Our Strange Duet

Chapter 1

Paris, March 1895

A mirror never lies.

As I all but collapsed onto my little stool, wedged before our section of plated glass in the corps de ballet dressing room—­all the way in the back corner, squeezed between an armoire and a wall to illustrate that Madame Giry did not play favorites—­it all but screamed the truth.

“I think I’m dying,” Meg gasped, falling beside me, pink-­cheeked and out of breath.

We stared hard at our reflections, taking stock of the evening’s damage. Covered with a slick sheen and the ghoulish tracks of running eye cosmetics, we looked wrung out and half dead.

“I can’t believe Mother made us run through the mountaintop section twice after rehearsal.”

“I didn’t think it would ever end. The singers would come back in the morning, and we’d still be onstage, picking through choreography.” I began peeling away a length of beaded snake from my arm. The serpents were affixed to us with globs of spirit gum and fervent prayers. Even still, the fabric strips were notoriously faulty, freeing themselves from our sweating bodies and littering the stage like macabre confetti the singers were forever tripping on.

Ubaldo Piangi, the opera’s principal tenor, had stumbled across a particularly realistic asp backstage before his first entrance and let out a shriek so loud he had to be put on complete vocal rest for the ­evening.

And our leading soprano, Carlotta Giudicelli . . .

We’d only just begun technical rehearsals for our new production of Gounod’s Faust, and already everyone was wistfully daydreaming of closing night.

“Can you unlace me?” Meg asked, spinning round on her stool to present her back.

In this opera, we began as beautiful young women, parading about a vast garden, only to turn into a swarm of witches and demons later on, in Act V. Our final scene was on a mountainside on Walpurgis Night as we writhed and twirled about the titular tenor in a bid to lure him from the woman he’d sold his soul to acquire.

The costumes were nothing but tattered chiffon and carefully placed paillettes, and had to be handled with great care lest we incur the wrath of the wardrobe mistress, Madame Barbier.

I loosened the cording, and Meg swooned against me with a grateful sigh. One of the dozens of pins holding up her silver horned wig poked my arm, and, playfully, I poked her back.

“Some of us are going out for supper,” she mentioned, straightening up to pull out the hairpins. They fell onto our shared table like an April downpour.

She snatched up one of the wig forms, but I grabbed it from her, spotting the daaé label. Meg was forever putting her costume pieces in my bins, mixing our jewelry, and sharing our makeup. We’d lived together for nearly half a decade, and we were just as close as sisters, but that didn’t mean I wanted her too-­small wig pinching me come next rehearsal.

“You should join us,” she added.

I considered the offer, thinking about the scant number of francs I had squirreled in my reticule. Our next payday was opening night, four very long days away.

“It’ll be such fun,” Meg persisted. “And with you halfway across town, in your very grown-­up apartment, I never get to see you. Not like we used to.”

“What restaurant?” I asked, wiping a wet towel over my face to remove the layers of melting greasepaint. Meg had a point. I’d moved out of the Girys’ house earlier in the season, when I’d first made the company and the prospect of a reliable monthly salary had made me hungry to act upon my sense of growing independence.

Meg shimmied free of her costume, letting it puddle on the floor as she skipped over to grab at her dressing robe. Such immodesty should have made me blush eleven shades of red, but after nearly a year in the corps, being backstage with singers and dancers in the midst of all stages of undress, nudity was nothing but a routine workplace occurrence.

“Le Chat Noir.”

That sealed it. My purse could not stretch so far, even if I ordered just a glass of wine and nursed it all evening. “We’ve been on our feet all day and you want to go dancing?” I made a face, hoping to talk her out of it. “Come to my apartment. I can make dinner instead. I’ve got a . . .” I paused, now thinking about the sorry state of my pantry. I so badly needed to go to the market, but with the start of dress rehearsals, there just wasn’t time.

“We’re not dancing!” Meg protested, her tone as bright as the blond curls cascading down her back. “Tonight, we are the audience! It’s sure to be grand. Frederick even says that they end the show with the cancan!” She whispered the scandalous words as Madame Giry—­ her mother and our ballet instructor—­strode into the room without bothering to knock.

Her dark hair was pulled back in its usual braided chignon. Her expression was thunderous.

“What a rehearsal! I’ve never seen such careless pas de bourrées, such dismal sissones. Meg Giry, you were a full count behind on the final garden combination. Truly a disgrace! I should make you all return to the stage and run through it again until it’s perfect!”

The room froze, waiting with bated breath to see if her threat would actually be carried out. It wouldn’t have been the first time.

The corner of her lips twisted into a frown of displeasure. “Fortunately for you, Silvio has already gone home.”

Meg let out a soft hiss of relief.

“But I expect each of you warmed up in the practice hall one hour before morning rehearsal, so that we can work through the adagio.” Madame Giry’s voice—­perpetually raised to be heard over the clunk of Silvio’s practice piano—­always sounded hoarse, as if she were on the cusp of a cold. Tonight, it all but cracked. Even she, it seemed, had been worn out by the long rehearsal.

With a sharp turn, she left, and, moments later, we could hear her through the thin walls, berating the male dancers with added fury.

“I wasn’t that far behind, was I?” Meg asked, tying the sash of her robe. She backed up and prepared to mark through the steps barefoot. She began the plié, then faltered. “I need the music. I can hardly hear myself think in all this madness.”

The dressing room had begun to empty as girls hurried out to enjoy what remained of the night, but the chatter was still loud enough to set my teeth on edge.

In the far corner, Lisette Sartienne was holding court with some of the newer members of the corps. Last month, she’d been assigned a soloist role in one of the ballet’s workshops, and now the rest of the dancers treated her as if she’d been coated in gold dust.

She held up one hat, then another, watching her reflection with a critical eye as the other girls fawned.

“Count me in, Christine. Marguerite’s ‘Jewel Song’?” Meg asked, drawing my attention.

I noticed the way her brow had pinched, concern gnawing at her expression. For as much as she loved to play the role of blithe coquette, no one else in the corps took their dancing as seriously as Meg. She would absolutely spend a carefree night at Le Chat Noir, flirting with anything that moved over endless coupes of champagne—­but she’d be at the barre for a solid hour after, her eyes fixed on the mirror, making sure every line of her body was angled to perfection.

I gave her the four bars in question, humming the score as I took off my own wig. A mess of dark curls spilled free, and I finger-­combed through them while watching Meg’s reflection.

She dipped and twirled, her usually fluid, sweeping movements stifled by the confines of the cramped space.

When the tempo changed, ceding over to the opening notes of Mar­guerite’s aria, I switched too, lightly singing the first lyrics.

“Ah! Je ris de me voir. Si belle en ce miroir. Ah! Je ris de me voir. Si belle en ce miroir.”

I lost myself in the melody, letting the French words roll over my tongue as fluently as my native Norwegian.

I’d always had a knack for picking up languages. As the daughter of an itinerant violinist who had played in whatever café orchestra was willing to pay, I’d spent my early childhood traveling through Europe, picking up Italian and Spanish, English and German. And, of course, French. Father had firmly believed that no place on earth celebrated music more ardently than France.

At heart, I was not a dancer. Not truly. Not like Meg. Though I’d spent my adolescence in studios, mastering the rigid positions and repetitive movements that ballet demands, I often confused échappés with entrechats. Madame Giry’s walking stick was forever nudging my feet into more extreme angles while I flexed and stretched at the barre.

But I knew little else.

When my father had died four years ago, wasting away within a fortnight after a doctor’s grim prognosis, and I found myself as a sixteen-­year-­old orphan, I’d needed something to save me.

Blessedly, Father had died in Paris.

He’d been good friends with Madame Giry’s husband, and I’d known her well enough that, when she’d approached me after the funeral, asking what I intended to do with myself, I answered her as honestly as I could: by bursting into bewildered tears.

She’d cleaned me up and taken me in, letting me stay with her family and share a room with her daughter, Meg. After a week of me and my grief hopelessly underfoot wherever I went in the crowded apartment, she enrolled me at the Conservatoire de Paris, where she was an instructor. As she took me to my first class, she’d wondered aloud if any of my father’s musical gifts might have worn off on me.

They had.

I could stay in tempo, keeping time, and had an innate understanding of the way my body was meant to move with a melody. While I would never be a prima ballerina, I wouldn’t embarrass myself—­or Madame Giry—­by swinging a bower of roses along with the opera’s corps de ballet.

But secretly, in the deepest recesses of my heart, I wanted to be a singer.

I knew I could never swan about the stage, commanding an audience’s attention with the same swagger as Carlotta, but I loved to hear my voice blend with other instruments, tangling and entwining to create music twice as lovely.

When Father had been between jobs, we’d visit street markets to earn our supper. He’d leave his case open to catch passersby’s coins as he played popular tunes that I could sing along to, drawing a crowd as my tiny voice rose above his racing runs. I knew my tone was clear and sweet, and Father often praised my vocal range, but we traveled too much for formal training. I’d never found a true instructor, and so my secret dream stayed nothing more than that: a secret.