I set the novel down, full of the same dread I’d felt since being told of its existence and rang for my breakfast tray.
Not quite a week had passed since the bal and the mysterious novel’s arrival, and in attempting to certify whether its existence constituted a betrayal of some kind, I had gone through my short list of suspects—Euphrosyne, the tenor, the Comtesse—without luck. Euphrosyne seemed entirely innocent to me, even of carelessness, and seeing her glittering in her elegant home reminded me that my past was not a subject she spoke of to others, just as she did not speak of hers; she would protect me much as she protected herself. She had forgiven me instantly for my abrupt departure from her salon, and now each day’s mail brought me more letters from her of the bal she was planning for me.
My visit to the tenor had likewise reassured me that all between us was as it had been for some time. His long obsession with me seemed unchanged. I did not suspect him of being the source of the marriage rumor, either. He had once proposed marriage to me, and I had rejected him as, just as the Comtesse had said so plainly all those years ago, I was as unfit to marry him or any other men of his class as I ever had been; and this, like his social class, would never change. What he wanted from me did not require marriage nor did it derive from it. We both knew that when he saw me sing on that little stage at the Majeurs-Plaisirs he hadn’t imagined our sitting with a batch of baby tenors and sopranos, and my pulling at a spindle somewhere in Prussia. He imagined us together in Paris, on the stage, at last singing Il Trovatore at Les Italiens.
I had rejected him by reminding him of all of this in no uncertain terms. And by denying him, I had ensured he would be a servant to this dream forever and, in a way, to me—in a way that protected me. My visit had assured me all of this was as it had been since that rejection so long ago. It would thus be too painful for him to joke in public of something he still desired.
And there was every chance he had since married some Prussian princess picked out by his family at birth and left behind to be the mistress of that distinguished, ancient, if also somewhat reduced, domain—him all the while in Paris. In the times I had seen him since the end of our liaison, he had seemed richer than before, and I knew well that for men of his class a wife was what secured you your inheritance and her dowry, and a lover was where you spent both. But I did not know, and had never asked, if there was a wife. Either way, I no longer suspected him.
The Comtesse alone remained, albeit out of reach. I had never told her of the end to my liaison with the tenor. I was sure my value to her—and our bargain—had ended once Eugénie had been driven from the palace. The discovery that she was still surrounded by agents, and French agents at that, not Italian ones, a decade after the passing of the Empire, this had only made me fear she did not agree that our agreement had ended; this left me the more sure she was my mysterious antagonist. And while the police officer I’d spoken to that day seemed content to think he knew me for knowing my reputation as a singer, if he were to check into my background, he might find that series of mysteries that could lead him even a little of the way back to the Comtesse, who knew the answers to most every question he might ask—and I was certain she could still provide my old dossier on request. For all I knew, she had my old carte from the registry and the record of my examinations and arrests—and death.
This novel and the opera, though if a plot of hers, had not yet revealed her style. If she sought some final revenge on me, she was unlikely to come for me this way. She had a great love of theater, yes, but her theatrics were meant to draw your attention directly to her. If she was behind this, it would mean she had changed in some way I had not foreseen and couldn’t imagine. And certainly, hidden as she was now inside of her blackened apartment, this was possible.
My single consolation was that if the Comtesse read the paper as the officer had, then she likely knew the rumor of my forthcoming marriage to the tenor and might be reassured to think the arrangement she’d set was still in place. That might stay her hand if that hand was raised to strike.