Die Upon a Kiss (42 page)
I was in the court today,
it said without salutation, without date or address or any kind of identification, but he knew the hand. He had last seen it on a note informing him that the writer was on her way out to Cornouiller Plantation on Bayou des Familles.
I don’t think you saw me, though I was within a
few feet of you. It is surprising what a tignon and a
beaten look can accomplish. As I have reason to
know.
I wanted you to know that if they had convicted
Mr. Davis of the crime, I would have spoken. I
would rather get away free, as Vincent Marsan did
for my brother’s murder, but not if another had to
take my place on the scaffold. I’m not sorry for
what I did, nor would you blame me, if you knew
the life I endured, after Aucassin’s death. Mlle.
Jocelyn will have hardship, and I’m sorry to do that
to her, and to her mother, for they are blameless. As
I was.
You were good to me. More faithful even than
Silvio and Bruno. You came back into the burning
theater to help me, who was a stranger to you, and
whom you already knew to have done murder. I try
to remember things like that, when Marsan’s face
comes to me in dreams—or Silvio’s. I thank you.
Maybe one day I will have the freedom to be
that kind of friend.
January folded the note and tucked it into the pocket of his coat. Unsigned, and written in French—a language she would deny she wrote.
War is easier than loving.
Did Marie-Drusille Couvent have the courage to live in peace?
He looked up at his sister on the doorsill above him, arms folded beneath the blue-and-ruby gorgeousness of her shawl. “Thank you,” he said. And then, “Don’t let one of your friends tell you that it isn’t too late. If you change your mind about what you’ve decided, speak to me—and only to me.”
“I won’t change my mind.” Her breath was a cloud of diamond in the soft gold light from the room behind her. “I love him, and he loves me.”
Do you believe that makes any difference?
Instead, he said, “Go to bed. He isn’t coming.”
“I will.” But after she closed the door, she left the heavy curtains open, so that the light would fall welcoming through. He saw her go back to her dressing-table again, and pick up her book.
My mother hath a maid called Barbary,
Desdemona says to Emilia as she prepares herself for the coming of her lord.
She was in love, and he she lov’d prov’d mad, and did
forsake her. . . .
Like Desdemona’s willow song, the music would not leave January’s mind as he walked back down Rue Du Maine. Sidonie Lalage had waited, he thought. And Drusilla d’Isola. There were more ways than the violence of passion, for love to wound; more ways than one, to die upon a kiss.
From the corner of Rue Dauphine he glanced behind him, and saw the gold light of Dominique’s window still lying on the wet pavement, keeping faith with Henri in the raw blackness of the night.
OPERA IN NEW ORLEANS
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, opera held a position in popular entertainment almost equivalent to motion pictures today. There were wonderful operas, there were bad operas, and there were god-awful silly operas, and in the early nineteenth century New Orleans had probably the most active opera and opera following in the United States.
John Davis—to whose shade I extend my sincerest apologies for making him a suspect (although by all accounts he probably would have been tickled: he seems to have been that kind of man)—not only produced operas of close to European standards, but took his company on successful tours of the northern cities for several years running. There actually were “opera wars” of the kind I’ve described once James Caldwell opened a rival opera house on Camp Street, including putting on competing productions of the same opera in the same season. The original American Theater did not burn down as I’ve described in the book, though its successor did. In fact, incendiary destruction seems to have been the fate of most theaters in that era of gas lighting and nonexistent safety laws.
All the operas mentioned in the text, with the exception of Incantobelli’s
Othello,
actually existed, although it’s difficult to find recordings of some of them. The 1830s were years of transition, from Classic Opera into full-blown Grand Opera, with elaborate sets and over-the-top special effects. In this period neither Verdi nor Puccini had written yet, and many of their predecessors— like Auber and Meyerbeer—are far less well known today. (I looked very hard for a video of the ghosts of the mad dancing nuns.)
German opera was only just beginning to come into its own, and only one piece—Weber’s
Der Freischütz—
seems to have been popular in New Orleans.
Prior to Verdi’s 1887 rendition of Shakespeare’s
Othello,
there was at least one other opera of the play, by Rossini in 1816. (The tragic ending was rewritten because audiences in Rome found it too much of a downer.) (Rossini wasn’t the first composer to put Beaumarchais’s play
The Barber of
Seville
into operatic form, for that matter.) It was not unknown for producers to insert other music or popular songs into operas, or to tinker with the texts—in Italy it was not uncommon for the performance to be discontinued after the death-throes of the star, since nobody really wanted to see the rest of the piece anyway. I have done my best to give a sense of what opera must have been like at this era: grandiose, overblown, politically hot, sometimes silly but enormous fun.
Since blocked toe-shoes did not come into use until the 1840s, ballerinas really did do pointe-work supported by wires. Apparently some of the most famous actually worked on pointe without wires, with nothing more than lambswool stuffing and extra stitching on the toes of their shoes. They must have stayed on full pointe for relatively short periods of time, and must have had astonishingly strong feet.
Mostly, the object of the opera ballet was to provide a leg-show to the young bucks in the audience, many of whom had girlfriends in the corps: the dancers seem to have been a lot closer to Broadway chorus ponies than to the artists of today.
No plan of the original American Theater exists. I have based my reconstruction of the building on contemporary descriptions of it, and on the plans of other theaters in existence at the time. Likewise, I have tried to reconstruct pre-electric—and pre-Argand—stage lighting and effects as well as I could, from such histories as are available.
As always, I have tried to tell a story to the best of my ability, without doing violence to what I’ve been able to find out about a time, a place, and attitudes very different from our own.
If you enjoyed Barbara Hambly’s
DIE UPON A KISS
you won’t want to miss any
of the superb mysteries in the
Benjamin January series.
Look for
SOLD DOWN THE RIVER
and
GRAVEYARD DUST
at your favorite bookseller’s.
And don’t miss
WET GRAVE
the latest Benjamin January novel, available
in hardcover in July 2002!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
BARBARA HAMBLY attended the University of California and spent a year at the University of Bordeaux, France, obtaining a master’s degree in medieval history. She has worked as both a teacher and a technical editor, but her first love has always been history. Ms. Hambly lives in Los Angeles, where she is at work on the sixth Benjamin January novel,
Wet Grave
.
Also by Barbara Hambly
A Free Man of Color
Fever Season
Graveyard Dust
Sold Down the River
And coming soon in hardcover:
Wet Grave
DIE UPON A KISS
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