The lead ballerina in bright red twirled into the center, her skirts whirling into a filigree flower around her. Amalia Brugnoli, favorite of the great choreographer Armand Vestris, had captivated my imagination since I’d glimpsed her througha window one day in the rehearsal room. Now here she was, dancing before me with acrobatic bursts and the most complex footwork I’d ever seen. I squinted at her tiny slippers—how was she doing this?
Everything about her was strength and perfection, from her smooth chestnut hair to her paces. Astonishment and jealousy wound in equal parts through my veins, thick with angst. With desire. When she landed in anarabesqueand tilted to the right, the music rose to dizzying crescendos, and suddenlythere he was—leaping with bold precision onto the stage, springing forth and spinning in the air, his powerful legs propelling him across the stage again and again.
His legs scissored above the other dancers, and he landed with a double spin on one knee, arms overhead, and swept back into the air with an effortless leap. I sucked in my breath. If ever I’d imagined that ballet damaged a man’s masculinity, he disproved that notion in three beats of my heart. He was all muscle and control, skill and artistry—and suchpower. It oozed from him as he overtook the entire stage, the other dancers merely a background to his stunning performance.
And to think, I’d been in his presence—dancing alongside him.
I withered to the floor when the curtain shut, siphoning off my view of the most magical sight I’d ever witnessed, its intensity still sitting hard against my chest. Ballet was so much more real, more stirring and magnificent, than I’d ever realized. I was alight with more happiness than any devout member of St. Luke’s Church had any right to feel inside a theater, but I couldn’t help it. I straddled two worlds, my heart evenly divided.
I danced my way home through Covent Garden’s crowdedstreets and up the Strand, clutching the soggy program I’d managed to rescue from the gutter outside Craven. When I reached our home on dirty old St. Giles, I paused amidst distant shouts and banging doors to look through the paper for the name I desperately had to know.
North Wind...... principal dancer,Mr. Philippe Rousseau
I gasped, cold fingers over my mouth, and read it over and over. Principal dancer. I had danced with theprincipal dancer.
I looked up at the tiny square window with its four panes of greenish glass, the wealth of moss slicking the walls of our building in this little Covent Garden side street that clung by a thread to respectability. A single errant flower dared to grow between the building’s stones, and I plucked it, spinning that rare show of color between my fingers—beauty amidst poverty.“One day we’ll be dancing together on that stage. Ivow it.”
Impossible as it seemed, I ached with a crushing desire for that promise to be true.
When I climbed the stairs, barely remembering to skip the broken one, dear Mum’s warm smile greeted me, then Lily’s sisterly scowl.
Poor Lily was a pretty, dimpled thing two years older than I, who’d been built for a life of pleasure and amusement, but fate had stolen her real mum years ago and left her stuffed with us in this little flat, a life that snuffed her dreams of men and gowns and coquetry. Her mum, a longtime costume designer who’d worked in the theater when mine was dancing there, had once dressed her daughter in fine leftover ribbons and paraded her about London. I was seven when her mother died, and Lily nine. Now here she was with us, stirring her specialty—soupde scraps—in a pot over the fire, charging me with her look for every minute of work she’d had to do in my absence.
I pinched back a grin as I clutched the precious shoes and program under my cloak. I met Lily’s stare with a smile and spun her around with my free arm before bending to kiss Mama. “Happiest of birthdays, Mama.I’ll finish that cake, I promise. But first, a gift for you.”
Grinning so hard my cheeks hurt, I knelt before this gentle woman and placed the sacred shoes in her lap, ribbons spilling down over her knees. Weeks of extra work and secrecy ... all for this.
And it was worth it. She blinked, mouth falling open and hands framing her face as tears swelled in her eyes. She dabbed them with the corner of her apron and lifted the slippers as if they’d been the crown jewels. “Oh, Ella. Child. Are they...?”
“The very ones.”
“Oh, but how—why...”
I shrugged with a little smile. “Merely returning them to their rightful owner.”
2
She cradled them in her scarred hands, face radiant. “Heavens, child. Where did you find them?”
“You’ve told me a million times in a thousand stories where you kept them after every performance. Those underground dressing rooms are almost all that’s left of the old theater, and there they were, just waiting to be enjoyed again.”
The burn-scarred skin stretched tight over her cheekbones in a soft smile as she seemed to sink back into her memories—the theater, the stories, the telling of them to her girls in tender bedtime moments.
I laid my head on her lap, tracing the folds of her apron. “Won’t you dance again, Mum? It would be so good for you.”
Her hand rested on my hair. “I dance only for my precious girls now. Delphine Bessette is dead, my love.”
Yet I felt Delphine Bessette’s warm hand on my head. It caressed my scalp and communicated her deep love with every stroke. It hurt my heart to call Delphine dead, but in a way she was. A dancer is a rare artist, I’ve been told, because her art vanishes the moment she leaves the stage.
She hadn’t even set foot outside in years, afraid someonewould know that the greatprima ballerinaof the London stage had survived the fire. Or perhaps, I now realized, it was a person she feared. “Who was Marcus de Silva?”
Her hand paused, fingers curling a little against my scalp. “Another dancer. Wherever did you hear thatname?”
I felt her shift and knew her other hand would be creeping up her neck, absently feeling for that little birthmark near her shoulder. With all the strife we’d had in our life, she never did anything to reveal her worry to her girls ... except that. I rose and took her fingertips off the worry mark, as we called it, and kissed them. “Was he jealous of you? Did you quarrel?”
“Let’s not ruin this night speaking of such things. I mean to enjoy and savor your beautiful gift.”
When we’d finished eating, she put on the slippers and danced around the mismatched furniture, my little fairy-mother spinning like the dancer in her music box. I opened the broken box and wound it with a hairpin, watching them both twirl. How could I help but love ballet? It was impossible not to be swept up in Mum’s romantic charm as she danced about our dreary flat, our gray lives, and gave us a small taste of loveliness that was larger than our little home. It made the chipping plaster seem artistic, the close quarters cozy, the empty larder unimportant.
