7

They were love letters—all of them. Some from working-class hopefuls, others from discreet noblemen, all full of passionate adoration of Delphine Bessette. I strained to read them by the glow of a few candle stubs in the materials room after lessons were over for the day. This, of course, was the only place I could freely examine these—and the place I’d need to hide the box. I’d waited until everyone left so that no one would stumble upon them and make them fodder for the press.

It was bittersweet to read all these words of adoration directed at my mother and terribly unsettling to see the sheer number of men from which they came.

To the brightest star of ballet, the incandescent and wholly unforgettable Delphine Bessette. I will ever remember the sight of your lovely white arms sweeping through the glow of theater lights, your beauty perfectly harmonious with the music filling the auditorium, dancing as if only for me. What is it about you that charms me so, charms every man who catches sight of you? No one else brings the world to life as you do from the stage, stirring every molecule of air and infusing it with your glow.

I closed my eyes and I could picture her. How radiant she had always been, how splendid, even in her patched gown in our little flat. All my life I’d been fooled into believing, by watching her dance, that it was effortless. No harder than rising up on one’s toes and moving along with the music.

Yet she had something special, as the letter said, and I’d quite forgotten that when I’d set out to have the same career. “It takes much work to appear effortless,” she’d once said, and I felt every inch of that in my tired body. Yet for all my straining and rehearsing, I wasn’t any closer to what she’d been. This time I did not feel our lives running parallel. I felt only my lack.

After making it through only a third of the letters, I forced back tears and rose to go. This was leading nowhere I wished to be. Why had she saved all these? Surely she couldn’t have encouraged this many men. The way she’d spoken of Father . . . No one could be so double-minded. No one.

Shoes clicked through the echoey front hall and I tensed, sensing the presence of Philippe in the theater. I tucked the box away and rose onto demi-pointe and made a slow spin, feeling the perfect line of my body and waiting. For a flash, I imagined Philippe looking at me with the same admiration as that letter writer had felt toward my mother. It made my pulse flutter.

Yet ever since I’d returned to Craven, he’d been so closed off and difficult to read. A little attention thrown my way, then silence.

“There’s a secret part of himself he never shares with anyone—at least, not anyone in the ballet world,” Annika had told me. I could hear her quiet voice imparting these words, echoing what Minna had said, in a private training session in the morning hours. Bellini had asked Annika to tutor me privately, and I learned from her as the one who had already achieved all my dreams. I also soaked up everything she said about Philippe. “It fuels him . . . and isolates him.”

“Why does he do that?” I’d asked. I’d taken advantage of how open she became without the crowds of dancers around, and she’d already noticed how interested Philippe seemed in me.

“There is deep hurt somewhere in his past, something that holds him back from trusting. About certain matters, he will not open up to anyone.”

There was always a first.

Philippe’s voice rang out in the auditorium, deep and unmistakable, sending a shiver up my spine and drawing me back to the present. He was coming, and there would be another escort home. I swept up to a finito pose and waited. But while those steps clipped over the distant stage, I suddenly became aware of a steady stare already in the mirror. I stiffened. Jack Dorian leaned against the doorframe, a playful look angled directly at my reflection. No telling how long he’d been there.

I had a full view of his well-cut figure, golden hair, and almost divine appearance the others found so intensely attractive. Judging by his manner, he shared their opinion.

“Spin like that for too long and you’ll need someone to catch you.” His voice was smooth, effortless.

Steel hardened my spine. “I don’t fall.”

“Everyone falls.” He pushed off the doorframe and ambled in. “The question is, what will you do about it?”

Philippe’s footsteps still echoed, coming down the hall now, and I stiffened like a child with a pilfered treat. “I’m not like the other dancers. Why don’t you leave me—”

“What, to fall alone?” He assessed me, arms still crossed.

I moved to walk past him, but as I neared him, the footsteps stopped at the door.

“Oh.” Philippe stood framed there. His look of awkward shock strangled me. “I beg your pardon. I thought you were alone again, Miss Blythe. I saw the light and assumed . . .”

“I was, actually. I—”

“Quite all right, Rousseau.” Jack Dorian’s bold smile flashed, his commanding words barreling over my own. “I’ll escort the lady on my way home.”

Philippe hesitated, their gazes sparring for a moment, then the finest gentleman I knew gave a single nod of assent and backed away. “Very well, then.”

But it wasn’t very well. Not at all. I opened my mouth, but the words were stuck again. Philippe did that to me, nearly every time.

“I’ll wish you good day then, Miss Blythe.”

Before I could untangle my voice, he was gone, the shadows swallowing his lithe figure. So much for not letting things merely “happen.” What had become of me? I was not myself. I was like . . . In an odd moment of vertigo, I felt that I had transposed my life for Mama’s, living out her passivity and meekness, trapped by her vices.

Hurtling toward the same end.

I caught my breath, sucking air in quick gasps, and spun on the self-satisfied weasel who still watched me with that maddening grin. “Why in heaven’s name do you do that? Why are you always about, leering and flirting as if I’d given you the slightest encouragement?” None of his flashy smiles, the bold stance or invasive charm, held a candle to the solemn, scruffy, deeply poetic face of Philippe Rousseau.

He narrowed his eyes with another of his smiles. “Fancy the man, do you?”

My flesh heated, top to bottom. “More than I fancy you.” The words tasted succulent on my lips, but he seemed unmoved by the rejection.

He squinted, hands in his pockets. “Did I ever tell you of the time I wrestled a tiger to save a woman’s life? Brawny thing he was, and full of fighting spirit.”

“Philippe Rousseau is no tiger.”

But he wasn’t listening. He swooped down on the invisible animal and pretended to slam it to the floor. “I wrestled that beast down and held him by the throat, yelling at the woman to get away, and she escaped. Barely. Then I was alone with that mongrel and we had it out, and eventually . . . well, I ended up making friends with him.” He folded his arms and stepped nearer. “You remind me of that tiger.”

I turned away and rolled my eyes. He took to heart Shakespeare’s line about all the world being a stage. Yet I couldn’t understand how he expected anyone would believe those grandiose tales, let alone feel attraction to the narcissistic flirt who had, unfortunately, attached himself to me like a leech. Did women truly take to him for more than thirty seconds? He was always there, hanging about, ready to siphon my dreams away from me.

He moved toward me, looking me up and down. “What sort of role are you hoping to land with all this practice? I’m arranging the production, you know. I do have some say.”

Desires battled within my heart. “So I’ve heard.”

“I could make you into a lovely butterfly in the next production. Or perhaps a bird. Yes, I do like that.”

I pressed my lips together—I must play nice, at least, for that was the cost of remaining. Of survival. Mama Jo’s words came back to me. “You needn’t let the other girls know you’ve come here for free.” I sat with a grumble and peeled the slippers off my raw feet. “‘Free’ indeed.”

“What’s that, a tree? That can be arranged. You’d make a fine birch, with those long, white arms. How tall are you, anyway—more than five and a half?”

I brushed the slippers aside and wrapped my blistered feet in rags before forcing them into my day shoes and rising to face the man. “I refuse to let you target me this way, simply because I’ve not come under your spell. Not every woman wishes to fall at your feet.”

“I see no circles on you. Thorns perhaps, but no target.”

I glared, but he held out his arm to escort me.

“I’ve a promise to keep, I believe,” he said.

I took his arm with reluctance. It struck me as we left that perhaps he was the sort of man an escort should protect me against. I didn’t speak again until the frigid night air struck our faces out the side door and we strode down the alley toward Craven Street.

He spoke first. “You remind me of someone, actually.”

“Do I, now?” Sarcasm tainted my voice.

“It’s remarkable, really.”

“Isn’t it?” I forced a prim smile.

“You asked why I’d . . . targeted you, as you say. It’s because you look like someone I hold in high regard, and I cannot ignore the striking similarity. It’s uncanny, really.” He stared openly in the night’s dimness.

I narrowed my eyes. “Who?”

“No one you’d know, I’m certain. Yet somehow . . .”

Suddenly panicked, I lurched for the door of the rooming house. “I’m home now, you may go.” I didn’t want to hear my dear mama’s name on his lips.

Yet he only stood there in the dark street, hands jammed in his pockets, golden hair wild about his head as he blocked my way. “It’s those remarkable eyes of yours—so brilliant and vivid. I’ve never seen the like in all the world, except in one other person.” He tipped his head, gaze piercing. “Ever hear of the world-famous dancer Marcus de Silva?”

Everything stopped, curtain closed. I stood in the street as if I’d become a statue. I opened my mouth. Pressed it shut. Suddenly I looked at Jack Dorian as more than a threat to my dreams—he was even more dangerous, prying open boxes I’d locked away in my heart. “You’re claiming you know Marcus de Silva?” It made my heart hammer to say his name, knowing who he was to me, and I could feel the curiosity inflaming against my will. “That’s as likely as your tiger story. It seems he’s something of a disappearing mystery.”

He smiled, looking me over. “I did know him, actually.”

“Prove it.” I leaned forward, hungry for his answer. I didn’t want to, yet somehow I had to know more about this man with eyes that looked like mine. What did the rest of him look like? What were the timbre of his voice and the expressions of his face? Was there anything else of him in me? I’d never imagined sharing any similarities with the man, this stranger, yet suddenly I was a part of him. Connected by eyes no one else had.

Jack studied me, seeming to see through my snappish words. “One day you will find him, Miss Blythe, and right under your very nose. And that’s all the proving I care to do.” Another nod and he was gone, stepping through the night.

My heart hammered with an oddly unsettled fear. I pulled the door open and hurried up the stairs, trying to clear my head of everything I’d discovered, yet I found no safety in my little flat. A breeze lifted the white curtains into my room like two arms out to greet me, and something seemed off. I couldn’t shake it. I ran to close the window and that’s when I saw it—my wardrobe, with a bit of tulle caught in the closed drawer, a door slightly ajar. I wouldn’t have left it that way, costly as those practice skirts were. I knelt and dug through my things at the bottom of the wardrobe, the piles now disturbed, but I had nothing of value. No coin hidden there.

Then it struck me with metallic awareness what was missing, just as the door opened and someone entered.

Minna frowned down at me on the floor. “There was a man here earlier tonight, asking after you. I told him I wasn’t your keeper and to check the local priory.”

I ignored the jab. “What sort of man?”

“Tall, quiet, well-dressed but rather ill-mannered. He kept to the shadows, mostly, so I didn’t see more than that. He took off his ugly green hat—honestly, who wears such a color upon his head?—and insisted on waiting for you. Until I told him you might be gone for hours yet.” She unpinned her hat and dropped it on the dressing table.

I stopped myself from asking about his eyes, and if they resembled mine. Then I felt about in the bottom of my wardrobe to be certain of what I expected—yes, they were gone. Those red satin slippers were gone.

I felt their lack intensely, for so many reasons. I had not set out to find my father, but it seemed he had located me. Thanks to Jack Dorian, most likely, for I couldn’t imagine how else he might have suddenly known to look for me. I swallowed hard. Did he even realize who I was, exactly? He felt threatened by my reappearance, it seemed, and apparently by the shoes. But why take them? What clue did they hold to that wretched night so long ago?

Yet I didn’t really want to know more. Not about him, or whoever it was who had hurt Mama.

“If you’ve a mind to find a sponsor, Ella Blythe, you’d best let me help you form alliances. It’s clear you haven’t any idea what you’re doing.” Minna unleashed her long hair and shook it out before her mirror. “Unless he’s simply a hanger-on you’ve failed to dislodge. Do you plan to see him if he comes again?”

I pressed my lips together, then licked them. “I’m not certain what I should do.” I tried not to stare at the empty space in the bottom of my wardrobe, tried not to imagine where those scarlet slippers might be this minute and whose hands might be holding them.