31

It was June, and casting lists had been posted and choreography outlined. Philippe danced as the male lead, of course, but I did not, in fact, dance opposite him in the role Jack had envisioned for me—the part of my mother—and for that I was relieved. I should never be able to concentrate under such strain, and dancing as her might be my undoing on the stage. Instead, I slipped easily into a role Jack had written precisely for me. It was obvious even without him stating it was so, for the role seemed the very extension of who I was as a dancer.

We began learning combinations and bridges, with the notion that we’d put the whole ballet together into one show when Jack finished it. It was a most haphazard way to do it, but excitement buzzed in what had once been mundane rehearsals.

Jack Dorian reached his zenith as the ballet took shape. Pressure drove him, it seemed, for he came alive just as I’d seen him do at the wintering circus barn. “No no, arch in midair, for heaven’s sake. Throw your head back. This is meant to be dramatic.” He cleared the four steps in a single bound and exploded onto the stage with his characteristic energy, arching his back and grand jeté-ing before us all, and ending in a dainty pirouette. With a look of feminine affectation, he threw back his head, one hand upon his brow, and swirled into a faint with one prolonged twirl of his masculine body.

Applause sounded and chittering laughter popped across the stage while men scurried across with pieces of set design. The place was always an anthill of activity, swarming with people and props and pieces of costumes. We approached the twenty-third of June like a locomotive headed toward a cliff, and I held on for dear life.

Fournier had somehow managed to hire artist Clarkson Stanfield to paint a lusciously shadowed forest for the backdrop, and the walkers-on and stagehands had been cutting strips of tulle in various shades of green to hang from the ceiling as murky willow fronds and mist. To further the feel of romanticism and nature, we had created many forest scenes for the lovers’ trysts, and only the fire and a few small scenes occurred within a theater.

For the most dramatic scene, gas jets had been concealed in wooden boxes hooked to flies for a moonlight effect. The world of Jack’s imaginings was taking shape on the stage, and it was glorious.

Minna grumbled and stalked across the stage, ever dramatic as she rose in the ranks. She had earned herself the lead role of Delphine, the tragic dancer, and she’d never been more elated—or on edge.

I turned to Tovah with a smile. “You are stunning in your divertissement. It shows your every strength to full advantage.”

“Which is ironic, seeing as how Jack Dorian has never noticed before what those were.”

I pinched my lips and gave a shrug. Jack had received more help from me over the weeks since the ballet had been accepted, especially in the choreography sketches. Our imaginations had fueled each other, and the ballet had sprung forth from our combined minds. It was Jack’s story that had blossomed and taken shape, but I still felt a sliver of ownership when my mere presence sparked his ideas in rapid-fire succession. Perhaps I was becoming his muse—or we were becoming partners.

Jack, in all his sensationalism, had decided to make an unprecedented move to raise the needed funds. Our boxholders and investors would be allowed to attend an opening night preview—of all but the third act. It was meant to whet the appetite of theatergoers and press, and perhaps even King Leopold, before the official opening. If all went well, London would appear in droves the following night to discover what had happened to Craven’s famed dancer.

The night before our preview performance, the first before an audience, I forced myself to bed early, and I intended to sleep at least eight hours. Truly, I did. But once my bleary mind faded from the real world, it fell down one dark hole and into another.

I was fourteen again, running toward the little church outside of Seven Dials in the dark and without the warmth of my cloak. I pushed through the broken fence, dodged the tombstones, and approached the weathered door. I stared at that building, knowing it was a place of God, knowing the parish minister to be a good man, yet I sensed God pushing me away from it. I raised my hand to knock, but my fist wouldn’t cooperate. It merely hovered, then something overcame me. More than chills from the biting wind. Cloak wadded up in my arms, I turned and ran, fleeing that churchyard with my secret.

Instead, I ran to a house. It was a small brick cottage with black shutters, three neat little steps leading up to the front door. Several candles were lit, glowing underneath the closed shutters, and that’s why I chose it. How homey and warm it seemed.

I paused around the corner after sprinting away, letting reality catch up to me, the immensity of what I’d done knocking me off balance. It was done now, though. I couldn’t go back. I stood there staring up at the house, into the neat little windows, when suddenly a man appeared at the door. A tall man with stooped shoulders and a long face. He looked down at my cloak on his stoop, then out into the dark, in my direction, stunned confusion on his face.

I ran. Ran with all my might, feet pounding the brick street as I hurtled through the shadows. I slipped into the narrowest, most unappealing of streets until I found myself staring down the blocks at the tall centerpiece sundial of Seven Dials, the heart of the slum. I caught my reflection in the panes of glass guarding an old curiosity shop, and I was quite blue—my lips, my poor hands. How I longed for that cloak now. Another chill convulsed me, then I turned a second corner and ran harder. My foot clipped a broken stoop, my head banged the door with a shuddering thud, and I fell, a miserable, shivering wretch in the piles of refuse lining the grubby street.

As I lay there, noxious odors invading my senses, God began to overwhelm me with an awareness of his presence. I was afraid in the face of it, sensing the magnitude of him immediately, but it was a surprisingly welcoming hand reaching out for me, not a punishing one. I never forgot that moment. That encounter. The very feel of God’s pursuit, his awareness of one invisible girl. A strange sensation of warmth filled my limbs again despite the winter wind, down to the tips of my fingers. It was a sacred encounter, and my gratefulness immense.

Yet what had I done to show it?

My mind lifted from the memory, rising from sleep into my darkened room at the boardinghouse, but I still felt the weight of it, the weight of all I had to prove to God. I blinked my eyes open and stared at the dressing table mirror in the dark room.

I felt it again. Not enough.

As Minna snored, I rose and dressed, stealing down the stairs in a long cape with the hood concealing my face. The night was warm and wet, with summer finally beginning to gain solid footing through London, and I didn’t fear the chill or the aloneness. I waved for a hackney and sped toward that tall brick house and banged on the green door that was three stories up. After a moment, it flew open.

A flickering candle lit the haggard face of Jack Dorian, and it struck me that this was the night before his big day too. These were his dreams hanging in the balance as much as mine.

I gulped and my words rushed forth. “I’m sorry, Jack. I can’t do it. I can’t dance tomorrow. Can you possibly take the sylph part out of the ballet?”

His face was grim. With a quick puff, he blew out the stubby candle, grabbed his coat, and waved me along. “Come with me.” He jammed his feet into boots on the landing and draped his coat over the bedraggled white shirt and brown trousers he wore.

He took my hand and down the stairs and off we went, where we strode toward the gaslit streets with all the noises and smells of a city thick with people and their wares. I didn’t ask where we were going and he offered no hints. We moved through darkened streets and turned before a multi-wing brick building framed by budding gardens. “What is this place?”

“This is lesson number four.” He jumped up to the first step. “My lady, I welcome you to the great hall of Middle Temple.”

“Are we allowed here?”

He draped a protective arm about me without answering and hurried me up the stairs to a set of doors on the upper level. With a tug, they yawned open to a wide wooden indoor balcony overlooking unlit lights strung from every beam and hook. A cavernous, dark-wood room lay empty below us, but as my eyes focused, I saw something hanging from the rafters that both excited and terrified me—a trapeze.

“The circus is set to perform here for another two weeks. Lucky for us.”

“There will be an elephant in here? A tiger?”

“Part of the circus, at least. It’s to be a trapeze and high-wire act.”

I shivered at the word high. “What are we doing here?”

He pulled the trapeze bar over with a twiny rope and handed it to me. “Relearning how to fly.”

“It’s so dark.” I tried to blink away the inky blackness.

“All the better. You won’t be able to see anything below.”

I took hold of that bar and looked into his face that always held a welcome for me, even in the middle of the night. “Jack, how did you go from Seven Dials . . . to the circus?”

He sighed, running fingers through his mussed hair. “I begged her to take me for years. My mother, that is. The great lady. Every time she snuck away to visit me in Seven Dials, I asked again. Finally she took me for my birthday, and it was more than I’d dreamed. Larger than life, every moment spectacular.”

“So you grew up and returned to it?”

He fumbled with the knot tying the trapeze up, allowing several long seconds to pass. “Yes. All on the same day I arrived.”

“How old—”

“Eight.”

“Oh.”

He bent to set a candle stub upright in a brass holder and flicked a match. “After the elephant act, she spotted a man she knew across the way. She couldn’t speak to him with me in tow, of course. It was our ‘special secret’ that we were related, and I thought that was truly something. She was so lovely and perfect. Lace and earbobs, little hats perched on blonde hair. ‘You’ll be good, won’t you, Jackie boy, and stay here while I speak to him?’ I promised, and there I sat, a dutiful man-child, willing to do anything for her—wrestle tigers, jump about to make her laugh, fetch a star from the sky. So I sat there waiting for her to come back.”

“And?”

He tugged the trapeze. “Still waiting.” That familiar face turned to me, and it suddenly occurred to me how very closed off the charmer actually was. “There’s no space made in this world for illegitimate children. They’ve got to carve out their own.”

I watched his masculine profile in the flickering glow, seeing him in light of his story. That boy lives as one abandoned every day of his life. Suddenly the friendship he’d always offered me, the endless help, seemed far more valuable than it had before.

He pulled the bar one last time and held it out for me. “Come, take hold.”

Shivering, I shed my cloak and gripped the bar. Then he disappeared in a whish of cool air. It looked as though he’d grabbed another bar and swung into the air himself, but his voice sounded from somewhere in the dark emptiness below. “Now start flying.”

I climbed up on the rail and tugged on the bar he’d given me, testing its security. A dizzy fear took hold, and I closed my eyes, bracing myself. Then I pushed off the railing and sailed into the cool, open air with a whoosh. The trapeze arced down and up, my feet swimming in nothingness, then it sailed back, the air against my back. My heels struck the railing and I swung toward the openness again. I blinked looking down, then back. Lonely candle stubs now flickered on the opposite balcony where I’d stood, but I couldn’t see Jack in the glow. Panic fizzled in my chest. “How do I stop this thing? I can’t see to get hold of anything.”

Then his voice echoed off every wall and surface of the room, making it sound near yet distant. “Let go.” Wind whistled past my ears. “Don’t be afraid.”

Do not be afraid. That was in the Bible somewhere. Not in Psalms. My panicked mind grasped for the verse. But my eyes looked down. “What’s below?”

“I said, let go.”

Panic seized me. “I can’t do it. Just help me find the railing again.”

Silence. God is in the midst of her; she shall not be moved: God shall help her.

I inhaled. He’d found me once in Seven Dials, and I hadn’t even been looking for him. He had a special love for me, it seemed, and he was always there. Simply there.

Even in the theater, Lord? Are you truly with me there too?

I struck the blank wall and careened back through the air. My hold tightened, but my hands ached. Moisture slicked my grip. I braced myself to keep from whimpering up there suspended above who knew what. I looked down, tried to force my vision to clarify whether or not there was a net below. I didn’t see one. I looked up as my body collided again with the railing and lurched back into its downward arc.

My left hand slipped. I shifted my weight up to grip with my right, but that only made it slip further. I clung with naught but my fingers as pain knotted each knuckle.

Jack’s voice echoed. “I said . . . let go.”

Fear thou not; for I am with thee.

I gulped.

Let go.

With a shiver, my throbbing fingers slipped further. When I could not hold on any longer, I let go. I hung in dark, musty air for an eternity, then a muscular arm clamped about my waist, hurtling me through the cool darkness. I held on to nothing, limbs flailing, as Jack Dorian swung us both from one side to the other with a speed that would have frightened a pair of racehorses.

Air whooshed in my ears, the line went slack as we reached the top, then we twirled, blindingly rapid spins in the air that left me fearfully, delightfully dizzy. A laugh of sheer relief bubbled up from somewhere inside my trembling body, echoing in the open room. We reached the other side and his boot connected with the wall with a thud before we flew back the other way again, arcing around the entire room in one great circle, then spinning to the middle.

I heard the zip of rope against rope and we lowered to blessedly solid ground. He set me on my feet and disappeared again. All I heard was the whip of disturbed air as the trapeze took off. “That was rather a dangerous stunt. There wasn’t any net.”

“You were never in danger of falling.” His voice arced through the room. “I was beside you on a second trapeze.”

“I didn’t see you.”

His foot thunked against the balcony as he landed. “You were too busy looking for a way to land on your own.”

“Then why did you let me dangle for so long? I was slipping!”

“I wanted you to experience what it is to let go. There’s nothing like it.”

I stood in the center of that great expanse and looked up into the dusty rafters. Was he swinging somewhere up there? It was impossible to see clearly. “Unless there’s no mad trainer there to catch you.”

“If you believe in God as you say you do, there is always someone.”

The shuffle of my boots echoed through the hall as I turned in a slow circle, a smile tipping up one corner of my mouth. “You’ve such a way with words, Jack Dorian.” I stared up at the darkness, catching a flying glimpse of his boot above. “It’s no wonder you’ve charmed all the theater girls.”

The thwip of a rope sounded somewhere above. “Not all of them.”

You’re closer than you think. “Are all those rumors true of you, Jack?” Suddenly I wished he’d say no, in the way one wishes for a happy ending to a novel already known to be a tragedy.

Another swish high above. “I can see your eyes from here. Have they always been so stunning, or is it merely the angle?”

“How many times have you used that gem?”

“Gems! Yes, they’re like gems.”

I crossed my arms, pinched my lips. “Has any woman yet believed such a line?”

“You’re lovely when you’re pleased. Stunning when you’re not. Like now.”

“I’m far too sensible for such nonsense.” I stood in the center of that great room, turning in a slow circle as my puny girlish voice bounced off the walls.

Then he dropped right in front of me, boots striking the floor, his warm breath fanning over my face. “I’ve never had a home. Never anything sure. Yet there’s something sure in you. Something aglow and so very . . . real. Sometimes I wish I had it too.”

His gaze held me captive even as my mind ran haywire. He moved nearer, his hands taking mine, drawing me close, past the point of no return.

“I saw it in your eyes the moment we met, and it creeps back out when you dance sometimes. Especially when you think no one’s watching. From that first glimpse, I wanted to know what it was. To touch it. To . . . taste it.”

I ran my tongue across my lips. There was a bet. And he was about to win it.

The windows rattled in their loose panes. Wind howled, and a chill crept around the room. He brushed his thumb over my lips first, and when I did not push away, he leaned down and he had his taste, drinking deeply. My eyelids fluttered.

Everything I thought I knew fell away in a shocking instant. That kiss was unspoiled and tender, silkily vulnerable with a tang of fear. That rogue, the world-weary lady’s man, lingered in that simple intimacy, framing my face with gentleness and savoring the moment as if he couldn’t get enough of the sweetness he’d discovered.

I reached up and put my arms around his neck, pulling him closer. Had kisses always been like this? I should have tried one sooner. It was so good. So honest. A natural extension of everything lovely and delightful that had occurred between us.

He stepped back, stroking my cheek with his thumb, and I hardly recognized that face—it was almost youthful in its raw vulnerability. Hopeful. The glow of his features had turned to burnished affection that shone like copper, and it made me shiver. I could still taste his lips, a heady deliciousness that lingered. But as he released me and the unwelcome cool air swirled up between us, my senses returned.

This was Jack Dorian. I had kissed Jack Dorian, and betrayed Mama, Philippe, and the God in whom Jack had no interest.

I looked to the floor that was too dark to see. “I do feel better now.”

This is exactly what it had been for them, hadn’t it? Secret kisses, encounters veiled in the romantic darkness, swelling doubts in the face of so much disapproval. My heart pounded with the awareness of their tragedy threading through my entire life—inescapable, potent.

But this was different. I was not choosing the principal dancer but the theater trifler. The flirt. The known scoundrel. If Mama’s story with a fine man ended in fiery tragedy, what would become of mine with a man like Jack? I gripped a post on my left, nails digging into wood. “Perhaps we should make our way back. It must be late.”

Jack paused, something flickering across his face, then he disappeared into the dark. He clunked up a ladder and back down, then returned with my cloak. “As you wish.”

As he stood there holding out my wrap in the long shadows, I faced the realization that Jack wasn’t the trifler everyone imagined him to be. He simply wasn’t. No trifler spent half the night and much of his free time teaching a stubborn, plain-looking dancer. No trifler swept an old beggar woman into an enthusiastic dance. No trifler kissed with such exquisite restraint.