9. Chapter 9
‘There is nothing going on? It is still just an act?’
Odette’s eyes skimmed Cassius to gauge his level of discomfort, but as usual, he remained as unreadable as smoke.
Karl’s chair creaked as he leant back, his grey eyebrows knitting into a frown.
Drawing on years of training to suppress the urge to fidget, she steepled her fingers together and breathed until her insides settled into the sheen of a pond on a calm summer’s day.
‘That is a ridiculous question. Why would you even ask it?’ She flicked an imaginary piece of dirt off her skirt for effect.
Cassius, for his part, sank deeper into his seat.
He even had the nerve to hitch his trouser leg, loosening the tension in the fabric, and then rested his left ankle on his right knee.
As if he had never even dreamt of kissing her two days ago.
As if he hadn’t almost kissed her, pulled back, and avoided her since.
Odette had been kissed by men before. She’d also been almost kissed and turned away from them at the very last second.
But no one had ever, ever, pulled back on her.
‘Why would I ask?’ Karl’s voice drifted through a wave of pitches.
‘Why? Oh, I don’t know. Perhaps because I have nothing more important to do than contemplate such questions.
Because I delight in imagining even more bad press to wrangle.
Because I am paranoid. Or perhaps…’ he rummaged through the drawer in his desk, ‘…perhaps, because the two of you were spotted in a highly inappropriate embrace!’ The magazine slapped onto the cedar wood.
With an expert flip, Karl opened it to a page where a bold headline proudly announced controversy—followed by an article that detailed their perambulations at the flower show.
‘I worry about reviews in The Times. I worry about the Music Hall and Theatre Review. I worry about Bell’s Life and Figaro.
But never, in all my working days as a theatre manager, have I worried about a scandal being broken by the Journal of Ferns! ’
Cassius spluttered, then smoothed his outburst into a cough. He gave a nonchalant wave, as if he were deliberating, but his eyes glinted with water.
That was something, at least.
‘And not only that.’ Karl rose from his seat as he kept rummaging through the drawer.
Then he slapped another magazine onto the desk.
And another. ‘Floral World. The Gardener’s Chronicle.
Even Amateur Gardening has run an article speculating about the special allure of ground covers after the two of you were spotted making a spectacle of yourself in front of such a display.
You were meant to put on a boring courtship.
Something conventional. Restrained. Go for a walk.
Maybe shake hands. Not enact some torrid love affair! ’
Odette dared to peak at the open page.
More than flowers blossoming…
She sat back. She did not need to read further.
‘Why would they even bother with us? They’re gardening journals.
’ Cassius bent forwards, his hands resting on his knees.
In the low light of Karl’s office, the creases and lines of his knuckles appeared angular and hard, even though his palm had felt feather-light against her waist when he’d held her.
His thumb had stroked her hip with… with longing, yes.
And the way his small touch had sent her skin crackling…
Odette startled as Karl swept the magazines off his desk.
‘Because every second journalist at a small press dreams of bigger days. Of their own bylines, their own columns, of owning bloody Fleet Street! And they will take any opportunity to grasp at success. The other papers don’t know whether to run the story or make fun of it. Meanwhile, the patron is horrified.’
Odette bit back a retort. The patron was likely delighted at having something new to moralise about. She’d be decapitating roses next, labelling them co-conspirators of vice.
Karl collapsed into the chair, his anger spent. Odette flicked a glance at Cassius, expecting to find him focused on their manager. He had a way of talking the man out of his tirades and into a more agreeable mood.
But he wasn’t. He was watching her. An inscrutable glimmer shone in his eye, the trace of fire catching or dying—she couldn’t tell.
Lifting her chin, Odette held her pose, even as her heart thumped with the same prestissimo it had thundered into at the gardens when she’d thought he was about to kiss her.
Until he had turned his cheek.
‘Karl…’ Cassius began, his gaze lingering on Odette, then slowly sweeping away.
‘You are a man of the stage. You know how the light works. We have nothing to confess because nothing happened. They saw a quiet conversation and applied their English prudery between the branches. It was probably just an inconvenient angle.’
‘Four inconvenient angles?’
‘One of them likely thought he saw something, then gossiped to his friends, and they raced to be the first in print,’ Odette offered, her tone as cool as Cassius’s.
‘Like you say, they all dream of bigger things. Ignore it, darling. The drama will peter out when they find no more substance. Now come upstairs and leave the conductor to his pit. We have a blocking rehearsal to get to.’
‘Fernandez is sick. Cassius must join us onstage.’ Karl was already brushing himself off and straightening his pocket handkerchief.
‘Where is the understudy?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Karl snapped. ‘He has not arrived.’
‘He can’t—’
‘I must—’
‘For heaven’s sake, can the pair of you not argue with me!’ Karl pressed his palms to his eyes. He heaved a sigh that almost sounded like a choked sob. ‘I have enough worries. Please. Please. Just… don’t.’
Cassius left first, his silent departure cutting through the tension in the air.
Odette followed close behind. Part of her wanted to reach out, to tap his elbow and share a quick word or a smile—even just raise a pointed eyebrow about Karl’s outburst—but for the first time in their friendship, he felt beyond her reach.
She’d intended her small sentence, calling him a lovesick fool, as an invitation to be one.
A clumsy encouragement, perhaps, and for a purpose she could not have articulated any better in the gardens than she could now…
But still, it had been her way of trying to move a little closer to the man who kept himself so aloof.
He was a puzzle and a provocation that she had never been able to resolve.
But he had stepped back, moved away, thrown up a wall. And as he trudged up the stairs to the stage now, resentment almost rolled off his back at being dragged before an audience once again. He was always far happier with his back to them.
That damn ringing was filling Odette’s ears again. Underneath it, she lost his words as the sound of his voice filled the stairwell.
‘Pardon?’ she called.
He turned back with a huff. ‘I said, are you coming? After all, this is your show.’
‘I need five minutes,’ she said.
With another grumble, Cassius continued up the stairs. Odette opened the door to her dressing room. Checked it and, once happy it was firmly closed, pressed her fingers to her temples and waited for the buzz to stop.
The new pills—where were the Calomel pills?
Odette found her bag and retrieved the rectangular bottle with the paper label.
Finest mercury, cures most ails! the advertisement had proclaimed.
Odette shook out two circular pink promises and swallowed them down with a gulp of cold tea. The buzzing eased, then faded.
So soon? Odette flipped the bottle over, read the print on the label again. Perhaps this would work. Perhaps these pills would be the cure that the doctor had assured her was unobtainable.
‘Pfft. Doctors. They do not know everything,’ she told her reflection.
Odette tucked the bottle back into her bag. Once she had checked herself in the mirror, she made her way upstairs. Ezra was shouting. Not with anger, but with elation.
‘And then Lisette whispers to Willem that the lascivious d’Artois is besotted with his Marietta!’
Odette paused at the edge of the curtains. Ezra was holding the score up before him and pointing animatedly from Freya to Cassius as he relayed instructions.
‘At first, Willem won’t listen…’ Ezra looked up, and Cassius harrumphed. ‘He refuses,’ Ezra tried again, then held up both hands to one side of his face. ‘Pretend you don’t want to hear it. They need to see the action. Most of the audience won’t follow the song if the actions aren’t clear.’
Cassius’s shoulders lifted, then sagged. He raised his hands as instructed, if slowly. Odette covered her mouth to hide a smile. He must be hating this.
‘And then Lisette pushes his hands away and makes him listen!’
Freya, the young soprano who was both cast and Odette’s understudy, gave a perfectly poised bow. She placed a hand close to her mouth and sang her line.
Cassius startled.
‘Not for blocking rehearsal,’ he said in a gruff tone. ‘No singing. Just the actions, so we can all learn where the cast needs to move. Normally, the composer learns from down there.’ He pointed to his precious podium. ‘But I suppose today I am learning from up here.’
Freya bowed her head, and a sharp flash of pink stained her cheeks.
Odette hadn’t heard the young girl sing in character before.
She was good. Far, far better than her brief line in the chorus had allowed her to demonstrate last year.
Recovering her composure, the young woman went through the motions again.
She raised her hand, performed the exaggerated bow, then pushed aside Cassius’s hands until he twisted, turning to look up into her so very pretty face.
A jagged blade of jealousy cut through Odette, red hot and sharp. Cassius looked away, and Freya whispered in his ear. A good singer, prettier than most. How many more like her would there be once he went to Vienna? If Freya invited him to kiss her, would he turn away?
Odette bunched her skirt into her palms and strode onto the stage.
‘Miss Delaney! Perfect timing!’ Ezra called. ‘Next comes the lovers’ dance between Marietta and Willem, where he asks her to be his bride. But also, d’Artois is watching and plotting his own seduction. Stand here!’
Determined not to look at Cassius, Odette held her chin high as she walked to where she was directed.
She already knew this song by heart and hummed the words as she sashayed across the stage.
Ezra pointed to a spot further downstage with the score folded in his tight grip.
‘Marietta walks by, dreaming of her love. She sings a verse, and then, he appears!’
His shadow engulfed her. His shadow and then his scent, that hint of linen and orange water that spoke of a man too busy to bother with more and too alluring for it to matter. His exhale caressed her nape and sent gooseflesh across her skin.
‘Hands on her arms,’ Ezra directed. ‘Yes! Perfect!’
Cassius’s palms pressed firmly against her, their warmth radiating through her sleeves. Odette’s breath tightened as his fingers splayed.
Ezra, meanwhile, was consulting his notes. ‘What’s next?’ he muttered, flipping through the pages. ‘Next…’
They kiss. Odette forced her lungs to expand, reminded her heart to beat. He turns her around to face him. They sing. Then they kiss.
The tips of his fingers dug into her flesh.
He knew what was coming, too. She could sense it.
An unsung note was trembling through the length of his body, bleeding from him, meeting her own music.
And just like at the gardens, she could not help but recognise what she’d become so good at spotting in other men—he wanted her.
Every nerve inside her screamed with the realisation that the one man who’d always walled himself off from her had finally lowered the barricades.
‘Here it is!’ Ezra exclaimed.
Cassius ran his palms down her arms. The fingers of one hand tightened around her wrist while the other tapped her arm, as if he was anticipating the prompt to turn her towards him.
They wouldn’t really kiss. Not even during the performance.
But they would press cheeks, they would stand so close their bodies would be touching from chest to pelvis.
He would put his hands on her waist. She might nip his earlobe, just to see what he would do.
Whether he would maintain his composure, or fracture.
‘Sorry I’m late!’
As Fernandez’s understudy rushed onto the stage, Cassius jerked away like a man caught touching something that wasn’t his.
Sweat shimmered across the understudy’s forehead.
He bent forwards, hands on his knees, gasping, sucking in deep gulps of breath.
‘There was a wagon. Overturned. Blocking the street. I had to cut across the park. Then come through Trafalgar Square…’
Somewhere behind her, Cassius huffed. ‘I will be downstairs,’ he grumbled, then strode offstage without a goodbye. He did not even acknowledge Ezra’s thanks as he passed them.
The understudy looked at Odette, fear blanching his features. ‘Is Mr Zadora angry? Are you angry? I am so, so sorry,’ he offered again, his voice heavy with emotion.
Those poor understudies. So close to what they wanted they could almost taste it, and yet so far that any mistake might snuff out their dreams.
She painted a smile to hide her disappointment. ‘It is nothing, darling. Leave the conductor to his pit. Take a moment to find your breath. Then let us continue.’