And so we toasted a long life together, full of this luck.
We could see her in the distance. Her white halo of hair in the royal box across from ours glowed in the gaslight, she the guest of the Queen, of course, her opera glasses flashing or, mostly, turning to an unseen friend to make remarks on what was certainly not the opera.
I had not wanted to see her again in Aristafeo’s company; after all that had transpired, it seemed too much. Now, though, I could think of it all more easily. Still, the moment in Aristafeo’s library when I lifted the musket returned. The memory of her scent, the sight of her nightgown. Her bracelets on the table.
The ruby rose from the Emperor that I’d set down beside them.
I understood finally something I had never understood before then. The Emperor wore no ruby flowers. My ruby token, it had been from her.
The Emperor, the Comtesse, the Empress. Their loneliness had made a back passage through all their lives, and I had spent so much of my life there. It was fitting, it seemed to me, that I should see her here like this.
For theirs had been my loneliness, too.
I should have known her for the omen she had to be, there in the dark. It was fitting that I should see her right before this departure. She in her exile some sign of my own to come. The Comtesse having hunted us both here. But I did not.
Instead, I wondered if she had known the way I was used against her or if I was only a secret between the Emperor and the Comtesse, a counter in the secret battle they had waged. I would never know. Those were always the terms.
And then the opera began, and we watched as Amelia, the soprano lead, searched the execution grounds for an herb of forgetfulness, eager to rid herself of the memory of sinful passion. I had the thought I always had at this point in the opera: How young she must be to think an herb could take something like this memory away.
§
In the paper the next day, the item of our meeting ran with a caricature of us, THE EMPRESS AND HER GéNéRALE.
The item read: At last night’s performance of Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera, the attendees outside were greeted to another performance, that of Paris’s own La Générale, Lilliet Berne, greeting her Empress-in-exile Eugénie with that most proper French curtsy, bringing a smile to her face and gasps from the crowd around her. No doubt the sight of her subject-in-exile giving her this honor warmed Eugénie’s heart.
We were drawn with doll’s bodies and the enormous outsized heads of dolls. Her crown was drawn askew, of course, giving her the appearance of being confused or drunk. And I, I appeared to be the picture of servility, my general’s coat drawn over my gown despite my having left it at home; I wore it only when I wanted to be recognized.
The item soon made it to Paris, where it was repeated in the French papers with the same caricature and a great deal of public outrage. I should not, as a patriot, have greeted her this way, to do so was to declare oneself still her subject. Was I a monarchist? And so on. And what’s more, speculation ran as to why I was there at all, as I was thought until then to still be in Paris, in mourning for the tenor.
This was not the beginning of our good luck, then, but the long shadow’s first fall. It was not where we thought it would be, and so we did not see it for what it was.
§
We left for Russia the next morning. From the Empress-in-exile we then went for an audience with another, reigning under a near permanent midnight at the end of the Baltic Sea in her palace of crystal and mirrors. Our trip was long but urgent—if we waited any longer the sea ice would soon make the trip impossible.
At first, I thought the Russian Empress had sensed that the opera was not precisely for her, much less her son, in the way any woman who’s become an empress can tell these things. She was a patroness of the arts with a sapphire the size of an infant’s face in her crown. And the face of a child herself. She was a beautiful woman, Maria Feodorovna, but with large sad eyes. She looked as if she were the fisherman’s wife whose husband had caught the magic fish and the jewel of wishing, the one she uses to wish herself a palace—and finds herself lonelier than she thought.
During our audience, I watched my reflection in her sapphire as I sang for her the opera’s major arias in the mirrored recital room of her frightening palace. I knew not to look directly at an empress’s eyes, and so I looked instead into the sapphire.
A peculiar hunger, that for sapphires. I wanted to reach out and pluck it from her brow, to press it against my cheek.
I forgot myself only once and looked down to see her terrified eyes look back. I pitied her what I saw in those eyes. My song never broke. I swept my eyes down farther as if this were only a part of the dramatic gesture.
At the conclusion, she was polite, but she rejected the opera commission, declaring it, with its cast of animals and circus freaks, too expensive to produce on the stage anywhere in Europe.
Perhaps the Prussians can afford this, she said, with a dark look at us both. With their war duties.
I tried not to laugh at this, for how clearly it was a lie. The opera had been written precisely to anticipate the extravagance of a young Russian prince’s celebration. The animals alone wouldn’t have cost more than the jewels on one of her slippers that day. As she pronounced against it, I listened as if I were very far away. I watched as Aristafeo accepted her decision politely, for she was an intelligent woman somewhere under the enormous gems.
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?