He tensed, gripping a pew back. He’d never had a father, never cared for the heavenly variety, yet the way Ella now lifted her tear-streaked face to God, as if seeking comfort and findingit, was like the scent of warm bread as his stomach growled. He closed his eyes, grasping the back of that wood pew like a lifeline, standing strong against whatever was threatening to sweep over him.
When he opened his eyes, they had left the cemetery, but Ella’s sister lingered at the outer gate, looking back to the stones within. The desire was huge to approach Lily and have a conversation—he hadn’t promised not to tell her—but the notion of Ella walking home alone after this quiet graveside remembrance wouldn’t release him. He bowed his head and strode out of the church, eager to feel the weight of it lift when he left this place.
Yet it did not, not on the entire walk home. God, it seemed, was not ready to let go of him. He threw his hands in the air and yelled, “What? What do you want with me?” His voice sent a pack of pigeons flapping up and away between crowded buildings. A few people walking on St. Charles Street glanced his way, but he wasn’t interested in them. None of them. Only one person mattered in the moment, and her memorable little face wasn’t anywhere to be found.
Yet when he found her at last, standing outside Craven with her back to him, she clung to the arm of Philippe Rousseau. The man looked down at her with tender devotion that made Jack step away, the intruder. The outsider.
She’d once leaned on Jack that way. The memory caused a physical ache. At least he could verify with his eyes that she was safe—and that she no longer had need of him. He turned, head bowed, and left her to the life she’d always dreamed of.
He shook away the images and turned on his heel, pretending to inspect a rack of cooling candles hanging in pairs. Suddenly he felt as foolish as the small boy sitting in the stands, awaitinghis mother’s return. She didn’t need him. No one reallyneededhim. Not even Philippe would need him for long. Jack stared at the back of Ella’s trim figure, trying to recast her in his mind, to put her in a new, more distant role in his heart. She was no longer his concern, and that’s the way he wanted it. The way he needed it to be.
He’d been drawn to her from the start, and for once he’d become attached. Painfully so. God had folded back the layers of his soul around her, bit by bit, until he now lay exposed—and alone. What was the point?
Well, thepointwas opening his eyes, of course. The answer came to him almost automatically. Nothing else would have shaken up his world quite so much as encountering Ella Blythe, and it was the only way God could have gotten his attention. Beyond that ... perhaps he’d been a conduit. Someone used of the Almighty to bring this woman’s dreams to her, and to prepare Philippe to be the man she needed. The one she believed him to be, and the one Jack sincerely hoped he was now capable of becoming.
36
Icarried the weight of everything I had learned onto that stage. There was such a significance now to my performances, for they meant far more. Success was not optional. Not with all that I had cost this theater—and even more so, my mother.
There was nothing for it but to pour everything into the performance and make it count. So pour I did. Every lift, every turn, every raise of a pointed toe was infused with the intensity of my angst over Mama, indebtedness toward Fournier, and a passionate desire to be worth the expense to them all.
“There’s no space in this world for illegitimate children when they come into it. They’ve got to carve out their own.”Jack’s words came back to haunt me, and the ache to speak with him deepened.
Up until today, I’d felt equal to the task of earning my place eventually, of proving myself. Today, I felt I was a child pretending at life.
I looked over the audience before we began the first full night of Jack’s ballet. Not one blue-velvet chair back was visible in the whole place and the rear walls were packed too.
Aisles were jammed and balconies overflowed. My gaze drifted as always to the peep, reconnecting with a memory. I smiled sadly as my hazy mind imagined a face there, looking out at me. Mum’s face, a white porcelain profile framed by delicate tendrils. And she was smiling—always smiling. Philippe’s face, watching as I once had watched him, delightfully shocked at what I could do on the dance floor.
I moved with ease through all the scenes but felt my heart pounding as we began the third act, the lover’s argument and the fire. The revelation of a murderer.
The scene opened as two dancers moved in tandem, one directly behind the other—the two Delphines. Then they divided, each dancer mirroring the other, and there was an audible gasp from the audience. The paces grew impassioned, fervent. One would spin, then the other, competing for the same position. Then one ran behind a sheer curtain. Philippe as de Silva twirled behind it and the pantomimed argument ensued. I turned away, sick with the knowledge of what they were saying.
Then he left, and I held my breath. It was coming. The big reveal. How would the audience react? From the wings of the stage where I waited, I looked up into the high ceiling of this fabled old theater that was about to relive a most horrific night of its history. Would it allow such secrets to be released after keeping them in close for so long?
A cymbal clash, a flash of light, and the theatrical fire flared. The audience gasped. I spun back onto the stage for my part, but something was wrong. Minna had frozen in her dance. All the dancers ground to a halt, even though the music continued. Minna screamed and darted offstage as one tulle frond went up in an instantpoofof flames and disappeared. Smoke pouredaround the set design from backstage, and shrieks came from the audience. “Fire!”
I tasted metal in my mouth as realization struck me. The theater had not forgotten that night. And we had only stirred its memory, re-creating the cataclysmic blaze that had changed everything.
I stood frozen in place, acutely aware of past and present converging in a single moment. All along I’d been marching toward this. Living her life within a mirror, one of those stage props to give a ghost effect. And now we’d reached the tragic ending that I never could have avoided. Smoke poured over the stage. It was coming for me, marching me toward my fate, the theater ready to swallow me whole too.
I will not let the theater ruin you as it didme.
Heart thudding, I broke away and scrambled backstage with the rest. Flames ate up a discarded curtain on the floor, raced up a dangling pulley. “Drop the fire curtain!” The call came from somewhere, and Jack the circus performer scrambled up the ladder at stage right, swinging from the harnesses to yank a cord that dropped a heavy curtain. Men surged past with buckets and blankets, dancers fleeing through the side door to the alley.
I hurried toward them, but bodies clogged the narrow steps down. I looked back and the flames leaped toward us, as if searching me out. Then I saw Tovah scrambling in the other direction, toward the cellar stairs. Maybe she knew of an exit. Perhaps she was heading for certain death. Lifting the overlayer of skirt to cover my face, I bolted after her. I coughed as the smoke thickened quickly, flailing about to find the doorway down. I saw a cape moving not far away and ran for it, reaching out for my friend. “Tovah!”
The figure turned and grabbed my arm, the strength of itbiting into my flesh. She yanked me toward her and a white face appeared between the folds of the hood. “You.” It was Lady Gower. Jane Fawley. Delphine. Crazed and frantic, she pulled my face to hers and I felt the moisture of it. The heat. “You stole my name. Everything I am. You ...replacedme!” She grabbed a fistful of my costume in her other hand, staring into my face and seeing my mother. Seeing the story my life inescapably resembled.
“What did you do to her?” I was paralyzed, in the grasp of this woman’s fear that had destroyed my mother. Another tragic end of a story that began withnot enough.
“Delphine must end.” Her breath fanned my face, her spit landing on my chin. “There can only be one.”
With a savage growl I tore away, stumbling toward the stairs. Then she clutched me with a vice grip. For a flash, I felt immense pity. Then her face contorted as one possessed and she shoved me back toward the stairs. I grabbed her arm in fear as I pitched back into emptiness, but she faltered, her body colliding into mine and we were falling together. I flailed, nails desperately scratching at the wall, but her weight sent us hurtling down into darkness. Stone steps battered my body, knocking my head and jamming my shoulder and hip. Sickening thunks and blows that knocked the wind from me.
At last I struck the cool floor at an odd angle and lay still, denying the blinding pain coursing up my leg and through my pelvis. It wasn’t serious. It couldn’t be. I’d escaped the tragic ending I had been dreading.
Hadn’t I?
