, January supposed she might have sung better— but probably not very much. He’d heard her in rehearsal.

Still, she was on-stage, chalky beneath her make-up and operating, as many artists can, strictly on learned technique: a gesture, an angle of the head, a flourish on the end of a cabaletta, an ornamental trill. Automatic responses, like a well-bred hostess trading commonplaces with morning-visitors while planning the menu for next week’s dinner for twelve. The simpler popular songs, if somewhat mispronounced, required nothing in the way of skill and were easily within her range.

At least she didn’t forget her lines, though she came close to doing so in the third act. She opened the desk-drawer to get out paper and pen for the Letter Duet— January’s favorite piece of the show—and gagged, stammered, jerked her hand back. . . .

Somebody put something in the drawer,
thought January, between annoyance and resignation. The favorite was a dead rat, though in other performances of
Nozze
he’d also encountered a live rat, the biggest spider obtainable by the diva’s rival, and any number of obscene drawings designed to reduce the heroine to blushes, giggles, or aphasia at the start of this critical piece. At the Paris Odéon once, a rival had tried to introduce a turd into the drawer, but the smell had tipped off the stage-hands, resulting in a great deal of ribald speculation backstage.

Whatever was in the drawer, d’Isola simply closed it, took a much smaller scrap from the top of the desk, and settled down with her pen. She certainly sang no worse for it. Though it would be difficult, reflected January sadly, for her to sing worse than she already was.

Montero would have been ten times better.

But it didn’t matter. D’Isola was exquisite, the music was beautiful, and though the wealthy patrons in the boxes (and quite a few of the slaves in the gallery, who had seen enough opera to tell good from mediocre) might sniff, the pit was ravished. Thunderous applause greeted Susanna’s musical duels with Almaviva and his scheming minions; whoops and hollers encouraged Cherubino’s leap from the balcony; boos and hisses excoriated the lustful Count’s advances. The scantly-draped ballet performed between acts and, in greater strength, in Acts Three and Four to yells of approval and delight— “Cherry-Cheeked Patty” notwithstanding—and everyone had a marvelous time.

Only afterward did January learn what was in the drawer.

Mr. Trulove had spoken no more than the truth about the promised feast. Cold ham, champagne,
foie
gras,
and pastries loaded down the trestle table that had been set up in the green room. Early strawberries and hothouse grapes blazed like jewels. A second table provided cakes and lemonade for the musicians. It was an arrangement January had encountered in Europe on those occasions at which the boxholders’ associations deigned to include the musicians at all. The difference in America was that a third table, pushed up against the footslopes of Vesuvius, provided
gaufres,
fruit, and oysters for the white members of the stage crew, and for the little rats, most of whom had access to the green room anyway at the invitation of various gentlemen whose friendships they’d secured in their days in town.