Page 3 of Our Strange Duet

I tucked the rose within the sheets of music and stood. A sudden flush of déjà vu swept over me, seizing hold of my mind and taking me back to another time, in front of another mirror.

There had been roses then too.

And him.

And the music.

So, so much music…

Chapter 1

Paris, March 1895

A mirror never lies.

As I all but collapsed onto my little stool, wedged before our section of plated glass in the corps de ballet dressing room—all the way in the back corner, squeezed between an armoire and a wall to illustrate that Madame Giry did not play favorites—it all but screamed the truth.

“I think I’m dying,” Meg gasped, falling beside me, pink-cheeked and out of breath.

We stared hard at our reflections, taking stock of the evening’s damage. Covered with a slick sheen and the ghoulish tracks of running eye cosmetics, we looked wrung out and half dead.

“I can’t believe Mother made us run through the mountaintop section twice after rehearsal.”

“I didn’t think it would ever end. The singers would come back in the morning, and we’d still be onstage, picking through choreography.” I began peeling away a length of beaded snake from my arm. The serpents were affixed to us with globs of spirit gum and fervent prayers. Even still, the fabric strips were notoriously faulty, freeing themselves from our sweating bodies and littering the stage like macabre confetti the singers were forever tripping on.

Ubaldo Piangi, the opera’s principal tenor, had stumbled across a particularly realistic asp backstage before his first entrance and let out a shriek so loud he had to be put on complete vocal rest for the evening.

And our leading soprano, Carlotta Giudicelli…

We’d only just begun technical rehearsals for our new production of Gounod’s Faust, and already everyone was wistfully daydreaming of closing night.

“Can you unlace me?” Meg asked, spinning round on her stool to present her back.

In this opera, we began as beautiful young women, parading about a vast garden, only to turn into a swarm of witches and demons later on, in Act V. Our final scene was on a mountainside on Walpurgis Night as we writhed and twirled about the titular tenor in a bid to lure him from the woman he’d sold his soul to acquire.

The costumes were nothing but tattered chiffon and carefully placed paillettes, and had to be handled with great care lest we incur the wrath of the wardrobe mistress, Madame Barbier.

I loosened the cording, and Meg swooned against me with a grateful sigh. One of the dozens of pins holding up her silver horned wig poked my arm, and, playfully, I poked her back.

“Some of us are going out for supper,” she mentioned, straightening up to pull out the hairpins. They fell onto our shared table like an April downpour.

She snatched up one of the wig forms, but I grabbed it from her, spotting the Daaé label. Meg was forever putting her costume pieces in my bins, mixing our jewelry, and sharing our makeup. We’d lived together for nearly half a decade, and we were just as close as sisters, but that didn’t mean I wanted her too-small wig pinching me come next rehearsal.

“You should join us,” she added.

I considered the offer, thinking about the scant number of francs I had squirreled in my reticule. Our next payday was opening night, four very long days away.

“It’ll be such fun,” Meg persisted. “And with you halfway across town, in your very grown-up apartment, I never get to see you. Not like we used to.”

“What restaurant?” I asked, wiping a wet towel over my face to remove the layers of melting greasepaint. Meg had a point. I’d moved out of the Girys’ house earlier in the season, when I’d first made the company and the prospect of a reliable monthly salary had made me hungry to act upon my sense of growing independence.

Meg shimmied free of her costume, letting it puddle on the floor as she skipped over to grab at her dressing robe. Such immodesty should have made me blush eleven shades of red, but after nearly a year in the corps, being backstage with singers and dancers in the midst of all stages of undress, nudity was nothing but a routine workplace occurrence.

“Le Chat Noir.”

That sealed it. My purse could not stretch so far, even if I ordered just a glass of wine and nursed it all evening. “We’ve been on our feet all day and you want to go dancing?” I made a face, hoping to talk her out of it. “Come to my apartment. I can make dinner instead. I’ve got a…” I paused, now thinking about the sorry state of my pantry. I so badly needed to go to the market, but with the start of dress rehearsals, there just wasn’t time.

“We’re not dancing!” Meg protested, her tone as bright as the blond curls cascading down her back. “Tonight, we are the audience! It’s sure to be grand. Frederick even says that they end the show with the cancan!” She whispered the scandalous words as Madame Giry—her mother and our ballet instructor—strode into the room without bothering to knock.