Inamorata (8 page)

But then she glanced away, out toward the lagoon, to her brother, and that expression disappeared, leaving me uncertain of what I’d seen.

“I think beauty has more power than horror, don’t you?” she asked softly.

“Like your story of Mestre.”

She nodded. “I’d rather have the magic. I want to see the world the way Joseph does—he sees so much beauty in everything.”

“He’s fortunate to have the talent to show that vision to the world. I suppose we’re all luckier for it.”

“Yes. I don’t know what I’d do without him.”

“From the looks of it, he feels the same about you. He seems quite devoted.”

“We’re devoted to each other,” she told me frankly. “We’ve no other family.”

That didn’t surprise me. “Your parents—?”

“Died in a carriage accident when we were very young.”

Here it was, I thought, the reason for the haunting shadows in her eyes. “How tragic. Who raised you?”

“Our aunt was our guardian. Have you any family, Mr. Dane?”

I was too good at this myself not to notice her deflection. “A full one, I’m afraid. No unfortunate deaths or illnesses to blight it. My mother and father are well on their way to a distinguished old age. My brother and sister are both married. My sister has proved to be excellent at breeding, which removed from me and my brother the need of providing grandchildren, though I suppose he could have obliged by now. It’s been some time since I visited, so I don’t really know.”

“You don’t? How strange.”

“Not really,” I said. “We’ve no real interest in each other. And my father and I don’t get along. He had other aspirations for me.”

“He doesn’t like your being a poet?”

“He thought I should pick a profession that might actually make me a living. I suppose he wasn’t wrong.”

Again, that smile. “Well, I have great hopes for you, Mr. Dane.” She leaned forward; the movement sent her perfume wafting—violets, I thought, and desire rose unbidden, unfettered and intense.

Just as it had with Odilé.

The moment I had the thought, Giles called, as if the universe had put him in place to save me, “You shouldn’t monopolize Miss Hannigan that way, Nick! You’ll bore her to death with your cynicism. Come over here a moment, Miss Hannigan. Tell me if I’ve truly captured the color of that rose.”

She hesitated; I thought I saw disappointment, and I was struck by the realization that she had wanted to be alone with me, which made me a little too glad. Deliberately I summoned control, which brought a chill to my voice I didn’t quite mean when I said, “Please don’t let me keep you.”

It took her aback, I saw. She colored and rose, going over to Giles, and I watched in interest as he stood back to show her whatever it was he was painting, trying to imagine what words she might find to compliment Giles’s true lack of talent for landscape. Whatever it was she said, it was the right thing, because he exclaimed with pleasure.

He pointed to the balustrade, and as she wandered over to it, I realized that he was asking her to pose for him. I felt a stab of annoyance. It was too late in the afternoon for it; he would have her standing there for hours, and I would be caught up in it, and I’d had enough of the day. There were still things I must do before the sun set. I rose, wandering over to them, saying as I approached, “For God’s sake, Giles, don’t burden her with posing.”

Sophie Hannigan tendered a hesitant smile. “Oh, I don’t mind it. I’m used to it.”

“What else have we to do?” Giles asked.

His words reminded me of the reason I had come to the Gardens today. To keep Joseph Hannigan in my sights, too busy in my world to wander about in Odilé’s. There was a poetry reading at Katharine Bronson’s salon, and Giles and I had promised to attend.

I said to Giles, “We’re supposed to be at Katharine’s tonight, or have you forgotten?”

Giles winced. “Oh yes, I did forget. Well, it won’t matter if we’re late, will it? It’s only Johnson’s verses.”

“Oh no, please, not on our account,” Miss Hannigan said, and there was a stillness to her now, disappointment or restraint. “Neither Joseph nor I would keep you from an appointment.”

I said, a trifle disingenuously, “It’s not an appointment, not really. More of a longstanding engagement. Katharine Bronson’s salon at the Alvisi. You know, you and your brother should come. Yes, you absolutely should. I think the two of you would enjoy it.”

“Whistler was there the other night,” Giles said. “And Frank Duveneck.”

“Oh it sounds wonderful. But I shall have to ask Joseph—”

Giles shouted, “Hannigan! Come here!”

Hannigan jerked as if he’d just awakened from a reverie. He closed the sketchbook, rose from where he sat against a nearby tree, and came over to us. I said, “You’ve no plans for tonight, have you?”

He glanced at his sister, who said, “Mr. Dane has just invited us to Katharine Bronson’s salon.”

“A salon?” He seemed barely waking from his distraction.

“It’s not so boring as it sounds,” Giles said. “At least not usually.”

I said, “No indeed. They’ll love the two of you. Fresh blood, as it were.”

Giles laughed. “The only requirement is that you be entertaining. They put a great store on that. If you can’t be entertaining, you must at least be a good audience.”

“I am the best of audiences,” Sophie Hannigan said. “Isn’t that so, Joseph?”

“But you’re already destined for entertainment, Miss Hannigan,” Giles said. “You’ll never get away with being in the audience tonight.”

She frowned. “Why is that?”

I expected Giles to prattle some compliment about her loveliness or something equally inane, but he said, “By tonight, Stafford will be all the gossip. They’ll want to hear your story.”

“Oh,” she said. “I’m not certain I’ll want to talk about it.”

“They won’t forgive you for withholding,” I said quickly. “You’ll be the guest
du jour
, after all. I give you fair warning: you’ll make no friends with reticence. Not in this crowd. And you should embellish too. They love detail. They expect lies. You’ll be very good at it, if your tale of Mestre is any indication.”

Sophie Hannigan’s smile caught me unexpecting; I had no defense.

She said, “Of course. I shall tell them anything they want to hear.”

S
OPHIE

W
e went back to the room to dress before Mr. Dane and Mr. Martin were to fetch us at six. We were no sooner through the door than Joseph turned to me, taking my face in his hands, kissing me hard. “Mrs. Bronson and the Alvisi, Soph!” he said, ebullient. “I told you, didn’t I? I knew he had the connection.”

I wrapped my arms around him, holding him tight. “You were right, as always.”

“And now, thanks to you, we’re in.”

“Thanks to me? Oh, I don’t think it’s thanks to me at all. It’s more thanks to you.”

“To me?”

“He’s taken with you. I don’t think he’s attracted to me at all.”

Joseph sobered and frowned. He stepped away and went restlessly to the window. “No. He’s interested in you. The sketch and . . . yes, I
know
he is. I saw it.”

“Well he didn’t seem so today.”

“When I left you alone—”

“He seemed quite immune.”

“What did you speak of?”

“I hardly remember. God, I think. Or fate. His lack of inspiration. He was envious of yours, though. He asked about our family.”

Joseph turned, ghosts in his eyes. I felt the ragged edges he worked so carefully to hide calling to mine. “What did you tell him?”

Quickly, I said, “Enough to show him it wasn’t very interesting. Dead parents, raised by an aunt, nothing more.”

I was relieved when his ghosts fled. My own settled in response. Joseph sighed. “Did he touch you? Your hand or your arm?”

“Not once.”

“Did he smile? Or laugh?”

“Yes, but not as you mean. Perhaps you’re right and he is interested, but if that’s so, it’s obvious he means to do nothing about it. I can tell.”

“Martin said he had no other girl. You just need to flirt with him a bit more. Remember what I taught you?”

“Yes of course. I tried. Truly I did. He hardly looked at me.”

“Give him time,” Joseph said dismissively. “He’s cautious is all. He liked the story as much as I did. It was . . .” he trailed off. I saw the memory of it in his eyes, the world I’d made for him that we both wished to live in, where nothing hurt and no one troubled us. And I saw the desire it raised too, that mirrored my own, that made me feel powerful and miserable and helpless. He blinked it away and said a bit roughly, “Believe me, he wants you as much as Martin does.”

I drew off my tight gloves, wiggling loose one finger at a time. I remembered the bitterness in Nicholas Dane’s voice, my thought that he’d been hurt before and meant not to be hurt again. “Perhaps. Though he’s drawn to you too. He couldn’t stop watching you.”

“I’ll remember that.”

“Why does it matter now? Why should either of us keep trying? We’re to go to the Bronsons’. What more do we need him for?”

“We’ll need his support a while longer, at least until we establish ourselves there. And there’s still Henry Loneghan.”

“Yes,” I said on a sigh, setting aside my gloves, pulling out my hat pin. “Loneghan.”

“You know his reputation. People listen to him. They follow his lead.”

“I know.” I lifted my hat, shaking loose the strands of my hair that clung to the veil before I threw it to the chair.

“Dane won’t be able to resist you for long, even if he wants to. Trust me. You’re irresistible.”

I only looked at him.

My brother’s eyes softened. “You don’t have to do it alone, you know, Soph. I’ll do my part.”

I nodded. “I know.”

Joseph looked back out the window. Quietly, he said, “They won’t have heard of us at Bronson’s. Don’t mention Roberts, whatever you do.”

A pall settled over me. “Why would I mention him?”

“I didn’t say you would. I’m just warning you not to. You get nervous sometimes, and things just come out.”

That stung, no matter how true. “I wouldn’t talk about him. I’ve forgotten him already.”

“You’re certain he wouldn’t have spoken to them of you?”

That pall grew heavier. “I meant nothing to him. It was only you he cared about.”

Joseph let out his breath. “Then we’re fine,” he said with satisfaction. “There was no reason to speak of me.”

I went over to him. “It was such a very little scandal, Joseph,” I whispered. “Hardly anyone knew of it. No one was hurt.”

“Only you,” he said gently.

I nodded. I laid my cheek against his back, the soft, worn cloth of his suit coat, and put my arms around him. He gripped them tight. “Only me.”

O
DILÉ

I
stood at the window and watched the late afternoon sun play upon the currents of the Grand Canal, sparkling and settling and spreading to the strains of the pianoforte he played. It was a concerto I knew well. I had heard it as it came to life, each note set fast upon the one before it, a flurry of notes like a blizzard, racing and tumbling from a hand shaking with the urgency to get them down, to not lose them.

I closed my eyes, remembering, savoring. I remembered how he’d finished it, nearly collapsing from exhaustion, sweating with the heat of composing, staggering to me, falling into my arms and bringing me down to the floor, where those notes of his tangled in my hair, twining around our contortions and contractions, convulsions of pleasure, cries that echoed his song.

Now, the playing came to an end, the last chord lingering in the warm afternoon, fading slowly, dissipating into separateness, settling like dust upon the floor. Neither of us said a word—this new musician of mine was as appreciative as any of a predecessor’s talent. It was my favorite characteristic of musicians. They were competitive and jealous, but unlike poets or writers or painters, musicians borrowed and built upon old foundations and acknowledged the genius of before. They
used
it. One discovered, and others embraced, embroidered, and embellished, twisting and shaping it into something that was quite their own, even as it held echoes of the past. In this way, every melody and harmony felt part of some vast universe that belonged not just to man, but to every other creature—worldly and otherworldly.

It was music that had saved me once upon a time. Music that assured me I still had a soul—otherwise how was it possible to be so affected? During those times when my appetite was appeased, and I was left numb and waiting, it was music that reminded me that I had felt something once. Smells anchored me, but music . . . music told me that whatever else had been taken from me, my soul remained. Even when the dark craving possessed me, and I was nothing but appetite and rapture tangled together, I was still—somehow—Odilé. And that was what I was most afraid of losing now.

I heard the shuffle of papers, the soft closing of the lid, the creak of the stool as he rose. I opened my eyes, glancing toward him. He was wild with playing, his pale face flushed, his red hair falling over his forehead, his eyes bright. My appetite leaped the space between us, drawing upon him, making him stumble. He frowned a little in confusion and looked at the floor as if accusing it of meaning to trip him. Then he came up behind me, wrapping his arms around me and pulling me against his chest.

“Odilé.” He whispered each syllable—Oh-de-lay—into my neck, just below my ear, stirring the fine hairs there, sending a shiver down my spine. “You look so beautiful and sad I can’t bear it.”

“It was the music,” I said. “Do you know who wrote the piece?”

“Schumann,” he said without pause.

“They say he was inspired by angels. But he wasn’t, you know.”

“His wife, I heard.”

I resisted the pull of hunger for the moment, letting the pain—almost exquisite now—build. “No, not his wife, though he loved her. There was another woman. One no one knew of. He called her his angel. He thought she had come from another world, and in a way, she had.”

He nuzzled my neck, breathing deeply of me—I felt his bewitchment in my pulse, my hunger opening wide to swallow him. For now, I denied it, savoring.

“He met her on an icy street in D
ü
sseldorf.” I remembered the way Robert Schumann turned a corner, sliding on the ice with the suddenness of his stop. He caught his fall with a gloved hand pressed to the wall. He had intense, burning eyes, and longish dark hair beneath his hat. “He told her later that she had been silhouetted against the winter sun when he first saw her, so it seemed she was haloed, as if she’d been an angel sent to him by God, and he’d thought for a moment that she wasn’t real.”

The musician murmured something. I felt his lips move upon my skin, warm and moist, the press of his kiss.

“He was desperate. He loved his wife, but he was jealous of her. Her fame eclipsed his, and it tormented him. He felt he could write nothing. He said he heard voices that told him to stop composing, and others screaming to be let free. But when he was with his angel, the music flooded from him. He could not write quickly enough. It was she who made him see his own genius. It was she who brought him the fame he longed for.”

My musician had gone still. “Who was she?”

“No one knows. Only that he wrote
The Ghost Variations
for her. Some think he dedicated it to his wife. But he didn’t. It was for his angel, though he never revealed her name. He rewarded her with obscurity and insignificance.”

“I remember that he was obsessed with angels. He went mad, didn’t he?”

I turned to face my musician, wrapping my arms around his neck. “Yes. It was the price he paid.”

“The price? For what?”

“For inspiration.” I smiled at him. “For fame. Do you think it was worth it?”

The musician stared at me as if I’d bewitched him—the same look I’d seen in Robert Schumann’s eyes on that frosty street, the black glove poised upon the wall, a moment in time frozen, arrested, a breath of fog on the air.

“Yes,” Jonathan Murphy murmured. “He’s the one we remember now, isn’t he? Not his wife.”

“Indeed.” I went up on my tiptoes to kiss him. His mouth was like honey. He staggered against me like a drunk.

“But what of the woman?” he insisted, slurring, weakened. “Was she really an angel, as he said?”

“An angel? Oh yes.” I pressed my mouth against the pulse in his throat, feeling it jump beneath my tongue. He gasped and shuddered with pleasure, already cresting, a willing prisoner, begging to be taken, and I felt a frisson of exhaustion, and relief too, as I ran my hand through the fine thick red of his hair, murmuring, “Yes, she was his angel. But can’t you guess, my love? She was his demon too.”