Thank you, I said, and returned to my room to wait, where I stood by the window, looking out into the dark garden again.
What luck, what luck it was that had put me here, a welcome guest in their celebrated company. And yet the one feeling stranger to me than being unable to rescue myself from an unlocked room was my growing sense, as I listened to her, that I did not want to be rescued—not from this. The menace I’d previously ascribed to her and whatever this school of hers would be was gone, and in its place was the feeling that I did not want to leave, perhaps ever. As Pauline returned to her careful vocalizes, and I heard the sure-footed power in her voice as it ran its paces, I recognized that her voice had some of the timbre and qualities of my own—a sense of recognition I’d not had previously. Before I’d had even a single lesson with her, I knew, now that I was here, I would do well not to leave her side, not until I was finished learning everything she could teach me. I’d never met a woman like Pauline and had met her at a time when I feared not one woman like her existed in all the world. In some way I had never known how to express, I’d feared I would have to become the first of my kind, whatever my kind was, should I be allowed to survive—that which history has never seen before. Instead, here Pauline lived; she had done what I feared I would have to do and now lived as the most liberated woman I’d ever met in a world she’d sung into existence with a voice much like my own. And whether or not she could teach me to sing with this strange voice of mine, I wanted to learn how to be like her as much as possible, and so I did not feel like a captive now. I felt saved. To leave would mean leaving this education undone.
Yes, I could stay until after tonight, or I could stay until the spring. Or I could stay until she was done with me. I knew already what I would choose.
For now, the price was the performance I was to take up again, waiting for me in the trunks by the dressing room; I had a few more moments before the tenor roused himself and it would begin again. I poured water into the washbasin at the table and began to gently wash my face with a cloth. The strange pity I’d felt earlier for the tenor returned—and while it was strange to think of him as the innocent in this, he was; and the more I did think of him this way, the more that pity began to change, though I was not yet aware of it or what it meant.
Pity, which, it should be said, is the ambassador of love. And it grows only from a position of power. And I did feel powerful, at last, as I sat, shook out my hair, and, with a fine new hairbrush found waiting among my parcels in that first trunk, began to brush my hair flat. I felt as powerful as if I’d already escaped into my heart’s desire.
One day I would leave him, and I would not explain. Whether I left with a summons to go at once to the Emperor’s side or because I’d earned my eventual freedom, either way I knew I would leave and he would never know, and he could never know, this was among the conditions. And if I did my best, he, in turn, would protect me and more. He would need to believe on waking what he believed as he slept there across the hall, and he would need to believe it constantly, so that he would never see the moment when it came. There should be no falseness to it, I told myself, as I prepared to put my hair back up.
What I did next, I would do every night after. Whenever you think of the one, think of the other, I told myself. This is how you will survive. And so I built a secret second heart inside my heart, a little theater full with my memories of my real love, such as they were—a gilded cage for him made of this music, the torch in the night, the music room in a palace. All of it would be hidden at the center of the other heart, the one I’d always had, now an alias as surely as the name I had given the world. There was a secret door, of course, hidden by a view of chestnut trees gold with autumn in the afternoon sun.
I recalled the two of them as they were that night at the ball when they performed together, when I watched, hidden, until the Princess Metternich scared me away. My true love and my false one. If I could see that memory each time I saw the tenor, I could smile as I ought to, touch his neck as I ought to; I would behave entirely like the lover he believed was here, and I would travel safely to my true love on the other side of these days before me.
Wherever the Empress still kept him, this was his home with me.
§