He blinked from the rain and surprise. No, he said. Not this way. For now, I cannot.
Are you so afraid to leave her now? I asked. I gathered my dress to me. If you won’t, please, get me back so I may at least leave this place. I pulled away from him.
He remained standing there, looking down to his feet.
The rain fell softly again as we stood there, neither of us moving. In some way, our refusal to act or speak allowed us to be at rest with each other again.
What hold does he have over you? he asked me again, as he had at the ball.
You, I said. If I will marry him, he lets you live.
He laughed. What then?
I let my head rest on his chest.
Leave with me, I said. If not today, soon. Leave with me and I will create the role. But not here. London, Saint Petersburg, Rome. Anywhere but here. If I leave, you must also.
Are you mine, then? he asked.
Yes, I said. I knew it as soon as I gave the ring back. And you, are you mine? What of this? And her? I waved at the woods.
He took the ring from his pocket and slid it back on my hand and pulled the tenor’s ring off, handing it to me.
Yes, he said. I’m yours. I will always be grateful to her, he said. Because of her, I was able to grow strong enough here to find you. But I’m yours, always yours.
§
I saw the old friends, as the tenor had put it—he and the Baroness—emerging from the house as we approached.
She had already dressed for dinner.
I dismounted and Aristafeo ran off and returned with a black blanket warmed at a fire. Behind him came men carrying hot-water bottles. When I slid the blanket over my shoulders, I could smell his verveine and something else, of neither Rouen nor Paris. Him. His own blanket then? I wondered.
He looked down and to the side as I wrapped it around myself.
A pity, the Baroness said, as she walked toward me. Your dress! I will pay for it.
I shook my head, for it felt like bad luck to take any money from her in light of what I had just taken.
She relented a little and allowed me to undress in one of her apartments with the help of her maids, who clucked over the ruins of the dress and prepared a hot bath for me. When I was warm and dry, they dressed me in a muslin shift and wrapped me in hot blankets again.
Her carriage would take us home.
From inside it, as the driver’s whip cracked, I did not look at her or Aristafeo as we left, or at the tenor, who prattled on as to the party and the Baroness, saying, I’m ashamed to say it was some sort of audition. I’m very sorry, I was not told, not until after, when she bragged to me of it.
The tenor was changed. He was speaking as if to someone else in the cab. Your composer apparently told her he needed to hear you without the costumes and the lights, he said. To which she said, Then she will come and sing for us, and if she must, she’ll appear naked.
He laughed. Now look at you!
I laughed as well, but my thoughts were of Aristafeo now. The tenor had not noticed I was sitting there waiting for him to turn to me, to acknowledge me. He was only speaking, saying things he thought I would want to hear. Something in all of this had frightened him and now it frightened me as well.
By the time we were in Paris, he seemed himself again, but I was not. I could feel the seal of the life I had led until that afternoon press back over me, insistent, asking that I return to it, and to the little prison hidden within it, where there was no room for Aristafeo, no room even for me. Here was the door to it, the door of the apartment on the avenue de l’Opéra, the place I had thought I could keep somehow and not also keep all that had come with it. I entered the apartment to the shocked exclamations of Doro and Lucy, who undressed me and made horrified faces at the dress’s condition as I unpacked it from the bundle of its ruins while they tried to set me in my own bath. I refused it, though, and asked for a fire and gin.
When they left me, I saw, as if for the first time, the dove-gray walls of the place—I had thought I was so different from the Comtesse. I had found her living crypt pitiable; I had not seen my own.
If she had buried herself alive there, I was entombed within my own life as well. She had, perhaps, taught me even this.
What was my own, though, was the plan we had begun. I would finish Carmen and he would finish the opera, and then he would suggest a plan.
I will take care of it, he had said. I know how long you have waited, wait just a little longer. I will send you a message next week. Wait for my word.
§
Perhaps the very last person I expected to see a week later then was the Baroness, and so I was incredulous when Doro brought me her card and I insisted she at once show her in.
May I speak to you in private? she asked, as she sat.
Of course, I said, ringing the bell and telling Doro and Lucy we would not take tea.
Monsieur Cadiz has challenged our tenor friend to a duel, pistols at dawn in Rouen the morning after Carmen concludes, she said.