Chapter 7
The stairwell was alive with the thumps of toe shoes racing down its metal treads.
We’d finished our final class for the day, and with the stage being readied for the summer gala, we found ourselves with a rare evening off.
Everyone had raced away after our grand révérence, eager to get dressed and enjoy the fine evening.
“Christine, wait!”
I turned to see Meg hurrying after me. Wild wisps had worked themselves free of her bun, and her cheeks were stained red. It had been a grueling barre session. “We’re all going out tonight,” she announced as she caught up.
“Oh, I—”
“Don’t say you can’t come,” she chided. “We’ve so much to celebrate! Lisette is engaged!”
I couldn’t hide my surprise. “Engaged! To whom?”
Meg laughed as she took the spiral stairs down two at a time. “I forget how much you miss, being in the other dressing room.”
My relationship with the rest of the corps was shifting, altering degree by degree, so that I now felt as though I were an outsider looking in.
“Philippe Cadieux.”
The name meant nothing to me, though I could tell from Meg’s expression of disbelief it should have been recognized.
“He’s a member of the Jockey Club.” She whispered the name of the exclusive group as if worried we’d be overheard by one of its aristocratic members. “He’s massively wealthy, on the board of directors for some dreary something or other.”
“And he’s marrying Lisette?” The idea was too strange to believe.
“He’s smitten with her! Says she caught his eye during her Faust solo—it was such a small bit, can you imagine?—and then he started coming to the stage door every night with dozens of roses for her. Her apartment is bursting with them all. There’s nowhere to sit!”
I wondered, briefly, what that would be like. To have someone who yearned to be with you every moment of every day. To look forward to seeing them too.
I have that, I thought, chastising myself. I have my Angel. And he gifts me things far more precious than roses.
But you’ve never seen him, another voice within me said, sneaking in the nasty little aside like a swift nick of a dagger.
We arrived at the end of the stairs and paused at the hallway split. One side would take Meg to her dressing room, and the other led toward mine.
“He’ll be there tonight. You can see how he fawns over her yourself.”
“I…” I paused, remorse flooding through my system. “I’m afraid I have other plans.”
Meg tsked in disapproval. “But we never see you anymore. Ever since you changed rooms, it’s like you’re off in an entirely different world.”
She wasn’t wrong.
“Please come? Just for a little bit?”
“I can’t—Meg!” I laughed as she stuck out her lower lip, pouting in a way that made her look so much younger than nineteen.
“We never spend time together. Not like we used to. I don’t even know what you’ve been up to recently. You could be in the throes of a wild affair with Monsieur Lefèvre, and I’d never know.” She brightened. “Wait—are you?”
I snorted. “No!”
She sighed, pained. “All you do is rehearse and go home.”
“That’s not all,” I protested, but I stopped short of explaining.
The Angel of Music had never expressly forbidden me from telling others about him, but it seemed wrong to share the secret.
In a company where I shared everything, from tights to hairpins, distilling anything unique about myself to blend into an identical horde, it felt deliciously wicked to hold something away, saving it for just myself.
But Meg misunderstood, her eyes immediately flickering with excitement. “Christine Daaé! You’ve been keeping secrets! What’s his name?”
“His name?” I repeated. “No. It’s not like that. I promise. There’s no one!”
“Christine has a beau!” she sang out, shrieking the news so loudly I winced.
“I don’t!”
“Where did you meet him? What’s he look like? Oh, Christine, tell me everything!”
“There’s nothing to tell. There’s no suitor,” I insisted.
Her face fell. “Then what it is?”
“I…” I swallowed, seeing no way out of it. “I’ve been taking music lessons.”
She wrinkled her nose, looking dubious. “Music lessons? For what?”
I licked my lips, fighting the urge to squirm. It sounded so silly as I readied to say it out loud. “I’ve been thinking about auditioning for something else in the operas. A…singing role.”
To her credit, Meg only raised an eyebrow, a gesture that made her look uncannily like her mother. “Truly?”
I nodded.
She squinted, as if picturing me onstage in a spotlight instead of in a line of ballerinas. “I can see that.”
My heart warmed, inordinately touched by her unearned confidence. “You think so?”
Meg smiled. “But I wish you’d skip your coaching tonight.” She took my hand in hers, lacing our fingers together. “I really do miss you, Christine.”
“And I miss you,” I swore, squeezing back. This was the moment I knew I should suggest some other outing on some other night, but I couldn’t. I’d made a promise, a holy vow as real as a nun’s, to my Angel, and I intended to keep it. “Tell me all about everything tomorrow. At group stretch?”
With a final nod, she wished me good night and bounded off.
When I reached my dressing room, I could instantly tell something was different. Something had changed. It took only a quick scan to spot the item perched upon the piano lid.
Curious, I picked it up.
It was a rose, blooming with an extravagance of velvety petals so vividly red they seemed obscene.
I glanced toward the hall behind me, wondering who might have left it and why, but all was quiet in my little corner of the theatre.
I shut the door before lifting the rose to breathe in its scent.
Its sweetness went straight to my head, and I absently brushed the bloom over my lips, pressing a kiss to its softness.
It was foolish, a silly thing to do, but I couldn’t help myself.
After Father died, my own shroud wafted over every aspect of my life.
Everything turned flat and gray and ugly, tasteless and tepid.
I dutifully went with the Girys to class after class, only stopping for a few hours of exhausted slumber, and then I’d wake and start the whole process again.
Even after securing a position within the corps and having the money to rent a little apartment for myself, my days played out in similar cycles.
So much energy was spent trying to survive I was left with little opportunity for anything else.
But I wasn’t immune to wondering.
During a production of Henry VIII, my attention caught on a young man in the front row.
There had been something about him—his twinkling eyes, the sharp line of his jaw, the elegantly careless way he wore his tuxedo—that grabbed hold of my imagination.
The handsome stranger filled my thoughts for weeks after.
I let romantic—and increasingly fevered—scenarios play throughout my daydreams. I pictured us having grassy picnics at the Square du Vert-Galant, window-shopping along the Rue de la Paix while I slipped a daring hand along his forearm.
There were cozy dinners in little restaurants, our table lit by a single candle.
Sudden rainstorms that would send us running for secluded shelter.
We’d arrive under a striped awning, giddy and breathless with laughter, and he’d offer me his coat, then push me against the brick wall and bring his lips to mine, kissing me with a passion too strong to be held in ch—
“Are you familiar with that rose?”
I startled at the Angel’s voice, feeling a mixture of guilty embarrassment and joyful exhilaration.
It had been seven torturous days since we last spoke.
“You’ve come!”
“Of course,” he said, with no mention of what had kept him away, no apologies or requests for forgiveness. He already knew I’d grant him anything. “Rosa Joséphine,” he went on, returning my attention to the flower. “Do you know it?”
“I’m afraid I don’t.”
“There’s a wonderful story behind its existence. A love story…as it so often goes.”
I didn’t know how to respond to that.
“You know, of course, of Empress Joséphine and her great fondness for both roses and her husband, Napoleon Bonaparte.”
Unable to recall any of the specifics, I said nothing and let him continue.
“Shortly after they’d married, Napoleon went off to fight in Egypt, and Joséphine bought a manor here in Paris—the Chateau de Malmaison.
Napoleon was furious when he returned. The house was falling apart and needed extensive renovations, but Joséphine loved it.
She oversaw its repairs and filled the grounds with gardens and heated nurseries for her roses. ”
“Like this?” I asked, holding out the blossom.
“And many others. She filled the grounds with new varieties from all around the world and, on occasion, would create hybrids, mixing the pollens of two strains to make something wholly new and wonderful. While Napoleon was away, she set out to make a rose as deep as her love for him and created that…the Rosa Joséphine.”
I breathed in the heady fragrance appreciatively. “It’s one of the loveliest roses I’ve ever seen.”
Somehow, I felt his smile. “Before he returned, she commissioned an artist to sculpt a set of figures locked in a most passionate embrace—Eros and Psyche—then surrounded them with her new roses to show Napoleon how special the estate could become.”
“Eros was the god of love, in Greek mythology, wasn’t he?”
“God of desire.”
The word fell out heavily, seeming to charge the very air around me. I felt the hairs on my arms stand at attention and was suddenly terribly aware that I still wore my dance uniform from class—nothing but a short practice tutu, a corselette, and tights.
“And Psyche was the mortal woman who became his bride,” he added, sounding careful, cautious.
“Oh.” I swallowed. “Of course. I think…I think I remember that story.”
“It’s a very good one,” murmured the Angel. “Another love story.”
“Will you tell it to me?” I asked, drawing closer to my usual perch beside the mirror. It somehow always felt like the area of the room closest to him.