Chapter 3 #2
The theatre’s house was mostly empty. Only three seats were occupied near the center: the director, the producer, and the stage manager, although from here she couldn’t tell who was who.
All of them were half-lost in a dazzle of snowy light that poured in from the lobby behind them, solid silhouettes framed in silver.
“Experience?” called one of the men, the one in the middle, sounding bored already.
Go forth and shine.
“I’m new.”
The silhouette to the left leaned toward the other, saying something too low to catch. The first man sat back, pushed a hand through his hair.
“Oh, lord. Her. Right.” He raised his voice. “No experience, then? No formal training?”
“I spent two years at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm,” she said and waited a moment for that to sink in.
“I played Kristin in Miss Julie, Irena in Three Sisters, and Hero in Much Ado. Mr. Strindberg spoke of putting me in his Part 3 of Till Damaskus, but I returned to England before he could finish it. My—my father recently passed away.” She pressed two fingers to her heart and took a steadying breath.
“Pardon me! It was rather sudden, and I found I wanted to be closer to my family. I arrived just last week.”
The man leaned forward, rifled through some papers. “Quite a chronicle. Harvey, where’s her—no?” He looked up again. “Why didn’t you hand over your bona fides?”
“Because none of that was true.” Marguerite dropped her hand. “But you believed me, didn’t you?”
Someone in the wings gave a gasp, but otherwise only a ringing silence seemed to settle across the theatre. Plus those prisms, still tinkling, still swaying, flashing their rainbowed darts.
The man in the middle finally spoke.
“All right, Miss New, let’s get this over with. Give me Bessie’s monologue, top of page three.”
Marguerite flipped the pages. She had nothing memorized—there had been no time for that—but she remembered the essence of the speech, and the character. Bessie, the flighty one, the prettiest one, the most ridiculous.
“I don’t think it’s remarkable in the least—”
“Louder,” commanded the man.
“—remarkable in the least that Alonzo should follow Nancy around like a puppy! He’s quite besotted with her, you know, stardust in his eyes. Anyone could see it. And to think she’d toss him away to be a typist! I’d give anything, anything to hold Alonzo’s heart, to bask in that smile—”
“Thank you,” interrupted the man. “The address you provided is real, at least?”
“Yes, I—”
“Stage left to the exit. Harv, who’s next?”
She bent down, gathered her hat and pins. She walked offstage and into a frosted cloud of soft, girlish snickering.
BY THE TIME the hansom made it back to Bloomsbury, the sky had roiled into a sullen slate, and the snow had thinned into needles.
As soon as she stepped out of the cab, her face stung, and the needles lodged, cold and damp, under the collar and cuffs of her coat.
Marguerite’s mood was about as dour as that sky.
She was unused to failure. She was unused to men treating her as if she were an inconvenience—at least since she’d turned fourteen, when it’d seemed she’d walked across some magical, invisible threshold, and after that no one could look away from her.
Almost no one, apparently.
The steps leading to the front door of the flat were steep and handsomely carved, although right now they stood buried in about three inches of snow; apparently, the hired boy who was supposed to come by and sweep hadn’t gotten to them yet.
Marguerite minded her feet climbing them, one by one, all seven, her boots caked in white.
Thanks to the unheated Catharine, it had been a while since she’d felt her toes, and she wondered at that, at the complete lack of sensation in her feet. Yet here she stood, still upright.
She fit her key into the lock and opened the door, releasing a waft of warm, stale air. She kicked the snow off her boots as best she could, then hurried inside.
There was just room enough in the entranceway for a vase of lilies in the nook and an embossed copper mirror mounted on the wall opposite.
As she was shrugging out of her coat, she caught her reflection in the mirror.
Her cheeks were chapped, her eyebrows lowered, her hat drooping.
She stopped for a second, unsettled by this flinty stranger staring back at her, then plucked the pins from her hat, far more briskly than she had at the audition.
Mrs. Corbyn arrived to collect it all, her expression stoic.
“Welcome back, miss. I’ll set this all out to dry downstairs.”
“Sorry to track in the mess. It’s heaps of snow out there.”
“It’s the time of year, miss, all this wet, nasty stuff. It’ll get worse before it gets better.”
“Ah.”
“Shall I bring tea?”
“Yes, that would—”
“Marguerite?” Inez’s voice floated out from the parlor. “Are you back already?”
“That would be lovely,” Marguerite finished. “For us both, I’m sure. Thank you.”
The housekeeper retreated. Marguerite threw a practiced smile at the mirror, smoothed her hands across her hair, and went to find her sister.
Inez sat wrapped in a pink-striped eiderdown before the hearth, only her head and feet visible, plus one pale hand clutching the ends of the quilt together over her chest. Her bun was coming loose in curls; her eyes were rimmed in red.
She might have only just gotten out of bed.
In the slippery light of the fire, with her tousled hair and delicate features, Marguerite thought she resembled a dryad or a sylph.
Some tender wild thing out of place in the heavy Louis XVI splendor of the room, with its silver-gilt furniture and pewter satin cushions, and shadows scented of lemon polish.
Marguerite collapsed into the chair opposite hers, stretching her feet toward the hearth. Then she bent over, flipped back her sodden skirts, and began to unbutton her boots. Inez watched, unblinking.
“How was it?”
She kept working on the buttons. “Dazzling, naturellement. I dazzled them.”
Inez seemed to rouse. “Oh, wonderful. Really?”
“No, not really.”
“Oh,” she said again, this time uncertain. And then, “I’m sure it wasn’t as bad as that.”
“It was.”
Marguerite kicked off both boots, slumped back and held her feet as close to the iron fender as she dared. Inez settled deeper into her eiderdown.
“Well, it was only your first time. You’ll become more used to it, figure out how it’s all sorted here. If anyone can, it’s you. You’re on your way.”
“I’m starting from nothing.”
“You’re starting from Maman. That’s hardly nothing.”
The fire crackled. From the lower bowels of the apartment, a door slammed.
Marguerite closed her arms over her chest and fought a shiver.
The cold soaked into her from the theatre wasn’t yet banished; her feet were still numb, her soaring, witless hopes still numb. The sky outside, so gray and numb.
“You’ll scorch your stockings like that.”
Marguerite inched closer to the fender.
“Fine, then!” Inez pushed the quilt down to her shoulders.
“Are you sulking? Are you going to pack it in after one false start? You’re the one who dragged us here.
You’re the one who said won’t it be splendid, we’ll have such a grand time, carving our fates and conquering the stars.
I never wanted to come, and now look at us in this freezing hard place, far from home, and I just—I just want—”
“What?” Marguerite asked quietly, sitting up again. “What do you want?”
Inez glanced away, swiped at her eyes. “I’m so cold. All the time, I’m so cold. How does anyone stand it here?”
“I take it your latest lesson with Fr?ulein Wietrowetz did not go well.”
“It was dazzling, naturellement.” She leaned her cheek against the back of her hand and gave a despairing laugh. “As usual. I so look forward to our sessions. She thinks I’m a country chit reaching for glory by way of the Jolivet coattails.”
“Sounds familiar.”
“She believes I am a waste of her time.”
Marguerite sent her a sharp look. “Did she say that?”
“She didn’t have to. I felt it from her. I felt it positively emanating from her soul. She longs to be back in Berlin at her Hochschule, with her talented students and—and strudel—”
Marguerite pressed a hand to her mouth to cover her smile.
She forgot sometimes how young her sister was, still only sixteen, and a coddled sixteen at that.
But no doubt Winter Queen had coddled them all.
Certainly it had been easier there to stand out, to blaze, to bend the rules and be applauded for it.
Perhaps it was Inez’s passionate heart that made her seem older, or her musical gifts that could shame virtuosi thrice her age.
Yet in this moment, she was very much a frustrated adolescent, chafing against this new London life, against the ironclad will of their parents.
Inez glared at her, tugging the eiderdown high again. “I don’t expect you to understand.”
“But I do, darling.” Marguerite slid off her chair, knelt before her sister.
“Or at least, I’m trying to. I know it’s been something of a rough start for us here.
But we’re not waving the white flag yet.
It occurs to me that, so far, we haven’t had much of a chance to be scandalous.
Here we are, in the big, bad city, and still decent as seraphim.
Imagine how disappointed Maman will be.”
Inez shook her head. “I don’t wish to be scandalous.”
“Only a little scandalous. Just the tiniest touch of scandal. I have an idea about that. I think we’ll start tomorrow.”
“I don’t want—”
“In the meanwhile, though, I have another idea. Nothing shocking, per se, but …”
Inez’s gaze angled to hers, her brows scrunched with doubt.
“How about a fresh start for us both?” Marguerite sat back on her heels; the fire’s heat on her left side was finally beginning to smart. “How about from now on, we each become someone else?”
“What on earth do you mean?”