The Mercury Waltz (34 page)

Steadily: “Who could part you, Monsieur?”

“
Cher
Madame, don’t you know?”

Christobel gazes down at her gloved hands, as if in contemplation. When her stare rises again it is hard, in sudden marked resemblance to Isobel de Metz, her voice as sharp as a duelist’s point: “The formal banquet you disrupted—you did not scruple to use my husband’s name there, as your entrée,” that stare including Haden, now, indicting him as well; Haden does not look away. “And on your own stage, too, to your own ends you have used him; the Blackbird Theatre, and other—venues; I remember. Do you, Monsieur, remember M. Bok’s own incarceration, whose hand reached to save him then? Yes, I know those details, they were told me by dear Javier. So does it not behoove you to be generous, as my husband has been generous, time and time again? These are not decisions of the mind so much as movements of the heart, and there as well, Monsieur, I do believe you can afford more generosity.”

In the house there is silence, as there would be such a silence onstage, a testing moment between antagonists; even in farce, such a moment would have weight. If Rupert is listening high above, quiet to climb like a stealthy boy the rust-flecked sway of the catwalk, none of them seem to mark it; if Tilde is thrusting her needle through the fabric of a mask as if stabbing a rapier through an assailant’s heart, no one but Frédéric sees, Frédéric who continues to write furiously in his notebook as Haden’s gaze flicks back and forth between Istvan and the lady, with Istvan’s own trick of study through the lashes, a master class as “It is more than coincidence,” says Istvan, “that you should reference our great, lost mutual friend, who knew how to make allies and keep them, and keep what he loved from destruction,” sharing with her then the existence of the mythological cache, offering a strategy and a temporary alliance, offering, even, his demonstrable regrets, for “One must own that your husband owns a stout heart—it is not nothing, to feel so deeply for so long. And I of all the world must commend the excellence of his taste.”

If Istvan hopes for an answering smile from Mme de Metz he does not get it; instead, from behind the veil, “He could not have M. Bok, so he worked to become him; a stout heart, as you say, Monsieur…. I know Javier very much enjoyed your performances, he told me so often. I should like to see what he sent you.”

“I can show you nothing, Madame. You must take me at my word, or not at all.”

Silence: the gaze beneath the veil: then, rising on a waft of lavender, gloves gripping a pavé reticule, “I shall consider all that you have said, and send my husband’s servant with my answer; his name is Emory, he will have my card so that you may know him. —Why do I feel, when I speak to you, Monsieur, that less than half of what you say is true?” with an arctic smile that Istvan matches with no smile at all, a bow so beautiful it verges on cruel burlesque as “Which half, though, Madame? And you have a child, do you not, a little boy—that tale can be his patrimony. If you like, we’ll scribe his name onto the safebox key.
Bonjour,
” as Christobel, lips tight, takes her leave, Haden escorting her to the squareside door, bowing her out to her cab then back down the aisle where “Christ, uncle,” he says on an exhalation. “You twisted her garters there at the end, do you want to go back to Eig’s hotel? Spiff bluff, though, about the documents. —It is a bluff, an’t it?” to bring Istvan’s authentic smile, he hooks an arm a moment around Haden’s neck and “Save one, ruin one, it’s all the same to them, yeah? Cupid’s woe is that he never learned to take no for an answer. And you’ll note Madame never mentions our imminent eviction.”

“May be she doesn’t know? She does make a bona pander, if what she wants is—”

“Oh, her wants, his wants, what can they signify to us? Come on, let’s have a look from the perch,” turning for the catwalk and the embrace of the god, to take up again the hard repertory business of love, as Rupert above salutes them, as Frédéric reaches the end of his page with an emphatic exclamation, as Tilde sets aside the finished mask to take up the next one on the pile.

Soon they will sit together around the backstage table, for an early supper of stewed pears, new bread and fresh butter, pea soup—Frédéric tasting with a little pang, pea soup a favorite of his mother’s, the pang soothed by the feel of Haden’s hand upon his thigh—as Istvan regales them with tales of the road, of awful scrapes and near-escapes and the laughter of puppets, of the way it feels to lie on one’s back at night and watch the stars from some strange rooftop, some stranger’s room, oneself always a stranger though “Not to the ones in the boxes,” nodding to the masked four hung in their row, “and not to oneself,” looking to Rupert, who meets his gaze over the head of Tilde, diligent to spoon her soup, knowing without knowing, yet better than even they, what this last show will cost, and must demand. If her eyes prickle with tears, and they do, she blames it on the soup steam, on the salt of the fatty pork a-swim in the tureen, and rises resolute as the rest for the evening’s work, applauding louder than any when Rupert demonstrates a jigging backflip—“Not too old yet, hey? But it wants a deal more practice—” and “Practice, yes,” says Istvan, taking up Mr. Pollux. “Have at it then,” until it is very late, until muscles ache and all the tea is drunk and Frédéric falls asleep still holding the devil puppet, until each makes his way and Tilde hers into the evening’s beds, to be audience and player both on the dark stages of various dreams.

In other beds, other dreams are dreamt, other, more copious tears assuaged —James Aubin has finally arrived, with a dozen trunks and a fine new Scottish blazer and hands outstretched for comfort—and other plans and worries laid, at least for the moment, to rest; Martin Eig sleeps; Guy de Vries sleeps. Christobel de Metz does not sleep; nor does Herr Hebert, paging worried through a stack of newspapers from abroad; while the theatre district’s rest or lack spans from Mrs. Cowtan’s toothache, dosed unsuccessfully with juniper oil, to Cockrill’s open-mouthed, cherubic snores. Haden’s boys, in Haden’s old rooms, sleep like sparrows in a rookery, fluttering and grumbling, awaiting the next day’s flight and mischief; they too have had their practice, and will have much more. Meanwhile the moon gleams like milk through the wreathing clouds, lighting the Bridge deserted by all but the sapient cats, lighting the surface of the river barely creased by ripples on this windless night; it shines through the trees of the Park, where the leaves already gild and brown for winter, through casements as gilded and garrets as chill; through the rooftop hatch refastened, its hinges newly planed and oiled to move at a fingertip’s touch—

—though it cannot cast its light so low as to reach the table where Tilde sits again and still wakeful, slowly turning card upon card as a nun might turn through her psalter: for comfort, for company. When Istvan appears like a spirit beside her, she does not startle; she nods to the freshened teapot, but he shakes his head, hand rising by habit to finger at his earring, feeling instead with a little scowl the sore and suppurating lobe and “I had the nightmare,” he says, over the glass she pours for him of
vin ordinaire.
“Mouse—that is, Rupert was falling…. Not like that,” to the look she gives, “or may be that’s its seed. But falling, falling down and down to where I could not reach him.”

“It is like that,” she says. “Can’t Haden be the climber? Sir has the vertigo—I’ve seen him wobble!—and only the one eye to see with. If he—”

“He’ll do as he’ll do, and there’s an end, yeah?” though Istvan shudders slightly, eyes dark; he glances at the colorful cards. “Shall we see what these fine folk have to say about it all?” startled then himself as “
No,
” Tilde emphatic, both hands pressed flat upon the little squares, as if she will protect him, them, the cards themselves from such an action. “I’ll tell them for you in the daytime. Don’t you know the moon is full?”

“It’s still the moon in the daytime,” though meekly, and not without a certain humor. “But I bow to your greater expertise.” He sips his wine and considers her, haloed by lamplight, girlish white nightgown and long hair loose—her hair is very long now, Milady Mab, nearly to her waist and wild as ever; and she herself such a wild little thing, yet imbued with a new gravitas—like Mouse, it entirely becomes her, pure and singular and stern. It reminds him of a painting he saw once, in some toffy mansion or other, of the Virgin Mother herself barely more than a girl, kneeling on black rocks in the light of a holy ghost; that suits this one, too, and her child without a father. The Virgin of the Mecs…. With a distant, warm nostalgia—for Puss, even for Ag, awful Ag—he leans forward then, he kisses her cheek—this does startle her—and “I salute you, dear,” he says. “And your little stranger, whose advent I shall be very sad to miss. What will you call the child?”

“If it’s a girl,” she says, “Isabella.”

“Lovely. If a boy?”

“Rupert.”

He waits until she smiles to smile himself, then “A brave name; I entirely approve. And those two can stand godfather, yeah?” thumb up to the room above where Frédéric and Haden lie, dark and fair on the garret bed like young gods after a busy day; it is another kind of portrait, one that Caravaggio might have made. “But who’ll be for you, then, miss? You’d be a rare gift to any fellow, I’d marry you myself if I had the stones.”

Meeting his gaze head-on, those fierce blue eyes—how has he never fully marked that blueness? Someday she will be truly beautiful—but “Love’s not for me,” she says, though a blush washes over her cheeks, a last rose blooming before the hard cold to come. “And no man will feed and keep a child that’s not his own, that I know.”

“Some men might be moved to do so.”

“Did you have a father?”

“
Touché,
” and “We’ll stay just as we are, here,” says Tilde firmly. “We have what we need and all we need,” as Istvan drains the wine, hand rising again to where the pearl should be, Tilde noting his wince and “That needs sewing,” she says, with a measuring eye. So the sharp needle is again deployed, Istvan in the chair with his hair pulled back, whistling through his teeth, through the heat of the pain an old, old cradle song, one Tilde to her surprise finds that she knows as well: not “Volim Te” but of the same vintage, the same village perhaps, a song of a child lost in the darkness, who finally and past great danger wends the long way safely home.

When the wound is mended and neatly stanched with brandied cambric—her stitching is superb; there will barely be a scar—Istvan rises, his yawn tremendous, and “It’s nearly dawn,” turning from the pooled light of the table to the dark of the stairs. “You ought try to sleep,” yet surprised one final time on this long night by Tilde’s hand suddenly reaching for his own, Tilde’s urgent diffidence to note that “A man came, today, while Sir was off fetching you. He makes pictures, he says.”

“Pictures?” standing blank as she then explains: an enterprising photographer who visited the square,
Ridley’s Finest, cartes-de-visite
hand-colored, not too expensive and “You would like one?” Istvan asks, examining the specimen she shows him, fully at a loss. “Of yourself?”

“No, no—of Sir. Or,” with a dour generosity, “it can be of Sir and you,” which is how, and why, the only formal photograph of Rupert Bok and Istvan Marek—such is the name he offers the photographer—comes to be made, the two posed hatless in cutaway coats before mildly moth-chewed drapes, in a fumed and makeshift studio on Crossways Street, wedged between a tobacconist’s and a busy barbershop. The photographer, Mr. Ridley, will be rapturous to include the puppets—he will be rapturous in general over the puppets, all the available props and sets:
These little actors of yours are simply golden, gentlemen, I’d be in your debt forever if you’d let me make their pictures! And of yourselves as well!
—but
It’s enough foolishness to do it once,
Rupert’s frown, though in the portrait he nearly smiles at Istvan leaning on his shoulder, bright on the cusp of laughter, two fingers raised as if in flirtatious farewell. No names are printed below, unusual for a
carte-de-visite,
but on the back is the address of the Mercury Theatre, as if those men might always be present there in some capacity, whenever one might wish to come and call.

If the city itself were to have its portrait made, its photograph taken in this autumn of wet sepia and silver, chiaroscuro moment itself a crossways street, what might it offer to the eye, the sad eye, the considering eye, the dry eye of history? What can be known, just by looking? In the merchants’ districts, commerce is still brisk, stocks are traded and commodities offered, and newspapers are closely studied—among them several new and popular publications, the
Civic Guardian
and the
Vigilist,
alongside the
Gentleman’s View
and the
Globe,
and the still-extant, now entirely muted
Daily Solon
—as what constitutes morality is parsed and reparsed, until adjustments, however onerous and painful, may yet again be made. The Prefecture’s Commissions on Morals, on Security, meet daily, though not every meeting is available to, or known by, every commissioner. Many more clerks have been hired to process the reports, the multiplying inquiries; all the constables have had a raise in pay.

In the shops, prices are much higher, and there are mounting and curious shortages—the apothecaries cannot keep a stock of paregoric syrup; there are no decent ladies’ hairpins to be had—and the dairymen have rioted again, to no one’s benefit, including their own. The Park seems almost the same, the brick paths are busy and the Carousel still turns, though the beggars and drunkards are beaten now with more open savagery, and the gypsies have decamped, all of them, all at once, like swallows fleeing a storm, their muddied tracks and deserted Fortune’s Wheel left as their only spoor; they are followed by many of the titled class, those with country houses deciding not to spend the coming winter in town after all. The Virgo girls have gone, perhaps accompanied by the bravos in black armbands; the Literary Leopards are extinct. The Cemetery has been padlocked, as well as the Cocked Hat, Le Chapel Vert, and nearly all the nonesuch hotels, none such to be left to operate in peace, while the whores of the Bridge have taken the hint and gone indoors, to the humbler cafés, where they hunch in their newly modest skirts beside the satcheled scholars and the cab drivers whose penny papers have crossed into the fully hysteric: Jews are a favored topic, as are unspecified “foreigners,” and murderers who come in the night and leave no trace; these three are often conflated, with opinions offered on the best way to deal with them all.