4. Chapter 4
Would leaving have proved harder if the old theatre hadn’t burnt down?
If that ramshackle, patched-together, hastily extended relic that had morphed shapes for over a century still remained?
If he were walking into that building one last time—the one teeming with echoes of applause, with songs humming through its walls and notes vibrating in the floors—would he hesitate to go?
Cassius shook his head. He’d probably be moving twice as fast to dodge the memories and loose floorboards.
Throughout the last performance, he hadn’t missed the old theatre, so there was a good chance he wouldn’t miss this one either once he was hundreds of miles away across the Channel.
After all, the last theatre had played a far more important part in his life.
There, Karl had given him his first real chance as a pianist, in the same opera that had catapulted Odette into fame.
And after that performance, Karl had taken him aside and told him what others had never bothered to put into words or been brave enough to say.
That, as a piano player, Cassius was technically exceptional but lacked the soul to become a star.
Which was, of course, what happened when the prodigy was forced to practise for seven hours a day, and when the family’s fortunes rested on his skill.
When mistakes were punished with tirades, when any lack of discipline ended with a backhand.
The prodigy lost the flow of the music, and all that remained were the sharp shapes of its chords.
Cassius thought every note before he pressed the keys, instead of feeling his way like when he’d climbed onto the piano stool while he was still learning his letters.
Rules and demands had extinguished all curious, childish love.
Or maybe his playing would have turned out all the same, regardless of the pressure.
Cassius had always been partial to controlling his world.
He liked to line up his few small possessions with the same distance between them, and while his father often scolded him on many fronts, he never needed to tell him to make his bed or fold his clothes before putting them in his travelling case.
Perhaps the roots of his orderliness lay there—in a childhood spent drifting between noble manors and cheap inns.
Both places offered an audience, and both provided food and a bed in return for his music, and sometimes a little coin.
Once he grew tall and his father could no longer pass him off as a child maestro, the inns increasingly replaced the castles, and soon, he played less for lodgings and mostly for vodka.
Karl’s truth had come as a brutal relief. In one sentence, he released Cassius from the pressure of becoming a star of the stage, but with the next, he outlined a heretofore hidden talent, and an opportunity for them both.
Don’t fight it. Embrace it.
As you’ve mastered yourself, master others. Lead them. Conduct them.
It had suited Cassius to give up the keys.
Conducting came with its own peculiar type of infamy, of fame wrapped up in anonymity.
Most audiences didn’t pay any attention to the man who spent the performance with his back to them as he directed the musicians, but concert hall and opera house owners knew what a good conductor could do.
While the audience remained mostly ignorant of his name, he became well known to the men who booked the shows and awarded contracts.
They recognised him as the maestro capable of controlling all those messy musicians and folding them into one harmonious orchestra.
His reputation had made it easy to settle into theatres for short stints or longer spells, depending on what suited, although signing a three-year contract with Karl had been lazy folly.
But how was he to know Vienna, of all places, would come knocking?
He trotted down the stairs, moving deeper into the subterranean backstage world.
Hopefully, Karl was already in his office and had signed the early termination to release him from the final year of their agreement.
Over the next few weeks, Cassius could finish organising transport for his things and finally be on his way.
He tapped the plaster as he turned a corner and wandered past the dressing rooms, where Odette’s name still clung to her door, then past the green room, and by the stairs that led to the stage.
These walls would soon soak up their own music and song.
Their own fights and love, their own energy and anticipation.
Or maybe, in a month’s time, she’d burn down again. It happened.
Either way, he would be gone. Long, long gone.
Raised voices burst into the quiet hallway ahead of him, then subsided once more.
Karl was giving someone a warning, or worse.
The argument continued to rise and fall as Cassius moved closer.
He leant against the wall outside Karl’s door, preparing to wait until Karl had finished stripping whatever poor soul had earnt his ire—then stiffened as a sob bled through the wood.
Odette?
That couldn’t be right. Karl and Odette disagreed. But they never fought.
Karl was one of those men who loved the theatre although he had no talent or rhythm beyond clapping.
Even then, he never quite found the same beat as others.
But he still had a good ear, and a better measure of the crowd than most. He excelled at managing the accounts and never took bigger risks than the columns could manage.
He was the only manager Odette owed a debt to, and she was the only performer he’d ever accepted any criticism from.
If they were fighting, then something must be very, very wrong.
‘Of all the—’
‘How was I to know—’
‘Everyone could see he was obsessed!’
Cassius tapped at the door, but Karl’s thunderous tirade continued.
He tapped again, then pushed it open. As he entered the room, Karl broke off mid-word, and the creases around his eyes hardened into a mix of anger and angst. He ran a hand through what remained of his greying hair before muttering a German curse under his breath.
Odette, meanwhile, was sitting in a chair near the desk, head slightly bowed, her fingers twisting over each other in her lap.
She looked up and met Cassius’s gaze, rolled her eyes, then collapsed back in her chair.
Karl pushed himself from his seat with a grumble, grabbed a half-empty brandy bottle from a cupboard, and retrieved three glasses.
He set them on the edge of his desk and filled them almost to the brim.
‘Not for me,’ Cassius started. ‘It is not quite ten…’
Karl threw back one lug. And the next two, in quick succession.
Then he refilled all three glasses and gathered them into his large hands, blew a stray wisp of hair out of his eyes, and lowered himself back into his seat.
After lining up the glasses again, he threw back another of the tumblers, and another.
At last, he stared, slow and hard, into the remaining one.
Odette fidgeted with her gloves. ‘The audience will still—’
‘The audience will not!’ Karl hollered, and even Cassius startled.
‘You have been too perfect. You gave the press nothing, and they detested you for it. Now they have more than enough to make you pay. They are wolves sniffing out a trail of blood, and they will track you until they can destroy you, just to show you they can. Five reporters have come to see me this morning alone. Five! And that’s not counting the ones with no name who are loitering in the alleyway and hoping for their first exposé.
Nor does it include the gawkers and gossips out for a snoop.
Half of London has their own theory on what happened, and you do not fare well in any of their stories. ’
Cassius continued to wait for some explanation, but Karl and Odette remained locked in their poses, both clearly defeated, yet shooting defiant, hard looks at one another.
A newspaper with today’s date lay folded on the manager’s desk, and as Cassius reached for it, Karl flattened his palm over his eyes.
Odette crossed her arms over her chest.
Cassius turned the paper and shook it open.
Falling for a Soprano
The crown prince of one of Germany’s recently unified principalities has been resident in London for some weeks now.
During this time, he has attended every performance at the Constellation Theatre, headlined by the famed soprano Miss Odette Delaney.
A great lover of the opera, perhaps? A cultured man?
Or perhaps not. On the night of Thursday, 3rd May, he was climbing a wall of the Constellation when a loose brick gave way, causing him to fall and break his ankle.
It took some hollering until he was rescued by a group of passersby, who raised the alarm and called for an ambulance.
In his pained delirium, and after the liberal application of some brandy to ease the pain, he loudly confessed his undying love for the soprano.
Speculation abounds: Was he trying to climb in? Or was he, perhaps, sneaking away?
The prince and Miss Delaney have been seen at various establishments dining in the company of others, including princes and nobles and the notorious Count of Almonge.
Word has reached his wife, who was taking the waters in Bath for her health. She has reportedly locked herself in her rooms in despair.
‘Did you know he was married?’ Cassius asked.
‘And of course, of course the conductor cannot wait to add his judgement,’ Odette snapped, as if she’d been bottling up all her anger while Karl railed at her and she relished the space to vent it.
‘It is my fault men can’t be faithful, is it?
It is my fault they want a woman at home and one on the stage and likely a mistress in every city, too?
It is irrelevant either way. He is a boring fool. I was not with him.’