2

She cradled them in her scarred hands, face radiant. “Heavens, child. Where did you find them?”

“You’ve told me a million times in a thousand stories where you kept them after every performance. Those underground dressing rooms are almost all that’s left of the old theater, and there they were, just waiting to be enjoyed again.”

The burn-scarred skin stretched tight over her cheekbones in a soft smile as she seemed to sink back into her memories—the theater, the stories, the telling of them to her girls in tender bedtime moments.

I laid my head on her lap, tracing the folds of her apron. “Won’t you dance again, Mum? It would be so good for you.”

Her hand rested on my hair. “I dance only for my precious girls now. Delphine Bessette is dead, my love.”

Yet I felt Delphine Bessette’s warm hand on my head. It caressed my scalp and communicated her deep love with every stroke. It hurt my heart to call Delphine dead, but in a way she was. A dancer is a rare artist, I’ve been told, because her art vanishes the moment she leaves the stage.

She hadn’t even set foot outside in years, afraid someone would know that the great prima ballerina of the London stage had survived the fire. Or perhaps, I now realized, it was a person she feared. “Who was Marcus de Silva?”

Her hand paused, fingers curling a little against my scalp. “Another dancer. Wherever did you hear that name?”

I felt her shift and knew her other hand would be creeping up her neck, absently feeling for that little birthmark near her shoulder. With all the strife we’d had in our life, she never did anything to reveal her worry to her girls . . . except that. I rose and took her fingertips off the worry mark, as we called it, and kissed them. “Was he jealous of you? Did you quarrel?”

“Let’s not ruin this night speaking of such things. I mean to enjoy and savor your beautiful gift.”

When we’d finished eating, she put on the slippers and danced around the mismatched furniture, my little fairy-mother spinning like the dancer in her music box. I opened the broken box and wound it with a hairpin, watching them both twirl. How could I help but love ballet? It was impossible not to be swept up in Mum’s romantic charm as she danced about our dreary flat, our gray lives, and gave us a small taste of loveliness that was larger than our little home. It made the chipping plaster seem artistic, the close quarters cozy, the empty larder unimportant.

The flush of delight remained on her features through dessert, the pathetic little cake I was too excited to attend properly, and later followed her toward the curtained-off mattress where Lily and I slept. She bent to kiss each of us, even though we were fairly well grown, and her hand lingered on my face, that webbed burn scar on her palm smooth against my cheek. “Precious daughter. Thank you for a most perfect gift.”

Lily rolled away from us and was soon breathing deeply. I sat up, the quilt scrunched over my knees, and dared to quietly voice the thought that had hovered all night, pleasantly glowing like a star through the smog. “Mum, I’m ready to join the theater. Next time they hold auditions for the corps, perhaps.” I was fifteen already, far older than most beginning members of the corps de ballet, but I’d start anywhere just to be near the ballet.

Her pained shock halted my flow of excitement, and it melted in the face of her stony silence. She shook her head, loose wisps of hair dusting her pale cheeks.

“Whyever not?” Practice consumed me, the dire need to perfect and to polish, and she herself had trained me. Yet we’d never spoken of what would come of it.

She looked as though she’d cry as she fingered the loose strands of my hair. “No daughter of mine will be lost to the theater.” She touched my cheek, her fingertips cold against my now-heated face. “We are so similar, you and I. Yet I want nothing more than for your story to be wonderfully different than mine.”

I looked away from the softness of her gaze. We were different—she, with her gentle meekness that was both a strength and a downfall. Things happened to her. Me, I was just as quiet, but made of stronger stuff.

“It was one thing when you were a little girl, so excited about the world I’d come from. It was a joy to do it together, to teach you everything, but now that you’re grown . . .”

“I love it even more. Love it enough to practice every day. Surely you see that. Even while I’m working at the laundry, I am strengthening my feet. Preparing. I’m ready to try, Mum.”

She took hold of my shoulders, her glassy gaze holding mine. “I will not let the theater ruin you as it did me.”

“I won’t dance near a flame, I promise. It’s—”

Her squeeze tightened. “It was not merely my skin that was ruined that night, my love.”

I looked at this delicate woman and tried to picture her dancing before Princess Charlotte with flowers in her hair. I could see it, with her eternal grace and elegance, music in bodily form.

Yet now, no one but us were witnesses to it. Dancers who were not onstage were forgotten. What of the ones who never reached it?

“My story will be different.” I spoke with conviction as I rubbed her arm. There was simply something at my core that was drawn to the beauty, the symmetry of ballet, and I felt compelled to be a part of it—to bring that loveliness and order to a world that seemed to have forgotten its value.

“Naught but God is strong enough to handle the burden of fame and praise.”

“Well and good, because I want no part of that. I’m not one for spotlights anyway. Just to be in the midst of it all . . .” I considered her as my words faded. “They’re creating all sorts of legends about you, you know. The great dancer, whose spirit still flits about the theater in search of her lost slippers.”

She smiled and hugged the shoes I’d given her. “Well, then plain and tired Mary Blythe can sleep in peace tonight, no?”

I gave a wan smile. She had so many surnames—her true and legal married name, her maiden name, her stage name . . . yet she only used the assumed one we now all wore like a cloak to hide us: Blythe. We had for as long as I could remember. Yet I so desperately wanted something about me to be authentic and fully on display before the world. Especially if doing so would earn me enough money to bring her a comfortable life. “Won’t you let me at least try, Mum? Just to be part of the corps would thrill me to no end.”

Her smile disintegrated, and she rose without answering, disappearing through the curtain that surrounded our bed. I shifted, burying my face between the two pillows and centering my soul on the only father I seemed to have. Please . . . Please . . . was all I could get out in my prayer. He knew what I meant, for we’d had endless conversations about it already.

Soon I could hear Mama speaking to God at the table, those indecipherable utterances that always seemed to carry so much weight with the Almighty. Was she flat-out asking him for my failure? My stomach twisted. Never in my life had Mama and I prayed for opposite outcomes. I’d for sure be on the losing end of that match.

Yet Philippe Rousseau’s promise lay awake in me, vivid and pulsing with life. It couldn’t possibly come to pass without a true miracle, but I could not snuff the thing from my heart. The very notion had taken up residence there and lit a warm, glowing fire on a cold night.

In the morning, Mama hovered by the hearth as if she hadn’t slept. When she saw me unplaiting my hair on the end of the bed, she opened her arms and welcomed me close, kissed my hair with trembling lips. Her presence was warm, always embracing with a look even before her arms came around me.

I buried my face in the honeyed scent of her arm. “You needn’t worry so, Mama. Aunt Luce made certain we were raised in the church, and the theater can never make me what I am not.” Lucy Kimball—Aunt Luce, as we called her—was someone from Mama’s past, and the only other person besides Lily’s mother whom she trusted. Aunt Luce had been our door to the outside world, coming to fetch us to market and to church every week.

“It isn’t you I worry about, love.” She combed her fingers along the hair trailing down my back, and I felt the ripple of her burned skin, the angry marks ballet had gifted to her. “Do you know why I never found out who set the fire all those years ago? Because there were so many people it might have been. I’ve found threatening letters, had my costumes mysteriously destroyed . . . You have no idea how many secret enemies a woman can have in the ballet if she’s any good. Even among her supposed friends.”

“That solves it, then. I shan’t be any good, Mama. I vow it. Merely good enough to remain.”

Another kiss to my hair as she held me close. “In the end, I don’t think you’d be able to help it, love.” She held me at arm’s length. “No one would be able to miss your talent.”

I shifted back, looking into her face to watch the play of tender emotions that always lived just below the surface. “Was it Marcus de Silva who did these things?”

She paled, those rosy lips the only bloom of color on her face. Carts rumbled by outside, feet pounding through the street as costermongers and drunken men called out as they stumbled home. “No. No, I don’t think so,” she said at last, but her pause was not lost on me.

“Was he a very important dancer? A thwarted suitor?”

A long, shuddering sigh. “He was your father.”

A powerful weakness swept through my middle at that word, thoughts instantly fracturing. The lack of that particular person in my life had wound through my being with a taut thread of insecurity that left me anxious, always with something to prove.

“You see why you cannot be in the theater, Ella.” She grasped my hand. “Life there is so complicated, so ugly. No one can be trusted, for they all want something—and they all know how to play a part.”

“But you just said he didn’t—”

“I said I didn’t think so.” She fiddled with the hem of her sleeve. “We ran away to be married, and we kept it secret. That’s how much we loved each other. So I cannot imagine . . . But things between us were not so simple. Especially at the end.”

“Perhaps I can find out if he did.” For her as much as myself. She had silently tortured herself over this, it seemed—the unknown—for all this time. Closure would be a gift. “I’ve never met him, after all, so he wouldn’t know me.”

She straightened, giving a glimpse of the regal dancer she’d once been. “You will go nowhere near Marcus de Silva, Ella. He must never have a chance to find out who you are.”

“Why ever not, Mama? You once gave up a great deal to marry the man, so I cannot understand why you will have nothing to do with him.”

She laid a slender hand over mine. “This is how it must be. Will you do that for me?”

There was to be no father, no answers . . . no theater. I hesitated, but with the wan look on her face, I nodded. Of course I understood. I didn’t need my father. Truly, I didn’t. I was an independent soul. Fathers, for girls like me, were optional.

Truly.

But it came about that one day a miracle did occur and I returned to ballet, to Philippe Rousseau, and to Craven Street Theatre.

As a dancer.