AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“We’re here,” she said, pressing a kiss on Manuela’s neck before she dismounted Cora’s lap, right as the footman opened the door. For a breathless moment Cora wished he’d opened it a second sooner and everyone arriving at the opera house would see them. That the decision would be taken out of her hands.
“Georges Clairin made this,” Manuela said as they mounted the steps, pointing to the placard displayed behind glass along the front of the theater. They would be seeingEsclarmondetonight, which Jules Massenet had written exclusively to be debuted at the Exposition. “I heard he’s been experimenting with Japanism,” her artist explained. Her face very serious as she traced edges of the illustration with her gloved hand. “See the clouds? That’s part of the aesthetic.” The piece was done in a palette of blues and yellows. The woman standing under a beautifully rendered arch was dressed in long robes, a Byzantine crown on her head. Her eyes were stark and haunted as she held her veil away from her face. “There are so many elements, yet the effect is so clean and precise,” Manuela marveled. Cora wanted to kiss her, would’ve given not a small amount of money to be able to take her by the hand and lead her into that theater, letting the world know this glorious creature was hers.
“Manuela, is that you?” They’d both been so engrossed in looking at the poster the newcomer caught them by surprise. Manuela paled when she saw the woman, prompting Cora to step back.
“Doña Amadita.” Manuela beamed. She looked and sounded delighted, but Cora had learned to recognize when her lover was merely pretending to be so. “So wonderful to run into you here. This is the Duchess of Sundridge.”
Doña Amadita’s eyes widened. “Your Grace.”
Cora was accustomed to a barrage of effusive greetings once her title was offered up, but none were forthcoming from Doña Amadita, who though polite, kept sending suspicious looks between Cora and Manuela. The older woman had clearly heard about Cora’s reputation.
“Duchess, Doña Amadita’s husband is a diplomat. He was the Venezuelan Ambassador to Britain for a number of years.” This explained some of the lady’s chilliness. At one time Cora had been a very hot topic of discussion, and for all the wrong reasons. Her rumored love life was bad enough, but her insistence in engaging in such lowly, disgraceful things as business and commerce incensed a large swath of the women of her class. Many of them were more disapproving than the men.
“Are Prospero and Consuelo inside?”
“No, my parents are still in London.” Manuela’s effusiveness was beginning to crack under the older woman’s censure.
“I hope your fiancé is all right with your parents granting you so much liberty.” The mention of Manuela’s fiancé was a slap in the face. Manuela never mentioned the man and Cora more and more avoided the very notion of his existence.
“He is, of course.” Manuela’s non-answer seemed to further aggravate Doña Amadita, who continued to send unhappy looks in Cora’s direction until she was finally pulled away by an equally sour-looking matron. The two of them walked off, Doña Amadita still loudly espousing her general discontent with “the many liberties unmarried girls took these days” as she entered the theater.
“She’s an old friend of my mother’s and a desperate chismosa,” Manuela explained needlessly, sending a concerned look in the retreating woman’s direction. After a moment she seemed to snap out of it and turned to the poster again. She examined it quite closely, her eyes darting back and forth over the illustration. Cora, who had never been able to stand still for very long, thought she could remain there for hours, if it meant watching Manuela take in a piece of art that interested her.
“I wonder if he is under contract with the theater,” she mused, with a shrewd expression on her face Cora had not seen before. “Or if other theaters need that kind of work done.”
“You are thinking of your artists’ collective?” Cora asked, as they headed inside.
“Well, not mine,” Manuela prevaricated as she’d done every time Cora implied she might have a permanent connection to the endeavor. “Or anyone’s, really. So far it’s been more my brain firing off silly ideas and me pestering Cassandra about them.” Manuela had talked to Cora for almost an hour about her thoughts on the collective as they’d walked around the greenhouse. And her ideas were far from silly. She had a solid concept for how to organize artists in order to leverage better fees and steadier commissions. She even had the idea of compiling a catalogue with their work they could send to companies and publishing houses. There was something there, and it was clear it excited Manuela greatly, but so far, she’d staunchly insisted she would be returning to Venezuela to get married.
“From what I heard from Cassandra, she thinks all your suggestions are brilliant.”
“They’re not all mine, not really.” Despite the folly in it, Cora wanted to push, to ask her if she was interested in working in the collective more formally. But that would lead to other questions, like how she’d be able to be involved in something that was happening across the ocean from where she lived.
Cora was not yet so reckless to enter into those marshlands.
“And I don’t know about brilliant.” Manuela blushed, her brown eyes glowing with a mix of longing and hope. “She did seem intrigued and said she’d discuss it with Monsieur Pasquale and the ladies from the dinner club. I even thought of offering the money of the sale of Baluarte to help with getting it off the ground. But I was very clear I would not be of much help once I leave Paris.”
Cora would’ve never imagined that the same woman who had offered her land in exchange for a bit of fun would be standing before her, glowing at the prospect of using the funds to help artists unionize. Then again, she, like probably everyone in Manuela’s life, had completely missed the heart of a lioness hidden in this woman. “My mother would have my hide if she ever heard I was involved in something like this, but I can just add that to the many ways in which I’ve disappointed her.” She said this breezily but the same stark devastation Cora had seen when Doña Amadita walked away settled in her gaze.
“Is she hard on you?” she asked, unable to contain herself.
Manuela gave her another one of those shrugs that seemed to encompass a world of disillusions. “She’s under the impression I am to blame for all of her worldly troubles. Which is why I must make up for it with this marriage.”
A scandal at the moment would cast a shadow over Alfie’s return to London, Cora told herself, in place of speaking. She had duties that superseded whatever personal losses she might experience.
A suffocating silence rose between them as they stood in the threshold of the theater. She wanted to make this evening memorable for Manuela, but Cora was struggling to keep her emotions from clouding her judgment.
“This is beautiful,” Manuela said, valiantly mustering up a smile as she looked up at the gilded walls and the marble staircase.
“It’s one of the newer theaters in the city,” Cora told her, thankful for any excuse to get out of her own head. “It was seized at the end of the Paris Commune and mostly destroyed.”
Manuela continued to observe, her eyes turning this way and that as Cora guided her up the marble staircase. Her pink dress contrasted beautifully against the gild and white marble. She was luminous, made for Parisian nights. Manuela Caceres Galvan, always in full bloom. Cora swallowed down the bitter taste in her mouth at the thought that this living, breathing garden would soon belong to someone else.
By the time they got to Cora’s box Manuela’s mood seemed lighter, while Cora’s darkened with each passing second.
“I’ve been in opera boxes before, but this is the most lavish I’ve ever seen.” Cora had seized the box in lieu of payment from a French duke who could not repay a debt in time. Usually she was eager to share the anecdote of how she’d bested the monetarily delinquent peer, but she had no appetite for it tonight.
“It was quite shabby when it was passed to me.”
