Enchanted, indeed.
Fournier stood with his back to me just inside his office, and I approached quietly, with the gentleness of knowing. Yet I had to be certain. Turning the little dancer and her broken mechanism about in my hand, I held it out and spoke. “I don’t suppose you recognize this, do you, sir?”
He turned, looking at me and then the little ballerina. He paled as his fingers pulled on the narrow beard, all the waydown to its point, then he scooped her in his palm as if she were the actual person to whom he’d given her. Lowering with much squeaking into his leather chair, he rummaged about in a narrow desk drawer and drew out a key, fitting it neatly into the mechanism where we’d always jammed the hairpin. With a firm flick of his fingers, the dancer I thought forever ruined sparked into motion and familiar strains emanated from it, even without the beautiful box around her. So much brokenness, but so much was being set to rights too.
He looked up to me, and in that moment everything came into sharp focus, a warmth pouring through my soul as I finally believed it. “You belonged here before you ever tried. You still belong.” He looked down at that dancer turning on his palm, and tears began an awkward journey down the many crevices of his old face. “She only did it for me—taking Delphine’s place—to save the theater I loved so much. She was a far superior being in every way. Inside and out, she ... was ...magnificent.” His great chest shuddered.
I could only nod in humble agreement, full to the brim to know Mama had been loved and appreciated as thoroughly as she’d always deserved.
“She never told me she had a child. We hardly spoke after she married, but you must be ... I can see her in you. And the shoes.” He rose and walked around the desk to stand beside me. “Please stay, Miss Blythe. Ella. Whoever you are. You have a place at my home, if you wish it.”
His deep-set eyes begged me to say yes, but I hesitated, picturing the overwhelming London home where I’d met with investors.
“Perhaps your mother has told you awful things about her old father and you don’t care to be around me, but...”
“I shouldn’t like to impose.” My voice was scratchy when I found it, but my resistance fell away in layers. How pointless it all had been—that striving and worrying, forcing my way into a place I already had free admittance. The absurd freedom of that made me want to laugh.
His face fell. “There’s no one at my house to be put out. My wife was lost to me some years ago, and my little girl...” His expression crumpled. “Well, there’s no one.”
“Not ‘no one.’” I braved a smile and reached out to touch his arm, overflowing with affection for the man who had so loved my mother. “Youdohave a granddaughter.”
The old man squeezed my hand, an involuntary flicker, a steeling against the emotions surfacing in his features. He lifted my hand, first holding it to his chest, then dipped his head to kiss it. He spoke with a broken voice. “I always regretted how I pushed her. How my ambitions drove her to that practice room late at night ... especiallythatnight. And I promised myself when I heard about the girl in the red shoes that I would do better this time. Have I ruined everything?”
Thank goodness for those shoes, and for a sister who all but forced me to wear them to the scholarship audition for luck. I smiled, squeezing his hand, revelling in the beauty of belonging. “You’ve nothing to fear. Whatever you do or fail to do, you are, after all, my grandfather. And as I’ve no one else, I’m afraid you’re quite stuck with me.”
39
COVENTGARDEN, LONDON, MARCH1839
Grandfather strode into the room where a fire popped and crackled, and I set my book on my lap to look up at him. He said only four words. “They’re beginning to talk.”
It had been months since I’d come to live with him, and I’d become used to his proclivity for walking into a room and dropping a few spare words that made no sense on their own. “Are they? And what are they saying?”
“That Jack’s ballet should be run again, the ending completed. We’ve whetted their appetite, and they want to know what happened. And they’d come back tohertheater to see the performance too.”
I tucked my feet under me and looked at his face shadowed by the bouncing flames. Life had become comfortable, filled with tender moments and blessed quiet in this generous old house, and we’d worked together to keep Craven’s ballet company performing across the continent. It was a balm to my soul, andit made me long for the heady rush of being part of a performance. More so as time passed, although I hadn’t admitted it.
“Jack has been working on a new production of it—smoothing out the rushed pieces, making it even better.”
I frowned. “That last one had plenty of merit as it was.” There was something precious and sacred about that creation. Would someone else play my woodland sprite role? Would they use the same choreography that had sprung from that deep well inside Jack and me together?
He settled into the chair across from me and looked into my face. There had been a time that he’d asked all about my mother, about what had happened to her and what she’d been like in the years of her marriage that they hadn’t spoken. Then, once he’d felt a sense of completion about it, he’d simply stopped asking, like a spigot turned off. His face held that curious glow again, though. “Would it set well with you to have her story told? It wouldn’t trouble you, would it?”
“It would please me.”
He gave one firm nod. “You will, of course, dance as her.” The words were spoken so simply, as if he were merely requesting that I shut the garden door behind me.
“Dance ... the lead?”
“It’ll be the story on display, of course, not the dancers. You needn’t worry about mistakes. Stiffness. No one would notice, as long as the climax came this time. And no matter what happens, how many times you fall ...” One corner of his mouth lifted in that quiet smile I’d come to recognize. “You still have a place to sleep.”
I smiled, ducking my head. “Aren’t you forgetting something? I don’t dance anymore.”
“Not when anyone’s watching, anyway.”
My neck warmed. “You’ve seen—?”
“You cannot keep away, and you never will. We’ll have that knee examined if you wish it, but it does seem to be quite healed ... and put into use already.”
