They all missed Mr. Cassidy, who had found heavy work quite soothing and was happy to be paid in scones and good will.
“But I suppose it’s helpful in that we know we ought not let the guests tug on the stars,” Delilah said encouragingly. “We’re sorry this happened to you, Dot.”
“I suppose we can put it down to life’s vicissitudes,” Dot said blithely, and departed to get sorted out.
Both Delilah and Angelique gave a start.
“Vicissitudes?” Angelique whispered. “Where did she learn . . .”
Delilah shook her head, mystified.
Mr. Delacorte grinned when he saw the blue and disheveled Dot pass him on his way into the ballroom. “Good morning, Dot. Blue’s your color.”
“Good morning, Mr. Delacorte,” she said, with dignity. “Thank you.”
He surveyed the wreckage of the nets. “Oh, well, that’s a pity.”
“Dot was catch of the day, Mr. Delacorte,” Delilah told him.
“Ha! Glad to see her safe and sound. As for me, I’ve been having a look round the attic,” he said.
This seemed evident, as he had a cobweb in his hair, though they didn’t say so yet.
“Please don’t tell us you’ve found a ghost.”
“No such luck,” he said. “But you ought to come and see what I did find.”
They gathered around the sitting room at Mr. Delacorte’s behest, and were silent with awe.
Mr. Delacorte had brought down from the attic a dusty stained glass window in a frame, about two feet tall and two feet wide. Against a background of deep royal blue, amber and white petals of glass had been fitted together to form a large, single, concentric circle.
“Oh my goodness. It’s our moon,” Mariana breathed.
An eager Dot had knocked on her door to tell her. Miss Wylde certainly seemed to need a lot of sleep, which was doubtless good for opera singers.
“We’ll suspend it from the rafter over the stage, hang a lamp behind it. It will be beautiful,” Mariana said at once.
“It has to be a good omen. It was in our own attic. We never would have found it if Dot hadn’t been catch of the day,” Angelique said.
“It was serendipitous,” Dot said.
Angelique and Delilah stared at her, startled.
Dot and Mariana both glanced down and exchanged swift, secret smiles.
“You might want to have a closer look up in the attic,” Mr. Delacorte said brightly, to Delilah and Angelique. “I saw a few other things up there that could be interesting.”
They smiled.
“The spiders might want to fight you for it, though.”
Their smiles vanished.
“Well, that’s what husbands are for,” Angelique said after a moment, wickedly.
Four days before the Night of the Nightingale, all of the decorations were in place. The one hundred chairs retrieved from the den of iniquity, looking downright virginal with their coats of whitewash and scrubbed seats, were arrayed in two even sections with an aisle between. In the corners, bushels of paper flowers bloomed up out of huge urns. A row of green felt, purloined from battered old billiard tables and stitched, was laid down like a carpet of grass between the chairs.
They’d made a garden of the surround, lining it with pots bursting with paper roses surrounded by trailing garlands and vines.
And they hung the moon.
With a lamp situated behind, it cast a beautiful, dreamy, creamy gold light. A wall of lamps arranged in a staggered pattern on either side of the stage would light Mariana.
Who, in her simple nacre-colored satin dress flowing in Grecian lines, looked like a goddess.
It wasn’t Covent Garden or the Italian Opera House. It was stunning, just the same, and they were proud.
There was a moment of silence for the beauty of what they’d accomplished, tinged with a bit of the bittersweet for Mariana, because what she deserved was a hundred tickets sold.
Eleven tickets had been sold.
Although perhaps more people would arrive the night of the performance. Especially if they sent Dot out with a bell.
(Dot still hoped.)
“I’m embarrassed,” Mariana confessed. “I so hoped to return your kindness.”
“We were aware of the risks. You’ll be giving us a night to remember, regardless. We have your friendship. And we would otherwise never have known how interesting Dot would have looked if she’d been born blue.”
The kindness made her eyes sting.
Italian lessons continued. Valkirk was aware that he was testing her rather relentlessly. It was as if words were weapons and fortifications he was sending with her out into the world.
She seemed to understand why he was so stern.
“Barouche,” he barked.
“Calesse,” she replied gently.
“I need help,” he demanded.
“Aiuto,” she told him tenderly. Her voice a thread.
He hoped she’d never need to ask for it.
Her sentences about did him in.
“Il tuo corpo è perfetto.”
“Your body is perfect,” she’d written.
And:
“Mi manca il duca di Valkirk.”
“I miss the Duke of Valkirk.”
He stared at those words a long time.
His throat felt tight.
He wanted to say, Don’t miss me, because he didn’t want her to suffer for even a moment.
He wanted to say, Don’t go, but he didn’t know what to say after that. He knew she must.
He did not know how to name what was between them.
The truth lay in the contrasts. If what approached at the thought of losing her was desolation, then whatever he felt for her was precisely the opposite of that.
He had known more than one defeat in battle, but defeat was just a tool he’d used to learn to become victorious. He would never be accused of being an optimist, but he was indomitable. He’d experienced grievous losses and blows and struggled to his feet again. It was what a warrior did.
But nothing in his experience was of use to him here. Desolation was not an enemy army. It was more like a looming shadow, or a creeping mist. He couldn’t grasp hold of it with logic. He couldn’t conquer it with strategy. His power and influence were as nothing in the face of its inexorable approach.
But he began to think he might be able to stop it with that other tool at his disposal: money.
He wasn’t yet married.
And he knew other allegedly “great” men kept mistresses.
Valkirk had always found the word “kept” distasteful in this context. One kept sheep, or horses, or pigeons, or perhaps a hothouse filled with citrus and exotic plants that ate flies, like a certain earl he knew.
Mainly because he could not imagine “keeping” Mariana any more than he could keep sunshine in a jar. And part of the magic of these few weeks had been the fact that she willingly came to him, night after night, despite the risk. Or, perhaps in part because of it. It was all good. Every bit of it.
The sweetness hid a blade, and it was this: the possibility that she might not come to him at all.
That contributed to the texture of the bliss.
And yet.
He struggled to imagine parting with her. He could not imagine a day when he did not know if she was well, or suffering from a shortage of funds, or fighting off grabby male hands, or brazening her way through a conversation full of words she hadn’t yet learned.