8. Chapter 8
‘I thought you would be bored of flowers by now.’ Cassius stuck his hands into his pockets as he ambled along the gravel path beside Odette.
Hedges formed a verdant backdrop for white and fuchsia buckets of blossoms. The gaps between displays revealed strips of the lush lawn that meandered down the rise to the pond, where children in boater hats and bonnets poked sticks into the water.
A slight breeze kicked up, sending the spray from the water fountain into a scattered pattern before it settled and resumed its steady dribble.
Visitors to Kensington Gardens’ Great Spring Show relaxed on seats or wandered through the rows of flowerbeds at the same sedate pace as them, as if it was impossible to move through the exhibits at any other speed than the dawdle of spring days and sunshine.
‘What makes you think that?’ Odette’s face tilted upwards, emerging from beneath the brim of her wide hat, which was anchored beneath her chin with a silk bow. She twirled her parasol, and the lace threw small spots of white light over the mint green and sky blue of her skirts.
‘You receive so many of them. After every performance, there is always a bouquet waiting in your room or about to be delivered. I remember, after Rossini’s La Cenerentola, there wasn’t enough room to stand in your dressing room.
The entire backstage smelt like a flower market.
My trombone player could not stop sneezing until they were cleared away. ’
‘And he sneezed louder than the brass section during the second act.’ She laughed, the lightness of it carried by the breeze. ‘But you didn’t flinch. You just brought in the strings a little louder. Nothing unsettles you.’
‘That’s my role.’ He kicked at a stone. ‘It’s nothing.’
‘I have seen many conductors throw tantrums that would make the Hempel children blush. The way you keep your composure is hardly nothing.’ They passed beneath an arch, then strolled by topiaries of elephants and a peacock.
Low-lying ground covers bloomed into a colourful display of swirls and circles, like a painting made of plants.
‘I like these flowers precisely because they are not mine,’ she said.
‘We moved from Poland to Prague when I was very young. My grandmother sold flowers, and I would sing for coins. I was surrounded by flowers that I could not own, only enjoy. They were like music. Impossible to capture. These remind me of those times.’
‘Singing on the streets of Prague?’ He couldn’t help but sound surprised. ‘That’s not the story Karl puts in the programme.’
‘And is everything Karl puts in the programme true? To be fair, it is not his lie, only one inherited from a theatre manager in Nice who thought telling people I came from Paris instead of Poland would make me sound more glamourous. He turned my real surname—Dalewski—into de Lacaze. And then that terrible theatre where we met misprinted it as Delaney. Such small mistakes, when I was too young and too trusting to demand better. I let others make choices for me. Was too hungry to demand they be changed. I did not know they would follow me forever. I envy you that… taking Poland with you, I mean. All I have of her now is a name on my door that most people cannot pronounce. Let alone comprehend what it means to me.’
Sobieski. He’d never asked her about the name she’d given her villa, although he pulled the threads together as easily as ribbons.
He’d first suspected that her story of being from Paris was a fabrication the same night he’d met her, and he’d been all the more convinced once they’d drunk to their failures.
The more vodka she’d drunk, the more her accent had slipped.
But the theatre was built on pretence and false names, so who was he to pry or even judge?
Later, when he’d been invited to the first of her famed musicales, his hazy hunch had been confirmed by a freshly installed stained-glass window above the door that spelt out a new name for her villa.
Odette, like himself, had found a way out of their broken home, and likely carried the guilt of salvation, too.
‘Why Sobieski?’ he asked. ‘Why the old king of Poland and not your own people or country?’
She smiled to herself. ‘To remind me to have courage. Babcia was a great admirer of Sobieski. I was too young to remember so much of our origins, and Babcia almost never spoke of our old life. How long should we walk for? I would much rather be rehearsing. It is only two weeks until opening.’
Cassius followed the brisk change in tone and topic of the conversation. ‘You heard Karl. As long as is necessary for us to be seen.’
‘So much fuss for one little article. Karl should be firm with her. Tell her it doesn’t matter. She will ruin the show to save our morals.’
That morning, Tattler had printed an article about the prince’s discharge from hospital, and inside it, speculation abounded on whether he would attend the opening night of Odette’s next show.
Normally, such coverage would delight Karl, and he’d start musing about extending the performance by a week or more.
But this morning, he had seemed jittery, mumbling things like maybe she won’t have seen it and not everyone reads Tattler to himself.
By midday, he’d snapped. ‘You can’t be a distraction if no one sees you!
’ he’d roared at Cassius, then announced that the understudies required the stage for an afternoon and Ezra could spend some time with the orchestra to talk them through part of the score.
Afterwards, he’d taken the two of them aside with firm orders that they go somewhere, anywhere, as long as they were seen. Together.
Rather than a distraction, Cassius felt more like an accomplice.
‘Mr Northcote’s patron. You have a… a history with her?’
‘History is an exaggeration. She lives on my street. She runs a society promoting societal virtues, although I think she is having a hard time keeping members without the draw of Duke Arley as her patron.’ She laughed, the sound hollow and just a little bitter.
‘She makes meaningless complaints about any noise, tells Wilhelmina how to raise her children, is always arguing with Petunia about poor Elise, but she reserves the worst of her judgement for me. She once invited me to her society to talk about my career—not to inspire her ladies, but so I could serve as a cautionary tale. Nothing I have not heard before, but it feels different when it is right on my street, near my home. I can throw away a newspaper, but not a neighbour. Whenever I see her, I remember what so many think of me. I cannot hide from their opinions.’
‘Does your life… bother you? After what you said in the office the other day with Karl, I’ve wondered. Worried, even. I’ve been thinking about what you said, about the theatre needing the dream. You don’t take lovers because you feel compelled—’
‘Not you, too, Cassius.’ She tutted. ‘Let me guess. You are trying to decide if I am a victim or a strumpet. Because an unmarried woman is, of course, incapable of being anything else. Don’t fret, I make my own decision on who I take to be my lover.
’ She tugged him towards her so that he had to lean down, and when she spoke, her whisper caressed his ear.
‘Did you ever imagine that, just like you, I might simply enjoy fucking?’
The shock of her brash confession nearly caused him to trip, and as she steadied him by the elbow, she burst out laughing.
How she could laugh. She took a breath of the world and transformed it into an explosion of joy and light.
If mirth had a melody, it would match the song of Odette’s amusement.
And if Karl wanted them to draw the attention of a crowd, this might well have been the fix.
Two groups walking nearby—one at the edge of the pond and another on the far side of the garden display—looked towards them.
A couple of women raised their hands to whisper to one another.
Conversations were obscured behind a fan.
Cassius shrugged, his coat suddenly itching at him.
A man with a top hat and walking cane, clearly wealthy, paused in his step.
His eyes trailed over Odette’s body like he knew it.
Or perhaps, he had merely heard stories and shaped them into his own sordid tale in response.
Cassius stared him down until he tipped his hat in deference and turned away with something like shame flitting over his face.
‘We should settle on a story,’ Cassius said, pulling her a little closer. ‘In case someone asks. It will do the facade no good if we give different accounts on how we came to be courting.’
‘I thought we had decided. You begged me for a chance. I took pity on you. Simple.’
‘Simple? The most famous soprano in all of London supposedly falls in love, and you want simple? Your love story must be as captivating as a performance if you want people to talk about it. How about… love at first sight. Like in Cendrillon, or Tristan and Isolde? You were dazzled by me from the moment you set eyes on me.’
‘I was dazzled by your cheap coat and your terrible scowl? And it took fifteen years for the feeling to catch up with me? You will need to do much better than that. I think…’ She tapped her cheek in playful thought. ‘You gave me a love potion. Yes. That’s the only thing that explains it.’
He laughed properly now. ‘I slipped you The Elixir of Love? But it’s just cheap wine, and the maid is a willing dupe. Are you?’
‘Hmm… I suppose you are right. The hero in that one is charming. Which you are not. We will need a much, much better story.’
Cassius watched her out of the corner of his eye as he selected his next weapon for their musical sparring. ‘I offered you a quiet life in the countryside.’
‘A bad write up in the press is not the same as death! And I refuse to be a fallen woman like in La Traviata. What a funny little world the opera is.’ She laughed.
‘I sometimes wonder if cupid has seen me fall in love on the stage so many times that he forgets I have never known the feeling. I suppose I will have to settle for elixirs and lightning strikes.’
‘Everyone loves you. You know that.’
‘They love the parts I play. The women I pretend to be. Not me.’ She spoke with sadness, but also clarity. ‘Do you ever wonder who you would be without the theatre?’
They had reached the end of the topiary gardens and wandered into a new display, this one full of roses and buzzing bees, along with more ground covers swirling into patterns of petals and leaves.
It was a good question. He’d often threatened himself with walking away in the past, but then he always signed another contract, stood before another orchestra, and conducted another season. ‘I would not know where to start.’
‘I do not know either. My entire life has been about singing. Maybe I am selfish to want everything. To want this opera. My opera. But the stage has always made me so happy. What else should we do, if not strive a little more? We might as well be automatons, performing for a penny.’
‘It will pass,’ he assured her. ‘This thing with the press. We’ll manage.’
‘Perhaps. I’ve never said it, but thank you, Cassius. No matter what threats Karl made, we both know he has no teeth. You did not have to stay.’
She pushed herself onto her toes. Went to kiss his cheek, and on a whim, spurred on by the fresh air and her sadness, he tipped his head into the memory of another time and another kiss.
Only the corner of their lips touched, the slightest graze, those angles of pink, plump flesh barely brushing his own.
Their breath mingled, two tiny exhalations catching each other like the battling breezes from the pond and the city.
For one glorious moment, Cassius leant into her freshness.
Tipped a little more. She licked her lips and pressed against him.
Tensed her nails against his biceps as he flexed against her.
‘See?’ she whispered, her mouth twisting into a smile. ‘You are the lovesick fool.’
Flame lashed against his ribs, then quietened as he wrestled the furl of anger into compliance. ‘Treacherous flirt,’ he muttered, pulling back and turning his cheek. ‘You convince only yourself. You are the one stooping to a courtship with a man who doesn’t wear a crown.’
Frail as gossamer, the thread between them tightened, caught the light, then snapped.
Odette hooked her arm through his elbow again, but held him a little further away.
When they resumed their walk, it carried more purpose, and while they still struck a slow pace, each step landed more deliberately.
The gates rose into view, and beyond them, the city tessellated into shape.
‘Tell me, Zadora… why no love story of your own?’ she asked. ‘You could have married a dozen times over. Why do you only chase women who could never become your wife?’
Her question caught him just as they reached the edge of the gardens and headed towards the spot where her coach was waiting.
For a few steps, it hung in the air, thick as a storm that had held on long past the moment it should have broken.
‘The music is my love,’ he finally offered.
‘It seemed unfair to drag a woman into a contest she could not win. Married women are less problematic.’ He guided her up into the carriage. ‘I could ask the same of you.’
He stepped back to allow the coachman to shut the door, and Odette leant out of the open window, her slim, gloved arm stretching along the length of its hollow. ‘Why have I never married? Oh, that is simple, darling. No one has ever asked me.’
Her revelation hung in the air long past her departure, humming like a faint, wavering note at the end of a song.
Until Cassius decided that yes, he would grasp it, and tuck it into his pocket.