Every singer knows to be careful of her dressing table; it is its own kind of stage, an intimate one. Most of her secrets appear there. Admirers often sought to give gifts so they would be displayed and thus warn off another suitor. And if you wanted to make someone jealous, you left out something they would not recognize—you could even buy it for yourself.
This tiny bottle, it was the size of my death if I did not get it back; I knew it. But having disavowed the flask, I couldn’t think of how to ask for it. Doro was never not in the room when I was there. She found London odd and a little dull, she said, when I offered to give her a day off.
How funny to think it so, she said to me, when she told me this. I had expected more of London.
I had expected more also. I’d imagined finding a house in London where Aristafeo and I would be alone at last, no reminders of our life previous except each other. I dreamt of a simpler life, one where I would sell my jewels, furnishings, gowns, all down to the last trinket. Everything would be new.
Instead, I had left nothing behind, it seemed. Or, at least, not what I had hoped to lose. As Doro wrote to Lucy to tell her to sell my things, I thought of the fortune-teller telling me I would get everything back. I only hoped she meant the flask.
Nine
AS THE VEIL had bothered Aristafeo so much, I left it off when I dressed for the opera the next evening and had even assured myself I would not be recognized. Mourning only mattered if you were known to those watching. But the London audience outside the Royal Opera, to my surprise, recognized me immediately as we exited our cab. The low mutter came: Is it her? Is it her? It is, it is, and then La Générale, and just as someone might have come forward to introduce himself, just as I felt that flush of something like pride at being recognized, Aristafeo ran to speak with an acquaintance of his, leaving me alone with the public gathering around me.
We were the guests of his friends in their box. I wore a jet silk velvet gown cinched to the waist and black velvet gloves beaded with jet, this to set off the tenor’s emeralds. Their color was the rich green that is called poison green—why, I have never known.
Poison, in my experience, is always hidden; it seems to me we never know its color.
As the murmur of the crowd grew, another elegant carriage drew up to the entrance. This one adorned with the unmistakable insignia of the French Empress-in-exile, now simply known as Eugénie de Montijo.
She had come for the Royal Opera the same as we, she now a somewhat extraordinary resident of London’s suburbs. Her driver leapt down, knocked out the footstool, and opened her door. I glimpsed her looking off to the side as if she waited for something more than this to summon her from the depths of the carriage.
She stood, still a regal beauty. She wore black as well, though she was no longer officially in mourning—the Prince Imperial’s death had been three years before, in summer, and with him had gone the hope of a restoration. France had meanwhile shouldered on, as if the imperial return she’d hoped for were out of the question and the Empire and the excesses of it and the excesses of its fall were all the sorts of sins democratic elections could atone for in the Third Republic. The papers were still full of discussions of imperial excess, even now. And everywhere, still, was the ostentatious false piety regarding luxury.
Which is to say, it was easier to wear these emeralds in London.
I stood there, full of my old longing to run to her, to make her smile again as she had once smiled at me. It would have only frightened and confused her, though. What’s more, I wanted to be sure she did not recognize me as she stood uncertainly in the cold night air and stepped down from the carriage. While I am sure there is a way to greet one’s ruler in a foreign land, I did not know it, and so instead, with a suddenness that surprised me, I dropped into my old servant’s curtsy and threw myself at her feet, my face pressed into my skirt.
The London crowd, momentarily stunned by my appearance and then hers—her celebrity, her air of tragedy and fallen empire, her hair white since the Emperor’s death and illuminating her still-fragile beauty—reacted with shocked silence.
I’m told she paused to smile down at me with affection, as the reports all said later.
It was not the manner of this curtsy to look up.
The British newspapers reported the French singer Lilliet Berne, the famous Falcon soprano who never spoke in order to protect her voice, greeted her Empress-in-exile with the full grand curtsy that night. The grand curtsy was very different, though, performed at the balls the Empress had once thrown, done when one was presented to her. That curtsy was performed by sinking noiselessly to the floor and pressing one’s face into the skirt of your gown as you held it out to the sides, so that the woman performing it resembled a bloom that had fallen on its face. You then rose up again and dipped, your face tipped down, your head, and, what’s more, your hair never above the height of her eyes, before you sailed on, making room for the next lady coming in behind you.