Chapter 2
The voyage home seemed to stretch into forever. I know my time aboard the Saint Paul spun out into the same hours and minutes it usually does; I know that my dull mind was the problem. My vision was blurred. My body ached. Every moment felt like midnight.
But it gave me the opportunity to consider a good many things.
During those midnight days and nights out there on the Atlantic, I found myself pondering the notion of courage.
Of what it means to act boldly and fearlessly, even when confronted with death.
As a girl, I used to believe that I was courageous.
I would venture into the heart of the woods all alone.
I would play my violin for Maman and Papa’s ocean of humanity, for strangers and royalty, even when I was so sick with nerves I wanted only to hide.
I realize now that I was only pretending to be brave because you were. You were the girl in the sun and I was your shadow, and I swear I wanted nothing more than to be just like you.
Bold and fearless.
But shadows are what they are, fleeting shade that only exists in the presence of strong light.
AUGUST, 1901
MEDMENHAM, ENGLAND
Inez hardly recalled a time when her life was not saturated in song.
Gentle music, sometimes like a breeze teasing a weeping birch into flutters, or the lapping of the Thames along a shore of shiny mud.
Sometimes stronger, like rain pelting glass, or even violent, like a storm at sea, which, thank God, she’d only endured once in her life, on a crossing from Cherbourg to New York.
A November gale had wrenched their steamship up and down, back and forth, a banshee that never stopped howling.
For two days, it had been impossible to eat, impossible to drink; even Papa, usually so hale, kept to his berth.
When, desperate, she’d tried to sip a mug of hot beef tea brought to her by a steward, her chin was left scalded and the front of her pinafore soaked.
Of course, all of that was the music of nature.
Even in its most barbarous form, Inez adored it.
She could transcribe it, transform it, stroke the notes of it from her cherished rosewood violin so that everyone could hear it, not just her.
Wood and string, horsehair and rosin were her tools, and the otherworldly, fey pieces she produced (sometimes forgotten the moment the notes lifted from her bow) were her offering to the great mystery of life.
More difficult were the compositions of man.
Paganini, Bach, Chevalier de Saint-Georges—all required more precision than passion, it seemed to her.
Yet her mother, accomplished pianist that she was, insisted that Inez learn how to play not just from her heart but from sheets of paper printed with other people’s notions of form and harmony.
“Learn the rules,” Pauline had told her, “before deciding to shatter them. Don’t leave room for anyone to claim your genius an accident.”
It turned out to be excellent advice. By learning the rules, how others had handed their music to history, how dead men with fevered imaginations and grand reputations had created symphonies, composed scores that could spur crowds to weep, Inez gradually began to understand the truth of her own small magic.
She was her music. She was her violin. She was the sonatas and concertos and the mysterious, half-hidden songs from the woods.
When she stood, slender and alone, in the middle of Winter Queen’s red salon and played for her parents’ silk-and-satin guests, she was one of them, listening as they did, entranced as they were.
When she played for the moon outside in her robe and bare feet, she was its alabaster light.
This was her world, and at sixteen, golden and slight, she was a spark ready to burn even more brightly.
Both she and Marguerite had long ago overcome their Medmenham reputations as Other, at least as far as the male population was concerned.
The difference was that, although her older sister could flirt and charm and pull practically anyone along in her wake, willing hounds tethered to her leash …
Inez was different. A friendly smile from a boy would either baffle her or embarrass her, depending.
A walk to the village on the most mundane of errands would end up with the two of them drawing a flock of interested fellows.
The Jolivet girls were now considered fresh and lovely, local enough to matter, unusual enough to intrigue.
And it certainly didn’t hurt that their parents were intimates of the king.
The good people of the parish were many things, fishermen and shopkeepers, doctors and gentry, but loyalty to the crown was the common thread that bound them tight.
Marguerite, of course, could manage them all. She would tilt back her head and pretend-laugh at a joke, and no one could look away. With her dark hair and eyes, her pale milky skin and bee-stung ruby lips—with that throaty, sultry voice—she was more goddess than girl, even at seventeen.
Inez could only stand awkwardly by as the boys (and a few older than boys) orbited her sister, wishing herself alone again, safe in her room at Winter Queen, safe in the solace of the music.
It was a miserable thing, to be so shy. But it was who she was, and the idea of trying to break free of it (beyond those transcendent moments when she played for an audience) seemed as impossible as swapping her soul for another’s.
Later in her life, years later, she would sometimes wonder if she might have ever left the grounds of Winter Queen at all if not for the irrepressible ambition of her sister.
Perhaps not. Inez found great comfort in the familiar, in respecting the boundaries of what was known.
But Marguerite was a force majeure, uncontained. She was determined to spread her wings and soar up to the stars, and she was determined to drag her sister along with her.
AT DUSK, AFTER the sun dimmed to pink or orange and sank away gently to warm the other side of the planet, the mists would rise from the woods.
Thin tendrils slipped lovingly around the grounds, kissing the hedges and stone walls, smoothing all the rough spots, promising to hide any sort of secret.
It usually lasted only around an hour. Then Mab would call it back to the trees, and all the tendrils would dissolve, revealing the earth again, revealing a sky that had transformed into something denser than before, darker, either glistening with galaxies or streaked with clouds, paled around the northeastern edge by London’s eternal light.
Dinner the evening that everything changed took place after the mist had vanished.
It was not a lucent sky that night but a cloudy one, a humid sigh of rain carried along with the breeze.
By seven o’clock, the lone cracked pane in the glass dome of the conservatory had beaded with moisture.
Tiny droplets gathered and trickled down the iron fretwork to spatter a palm tree below, a languid, muted rhythm against its fronds: plink … plink …
The palm was only one of several potted trees that fringed the chamber.
There were also bay laurels and Spanish oranges and pomegranates, all with dense crowns that reached for the ceiling, along with the rows of orchids that grew thick between them.
About six months past, a pair of wrens had stolen inside to take up permanent residence, and Inez ensured there were always bowls of seed and clean water set out for them.
It was a bijou paradise, heady with perfume and birdsong.
When Winter Queen hosted no guests, the Jolivet family tended to take their meals there.
A teak table was set up near the center, carved benches on either side.
When he was younger, Alfred had complained about the benches—he’d been too short to reach his plate from them—so he’d been given his own chair at one end of the table.
Even now, well out of short coats, he still claimed that chair.
But everyone else sat side by side, elbow to elbow, knee to knee.
“What a right jolly peasant lot are we,” Charles would announce in his most posh British accent, and his children would laugh.
Yet the footmen still served them with sterling spoons and forks and tongs.
The fine bone china was painted with doves and olive leaves, a gleaming contrast to the plain table.
Embossed flatware and crisp French linen napkins accompanied every meal; Pauline would have her children remember their court manners, passed down for generations through her line, no matter the location.
It happened over dessert, over the peach-and-blueberry trifle Inez was carefully exploring with her spoon, the custard a creamy smear along the glass sides of the dish. She had just lifted the spoon to her mouth when Marguerite spoke.
“I want to move to New York City. To the heart of it, Manhattan, Broadway. I want to perform on Broadway.”
Inez’s gaze slid up to her sister, the spoon frozen in front of her lips.
Marguerite, sitting so close their skirts overlapped, was looking directly at Papa, across from her.
Her cameo-pink silk was cut just below her neck, and her chin was lifted; this near to her, Inez could follow the telltale pounding of the pulse in her throat.
Papa looked back at her with a slight, shocked peak to his eyebrows.
Maman, however … Maman was opposite Inez, and even though she sat perfectly straight and still, her hands on her lap, Inez saw at once that her mother was unsurprised by this announcement.
That she had, in fact, maybe expected it, because although her eyes were cool and hooded, her lips curved upward, very faintly, into an expression that Inez could only call gratified.
“Broadway?” echoed Papa, sounding baffled.
“Yes. I’m good enough. You know that I am.”
“I don’t know—”