Chapter 11
Do you remember where you were when you learned of the assassination?
Of course you do. Everyone in the world surely must. A moment like that, a moment when the firm and known path of history pivots, disintegrates, shattering lives …
it embeds in our memory like a needle of glass, forever stinging, never dislodged.
I was here, in Manhattan, perusing the early papers alone over coffee and poached eggs.
I remember very specifically that the eggs were too runny, and there was a chimney swift perched on the balcony rail just by my chair, a cheerful fellow chittering to another I couldn’t see.
Two weeks before that mild morning, George had left on a trip I was not allowed to join.
Not allowed. He’d told me kindly, but firmly. Certainly it wasn’t the first time he’d traveled without me since our union, but, oh, my heart.
As soon as I read that headline, ARCHDUKE FERDINAND AND DUCHESS SOPHIE OF AUSTRIA MURDERED IN COLD BLOOD, MANY OTHERS INJURED, my fingers went numb. I dropped the paper to the table. All I could think was, Please, God, don’t let him be in Sarajevo.
It turns out that he wasn’t. But in the end, it hardly mattered.
Lives shattered. So many, many lives, blown to pieces after those first royal two. I can’t stop thinking about it.
JULY, 1914
NAPLES, ITALY
Rita stood beneath the thick and spreading boughs of a holm oak, dusty leaves tossing sinuous shadows around her, over her, dappling her hair and face and shoulders, the flowing robes of her embroidered tunic.
Before her lay a meadow ruffled with rye grass, dry and golden, and about forty extras in far plainer tunics, all of them facing her, all of them squinting and sweating beneath the ferocious sun.
Rita lifted one arm, curved and graceful, as high as her chest, palm up, fingers cupped.
“I have come to your land not for war, but love!”
She spoke in French, since it was closer to Italian than English.
As she’d mentioned to Charles, it hardly mattered, since the title cards were going to read what they were going to read in whatever language suited the audience, but she thought maybe the cast and crew could understand her a little better, at least.
She dropped her arm, unbuckled the heavy, wide belt that held her sword and scabbard, then let that drop too, right at her feet. The oversized brass buckle barely missed her toes.
“I come because my heart, my weak and foolish woman’s heart, has decided my destiny for me! I bend my armies to its will, and agree to wed your emperor!”
She bowed her head, the ringlets of her wig falling long over her shoulders and down her chest. It was the signal for the crowd before her to cheer, which they did. Rita looked up again before the tin diadem pinned to the wig could slide forward, as it had twice in rehearsal.
Raising both arms chest high again, she angled slightly to the right, making certain the camera, five feet away, could capture her face, her darkly painted lips, her darkly kohled eyes and eyebrows.
She bowed her head one final time, briefly, modestly, and that was when a little bird—she would find out later it was a chaffinch—flew in front of her, so close that the wake of its passage stirred the coils of her hair.
As she straightened, the bird returned to land on her outstretched left arm, right there on her arm, a weight so precious and slight she felt only a pinprick of talons against her bare skin.
For a second, no one did anything. Then the extras closest to her began to exclaim, and Rita’s polished smile turned into a grin, and when the bird flew off again, startled, she waved farewell to it.
“Mio Dio,” the director laughed from his chair behind the cameraman. He brought his hands together in a brisk clap. “Perfetto!”
“SO, YOU HAVE a secret gift,” Giuseppe said as he handed her a glass of tea from the jug in the hamper between them.
It was no longer cold, not in this heat, but still blessedly cool.
She took the glass and held it between her palms, knowing it was going to warm up faster that way but not caring.
If she could have pressed it to her forehead without ruining her makeup, she would have.
“A gift you’ve never confided,” he went on, bringing his own glass to hers; they clinked rims. “You, Margherita, are a bird charmer.”
As one of the main financial backers of the production company, the Count de Cippico was allowed on set whenever he wished.
And usually when Rita was filming, he wished it.
It was flattering, really. Giuseppe was both a businessman and an aristocrat, a man who certainly had more important places to be than, for example, a field of scruffy rye grass in the middle of a hot Wednesday afternoon.
But she didn’t mind him coming and watching.
He was more a silent presence than not; he never offered notes; he never interfered.
It was possible her directors and crews were a trace more courteous when he was around than they would have been otherwise, which she also appreciated.
They sat in low folding chairs beneath a blue-striped umbrella so wide the shade easily blanketed them both. The extras were less fortunate, taking their meal break in whatever comfort they could find beneath the trees, with stern admonitions from the assistant director to not trample the grass.
“Yes, I speak bird,” Rita said lightly, after a long drink of tea. “And dog and cat. A little horse. Some shark, even.”
“Shark! Where did you learn that?”
“The depths of the sea. I go there at night, after you’re asleep.”
“I knew you were more siren than not. How could it be otherwise, possessing such beauty?”
She eased back in the canvas chair, feeling the change in him, from blithe to purposeful, wondering how best to respond.
He’d been circling closer to her recently, mentioning plans for the weeks ahead, the months ahead.
Next year, New Year’s, the Festival of Saint This-or-That.
Mentioning his estate in Mentone, which she had been judicious enough to avoid for nearly a year, except for a single visit two months past, when she’d been placed in the quarters of the countess.
(There was no countess now, though, was there, so she supposed they were the quarters of whatever future countess would come.) Rooms cocooned in satin and crystal and gilt; colorful glass drops melting from the light fixtures.
Exquisite marble floors and walls everywhere she looked, marble the color of frost, or blood, or blushing roses.
For the entire five days of that visit, she’d done her best to dodge the expectations of Giuseppe and his staff, everyone so welcoming and deferential.
When one of the footman had slipped up and quietly greeted her, “Contessa,” as she’d passed in a hallway, Rita hadn’t looked around, hadn’t paused. She’d acted as if she hadn’t heard him.
She was not ready to hear that word. Not yet.
SHE HAD EXPERIENCE with matrimony, brief as it was.
Alfred Charles Stern, who preferred to be called Freddy, he of the cheeky smiles and smoldering looks, that lad so familiar with all the dank and smelly corners of Stratford-upon-Avon, back when she’d been with Poel’s traveling company.
She’d been young and curious then; what teenaged girl, a sheltered girl suddenly set free, wouldn’t be?
Innocent, in her way, but certainly intoxicated with the newfound liberation of her life on the tour.
As months passed, months of Freddy’s secret smiles and admiring glances, Rita found herself wondering more and more what it would be like to linger over the taste of a boy’s lips.
To feel the touch of someone who kindled her blood.
The only romantic kisses she’d ever known were stage kisses, chaste and quick.
But when she imagined kissing Freddy, when she imagined his hands on her body, nothing about her felt chaste.
One evening after a show in Durham, Rita had been hurrying alone back to the hotel from the theatre, listening to cathedral bells tolling across a lilac sky.
It was a short distance to walk; Poel always booked accommodations as close to their performance venues as possible.
But because of a rip in her costume, and the seamstress cousins backstage who’d delighted in recounting the entirety of a letter they’d just received from a great-niece, Rita had missed joining the main company heading to dinner.
The new stagehand had followed her, stealthy as a stoat.
She realized later that he must have been waiting for her just outside the dock doors, his dirty clothes, his dirty face, blending with the dusk.
He’d been with the company for less than a week, bloodshot eyes, greasy hair.
She’d taken note of him vaguely in the days before, in the same way a rabbit might take note of the stale scent of a predator hanging in the air, but that was all.
The problem was, there were always plenty of predators around. His was just another scent.
In that tricky descending light, he’d come up from behind so quickly, snatched her by the waist so roughly, that she’d barely had time to cry out.
Then they were in an alleyway littered with rubbish, and his filthy hand was over her mouth, pressed against her teeth, while the other groped at her skirts.
Rita had wrenched away as hard as she could, now managing a full scream.
She even got in a quick blow to his face before he hit her back, sending her spinning.
But then Freddy was there, sudden and fleet. He and his two mates were also late to dinner, also hurrying, when they’d heard her scream.
Three to one. The stagehand fled into the night, several teeth missing, his arm broken. Freddy had helped Rita gently to her feet and kept his arm about her shoulders to support her all the walk back.