Aristafeo had taken rooms at Brown’s on our return from Russia, down the hall from my own so as to be closer to me. I listened from within my bed as he read these reports to me, and while I tried to be as amused as he seemed to be, I wondered who had spied on us and how they had traveled back more quickly than we.
He did not wonder. Instead, as he set the papers down, he was all confidence, convincing me of the soundness of his new plan to stage the opera in London after my run in I Masnadieri—with the Empress’s dismissal, we were free of the Baroness’s last favor to him. And so we made the rounds of the British theaters for a week, giving our presentation, and I let go of my curiosity as to our enemies. Our next new future seemed possible, after all, and now our little spy in Russia wouldn’t matter. There was a new lightness to that week, the one I had waited for. But these theaters all eventually rejected the opera as well, in the same spirit as the Russian Empress, complaining of the costs, of having to clean after manure, of animal smells, questions of where the animals could be stabled. All of this was published in the gossip columns with speculation that the failure of the opera to find a home was perhaps related to my voice’s famous curse, and I thought again of that day in Rouen when I entered the Baroness’s chateau, the garden covered in her deathless roses. The circle of chairs in her ballroom full of opera’s most powerful men.
I knew she could turn them toward him; I knew she could turn them against him.
The wind out of the forest in Rouen that never stops, the chairs turning and turning, for and against, for and against. That wind had reached all the way to the Russian Empress, no doubt the author of her rejection before we had even arrived. And that rejection would be the least of it.
A letter came from Verdi asking me to withdraw from I Masnadieri. The resultant scandal in Paris over my curtsy to Eugénie meant there was an unreasonably hostile atmosphere to me there, and so the production was endangered financially, and did I understand?
At first I did not—the production was to be here in London, not in Paris, but then I did understand all too well. Aristafeo’s Baroness had reached even Verdi.
I wrote back to Verdi and told him that of course I would withdraw from I Masnadieri and offered to withdraw from Un Ballo in Maschera as well. When this letter was ready to send, I called for Doro to send it, and when she did not appear, unlike her, I checked her room.
I found it empty of even her things.
Only a note waited on the empty vanity, addressed to me. The Castiglione insignia was pressed into the red wax seal.
I see you are in London, having found a way to grovel to that woman still. I am writing to say I reviewed our agreement and have taken my price. Our business is now concluded.
To be sure, never return to Paris again.
Nicchia
The curse now the least of my troubles.
Ten
I STOOD VERY STILL in Doro’s room, the note in front of me.
I had wondered who Doro had worked for before the tenor hired her, but, of course, Doro could only have belonged all this time to the Comtesse, much as I had. An agent in the tenor’s household, bound there as well.
All those years I had wondered as to the four hundred, the Italian assassins waiting for the Emperor to fail in his devotion to their cause—Doro could only have been one.
Doro, then, good, kind Doro, who always had the answers no matter the question, giver of cards and gin, on her way from the hotel to the train, the train to the ferry, most likely at that instant on a boat back to Paris, the little metal flask in her bags. She would soon be in that apartment on the Place Vend?me, all the windows sealed in black, watching as the Comtesse lit her candles in order to examine her newest gift. I knew how long the trip could take; I had perhaps three days at best before the Paris police would begin their hunt for me, and this was provided they had not already begun.
When the earth opens up under your feet, be like a seed. Fall down; wait for the rain.
Everything you lose you get back.
The fortune-teller’s words mocked me almost as much as the Comtesse’s.
I felt myself dropping, again and again, into that curtsy before the Empress, the skirt of my gown rushing up at me as I kept falling, falling all the way into the underworld, falling down into the darkness.
If only I had worn a veil that night . . . but I had not. I had wanted a night where he could look at my face in public and not first frown.
That sly pickpocket, love, who will ask you to let down your guard and make a mark of you to the world. What finds you next will take everything and leave nothing.
I resisted the urge to run down into the street, to shriek Doro’s name, to try to follow her and catch her. I knew she was gone; she was surer than I. She always had been. I ran back to my rooms instead.
§
Aristafeo waited there, looking up, faintly cross as I entered. You’re not ready for dinner, he said. What’s wrong?
My maid has left me, I said.
Ring for one from the hotel, he said, as if that would be all of it.
Maids left you, after all, all the time.
I did as he said, and a hotel maid arrived, clucking her disapproval as I explained mine had left suddenly. Did she steal from you? this new maid asked me, and I nearly laughed to think of the answer. She then asked me if I would need her to go through my things with her to be sure they were all there. I found I was afraid of maids now and told her I would do it myself.
I dressed instead, in yet another elaborate mourning costume, this one with a black feather ruff, the bodice shining with black beads, a black fur cuff for the cold, black ostrich shoes that gleamed so that my feet were like that of some even stranger bird, hoping to make myself brave; but this costume was nothing, and as I sat before Aristafeo at dinner, I still felt myself falling, the speed quickening, and the wind of that passage and its growing hush of fear were such that I could not make out what Aristafeo was saying to me, not until he asked, Are you listening? What is troubling you? And I knew I would need to speak to him.
He raised an eyebrow.
The maid still? The Italian one, Doro, the one you’ve had all this time?
Yes, I said. We were close.
Advertise the position at once. I am trying to speak to you of something quite serious, he said. You must write to the Paris police. The papers say they are searching for you, hoping to ask you questions.
So, I thought. There would be less time than I’d hoped.
Here I am, I said. Will they come to London?
The Paris papers publish stories on the murder each day. The police patrols along the Seine have doubled as they search for what is now believed to be a savage band of killers. They have questioned his mistresses, his household staff, and now they search for you. He nodded his head as he said this, as if toasting me.
His mistresses. This amused me. Of course there would be many.
You smile, he said. Why?
How do they say he was he killed? I asked. For I knew I should ask.
Someone slit his throat and then set him on fire, he said, and then they tossed him in the Seine. When the police found him, they only knew him by a letter in his coat’s pocket, his address there. It was dry enough to read.
He paused here. The newspapers say it was from you.
I never wrote to him in advance, I said, but even as I said it, I knew the note was my own, accepting him, telling him to meet me that night. The meeting he had abandoned for the duel I had kept him from fighting.
Worn over his heart.
Aristafeo picked up his glass, and looked deeply into the wine inside, and then added, I would have given him a better death; I would have shot him just the once. This was what I told the police when they questioned me.
I said nothing, for there was nothing to say to this.
They told me they found his money on him—he had not been robbed. Who would kill him and take only his life?
So he was killed by a rich man, I said. Someone who wouldn’t think to rob him. He had many enemies, and only a very few of them needed his money.
You must write to the police, he said.