A long, lingering look. “I recognized you almost immediately as his. Besides, no one is ready for the sujet after a mere two years in Paris. That is, unless dancing is already in her blood.” She came to stand beside me, looking up at the vivid painting. “It’s easy to see at once that you belong to him, and to ballet. One has the notion from looking at you that you never walk anywhere. Not when dancing is an option.” She winked.
I smiled at her and returned my gaze to the portrait, learning every feature and nuance of the man who had always been naught but a shadow. “What was he like?” It was a vulnerable question, revealing the huge lack in my life, but she took it graciously in stride.
“A gentleman. Refined and genteel, but all fiery passion on the stage. I often wondered if he was a dangerous man behind closed doors.”
“Whatever became of him?”
Shock flitted across her features at this admission that I had missed more than his past. “I have no idea. He disappeared. No one’s heard from him in years. They say he changed his name after the fire and remained in the shadows, though which ones I could not say.”
I stared at him, trying to decode the guarded look on his face. “Was he ... that is, doyoubelieve it’s possible he’s responsible for the fire?” I nearly asked her if she’d let him into my flat last night, if she knew anything about the missing shoes, but I’d already gone too far.
She studied that portrait, measuring her words. “Yes. I do.”
Something delicate shattered within me, as if I’d lost a parent all over again, but I fought to keep my face impassive.
“I’ve no doubt he had good reason, though. Delphine, she was a difficult partner—demanding and passionate when it came to ballet, which is what made her magnificent.”
I blinked in shock. “Demanding?” Yet fire melted things, of course. Melted and softened. It was the first time I’d let myself believe the fire had brought any good to Mama’s life.
“Everyone loved Delphine, and she cast a charm over them. Women were drawn to her femininity, men to her seeming need for protection. But when it came to ballet, and Marcus de Silva...” She clasped her hands before her. “They complemented one another well onstage, he the gentleman and she a true lady in every way, but they were a constant explosion. She wanted nothing less than perfection in ballet, and he was much more of a free-form artist. Besides all that, she never liked thewoman with whom he fell in love. I never heard who she was, but it seems she and Delphine simply could not tolerate one another.”
I blinked, mind stretching to accommodate the odd revelations coming one after the other. Another woman? The tortured look on Mama’s face haunted me now, with new layers of understanding. Perhapsthiswas the reason he’d kept their marriage a secret. And why she’d never told him she’d survived the fire. He’d found another woman.
“I suppose your mother, whoever she is, came into the picture later—after things blew over with Delphine and this ... other woman. Or perhaps ...”
I looked away, unable to fill in the information she sought. No, my mother wasnotthis other mystery woman. She was the original woman, my father’s true partner and wife, no matter what Mama Jo seemed to believe.
I wanted to cry. And to never search for my father.
No, I wanted to find him so I could give that wretched deserter a piece of my mind.
“You see, it is all a complicated muddle, and it seems your mother knew that if she kept you away from your father for long enough ...” Her statement was followed by a raised eyebrow, asking a question.
I wasn’t sure which question she was asking, but I sidestepped them all. “So this is why you think my father set the fire, because he wanted to be rid of Delphine and her jealousy of this woman?” I nearly choked on the ridiculousness of that notion—a wife being jealous over her own husband.
She turned her shadowed face to me, staring me up and down. “Marcus de Silva kept a great many things to himself. If he ever held affection for Delphine, no one in the theater knewit. Or perhaps it was all a different matter. No dancer is without a certain amount of theatrics in real life. It simply leaks from the stage to the home, no matter how hard one may try to avoid it.” She sighed. “Mark my words, ma petite.Every romance that begins in the theater ends with just as much tragedy as the ballets themselves.”
I stiffened my spine. “Noteveryballet is a tragedy.” Philippe’s face swam through my mind, somehow mingling with the dramatic face of my father.
“You see, this is one reason I never married. When you work as hard as I once did, and the only men you meet are dancers...” She shrugged.
When I looked back at the portrait, my father looked down at me from that portrait, and suddenly the oils on canvas were not enough. His face was unreadable, just like Philippe’s, and I had a wicked, selfish desire, despite my promise, to know what was behind it. What he would think when he truly looked at me. It was as if, by understanding my father, I could understand that stony, silent Philippe.
I thought of my father quite often in rehearsals that day, as if he were watching. As if he would recognize me across whatever divide separated us and realize, as Jack and Mama Jo already had, that I was his daughter.
My muscles quivered in their hold as the man known as the great furnace came around the side of me and scrutinized the line of myattitudeleg lift. He frowned, one eye nearly disappearing in the folds of his face.
“Like a flower, not a tree trunk.” His voice was low, rumblingfrom somewhere deep in his chest. He reshaped the circle of my arms, and I felt brittle to his touch—stiff and fragile. “Now, try again.”
I swept my arms down and made the turn, forcing poise and grace into my steps, but his grimace did not lighten.
“Again.”
I repeated, muscles sore with tension.
“Again, again. Lift from the chest.”
His frown had deepened every time I saw it.
