By now it was becoming light. I could see her soft expression, so like sleep I envied her a little. Soon the tenor would come, he would pay my bail and show my papers, and I would be returned to him.
I had thought to ring for the guards. I looked down the hall to see the one set to watch over us asleep at his post. He’d be angry to be woken, I knew, and would demand to know which of us was who, and it was then I knew it was likely all the same to them which one they buried, and which they sent on to the nuns.
She had been mortally injured but unable to say so, her girl’s body all bruises and infected wounds, which I saw as I undressed her, for I was now determined to take her place. I felt a terrible sadness and also fear, that to even pass myself off as her would make me share this fate or worse. If you were damned before this, I told myself, you’ll be twice damned now. But I wouldn’t be stealing from the dead—she couldn’t use her future, and I could. The only person it would matter to was me.
I remembered the prayer I had said over my own mother’s body and whispered it softly, as if she could listen, and then kissed her hand, pressing my cheek against it.
I know you can’t give a blessing, I said to her quietly. But spare me a curse.
§
The guards came to take us to our breakfasts, such as they were. As I had suspected, the morning shift was new.
You there, wake her up, the first guard said, before the second yelled over him, Wake up, my dear! It is time for breakfast!
They laughed at this, but stopped laughing when she didn’t wake.
They looked at her, arranged in a posture of sleep, her face turned to the wall, her feet set into my cancan shoes, visibly displayed. This had been the most difficult part, her feet having stiffened after death and me still wanting the shoes.
What’s the matter with you? Are you stupid? asked the first guard to me, before the other said, She’s dumb, she can’t understand us. They began miming to me, for me to go over to her.
I did. I pulled at her shoulder, and she fell to the side with that unmistakable slowness of death. I stepped back, my face a perfect expression of terror, fit to make Delsarte proud.
All right then, one less mouth to feed, the second guard said, as he unlocked the door. Our little slut is dead.
§
After breakfast, I was returned to wait in the now-empty cell. I stared at the cell door for some time, waiting for them to angrily return and accuse me of what I had done. But the guards returned to escort me to the sisters, and I was handed a small satchel I understood to be the girl’s effects.
I had not expected this somehow. Light as it was, it was heavy in my hands. Not quite a warning.
Her name was unknown to me, and so as I stood before the magistrate again, he asked me if I understood that he was releasing me to the care of the orphanage. I only stared as I had seen her do.
Sidonie, the magistrate then wrote for my name. He held it up and showed it to me. This is your name now, do you understand? They are giving you this name, will call you by it, he said, and then he gestured for the guards to take me off, and as I left, I felt the name close over me like a door.
§
She is most likely in the rue d’Enfer now, one of many in the hedge of skulls down in the catacombs. There’s an entire city of the dead under Paris, complete with streets and corners. I sometimes wonder if it is any more merciful than this one.
As for me, I was delivered to the Convent of Saint-Denis orphanage. The sisters stripped off my uniform and burned it and shaved my head for lice, as they called me Sidonie and I struggled to remember to look at them as they did so.
I had again taken a dead girl’s name to make my escape.
In the first months, I waited for the police to angrily return, to take me from the sisters and return me to jail. But they never did.
I knew my last life was truly over, my name struck from the registry, a death certificate written for me. No one owned me but me.
Alone in this new country made by my new name, as I walked the convent walls, learning my alphabet, my sewing, I felt something surely miraculous waited for me now, something only possible now that I had died and been reborn.
Act III
Un Ballo in Maschera
One
WHEN THE TIME came for me to find the Comtesse de Castiglione again, it was easier than I would have thought.
She was said to receive no one now, and yet everyone I asked knew where she lived—an apartment on the Place Vend?me, said to be painted black and empty of mirrors, the windows shrouded. The building was stately but conservative, strangely understated for her.