Light Fantastique Read online

  “Bien.” Lucille released her grip on Marie’s arm, and they walked into the front hall. Lucille drew a curtain back, glanced outside, and let the material fall back into place with a heavy snap. “They are still out there.” A wrinkle of indecision appeared on her forehead, an unusual expression.

  “What were you so concerned about earlier?” Marie asked. “Why did you chase us out of the theatre? Is it safe to go through there now?”

  She almost asked about the strange man who appeared to her in her dressing room, but she still was unsure if it was real or if she had dreamed the whole thing from the tortured mind of the Henriette character. That was the problem with playing someone whose brain ended up being addled by opium.

  “The devil inside or the angel of justice outside,” Lucille said, and her shoulders slumped. “At least there is the chance the devil sleeps.”

  “I’d probably find his company more interesting.” Marie turned to go, but Lucille put a hand on her shoulder.

  “You are well aware that sometimes good intentions end up badly. Keep that in mind and be careful. A strong man can only protect you to a certain point.”

  She let go, and Marie entered the theatre itself. A lone figure sat on the stage and played the violin with a touching, mournful air: Maestro Bledsoe.

  Merde. That’s what I get for implying my interest to my mother. I should’ve known it would work out for me to see him.

  But something in the music tugged at her, and she stood behind a pillar and listened to it. The expression of the notes made her homesick for something, but she didn’t know what.

  A piece of paper fluttered down from the balcony above her. Marie looked up but couldn’t see who had dropped it. She picked it up and shoved it in the pocket in her cloak.

  * * * * *

  Sometimes the wanderlust in Johann subsided just enough for him to feel a twinge of homesickness. The snow outside made him think of how his family home would look now at the beginning of the holiday season. Perhaps a light dusting would give the peaks and sharp-angled roofs a glittering edge, or a heavier fall would make the old hall look like a dowager trimmed in white fur—dignified and elegant, but also potentially deadly.

  His mouth twisted into an almost-grin at the association. One never escaped a conversation with his grandmother, the dowager Marchioness, without some sort of scar. Typically for him it included a hint or direct statement of what a disappointment he was to the family, a dreamer rather than a doer like his older brother.

  A fluttering movement caught the corner of his eye, and he looked up to see Marie standing in the back of the theatre, something clutched in her hand. Whatever it was disappeared into her cloak pocket, and her expression distracted him from curiosity about what she’d caught, if anything. Longing warred with confusion on her face.

  “Mademoiselle?” he asked. “Are you all right?”

  “That music,” she said and put a hand to her middle between her heart and her stomach. “It made me homesick for something, but it doesn’t make sense. This is my home, such as it is, but now I miss…something. What were you playing?”

  Johann had spoken with hundreds and played before thousands, but he’d never told his secret. His gut said he could trust her even if he wasn’t trustworthy himself. What would it be like if he was, if he could bear open his heart to someone else? He’d never wanted to, and the idea struck him as strange, but accustomed to going with his impulses, he stepped into that space between fear and trust.

  “It’s my own composition. I call it Winter.”

  She moved closer, and the amused lift of her cheeks became apparent when she stepped into the light cast by the lamps in the orchestra pit. “Original title.”

  He put his violin on its stand. “You mock me, Mademoiselle?”

  Her smile vanished, and now her cheeks reddened. “Oh, no! It was lovely, but it needs a name that’s less bleak and more poetic, maybe Blossoms Under Snow?”

  He liked seeing her blush and wondered if she was one of those women whose flush covered her entire torso if it was deep enough. He sent a desist thought to his groin, but it bounced the notion back with the urge to keep her talking and blushing. “I can’t use a word like Blossoms in a composition title. I’m far too manly for that—it would make me appear weak.”

  “Then how about icy shards? That shouldn’t challenge your masculinity.” The temperature in her tone matched that of the hypothetical ice.

  What had he said? It figured he would get himself in trouble before long. What did she want?

  The answer came to him, then—to be respected for who she was. And he saw her as a very strong woman. But he didn’t know what to say to get himself out of this mess. He only knew one thing—he didn’t want her to leave angry.

  “Forgive me,” he said and took her hand. That was always a safe bet, much safer than the ones that had ended him up in this mess, the ones he’d taken to escape his father’s influence.

  “For…?” She wouldn’t look at him, and she snatched her hand away.

  “For being an ass. I’m too good at it. I didn’t mean to imply that womanliness was the opposite of strength. In truth, you and Iris are two of the strongest people I know.”

  “Iris? You are on such intimate terms with her?”

  “Miss McTavish, then. Yes, we’ve been working together to help Edward, and no, nothing improper has occurred between us. We’re…friends.”

  “You’re not accustomed to being friends with women.” Her statement was almost a question.

  “Not typically. I’ve not treated them well in the past, I fear.”

  What was she doing to him to make him want to confess and clear his conscience to make room for… For what? He certainly had no desire to be tied down to anyone. As soon as he got this little problem with the Clockwork Guild worked out, he planned to continue the adventure they’d started, perhaps even to the Ottoman Empire and beyond, and he wasn’t afraid to go on alone.

  She drew back, but she didn’t leave. “Why the sudden burst of honesty?”

  “It was the music. It is a piece about my home, and I play it when I miss it.”

  She took a seat on the front row, and he joined her but sat with a proper seat between them.

  “Where is home for you?” she asked. “I know you’re from England, from near that little village where Cobb’s train picked you up, but not much else about you.”

  The sentiment hung between them—other than that he had an apparent gambling problem.

  “Ossfield Manor,” he said. “It’s one of the noble estates in the countryside, beside Edward’s family estate. We grew up together.”

  “So your father is…”

  “A marquess.”

  “So you’re a noble son?” Her face expressed amused disbelief. “I should have guessed.”

  “A second son. And how so?” He looked at his hands, his fingers calloused from his long years playing music. “These don’t look like a nobleman’s.”

  “No, but you have the air of a spoiled brat about you sometimes, although you have a good balance of loyalty, at least to your friends.”

  Now he was truly offended. “Mademoiselle, you wound me. I’m not a spoiled brat by any means. In fact, the money I lost was completely my own, not my father’s.”

  “But couldn’t he have helped you?”

  That was the point, for him to refuse. But all he said was, “He didn’t want to. In fact, he sent me away in disgrace and told me he didn’t want to ever see me again.”

  “So why did you do it, gamble so much away you’ve made trouble for yourself?”

  He’d never been able to explain to Edward, who did what he wanted and whose family had long given up on trying to push him into any sort of role he didn’t care for, but Johann recognized that Marie seemed to struggle with a reluctance similar to his. He took a deep breath and pu
shed his father’s disapproving face out of his mind.

  “It’s family tradition for second and third sons to go into some sort of trade or role that would help the running of the estate, whether it’s a magistrate, some other local office, or even a businessman who can help broker the estate’s goods. No useless army commissions or clergy vocations for the Bledsoes, especially since those require an investment of some sort.”

  “So they pressured you?”

  “It wasn’t pressure so much as lifelong training. ‘Make yourself useful’ was my parents’ refrain from my childhood, and art and music are the most useless trades of all.”

  “Even though you’re disciplined enough to have made it work for you. I heard of you long before I met you.”

  He jumped on the chance to distract her from her line of questioning so he wouldn’t have to tell her about the stupidest thing he’d done. “Was I what you expected?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Oh?” He moved to the seat next to her. “And what did you expect?”

  She shrugged and pulled her cloak around her. He took the hand that was on her lap and kissed the back of it.

  “Monsieur, you presume. And you haven’t said how your family drove you to gamble.”

  But she didn’t draw her hand back, and he trailed kisses from the delicate soft skin between her index and middle knuckles down to her wrist. Now he was close enough to see the blush did extend down her neck, and he wished she wasn’t wearing a cloak, that he could see more of her chest and the delicate pink she would turn when she thought of him kissing other things, for that particular maneuver hadn’t failed him yet. When he reached her wrist, he allowed one tooth to lightly graze her skin before the final kiss. She shifted, her breath quickened, and he wondered what unladylike sensations he made her feel.

  “Marie!” Lucille’s call drew them both to their feet like marionettes jerked to attention.

  “I have to go.” Marie drew her hood over her head and disappeared through the door beside the stage.

  He sat to allow the evidence of his ungentlemanly feelings toward her subside and smiled. He might have told her more than he had any other woman, but he still hadn’t revealed the extent of his juvenile stupidity even if she did make him fuzzy in the head like a young buck. He’d always liked actresses and hadn’t hesitated to bed them, but he promised himself he would be careful with her.

  It’s always best to not bite or sleep with the hand that feeds you…or her daughter.

  He returned to the orchestra pit and picked up his violin. He hadn’t seen anyone in there, but he found a note when he opened his case.

  You may think Mademoiselle St. Jean is another of your games, but she is not for you. Stay away from her, or your true nature shall be revealed.

  Chapter Nine

  Théâtre Bohème, 2 December 1870

  Marie walked quickly, every step a delightful torture due to the sensations at her core and between her thighs.

  Mon dieu, what was that about?

  The answer came before she wanted it to: it was her usual pattern. Due to her stupid talent, men saw in her what they wanted. Johann Bledsoe liked actresses—she’d read that in Cobb’s dossier on him—and she was playing a woman who had been caught up in the same great passion she inspired, at least in the sensationalized version of the Hector/Henriette story Light Fantastique told.

  She had to stop due to her tears obscuring her vision in the dim passage. There was no point in tripping over her own disappointment and twisting an ankle or worse—she was deep enough in the bowels of the theatre now that no one would hear her calling, and it was possible that they wouldn’t find her for days if she injured herself.

  It had felt like an honest conversation, two people deciding to trust each other just a little, but as with everything in the theatre, it was an illusion. The only real part was that she might find herself attaching more to her idea of him. He had an artist’s soul—that much was apparent, and it was enough to keep drawing her down a destructive path like water in the inexorable groove of the sewer.

  That’s a lovely image, and trying to find the good, pure part of a man beneath all his merde has never gotten me anywhere.

  She stopped her mind from following that notion and paused between two set pieces. She glanced around to make sure no one saw her. The cool air and quiet settled around her, and the smells of musty wood and decaying paper and paint did nothing to dispel the feeling of being in a tomb.

  Where old sets go to die, and now I descend into Hades, she thought for the hundredth time before pulling open a trap door and allowing her foot to find the first of the narrow steps in the darkness.

  Unlike the wooden stairs leading from her most-used sewer passage to the other end of the theatre basement, these were of stone, and she wondered again who had built them and for what purpose. She’d asked Zokar when he gave her directions as to how to find his camp, but he’d only told her that they were there before the theatre and probably extended farther toward the surface to a long-destroyed church or monument. That was the most logical explanation for why she always had to walk through a city of the dead to reach him.

  Her torch was in its customary place at the bottom of the stairs, as was the little tin of matches that always held just two—one to light the torch and another in case the first didn’t work. It was all he’d allow her to keep there, and if neither lit, she wasn’t meant to visit him that day. She wondered if he somehow manipulated them or the torch to keep her from coming at inconvenient times. There was nothing she’d put past him, and she thanked whatever god might be listening that he was on her side.

  The torch lit with the first match, and the words scrawled along the walls, souvenirs from when the passage was used as a prison during one of the uprisings, seemed to jump out at her. Most were pleas to God or other supplications, but she paused at one and traced it with her finger, her usual ritual.

  But I loved him.

  They echoed her own feelings of betrayal and frustration, and she wondered what woman—or man, which she allowed the possibility for since she’d known enough actors—had scratched the words so deep she still hadn’t found the bottom of their despair with her fingertips.

  The passageway led her deeper underground, and the walls took on a natural stone look.

  Although she knew the bones had not been disturbed in a long time, she always held her breath and tiptoed through. She stayed alert for the rattling noise that would indicate they came to life like in the cautionary tales about girls who would get lost in the catacombs and fall prey to angry ghosts. Marie had started exploring the underground areas around the theatre as soon as she could get enough time away from her watchful mother and give her governesses the slip. She had a good sense of direction and soon figured out what passages led where and which were dead ends or too full of sewage at certain times of the year. Lucille never approved of these explorations, and keeping an eye on her daughter was one of the primary motivations for allowing Marie to start acting.

  Now through the catacombs, Marie had to focus on the scratches on the walls again. They seemed random here, but she knew how to discern their patterns. She didn’t know how Zokar did it, how he changed the way she reached his camp every time, but she’d found out once that following her previous trail and not following the lines in the strange language on the walls would lead her to one of those dead ends or disgusting sewers. One time she’d needed to bathe in citrus water for a week before she felt like she shed the smell just from being near it.

  Finally a warm glow at the end of a tunnel so long she felt she must have gotten something wrong told her she was close. She inhaled the scents of wood smoke and food cooked with spices that made her feel warm all the way from her nose to her stomach, which growled. Her little ham and cheese roll hadn’t lasted long, and her mouth watered.

  As always, Zokar was there to welcome her wi
th a warm embrace. His wife Saphira offered a bowl of hearty beef stewed with those wonderful spices.

  “I could hear your stomach a mile away,” he said, and she felt his words rumble through his barrel chest. His full black beard was streaked with more gray than the last time she’d seen him, but his face looked just the same, as did Saphira’s.

  “What’s the news?” Marie asked him and followed him back to the fire in front of his tent, one of many in the large cavern that seemed to be natural, even to the vent at the top that drew the smoke. It always felt backwards to ask him what was going on since he lived underground and she on the surface, but he was always more informed.

  Out of necessity, he’d told her.

  She was so used to seeing him jovial that when a scowl crossed his face, she stepped back and nearly tripped over a goat pen. He steadied her elbow, and Saphira only shook her head. She never spoke, having come from Romania, where her tongue had been cut out for a supposed lie—a common punishment inflicted on the Romany who lived there as servants and then as slaves. She’d been one of the lucky ones to escape, and Marie was always conscious that her heritage made her vulnerable to scapegoating and the unjust punishments that came with it.

  “What’s the word on the siege?” he asked and sat with a heavy sigh on one of the makeshift chairs, a crate covered in blankets.

  Marie settled on the one next to it. “It’s a stalemate. Some supplies are able to come in through the underground and airships, but not nearly enough, and I fear the people will riot soon.”

  He nodded. “And the theatre? Is Lucille having theft problems?”

  “No, Maman hasn’t mentioned any. She is doing well, her usual self. I don’t know what her network is telling her, but she doesn’t seem to be too worried. She’s busy with the start of the next production.”