Rosalie
Malta, 1925
Rosalie looked up at a shabby eighteenth-century Maltese town house in the village of Kalkara. With rooms inside that were let only to foreign performers, it was to be her new home. She went inside and was shown a large bedroom on the second floor, with a balcony wide enough to sit out on. She caught her breath when she saw the spectacular views of the Grand Harbour and Valletta itself. From the Kalkara peninsula the city stood just across the water, shining and golden, and above it fluffy pink clouds floated by lazily. The liquid shine of gold from the city seemed to spill out onto the water, but of course it was just the reflection. After her experience at the lodgin’ ’ouse Rosalie hadn’t expected anything asbeautiful or convenient as this, only about seven miles from Valletta by road.
‘Quicker to get a ferry or adghaisa,’ Gianni said.
Thank you,’ she replied as he prepared to leave. ‘For this and for the job. I won’t let you down.’
He grasped her hand and shook it. ‘Be sure you don’t.’
Gianni was a tall muscular man with astonishing dark eyes, a hooked nose, and a powerful presence due, she felt, not merely to his physique. Two gold teeth had gleamed when he smiled at the mention of his wife Karmena and he had whistled with pleasure when Rosalie auditioned for him. And yet when he’d shaken her hand with his own gnarled ones, she had felt gripped by the strongest feeling you wouldn’t want to cross a man like that.
Soon after he’d gone, she hung a few of her clothes on a rail behind a gaudy gauze curtain and then wandered down to explore the village of Kalkara itself where she found a square, a church, a café, and a small shop. She bought fresh fruit and tomatoes from a grocery cart, plus bread, olive oil and cheese from the shop, and decided she would eat on her balcony as the sun went down. She wasn’t due to start work until the evening after next. Until then? She wasn’t sure. She seemed to have landed on her feet, but this was a new and different world and she had yet to learn the rules. On her way up the stairs, she heard the clatter of crockery in the kitchen she was to share with several other girls, so she pushed open the door and entered shyly.
‘Ah,’ a curvaceous blonde said, the moment she spottedRosalie. The girl had eyes the colour of a stormy sky and spoke in strongly accented English. ‘You are the new girl.’
‘I am.’
‘English?’
‘French. Riva Janvier.’ Her new name felt strange on her tongue.
‘Welcome. My name is Erika. I am from Hungary. You working tonight?’
‘Day after tomorrow.’
‘Come with me tonight and you’ll see what it’s like.’
‘Thanks. I’d love to.’
Erika laughed. ‘Don’t say that until you’ve seen it.’
Later Rosalie was sitting on a leather stool at the highly polished mahogany bar of The Evening Star, a mirrored room painted in colours of crimson and gold and lit only by gaslight. It was deeply atmospheric and already heady with smoke, but she liked it. On their way Erika had pointed out the Cairo Club, the Egyptian Queen music hall, the Four Sisters bar, and so many others Rosalie could not recall.
‘Everything is here,’ Erika said. ‘Restaurants, dance halls, jazz bars.’
‘I love jazz,’ Rosalie said. ‘In Paris …’ but then she stopped herself. Best not say too much about Paris.
It was still early and nothing much was happening yet at The Evening Star. She was talking with an English-speaking barman, a Maltese man named Ernest, who was filling her in on what lay ahead.
‘Some of the bars are seedy.’ He shrugged. ‘So the streetgets called The Gut. Military come here for a good time one way or another.’
‘And they get what they want?’ she asked.
He raised his brow and gave her a knowing look.
‘So, who works here?’
‘In the street?’
She nodded.
‘Maltese in the clubs and bars as waitresses and barmen like me.’
‘And those?’ She pointed to a glamorous but extremely young woman in an evening dress.
‘She’s one of the hostesses.’
