Both Delilah and Angelique gave a start.
“Vicissitudes?”Angelique whispered. “Where did she learn...”
Delilah shook her head, mystified.
Mr. Delacorte grinned when he saw the blue and disheveled Dot pass him on his way into the ballroom. “Good morning, Dot. Blue’s your color.”
“Good morning, Mr. Delacorte,” she said, with dignity. “Thank you.”
He surveyed the wreckage of the nets. “Oh, well, that’s a pity.”
“Dot was catch of the day, Mr. Delacorte,” Delilah told him.
“Ha! Glad to see her safe and sound. As for me, I’ve been having a look round the attic,” he said.
This seemed evident, as he had a cobweb in his hair, though they didn’t say so yet.
“Please don’t tell us you’ve found a ghost.”
“No such luck,” he said. “But you ought to come and see what Ididfind.”
They gathered around the sitting room at Mr. Delacorte’s behest, and were silent with awe.
Mr. Delacorte had brought down from the attic a dusty stained glass window in a frame, about two feet tall and two feet wide. Against a background of deep royal blue, amber and white petalsof glass had been fitted together to form a large, single, concentric circle.
“Oh my goodness. It’s ourmoon,” Mariana breathed.
An eager Dot had knocked on her door to tell her. Miss Wylde certainly seemed to need a lot of sleep, which was doubtless good for opera singers.
“We’ll suspend it from the rafter over the stage, hang a lamp behind it. It will be beautiful,” Mariana said at once.
“It has to be a good omen. It was in our ownattic. We never would have found it if Dot hadn’t been catch of the day,” Angelique said.
“It was serendipitous,” Dot said.
Angelique and Delilah stared at her, startled.
Dot and Mariana both glanced down and exchanged swift, secret smiles.
“You might want to have a closer look up in the attic,” Mr. Delacorte said brightly, to Delilah and Angelique. “I saw a few other things up there that could be interesting.”
They smiled.
“Thespidersmight want to fight you for it, though.”
Their smiles vanished.
“Well, that’s what husbands are for,” Angelique said after a moment, wickedly.
Four days before the Night of the Nightingale, all of the decorations were in place. The one hundred chairs retrieved from the den of iniquity, looking downright virginal with their coats of whitewashand scrubbed seats, were arrayed in two even sections with an aisle between. In the corners, bushels of paper flowers bloomed up out of huge urns. A row of green felt, purloined from battered old billiard tables and stitched, was laid down like a carpet of grass between the chairs.
They’d made a garden of the surround, lining it with pots bursting with paper roses surrounded by trailing garlands and vines.
And they hung the moon.
With a lamp situated behind, it cast a beautiful, dreamy, creamy gold light. A wall of lamps arranged in a staggered pattern on either side of the stage would light Mariana.
Who, in her simple nacre-colored satin dress flowing in Grecian lines, looked like a goddess.
