And as the first group of men leap across the stage in thegrand allegro, Mara wipes away the first tear she has shed since the night the Crow gave her that coin.
Dance only exists in the single instant of the dancer moving. Before it is only potential, an itch in the muscles, a yearning between two bodies. Afterwards it’s at best a sheen of sweat on the skin, panting breath and the music lingering in your fingers. There is nothing else. If you are not dancing right now, perhaps you are not and never were a dancer. Until you dance again.
And if you never do?she wonders as she watches Romero soar into the air in thejeté. One day you dance and so you’re a dancer, and the next day you don’t and so you’re a… what? She’ll find out soon. In forty to fifty days, depending on when Belinda arranges their days off.
‘Thank you, everyone,’ Cecile calls. ‘Good work. Take fifteen and I will see tonight’s cast of the court scene back here.’
Blast. That’s her.
***
Two thirty, and downstairs in the musicians’ green room Henry sits on the edge of a chair with his score spread on the table in front of him and his violin on his lap. He follows a few bars with his fingers, shakes his head and tuts, goes back to the beginning of the page.
The door opens and Henry looks up expectantly, although he knows exactly who it’ll be. He has been waiting for him to finish playing for ballet class and come here for the break before rehearsals.
‘You don’t mind, do you?’ he asks, rubbing rosin on his bow. ‘There’s a bit in act three I find a bit tricky.’
Michael sits down in a chair by the door and pulls out his notebook. ‘It’s fine. I have these.’ He rummages in his pockets, pulls out his earplugs and presses them into his ears.
The thing about this score – and he’s only been playing it a few months, not like some of the other musicians who are decades in, could hum it in their sleep – is that it sounds like everything else Henry’s ever played. There are a few nods to Tchaikovsky – the marches and the harp, the way the Suitors and Princesses solos all match theirpas de deux, and you can hear the pomposity of Elgar in the court sequences. The hunting dance could be Mendelssohn, allquivering and lush, and parts of act two could be Prokofiev, teetering on the edge of discordant. It’s confusing, and if you don’t pay attention you’ll slip into some other score you used to know from years ago.
Then, to complicate things, there are all the parts of the score lifted directly from the Fae. The Blue Princess’s solo reminds him of the song that used to open one of the lavish winter balls. The melody of the White Suitor’s solo is very like the one that he used to play while the Fae supped on dessert at their banquets, and the Pearl waltz is based on an old Fae lullaby. It makes his heart ache. He spent his childhood humming those tunes and his youth practising them note by note on his violin. For the past twenty years this music has lived only in his mind. Until he came here.
He’s put it together piece by piece in the years since he returned, taking out each memory, shining it, putting it carefully in its place. The earliest thing he remembers is a hawthorn grove in full bloom, the wizened trunks of the trees alive with insects and warm to the touch. He’d been lying in a willow basket – as his nursemaid told it – wrapped in a flax blanket and giggling at the clouds as they passed by on their white-as-cream mares bedecked in ribbons and tinkling bells.You not three years old and your golden curls shining in the sun there, oh! You were gurgling and singing away – the sweetest sound it was, and the Queen couldn’t resist you!
He never asked about his mother, a woman long dead by now, her bones mouldering somewhere in the earth. Never wondered aloud what possessed the woman to leave him ona bright summer’s afternoon at the foot of a tree in froth with may blossom, without so much as a nail to protect him. Never considered her shriek when she came back and found her basket empty.
The door to the musicians’ green room swings open with a long creak and Sandra the clarinet shuffles in.
‘Hi Henry, you okay?’ she asks in her quiet, mousy voice.
He smiles tightly. ‘Yes thanks.’
She glances at Michael slumped in the chair and her face darkens with disapproval. Sandra is a joiner-inner, a helper, a let-me-know-if-I-can-help-honestly-it’s-no-trouble kind of woman. She’s a Miss Bates who wants to be a Jane Eyre and secretly worries that she’s a Mrs Bennet.
‘Act one Crow’s solo, is it?’
‘The Redpas de deux, actually.’
‘Oh yes, that one is tricksy for strings. I’ll leave you to it. Just let me know if I can help you at all, it’s no trouble.’
He pulls his lips back in another approximation of a smile and she adjusts her lank hair in its chipped barrette and settles in an armchair just opposite him. He tries not to growl. He’s learned that kind of behaviour doesn’t help you fit in among humans. She opens a bag and takes out a package wrapped in white paper and blotched with grease.
‘I can’t tell you what a happy day it was here when Gino finally agreed to do takeaway!’ she giggles, unwrapping a sandwich and releasing a waft of hot brie into the room. Annoyingly, Henry’s mouth waters a little. The chef here is surprisingly good. Not as good as what he was raised on,of course. It’s a myth that you’ll never leave if you eat fairy food. Every time he’s read it in a stupid mortal-written book he’s wanted to scream and strike it out. He ate nothing but buttermilk, honeycakes, pears and mallow fruit every day of his childhood and still he’s here, exiled in the cold, stinking hell of the human world.
He goes back to the score and tucks his violin under his chin. He can feel Sandra’s eyes lingering on his instrument which makes him soften to her a little. Carved from a single piece of juniper wood, its grain ripples along the f holes, and in certain lights the wood appears to move with the vibration of the strings. The bow used to be strung with human hair, but over the years it’s proven too much effort to source it and now he uses horsehair like all the others. It was given to him by the Queen herself, at the beginning of a May Day banquet when he was about ten years old. He remembers how the wood warmed to his touch as soon as he took it, how the strings sang as he plucked them, how the living pulse that flowed from the scroll poured into his palm.
He adjusts his chin rest, raises his bow and begins the Redpas de deuxat half tempo. This part of the score is odd, a Fae jig turned melancholy in stateliness. Not for the first time, Henry wonders about the traffic between the two worlds. The other musicians have only a few topics of conversation and most of them make him feel like pulling out his eyeballs from boredom. The only discussions he can bear to listen to are where the score forThe Apple andthe Pearlcomes from. They debate it endlessly without resolution, the Jarndyce and Jarndyce of the green room.The Fae gave it us, note perfect. It evolved from a single song like us from the amoebas that float in the sea. Every hundred and one years there is a new composer, a new choreographer and a completely new set design and that’s how the Crow keeps immortals coming back for more.
He stops playing and starts flicking through the score. He comes to the last few pages, to the Crow’s solo in act three, and looks through the mess of notes. Sandra’s right, the Crow’s solos are difficult. Human and Fae music – which seem to amount to the same thing – are based on fours and threes. Either theda-dum da-dumof a heartbeat and theda-da da-daof footsteps, or the swayingONE-two-three ONE-two-threeof a baby rocking to sleep in warm arms. It’s fed to you from birth, dripped into a place beneath memory, beneath language, etching itself on the spiralling ribbons of your DNA.
But the Crow’s music comes from an entirely different kingdom. There are no melodies and you can’t sing it. The time signatures are all over the place; it’s muddy, atonal and as soon as you catch onto something familiar it flies away. The closest thing to a tune happens in the act three solo where there are a few bars of sevens lent a bit of pulse by the timpani, before it dissolves into a random mixture of fives and nines with no phrasing, no breath, no roll and bounce in the notes.
His violin hates it. It quivers with distaste under hisfingers and all the way down his arm. The instrument is Fae-crafted and it just about tolerates the human world, but it rears away from whatever the Crow is. Everyone thinks it’s the salt and the iron that keeps them all from being snatched into paradise but they’re wrong. It’s whatever black, flapping, cawing thing lurks in these parts of the score that leaves the Fae bamboozled.
It was only after he joined this show that he discovered there was anything in any world that could bamboozle the Fae. In his childhood he’d regarded himself as a worm among gods, living in an ever-deepening state of panic and disgust. The sweat from the creases under his arms, the stickiness of the saliva in his mouth, the flaking of his skin, the moulting of his hair. And always the stench of him and all his effluvia, lingering in the air, leaving must on his clothes.Leaking again, his nursemaid would sigh.Clean yourself up, boy. Before the lords and ladies catch a whiff of you.He learned to hide the foul parts of his human nature in Fae. He learned to pretend that he didn’t piss and shit like the other changelings, he was – if not perfect – trying his best in an endearing kind of a way.
He was perhaps fourteen years old, it was hard to tell, and he was miserable because his body was betraying him, a different blow every single day. Tiny eruptions of pus on his face, coarse hair the colour of straw sprouting under his arms, at his groin, on his chest, on his sweaty upper lip. A voice that careened between a growl and a squeal, dreams of burning and drowning that awoke him with araging erection that shamed him. Human desire was taboo in Fae. Every day he would stare at himself in the looking glass, despairing. His nursemaid, who still retained her old affection for him would wince when she saw him.Try to hide yourself away until you’re presentable again, won’t you dearie.
