Chapter 8
As I ground the tip of my toe shoe in the box of rosin just off stage left, a severed head flew through the air and struck me in the chest.
From the next wing over, Franz Sch?fer, the props master, let out a long string of curses.
One of the répétiteurs hissed at him to be silent, but Franz wouldn’t concede. “That vile woman is doing it on purpose!” he declared to anyone who would listen. “The head is supposed to be thrown into stage right three. Yesterday, she threw it into two. Now where is it?”
“I have it,” I volunteered from the fourth wing, holding the macabre prop with loose fingers. It was made of burlap, wax, and trailing red ribbons, and was realistic enough that I felt queasy simply looking at it.
Franz hurried over and snatched the head from me as, onstage, Carlotta finished a long, extravagant cadenza. He winced. “God in Heaven, what was Lefèvre thinking?” He turned to go, but I grabbed at the back of his suspenders, waylaying him.
“Elephant,” I warned as the enormous plaster beast came barreling down from its storage bay.
It took four stagehands to ready the creature for its upstage entrance, and another two to operate the mechanisms from inside its torso. The slender men stretched their arms back and forth before climbing in. I was amused to see their ears had been stuffed with wads of cotton.
Elissa was not Carlotta’s best role.
It was the final dress for this season’s gala performance, and if the first act was any indication, opening night would be a resounding success.
Already, Ubaldo had been late for his first entrance, wearing the wrong costume, with his helmet on backward.
Carlotta’s wig—a towering confection of twisting russet braids and a bejeweled crown—had gone missing, and the substitute refused to stay in place.
During an earlier scene, it had fallen off and been snatched up by one of the Carthage army’s stallions.
The animal’s handler had to drag the horse offstage as it pranced and bucked, trying to keep its prize.
A wave of choristers rushed on now, carrying wooden swords and long-poled candelabras.
“With feasting and dancing and song, tonight in celebration,” the women sang, filling the stage with a wall of sound so loud I could feel the vibrations along my sternum.
Meg and another dancer joined me in the wings, readying for our entrance. In this opera, the corps were captured slaves, clad in chained bracelets and swinging skirts of red, green, and gold cording.
“Where’s Lisette?” I whispered to Meg as I noticed Sophie with her.
Meg poked her feet into the rosin box and did a quick rise en pointe, testing the friction. “Gone.”
“What do you mean?” She’d been at rehearsal just last night. “Injury?”
Sophie stepped in as a group of supers made their way onstage, carrying treasure chests full of shining paste gems. “Quit. Her new beau didn’t fancy her showing off all”—she looked at our scandalously low corsets and the length of our exposed legs—“this every night. She’d thought he was joking, but then her station was cleared out this morning. ”
“That’s terrible,” I gasped.
“That’s life,” Sophie said unsympathetically. “At least she got a proposal out of it.” She fixed a reflexive smile on as our entrance music began.
“Hear the drums—Hannibal comes!” the chorus announced as we scurried on, making a grand loop to showcase Ubaldo’s entrance before we collapsed into attitudes of reverence on the button of the finale.
Ubaldo began his recitative but was quickly stopped with a correction from Monsieur Reyer, always a stickler for diction.
As they argued over pronunciations, my mind wandered, and I noticed a familiar knot of wood in the stage floor near my hand.
I frowned, trying to think of why the wood grain would have grabbed my attention before realizing I was in the exact same spot I’d been positioned in earlier this season, bowing then to a bedeviled bass instead of a Carthaginian hero.
I should have found the coincidence amusing, but my mood soured instead.
I was tired of bowing and scraping before the principal singers, surrounding them with fists of thrown rose petals or a beautiful arrangement of our limbs and bodies.
I wanted to join their ranks. The Angel of Music said I needed to be patient, that I needed to wait, but he wasn’t the one with his forehead pressed to the same bit of stage night after night, show after show.
I’d waited for him after rehearsals every night for two weeks, but he had not returned. It was the longest my Angel had ever stayed away, and I worried endlessly that I’d offended him, that I’d damaged our relationship beyond mending, and that I would never hear his wondrous voice again.
I blinked back the sudden prick of tears that wanted to fill my eyes. I was amazed there were any left to fall. I’d cried myself to sleep every night since the Angel’s disappearance. It felt impossible that I should have any more to give.
Just as Monsieur Reyer and Ubaldo came to an uneasy understanding, a commotion from stage right interrupted the scene once more.
Monsieur Lefèvre entered with two other men. Their dark-gray suits stood out in sharp relief against the backdrops of red and amber.
“This way, gentlemen, this way,” Monsieur Lefèvre said, ushering them toward center stage, heedless of the chorus members they displaced. “As you can see, rehearsals are under way for our new production of Chalumeau’s Hannibal.”
From the corner of my eye, I noticed Meg twist around to watch the interruption. Many of the other dancers fell out of their positions as well, some even sitting up to stare openly.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Monsieur Lefèvre said, raising his voice. “Some of you may already, perhaps, have met Monsieur André and Monsieur Firmin.”
I was struck by how different Monsieur Lefèvre seemed today. Gone were the dark half circles which perpetually lined his eyes. He’d lost his usual worried demeanor and was actually smiling. It looked as though an enormous weight had been lifted from him.
Monsieur Reyer tutted at the theatre manager, silencing him. “I’m sorry, Monsieur Lefèvre, but we are rehearsing.”
Ordinarily, Monsieur Lefèvre would have hurried away, throwing hasty apologies over his shoulder, but now he only nodded and took a step back, returning to his conversation with the other men.
Who are they? I mouthed to Meg as Ubaldo once again tried his recitative.
She shrugged as the tenor scooped both his voice and his clawed hand, straining to hit the top notes.
The music for the ballet began, and we rose, altering our choreography to move around the men as they stayed staunchly at center stage, unmoved by the chaos swirling around them.
The two strangers were wide-eyed, their gazes flickering from us to the stage lights above, to the backdrops, to the front of house.
It was as if they’d never seen a theatre before.
As we twirled about them, I could only make out snippets of their conversation, but it seemed to mostly involve appreciation for several members of the corps.
The shorter man singled out Meg, all but licking his lips until Monsieur Lefèvre warned she was Madame Giry’s daughter.
With a gulp, the man turned his attention elsewhere, pointing out the elephant as it rolled on.
Carlotta strode forward, taking her place beside Ubaldo. With her head high, she held up a long red-and-green tasseled scarf before her, all but daring the strangers to not watch. “Once more to my welcoming arms, my love returns in splendor!” she belted.
“Once more to those sweetest of charms, my heart and soul surrender!” Ubaldo answered.
Every company member took several steps downstage, clearing a path for the elephant’s entrance. It was wheeled out to its mark while tossing its head with mechanical triumph.
As the chorus began its final verse, Ubaldo was meant to climb onto the pachyderm and strike a heroic pose, sword brandished high as he readied to bravely face the Roman army.
But because nothing about this rehearsal was meant to go smoothly, he slipped while climbing up the elephant’s side and landed with an ungainly thud.
He grumbled a curse in Italian, loud enough to be heard over the boom of the bass drums—making several of the supers blush—before he struggled to his feet.
He half-heartedly held out the sword, as if this were the blocking he’d intended all along, and the number came to a merciful end.
Immediately, the two strangers burst into uproarious applause, clapping enthusiastically as they tried to make eye contact with every company member surrounding them.
“Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention?” Monsieur Lefèvre called out, clapping his own hands, but several of the répétiteurs had rushed on to begin giving their notes, and, in the orchestra pit, Maestro Messenger had instructed the wind section to run the opening bars again, tsking out his tempo as they lagged.
“Ladies and gentlemen?” Monsieur Lefèvre tried again. “Ladies and…” He glanced to stage left, nostrils flaring with irritation as he squinted into the wings. “Madame Giry?”
The ballet mistress strode onstage and struck her walking stick against the deck. All it took was a single rap to silence the whole company.
Monsieur Lefèvre looked unamused. “Thank you,” he said dryly. “Now. As you know, for some weeks there have been rumors of my imminent retirement.”
Had there? I glanced at Meg to see if she’d heard anything, but she only shook her head, looking as surprised as I felt.
I worried at a hangnail along my thumb and wondered what this might mean for me.
Monsieur Lefèvre was Carlotta’s biggest supporter.
If he left, perhaps a new manager would be open to looking for other talent, encouraging new sopranos to take on principal roles that Carlotta had aged out of.
Without Monsieur Lefèvre’s insistence that she sing every lead, others could shine.