Alexander Chee - The Queen of the Night

I imagined myself waiting in Milan for him, thinking he might be dead or receiving news of his death. The Verdi plan sounded to me like his sending me to the place I would go to be comforted for his loss.

I wrote back to Aristafeo and agreed, placing yet another note in the oboist’s hand before the curtain rose that night.

And then after the performance, I dressed in my finest new gown and waited for the tenor in the green room, wearing his emeralds.

He did not come.

His habit by now was to go with Maxine to her apartments after the performance and spend the evening. It was my guess that he would end their affair on the night of the last performance, given his instinct for cruelty. What I had not expected is that he would leave me to wait for him.

I waited just past an hour before asking one of the stagehands if he had seen the tenor leave, and when the answer was yes, I returned to my dressing room and put myself in my usual disguise and left as well.

I went first to the Café Anglais. When I held out his card, indicating I was to be brought to him, they said he was not there, so sorry, they had not expected him.

It was then I knew. He would not risk bargaining with me, not anymore. He meant to do this, to kill Aristafeo and be done. Perhaps he had guessed my reason for accepting. Perhaps he even planned to return to accept me only after killing him.

After Maxine’s, he would return to his apartment and prepare for his duel in the morning.

I had done almost everything in my power to prevent the duel. There was only one thing more to do. My only path opened up in the night.

§

His own apartment was near her home, close enough that he would walk along the Seine and take the air. I waited along the passage.

I sat sitting so only my bare foot showed in the light — my old signal, though I had never used it with him. I didn’t want him to know me. And in the dark, with my different silhouette, the wig, at a distance, when he smiled at me and I made for him to follow me, he did not know me and followed me down under the bridge where it was possible to sneak in an assignation.

Dark Night, Queen of Silence, protector of thieves, the sleep of the world that covers over the shame of whores, she protected me in that instant and delivered him to me. But even as she did, she put me under her spell.

I suspect it is her price.

He pulled me to him. I wrapped my arms around him, and when he came close enough to see my eyes, even as he stared now that he knew me, I did not hesitate. I sank my poisoned barb into his neck and pulled it so that it cut the vein at his throat.

The heart is a difficult target, Priscilla had said so long ago. I did not have my knife, so I used this last gift of Eugène’s, a barb filled with prussic acid, the one he had asked me to use if captured.

I had been captured. But I did not want to die.

His blood sprayed wide and he stepped back, coughing, and as he did so, he gathered his hands to his neck to try to hold the blood in just as I’d been taught to expect. I’d jumped back as well. His eyes were wild with rage and despair, his breath ragged and steaming the air. He had the choice of lunging for me and choking on his blood or holding it in with his hands.

I was sure killing him was not enough to keep us safe. He needed to vanish, to never be found. And I, I had come prepared to do this. I was possessed, a daughter of the Night, a Fury — Alecto, who fans the spark.

Ere it dawns the second time, the whole game I’ll shiver .

I took a breath, struck a match, and as the flame guttered alight, sipped the pétrole into my mouth quickly from a flask at my side and then blew gently above the match. A cloud of flame moved out from my lips, lighting the underside of the bridge. He shrank back, choking as his blood filled his throat, smoke rising on his hair.

Here we were; it was always going to be to the death between us.

With my second breath, I stepped closer; the fire blew out across to him in a sheet, and when he saw the flames, he lifted his hands to protect his face. Blood flew from his throat into the fire burning now on his shoulder. Still he struggled; he was a powerful man. He charged for me.

I stepped back, and this time he slapped at my hand. The pétrole splashed across us both. I leapt up onto the banks, and he slipped on the slick. As he fell, he leapt from his fall toward the Seine in a halting dive.

The river put out the fire, but the poison had stiffened his limbs finally, and he went under.

I wanted to run, but instead I had the presence of mind to pick up my flask off the ground and hide under the bridge, watching the water until I was satisfied the tenor would not return from the river.

I do not know how long I stayed staring at the dark Seine. Only when the dawn came did I make my way home past the faltering swells and cocottes emerging from their last assignations.

At home again, I sat in front of a fire I’d built up high. In a few hours I would begin to prepare to leave for Milan. I would give Lucy and Doro their notices. I would prepare to sell the apartment and everything within it. But for now, I sat in front of the fire, naked, and as the flames leapt, the emeralds showed me him burning in the night, staggering toward me, his arms raised, his voice gone. Falling into the Seine, out of the world, away from me, again and again.

I’d sell them, too.

It was done. Nothing of his could stay. I had defeated my curse. I had always thought he would be my doom, and instead I’d been his. There would be no duel in the garden. Leonora had killed the Count. Aristafeo would wait on the hill for him and wonder. And live to come to me, mine again at last.

IN MILAN, I had accepted the invitation of a prince to make use of an apartment in his ancient Milanese palazzo. This was a gesture of thanks, he said when he offered it, for a performance of mine he’d attended in Rome, of Aida. He reassured me he would never intrude on me and this was true: He never did. His staff, in fact, worked according to the same instructions as my Paris staff, at Doro’s impeccable direction and yet more invisibly, as if I were attended by magical servants. I had a feeling of being even more alone than I had in years.

It was there I waited to see if I would be joined.

I had left Paris without having received any further word from Aristafeo. Here was where I was to wait for him, to pretend to be surprised when he returned with word the tenor had not shown for their duel.

The quiet in the wing of the Milanese palace that I occupied was such that I spent much of that first evening following the sound of what turned out to be a wandering dove inhabiting a lonely ballroom, rising and descending in and out of a beam of light that came in through the crystal windows lining the ceiling. As it leapt, blue feathers glowed from underneath, as if from a lamp hidden under its wings.

I wondered if it had hatched there in the dark ballroom or if it had flown in and become lost. Or if, perhaps, it was some lover under a spell, doomed by a sorceress to stay there forever.

This Milanese prince had not invited me for being lonely. He asked only that I dine with him once, an invitation I accepted gladly, and there I was introduced to his wife, as stylish as a Parisienne, but more voluptuous, warmer, and more generous. She was a dark-haired beauty with the large, firm breasts of a mermaid and a dolphin’s appetite. She came to dinner in a chic gown of exceptional black silk satin and velvet set off by a collar of rubies and diamonds. She seemed aware of her beauty in the manner of someone with something she is determined you should enjoy. Their two daughters and one son, also at dinner, all took after her, all beautiful and proud of their beauty.